Bagatellen

Brötzmann Tentet

Still fresh in my thoughts is the May 17th Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet gig in Philly. I hope others can chime in with their thoughts in the wake of their sparse North American tour. I don't listen to free jazz very often, but following this group on record and in concert has been something of a habit for so many years that it's the kind of gig I can't seriously consider skipping, especially with Joe McPhee in the group! Once again I was completely blown away and my enthusiasm for these musicians was completely refreshed.

Ever since the early days of the group, I've thought of it more as a collection of small groups—duos, trios, quartets—that play in an overlapping sequence than the ten-piece orchestra it appears to be on paper. It's very rare that they all play at the same time, and they even seem to err on the side of underplaying sometimes, with a certain slavishness to the respectfully-and-sensitively-waiting-for-a-turn-to-solo sectional format of jazz instead of the constant collective interaction of a lot of free improv. This subgrouping-sequence format prevailed again in this concert, with the occasional roof-raising blowout giving the music a classic, old-fashioned feeling of peaks and valleys balancing tenderness and aggression.

While in some ways it's not a very risk-taking or adventurous music—and who cares as long as it's good!—at the level of small group interaction in a given section the content is wide open and extremely exciting. There were literally dozens of moments when the playing got to those rare heights of rapture that justify the whole endeavor. Brötzmann himself delivered exactly the kind of shredding, timbrally miraculous solos one expects, always a revelation to experience anew. I still have vivid memories of the Brötzmann/Vandermark/Gustafsson trio gig I caught last Fall in Philly, which was possibly the most emotionally intense live music experience of the year for me, hearing Brötzmann in such an intimate and concentrated context. There's an equal balance of distinctive personality and a deep wellspring of shared history among these three, the saxophonic core of this large ensemble project for most of its history.

We can always count on Fred Lonberg-Holm to deliver some highlights, and although I thought his solos this evening were somewhat unremarkable, he put his snazzy new indestructible non-wood black cello to good use in some spine-tingling interactive passages, especially one with his long-term partner Michael Zerang that brought back fond memories of a kitchen-sink duo gig I saw about 10 years ago. He is one of the true masters of split-second interaction, delivering that one unexpected note that transforms an entire passage. I must admit a preference for the sort of small-sounds pointillistic improv that was only given one extended realization in this concert, naturally with Zerang, Lonberg-Holm, and Gustafsson grabbing the baton. Zerang did a whole bunch of swell stuff that night that reaffirmed my feeling that among the many percussionists I tremendously admire (including Tatsuya Nakatani, Paul Lovens, Paul Neidhardt, and Sean Meehan to cite a few with special prominence in my current thoughts), it's Zerang and Lê Quan Ninh that get my highest praise above all. I also can't think of anyone who is as equally advanced playing both standard drumkit and idiosyncratic percussion as Zerang.

As is customary for this project, by now a weathered institution in the annals of contemporary music, some new players were brought into the fold. In this case, the Chicago-Scandanavia connection was mined yet further with Magnus Broo (Sweden) on trumpet, Per-Åke Holmlander (Sweden) on tuba, and Paal Nilssen-Love (Norway) on drumkit, all familiar collaborators of Vandermark and Gustafsson. Holmlander seemed left out of the fun for much of the evening and I was beginning to wonder if he had anything to say on his instrument when a passage well into the second set completely reinvented my understanding of the instrument (admittedly based on precious little data). Astonishing sounds entered the mix and I could only fathom they were issuing from a clever sleight of electronic processing by Longberg-Holm when I suddenly realized it was Holmlander revealing some absolutely miraculous techniques on his brass behemoth. Later Zerang quipped to me that he's got a laptop hidden inside that thing! I sure hope to hear more where that came from—hopefully Holmlander's got some non-idiomatic small group improv I can lay my hands on.

Broo was the only player in the group that didn't especially impress me. Granted, he played some excellent stuff, but the other nine musicians all went that extra step. One of the great moments was a trumpet duet between Broo and McPhee; their blending was relaxed and sublime. McPhee dropped out at one point and Broo's extended unaccompanied solo seemed very generic to my ears. McPhee rejoined him with trumpet phrases of such nuance and timbral complexity that the side-by-side contrast with Broo imparted a vivid understanding of the difference between an excellent musician and a singular living treasure. I had seen McPhee do some solo trumpet pieces just a few weeks prior—there's a Bagatellen entry about that—where his playing was mostly very restrained, but here I heard him totally push the limits of his pocket trumpet to create that overwhelming fullness and richness that characterizes what Brötzmann does with a saxophone. But music is not about competition and I cherish the achingly beautiful duet between McPhee and Broo as much as anything else, where they made extremely thoughtful equal contributions that summed way beyond itselves. McPhee has generally focused on his brass instruments in the saxophone-heavy tentet, and it was a rare treat to see him wail and riff on valve trombone, but he also played some amazing soprano sax in this concert.

The only other high-pitched sax of the evening was a new experience for me—Mats Gustafsson whipped out a vintage 1922 slide saxophone and absolutely raised the roof in tandem with some high-energy drumkit playing—by now I've forgotten whether it was Zerang of Nilssen-Love or both, but I remember being pushed to Interstellar Space levels of ecstasy. After the gig I playfully exhorted Gustafsson: "Man, where's your slide sax solo album?!?!". "It's in my bag here" was not the response I was expecting! My disappointment in learning that he didn't actually have copies with him to sell was more than compensated for by this uncanny discovery that, yes, indeed, such an album does exist and was about to hit the market! I'm drooling with anticipation. He mentioned he'd been searching for one of these rare horns for something like 20 years! (Can't remember exactly how long he said, but a really really long time.) As usual, pretty much every sound Gustafsson made in this concert was golden; he continues to play at the highest possible level known for his instruments, technically and conceptually, in a category I could only cite John Butcher, Robert Dick, and Mat Maneri as further examples of.

Taking a totally different approach to his reeds, it was Ken Vandermark that once again probably impressed me more than anyone else in the group. Time after time, he introduced ideas that gave the music its true substance, working equally as a subtle team player and a burning soloist. I was really knocked out by his clarinet playing in the first set—it was a fairly dense section, but suddenly I realized his carefully sculpted long tones were shaping the whole ensemble into a coherent structure, besides the fact his tone is just always so beautiful on clarinet. He's definitely one of the greats of jazz clarinet. On the other hand, I was lukewarm about an aggressive bass clarinet solo he took at another point; it just seemed to lack power, as if the ideas would've been better expressed on tenor sax. Speaking of which, one of the best solos of the evening was a Vandermark tenor sax solo in the second set where he reached that ultra-sublime level of sharp slicing sounds between the notes. It doesn't get much better than that solo—gliding momentum, timbral fireworks, and Vandermark's knack for strong melodies. Another brilliant episode of Vandermark tenor sax came in the first set when the group was roaring at full blast and Vandermark was standing in the far back of the stage deferring to the others. He started gradually introducing a perfect comping riff that a few others picked up on and amplified, building up to a tight and exhilarating passage of classic foot-stomping big band jazz with the rhythmic complexity of great free jazz and incredible solos by the likes of Brötzmann riding atop the pulsing and shifting riffage. This section seamlessly turned into a great Vandermark tenor solo small group section that kept the momentum intact while also rescuing the big band orgasm from crashing into a dead-end. The whole episode affirmed Vandermark's great talent for grasping and shaping the overall musical structure in real-time.

It was also a case study in instant composing for a group that had previously split their time between free improv and charts or directed improvisation, sometimes of a very experimental nature and sometimes just classic head/solo sectionalism. McPhee had told me beforehand that the group was sounding totally different than in the past and they'd dropped the charts and decided to go totally free. He's probably one of the musicians who most prefers it that way. Needless to say, methodology is moot for musicians of this caliber.

After an evening of characteristically airtight throbs, Vandermark's right-hand man on the doublebass, Kent Kessler, made a rare foray into the foreground during one of my favorite passages of the evening. A handful of the guys were nursing some beautiful long-toned harmonic blending that had a special impact in contrast with the preceding passage, and when this movement was about to expire Kessler sustained the metric feeling with an ingenious solo of medium-length notes in a gentle staccato pattern. It was a minor miracle that he took the music on his shoulders and prolonged the delicate beauty with such patience and focus, gradually developing his solo into new, but equally meditative and sublime, territory. It was more evidence that this is a group of incredibly sophisticated listeners who are ready to work with any direction the music might move in. Anything that could've been achieved with the help of charts was effortlessly achieved without them.

I'll wrap up these brief remarks with the single most exciting aspect of this concert for me: beholding Paal Nilssen-Love for the first time. I finally got some visuals to link up with the stupendous playing I'd been hearing on recordings by The Scorch Trio, The Thing, etc. Still a fairly young cat at 30, Nilssen-Love is just FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE. He brings the visceral groove of rock into the realm of free jazz abstraction with an effortless orchestral sensibility that reminded me of Tony Oxley and a ultra-high-velocity precision and lightness of touch that reminded me of Günter Baby Sommer. The matter of velocity deserves special attention in this case; there is something irreducibly great about extreme speed in music and it's pretty rare to hear it combined with the abstraction and nuance of Nilssen-Love. The photo of one of his cymbals above is also my personal tribute to his devastating attack on these perenially underutilized metallophonic discs.

I have to admit that there were a few times when the music felt like a lot of pointless and chaotic huffing and puffing, but this says more about me than the music, as my fire music cognitive grammar has grown rusty from disuse in recent years and I have a bad habit of fantasizing that musicians would stop, make some kind of soft plink and then sit there silently for a while before playing some kind of Raineyesque long tone, but I'm glad to report that in almost every case where my mind drifted into self-doubting about whether I belonged in that audience, I found that the music would suddenly crystallize into something rapturous and sublime, something that can't be predicted or controlled or consciously identified, something that can only come from the honest engagement of certain motor systems with certain instruments, something that pushes the boundaries of density and momentum with a deluge of delicious timbral detail unique to reeds, brass, strings, and percussion. It's a reminder that for all its familiarity and cultural entrenchment, fire music doesn't put itself on a silver platter to be casually plucked as a whim of pleasure; it's a zone the listener needs to do some work to enter, and I'm happy to report the entrance justifies itself resoundingly.

~Michael Anton Parker

Many apologies for waiting almost two weeks to issue this concert report; it's simply the first chance I've had to really sit down at the keyboard since then. There are surely many worthwhile details that have escaped my thoughts.

La Negra Graciana – Sones Jarochos with the Trio Silva (Corason)

Okay, I’ll admit it; I bought this one based on the cover.The portrait of Graciana Silva in paisley mu-mu poised at her harp, front-teeth capped with gold, won me over instantly when spotted in the bargain bin at Let It Be Records. The venerable Minneapolis brick & mortar is bolting its doors in few weeks, another casualty of the condo gentrification that’s sweeping downtown acreage. With it goes a prime source for procuring on the cheap such finds as Trio Silva’s lone disc for the Rounder-distributed Corason label. Graciana’s been plying her harp in the market and cantina centers of Veracruz since the age of ten. Fifty-eight at the taping of this ’94 recording she’s joined by her brother Pino on jarana guitar (a minature mandolin-like variant used in mariachi combos) and Elena Huerta on second harp. With just three sets of strings (though a combined eighty or so between them), the trio crafts a lithesome and fulsome ensemble sound. The repertoire centers on the son jarocho, a songbook popular among mariachis that blends subtle African-influenced counter rhythms with an epoxy of Spanish and mestizo-derived melodic content. Graciana’s boisterous and occasionally strident vocals dance atop a scintillating surface of braiding harp chords, her “ll’s” trilling with comparable coquettish enthusiasm. Pino strums his jarana jovially beside her, barking out a series of hoarse responses to her calls and sustaining the incessant strutting beat for the zapateado, or traditional foot-stamping dance. Elena plays the wallflower, insinuating supple fills, but leaving the dramatic repartee to the siblings. The music is at once delicate and exuberant, candid and complex. Most of all, it’s contagious, causing toes and heels to tap in instinctual response to the frolicsome fluctuating cadence. They even do a version of the familiar “La Bamba” that playfully strips the polished pantalones off the popular Los Lobos version. A few amigos, a six-pack of Negra Modelo, a grande order of papas fritas y salsa & this disc are all the ingredients necessary for a satisfying late afternoon fiesta.

Paul Flaherty & Marc Edwards – Kaivalya Vol. 1

Cadence Jazz Records 1177

Paul Flaherty has a long-standing penchant for pairing prosperously with powerhouse drummers. His past partners have included percussion dynamos Randall Colbourne and Chris Corsano. But the recorded results are sometimes hard to come by given their limited circulation on tiny independent labels like Zaabway and Ecstatic Yod. Marc Edwards fits well as a member of that strongman fraternity, his sticks having supplied rippling rhythmic muscle for both Cecil Taylor and David S. Ware. His own albums at the helm have been few in number but notable, particularly a CIMP date with Sabir Mateen and Hill Greene, which thanks to the early bass-stifling acoustics of the Spirit Room, was more duo than trio. Flaherty’s go-for-broke philosophy on horns demands this sort of assertive, sedulous support. A shrinking violet behind the kit would all but certainly buckle and flatten under the saxophonist’s blitz.

In this respect and others Flaherty is like an American equivalent to Brötzmann, a comparison no doubt conjectured before. Both men hold no compunction when it comes to blowing their respective stacks. Their horns are means to an end, not habiliments handled with care and diplomacy. But each tempers his shouts and bellows with bouts of melancholy and even melody, albeit the latter often wrung through the wringer. Like his German counterpart, Flaherty loves to burrow and root in the bowels of his instruments, especially tenor, unearthing wide-girthed atonal slabs that explode like pockets of natural gas ignited by a steam shovel spark. Texture and timbre also play crucial parts There’s plenty of room for him to engage in such excavations on this set, the first of two volumes documenting a confab with Edwards in, of all places, a Pubic Television Station studio (the natural addendum question being: was it aired?).

Improvisation nourishes all six tracks. “Dark Desert” gathers velocity like a sand-blasting sirocco, Edwards’ sticks whipping dervish rhythms across skin and cymbal surfaces. Flaherty’s tenor unleashes a stream of scalding multiphonics, eventually tapering into a gnarled point that etches at the edges of melody. Simmer to boil marks the strategy on “Small Doorway” where Edwards manages to generate a whirlpool force on nothing but brushes and kick drum. Flaherty chews through another reed, this time affixed in alto mouthpiece, blowing a surge of overtones that sound almost like Dunmallian bagpipe sonorities. Again the Brötzmann parallel is powerful and conspicuous as the pair traffic in emotion-on-sleeve sincerity. “Amrita” scales back the momentum significantly. Edwards crafts a sparse clip-clop cadence and the track’s brief five-and-half minutes amble by as feature for Flaherty’s more measured and lyrical side.

“Janagama” benefits from more Flaherty firepower, but falters under Edwards’ numbingly static beat. “Mahabharasta” detonates as the filibuster closer. Edwards erects a tumult-filled backdrop while Flaherty digs in, long blustering breaths singeing the curved corridors of his horn. By the time the disc slides to a stop it’s a wonder there’s any lacquer left unblackened by the furnace-hot onslaught. This is just one of several recent discs with Flaherty in the front line. Others include a date with Corsano and saxophonist Steve Baczkowski on Wet Paint, and an outing by the possibly one-off Jumala Quintet where Flaherty crosses horns with Joe McPhee. As exciting as all the activity is, it also heightens yearning for another match-up that might be even more momentous. A teaming with Brötzmann seems long overdue.

~ Derek Taylor

We Will Control All That You See & Hear

Poll people familiar with its original 60s run and most will probably voice plenty of praise for The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling’s hour-long excursions into homiletic sci-fi and fantasy changed the face of television and influenced countless subsequent shows. I’m a huge fan myself and the fact that all of that program’s episodes are now available in DVD box sets is a boon that speaks to the great value of the medium. Still, for many these sets are prohibitively priced.

Poll the same sample as to their opinions on The Outer Limits and I’d conjecture the results as far less uniformly positive. As the skinny, bespectacled brother to The Twilight Zone the show has long been the holder of a second class status. Granted, no episode of The Outer Limits could touch Serling’s anthology at its best, but there were plenty of clunkers on the coveted side of the fence too. Part of the problem stemmed from The Outer Limits origins. Commissioned by ABC to compete with the already popular and critically-lauded Twilight Zone on CBS (then in its fourth season) the series suffered from a short-sightedness on the part of the corporate suits when it came to financing and support.

Talent wasn’t the problem. A stable of promising actors and writers including: Donald Pleasance, Robert Duvall, Bruce Dern, Warren Oates, Meyer Dolinsky and Harlan Ellison ensured fertility on the creative front. But the economic situation was often dire with slim funds stretched nearly to the snapping point. The bright side of the network’s ambivalent attitude was an increased measure of artistic latitude for the show’s production team. Directors were encouraged to try new things, to experiment both visually and thematically, devising stories that pushed the boundaries of the set-up/punch line narrative form, every so often with wildly inventive results.

The show quickly established an emblematic atmosphere and import. Chief among the earmarks was the opening transmission from an omniscient alien presence personified as the Control Voice. The spoken preamble presented a simple, but highly effective demonstration of his/its power:

“There is nothing wrong with your television set;
do not attempt to adjust the picture.
We are controlling transmission.
We will control the horizontal.
We will control the vertical.
We can change the focus to a soft blur.
Or sharpen it to crystal clarity.
For the next hour sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.
You are about to participate in a great adventure.
You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind
to the Outer Limits…”

Without the intrusion of commercial breaks the illusion is even more palpable. Dime store budgets were the norm, but the directors and actors often made surprising do with the scant resources, taking risks in trying out temerarious new techniques. Source material tapped the mother lode of pre-Code sci-fi comics and pulp fiction magazines, mixing lurid psychological angst and skepticism with cosmic and even metaphysical concepts that spoke to the conflicting magnitude and insignificance of the human condition. The protagonists frequently found themselves embroiled in the thankless task of searching for some semblance of sense and worth in an immeasurably vast and lonely universe.

The third episode “The Architects of Fear” is a great case in point. Robert Culp (of later I Spy fame who would star in several more episodes including what some consider the series’ pinnacle hour “Demon with a Glass Hand” in Season Two) plays the part of a military man chosen through the drawing of straws to take part in a secret perilous experiment designed to compel humankind into a condition of world peace. The shadow and light effects used in several of the scenes are amazingly effective and Culp’s harrowing transformation from naïve patriot into gibbering monstrosity leaves legitimate chills.

Make-up and prosthetics rarely move beyond bargain basement, drive-in monster movie fare. Some are even laughably on par with the antiquated Cliffhanger serials from which stock footage is occasionally pilfered. Rubber-masked aliens & monsters represent the norm. But there’s a grotesque flair to a handful of the creatures, especially when rendered in the stark black & white cinematography that is sometimes genuinely creepy. “The Galaxy Being” employs clever negative-imaging & post-filming strategies to create the chimera of a glowing, radiation-spewing, pure energy interloper from Andromeda.

The stories span a spectrum from silly and preachy to ambitious, thought-provoking and surprisingly dark in tone and design. In the ominously-titled “A Feasibility Study” an entire suburban neighborhood finds itself transplanted to alien planet where the native populace, riddled with a deformative disease, seeks to dilute its tainted gene pool with unwilling conscripts. Atomic Age and Communist Threat fears of the era give unexpected gravitas to a lot of the tales. “The Invisibles” imagines a shadowy alien conspiracy and the neurotic government agent assigned to infiltrate and expose its nefarious schemes. “Corpus Earthling” posits a pair of rock-sized protoplasmic aliens that plot their own path to world domination from the storage shelf of a geology laboratory. Drug culture gets a nod in “Specimen: Unknown” when an unlucky crew of astronauts finds their bachelor-pad spaceship besieged by lethal fungal spores.

Regrettably, the series also borrows the creaky trope of pansophical pedantic narrator from its sister show on occasion. These preachy moralizing pronouncements always feel dated and distract from the ideas as they are explored more subtlety in the stories. Acting runs the gamut too, from Ralph Meeker’s wooden and hammy turn as a lovelorn mercenary in “Tourist Attraction,” a lame passion play where amphibian monsters unintentionally aid in a South American coup, to a convincing turn by Martin Landau in “The as a mind-controlling mutant who travels back in time to assassinate the inventor of future plague in the “Man Who Was Never Born”. The deliciously-pulpish titled “Don’t Open Till Doomsday” delivers perhaps the most demented mélange of material: a bats-in-the-belfry widow ensconced in a crumbling gothic mansion, an innocent newly-wed couple on the run from a domineering father, and a one-eyed, blob-shaped, world-eradicating alien trapped in a space-time defying metal breadbox all collide in a tale tall on melodrama and crazy camera angles.

I’ve owned the First Season set for nearly two years and have only managed to watch about half the 32 episodes. Memory dim to my initial screenings as a kid, the fun in revisiting these shows in piecemeal fashion is something I’ve come to savor. Season Two, came out about a year ago, but I’ve yet to pull the trigger. Aside from a handful of classics like the above mentioned and “Soldier,” another Harlan Ellison-penned potboiler that would decades later serve as the seed of The Terminator, many of these episodes purportedly wallow in formulaic tedium. Budget constraints and a newly invasive team of network analysts put the kibosh on much of the creativity, hoping to spoon-feed the show to a larger audience by stifling its more subversive elements. The agenda back-fired and the program imploded under the pressure after only half a season. The Twilight Zone may hold the crown, but in its prime The Outer Limits was certainly a contender. As a repository for generous doses of Cold War paranoia and technological trepidation that would drive luddites to cheer, all filtered through a vintage cathode ray tube conduit, this show is very nearly without peer.

Creative Sources Roundup

I'm continually surprised at the rate with which Ernesto Rodrigues releases discs on his superb Creative Sources imprint. As most folks reading this know, the excellent viola/violin/electronics improviser began to document Portuguese and Spanish improvisation several years back and has quickly developed his label into one of the premier outlets for improvisation at the intersection of European free music, electroacoustics, and new music. I recently opened up my mailbox to find a package stuffed with seven of the label's latest goodies. All told, it's a strong batch.

Istmo (CS 023) features the fantastic trio of Ferran Fages (acoustic turntable), Ruth Barberán (trumpet), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion), whose initial release Atolón (on Rossbin) was a jarringly noisy slice of reality. On this followup – consisting of two tracks recorded in the fall of 2003 in Toledo and Barcelona – the grit and alien organics of the trio's debut are back, but the music is slightly less relentless and has a wider textural palette. One of the new elements is Barberán's wonderful, didgeridoo-like low end ruminations on her trumpet. Her range is really growing these days and this gnarly, crackling trio – with the insane colors Fages whips up often being the least predictable – is the perfect setting for her. But the group language is growing too, now including passages where they ease back on the throttle and assemble relatively delicate layers of tonality. The key figure here is Monteiro, who really shapes this music with his silences, his wheezing, his aggression, and his ever-so-occasional lyric gesture. Tough, fascinating, and wonderfully unpredictable stuff.

In April 2004, Claudio Rochetti (turntable, small percussions, radio), Fhievel (field recordings, objects), and Luca Sigurta (cymbals, objects, toys) got together to record the two improvisations comprising Pocket Progressive (CS024). What distinguishes this recording from the others in this batch is Fhievel's use of field recordings. In some ways, this recalls Jason Kahn's and Greg Kelley's recent experiments with these materials. But this trio works in an area that is more expansive than Kahn's Songs for Nicolas Ross and less caustic than Kelley's I Don't Want to Live Forever. Muffled street and animal noises float in and out while flinty percussive and metallic noises squirm together as if craving release from some containment. Much of the first track sounds like a bunch of crinkled-up aluminum foil straightening itself out. And while the second piece retains a roughly similar feel, the very closing minutes open up a huge echo-drenched space followed by the tiny sounds of skittering electronic mice and sine tones. What really compels during these pieces is how distinct this trio sounds, considering the instrumentation (you'd be hard pressed to pick out just where those toys and radio and so forth are at work). Almost like the fragment of a Xenakis piece distilled to its essence and improvised over the course of 35 minutes, this crackling, sizzling trio is excellent. They have a clear focus on specific sounds and areas of the music, and they let things develop patiently.

One of Creative Sources' sub-genres is the solo winds recording (check out Bertrand Gauguet's recent Etwa). Wade Matthews is a new name to me, though he has apparently been an active presence in Europe over the last few years. On Aspirations & Inspirations (CS026) he sticks to alto flute and bass clarinet alone, using close miking to conjure up some wild, unearthly sounds – often he produces overtones, sympathetic vibrations and the like which suggest overdubbing has occurred (it hasn't). Feedback hums, pinched breath noises, radio static, and more all emit from Matthews' lungs and mouth. Recorded between 2002 and 2004, these nine studies of breath (dig the etymology in the title?) are each compellingly atmospheric. Some highlights include "Remembering William" (where Matthews generates a pretty wild pulse track with his fingering, layering rough breathy slashes atop it), "Discontinuing continua" (with its soft chirrups and rustles from bass clarinet), and "Cassandra Wakes Up and Thinks for Herself" (with Robert Dick-like flute magic from drops in the pond all the way to spitty choruses). My favorite is "Scappa Flow," the most seriously breathy of these pieces, almost like a Berio Sequenza for amplifier hiss and wah pedal. Nice stuff.

Sunday Sundaes (CS030) is an altogether more declarative and caustic solo reeds performance, by the veteran Stefan Keune (who here plays alto and sopranino saxophones). Covering a lot of bases, these eleven tracks (recorded from August – September 2004) concentrate on the saxophones' harsher properties: squeals, wails, hollers, and blurts. From the opening "Conically Speaking" – where Keune seemingly tries to force as much air through the bell as possible, in almost Gustafsson-like voice – you know you're in a different territory than one usually occupies on a Creative Sources release. "The Mole" and the long "Fric Frac" concentrate on overblowing and split tones almost exclusively; as an essay on harshness, this is pretty effective stuff (particularly the super-intense tracks like "Ambit Gambit"). But it's not really where my ears are these days.

Several years on from their first release Luwa (on Rossbin), Ailack (CS027) finds Tetuzi Akiyama (tape delayed electric guitar), Jason Kahn (analogue synthesizer, percussion), and Utah Kawasaki (dismantled Roland synthesizer, cell phone) in an altogether more provocative place than their earlier music. Fan that I am of these musicians, I felt like Luwa wasn't as successful as it could have been. This recording – a single, 35-minute track recorded in April 2004 at Tokyo's Kid Ailack Art Hall – benefits from a better acoustic, a better recording, and better empathy among the players. The main musical relationship is between the vast reverberation (which often flirts with tonality) that permeates much of the beginning, and various rude noises that slash, shove, and kick at the drift towards settled meditative space. To me, the central presence here is Akiyama; he gets quite deep into his twisted, fractured blues, which emerges here like some alien language. But nothing really gets complacent in this music, as during the second half of the piece things get quite dense and loud (a surprise given the players involved), and the music starts to sounds like a giant piece of tuned metal expanding outward. One of the best discs of this batch.

Kenon (CS028) features a trio of up and coming Japanese improvisers: Kazushige Kinoshita on violin, Masahiko Okura on alto saxophone and tubes, and – the best-known of the three – Masafumi Ezaki on trumpet and metals. The disc opens with metallic clangs that almost recall Threadgill's hubkaphone or the early improvisations of the Creative Construction Company (albeit with different musical sensibilities). Like a door which opens slowly to reveal the room within, the two long improvisations (from June 2004) reveal themselves cautiously, one fragment at a time, as metals and tubes establish the space within which Kinoshita can roughly press his bow on the bridge, Okura and Ezaki can wheeze and spit and hiss. The first track is mostly percussive – scrapings, clicks, and pops that bring the music to boil, occasionally letting off steam. The second is slightly more active, both in terms of density and the occasional tonality that creeps in (I was reminded of early Partch studies somehow). An unpredictable, satisfying disc.

Finally, one of the strongest, most beguiling releases of this batch is Amber (CS031). A wickedly good quartet – Rhodri Davies (harp), Robin Hayward (tuba), Julia Eckhardt (viola), and Lucio Capecce (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet) – deliver two rich improvisations, recorded in April 2004 in Berlin. Four acoustic instruments are reduced to their granular essence, and these instrumentalists reconstruct sound through their expert, knowing use of breath and articulation. The huge round sound from Hayward's tuba, the gentle hiss and release from lightly bowed strings or reedwork, and the always unpredictable Davies work in concert to create a singular sound. Whether bowed, breathed, plucked, or struck, the instruments slowly merge into one another to produce a rich palette where tones blend, colors combine, and shapes shift. What's even better is the way in which the quartet frequently achieves – through exactly this kind of blending – a sound that is very close to electronic music, with nuances of feedback, sine tones, and so forth (I suspect Davies may be using an Ebow here). In general the mood is very still and quiet, so that the few passages of raucousness and aggression have more power. One of the better discs I've heard so far this year.

Taken together, this septet of discs is worthy not just for their quality but also for their documentation of this music (and some of its lesser known players). Rodrigues already has a new batch out. In the meantime, however, don't miss out on some of these gems.

~ Jason Bivins

Shakey Jake - Good Times (Bluesville)

Back in the pivotal 50s and 60s, Rudy Van G’s storied recording studio residence wasn’t just home to jazz musicians. A fair share of bluesmen also made the trek to suburban Englewood Cliffs, NJ to lay down tracks, mostly for the Prestige subsidiary Bluesville. Few featured instrumentation as unusual as this Shakey Jake platter. It’s a configuration that to my knowledge hasn’t been duplicated on disc since. The absence of any sort of conventional rhythm section (no bass, no drums, etc.) definitely absolves the session from the ordinary. Jake’s harmonica and vocals join Jack McDuff and Bill Jennings and the result is a weird kind of chamber blues sound. McDuff and Jennings were a familiar fit, the latter holding the guitar chair in the B-3 organist’s band. Both men stayed musically fit on steady rations of gutbucket blues goulash. All composition credits go to the mouth harp ace’s mild-mannered alter ego Jimmie D. Harris. But it’s a bit of a ruse since most of the selections pilfer blatantly from existing blues tropes. Shakey stamps each with his cocksure signature, but only minor lyrical modifications. His vocal inflections borrow heavily from Muddy Waters (not surprising considering his Windy City digs) on tracks like the opener “Worried Blues” where his whoops and harp breaks ride out a rhythm of chugging guitar and well-endowed organ swells. “My Foolish Heart” a barely camouflaged retread of “Mannish Boy,” is even more conspicuous in its borrowings. The trio also tackles a handful of instrumentals like the slowly smoldering “Sunset Blues,” which features killer relaxed fretwork by Jennings and a molasses-paced groove from McDuff built on plush sustains and staggered trills. These numbers reveal fascinating collisions in styles and levels of experience between the leader and his ‘sidemen’. Despite the differentials Jake’s reedy blowing and spirited singing dishes out instant charms. From its field holler beginnings the blues has depended on creative appropriation. Jake just does right by the long-standing custom and in so doing crafts one of the singular records of the idiom.

Daniele D'Agaro - Chicago Overtones

hatOLOGY 613

When on working holidays to the Windy City, European improvisers commonly come in contact with players in the Ken Vandermark coterie. The Chicagoan’s industry and cachet in his adopted town virtually guarantees it through ever-diminishing degrees of separation. Italian reedist Daniele D’Agaro sought out a pick-up band with just such ties on his visit. Trombonist Jeb Bishop and bassist Kent Kessler are long-standing members of various Vandermark ensembles. Drummer Robert Barry is a standing member of the Sound in Action Trio, though his employment with Vandermark represents only the apex of the iceberg of Chicago musical credentials with a C.V. dating back to Sun Ra’s fledgling 50s combos in the city.

At first blush D’Agaro doesn’t appear to give his sidemen’s higher profile employer much mind, but there are telling similarities in their methods and preferences. D’Agaro doesn’t go so far as to affix dedications to each piece, but the studio program still scrolls out as one of multifarious and overlapping influences. The figures of Ellington and Leadbelly percolate to the top most frequently and a studious breadth of jazz history becomes evident in D’Agaro’s technique and temperament. Wielding tenor and clarinet his tone and phrasing are drier here than on his earlier Strandjutters and generate a consistent calefactory friction with Bishop’s own coppery-tasting enunciations. His maneuvers on licorice stick refract a rogue’s gallery of past players from the bubbly bop effervescence of Buddy DeFranco to the mercurial mood swings of Perry Robinson. Tenor tracks a trajectory from burnished Ben Webster croons to rip-snorting Aylerian wails.

Barry doesn’t sound all that comfortable on the more conceptual pieces like “Ultramarine #13.” Instead of loosening and abstracting his metrical touch he simply lessens the frequency of his stick play, creating greater space through sporadic impact on the skins and rims. It’s a forgivable enough tactic, but one that sometimes falls flat in the contrastive context of his colleagues’ adaptability. Kessler evinces his usual levels of harmonic and rhythmic expertise, spurring the foursome from a largely backseat slot, but soloing adroitly as the opportunity arises as on “Barry K.”

Call it a personal failing of vision, but I’ve never much grasped the desire of advanced jazz improvisers to adapt folk blues tunes to their repertoires. D’Agaro’s refurbishing of the Leadbelly ditty “Dick’s Holler” does little to endear the exercise. A substantial element of the composer’s charm was his ability to preserve skeletal melodies through cunningly simple guitar and button accordion play coupled to coarse hewn vocals, all sans trappings or frills. The boiled down end product left emotional veracity and an unadorned authenticity in bold relief. Juxtaposed, D’Agaro’s exacting Dixieland approach turns it almost into an academic exercise. It’s a relatively minor minus to album populated mainly by plusses. His cover of Ellington’s “Sweet Zurzday” exhibits a fluidity and temerity that Vandermark could take a few notes from.

While hardly an epiphany experience this disc still offers satistfying small group jazz in the classicist-cum-modernist vein that constitutes the free jazz answer to neo-conservativism.

~ Derek Taylor

Lagniappes from Longfellow School

I’m continually amazed by the fortuitous wonders even the most purposeless Google searches can yield. A slapdash search for hubcap percussionists the other day brought me to the virtual doorstep of the Longfellow School & by proxy the larger umbrella site Musical Inventions which tabulates sound-producing gizmos cooked up by enterprising students across the nation. It’s immensely inspiring stuff like this that helps assuage my outrage fatigue at the Bush Administration’s continued hack & slash attitude towards education (through trickle down economics 300+ more teachers are slated to hit the bricks this fall in the Twin Cities). Dig the romantic notion of resourceful educators cleverly out-witting budget constraints and piquing their pupils’ interest in both musical performance and shoe-string instrument-smithing. Dig further their consensual resolve in posting the results in an online forum for the global net community to peruse. How fucking cool is that? Harry Partch would be proud!

Music Inventions has an impressively large list of participating schools, but the pick of the talented litter by my lights is Longfellow Elementary in suburban Oak Park, Illinois. The site features a good three dozen hand-crafted instruments right along with their creators. Lend an ear to Alec H. knocking out a clamorous cadence on the Drum Kabob. Thrill to Andrei J. tearing it up on the pipseiphone (John Butcher better watch his back) and Brian C. (a budding Roscoe Mitchell?) blowing corpulent tones on the saxabone. Further down the page can be found Katherine R. and her charmingly rinky-dink Chimer. Sadly, half of the audio/video links on the pages are either missing or broken (among them the Bang-Blow, Chris G.’s colorful contraption pictured above- damn!), but there’s still enough here to glean a healthy gist. Spurred by the creative industry on display, I’ve been working on my own variant of the Bang-Blow. With dust-collecting Maker’s Mark, Dickel, & Woodford Reserve empties serving as resonating chambers, completion and christening of the Bourbono-Boom-Bam® --a device whose discovery is sure to turn the world-wide wind percussion community on its collective drum rim-- is drawing nigh.

Mike Cooper - Metal Box

Rossbin 20

Although he’s been around on record since the late 60s and has played and recorded with any number of musicians with whom I’m familiar, I entirely drew a blank on the name “Mike Cooper”. Somehow, he’d managed, as near as I can recall, to fly absolutely beneath my radar. Credited with having been a key figure in the London blues revival of the 60s (his album, “Trout Steel” seems to be the one to hear), he moved on into free improv, performing with the South African ex-pats in Britain, Steve Beresford, etc. and, with Lol Coxhill and Roger Turner, formed the band, The Recedents. Glad I finally got around to hearing him.

“Metal Box” consists of six more or less improvised pieces for solo National Steel guitar (another guitarist, Tim Catlin, appears on the opening cut), although the results have been greatly augmented post-production with overdubbing, backwards tracks and so on. I admit to being a sucker for the sound of steel-bodied acoustic guitars; that rich, metallic resonance is just so juicy. The album is dedicated to the memory of John Fahey and, indeed, blues allusions are never very far away no matter how abstracted the proceedings otherwise become. A typical piece will have a huge, cavernous bed of sound, out of which scramble crotchety figures, soft pings, reverse-throbs and so on, generally centered (obliquely) around a tonal core. There are, in fact, moments when I think I’d prefer to hear just the guitar, simply played. As attractive as the baroque elaborations are themselves, they occasionally verge on clutter although there’s always a redeeming aspect, such as the plaintive moans that arise from the lonely pulse of “A Big Wave Event”. All misgivings are cast aside on the final, most overtly Faheyesque track, “Last Chant and Dance for Blind Joe Death”. Part dirge, part lament, ultimately a heartfelt if somber celebration, all the disparate elements mentioned above coalesce with grace and purpose into a wonderfully solid paean to the late, great musician.

The disc times in at on a smidgen above a half-hour, but this is a case where the “shortness” seems to be about the right size helping. Nice record.

Marko Melkon (Traditional Crossroads)

“One of the most beloved cabaret musicians of New York’s 8th Avenue Middle Eastern club scene of the 1950s”- so asserts the blurb on back of this Traditional Crossroads comp and it’s not an overstatement. Udist Marko Melkon did much to popularize his lute-like, watermelon-shaped stringed instrument on American shores, but he accomplished it with ears, fingers and intellect attuned to custom and tradition. Like Markos Vamvakaris, his Greek counterpart on bouzouki, Melkon subtly tailored his songbook of folk melodies and rhythms to the fickle tastes of his Westernized audiences without ceding any of their old country integrity. The 21 tracks here, most rescued from heirloomed sides on long defunct labels like Kaliphon and Me-Re, furnish an edifying extract of his lionized career. Many of the tracks suggest a soundtrack equally at home in a bustling Turkish market or a Lower Manhattan speakeasy stage. Melkon works mostly with a small revolving ensemble of violin, kanun, dumbek and finger cymbals. Gliding microtones abound in the string playing and the leader’s vocals make for pathos-padded counterpoint to the serpentine structures of the tunes. There’s even a small clutch of brilliantly executed solo taksims that zero in on Melkon’s adroit fingering skills and substantiate his storied standing among peers. The set caps with an incongruous artifact: “Asia Minor” an early Armenian/Afro-Cuban alloy that finds Melkon’s amplified axe fronting his son-in-law Roger Mozian’s jazz band. It can’t hold a clave to Machito’s majestic version of the tune, but Melkon does manage to summon some masterful Dick Dale-presaging tremolo in the closing seconds. This set is just one of several Traditional Crossroads discs celebrating canonical doyens of the ud. Others of note include compendiums of work by Udi Hrant Kenkulian and Udi Yorgo Bacanos.

George Cole - The Last Miles

The Last Miles: The Music Of Miles Davis, 1980-1991
George Cole
University of Michigan Press

This review obviously requires a big honkin’ disclaimer up front, so here goes: I’m the author of a book on Miles Davis’s electric music, Running The Voodoo Down, which will be published later this year, and which puts the music of his final decade on an equal plane with the records that came before. But if you wanna infer professional jealousy from anything you’re about to read, I’ll say right now that you’re wrong.

This is an admirable book. It’s incredibly exhaustive; Cole has interviewed just about everybody who ever played on a Miles Davis record, or joined him onstage, from 1980 to 1991, plus a gang of other folks - producers, label dudes, etc., etc., etc. (I’m not kidding around; when I say “just about,” I mean that five bandmembers out of thirty-six didn’t get interviewed.) Every recording session is discussed by folks who were actually in the room at the time. This is terrific information to have, especially when it comes to the “Rubber Band” sessions of 1985 and 1986, which were meant to start Davis’s tenure at Warner Bros. with a funkier, even more pop-oriented follow-up to You’re Under Arrest, before that idea was scrapped in favor of the (it seems, based on this book) much more brilliant and unique Tutu.

There’s a lot of discussion of the live bands, too, which is very welcome. Anybody who’s heard the 20-CD box The Complete Miles Davis At Montreux 1973-1991 (and given its bulk and price, that’s nowhere near as many folks as should) knows that Davis’s 1980s bands smoked live, particularly in the latter half of the 1980s. Joseph “Foley” McCreary, technically a bassist but filling the lead guitarist’s role, was every bit as interesting a contributor, within the context of the music being made at that time, as Pete Cosey. Unfortunately, he doesn’t play on the studio albums to any significant extent, so it’s hard to know that without digging up bootlegs or live videos or the (nice, but not enough) posthumous Live Around The World CD.

That being said, there’s very little poetry in this book. If you’re talking about music, you’ve got to bring something to the table beyond a mere litany of dates, places, songs played, etc. The author is described on the flap as a "freelance music and technology journalist" (emphasis mine), and too much of this book seems aimed at gearheads and folks who need to know every detail of every session. That stuff’s fun, in a nerdy way, but it doesn’t sing, it doesn’t tell you anything about Miles the man (as opposed to Miles the professional musician who was in this room on this day and played this many overdubs on this song, which was written by this guy and this guy and programmed by this other guy), and it won’t convince anybody to go out and buy these underrated albums.

If you’re a total Miles maniac, this book is fascinating – sometimes in a surprising way, as it reveals through repetitive anecdotes how Davis used the same psychological-warfare techniques on everybody who ever joined his band, for decades. If you’re just getting into the music, though, this isn’t the book for you. (That one comes out in the fall, ha-ha.)

Cello and Context

photo: Emiliano Neri

Chanced to catch Erik Friedlander doing his solo cello thing last week in Philly. Wow. Just finished watching his new solo cello documentary DVD. Wow again. Besides the rapturous music, the gig reinforced some thoughts I keep returning to about the entire culture of live music performance, a topic I can spew endless bile about. But this is a happy story, an example of how things ought to be more often. Let's see, solo cello performance—what kind of audience do you get for that? 500? 100? 50? Ah, we're getting warmer. Doesn't matter what kind of music we're talking about or whether it's a prominent master musician like Friedlander whose music is so rich and deep that it leaves both avant-garde and non-avant-garde listeners with a warm glow in their hearts—the fact is that people don't swarm to gigs like that. But who are these "people" anyway? Well, I'm talking about the hundreds of anonymous youngish folks who reliably show up for pedestrian rock acts pretty much any day of the week in cities across America. It pleases me to report that Friedlander got to present his art to such folks last week, one in a string of five East Coast gigs he did as an opening act for a long-running acoustic pop duo called The Mountain Goats, having figured largely into their recent album as a session player.

Standing by the side of the stage, I could not only hear the soft details in Friedlander's astonishing virtuosity, but also take in some revealing visual details. First—a very unpretentious man in blue jeans and white t-shirt seated with a cello and a partially emptied beer bottle at his feet. That's it. A man and his instrument, taking his art on the road in the grand tradition of the gigging musician. It was poetic in its simplicity. Second—smiling, rapt young people (late teens, early 20s) standing right up against the stage. Listening. Complex and intellectual, but also visceral and immediate, it was the kind of music that could easily set one of those kids onto a different path. I'd reckon the audience numbered at least 150 that night and it's quite rare I attend any kind of show without bumping into some friends or acquaintances, but I don't recall any familiar faces, curiously not a single person from the usual crowd of avant-jazz fans I'm accustomed to from Philly's great long-running Ars Nova Workshop series, where Friedlander is a familiar performer. It was a whole different scene. Incidentally, it was a typical example of the consistent and prolific concert promotion by r5 Productions, a fabulous, grass-roots DIY organization that's been sidestepping the disgusting Clear Channel socio-economic monoculture of popular music (punk, rock, hip-hop, etc) presentation for quite a few years with an emphasis on all-ages admittance, and the venue was a spacious church basement in the bustling center of the city, a really comfortable space where I've enjoyed a handful of avant-rock gigs over the years.

This is the kind of genre-mixing in concert production that I wish were the norm, instead of the depressing and ubiquitous scenarios where you face a night of monotony hearing a handful of similar-sounding rock bands—typically one good band and a few disposable wannabes—or you see one or two sets by a jazz group, a wasted opportunity to present short sets by local improvisors or maybe a recital by someone who's been working hard to master a piece of experimental notated music. There's a reasonable amount of thoughtful, creative rock music in the world these days, even if weeding through the morass is too daunting for most sane people, myself included, and I believe there's a demographic of listeners who aren't inclined to attend typical improv gigs, but would welcome the contrast and stimulation of a short improv set sandwiched between creative rock groups. Everyone benefits from this kind of mingling between different scenes and aesthetics and it's a way to make a concert outing a memorable, unpredictable experience instead of a clinical consumption of familiar music. For improvisors like Erik Friedlander, and even more so for the lesser known, avant-garde segment of the improv world, this is a way to test fresh ears and expand beyond the insular, jaded improv scene. What's more, I think music simply sounds better when it's set off in stylistic or dynamic relief; I've seen mini-marathons of the same style of music where basic mental satiation attenuates the pleasure of the later performances, occasionally reducing a potentially transcendental set to an exercise in perceiving the qualities that would make it such. And contrastive, stylistically varied listening experiences are the norm in most serious music fans' private listening habits anyway, so it's only natural to present live music the same way.

Friedlander is the kind of classic creative music virtuoso who casts a spell on the listener, imbuing every gesture with precision, verve, and vivid musical logic, whether it's the spine-tingling warmth of thick, traditional tone and melody or the tension and excitement of violent or harsh extended techniques. It's just plain rare to see this level of musicianship, and I mean both the technical and creative dimensions. Friedlander's compositional style pivots around the sorts of fat grooves and exuberant melody you find in classic R&B, contextualized by the inevitable diversity in structure and mood of someone immersed in avant-garde jazz and classical music. My tastes generally run in favor of the scrapey, scratchy side of music and I'd be just as happy listening to Mark Wastell, Audrey Chen, Nikos Veliotis, Fred Longberg-Holm, Bob Marsh, etc, but Friedlander's music has the same deep appeal to me as traditional folk music from a distant culture. Or from an intimate, familiar culture as is closer to the truth here. When he announced he was going to do a piece from an obscure Abdul Wadud solo album from the 70s, besides the sobering thought that I was probably the only other person in the room who even owns a Wadud album (though sadly not the solo album he mentioned), something clicked for me. Abdul Wadud. Julius Hemphill. Tim Berne. Erik Friedlander. Everything made sense and I glimpsed some kind of untold aesthetic history underpinning my rapturous enjoyment of this solo cello music. Even though I dig the Zorn stuff and his Topaz and Chimera stuff as much as the next guy, my ears have been cocked in Friedlander's direction much more than usual since I saw him do a set of Tim Berne's music last fall in trio with Tom Rainey. You can't ask for a more perfect trio than that and Friedlander's playing that night was by far the most mind-blowing cello performance I've witnessed, his own musicality amplified a hundred-fold by Berne's inimitable compositions and Rainey's orgasmic drumkitting. Despite the instrumentation, that trio doesn't sound much at all like the classic Miniature stuff with Joey Baron and Hank Roberts, who sadly retired before my time; it's more like Hard Cell with Craig Taborn swapped for Friedlander, an equal exchange of players I'd say.

While I did see Ernst Reijseger do a solo set at Tonic quite a few years back that was equally impressive, Friedlander's solo recital was so incredible I had to check out his new DVD, Vanishing Point: A Road Journal, a straightforward documentary of his 2004 solo tour of North America. It wonderfully captures the music I saw last week and this stuff is well worthy of repeated listening. With the "on the road" imagery and mournful cello I quickly had a sentimental thought of the early Tom Cora segment in Step Across the Border, but even though the music itself is just as mind-blowing, Vanishing Point doesn't have anything like the breathtaking layers of visual artistry and historical, personal subtext of that landmark film. It's more like a solo album enhanced by concert footage and brief snippets of roadside imagery; the emphasis is on the music and fits Friedlander's no-nonsense, down-to-business approach to his craft. A man and his instrument. It's an ideal way to get totally immersed in his compositions and technique, letting the music create its own cinema. There's some clever editing for his avant-barnstormer "Here Comes the Madwoman", with four different performances seamlessly interwoven with each other, making for some especially fun viewing and highlighting the meticulously rehearsed and refined nature of these solo pieces.

I also loved the scene preceding the piece "Pig's Feet" with his father, Lee Friedlander, who travelled with him for part of the tour, taking great pleasure in ordering and eating some BBQ pig's feet from a roadside shack somewhere in rural America. Nutritious, delicious traditional food like pig's feet may have lost its place of honor in mainstream culture, but it will always pass the test of time and outlive the fads of our post-industrial society. The very same can be said for the kind of timeless, quintessentially human music that Erik Friedlander plays.

~Michael Anton Parker

Longfellow School

Mengelberg Marathon

Just swung by The Stone website on a lark and stumbled across a surprising May schedule. I gather the joint was originally slated to be shut down for the entire month to facilitate a laundry list of renovations (plumbing, lighting fixtures, new Formica cup holders, Zorn’s personal sushi/karaoke annex, etc.). But Dutch ivory-tickler/torturer Misha Mengelberg sidled in at the 11th hour for a half-month residency. Maybe there was a linguistic mix-up, or maybe it’s just another example of chronic Dutch improv absurdism, but it appears Misha took the title “curator” to be synonymous with the phrase “principal performer.” There isn’t a night in the series that doesn’t feature him in some capacity. Seems like he’s to be heard in the company of everyone but undersung hubcap percussion wizard Deonta S. Piano trios; piano plus electronics; piano meets Chabournian guitar; piano with trumpet; piano, tuba & drums & much more. That’s a helluva lotta Mengelbergian hijinks! Sadly, it looks like the frolicsome fun is almost over- just tonight, Saturday and Sunday remain. Hopefully the mics were whirring and the tape decks spooling as the perspicacious Hunchback of Holland had his prolix say. Actually, this entire post is little more than a paper-thin ploy to probe whether Michael Anton Parker, our man in The Apple, was in attendance at any of the gigs & cares to comment.

Sirone Bang Ensemble - Configuration

Silkheart 155

Configuration marks the return of the Silkheart label after a few years of hibernation, now in association with Sweden’s other premier free-jazz label, Ayler Records. It’s a live recording from a 2004 New York gig, and features an intriguing quartet of musicians. Sirone has been receiving fresh attention lately since the return to action of the Revolutionary Ensemble; in a similar spirit, Configuration picks up the threads of a couple other of the bassist’s musical relationships, reuniting him with violinist Billy Bang and saxophonist Charles Gayle. The group is rounded out by firebrand drummer Tyshawn Sorey, a fresh name on the scene but one who’s already made his mark with his work on Vijay Iyer’s superlative Blood Sutra.

As you’d expect from this free-jazz supergroup there are some fireworks on Configuration, but as it turns out much of the album is preoccupied with mournful free balladry doled out among solo and duet subdivisions of the group. The opener, “Jupiter’s Future,” is pretty sluggish for most of its 16 minutes’ length, though it makes a late surge with Bang’s galvanizing improvisation. “We Are Not Alone, But We Are Few” and “Notre Dame de la Garde” are similarly slow-moving but stronger performances, with the Bang/Gayle duet on the latter a highlight. “Freedom Flexibility” and “Configuration” are heavyduty one-chord jams – unusual territory for Gayle, who sounds frankly at sea, but Bang’s wildly grandstanding contribution to the latter is worth the price of admission alone. The saxophonist sounds altogether more in his element on the rampaging first half of “I Remember Albert”; he drops out for the second half, a winding three-way dialogue between Bang, Sirone and Sorey. On balance, a pretty enjoyable album, though the rough edges and dead spots betray the fact that this was the quartet’s first meeting.

~ Nate Dorward

Civil War - When Fact Threatens Belief

Civil War
When Fact Threatens Belief
Longbox LBT 031 3"CD

Chicago's Adam Sonderberg and his Longbox label epitomise the stubborn independence – whatthefuckness, I described it elsewhere – that characterises the best of today's new music. Coming from an improviser who refuses to play by the unwritten rules – check out his compendium of anti-duets with Boris Hauf – it's hardly surprising that this debut ("and, by default, finest recording", deadpans the press release) from Sonderberg's Civil War trio with Amy Cimini on viola and Katherine Young on bassoon consists of three solo tracks (Sonderberg himself is credited as playing bass drum, but his contribution sounds more like bowed cymbals to me). So much for the idea of a group, and recording studios be damned too: this was recorded in an abandoned grain silo, "pregnant with rich textures and overtones that only a relic of American agriculture could help foster" (can't resist another quote from the blurb). It sounds, as one might expect, amazing, and not at all like improvised music's "supposed" to sound: well, OK, Eddie Prévost comes to mind in Sonderberg's offering, but Cimini and Young's offering could easily pass for Scelsi or Radulescu. A copy of this should be sent post-haste to Werner Dafeldecker and Uli Fussenegger – a label like Durian that bridges the gap between improvisation and composition would be an ideal home for a full-length Civil War outing. Live in hope.

~ Dan Warburton

Bukka White - Memphis Hot Shots (Blue Horizon)

Nearly thirty years before tastemakers at Fat Possum capitalized on the scheme of fusing garage rock with country blues Bukka White cut this asymmetrical album. The aged bluesman was still riding the swell of his “rediscovery”, regularly appearing at Folk and Blues festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Sensing the Zeitgeist he expressed an interest in recording with a backing band, preferably comprised of young turks. Trouble was, like other idiosyncratic troubadours, White’s music worked best as a solitary affair or with minimal (usually washboard) accompaniment. British producer Mike Vernon honored the desire anyway and organized a pick-up band of second guitar, harmonica, piano, string-bass, drums and washboard. Two of the sidemen even adopted the colorful monikers of Harmonica Boy and Anchor for the session. All were mere fractions of their frontman’s age.

The set list is a predictable mix of White’s “hits” as well as ‘standards’ sifted through the Buddha-smiling raconteur’s improvisatory sieve. White called his extemporaneous creations “sky songs,” a phrase touching on his tendency to pluck ad-lib verses and chords from out of thin air. The band responds to his unscripted anecdotal ditties with varying efficacy. The most startling collision occurs early on White’s signature “Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues,” a train wreck on the surface that reveals an odd syllogistic solidarity within the tangled wreckage. Here it almost sounds as if Bukka layed down his vocal and guitar tracks first and the band overdubbed their parts on top days later with the tape decks set to the wrong speed. Chugging backbeat drums, slapping bass and wailing harmonica approximate a speeding locomotive while White resolutely rides a completely different rail. As incongruous as the fit is there are improbable moments where everything synchs up and the effect is electrifying.

The band sits out on a handful of tracks too, like the dour “Drifting Blues” and harrowing “(Brand New) Decoration Blues” ideal vehicles for White’s gravelly bark and hard-strumming fret-play. On the latter he refurbishes the habitual lyrics with a string of virginal verses, slapping his surname on the song credit to boot. With “Give Me An Old, Old Lady” White acquiesces to his band, whooping and grooving on a stomping rock beat and rolling out the lyric: “Got an old lady, sittin’ in my bed, when I come ‘round, she gonna rub my head…” without the least bit of bashfulness. White’s Pre-War sides for Vocalion are a benchmark of his career (and arguably Pre-War blues in general), but this Blue Horizon set makes for a very pleasing detour and anomaly. One lingering question: is that Bukka in the spacesuit or some defacto substitute?

The Bong-Rattling Bass..., Etc.

In the last month (first batch April 12, second batch last night) I have bought six CDs by Grand Funk Railroad. I now own the 2002 remastered editions (w/bonus tracks) of On Time, Grand Funk, Closer To Home, Survival, E Pluribus Funk and We're An American Band, plus Live: The 1971 Tour, which I bought a couple of years ago. Unless someone can make a really convincing argument for Phoenix or anything post-WAAB, I think I'm done. But only because the discs I do own seem to contain a lifetime's worth of knuckle-dragging joy.

I'll step right off the ledge with my opening gambit: I prefer Grand Funk's version of "Gimme Shelter" to the Stones' original.

[waits as everyone leaves]

Seriously, that one track, contained on Survival, sort of encapsulates everything great about Grand Funk - the album as a whole is kind of their defining statement. (It's not their best album; I think Closer To Home is. But it's their most unadulteratedly Grand Funk-ian.)

On the Survival cover, the members of the band are clad in loincloths, covered in mud, clutching bones and huddling at the mouth of a cave they're clearly supposed to be living in. (This is a pretty fair approximation of the circumstances critics of the time would have wished upon these three lunks, had they their way. But anyhow.) They're running with the Nugent-ian noble-savage thing, a few years before Terrible Ted would put on his own loincloth, and swing across arena stages on a rope.

The music on Survival, as on every Grand Funk album I own, is as gloriously primitive as the artwork. The mix is crystal-clear, allowing the listener to wallow in the sheer...competence of every recorded moment. For a band no more talented than your average collection of sixteen-year-olds in a suburban garage, these guys sure liked to jam. The bonus tracks on most of these reissues contain extended versions of album cuts - and wow! did they bloat up in concert.

I think it's the dumbness of Grand Funk that makes me like them so much. They distilled American white teenaged Seventies-ness down into a thick, tar-like muck, and spread it everywhere. It's not the hostile dumbness found in, say, NYHC country or Toby Keith, though. It's unthinking fun, with occasional outbursts of semi-coherent philosophizing ("Save The Land").

Make no mistake, though: my newfound enthusiasm for GFR contains not a drop of contempt or irony. I have always preferred the music of 1970-75 (and even the late 1970s) to the music of 1964-69. The Beatles? Pre-Let It Bleed Stones? The Velvet Underground? No thanks; I'll take Black Sabbath, ZZ Top and Grand Funk. (And Blue Öyster Cult and Motörhead and Cactus and Montrose and Free and Bad Company and...and...and...)

Yo Miles!

Yo Miles! The appellation chosen by this loose collective fronted by trumpeter Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith and guitarist Henry Kaiser is both apt and evocative. It is an argot affirmation, a transgenerational shout of acceptance and homage across the decades to the challenges laid down by Miles Davis when he began committing this ferociously beautiful music to tape in the early 70's. While producer Teo Macero's contributions to the structures constantly unfolding deep within Bitches Brew, On the Corner and Big Fun are now the stuff of mix-master/ DJ / beat-science legend, Davis, far from content with magnetic representation, began to use a similarly cinematic approach in his performances during this decade. Miles' "Dark Funk" is a music of vamps, occasional sparse riffs, encoded phrases leading to abrupt but seamless shifts in mood, tempo and group dynamic -- devices which Henry Kaiser calls the "70s Miles formula". Especially on their two Cuneiform releases, Sky Garden and Upriver, Yo Miles! has distilled and refined the evolutionary processes that made this music so innovative, exciting and difficult. Culled from a single marathon session, these two double disc sets present, in both micro- and macrocosm, a comprehensive re-appraisal of Davis' most challenging music.

The casual verbal agreement, made in Oakland, that was Yo Miles!' genesis is well documented, especially in interviews with Kaiser. Likewise, the group's aim to be more than just another tribute band, incorporating Smith's own compositions to then enhance Davis' own musical language, is also common knowledge. Yet the ways in which these two innovators approach the various philosophical underpinnings of Miles electric music could not be more different, or more complementary. Kaiser, having seen Miles' Pete Cosey / Al Foster band some dozen times, spoke with palpable excitement when he told me of the intellectual and raw emotional impact of those concert experiences. "Oh yeah, they were doing stuff they never did on the released music…", the guitarist's voice rising in delight as he described the mastery of tonal / melodic superimposition and transition achieved by that group at their zenith. Smith, a philosopher by training as well as inclination, eschews such technical description in favor of Davis' accomplishments in non-verbal direction. "It was the first time in his [Davis'] artistic life where he could have a forum in which to express everything he wanted to express and do it non-verbally, by utilizing the trumpet and by his own particular manner of creating music." Kaiser and Smith further cite rather different reasons for the violence with which this music was greeted, in large part, on its initial release. Smith puts it down to self-reflexive hostility on the part of audiences unwilling to re-examine their likes and ownership-induced biases, because "You can't reject art!" Kaiser's view is more practical. "The music had gotten away from a very white kind of jazz based on the popular song-form -- that was more Eurocentric; [Miles] changed to present something that was based on a more Afro-centric kind of logic. That was a very hostile scary thing to people who wanted the nice tame Miles in a tuxedo playing 'Round Midnight.'"

Both Kaiser and Smith, though, are vehement about the spontaneous nature of their endeavor. Nothing is rehearsed in a group sense. If negotiation takes place, it occurs on a musician -to-musician, "need to know" basis and not on a collective level, as in the form of band instructions. Smith's wah-wah experiments are similarly spontaneous and, consequently, assured, not amateurish or modish in any way. Overall, the goal is to keep the proceedings as fresh as possible in order to best serve Miles' compositional / improvisational formulae and the new directions in which these riff-and-vamp implications might lead. Arrangements exist -- witness the lush orchestration, courtesy of the Rova Sax Quartet, of "Black Satin Slight Return" on Upriver -- but these to are blueprints only, as much of and for the moment as is the collective improvisation that typifies these sets.

Smith's long-explored approach to rhythm, sound and silence, combined with Kaiser's equally thorough-going preoccupation with timbral and coloristic experimentation, ensure expansion and magnification of the minute details in each composition. Yo Miles!' treatment of "Great Expectations" seems to be a primer for the group aesthetics. On Sky Garden only its first half, a "Nefertiti"-esque study in melodic repetition and accompanimental variation, is treated directly. The semi-circular nature of the "Expectations" melody -- it ends on the pitch from which it began -- has broader implications in the Yo Miles! version, as the piece becomes a loosely palindromatic series of group improvisation and dialogue. The four dialogic sections all involve tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, an absolutely stellar choice for this project. While Badal Roy's tabla work on the Miles albums is pleasantly coloristic but often blurry, arguably to good effect, all of Yo Miles!'s work is about clarity. "Expectations" is written in seven, and Hussain matches wits perfectly with Steve Smith's (drums) and Michael Manring's (showcasing a fat tone and a very supple sense of funkiness on fretless bass) to drive the group improvisation sections. The dialogic (dualogic?) intro, interludes and post-lude, are of quite a different nature altogether. While motives from "Expectations" are referenced occasionally (notably, at one point, by Hussain's tabla!) the interplay is more rhythmically and melodically eclectic. The piece's opening dialogue, featuring Hussain and Wadada, illustrates perfectly Smith's views on the symbiotic relationship between sound and silence. "If you make an impact with a sound and you allow silence to precede it, it creates a greater expectation than if you fill that space with sound." His solo puts these comments into practice; each note jabs, bends, ebbs and flows with the certainty of its place, and again.

Hussain is the perfect foil. The second and third duets, both with tabla and sax, are somewhat more frenetic and metrically exploratory. The first of these, presumably with Greg Osby, builds to several post-tonal frenzies on the fringes of bop, while the second, apparently pairing the percussionist with John Tchicai, is a sinewy, slithery construct in which the soprano saxophone often sounds like a muted trumpet, conjuring and magnifying reminiscences of Davis' precognitive slides and moans. Another Smith / Hussain conversation, this one replete with stunning multiphonics, closes out the proceedings, rendering "Expectations" circular melodic structure both a kind of grammatical Möbius strip and a concise exploration of historical and geographical jazz innovation. The collective improvisation sections are far removed from the heavily effects-treated, swirlingly psychedelic mass that enveloped Big Fun's version of this composition. Each gesture is presented with the lucidity of a gem, and while keyboard work on the 70's recordings often became miasmic, Tom Coster's work here is as cleanly recorded as his ideas are developed, both on his solos and within his accompanying patterns. Kaiser's guitar work is tastefully distorted and bluesy, respectful of multivalently historical lineage without being the least bit overintrusive or self-indulgent.

"Great Expectations" is by no means the only track to receive this kind of deconstruction. "On the Corner Jam" gets similar treatment on Upriver, and both Cuneiform sets are programmed in such a way that each disc can be viewed as an extended suite. Not only is significant attention paid to contrast of all sorts, in the 70's Miles tradition, but unlike the 1998 Yo Miles! release, most of the tracks segue jump-cut fashion, not unlike live Davis releases such as Dark Magus or Black Beauty. The Smith compositions, mostly found on Sky Garden, mirror this process on a smaller scale; "Who's Targeted" slams headlong into drum-driven focus after the nebulous orchestral wash of "Miles' Star" only for the drums to fade into a momentarily static organ cluster. It is tempting to hear each Smith composition as an etude-like expansion upon one aspect of the "Miles formula", "Shinjuku"'s multilayered African funk being so reminiscent of Agharta's similarly aggressive vibe, but comparisons of this nature break down in the face of Smith's fluidly appropriate conceptions.

While much ink can be spilled on Yo Miles! interpretive and compositional take on the Miles method, Kaiser now says that as far as he's concerned, they've said all they need to say about Miles' own compositions. I wouldn't be the first to announce the tantalizing plan for Yo Marley! disc, but Kaiser deems the project highly unlikely. Whatever facet of musical culture Kaiser and Smith decide to explore next, it will be well worth repeated listening and extensive analysis.

~ Marc Medwin

James Finn Trio - Plaza de Toros

Clean Feed 34

Few customs challenge the tenets of cultural relativism like the Spanish bullfight. I’ve only witnessed one (and a botched Mexican variant at that), but the experience left a coppery smell of gratuitously spilt bovine blood in my nostrils that lingers to this day. Tenor saxophonist James Finn takes a different ideological tack to the ritual on his new Clean Feed disc. His third album to date it’s one that builds appreciably on the previous pair. Two other entries (The Last Matador and Into the Afterworld), part of a proposed trilogy, are set for release on his own Ginko Leaf label. Approaching the controversial sport from a vantage closer to Hemingway, Finn celebrates the symbolism and grandeur attached to the event as a cunning contest of wills between man and animal archetype. Each of the program’s tracks corresponds to an episode in the confrontation. The whole unfurls suite-like, one piece folding into the next.

Unlike Finn’s earlier two outings, this one doesn’t carry any special aural mandate for the listener or the subjective dodginess of demo quality sound. His horn, Dominic Duval’s strings and Warren Smith’s traps are all rendered in near pristine studio clarity. Just skip to the incandescent drum preface to the closer “Toro Bravo” for indicative and engrossing litmus. The difference makes this disc an optimal entry point for folks just becoming acquainted with Finn’s already-storied talents. For those not in need of persuading it may engender mixed feelings. Perhaps it’s the carryover of instrumentation. It’s certainly a function of taster’s choice. But this latest entry didn’t greet my ears with the same degree of revelatory inebriation. The chinks in Finn’s sturdy armor, miniscule as they may be, are more visible. Along with the exposed vulnerability comes an even greater expressive range.

Spiraling ascendant arpeggios and hoary overblowing are still prominent weapons in his arsenal, but a counterweight of dark lyricism tempers the fulminatory tendencies. “El Tericio de Varas” opens as a somber dirge, Finn’s charcoal horn fluttering and smudging across a backdrop of humming arco bass and crustacean scuttling brushes. An inevitable, but barely perceptible ramp up follows. Finn’s tone tapers and hardens to banderilla sharpness, poking pointillistic holes in the track’s tough-textured rhythmic hide. “Torea de Capa” and the title track he sounds akin to Andrew Lamb, blasting through Moorish motifs that carry the regal gravitas of Andalusian anthems. On the former his tenor mimics the staccato fanfare of bugles over Smith’s martial snare. Duval summons Flamenco strums on the latter, evoking the memory of Jimmy Garrison as Finn once again entreats the spirits of deceased toreadors with ecstatic swooping cries.

Energy ebbs and swells in the album’s second half. The tender ballad miniature “Eyes of Angelina,” where Finn daubs delicately at a velveteen melody, segues into the conflagration of “El Tercio de Vanderillas,” where turbulent tenor bucks and snorts against a counterpoint of thrumming bass and stampeding percussion. “El Tercio de Muleta” traverses much of the same trajectory, gliding from comparative and industrious calm to ululating blowout and back again. Such ensemble shifts all occur on well-greased gears and Finn’s fluctuations never lose their logic or coherence. This talent for irrepressible continuity marks an important edge for the saxophonist over many of his peers. Duval and Smith dovetail with it beautifully, giving the trio an uncommon advantage. Even so, the configuration has its limitations. Hopefully Finn will opt for more expansive and/or exploratory instrumentation on his project. As appealing as this new music is there are even more impressive heights to essay in the future.

~ Derek Taylor

masochists, all of ya

In a meeting with Dorward the other night, he sobbed to me that he's pretty offended that the Jazz Journalists Association has again, for the second year straight, failed to nominate Bagatellen as one of the many music publications striving for web-based excellence. I agree with him, and it only goes to prove the mainstream's conspiracy to further marginalize the already divided members of the improvisational music community, but feh.

Is it me, or is there still a dearth of entries on the main page of a fairly popular music blog? I know this subject comes up every now and again, usually in the form of a shameless Derek Taylor plea, but hey, it's worth mentioning. Again. Granted, I've found in the past that it's difficult even for the guy who started the site -- and thus has had the most stock in its being afloat -- to post off the cuff here more than enough, mostly due to the fact that the audience is fairly difficult to read, no pun. [Audiences deemed challenging are deserving of a pat on the back, so be proud.] In terms of readership by way of comments and site stats, the most oft read items are the music reviews, the record of the week, exchanges that involve a scuffle with Jon Abbey, and my selfless feature contributions. No other statistics available, sorry.

Oh, before I forget, if you're the guy who has something about free jazz and "Chemistry" in your blogspot blog, and you link to Bagatellen, let me know, and share the URL. It's since dropped from the bottom of my statcounter page and I'd like to link back to your site.

Lastly, it's on the brink of confirmation that Death Cab For Cutie's next album may indeed suck, now that they've signed with Atlantic Records. Ben Gibbard says he's been given full artistic rights and that fans have nothing to worry about, even though I was worried the minute I'd heard they left Barsuk.

Extreme Prejudice

I’ve seen all four of what I’d consider the major works of Sam Peckinpah. Two of them, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, are great. On the other hand, I tried to make it through Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (newly released on DVD) the other day, and by about the halfway point I was ready to saw my own head off. And The Getaway - well, all I can say is that the Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger remake didn’t do the half-assed original any harm. Some folks like his stuff a lot better than I do, though. Walter Hill loved Bloody Sam so much he made his very own Peckinpah movie, back in 1987: the baroque, blackly hilarious, sweaty, bloody, fucked-up border blast-’em-up Extreme Prejudice, which I watched last night for the first time since catching its theatrical run at 15.

The movie has two main plotlines, which intertwine pretty well. Plot No. 1: Jack Benteen [Nick Nolte] is a Texas Ranger; his best friend from childhood, Cash Bailey [Powers Boothe], is a drug dealer who lives across the Mexican border in Kurtz-ian splendor, strutting among his thuggish banditos in a gleaming white suit and crushing the occasional scorpion in his naked fist, just because he can. (Today’s movies are really missing the ostentatious, context-less displays of macho that substituted for character development in 80s action flicks.) In their constricted, manly way, they both love the same woman, played by Maria Conchita Alonso. Conflict ensues. Plot No. 2: a group of killing-machine veterans, all supposedly dead, travel the world doing the U.S. government’s dirty work, and their latest assignment, they believe, is to take out Cash Bailey, who used to be an informant but who’s turned rogue. (There’s a twist here, but I won’t spoil it, because this movie really is worth a spot on every Bag patron’s Netflix queue.) As part of their anti-Bailey efforts, they blow up large sections of Benteen’s home town, which makes him angry. Eventually, though, he travels down to Mexico with them, aiming to get a personal confrontation with Bailey while the soldiers tear the place up.

The supporting cast is sort of an 80s action all-star team. The soldiers are played by, among others, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe, and Michael Ironside. (The guy who played Lamar in Revenge Of The Nerds is in there, too, but if anything, that should be a laudable tribute to his range.) Nolte’s running partner, the local sheriff, is Rip Torn. Cash Bailey’s two main henchmen are “Tiny” Lister and Luis Contreras (you may remember him as a tall, surly supermarket security guard in Repo Man). Forsythe steals most of his scenes, as he so often does (side note: a friend of mine interviewed Forsythe once, and the actor's recollection was that in true Peckinpah spirit, this was the drunkest set he'd ever been on), but this movie really belongs to Powers Boothe.

Boothe’s madness in this movie is brilliant and hilarious. The first time he confronts Nolte in the desert, his white suit shines like the sun. The next time we see him, he’s wearing the same suit, but he’s unshaven and it’s practically pinto-spotted with dirt and sweat. He’s a true sleaze, the centerpiece of Walter Hill’s view of Mexico as a place where no one seemingly could get clean even if they wanted to. Clouds of dust float around greasy, heavily-armed Mexicans, and Boothe lists in the middle of the crowd, tequila bottle in one hand, revolver in the other. His delivery of the sometimes preposterous, other times oddly brilliant dialogue is note-perfect: you never believe he’s anything but an utterly dissipated, depraved scumbag, and yet he’s oddly pitiable even in his psychosis. It’s sort of like he’s channeling his earlier, equally unforgettable work in the 1980 TV movie Guyana Tragedy: The Story Of Jim Jones.

There are a bunch of extremely violent outbursts, including a massive explosion, a bank robbery, and a shotgun-to-the-foot scene that made me wince when I first saw it as a teenager, and did it again this time. But the climactic massacre is where the Wild Bunch comparisons really come into play. Just like the Peckinpah version, there are machine gun nests, blood squibs as far as the eye can see, and bodies tumbling from roof to street in lovely slow motion, all expertly edited so the plot is never lost. At the same time, the duel between Boothe and Nolte over Alonso has an almost Leone-like majesty. This film reveals the extreme difficulty of making a modern-day Western that really works. Walter Hill pulls off what very few other directors could (probably because most wouldn’t even try).

Hill is one of my favorite directors, and I think this might be his best movie. It’s the movie that made me start looking for his name as a factor in whether I’d buy a ticket, or hit the video store, or not. It’s underrated, and too infrequently seen, compared with his better-regarded, better-known movies like 48 Hrs., The Warriors, Southern Comfort or Hard Times, but I think Extreme Prejudice distills everything great about Hill’s cigar-chomping, balls-out approach to filmmaking (and everything he stole from Peckinpah’s few lucid moments). It’s a movie that deserves a reputation beyond folks like me. (And a widescreen DVD release would be nice, too.)

~ Phil Freeman

Cowboy Poetry

I’ve seen all four of what I’d consider the major works of Sam Peckinpah. Two of them, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, are great. On the other hand, I tried to make it through Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (newly released on DVD) the other day, and by about the halfway point I was ready to saw my own head off. And The Getaway - well, all I can say is that the Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger remake didn’t do the half-assed original any harm. Some folks like his stuff a lot better than I do, though. Walter Hill loved Bloody Sam so much he made his very own Peckinpah movie, back in 1987: the baroque, blackly hilarious, sweaty, bloody, fucked-up border blast-’em-up Extreme Prejudice, which I watched last night for the first time since catching its theatrical run at 15.

The movie has two main plotlines, which intertwine pretty well. Plot No. 1: Jack Benteen [Nick Nolte] is a Texas Ranger; his best friend from childhood, Cash Bailey [Powers Boothe], is a drug dealer who lives across the Mexican border in Kurtz-ian splendor, strutting among his thuggish banditos in a gleaming white suit and crushing the occasional scorpion in his naked fist, just because he can. (Today’s movies are really missing the ostentatious, context-less displays of macho that substituted for character development in 80s action flicks.) In their constricted, manly way, they both love the same woman, played by Maria Conchita Alonso. Conflict ensues. Plot No. 2: a group of killing-machine veterans, all supposedly dead, travel the world doing the U.S. government’s dirty work, and their latest assignment, they believe, is to take out Cash Bailey, who used to be an informant but who’s turned rogue. (There’s a twist here, but I won’t spoil it, because this movie really is worth a spot on every Bag patron’s Netflix queue.) As part of their anti-Bailey efforts, they blow up large sections of Benteen’s home town, which makes him angry. Eventually, though, he travels down to Mexico with them, aiming to get a personal confrontation with Bailey while the soldiers tear the place up.

The supporting cast is sort of an 80s action all-star team. The soldiers are played by, among others, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe, and Michael Ironside. (The guy who played Lamar in Revenge Of The Nerds is in there, too, but if anything, that should be a laudable tribute to his range.) Nolte’s running partner, the local sheriff, is Rip Torn. Cash Bailey’s two main henchmen are “Tiny” Lister and Luis Contreras (you may remember him as a tall, surly supermarket security guard in Repo Man). Forsythe steals most of his scenes, as he so often does (side note: a friend of mine interviewed Forsythe once, and the actor's recollection was that in true Peckinpah spirit, this was the drunkest set he'd ever been on), but this movie really belongs to Powers Boothe.

Boothe’s madness in this movie is brilliant and hilarious. The first time he confronts Nolte in the desert, his white suit shines like the sun. The next time we see him, he’s wearing the same suit, but he’s unshaven and it’s practically pinto-spotted with dirt and sweat. He’s a true sleaze, the centerpiece of Walter Hill’s view of Mexico as a place where no one seemingly could get clean even if they wanted to. Clouds of dust float around greasy, heavily-armed Mexicans, and Boothe lists in the middle of the crowd, tequila bottle in one hand, revolver in the other. His delivery of the sometimes preposterous, other times oddly brilliant dialogue is note-perfect: you never believe he’s anything but an utterly dissipated, depraved scumbag, and yet he’s oddly pitiable even in his psychosis. It’s sort of like he’s channeling his earlier, equally unforgettable work in the 1980 TV movie Guyana Tragedy: The Story Of Jim Jones.

There are a bunch of extremely violent outbursts, including a massive explosion, a bank robbery, and a shotgun-to-the-foot scene that made me wince when I first saw it as a teenager, and did it again this time. But the climactic massacre is where the Wild Bunch comparisons really come into play. Just like the Peckinpah version, there are machine gun nests, blood squibs as far as the eye can see, and bodies tumbling from roof to street in lovely slow motion, all expertly edited so the plot is never lost. At the same time, the duel between Boothe and Nolte over Alonso has an almost Leone-like majesty. This film reveals the extreme difficulty of making a modern-day Western that really works. Walter Hill pulls off what very few other directors could (probably because most wouldn’t even try).

Hill is one of my favorite directors, and I think this might be his best movie. It’s the movie that made me start looking for his name as a factor in whether I’d buy a ticket, or hit the video store, or not. It’s underrated, and too infrequently seen, compared with his better-regarded, better-known movies like 48 Hrs., The Warriors, Southern Comfort or Hard Times, but I think Extreme Prejudice distills everything great about Hill’s cigar-chomping, balls-out approach to filmmaking (and everything he stole from Peckinpah’s few lucid moments). It’s a movie that deserves a reputation beyond folks like me. (And a widescreen DVD release would be nice, too.)

Michel Doneda, Jack Wright, Tatsuya Nakatani - From Between (SoSEditions)

The elegant cover image reproduced above is, as it happens, virtually impossible to make out on the physical artefact: printed black on black, the texts and images are only legible because of the indentations left by the old-fashioned letterpress printing. Similar games concerning legibility and communication play out inside the packaging – a Jerome Rothenberg poem printed in light grey on white, a CD covered in Morse code (a reference, I take it, to the label name). The music itself has a simplicity and stateliness that often suggest a ghostly afterimage of Cage’s Ryoanji. Percussionist Nakatani places each click and drumtap with the precision of a step taken in a ceremonial dance, and often adds soft touches of chimes. Doneda (on soprano and sopranino) and Wright (alto and soprano) both make their horns sound slender as a reed, often concentrating on thin wire-drawn tones perpetually on the verge of disappearing entirely into the musical ether. The resulting music is far from austere: a kind of gradually unfolding micro drama, comprising a series of tiny vulnerabilities, frayings, insinuations, and stretches of miniaturized song. Like so many of the best improv recordings, this one seems to change shape and emphasis with every listen: delicate, languorously paced, yet tough as steel.

~ Nate Dorward

Michael Renkel / Luca Venitucci - Still

Michael Renkel / Luca Venitucci
Still
l’Innomable 04

Guitarist Renkel, recently heard to good effect in his collaboration (as half of Activity Center) with Phil Minton on Absinth, here teams with accordionist Luca Venitucci for three astringent but fairly rewarding improvisations. It’s a subdued affair, a touch drier than perhaps I’d have liked to have heard, but contains a good deal of careful listening and considered conversation, making good use of the sonic capabilities of their instruments, Renkel credited additionally with zither and “preparations”, Venitucci with flight-case (a first?) and “objects”.

On the initial and longest track (about 27 minutes), “second order observation”, Venitucci sometimes sounds as though he’s emulating Sachiko M, casting out extremely high, sine-like pitches from his accordion, shafts of tone around which Renkel weaves with delicate quasi-scalar strumming or harsher, similarly high-end bowing. Space is employed quite well as when, a few minutes later, soft squeezebox breaths engage with spiky harassment from the guitar, a very attractive and unhurried conversation. The two readily shift attitudes, Renkel soon acquiescing into soft chords while his partner scrabbles nervously about until a gentle truce is reached and an almost pastoral interlude drifts by. Maybe the piece goes on a few minutes longer than necessary as some agitation that sets in during the final moments distracts me a bit from the overall tenor of the work, but by and large, it coheres pretty well.

“serraglio” begins in not dissimilar fashion with nervous scrabbling by Renkel and soft, wheezy accordion. However, a more disjointed feel gradually manifests, the brief episodes flickering in and out of space like lit areas seen from a passing train. It ends up being less satisfying than I’d hoped, perhaps because of what I find to be excessive aridity in execution although that appears to often be part and parcel of Renkel’s approach (I’m not otherwise familiar, I don’t think, with Venitucci and therefore am not certain how typical or not this session is for him). The final selection, “interferenze”, is by far my pick of the lot, wherein the duo gets something resembling a drone up and running, Venitucci on ratchety objects (maybe that flight case, too!), Renkel obsessively iterating plucked notes. When, at its conclusion, an organ-y accordion finds itself in the company of sparse bells and low, thrummed guitar, a very special aura is created. Throughout, the shifts in mood unfold at a natural pace and the ten-minute piece achieves a stand-alone solidity hinted at with greater of lesser success in the others.

An interesting recording, worth hearing. Info at: http://www.linnomable.com/.

~ Brian Olewnick