Bagatellen

MI3 - We Will Make a Home for You

Clean Feed 39

The title of this latest disc by the trio of pianist Pandelis Karayorgis (here on Fender Rhodes), bassist Nate McBride and drummer Curt Newton is a truly eponymous one. For a trio whose moniker stands (or stood – the group disbanded in 2004 once McBride left Boston for Chicago) for ‘modern improvisation trio,’ the primary modes are immediate interaction and the process of evolution, thus giving composition a theoretical backseat. Possibly another reason for such a pregnant title is the fact that they have chosen to not only find a place for composition in a set of very free improvisations, but they have chosen to use four rather obscure Monk pieces, one by Philly-based pianist, composer and guru Hasaan Ibn Ali (see Max Roach Trio featuring the Legendary Hasaan, Atlantic, 1961), and Eric Dolphy’s Monk-ish homage to Italian modern flutist Severino Gazzelloni from Out to Lunch (Blue Note, 1964). These make for a welcome and odd program, combined with a few Karayorgis originals – not to mention the odd instrumentation of Fender Rhodes, bass and percussion, which could be another point the title makes, namely, no instrument need be left out of free music.

Normally a fixture in jazz-rock hybrids, the Fender Rhodes sounds perfectly at home in its fuzzed-out glory here, giving “Gazzelloni” a rawness and wryness that is only hinted at in its raw, brassy original form. McBride is all horsehair and gut in his powerful, liberated solo and Newton tastefully loose in his support. “Ugly Beauty” brings out the guitar-like voicings for which the Rhodes is known, Karayorgis somehow wringing taut harmonics that sound as though they were played behind the bridge of a hollow-body Gibson, holding the languid tempo as Newton and McBride make every effort to submerge the last vestiges. Newton’s melodic solo reminds one of Paul Motian in its balanced ethereality and conviction, a spacious freedom like the Bley trio at its electric finest. Despite the difficulty of making Monkish voicings on the Rhodes, Karayorgis does it well, as in the closing minutes of “Ugly Beauty,” only to take “Shuffle Boil” at a fast clip, the unearthly wah-wah of the electric piano still hitting the low, perverse blats that the theme calls for. Hasaan’s pragmatically-titled “3/4 vs. 6/8 4/4 Time” is a driving study in superimposition, similar in effect to the rhythmic push-pull of Valdo Williams’ trio music, shifting character as the waltz and straight-time sections become ever more fluid and giving Karayorgis a chance to test his synapses with the treacherous ice floes of bass and percussion. It is interesting that despite the foreground nature of the Rhodes, the instrument – and Karayorgis at times – appears to take a back seat to the interplay of McBride and Newton, perhaps due to the sheer dynamics that acoustic instruments carry over the tinny electric piano. Yet its limited range is made up for primarily in Karayorgis’ choice of phrases, a battle of form and wit against painterly mass – the Derek Bailey-like jaggedness at the end of a particularly warped “Monk’s Point,” for example, ready to explode into full-bore pianism at every turn.

We Will Make a Home for You is a fascinating study in color contrasts, mass and effervescence, and structured freedom. It is true that sometimes carving out a little home for something different – instrumentation, repertoire, context – is all that is needed to keep a group ‘free.’ The MI3 certainly found that niche.

They Just Wanna Give You The Creeps

How did we get from Black Sabbath (inventors of “doom metal”) to Khanate?

Doom is at this point nearly as wide-open as metal itself. The label encompasses everything from outright Sab clones like Saint Vitus to bad-trip soundscapers like Esoteric and Electric Wizard, from Southern-rock-infused purveyors of filthy noise like Eyehategod and Sourvein to the Japanese experimentalists Boris, who’ve done everything from semi-ambient drone pieces to rifftastic monoliths of roar. But Khanate is the band doing the most with the doom concept, or anyway, the most doomed-sounding band ever.

Sure, Khanate steals from Sabbath. But their brilliance is in what they choose to steal. Khanate are all about space. Each huge chord, each snare crack or cymbal crash, is allowed to decay into silence before the next arrives. They’ve heard the word “riff,” but don’t believe it applies to what they’re doing, and they’re right. Guitarist Stephen O’Malley can’t be bothered with Iommi-esque crunch; he’s imitating the church bells that opened Sabbath’s debut, while drummer Tim Wyskida’s cymbals recall the ominous rainfall. Vocalist Alan Dubin doesn’t sound like Ozzy as much as what that creepy woman on the Black Sabbath album cover might sound like, in your worst nightmares. Bassist Jim Plotkin isn’t nearly as nimble-fingered as Geezer Butler, but he looks like a 19th century serial killer in band photos; Butler just looks like an old hippy. So, points to Plotkin.

Khanate’s new single (never mind the 43-minute running time, two songs isn’t an EP) is the best thing they’ve released yet. Awash in echo, “Capture” and “Release” find Dubin portraying some combination of Gollum and The Silence Of The Lambs’ Buffalo Bill. “Who says I can’t have?/closer come closer/…strapped and tied/sing with me/…someone’s treasure crush,” he screeches. “Release” is even more disturbing, if that’s possible. Dubin, or the character he’s playing, doesn’t mean “release” in the sense that the victim captured in the first song will be freed; he means releasing blood from veins, releasing soul from body. The music perfectly supports the lyrics and vocals, too; some of the pauses between chords are so long that when the guitar does return, you’ll jump like the ceiling just fell in. This, more than any half-assed indie “noise” crap (fuck a bunch of Wolf Eyes and Black Dice), is the sound not of music itself, but of music’s death. Khanate have created a truly hopeless diptych, taking their sound, and doom as a genre, to what seems right now like its ultimate extreme. Hard to imagine a more desolate record being released this year, or anytime soon. I can’t wait to see them live again. (The last time I saw them, Plotkin fried a bass head, so they stopped after just over a half hour. I’m hoping he's upgraded his equipment, and can play a longer set this time.)

The Scotch of St. James – Live at AMPLIFY 2004: Addition

The Scotch of St. James – Live at AMPLIFY 2004: Addition
Confront Collectors Series CCS2

Mark Wastell is a good example of how the newer strains of improvised music value the quality and variety of sounds created above the historical language of the instruments played. Originally solely a cellist, Wastell has diversified his portfolio to include electronics, tam tam, bowed metals and ‘amplified textures’, mysterious small sounds created by rubbing and scraping closely miked surfaces and textures.
It is these amplified textures together with a minimal selection of tuned metal objects and simple electronics that make up Wastell’s contribution to The Scotch of St. James, his duo with percussionist Tim Barnes.
New York City based Barnes is also capable of playing in a variety of musical styles, having played in assorted avant rock outfits, but here he strips down everything to a single prepared snare drum, using a contact mic to seize a catalogue of microscopic sounds.

Beautifully recorded by Christoph Amann, Live at AMPLFY 2004 captures thirty five minutes of remarkably restrained yet thoroughly involving musical conversation.
Wastell’s input consists of crackles, gentle abrasions and the occasional hiss of escaping white noise, into which Barnes weaves intimate rattles, scrapes and other miniscule events. There is no sense of rhythm, the music unfolding itself naturally with Barnes focussed more on addressing the structure of his drum, both frame and skin to conjure up small studies of textural abstraction using a variety of wooden and metallic objects.
Every so often Wastell bows or strikes a Nepalese prayer bowl to add a single note of colour to the otherwise monochrome patina of the music, allowing the sound to die away slowly, often just blending into the ongoing structure of the performance but from time to time also providing signposts for the music to move in new directions.
Silence plays an important part. Little groups of sonic conversation are spread apart by brief patches of considered quietude, allowing the listener a few moments of repose to digest the music before becoming enveloped again. The quality of the recording really shows through here, every last crackle of static and stroke of the drum skin are crystal clear.

This is beautiful music that inhabits its own very individual sound world. It has an air of austerity and precision yet also in places the interplay between the two musicians carries back and forth in little bursts of scurrying activity. In other areas the conversation is less pronounced, the two musicians focussed on individual sonic discoveries merging together seamlessly in concert with one another.

Music of this type manages to release itself from the intrinsic emotional and historic baggage that comes with other music based around more traditional instrumentation. After the initial attempts to pin down the origins of every sound fail, the beguiling beauty of the music draws you in on its own terms. It is testament to the remarkable skill of the musicians that the sound takes on a life of its own, and it is only at the conclusion of the disc as the audience breaks into applause that you are reminded of the human element involved in its making.
Live at AMPLIFY 2004 is a real gem of a recording capturing two musicians at the height of their abilities and is thoroughly recommended.

The Scotch of St James will open the Erstquake 2 festival in New York this September.

~Richard Pinnell

Eclection

With a name coined by Joni Mitchell to acknowledge the eclectic nature of the UK assemblage of musicians from Norway (Georg Hultgreen), Canada (Michael Rosen), Australia (Kerrilee Male, Trevor Lucas), and the UK (Gerry Conway), Eclection was a band perched at the nests of jangly folk-rock, sunshine pop, and symphonic rock. This criminally obscure orchestral folk-rock platter was recorded and released by Elektra in 1968, meeting with no commercial success, but winding up firmly ensconced in the pantheon of connoisseurs of that era. It's the kind of record that could've easily launched a group into the stardom that Fairport Convention was quickly acquiring at the same time, but even with the imprint of a prestigious and hip label, somehow got a short straw in an explosion of creative rock music that's still being sifted through to this day.

The multi-national quintet bore an overabundance of talent, quite conspicuously in the case of vocals. Female vocalist Kerrilee Male was in the same league as Sandy Denny, and the way her heavenly voice floats above concise and rich symphonic textures recalls the finest moments of Annie Haslam in Renaissance. Just on the basis of this album, Male has a solid place in my top thirty or so female vocalists. It probably would've been better if the group had just one great male vocalist to balance the sound, but instead they had several men with enough talent to carry a band on their own as a frontperson. Happily for us, all this vocal talent makes the album a benchmark by which to judge the male/female vocal harmonies that flourished in that era and sadly have long lost their foothold in popular music culture. Between the vocal harmonies and the bright, sunny blend of acoustic and electric guitars, it's understandable they're sometimes compared to The Mamas & The Papas, but I find Eclection vastly superior to the underwhelming pleasantries of that California unit. For me, perhaps the only 60s group that I'd rank as high in terms of male/female vocal blends is The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, a group that was so consistently stunning in every aspect that they make my 60s pop top five (alongside The Beatles, The Byrds, The Idle Race, and The Action).

It's noteworthy that the group beckons those American references. While the similarities to Fairport Convention and other UK folk-rock bands is unmistakable, Eclection was a rare bird in that scene, and the sunny orchestral part of their sound is marked contrast to Fairport's stripped-down and edgy tendencies. Primary songwriter Georg Hultgreen (who later changed his surname to Kajanus—his mother was Norwegian sculptor Johanna Kajanus) was a Norwegian who made his way to the jumping London scene by way of stints in Paris and Quebec. The notion that Eclection were on the wrong side of the Atlantic is corrorobated by Kajanus in an interview:

I would agree that the musical direction of the group was probably closer to American folk-rock than anything else. I must confess, having spent my formative musical years haunting the folk clubs in Montreal, Canada and watching all the current folk and folk/rock programs on TV, I was strongly influenced by this music. The most influential artists for me at the time were people like Dylan, the Byrds, Fred Neil, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and Gordon Lightfoot. Pre-Eclection, I was a purist fighting the acoustic battle versus the electric "demons" creeping into the scene. I remember being shocked when Dylan went electric. It is therefore ironic that I should end up a few years later playing an electric 12-string in Eclection.

The connections to UK music won out in the end, though. Bass guitarist Trevor Lucas was the boyfriend and future husband of Sandy Denny and went on to form Fotheringay with Denny and Eclection's drumkitter, Gerry Conway, resulting in their magnificent eponymous release in 1970. Denny went on to a solo career; Lucas went on to join Fairport Convention (as did Conway a few years ago); and Conway went on to be a fixture in the Cat Stevens camp for a while.

"Nevertheless" was one of several singles spun off the album to little public response, and it's not only my favorite Eclection track, but probably my all-time favorite folk-rock tune alongside Judy Dyble's addictive rendering of "I Don't Know Where I Stand" on the first Fairport Convention album. Like so many great songs, it's a brief sweet spot in the core melody that makes it transcendent. The modulation of tempo before the chorus is another part of the song that pushes it into the realm of the sublime. Everything else about the song is perfect too, but that's not to say the other songs aren't just as rich in crafty details and timeless melodies. Not a single cover in the bunch, every song on here is a masterpiece and it's a reliably uplifting disc when lilting, gorgeous vintage folk rock is called for. I find myself returning to it again and again, sometimes heading straight for "Nevertheless", but usually winding up in a reverie that gives the whole program a spin, if not two or three.

~Michael Anton Parker

Graham Halliwell - Recorded Delivery

Graham Halliwell
Recorded Delivery
Confront
CCS 4

Saxophonist Halliwell appears here in three duo performances with Rhodri Davies (playing E-bowed harp), Steve Roden (extracts from his “resonantlighttones”) and Mark Wastell (tam-tam). Halliwell, as has been his practice in recent years, works entirely with saxophonic feedback generation, an approach he discovered independently from other purveyors of this technique, notably John Butcher. Two of the pieces are constructions based on previously recorded material (supplied by Davies and Roden) while the piece with Wastell is an improvisation.

For the piece with Davies, “Beat”, Halliwell used as his source an hour-long recording by Davies in which the harpist utilized two E-bows, Halliwell layering his own feedback alongside, producing a shimmering effect as the sine-like waves form beat patterns. He writes in the liners that the work was created under the strong influence of Eliane Radigue (“Adnos One”). You can hear that but can also relate it to some of the experiments of Alvin Lucier. “Beat”, however, has an entirely warmer feel than many Lucier pieces, which sometimes edge toward the clinical. Relatively high in pitch early on, you occasionally get the ghostly sense of a disembodied soprano voice. It begins to waft away gently, pulses intersecting, sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, taking its time, re-coalescing into a stronger tone, disappearing. A lovely work.

For the second track, Halliwell took a piece from Roden’s disc, “Four Possible Landscapes”, and used a form of looped feedback where successive iterations enhanced each other in an attempt to “compliment, not copy, Steve’s ideas and beautiful sonorities”. The result is my favorite of the three offerings, something that reminds me of certain gorgeous solo works by Sachiko M where, as on the opening track from “debris”, she evokes sonar-like blips in a vast, undersea world. Here, the pings are a bit brighter, emerging into the sound-field and winking past like floating, phosphorescent diatoms. It has an irregularly cyclic feel to it that’s quite attractive, providing some amount of stasis without ever actually going into a repeat mode. There’s also more than enough bite in the tones themselves to stave off any plunges into absolute languor, though I wouldn’t mind wallowing here for a long while.

For the duo with Wastell (Vibra #3), condenser mics were placed extremely close to the tam-tams, enabling them to pick up low frequencies and overtones that could profitably mix with the controlled saxophone feedback. Again, an inspired idea. You can hear the softly struck gongs, providing a gentle percussive element missing in the other works as well as a burr-y tonal element (the essential harshness of scraped or struck metal)
that sounds wonderful next to the ringing feedback pitches. As with all of the works presented here, it calmly runs its course, taking just about enough time to make its subtle point before leaving.

“Recorded Delivery” is a beautifully conceived disc, deeply contemplative, and one of the finest new releases I’ve heard this year. Check it out.

http://www.confront.info/

Menza/ Bacon/ Jones - Jack Rabbitt

Cadence Jazz 1184

It would be easy and somewhat opportunistic to open this review with a harbinging eulogy for the B-3. How far the vintage console organ, the pride of the mighty Hammond family, has slid in popularity since its heyday as the principal voice of the halcyon soul jazz 60s. A handful of high profile purveyors still pull the stops and press the pedals, but with Jimmy Smith now gone the instrument will likely never reclaim its past glories. Even so, it’s still far from a dust-draped relic. Dapper, declamatory reedman James Carter is currently touring with his own organ trio and Joey DeFrancesco, arguably Smith’s heir apparent, shows little sign of slumping on his own road shows, but my money has recently shifted to Menza and crew as among the most favorable flag bearers of the admittedly winnowed constituency.

Don Menza was only a name to me prior to auditioning this Cadence Jazz platter, a guy on the Buffalo, NY music scene who, like Ernie Krivda and Buck Hill in their respective locales, had opted for careers in close spiritual proximity to home. His swing-to-bop tenor evinces an abiding and refreshing Dexter Gordon influence, especially on the opening title cut where he strolls through a series of virile bop phrases with a steady stride and step. “Body and Soul” is a bold choice considering the standard’s as the most overworked tenor tune in the jazz fake book, soil sucked so dry of nutrients that in the wrong hands it often resembles the consistency of sand. Menza plants his flag confidently in the shaky alluvium and miraculously the pole stands fast, holding aloft his signature take and sustaining interest for an improvisationally rich 11+ minutes. His opening unaccompanied preamble, pregnant with a lush Websterian purr, references other requisite names like Hawkins and Byas.

Bobby Jones handles the B-3 duties. His method of shaping a line with diligent attention to cerulean shading reminds me strongly of John Patton. There are points where his interplay with Menza recalls the animated agreement shared by the elder Patton and his faithful horn colleague Fred Jackson on their Blue Note forays, but the vibe leans more heavily toward postbop than blues or funk. A telltale liner photo points to his primary instrument as piano, but his skills on amplified variant are more than passable. Finally there’s John Bacon on drums, a marvel with brushes who also serves double-duty as band historian by recounting their back-story in the liners. His light touch and preference for supple cymbal accents propels the trio along without straining the pistons and both Menza and Jones benefit from his deft ability at sustaining the forward velocity.

The rest of the program is populated by a near even mix of standards and originals, the latter batch all composed by Bacon. “The Right Spice” and “La Conga Loca” revisit the age-old soul jazz habit of unearthing Latin ore for sure-fire grooves. Bacon handles the boogaloo-tinged syncopations beautifully and Menza digs in with a succession of lustrous trills that once again tap the Newk vein.“Soldier in the Rain” and “My Foolish Heart” each eclipse the ten-minute marker and deliver eloquent ballad affidavits from the band. Those listeners resolved to Prestige and Rare Grooves reissues as a means of meeting their B-3 cravings will find much to masticate on here. The Cadence Jazz credo “the home of magic music” rings resoundingly true once again.

~ Derek Taylor

Danny Taylor

I'm surprised this hadn't come to my attention before now, but on March 10, 2005 Danny Taylor passed on at the tragic age of 56 in Kingston, New York. I haven't been able to locate any further details, but it's better to spend a moment thinking about his grooves instead anyway. Rock's answer to tabla tarang (the tuned drum array of Indian classical music), Taylor created a radical body of work in collaboration with Simeon Coxe as Silver Apples between the years of 1967 and 1970, creating three studio albums, Silver Apples, Contact, and a third that went unreleased until it was discovered in Taylor's attic in 1998 and released with other material as The Garden. Along with his extension of drumkit vocabulary into the realms of tuned percussion, Taylor's critical innovation was a style of drumkit rhythm that predates by several decades the breakbeats of electronic dance music culture and the bouncy blissouts of Stereolab and Broadcast. If someone heard tracks like "Seagreen Serenades" and "Program" from the 1968 debut without knowing any better, they could easily mistake it for an oddity of the mid-90s jungle / drum 'n' bass explosion, though the 60s feeling in the production and vocals would temper the impression.

Nobody else that I'm aware of in that seminal era of rock experimentalism played rhythms like Taylor. I wish I knew to what extent his breakbeats and motoric loops were based on earlier music, but my knowledge of pop music doesn't stretch much further back than the mid-60s. Quite generally, I'm itching to read a historical analysis of the development of the underlying rhythmic concepts explored in breakbeat culture. I would imagine that Taylor got ideas from earlier soul, funk, and jazz drumkit approaches, but I really have no facts to refer to. Concurrent to the explosion of so-called psychedelic rock that the Silver Apples were an obscure part of, James Brown was honing his advanced concepts of groove overseeing constant performances by a crack ensemble that would feature as many as five drumkitters in one concert, alternating duties depending on the specific requirements of each tune. Clyde Stubblefield's drum fill in the James Brown tune "Funky Drummer" is of course always cited as a landmark and has been used as the rhythmic basis for a vast amount of music in the past two decades or so, but this was recorded in late 1969. There must be some earlier chapters to the breakbeat story. Sheer personal invention by Stubblefield, Taylor, et al is probably part of it, but I'll bet there was a groove zeitgeist yet to be documented.

The motoric, even beats that Taylor used in addition to the funky ones can be heard in Maureen Tucker's drumkit style with the Velvet Underground, which predates the Silver Apples by only a year or so. Interestingly, both bands were from New York City, a disproportionately infertile region for the creative rock of the era (but let's not forget other great NYC experimental rock units like Autosalvage and Mystic Tide!). I wonder if their worlds overlapped? Taylor was definitely part of the lower Manhattan rock scene as the drumkitter in Jimi Hendrix's first group, Jimmy James and The Blue Flames, which formed in 1965 and hung its hat in the Greenwich Village scene. In the case of Tucker, it's not hard to hear how she was incrementally modifying earlier blues and rock models for her propulsive beats, but in tandem with Sterling Morrison's equally insistent strumming loops on electric guitar it was a fresh rhythmic feeling that predated the Krautrock of the early 70s, as did Taylor's more insistently repetitive moments, though the guitar sound of VU relates more to Faust, Can, Ono, etc than the pre-Neu!/Kraftwerk electronic timbres of the Silver Apples. Surely unbeknowst to each side of the Atlantic, Germany's quintet of American GIs The Monks broke comparable rhythmic ground in 1966, curiously even using a banjo like the Silver Apples did! While The Monks' amplified six-string banjo was a thrashing punk element much more brash and raw than their kindred spirits in NYC, the band definitely shared the austere propulsion of Tucker and Morrisson, not to mention the seminal introduction of guitar/amplifier feedback into the vocabulary of music. There's also a striking resemblance to The Monks in the Silver Apples' hot motoric banjo groove classic "Ruby".

I speculate that Taylor's unique prefigurations of breakbeats and some of his other rhythmic concepts were a result of adapting to the extremely novel form of bass accompaniment Simeon provided. Unlike just about every other rock band of the era you could name, the Silver Apples used no guitars in any form, bass or alto/tenor, and no keyboards in any form, except on the tracks where Simeon played amplified acoustic banjo. Aside from drumkit, the key compositions by the duo derived all their instrumentation from Simeon's homemade assemblage of oscillators covering the full range from deep bass to twee filigree. Simeon's bass lines were stark and mechanical, obviously predating yet another critical aspect of drum 'n' bass aesthetics. The conventional phrasing and inflections of a bass guitar (or heck, even a tuba, like on The Seeds' third album) were out of reach for Simeon and his crude oscillators. It's easy to imagine the duo reconstructing their rhythms from the elemental units of repetition and accent in response to these instrumental conditions, focusing on synchronization and rhythmic minimalism to accomodate the limitations of Simeon's motor system as he dealt with simultaneous layers of rhythm and melody on his oscillators. In any case, it's frankly astounding how similar the breakbeats and massive bass tones are to relatively recent music, and in the many times over the years I've found myself joyfully indulging in tracks like "Seagreen Serenades" at sonically forceful volume levels from my car stereo, I've occasionally caught myself feeling I might be awkwardly misrepresenting myself as a member of a certain acoustic-ecologically problematic subculture I have no affiliation with!

There's something odd about the fact we use the term "electronic music" to refer to a lot of music that's so heavily based on a purely acoustic instrument like drumkit, but you can't get much more electronic than Simeon's oscillators. Silver Apples manager Barry Bryant penned this classic precis of the duo's sound at the time:

Silver Apples is an organic mechanism composed of the Simeon and the Taylor Drums. The Simeon presently consists of nine audio oscillators and eight-six manual controls, enabling Simeon to express his musical ideas. The lead and rhythm oscillators are played with the hands, elbows and knees and the bass oscillators are played with the feet. The Taylor Drums at this point include thirteen drums, five cymbals and other percussion instruments that Danny uses to develop his own mathematically pulsating systems, creating both rhythm and melody. As the two artists each create melody and rhythm, the resulting sounds interchange and grow to an electronic evocation.

Índeed, as far as I know, the Silver Apples and The United States of America were the first electronic rock groups, and the Apples were the most purely electronic of the small handful of other groups in the late 60s infancy of avant-rock that used electronics, with the possible exception of White Noise, the 1969 studio project that gave us the timeless An Electric Storm. The United States of America were similar to the Silver Apples in their avoidance of the standard guitar vocabulary of rock music and offered an equally inventive homebrew electronic sound world, while also relying on the relatively conventional instrumentation of bass guitar and violin, albeit fretless in the former case and heavily electrified in both cases. The reason I rank USA higher than Silver Apples (and higher than any 60s rock music for that matter) is simply the untouchable vocals of Dorothy Moskowitz; in most other respects the two groups were equally brilliant, though it does bear special mention that Taylor's drumkit work was way more advanced than any group that could be cited for exploring electronics in this era. As it were, the only other significant electronic rock group of the era that I'm aware of is Fifty-Foot Hose, who were several notches less accomplished than these other three, but still created a masterpiece album with catchy, sophisticated, and innovative pieces that can still blow minds. Spoils of War and Red Crayola also count as minor historical footnotes in any overview of this first period of experimentation with electronics in a rock context, but didn't deliver the kinds of inspired masterpieces of songcraft that make a group like Silver Apples so relevant just as great music regardless of its innovative aspects.

In the end, the reason the Silver Apples are so deliriously enjoyable and warrant permanent high-rotation status is that they wrote songs that reached rare peaks of sheer, joyful pop bliss, and it's to these I turn most often, despite my occasional deep enjoyment of the bizarre anti-pop gems they crafted as well. These are the high-rotation pop nuggets: "You and I", "Misty Mountain", "Seagreen Serenades", "Lovefingers", "Program", "I Have Known Love", and "Oscillations". Simeon was a great vocalist who could nail a lilting melody. Combine that with some ace songwriting and the singular, devastating grooves, and you've got timeless music ranking among the greatest achievements in rock history. I return to this music again and again. It never loses its power.

The mid-90s saw a Silver Apples renaissance highlighted by the overdue proper reissue of their two albums and the fantastic tribute album Electronic Evocations that presented genuine reconstructions of their classic tunes with independent aesthetic identities. Somewhat regrettably, after decades of absence from the music world, Simeon tackled some of the same tunes himself alongside a program of new original material in a new incarnation of the Silver Apples that released the embarassing Beacon in 1998, a debacle on par with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer in the history of comeback attempts. Without Taylor's distinctive drumkit vocabulary and with gaudy digital synth timbres instead of the artfully primitive oscillator palette of the glory days, not to mention the painfully vivid loss of Simeon's vocal skills, it's an album that even serious Silver Apples fans should avoid wasting money on. Simeon's fascination with newer electronic instruments was also documented on the follow-up album Decatur, a single album-length track of beatless electronic noodlings with a musical sensibility akin to various non-academic electronic music trends in the 70s and 80s, a quaint, listenable, and pleasant work bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the earlier Silver Apples sound.

It was only a matter of time before Taylor would also re-emerge, but it's a shame it didn't happen a few years earlier to possibly forestall Simeon's failures to extend the group's legacy. The story is recounted in the liner notes to The Garden:

It was 12:30 in the afternoon of March 17, 1998. Danny Taylor was sitting at his desk at the phone company eating a baloney sandwich. He was idly listening to the radio, a satellite of WFMU in New Jersey. At 12:31 his eyes got round as saucers. He sputtered "That's Me!". The radio was playing "I Have Known Love" from Contact, Silver Apples' second album, recorded in 1969. Danny was the drummer on all Silver Apples sogs of that era, but this was the only one on which he sang! He couldn't believe what he was hearing.

The station was conducting a pledge drive so he called them up and pledged $25 saying "Anybody who plays Silver Apples after all these years gotta be alright". And he gave his name and phone number. An alert DJ at WFMU named Fabio noticed the pledge card and called him back, asking "Are you THE Danny Taylor, the long lost and missing-in-action Silver Apple?". So that's how it came to pass. Fabio emailed Simeon "We've found Danny!". Within minutes Simeon was out the door. He drove 300 miles for the reunion. They hadn't seen in each other in twenty-seven years!

Shortly thereafter, the long-forgotten recordings of the unreleased third Silver Apples album from 1969 were located in Taylor's attic, as were recordings of solo drumkit pieces from 1968 documenting Taylor's groove research. The seven songs that were completed for the album hold up nicely and show a bouncier, goofier side to the band, also continuing certain trends evident from comparing the first and second albums. The solo drumkit works (released on The Garden with some solid and reasonable electronic additions Simeon recorded in 1998) are especially relevant today as we reflect on Taylor's legacy. His fascination with the timbral and melodic colorations of tom-toms comes through as he loops through pounding, catchy grooves, and his fidgety breakbeat sensibilities are especially well captured on "Fire Ant Noodle".

~Michael Anton Parker

Thanks to avant-rock guru Craig Shropshire for bringing this news to my attention.

An informative entry on the Silver Apples appears on this pleasant blog. I also located this note on Taylor's passing from someone with a personal connection to Taylor and Simeon. In this fine interview, Simeon says Hendrix tried to get Taylor to join him for his UK transition. The fickle winds of history blow again.

Jo Jones - The Main Man (Pablo)

Basically a Basie band minus the Count, Jo Jones sole Pablo date (and one of his paltry few as a leader) mines a familiar swing-based songbook of blues, ballads and burners. His rep as the father of modern drumming more than warrants the Murders Row assembled in support. “Sweets” Edison AND Roy Eldridge, trumpets; Vic Dickenson on ‘bone and the pit-bull tenor of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, able to chew expressively through a riff like few others; how about that for a take-no-prisoners horn section? Also on loan from Jones’ former employer, the redoubtable rhythm sense of one Freddie Green, plectrist par excellence. Tommy Flanagan occupies the piano seat, but his flowery, urbane style isn’t always the best fit for the down-home propensities of the ensemble. With a surname shared but no relation, Sam Jones is an elastic ballast on string bass. He settles comfortably into a wallflower walking role that requires only a modicum of his prowess, giving frequent nods to elder Walter Page.

But enough ink about the roll call. A jam session flavor of old chums, carousing and confabulating, pervades the six tunes. Basie’s “Goin’ to Chicago Blues” commences the party with a couple choruses of rhythm section sans horns sounding off in ode to Jones’ hometown. Stamped by the leader’s pile driver snare, the frontline’s entrance quickly narrows into a gurgling tailgate of Dickenson’s brass and onward to solos by Eldridge, Davis, Edison and Flanagan. Jones’ brushes sashay through “I Want to Be Happy” and sculpt spry time and sibilant volume on par with the harder sonorities achieved with his sticks. “Ad Lib” arrives as his only compositional contribution and it’s little more than riff-piece excuse for more rambunctious horns-and-drums horseplay. At odds with an overly academic title, “Metrical Portions” finds him toying blithely with tempo and mixing up syncopated lather on cymbals amidst sturdy bass fills by the other Jones. A lengthy Buck Clayton arrangement of the old tear-jerker “Dark Eyes” and the gray-mane warhorse “Old Man River” complete the package.

Norman Granz regularly earned black eyes in the critical press for bankrolling albums that favored friction and excess over congeniality and finesse. Running contrary to this conventional ‘wisdom’, this session (and fairly-speaking a slew of others) speaks to his substantive skills as a producer. While it’s a shame there aren’t more Jones-led dates for posterity this late-in-the-game document is also a fitting monument.

Horn_Bill: Reed Solos

Spread over two compact discs, this Matchless release presents in its entirety a January 9, 2005 concert held in London under the auspices of the ONGAKU: enjoy_sound improv promotional organization. A rare and weighty event, it presented solo sets by six reedists representing a vast range of aesthetics. The performers were, in order, Nathaniel Catchpole, Seymour Wright, Lou Gare, Kai Fagaschinski, John Butcher, and Evan Parker. All of these musicians are British saxophonists, except Fagaschinski, a German clarinettest. Since this was a London event, it's a shame the great Caroline Kraabel didn't have a slot, because I saw her do a solo last year that revealed an idiosyncratic and deeply creative approach to solo saxophone that would've elevated this program.

I will outline some of my biases in approaching this music. I greatly prefer listening to both reed instruments and solo improvisations compared to other many other instrumental categories and performance formats, so I'm happy this document exists. I was fairly familiar with the three veterans—Gare, Butcher, and Parker—while more or less encountering the other three for the first time here. I have read commentary on Fagaschinski's work that suggest it's a highlight of recent improvised music and I sincerely apologize for this regrettable gap in my listening. My familiarity with Gare is strictly limited to a handful of AMM recordings (their early work and 1990's The Nameless Uncarved Block) that I enjoy greatly but not as much as the Tilbury/Rowe/Prévost version. My feelings about Butcher and Parker amount to generic hero-worship of some sort or another, and they are the only musicians of the six I've witnessed in live performance, although in the case of Parker it's been so long that my memory of the music is hazy to nonexistent.

I will now report my experience with each set. If you prefer a summary, I found the Wright, Butcher, and Parker tracks stunning and sufficient reason for any reed fan to listen to this program, while finding the other tracks unremarkable but easily credited with various virtues. With the interactive format of Bagatellen, I hope other listeners will reveal aspects of the music I'm neglecting and prompt me to relisten to these latter works from a more profitable angle.

Nathaniel Catchpole's "Maurice Brinton" is a slow 19-minute piece that deals primarily in continuous gestures with a duration similar to a single breath cycle and a low degree of internal variation. The first time I played the disc was in my car and I put it in without looking at the tracklistings or credits. After listening to disc one in its entirety, later in the day I looked at the track info and learned that I had mistakenly identified this as a John Butcher piece because of its melodic austerity and the way it seems to flirt with the boundaries of technical control and welcome unpredictable fractures in timbre and phrasing. I chalked it up to one of Butcher's occasional moments of fixation on static material that leaves me somewhat unengaged. In the midst of sustained tones that I had a neutral reaction to, occasionally a brief goose-like sound would escape through the cracks in timbre and give me a little thrill.

For the most part, it sounds like Catchpole is non-strenuously torturing the saxophone, an aesthetic I usually gravitate towards, but I honestly can't say I enjoyed this piece, even though it's in the same vein as David Gross' playing on Fetish, a disc that clicked into place for me eventually and I now love, although it's the kind of thing that requires a special mood I'm not exactly in too frequently. The strong dependency on a suitably charitable or depraved mood is the same way I feel about harsh noise like Merzbow or the like, which I enjoy far less and far less often than anything that could possibly be done on a saxophone or any acoustic instrument. While not bombastic and destructo-rampage-styled like Borbetomagus, both this piece by Catchpole and Gross' Fetish work are a kind of noise music for saxophone. I don't mean to make any judgements about its value and my experience was mostly neutral, not negative; I can only report my experience as a listener, which is always subject to change. Plus, I've only played the piece three times, so it's not as if I've exhausted every listening strategy on it. I probably would've only played it once if I hadn't assigned myself the task of writing this review. Sometimes accepting the role of a commentator becomes a chore instead of a pleasure. I could've enjoyed my life more if I played the Paul Dunmall solo bagpipe disc, Black Sabbath, or Azerbaidjani accordion music I had on deck instead. I don't mean to direct any of these thoughts specifically at Catchpole, surely an admirable and accomplished artist, but sometimes I think I'm crazy to listen to this difficult music instead of the inexhaustible and adequately diverse riches of failsafe fonts of musical joy.

That said, there's a passage in the piece I really love, a respite from characteristic reed sounds that kicks in at 6:35 and hits a sweet spot at 6:54, eventually reverting back to the main thrust of the piece early in the tenth minute. In this gorgeous passage quiet, breathy whistling phrases leisurely enter in isolation and end with a faint fast splutter. As another highlight, in one of my listens I found something meditative and seductive about the last three minutes or so.

Seymour Wright's "All Wright!" is a tremendously inventive 12-minute piece that uses the saxophone as a percussion instrument much more than a reed instrument, but crucially synthesizes both possibilities in a way I've never heard anything remotely like before. It's common among saxophonists to create percussive pops with the keypad or their mouths, and Wright does use these sounds a bit too, but his saxophone-as-percussion concept is vastly more literal, crude, and resolutely unsaxophonic. Using some kind of motorized device, if not several such devices, possibly a hand-held battery-operated micro-fan or coffee-stirrer or the like, Wright's piece is immediately distinctive for the persistent layer of clicking sounds that accompany his very sparse and strangulated bursts of reed sounds. The metallic clicks have a timbral intrigue of their own, but their primary role is vastly more revelatory. To my ears, they function as a variation on silence, by which I refer to the fact that ordinarily the sonic context in which musical structures are generated is silence, but logically there are unsilent alternatives for the sonic contextualization of music as well. The broad concept of a drone is the most common example, a layer of sound that is taken a baseline for sound events it doesn't necessarily structurally relate to. I wish to emphasize the phrase "broad concept", because I'm not referring to the narrow concept of drone, like in ragas where there is a critical structural relationship between the drone and the linear sound events, specifically a pitch relationship. "drone" has several related meanings with important distinctions. "All Wright!" is a rare example of percussive sound events—the opposite of a drone—functioning as a sound layer that modulates the sound environment away from silence, while remaining detached from the primary layer of musical structure. This is a fascinating and largely untapped area of musical exploration. Some of the aesthetics championed by Erstwhile Records can be taken as candidates for musical recontextualization apart from their more celebrated role as music, and frequently pose enjoyable dilemmas for the listener in attempting to or even just defaulting to an attempt to adopt a conventional foreground/background distinction among simultaneous sound layers. Whereas continuous sound events dominate these intriguing candidates for environmental modulation, what is especially novel about Wright's work here is that it exposes the possibility of texture derived from non-continuous sound events.

Before elaborating any further on the role of the secondary soundfield, let me identify the primary layer of musical structure in the piece. Wright mostly interjects extremely brief snippets of familiar saxophone sounds across an established range of technique, most of which would be considered extensions to the conventional vocabulary of the instrument. The sheer diversity of sound he issues almost gives the impression he's capriciously attacking the instrument with little regard for the specific character of the sound events, as if timing, duration, and dynamics are the chief structural concerns instead of pitch or timbre. I doubt this is truly the case, so I say "almost", but it would be nice to hear pitch and timbre ignored more often by other musicians and whatever Wright is doing is a treat to my ears. The animalistic, raw, seething gestures combined with an extreme sense of drama and restraint recall Jack Wright (no relation), Michel Doneda, Bhob Rainey, and John Berndt, but Wright is distinctive in his emphasis on percussive sound even when actually using the mouthpiece in a relatively familiar way, relative to 2005 when seemingly every possible saxophone sound has been made already, that is. While lacking the elements of linear development, phrasal compaction, and heart-stopping dynamic juxtaposition that put Mats Gustafsson in an untouchable category of his own, Wright's percussiveness is something of an anemic, wispy counterpart to Gustafsson's.

So how are the mouthpiece-related sounds perceptually relativized by the mechanical backdrop? First we can note that the clicks are in a class of non-rhythmic loops, repetition without accents or other variations to create an experience of motion. Power tools are another good example of this type of soundfield, though there's nothing overbearing or wearisome about Wright's gentle clicks. Despite their rhythmic neutrality, the sounds are discontinuous, creating a temporal grid that eliminates the temporal amorphousness of silence. If this grid was removed, Wright's playing would be comparable to the mostly-silence school of solo horn music pioneered by Radu Malfatti, Mats Gustafsson, Bhob Rainey, et al, where the experience of tempo and meter are taken to their vanishing point. In this grid, however, temporal reference is continually reset. Wright's sparsity is exempt from the drama of duration. It's a remarkably novel experience. Novelty aside, what it shares with the aforementioned players' work is the lowercase essence, a foregrounding of certain details of sound—timbre and envelope, for example—that are typically masked by pitch modulations and other larger structures.

Having portrayed this distinct music/environment division in the piece, there are two critical points to be made. First, in case it's not obvious, I'm simply reporting my experience and interpretation of the music, and I have no idea whether Wright's intentions or viewpoint is similar at all. But the most interesting qualification to be made is that the division verges on disappearing as often as it crystallizes in my perception. Take for example the sound at the 0:41 mark, one of my favorite moments in the piece, a small burst of blown sound somewhere in between a percussive pop and a reedy buzz. It's a lovely little sound and the way it's squeezed in between the fairly uptempo steady click loop almost transforms the surrounding clicks into a rhythmic event instead of an environmental background, creating the experience of perceptual flip-flop between rhythmically neutral background modulation and foreground phrasality of an austere, rhythmically minimal nature akin to that explored by post-techno artists like Plastikman or the stuff on the Mille Plateaux Clicks and Cuts comps, which I find to be a fascinating and frequently enjoyable innovation. Indeed, the role of Wright's clicks in the piece are malleable and resist the kind of pigeonholing I hinted at above.

Perhaps the most robust dissolution of boundaries between the two soundfields comes around the 10:00 mark. The clicks had already been drastically accelerated by this point, and suddenly Wright launches into staccato slashing reed jabs that motionally dovetail with segments of high-velocity clicks. The mouth/reed system and the motor/striker system interact at the phrasal level. This is a section of the piece that becomes unusually animated, with some very exciting action between 10:13 and 10:19 that climaxes with something seemingly falling to the ground and making a metallic or perhaps glass-like clink fondly recalling the opening moments of Greg Kelley's monumental If I Never Meet You in This Life, Let Me Feel the Lack.

Listening to Wright's piece reminds me of the little battery-operated fans I saw in some bargain store recently. It's a shame I didn't snag a few then, but I'll have to go back sometime before they're gone because they were just perfect for soundplay or gifts for musician friends. They were cheap and had great soft plastic blades. Although I'm not a musician, I do enjoy tinkering with sound when an opportunity presents itself in daily life. I've discovered some sounds that strike me as the sort of thing one of today's reed or brass extenders would give their left pinky to be able to make, but these are things that don't require the slightest bit of technical discipline or effort on my part, just pleasant and easily reproduced accidents from playing with scraping, rubbing, or bowing gestures. These experiences and Wright's simple mechanical gadgetry are object lessons in the simple truth of independence between method and content that may be disconcerting to the instrumentalists who've dedicated countless hours to achieving the rare technical skills necessary to make certain sounds at the thrilling boundary between fast rhythm and granular tone. Perhaps the reason why these instrumentalists produce such consistently excellent music is that the technical challenges function as aesthetic constraints, whereas someone tinkering around with unassuming objects can easily get sucked into the open-ended physicality of the devices and sacrifice an aesthetic focus. Nevertheless, this a purely conceptual challenge and it would be great to hear the current movement of lowercase improv based on unconventional uses of acoustic instruments enriched by musicians who use more modest technical means but retain the austerity and focus of this music. I'm thinking of a vast array of objects here, but it does bear making special mention of balloons, which offer a wider range of sound possibilities than any other known instrument while also requiring about the least amount of skill to play successfully. I think many musicians are secretly frightened of balloons, as if they are a threat to their profession like computers and robots once were to factory laborers. It's frankly depressing how few active balloonists there are in the improv scene.

Lou Gare's "Saxophony" works as an 18-minute easy-listening respite from the boundary-pushing music of the other five players. Sounding much like Evan Parker's tenor work but without the timbral harshness and virtuosity, it's an evenly paced, jazzy, flowing run through a seamless series of closely related melodic variations with a lovely use of the acoustic resonances in the room. It's pure, relaxed melody somewhat shorn of passion or tension. Polished and enjoyable. Actually, this piece greatly reminds me of another UK tenor saxist I saw perform recently in a small group jazz setting, Simon Picard. I guess I like this stuff, but... where's that Black Sabbath disc?

Kai Fagaschinski's "Manchmal Glaube Ich Schon, Das es Überhaupt Keine Liebe Mehr Gibt" and "Ich Kann Im Fortschritt Keine Fortschritt Sehen" add up to over 22 minutes of solo clarinet music that has proven to be the most challenging segment of the program for me in that I find myself loosely attracted to them but ultimately fail to have a thrilling experience despite considerable effort. It's easy to cite their virtues, however; Fagaschinski has a fine command of extended techniques and can construct precise phrases in which two or three distinctive timbres evenly alternate. He has a slow, methodical approach here that exposes the expressive possibilities of simple gestures through steady repetition and tiny modulations, aligning himself with the John Butcher school of solo music in which ideas are restricted and developed instead of multiplied, with a tendency to aim for minor timbral variations as a primary parameter of development. Unlike Butcher as his best, though, the dynamic contours of Fagaschinski's phrases are very conventional, mostly gentle arches. Perhaps that limits their appeal for me. As a further distinction, Fagaschinski doesn't operate at the threshhold of technical control like Butcher, instead reproducing what are surely diligently practiced techniques with a sense of conservative craftfulness.

"Manchmal" is surprising in its early passage of conventionally expressive melody, delivered with a carefuly controlled trilling technique I really enjoyed, but before long it switches to faint unvoiced sounds, while retaining the rough pacing of the melody to give continuity. Fagaschinski then abandons this territory as well when he shifts into high-pitched twitters and a harsher palette similar to Wolfgang Fuchs. My feeling was that he had a very coherent and promising concept early in the piece that would've been better to continue with instead of switching his materials entirely. Now I like when people change directions in the middle of a piece, but typically I like it when this happens very frequently and achieves moment form, not just every few minutes in an otherwise traditional theme and variations approach. If someone is gonna take the traditional route, I'd rather hear them stick with it and really unleash the logic of the phrases they're dealing with. In a reaction that applies equally to "...Sehen", it seemed that Fagaschinski was just working on one idea for a minute or two, then switching to another one for no other reason than he no longer felt like playing something, as if the music is being driven by the waxings and wanings of motor system dispositions instead of musical intentions. I don't find this to be an interesting approach to solo music at all, because I don't hear any relationships between the extended sections on one hand, and the music fails to function in terms of moment-form on the other hand.

I think of this, and to some extent Catchpole's piece as well, as an example of middle-of-the-road improv, in the sense that it seems the player wants to reject conventional melody but still work within the same model for phrasal shapes, winding up with bland melodies played with generic phrasing. I'd rather hear someone like Gianni Gebbia, Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, or Vinny Golia work a sweet melody with groove and grease, or alternatively, someone like Evan Parker, Jack Wright, or Michel Doneda completely reinvent the shape of individual phrases and explore parameters unrelated to pitch. To my ears, Fagaschinski's work here neither retains the fruits of traditional approaches nor pursues an aesthetic radical enough to give the experience of tasting new fruits. That's not to say those high-pitched twitters weren't awfully nice!

"...Sehen" is the only piece in the program where really quiet territory is explored and using headphones significantly changed the experience. At times it's like being massaged by unusual reed sounds, a lovely experience. An extraordinary passage of ultra-subtlety commences around 9:08 and sustains a beautiful faint texture for the final five minutes of the piece, dominated by tire-deflating sounds, with delicate trills entering at 10:34 and what I'd call the moment-length highlight of these two discs coming at 11:49, a trilled phrase at the boundary between offering rich internal structure and being an even chunk of air noise. Magical stuff. This and similar phrases in this passage give the feeling of hearing power tools from a thousand feet away, and they're placed into elegant sequences with the flat deflation sounds and generous pauses. The piece ends on a peak as faint whistling sound begin to emerge amidst the unpitched textures.

John Butcher's "29 1/5" is by a long shot my favorite piece in this program. Just like Butcher's solo albums reliably offer an aspect of his musicality the others don't, this 19-minute solo offers something quite apart from his solo albums (though I haven't yet heard Caverns of Nightlife). For starters, it's much longer than the pieces he's released. It also reaches some terrifying extremes of intensity that could be a new reference standard in his oeuvre. He pushes the saxophone to such shocking extremes of sound intensity that it sounds like my speakers are splitting open. I think I should put a new age solo piano album in my stereo just to test my speakers and make sure they haven't been reduced to shreds and tatters. Butcher plays with a passionate abandon here that matches Ayler as his most energetic; it's the sound of a total human body set into unified motion and exploding. Whereas Ayler's music is based on folk melodies, Butcher's music is based on the work of Adolphe Sax, so the cathartic passion takes on a vastly different musical character.

Butcher doesn't create a large volume of sound too often here, though there's a section that takes the feeling of piercing birdsong to rare extremes; his intensity is like the spring-coil attack of a tiger's nearly instantaneous acceleration into motion. His playing has an urgency of motion sometimes absent in his work. It's a quality I really respond to, something that taps into a kinesthetic modality.

[6:24-7:10] has the groovy forward motion of a surf rock guitar loop. Around 10:07, Butcher hits a fierce groove to put James Brown to shame, though he'd been working up to it for a little while, and for the next 97 seconds his rhythms are so hot it almost feels like a Billy Cobham or Alphonse Mouzon drumkit solo from the golden years of fusion, with constant shifts in accent that never let the meter or tempo settle to a fixed position. More to the point, it has the rhythmic nuance of Akira Sotoyama's drumkit twitches in Tipographica or Tim Berne's knack for letting a groove come right to the brink of falling apart, a feeling best captured in Bloodcount in tandem with Jim Black's like-minded flirtations with collapsing drumkit grooves. The way Butcher squeezes in a quick fast line at 11:12 is like the way a great drumkit solo might use a quick roll fill to jump-start a phrase. The short scalar run in [11:44-11:46] is a rhythmic lapse that causes Butcher to lose his momentum. The groove disintegrates and he shifts into staccato phrases for a short bit, and then defaults to his sicko birdsong freakout mode, which is always welcome to my ears because I just can't get enough of harsh, pitch-pitched music, especially if it has a trilled or buzzing quality. That must be why I'm so infatuated with Michel Doneda's music.

Incidentally, bearing in mind that this program presents a succession of six performances in the same concert, and given that Butcher is the most aesthetically flexible of the six players, I can't help but wonder if his playing in this piece was partially shaped in response to the music that came earlier in the evening. That would be part and parcel of freely improvising I suppose.

Evan Parker's "Solo for Hugh Davies" is a 19-minute addition to his solo canon. Parker continues to blur the boundary between notes and tones by issuing spiralling cascades at such velocity that not even the saxophone itself can keep up, generating sonic afterimages and mysterious epiphenomenal sound layers that make me shudder with pleasure. In a world filled with saxophonists exploring leisurely soft timbral delicacies, the pure ass-whooping visceral force of Evan Parker's solo music is more dramatic and heart-stopping than ever. With the feeling of sheer exhaustion that comes from a lengthy Parker solo workout, it's wise he was allotted the final slot in the program, although in practice I feel the same way about Butcher's piece and prefer to listen to Parker's finale in a separate session. Aside from that, the diversity of the program lends itself to an appealing continuous listening session.

~Michael Anton Parker

Come Say Hi To The Bad Guy

Unlike some other members of the Bagatellen “family,” I don’t sneer down my nose at TV, or many other aspects of so-called “mainstream” culture. Lots of stuff made for and sold to reg’lar folks is much more pleasurable, and rewarding, than the one golden truffle that can maybe be found after weeks of snuffling through nine hundred achingly “independent” releases (whether in print, on film, or on disc). Every Friday, I get my nerd on watching Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel, and three of the shows being broadcast by the FX network (The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me) rank with the best stuff that’s ever been broadcast, anywhere. Shit, I even watch "reality TV." (Big Brother and the occasional episode of The Real World, if you're curious.)

But I’m here today to talk about a show I first watched nearly a decade ago, and which has bubbled at the back of my brain ever since, in that very special zone labeled “What the fuck were these people thinking?” I’m talking about Profit, a Fox drama from 1996 that just became available on DVD from the fine folks at Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Profit is the story of Jim Profit, a sleek predator played with empty-eyed malevolence (and the tiniest hint of a smirk) by Adrian Pasdar. He’s rising through the ranks at corporate titan Gracen & Gracen, mostly by manipulating, sleeping with, and/or murdering people who have the job he wants, or otherwise keeping him from some goal. But it’s weirder than that. His evil father kept him in a cardboard box when he was a child, with only a hole in one side so he could see the tube. As an adult, he lives in a deluxe apartment in the sky, but every night, he crawls naked into the same box, secreted behind a panel where no one can see.

The show is terrifically amoral. In fact, while re-viewing it, I found it impossible not to speculate – did Mary Harron, who directed the movie version of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, watch this show? Did Christian Bale, the star? The world through which Jim Profit moves seems very like the hallucinatory universe of Patrick Bateman. The tone of black comedy is the same, too. Profit is funnier than most comedies, and suspenseful, given that most people can’t conceive of behavior as soullessly vicious as the title character’s, so his moves frequently come as a total surprise.

The creators describe their initial pitch to networks as “Richard III as a series. The hero is a psychopath, but only the audience knows it.” They were thrown out of CBS right after telling executives there that, in the pilot, Profit tongue-kisses his stepmother. Even Fox, the channel that finally agreed to air the show four years after it was initially pitched, pulled it after only four episodes due to low ratings. If, as Whodini posited, "the freaks come out at night," there weren't enough freaks coming out for Profit to keep it on the air. That’s what makes this DVD release so fantastic for those, like me, who watched that initial mini-run in wide-eyed wonder, punctuated with barks of wild laughter: four episodes that were only ever aired in France are included here, reaching American eyes for the first time.

Profit is a truly badass show. The term “corporate shark” has never been more apt than on these nine hours of re- and newly-discovered TV.

Philip Gayle - The Mommy Row

Family Vineyard

Alan Ginsberg once observed to a class on Buddhism that statements delivered in anger can only engender anger, an observation as true as it is obvious. The same principle ("in kind") applies to excitement, and New York-based improviser Philip Gayle's fifth full-length and first for the Vineyard is, at its heart, an all-embracing outburst of unbridled enthusiasm. The guitarist's stream-of-consciousness approach is innocently experienced yet evinces a mastery of sonic possibilities. Nothing clinical or "aw shucks" wry here, however. Gayle is more than willing to explore new sounds and new ideas; this music lives to be reborn.

This sense of ceaseless... one almost dares to say helpless... discovery is immediately palpable as Gayle on the opening track, "Gyo, Gyo, Gyo, Gyo". The action is frenetic, the momentum is a hurtle. And even on the disc's more reflective moments, high energy levels are maintained. Gayle's multi-layered improvisational style can initially be a form sensory assault is due to, and it is a style made all the more dense, not to mention overwhelming, via the use of overdubs. (This, after all, is a solo recital in the contemporary mode, i.e., the work simultaneously of one person and many personalities.) The guitarist's "bent" pulled and hammered guitar work, his incorporation of toy pianos, all manner of percussive and liquid "found" instruments, create a sound world often simultaneously transparent and brutal. It is also a world in which jarring shifts in tonality and temporality become the norm.

This is not to say that planning is absent from the pieces collected on The Mommy Row; quite the contrary. "Payphone" is too structured to be an eruption: a guitar duet that meanders between B-flat and G, with touches of E major thrown in for good measure, Gayle providing a nice modal workout over what might loosely (and awkwardly) be termed rhythmically staggered and chromatically inflected arpeggios. It's a nice reverie after the squall and scree of "Kanojo No Pan", a rather berserk Partchian deconstruction of what I assume to be a twelve-string axe. And, in one of the disc's finest moments, Gayle proves he can be beautifully distracted away from his often fragmentary approach. Despite the connotations of its title, "Zoomly Zoomly," opens up a negative, meditative space in the program, following "Gyo..." as it does with a portentously repeated gong. High-pitched drones -- one of the only times I could detect that effects were in use here -- keep the piece anchored as it shifts in and out of focus, the overall aesthetic being both luminous and terrifying.

In the final analysis, though, every standout track here is just one aspect of a hugely creative, unified effort. The Mommy Row is one of those discs that rewards reluctantly, but once it does start to reward, it does so consistently. It is also one of the most adventurous, some might posture prickly, releases Vineyard boss Eric Weddle has dropped thus far. Congratulations to all involved for a challenging and often moving listen.

~ Marc Medwin

Paal Nilssen-Love - Townorchestrahouse

Clean Feed 41

It is nearly impossible to listen to this quartet without considering it another ‘all-star’ meeting of venerated improvisers from the Continent (England, Sweden and Norway), three generations of European improvisers coming together for a trio of kaleidoscopic collective improvisations. Young Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, late of the Brötzmann Tentet and The Thing (with Mats Gustafsson and bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, also heard here), convened this quartet for the Kongsberg Jazzfest in 2002 with tenor and soprano saxophonist Evan Parker and Swedish pianist/multi-instrumentalist Sten Sandell (of Gush, with Gustafsson and multi-instrumentalist Raymond Strid, and formerly of Lokomotiv Konkret). Parker is, of course, a veteran of the extended-technique angle of reeds-and-rhythm quartets, having worked regularly from the early ‘70s until 2002 with Alex von Schlippenbach, Peter Kowald and Paul Lovens, as well as with Kowald, Irene Schweizer and Pierre Favre in a 1968 formation that resulted in one record for Wergo, ostensibly under Favre’s leadership. In other words, there is a pedigree here that Parker’s inclusion here both references and expands upon.

Despite the heavy company which this disc finds itself in – Nailed and Three Nails Left, to name just two – there is a quality of listening here that separates itself from the extraordinary fast synapses of the Schlippenbach Quartett and its ilk. All of these groups made use of surging sculptures of arco bass, tangled webs of augmented percussion and variously-prepared piano, all at a heightened sense of ebb and flow. Sandell makes use of not only roiling block chords and choppy rhythms, but coloristic sine waves and portable electronics in addition to a vast palette of piano-guts technique. As sound drops to a lower level of volume, density still remains in even the most sensitive moments – as Sandell’s roiling chords are replaced by electronic loops, allowing pastoral filigree to creep in as Parker’s tenor given to lilting phrases, Nilssen-Love fleet with brushes. Sandell is not Schlippenbach or Cecil, though there is an affinity for Schweizer’s playing – a tendency to insert romantic lines as the music’s density eases up, and an allover percussive-canvas approach melding dense aural blocks with found sounds, jarring string-plucks and scrapes belying his (and Schweizer’s) own history as a vanguard drummer/colorist. “Orchestra” is an extension of this crystalline lightness that is only hinted at in “Town;” flute-like soprano, piercing high-register grace notes and shards of cymbal-work introduce this second improvisation, an upward-spiraling revolution of interlocking sound sculptures before breaking off into trading volleys. Nilssen-Love is not only a remarkable drummer, but probably the perfect one for this setting – his repetition and expansion of otherwise Lovens-esque patterns sets him apart from his brethren with a measurable consistency rather than ‘consistent inconsistency.’ As Sandell reaches for whatever is in his grab-bag and Parker’s breath knows no bounds, the girding of rock-solid rhythm gives these three improvisations their drive without sacrificing the expanding canvas the music engenders.

Though Nilssen-Love has not had many opportunities to record as a leader, it is clear that his sideman and cooperative-group experiences certainly imbue him with the capability of driving a unit. Whether in the company of The Thing, the Peter Brötzmann Tentet, Evan Parker, or any of a number of improvisers on the world stage, Nilssen-Love’s hyphen is one to watch for.

Not Only Lone, But Forgotten

In a recent Bags thread some comments surfaced about Brian Morton's recent Wire article on solo reed and brass recordings (The Primer: Lone Horns). One of my most beloved topics, I had to pick up a copy of the reliable UK mag and read it for myself. Just fresh from soaking up Morton's controversial overview, I've got some thoughts I'm aching to share. Instead of inserting them into the tangled morass of that Bags thread, I figured everyone's interests would be better served by fashioning a clean and tidy new home for them here. So what I've done is paste all the comments on Morton's piece from that thread into this text object for convenient reference and add a few of my own, with the hopes that this will serve as a perspicuous convocation on the topic of solo music for wind instruments that will offer informal augmentation for Morton's immensely valuable formal survey and a convenient opportunity for everyone to fully vent their gripes about its puzzling omissions.

First, let's have a look at Dan Warburton's brief remarks.

While we're (still) on the subject of solo sax, what did you all make of Brian Morton's Primer on the subject in last month's Wire? The absence of Lol Coxhill has already been commented on, of course. I was bemused by his choice of Butcher's "London & Cologne" (as opposed to "Fixations" or "Invisible Ear"), Gianni Gebbia's "Body Limits" (nice, sure, but hardly indispensable) and especially Bill Dixon's "Solo Works" (the only solo trumpet disc mentioned at all, which is, to my mind, inexcusable - where's Axel Dörner's "Trumpet"? Greg Kelley's "Trumpet"? Maybe it's too early to nominate Nate Wooley's new Creative Sources "Wrong Shape To Be A Storyteller" but I'll do so anyway, cos it's WILD).

It all goes to show, I suppose, that Brian Morton (whose writing I admire enormously, certainly far more than he enjoys my fiddling :-)) is still coming at this from a Jazz direction. Doneda deserved his place, sure, but I would have liked to see Jack Wright's "Places To Go", Scott Rosenberg's "V", Stephane Rives' "Fibres" in there too. Returning to Bill Dixon, I'm still waiting for someone to explain the fanatical devotion the man seems to inspire among his students. No doubt a fine teacher, but I remain singularly unimpressed by his trumpet playing. Where am I going wrong? Show us the way, Clifford :)

Appropriately enough, a timely response came from a man who really deserves to have been in Morton's canon, Tom Djll, though it's really Djll himself to blame for his absence because he's never properly documented his astounding and groundbreaking acoustic solo trumpet work outside of some scarce recordings I'll be discussing at length in the near future on a Bags page near you.

Hey, Dan--
Agreed that Morton is bouncing off the jazz rails both right and left in his WIRE round-up. Ditto his omission of Butcher's Invisible Ear -- one of the most listenable of all the recent 'ground-breaking' solo excursions of recent years. Plus his selection of Roscoe Mitchell material I find faulty; where's Nonaah or S2 Examples?

Bill Dixon is a hard case to crack, I admit. I am impressed by his playing, but find that after one CD of it, much less six, I feel as if his music hasn't taken me anywhere. Technically he's amazing, in a way that isn't obvious (contrastingly, Dörner's technique seems always front and center). I detect an analogue of the 'sheets of sound' approach of Coltrane in his technique -- he's playing runs and scales so fast, they blur together. It ends up not sounding like Coltrane at all, of course. And he has a way of stringing together a huge range of sounds into intricately detailed 'sound phrases' that I find positively death-defying in their daring -- like a crazed Harry James on speed-laced acid (if you dare imagine such a thing). But, emotionally, I just don't connect. And as for longer-form structure, I admit to being mystified by what he's up to. But I have to confess, Leo Smith does the same thing to me. Whatever they're doing, it's cool, but frankly, it's way out there. More power to them!

Then there's the whole 'reverb' problem that Dixon poses. Why does he indulge in this tacky adornment so often, so indiscriminately? Is it some kind of addiction to the helping hand reverb lends to one's intonation? Or perhaps a lingering strain of romanticism (or drug esthetics)?

I had a conversation with one of his students recently, Andrew Raffo Dewar, whose master's thesis is on Bill Dixon and may possibly be accessed through the Wesleyan library system... maybe Mike Parker can contact him and induce him to comment here?

In one of the most uncanny strokes of good timing the interweb can claim, Andrew Raffo Dewar, a grad student and intimate of Braxton and Lucier at Wesleyan who's a promising candidate to deliver some canonical solo clarinet and soprano sax recordings of his own in the future, made his Bagatellen debut at the same time as Tom was invoking him, the two gentlemen pecking away in front of their screens on opposite coasts of the US completely unbeknownst to each other! Indeed, Dewar's meaty contributions were entirely unprompted and coincidental! His thoughts mainly referred to the on-topic exchange about the dilemmas of originality and critical responses raised in connection with David Gross' new solo disc, but I'm excerpting his comments on Dixon for the sake of our present concerns.

re: Bill Dixon. I've spent a good amount of time with Mr. Dixon in the last few years, and though I can't "convert" someone to liking his work, I can say that one of his goals with his playing is to use the horn like an orchestra -- so one thing worth trying while listening to his music is imagining the horn as an orchestra -- see where that gets you. (come on, "Papyrus Vol.2"?!!? that's got to give you something, no?!)

Brian Marley added his own two cents on the perenially polarizing topic of Dixon:

Oh, and can I say that some of the earlier comments on Bill Dixon by Tom Djll and Andrew Raffo Dewar are illuminating – many thanks, guys. For years I've enjoyed Dixon's music without understanding a damn thing about how he approaches and makes his music, and now I'm just that little bit clearer.

Let's hope the intimidating Dixon solo oeuvre is further aired out in the Commentellen below, but for now I'll timidly throw in my two cents, noting that unlike Dan, Tom, and Andrew, I'm not a musician, and unlike the lot of above commentators, certainly including Morton, I'm not a well-versed expert by any stretch, but rather a young and enthusiastic fan of solo improvised music with a special fixation on reeds and a newly acquired and rapidly growing affinity for trumpets. My intention here is simply to light a fire under the keyboards of more knowledgeable commentators, not provide any sort of definitive statement on either solo horn music or Morton's piece.

Morton's article reflects incredible depth of listenership in the post-jazz avant-garde and it's a no-brainer to recommend reading it to anyone remotely interested in the topic. His take on many of the players is synthetic, concise, and penetrating, truly serving the purpose of a primer for curious listeners. Surely it was written with a broad intent to serve the needs of a wide audience, not to satisfy the esoteric concerns of the sorts of specialized troglodytes bound to foam with indignation at its shortcomings.

Before tackling my BIG GRIPE about the primer, I'll stroll through some minor reactions. I was surprised that Steve Lacy's first solo recordings from 1972, found on the Emanem disc Weal and Woe, weren't cited. They're pretty astonishing and worthy in my view, besides their tremendous historical significance to the solo reed topic.

If forced to pick the most important Michel Doneda solo disc, I'd affirm Morton's focus on Anatomie des Clefs, but if other players like Evan Parker are recognized for multiple crucial recordings and evaluated in terms of their personal evolution, why wasn't Doneda given a similar treatment? The developments separating 1991's monumental L'élémentaire Sonore and 1998's only moderately more monumental Anatomie are well worth considering, and 2000's Sopradino is so outrageously important to not only Doneda's solo music, but solo reed music as a whole, that it should've been incorporated into Doneda's entry, its placement in the "soprano" category notwithstanding. Doneda has a new solo disc I haven't heard yet, by the way, but having seen him perform quite a few times in the past few years, I wouldn't be surprised if it sets a new reference standard for something or another.

I'll leave the topic of Braxton's solo music to the hardcore experts like Brian Olewnick, but I'll cite two grievances against the following sentence: "For Alto remains the key text, though, and one of the half-dozen genuinely innovative new jazz records of its period, still fresh and unassimilated after 35 years". Half-dozen? That's a ludicrously harsh take on innovation. Why call For Alto "jazz", regardless of whether "new" is attached? I mean, it's really an inappropriate term in this case and a disservice to the scope and restructuralist intentions of the record.

In the case of Gianni Gebbia, whose work I've become increasingly enamored of in recent years to the point he'd easily make my saxophone top ten, I believe the developments in his alto sax vocabulary revealed in 1997's H Portraits and most vividly on 2000/2001's Arcana Major/Sonic Tarots Session are somewhat more germane than the mid-90s recording Body Limits that Morton selected.

In terms of the radicalism of his aesthetic innovations, I'd only cite Evan Parker and Michel Doneda as peers to Mats Gustafsson in the history of the saxophone. His new baritone solo disc Catapult, should've been cited, considering the profound and underdocumented developments in the years intervening between this 2005 recording and the 1996 recording Impropositions that Morton left to represent such an actively expanding player all by itself. Catapult is one the best solo saxophone records I've ever heard. Period. Also, Morton's blurb on Impropositions beats around the bush, nay, forest, of Gustafsson's radical expansion of possibilities for saxophone. It entirely fails to give even a faint hint of the content of the disc; I mean "fiery intensity"? Come on, there's a bucketload of saxophonists better slighted with that phrase and there's a lot more happening in Gustafsson's solo music, that disc and otherwise, than fiery intensity! The exact opposite of fiery intensity, for starters. By the way, Gustafsson has a new solo disc on slide saxophone, surely a first of its kind, and while I haven't scored a copy yet, I did see him do an earth-shattering extended solo on the extremely rare instrument a few months during a Brötzmann Tentet gig.

Morton's entry on Brötzmann is not only fabulously on-the-money, but rather witty as well!

Only one entry apiece for trumpet and clarinet? Absurd, of course, but more on the trumpet thing below when I get to my BIG GRIPE.

In terms of format for the primer, I find it odd that Morton lists three Roscoe Mitchell solo albums, at least one of which he doesn't seem to be even recommending at all, while offering entries for other musicians that omit masterpieces well worthy of a vigorous recommendation to curious listeners, as in the cases of John Butcher, Michel Doneda, Gianni Gebbia, and Ned Rothenberg. It's a frustrating inconsistency of treatment.

That wraps up my casual stroll through Morton's piece. Now my face is red with indignation as I realize three of the most obvious and monumental solo saxophone records are absent. These are so massive, so unquestionably canonical, groundbreaking, revelatory, and mind-blowing, that I'll have to give Morton the benefit of the doubt and assume their absence was a purely accidental oversight, and not an intentional gambit of historical distortion. In any case, these are the omissions I consider completely inexcusable.

John Zorn A Classic Guide to Strategy
Sure, Morton didn't have a "duck calls" category in the primer, but these two albums from the 80s are untouchable landmarks as revolutionary and musically successful as any solo horn albums ever, period. For my tastes, heavily slanted towards the new concepts of lurching rhythms and jarring juxtapositions that constitute a primary aesthetic breakthrough of the 20th century, these timeless recordings by Zorn are the holy grail.

Joe McPhee Tenor
I can't believe I'm even typing this. I have to pick up that magazine again to double and triple check I didn't just accidentally skip a page of the article where Morton pays tribute to this legendary recording. Nope, it's really not there. There's a section called "Tenor Saxophone" that cites Ellery Eskelin (great choice! incredible album!), Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, and Frank Lowe. Joe McPhee is not mentioned. Tenor is not mentioned. Other solo albums by McPhee are not mentioned. I'm pinching myself. Yes, this is not just some kind of weird, ugly dream. Recorded in 1976, Tenor long predates the synthesis of non-idiomatic free improv and pitch-based songcraft that is finally starting to emerge as a palpable, though still elusive aesthetic now that the storms of earlier improv paradigm battles have largely receded. It has also indirectly but profoundly shaped the course of post-jazz in the past decade via its role in Ken Vandermark's personal developments. Bags' own Derek Taylor wrote a nice piece about McPhee's solo discs on hat Art.

Bhob Rainey The Withered Grasses
Recorded in 1999 at the beginning of Rainey's transition into lowercase improv, this is the closest thing we have to a definitive early document of the radical new solo saxophone language he developed that made him a household name in the improv world and an icon of quiet, sparse acoustic improv based on extended techniques. In fact, this might very well count as the seminal document of the "acoustic saxophone as electronics" aesthetic that has become fruitfully ubiquitous in recent years. It's not Rainey's first solo album, though; the 1997 recordings on Ink, while equally brilliant, represent his earlier style based on the direct influence of Joe Maneri, a style he essentially abandoned shortly thereafter. That said, Withered Grasses is a varied album that really reflects the transition he was making more than the place he arrived at. Sadly, Rainey hasn't followed up on Withered Grasses beyond the tremendous piece comprising his disc on the triple 3" CD release from Crouton, Folktales No. 2. The dearth of solo recordings is hardly an issue, though, considering the abundance of releases from Nmperign that take care of the same business for the most part. By the way, the most powerful experiences I've ever had hearing a live solo performance on any instrument, not just saxophone, have been the two solo gigs by Bhob Rainey I've caught, dating back several years, which contained much more silence than any of his public solo recordings.

Okay, now that I've covered the unforgiveable omissions, I can move on to the more relaxing matter of a few forgiveable omissions, some records I would've included, but I can hardly blame Morton for neglecting given space limitations and other factors. I suppose I should start off with what probably counts as my all-time favorite solo saxophone disc, Jack Wright's Places to Go, which I've already praised at length in these pages. However, the new Wright solo album Up For Grabs might very well wind up earning that distinction once I come to grips with it. A handful of listens so far have revealed musical concepts I'd never previously imagined. It's a groundbreaking record synthesizing the various threads in his tumultuous aesthetic developments in the past decade. So why is the omission of Wright forgiveable if his solo work is this monumental? I suppose he's the perennial underdog, a permanent outsider who resists the kind of easily grasped aesthetic identity critics and canonizers require in their deliberations. Or maybe the simple fact is that his recordings remain poorly exposed and distributed, and so I can't blame anyone for missing them. Heck, it's almost a sure thing Morton hasn't heard Places to Go because otherwise it would've been listed.

Kang Tae Hwan's 1994 solo recordings on the self-titled release from Chap Chap Records are extraordinary enough to warrant inclusion in a solo reed survey. While the bulk of the disc is given over to duo and trio collaborations with Ned Rothenberg and Yoshihide Otomo, most interesting to me are the two solo tracks that add up 28 minutes of extremely original alto sax improvisation cultivated in the relative isolation of Korea, where Hwan is one of the few improvisors to have ever registered on the global radar. While comparable in its focus on circular breathing to work by Evan Parker, John Butcher, Gianni Gebbia, and Ned Rothenberg, not to mention virtuosity, Hwan has his own rhythmic fixations and timbral quirks I find utterly bewitching. His music is rather obscure as far as I can tell, but aside from this killer disc, his equally scarce duo disc with Sainkho Namtchylak is an incredibly unique and devastating masterpiece that could make an improv top 100. He has a two-disc release of 1999 duos with Kazuhisa Uchihashi and Yoshimitsu Ichiraku that are somewhat more pedestrian, though still representative of his alto sax genius. I'd also recommend acquiring a copy of the compilation Deluxe Improvisation Series, Vol. 2 just to hear the amazing 2001 quartet piece with Ichiraku, Otomo, and Sachiko M.

Something of a novelty, though an entirely worthy and riveting one, Masayoshi Urabe's 1996 solo alto sax disc on PSF simply entitled Solo is worth citing as example of something that can be done with solo wind instruments I've never heard anyone else do. It's pretty scary.

I wouldn't think twice about canonizing Paul Dunmall's solo bagpipe albums. I haven't gotten a copy of volume III in the series yet, but volumes I and II are treasures I play often, and often at loud volumes. Few solo albums can match their visceral power, and Dunmall's adaptation of the majestic traditional instrument to an avant-garde improv context is an innovation worth celebrating. In the regrettably absent "Bagpipes" category of Morton's primer, I also lament the absence of Matthew Welch's stunning disc of solo bagpipe arrangements of Braxton compositions, though I suppose they don't count as improvised music in the same sense as the others.

There's a whole slew of other omissions, some downright unforgiveable, I haven't hinted at yet. In other words, it's time to address my BIG GRIPE. If someone told me "Hey, I'm writing a primer on solo improv recordings performed on wind instruments", I'd say "Golly, that's a swell idea! What could be more timely and useful in 2005 when we're finding ourselves right in the midst of the golden era of solo improv for wind instruments, with thrilling innovations and idiomatizations coming at a breakneck pace from every direction in a flurry of sympathetic activity around the globe that truly defines the current aesthetic zeitgeist in improvised music. I would love to see a balanced, historically comprehensive roundup of this vital art form, citing the relationships between the most recent work and the pioneers, and sorting out the signficance of various approaches, noting the widespread detachment of wind improv from jazz, and so on. It's just what I need to catch up on the essential recordings I've missed so far and gain a panoramic view on the burgeoning topic to counterbalance my narrowly focused interests in certain players like Wright, Doneda, Rainey, Kelley, etc. Just splendid, I can't wait to read it!". Well, that's really what I expected from Morton's primer, but I quickly realized it should've been called "The Primer: Lone Horns, Part One" because the most recent disc cited is from 1998! That is, with the exception of a Roscoe Mitchell release completely irrelevant to recent developments. In other words, the entire current era of solo wind improv has been omitted! And it's the very era in which this form has flourished more than any other! It's frankly absurd and without a "part one" or "jazz-related" qualification it's tantamount to historical fraud. I suppose that Dan and Tom had similar thoughts when they mildly noted the jazz-bias of the primer above.

I'm not especially knowledgeable about the flood of releases documenting new techniques and aesthetic concepts for reeds and brass, so I won't attempt to make some kind of list here. I'll leave that to someone like Dan Warburton who knows the stuff in and out and would be a good candidate to pen "Part Two" for the Wire. But we're talking about a few dozen solid candidates for inclusion in a balanced primer, among which at least a handful are essential. I will, however, address a very salient issue, the omission of Greg Kelley's utterly earth-shattering solo trumpet albums, 2000's influential Trumpet on Meniscus, and 2002's less-discussed but vastly more devastating If I Never Meet You in This Life, Let Me Feel the Lack on Rossbin, which represent drastically different approaches to reinventing the trumpet, the latter being unquestionably my favorite solo trumpet album and the high-water mark in my view for the entire burgeoning genre of extended-technique-based acoustic free improv, at least in its first half before the static soundfield kicks in. Kelley has a third solo trumpet album co-released just a few months ago by Gameboy and Little Enjoyer, entitled I Don't Want to Live Forever, but just as Lack was a quantum leap away from the palpable trumpet-ness of Trumpet, his third solo statement continues the trend of abstracton, to the point where it's hard to even consider it a trumpet album in any meaningful sense. Listing Bill Dixon all alone in the trumpet category is just an insult to the profound achievements of Kelley and his peers, and perhaps the one objection to the primer that would be unanimous.

Aside from bagpipes, other second-class citizens of the contemporary wind instrument landscape were unjustly ignored, like flutes and oboes, despite worthy ambassadors of both instruments in the improv world. For oboe, Kyle Bruckmann's Entymology is an obvious choice that fits in with the "new thing" movement entirely ignored by Morton. When it comes to flute, history's foremost master of the instrument, Robert Dick, has a slew of groundbreaking solo recordings heavily rooted in avant-garde improvisation, though often foregoing improvisation in favor of notational approaches. Dick represents a pinnacle of achievement in the development of his instrument in the solo format for which no other instrument can claim a figure of analogous stature. It would take ten saxophonists to amass the artistic significance of Dick's contributions to solo flute music, improvised and otherwise. Jérôme Bourdellon's Trajet Solo would be a no-brainer if it weren't diluted by the multi-tracked pieces instead of focusing on true solo music, as Bourdellon is a master improvisor familiar to many listeners through his two killer duo discs with Joe McPhee. As far as flute improv with aesthetic concerns similar to Kelley, Bosetti, et al, Sabine Vogel's 2004 solo recording Aus dem Fotoalbum eines Pinguins is stunning reinvention of the instrument I've had in heavy rotation since belatedly playing it for the first time a few months ago. If anybody writes "Part Two", please don't overlook Vogel's masterpiece because of its regrettable status as a limited, demo-style CDR issue.

Concluding my remarks here, I'd like to offer a point of view that turns the tables on conventional thinking about solo albums. Back when For Alto came out, there was a smothering bias against solo improv. It was seen as arrogance and egotism. Even after solo improv albums became relatively common, residues of that bias persisted in the tendency of muscians to put solo work on a lofty pedestal as if it were a form of creation they weren't qualified to address without years of paying their dues in group contexts. Clearly this is an artifact of earlier aesthetic and sociological models, and I feel we not only need to reject it, but embrace its inversion. In my view, improvisors should begin their creative journey with solo work. After all, they have to learn a private instrumental language before they can play music in any context, solo or group, and the very content of non-idiomatic free improvisation seems predicated on such individual instrumental languages. More and more, I've noticed that I rarely find improvised music satisfying unless I find each participant's individual language satisfying. Essentially, the primary methodology of free improv is choosing and mastering a certain set of sounds to draw from during performances. Dominic Duval once remarked to me that "You can't play something you don't know". Me and Dominic come to the philosophy of improv from very different aesthetic and ideological vantage points, but I think he really captured the essence of the situation for even improvisors rejecting the conventions of melody and rhythm he (very fruitfully!) operates within. I'm not denying the validity of improv in which uncertainty of technique is cultivated, but I view that as a secondary and relatively unproductive approach compared to the paradigm of mastering a private sound world before setting foot on stage, and this is the paradigm subscribed to by virtually all the improvisors who enjoy a measure of public accolade. I believe an improv debut release should usually be a solo album, because if a musician's solo music isn't interesting enough, I don't see how their group music will be either unless they pick great partners and just tinker in the background

A typical active improvisor is constantly reshaping their private language, often abandoning extremely fruitful concepts that go undocumented in the process. Because of the radical subjectivity of free improvisation in its independence from established aesthetic criteria, a musician themself will frequently assess their work in conflict with their audience. Whereas a musician has to live with their sounds day in and day out, becoming susceptible to aesthetic disenchantment owing to nothing other than overexposure, a listener only makes occasional contact with their sounds, and only a limited subset of them at that. All of this is simply intrinsic to the culture of improvised music, but one of the unfortunate side-effects is that a lot of vital music goes undocumented or at least not publicly documented in a way that listeners can readily access and enjoy. Improvisors have an unfortunate tendency to withhold their creative work for the sake of chasing an illusory carrot of refinement or optimal realization. Many feel they need to delay the release of solo music until they self-assess a certain level of sophistication in their playing. They don't hesitate to play this gig or that gig with other musicians or appear on albums of collective improv, but when it comes to the very core of their musicality they balk at projecting it into the world to move cilia as it may. The problem I see with this mentality is that is presumes a liner progression of musical value, whereas in practice most improvisors reach sufficient musical spaces early in the game and then simply zigzag around to others of no intrinsically greater value, while privately deluded into believing their path has an evolutionary logic. Oftentimes improvisors abandon rich musical spaces under the influence of aesthetic trends in their larger community.

As an antidote, I propose that any improvisor actively developing their private instrumental language should release at least one solo album per year to document the essence of their music at that moment in time. We suffer under a culture of overly selective and sparing policies about publicly releasing music, the masterpiece mentality that is fundamentally incompatible with the primary aesthetic foundations of experimental improv. Hopefully that situation will continue to self-correct with the technological advances of CDRs, hard-drives, and web-based distribution. More and more the arbitrary sociological and technological gap separating public performances and public recordings is thankfully eroding. For the most part, if someone is willing to get on stage and perform for arbitrary listeners, they ought to be willing to let other folks listen to it who may have been geographically inhibited from attending the performance. As it is, a ton of improv gets released to all manner of acclaim, ridicule, intrigue, and apathy, rendering the issue of quality control largely moot; great music will always fall on the wrong ears, but it shouldn't be inaccessible to the right ears.

So this is my message to improvisors: Please, don't hold back; the world needs more solo albums; let a million instrumental languages bloom; release your solo music or it may get lost forever. Oh, one more thing, if you make squeaky, harsh acoustic sounds, please let me know about it! That's what I like!

~Michael Anton Parker

The image quality of the album artwork at the top is not so great, so for reference, the left one is Joe McPhee's Tenor, the center one is John Zorn's A Classic Guide to Strategy (the CD reissue of volumes I and II), and the right one is Bhob Rainey's The Withered Grasses.

Ernie Althoff - dark by 6

Antboy 7

How to listen to recordings of installation pieces? How much to add mentally to what you’re hearing in a vain attempt to recapture what it might have been like to have actually seen the devices making these sounds (as well as other purely decorative elements), walked among them enjoying the change in sonic ambience as you moved? Some recordings work perfectly well on their own, others seem necessarily pruned of important elements. Ernie Althoff’s “dark by 6” is something of the latter, I think, although it’s hardly unsuccessful; it just really makes you want to have been able to experience the installations in situ.

The excerpt nature of the disc is apparent in the timings of the tracks: four of the five clock in at almost exactly 14 ½ minutes. This apparently arbitrary sectioning might be a bit off-putting but on the other hand it honestly advises the listener that he’s experiencing the work at one (at least) remove. Judging from the notes and accompanying photos, Althoff’s modus operandi is to set up numerous small machines in a room, gizmos that swing beating arms, pendulums, whisks and so on, alongside turntables mounted with bowls and dishes within which might be seeds, gravel, etc. These quasi-rhythmic but ultimately chaotic contraptions are set in motion and allowed to generate their own, semi-unpredictable clatter and hum, with a strong tendency toward the percussive or strummed. If there’s a single other sound-world with which many listeners might hear an affinity, it’s probably that of Harry Partch (the kithara-like glissandi especially), although structurally there’s no real similarity. The first two pieces in particular, “The Emergence of Mammals” and “Song of the Centipede”, have something of that feel though much looser and more rambling; rattles, chimes, wood block clunks and soft sizzles resembling some low-budget, robotic garden, each flower and insect contributing to the din (Here, one can also occasionally hear the engines of passing vehicles, a lovely and evocative element). Gentler versions of Tudor’s “Rainforest”, perhaps.

“Declivities” uses nine turntables affixed with various flatware in which seeds and marbles cavort, the dishes calibrated so as to produce a range of pitches. Others wield whisks that strike sheets of metal with sizzles attached in off-kilter rhythms. Althoff notes in his liners that installation visitors had the option of perceiving this conglomeration through “stethoscopic listening tubes”. One can only imagine but as is, it remains a fairly wondrous piece. The title track achieves a rather similar result via different means, here tripods, tin bells and clappers sent awhirl atop turntables rotating at 16rpm. In the original set-up, several other noise generating devices were hidden in the room’s darkened corners, presumably adding a layer of mystery that, unfortunately (dammit!) you can’t quite recapture on disc. The final work, “Dummy Run”, introduces a tactic that’s hardly new but isn’t utilized often enough: letting “non-professionals” in on the act. You would think that in the decades since operations like the Scratch Orchestra and Prevost’s “Silver Pyramid”, there’d be enough sound creators willing to not only cede control over their world to machines but to other people as well. Not that the results are guaranteed to be as intriguing or profound, but more as a general nod of appreciation and a gesture of anti-ivory-tower-ism. Indeed, “Dummy Run”, viewed purely on musical terms, might not be as captivating as the earlier pieces. Lots of gallery noise, conversation, etc. to which the “proper” music almost takes a back seat. And the Althoff-inspired sounds themselves, here set in motion by a small throng of gallery goers who’d been handed a “score” (essentially to activate a given instrument once they located it but also, perhaps crucially, to refrain from engaging in any “ego-tripping”), seem less well integrated and organic than before. But I’m still glad he made the attempt.

www.antboymusic.com

Boarding the Black Ark

In lieu of a formal “Announce Time Off” section of the Bags marquee, the Blog will have to suffice. I’m getting ready to board a plane under the embattled Northwest Airlines banner and fly the (hopefully) friendly skies to Jamaica for my brother’s nuptials. Fingers crossed on the weather (weather.com claims a steady wall of showers for pretty much the entire duration of our stay, but meteorologists are notoriously erroneous in their estimations so…), & I’m psyched for the rest. My bro’s bewitching fiancé is Jamaican so we’re looking forward to an insider’s perspective on all the sights & sounds to come and I’ve been boning up on the more academic specs at places like The CIA Fact Book (an indispensable web resource saddled with an unfortunate sponsor name).

Wedding HQ is in Montego Bay, but I’m holding out the hope of chartering a Jeep & making the trek cross-island to Kingston to visit the site of Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studio, birth place of two cornerstones of dub -The Upsetters’ Super Ape and The Congos’ Heart of the Congos- and now but an iconic memory. With luck there will also be plenty of time to sip Jamaican rum and gorge on spicy jerk chicken between all the bustle & hustle of ceremony preparations, speechifying & sight-seeing. I’m also trying out a personal experiment on a lark. My musical collection in all its shapes and forms will stay stateside. No Muvo, no Discman, no CDRs or mp3s. Just whatever music we come in contact on the trip & I’m planning on keeping a list. The decision is going to put me even further in the red as far as reviewing than I already am, but I think it’ll make for a refreshing change of pace & a fun challenge.

Haile Selassie & the Northwest Mechanics Union willing, I’ll be returning next Monday with an even ruddier complexion, a newly extended family, and some tropical tales to tell.

Betsuni Nanmo Klezmer - Omedeto

Klezmer bands with 18 members are not exactly common anywhere in the world, but it's safe to say this is the only one of Japanese provenance. Reed giant Kazutoki Umezu formed Betsuni Nanmo Klezmer in 1992 and the sprawling ensemble left the world with three public recordings, the 1994 debut Omedeto I shall be celebrating below, and two 1996 releases, Waruzu and Ahiru. Surely a monumental challenge to organize and sustain, the orchestra project was supplemented and eventually supplanted by Komatcha Klezmer, a small group vehicle for Umezu's klez urges that formed in 1995 and continues to be active, with releases in 2001 (Komatcha Kle) and 2003 (Gekkoishi no Shippo). With the exception of drumkitter Kozo Nida, the members of Komatcha Klezmer are BNK alumni: alto saxist Yoko Tada, violinist Ayumi Matsui, accordionist Koyo Chan, and tubist Takero Sekijima, and the two stars (in my mind) of BNK, wunderkind vocalists Tokyo Nammy and Koichi Makigami, have joined the group as occasional guests.

Omedeto is one of the strangest and most cherished items in my music collection. For starters, it's a positively ass-kicking, burning klezmer disc with inspired solos and a rare and devastating orchestral punch. Even more distinctively, the vocal performances by Makigami and Nammy are astonishing triumphs of creativity and virtuosity. More than anything, though, the group stands alone in the annals of klezmer for its alternately sublime and zany postmodernism. The musicians were clearly chosen for their freewheeling embrace of humor and playful antics as much as their instrumental chops. The lineup is something of an abridged who's who of Tokyo's bohemian prankster avant-garde. The total package unfolds as a seamless, ambitious, far-ranging album that doesn't falter for a single moment.

The festivities begin with "Ale Brider", a traditional tune rendered as five minutes of straight, passionate klezmer. The playing is flawless and bursting with the invigorating spirit of the timeless rhythms and melodies. I could listen to music like this for hours on end. My appetite for klezmer has been insatiable since I discovered the music early in high school and launched my obsession with The Klezmatics' Rhythm and Jews, so it's fitting that a tune I find so utterly addictive as this leadoff track on Omedeto features a quotation from The Klezmatics, specifically their 1988 debut, Shvaygn=Toyt. Credit is given to recordings on two other tracks: "Dona, Dona" quotes The Klezmer Conservatory Band's Oy Chanukah and "Der Gasn Nigun" quotes Theodore Bikel Sings Yiddish Theatre and Folk Songs.

For a guy who doesn't speak the language, Koichi Makigami's Yiddhish vocals on "Ale Brider" and throughout the album are unbelievably compelling. He rips through each line with utter clarity and verve, and there are few singers in the world who can rival his booming tone and precise, hovering vibrato. Just as his two mind-blowing landmark solo vocal albums on Tzadik (Kuchinoha and Koedarake) and his similarly astounding duo disc with Ryoji Hojito (Over That Way) place him alongside Jaap Blonk and Phil Minton as a benchmark for extreme extended vocal techniques, his work here (and plenty elsewhere, e.g. the twisted lounge pop of Koroshi no Blues) ranks him among the most advanced conventional singers. And for all the ace instrumentalism here, it's these robust vocals that really captivate me to the point I'd readily leave individual pieces like "Ale Brider" on repeat play. What's more, with 18 members, the vocal possibilities of the group certainly aren't limited to the two frontpersons; spirited unison group vocals push the energy level a notch higher on this song and a few others. When an insistent chanting chorus of "oy oy oy" in several catchy variations kicks into full gear towards the end, I feel like I'm part of the band, vamping away on this glorious diphthong with sheer bliss and abandon, or if not part of the band, at least there at the party partaking in the communal groove. Great klezmer does that.

The strident chorus, Tokyo Nammy's operatic background wailing near the end, and the sheer vigor of the tune as a whole is analogous to Koenjihyakkei, Tatsuya Yoshida's caffeinated and unabashed revision of Magma, in the sense that both ensembles take an idiom and reproduce it so literally and earnestly that it takes on a surreal absurdist comicality. Even while I'm bathing in musical pleasure, as both BNK and Koenjihyakkei fit my musical preferences like a key in a lock, I can't help but simultaneously experience a detached recognition of the parodism lying on the other side of the top they nearly go over. Curiously enough, aside from minor parts on other albums, my familiarity with Nammy is limited to her work in both of these ensembles (she's a pivotal third of the post-Kobaian "choir" on Koenjihyakkei's monumental masterpieces Nivraym and Live at Star Pine's Cafe), which may simply be coincidence given that this personnel overlap was not at all what motivated the analogy. Nevertheless, she's certainly a prime example of virtuosity married to fringe aesthetics, although she also maintains a more prolific parallel career performing commercial music under her real name, Nami Sagara.

After Makigami's lead vocal on the first cut, Nammy steps into the foreground on "Dona, Dona", where she not only rivals Makigami's uncanny ease with Yiddish lyrics, but goes even farther out into the realms of exaggerated vigor, singing with an exuberance that borders on ferocity. Boisterous accenting strikes me as a key feature of klezmer in general, at least in its thankfully ubiquitous hard-driving form, and Nammy conspires with the rest of the ensemble to give certain phrases explosive ending accents, practically shrieking "kalb" in unison with Sachiko Nagata's xylophone cluster in the line "Ver zhe heyst dir zayn a kalb?", and accenting the living daylights out of "shekht" alongside a saxophone blurt in the line "Un men shlept zey un men shekht". Beyond that, she puts some kind of articulatory spin on virtually every syllable. As an indication of the passion she attacks this material with, even when the same chorus is repeated later in the song, it comes out with a spontaneous rephrasing. At a mere 2:24, "Dona, Dona" works as a total joy-juice blowout pop nugget.

Trying to convey the extraordinary nature of the vocal performances on this disc, I find myself tempted to suggest that without the vocals, this disc would be quickly buried somewhere in a stack of great klezmer discs, but such thoughts are quelled when I turn my attention to the instrumental "Der Shtiler Bulgar", with its barnstorming massed horn riffing and wild solos. After a heavy-hitting orchestral run through the tune for almost two minutes, an insane clarinet solo launches a classic mid-section of turn-taking soloism. I can't say for certain which of the two b-flat clarinettists in the group get credit for this incredible upper register playing, but as a long-time Umezu fan with a solid stack of his records, the tone does sound familiar. Wataru Okuma is a ripping clarinettist too, the leader of Cicala Mvta, a wonderful kindred ensemble to BNK based around a kind of rowdy Japanese street music known as chindon in which a small drum is used to accompany peripatetic reedists—a role Okuma adopted himself for many years— but freely wandering into other areas, like Turkish traditional music, Albert Ayler, and, indeed, klezmer, with recent lineups benefitting from the explosive drumkit work of none other than avant-kingpin Tatsuya Yoshida. In any case, that mercurial clarinet playing is just the tip of the iceberg as a handful of reeds swirl around each other for about 30 thrilling seconds. Assuming the steady bass clarinet part is coming from Kazuhiro Nomoto, it sounds like all three clarinettists together for a bit, and some of Kanji Nakao's soprano sax too if I'm not mistaken. The reed thrills give way to brass thrills as Hiroshi Itaya launches into a devastating, roof-raising trombone solo, and the ensemble downshifts a bit to make room for Hidehiko Urayama's banjo solo. After a fake ending that gives Cicala Mvta member Takero Sekijima a chance to go out on tuba for a few seconds, the ensemble kicks back into the high-octane big band themes. A stunner even without a peep from Makigami or Nammy.

After the unrelenting energy of the first three tracks, the opening passage of "Terk in America" is especially effective, a taciturn doublebass solo that evolves into a brawny improv with some percussion. Two doublebassists are in the group, Joji Sawada (a notable composer in his own right) and Yasuhiko Tachibana, so it could be either of them I'm hearing. It's surely an unexpected and welcome pleasure to hear free improv that could pass for a Barry Guy and Paul Lytton duo right smack in the middle of all the smoking klez jams, which is exactly what the ensemble explodes into after about 111 seconds of this inspired improv detour. After ripping through the main themes, the ensemble drops out for an extended drumkit duet between Yasuo Sano and Yasuhiro Yoshigaki. Yoshigaki is easily the drumkit MVP of the Tokyo avant-garde, a master of every permutation of jazz, rock, and improv ever dished up by Altered States, Ground Zero, Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet/Orchestra, Rovo, Shibusashirazu Orchestra, etc. His nimble, powerful style is unmistakable on this album, one of the key instrumental factors that pushes it well beyond an average klezmer platter. On top of the rumbling, popping bed of drums and cymbals, Hiroshi Itaya delivers another devastating (seriously, this guy is the real deal) trombone solo, but this time taking things out into fire music realms, as does Kazuhiro Nomoto with a vicious baritone sax workout. Free jazz this good sandwiched in between klezmer this good—this album is a rarity indeed. And with two drumkitters, two doublebassists, and these kinds of heavyweights on horns, there's a supple, aggressive edge to even the tightly rehearsed klezmer romps. Not to say it's without peers though; we need look no further than Zorn's Masada or the New Klezmer Trio for well-known examples of music that consistently smokes across a similar expressive range.

After these two distinctive and incredible instrumentals, I'm almost tempted to suggest "Vocals? Who needs vocals? An afterthought."! But surely it will come as no surprise when I shortly launch into praise of Nammy and Makigami with effusion to make my earlier encomiums seem lukewarm. You see, as the expansive 8-minute tour de force of "Terk of America" fades out and the tribal drums and vocal freakouts of "Mahouzukai Sarii" enter, I'm jolted back into my main BNK zone. It's all about the human voice. It's rather charming that the lovely foldout paper with lyrics, credits, etc lists the Yiddish song titles (and one English title too) with Japanese translations below, only to give a Yiddish gloss for the album's sole Japanese song title! Then again, these things are all chicken-and-egg escapades anyway. "Mahouzukai Sarii" is given in Yiddish as "Di Makhsheyfe Sally" and translates into English as "Sally the Witch". While all the Yiddish lyrics are faithfully translated into Japanese on the lyric sheet, they didn't go so far as giving a Yiddish translation for the Japanese lyrics though!

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself even talking about lyrics though; nothing like intelligible vocal utterances factor into this song until the 1:27 mark. What comes before then is something that you'll not only never hear on another klezmer record, but on no other record period! But it's not only incredibly strange stuff, it also blows my mind as a triumph of fully realized creativity. Basically, the two drumkitters generate a percolating bed of dense, loose tribal grooves (somewhat reminiscent of Yoshigaki's work in Rovo, a decent group I have no special enthusiasm for) and a handful of the others go nuts on top of it, especially Makigami and Nammy. The closest thing I can think of is Jefferson Airplane's wacky miniature "Ribump Ba Bap Dum Dum" (never released until a CD reissue of Crown of Creation, where it appears as a bonus track), but this is a hundred times crazier. Far from being a chaotic freakout, though, the violin scribbles and xylophone darts are measured, balanced interjections and the whole thing works as a delirious swirl of rhythm and coloration. But most importantly, Nammy and Makigami go out; I mean far out. Hearing Makigami's extended vocal vocabulary is, of course, no surprise, but no less welcome and riveting for that. On the other hand, this precious passage is the only one I've encountered with Nammy offering a parallel thread of invention. Step aside Shelley Hirsch, Lauren Newton, and any other diva of the deranged, this lady is a few zip codes away from her rocker here. Completely mind-blowing stuff. It would be stretched out to album-length in a perfect world. Then again, it is an intro, and what it introduces is so great I can hardly wait till it kicks in! So you're starting to get the gist here. This song would be played on every radio station at least once an hour if the world was full of aesthetic pathologies like me. The fact is that as much as I love every track on this disc and relish it as a continuous experience, in practice "Mahouzukai Sarii" is the song I play most often, a track I pluck for handmade comps and often pop the disc in just for the sake of hearing as a quick fix.

So the song proper kicks in after this magical madness, and how does it begin? With one of the most scalding, gripping, medicinal vocal lines I've ever heard this side of "Civet's Tango" by the Sun City Girls (the leadoff track on disc one of 330, 003 Cross Dressers from Beyond the Rig Veda). Lasting only about seven seconds, it's all-too-brief; Nammy repeats a short line twice and then it's off to the next section of the song. The linguistic provenance of her utterance defies my grasp entirely. While clearly structured syllabically and transcribed in the lyric sheet, it's not any Japanese I can recognize, so I can only speculate it's some kind of adaption from another language or an outright phonetic invention, perhaps intended to suggest a magical incantation befitting the song's playful lyrics about a charming young witch. The best way I can think to describe Nammy's singing might be rather on the mark given the topic of the song: it's like the high-pitched cackle of a witch! Whatever it means and whatever Nammy's doing in her delivery, this singing makes my endorphins curdle.

After this mercurial micro-song, Nammy launches into the delightful Japanese verse about a young witch flying into town on her broom, flashing a mischievous grin, chanting some magic words, and so on—really playful, charming stuff entirely befitting the manic, wacky singing by Nammy and Makigami (in alternation), klezmer rave-ups, and even a irresistible heartfelt group vocal chorus. Being the only song in their native Japanese on the album, Nammy and Makigami clearly are in a comfort zone where they can push themselves into even more expressive depth than the killer Yiddish songs. What's more, the full-out complex group chorus would've been a daunting affair in a non-native language. Everything about this song just bursts with joy, passion, and fun. Best of all, that seven second vocal part comes back near the end!

The next track, "Doina", passes its first half as a simmering sparse klezmer reverie that gives Makigami a chance to go into his experimental vocal wackiness, notably including his Tuvan-inspired techniques, before it suddenly bursts into a breakneck klezmer hoedown with ripping Yiddish vocals so catchy I've caught myself virtually reciting them from memory in idle moments after a session with the disc. I start to wonder if I'm subconsciously learning Yiddish! Probably not, but it's not especially different than English, German, and other close Germanic siblings.

The album closes out with "Der Gasn Nigun", a traditional tune rendered as a slightly somber, sensuous, slow march with drones and langorous melodies from (I believe) all three of the group's bass clarinettists at once, with violins, accordion and xylophone laying out the melodies with old world phrasing . It's a chance to wind down and revel in the vibrant acoustic timbres of the ensemble and hear a side to their musicality besides the high-energy romps.

~Michael Anton Parker

phroq - collapse

Ground Fault 34

Noise. How do you possibly make qualitative judgments about noises? How do you say, “This noise is lovely, this one boring. This one profound, this one shallow.” It seems to be a fool’s errand, certainly when you’re dealing with the actual, first-hand noise experience. Does it change when a given noise is “lifted” out of multi-dimensional reality and transferred to disc? Damn it, it appears to. Unlike your basic melody, which you might find banal whether encountered in a concert hall or on your stereo, there’s a discriminatory filter that manifests when you know you’re listening to something that, for better or worse, is being presented as an art form. It’s difficult to imagine, for myself anyway, bumping into any sort of naturally or artificially occurring noise in an everyday environment (leaving aside, for the sake of argument, the physically painful, though even there…) that I could possibly “dislike” or find boring any more than I could see a color that, apart from its context, could be deemed ugly. It’s a sound, no more, no less, with no value judgments attached. Chances are, if listened to closely, a “simple” sound is more complex and chaotic than initially perceived just as a white wall is never white. Delivered into a recorded medium, something is, one presumes, inevitably lost but not only that. The listener senses intent behind the action of inclusion and that, I think, is what tinges one’s reaction to the music, the “whys” of its having been introduced more than the sound itself. Unfortunate? Maybe. Inevitable? I’m afraid so.

The thing is, phroq’s (aka Francisco Meirino) album doesn’t really sit as well with these concerns as I initially thought. On first blush, “Collapse” seemed to be a selection of tracks that fluctuated between muted, rumbling pieces that sounded carefully considered and explosions of sheer, mono-dimensional noise of the type designed more for inner-brain laceration than contemplation. But closer listenings revealed not only a rich level of detail in the quieter works (one that I suspected was there from the first) but also more complexity and nuance in the shrieking, roaring ones. If the latter, ultimately, are still not found as rewarding, they’re also not nearly as brittle or willfully arch and self-conscious as originally heard (viz, some prior releases from Ground Fault that I’ve written up here)

There are four “attempts” among the pieces, numbered 4, 2, 1 and 3. They’re short, quieter works, closely examining narrow areas of sound: crinkly textures in the first, soft rumbles in the second, faint whistles with a bit of background clatter in the third and human breath sounds in the last. Each is thoughtful and considered, manifesting an individual and real presence and each is entirely satisfying. The title cut begins with a several second onslaught that will have you leaping for your volume control lest your speakers combust but quickly subsides into some enticing, static-laced subsonics that, if you’re listening on headphones, are like someone idly tapping their fingers on your eardrum. It gradually mutates back near the level of the first few moments and, though you can pick out a number of elements within the maelstrom, there’s something lacking to these ears, some thinness that I don’t pick up, for instance, in some of the more successful, high-volume work of Francisco Lopez. Maybe it’s the difference between feeling like you’re really inside a jet engine or merely in a computer simulation of same. “Music for French Writing” begins somewhat similarly, all squiggly squeals and corroded bleats, complete with some loopy sine work. But when, a minute or two in, it settles into its gravelly roar, there’s a naturalness, almost a groove (!) that’s very appealing. The “whys” of this one working more successfully, sounding more of a piece, are difficult to delineate, but it’s arc seems right, it’s length appropriate, nothing more being said than what’s necessary. But the standout track is “Psychotest, last attempt”. Beginning with ultra-delicate pings right out of Xenakis’ “Concret PH”, it unfolds into a soundscape evoking calving glaciers, enormous engines heard from the next valley, scattering fauna (I gather sourced from field recordings) before ebbing back into those tiny prickles. Beautiful piece, reminding me of some of the better Tsunoda work I’ve heard. The final two cuts veer somewhat between the profundity of that piece and more flamboyant, wildly thrown out aesthesia, a little more hit and miss, a bit more of a grab bag, the last humorously employing something that almost resembles a walking bass line buried somewhere beneath a mountain of noise.

Some real good stuff here on “Collapse” as well as some work that walks an interesting, risky line. If phroq strays and falls off into unnecessary excess on occasion, it might be unfortunate, but it’s tough to hold against him too long, given the several high points attained.

Epstein/ Shepik/ Kilmer - Lingua Franca

Songlines 1555-2

Saxophonist Peter Epstein augers top-billing on the tray card, but Lingua Franca is really more of a communal affair. Guitarist Brad Shepik shares composing duties and Matt Kilmer supplies the array of supple rhythms integral to the music’s forward and lateral motion with a battery of drums. The title points not only to a common vernacular but also to the prevalence of precedence in both general approach and results. The trio’s blend of earthy ethnic influences, jazz, funk, blues and even a bit of New Age isn’t exactly nascent territory. They do manage to posit a shared personal perspective on the standard ethno-jam template. The outcome is nearly always enjoyable, but sometimes precariously familiar in scope and sound.

A pervasive pepper motif and pictures of what look like harvested Aji Escabeches grace the liners. The cover captures a scene from what looks to be an Andean delicatessen. Musical capital from that region of the globe fuses with the trio’s Radical Jewish Culture preoccupations to extract a stew rich in Old World and Third World seasonings that is occasionally a tad overcooked. Shepik’s sharp comping and precision arpeggios on “Miro” weave with Epstein’s slippery alto as Kilmer lays down a hand-jive groove via brushed frame drum. Shepik’s habit of shaping shimmering, often deliquescent lines that recall those of his Lower East Side colleague Mark Ribot lend the much of the music a wistful, even ethereal air, like the zephyrs swirling around the verdant slopes of a cloud-capped Peruvian peak.

“Témoin” turns attention back to sea level terra firma with another perambulating blend of percolating palmed percussion and fast-picking guitar. Epstein’s soprano rides the syncopations, but frequently cleaves too cleanly to the central melody, his tone anemic when a sharper, more tensile articulation might serve better. “Here & There” finds Shepik fingering the upper frets of his axes both acoustic and electric, shaving strips of bent notes in swift succession as his partners respond with agile atmospheric commentary. After a Shepik preface “Monsaraz” is mostly Epstein’s show, a vehicle for his Eastern-oriented soprano, solo and in nimble concert with guitarist’s hummingbird plectrum. Here and host of other places the pair attain a surprising level of congruity in shadowing each other’s lines.

“Sunrise” introduces a rubbery reggae beat and a brittle Rastafari guitar line and the trio adjusts its sensibilities accordingly in fleshing a convincing island vibe. “Meditation” morphs from the restrained mold of an opening reverie into a driving volley of processed guitar, cymbal crashes and piercing soprano. The SACD also includes a bonus track “Improvisation I” that travels a similar transformative course from delicate calliope opening to aqueous electronics-laden finish.

Tractable turns in structure and ideation are numerous but ultimately much of the program ends up sounding too much of a piece. Variety and experimentation are limned within relatively narrow parameters. As a tight and responsive trio willing to embrace a wide swathe of sources these musicians are more than equipped. But I caught myself longing for more fire and bite to their creations, flavor in common with the peppers that serve as the album’s visual analogue.

~ Derek Taylor

The Fabulous Sidney Bechet (Blue Note)

There’s better Bechet to be sure, but this comp collecting a deuce of early 50s sessions by the aging straight horn savant has several advantages, sonically speaking. First there’s the fidelity afforded by studio tape technology that renders both bands in clarity not present on earlier shellac sides. Next there’s the ensembles themselves: two sextets manned by specialists of Nawlins swing vernacular both elder and acolyte who are clearly enamored of their famous front man and more than happy to follow his lead. Trombonist Jimmy Archey is the only sideman shared between the two and his staccato tailgate style jibes jovially with wailing soprano in the customary layered horn polyphony. Bear-shouldered bassist Walter Page lends a slightly more modernist bent to the second session by straying from the usual slap time syncopations with frequent walking detours. It’s great fun juxtaposing his Basie-born approach with that of the venerable Pops Foster who pounds his own strings with merciless glee on the first clambake. A similar contrast arises between brassmen Sidney de Paris and Jonah Jones, the former firing away with crisp clarion clusters while the latter, on the cusp of his career as a mood music cash cow for Capitol, plays it with greater degree of lissome cool. And the drummers display fealties to different eras too. Johnny Blowers’ tribal tom rolls on “Rose of the Rio Grande” recall classic Chick Webb while Manzie Johnson’s lively cowbell and woodblock accents on “Original Dixieland One-Step” give nod to Baby Dodds. The tunes on both dates represent little remove from Bechet’s usual repast. Hardscrabble blowers like “Ballin’ the Jack” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” alternate with cerulean dirges like “Black and Blue.” Bechet’s rapaciously tilted horn holds court at the center of the action, manhandling melodies and subjugating rhythms with a sumptuous vibrato that swells to fill the rooms. “Fabulous” isn’t superlative enough to describe the half of it.

From Yultchieva to McComb

While googling for the frustratingly scarce information available about Monâjât Yultchieva, the Uzbekistani vocalist who very well might rank as my top pick for female voice outside of the untouchable Dagmar Krause (though the aesthetic gap is so severe it's useless to compare them!), this afternoon I discovered a resource that demands to be immediately broadcast here in the Bagodrome. Billed as Medieval Music & Arts Foundation, it's a well-organized set of reference materials on not only the West and Central Asian music I yearn for commentary on, but also personalized mini-guides to a glistening swath of other geo-traditional music, with a burgeoning emphasis on the well-trodden territory of West European post-religious and academic musical traditions. The overriding specialization is a general concept of classical music, a nebulous and mostly sociologically determined narrowing of traditional music. While not nearly as comprehensive, the site shares the spirit of the Improvised Music from Japan and European Free Improvisation sites that most Baggers frequent. It's all the work of a single eminently knowledgeable individual, though, one Todd Michel McComb, and that's where things get really interesting.

McComb has invested himself in far more than a reference work based around his personal musical journey. As a fully separate part of the site, between the years of 1997 and 2003 he generated a regular series of op-ed essays—some 150 or so in total—filled with far-ranging philosophical musings on music. Skimming what amounts to a book-sized lode of inspired text analogous to Edwin Prévost's No Sound is Innocent, I'm struck by two things. One, the essays are densely hyperlinked to each other, truly capitalizing on the potential of the internet for novel forms of textual organization, and ideally framing the speculative, tangential, openly searching nature of the content. I find myself reading bits and pieces of the essays in a whimsical path of clicks on the tantalizing hyperlinked phrases, often reading in fruitful circles. Second, McComb's frame of reference and worldview is by and large bizarrely bereft of intersection with mine despite tackling topic after topic that has long equally sustained my own comas of contemplation. He dwells on a conceptualization of "art music", but appears quite innocent of recent art music (which is mostly improv), the meat-and-potatoes of Bagocentric discourse. Medieval European music and Indian classical music appear to be his most favored sources of grounding in musical particulars. While I suspect I would vigorously disagree with McComb on most points were our paradigms even commensurable, this is fascinating reading I'll be clicking my way through in plenty of future sessions. McComb is a maverick of internet music commentary worthy of comparison to Bagatellen's own (temporarily inactive) Joe Milazzo.

To give a flavor of these self-described editorials, in his ruminations on the general concept of musical fusion in Fusion II: Inevitability & chaos, McComb asks "Other than the chronological precedence of medieval music as a basis for unifying styles, another obvious creative pole presents itself: Totally unbounded sound complexes, the "noise" phenomenon, a reinvention of form from outside any traditional constraints. The mind finds order in randomness, by its nature, and moreover, such "free" forms usually stabilize on some sort of order (the scale forms of Xenakis come to mind). If subsequently perceived elements are retroactively identified with various world traditions, is such a thing fusion?".

Curiously, the editorial section of the site requires registration to access. McComb explains himself thusly: "I like to keep this section of the site a little more private. Search engines cannot get into it, and people are not jumping randomly into the middle of a complicated series of thoughts. It also helps me keep track of some of these ideas. There is no fee, so I hope that you do not see it as a big hassle." It only took me a few seconds and it really isn't a hassle at all, but I tend to think this maneuver violates the spirit of the internet in unnecessarily secluding these texts from the emergent pond of discourse we can learn new ways to swim in. Besides, after accessing this archive, "jumping randomly into the middle of a complicated series of thoughts" is precisely what I did!

I'm delighted to see McComb shares my intense fascination with Giacinto Scelsi's music, and his Scelsi page is a treasure of extensive commentary and even offers a thorough discography for this woefully underdocumented body of work! Bravo!

By the way, Monâjât Yultchieva's Ocora release Ouzbekistan: Ferghana Maqam is probably my all-time favorite recording of traditional music in any style, though there's some Mingus albums that run neck-and-neck. I'll limit myself to this simple statement because I don't know how to even begin talking about her singing on this album, which I've played dozens of times over the past nine years in a state of stillness and rapture.

~Michael Anton Parker

The Greatest Movies Ever, Sez Me

Wanna know what my favorite movies are? Didn't think so. Well, someone else asked me to come up with a Top 100 list, so I did. You can read it after the jump. Sure wish all of these were on DVD...especially White Dog.

THE 100 GREATEST MOVIES EVER (SEZ ME)

1. Affliction
2. Aguirre, The Wrath Of God
3. Alien
4. Alien3
5. Amelie
6. American Psycho
7. Apocalypse Now
8. Bad Lieutenant
9. Bad Santa
10. Battle Royale
11. The Beguiled
12. The Big Heat
13. The Big Red One: The Reconstruction
14. The Blackout
15. Blade Runner
16. The Brood
17. Bully
18. Casino
19. Chinatown
20. Cockfighter
21. The Conversation
22. Cool Hand Luke
23. Cube
24. Dawn Of The Dead
25. Day Of The Dead
26. The Decline Of Western Civilization
27. Demonlover
28. The Dentist
29. Dirty Harry
30. Dirty Pretty Things
31. The Driver
32. The Edge
33. Extreme Prejudice
34. The Fashionistas
35. Fela: Music Is The Weapon
36. The Fifth Element
37. Gerry
38. Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai
39. Glengarry Glen Ross
40. The Golf Specialist
41. GoodFellas
42. Happy Gilmore
43. Hard Times
44. Heat
45. Heist
46. High Plains Drifter
47. The Hills Have Eyes
48. House Of Games
49. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (Kaufman)
50. It’s A Gift
51. Kagemusha
52. Killing Zoe
53. King Of New York
54. Lancelot Of The Lake
55. Mad Max
56. The Matrix
57. Miller’s Crossing
58. Mishima
59. The Naked Kiss
60. Near Dark
61. Nosferatu The Vampyre
62. Once Upon A Time In The West
63. Pi
64. Pickup On South Street
65. Point Blank
66. Prince Of Darkness
67. Raging Bull
68. Ran
69. Repo Man
70. Revengers Tragedy
71. Rififi
72. Road House
73. The Road Warrior
74. The Royal Tenenbaums
75. Seconds
76. Shock Corridor
77. Sorcerer
78. Southern Comfort
79. The Spanish Prisoner
80. Starship Troopers
81. The Steel Helmet
82. Straight Time
83. Straight To Hell
84. Stranger Than Paradise
85. Straw Dogs
86. The Swimmer
87. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
88. The Thing
89. Thief
90. To Live And Die In L.A.
91. Two-Lane Blacktop
92. Unforgiven
93. Vampires
94. Videodrome
95. The Warriors
96. Weapons Of Ass Destruction
97. White Dog
98. The Wild Bunch
99. The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl
100. X2 (X-Men 2: X-Men United)

Lady Luck Turns Her Back

Another Titan returns to Mount Olympus. Lucky Thompson passed away at the age of 81 and I’m getting tired of posting these obits. Though his flashy sobriquet became something of a sad misnomer in his later years, his best work still stands as some of the best bop-born jazz available. My personal favorites from a discography with an uncommonly high hit rate include: Tricotism (Impulse) w/ the killer trio of Oscar Pettiford & Skeeter Best, Lord, Lord am I Ever Gonna Know? (Candid) and his trilogy of releases for Prestige, Plays Jerome Kern, Lucky Strikes! and Plays Happy Days Are Here Again. The latter trifecta is notable for programs loaded with standards as well as the ample presence of his much vaunted soprano, all laid to wax under Rudy Van Gelder’s watchful engineering eye. It’s still my belief than no one can match Lucky’s sleek smoothness of tone on the straight horn (not even Zoot Sims, who by my gauge comes closest). His tenor work was the stuff of legends too, dark chocolate-rich and the epitome of urbane sophistication with an improvisatory acumen that could cut most comers. Hopefully Chuck Nessa will open a collection fund so the classic Body and Soul album reissued on his eponymous label can finally find renewed circulation. Where do I send the check?