Bagatellen

Bags Thoroughly Dispensible Humor, File #3167-42B

Nothing whatsoever to do with music... two words: Flipping Brilliant!

Sojourn - Lotus Mind

Dreamscape 4761

The prospect of another platter from the duo of American sarodist Lisa Moskow and Swiss multiinstrumentalist Hermann Buhler seemed a pleasant one. I’d quite enjoyed an earlier Dreamscape venture by the duo—a meditative but quietly adventurous melding of ancient and modern improvisational practice. It was fairly dry but immediate, at times even just a bit dangerous.

Would that were the case for this newest release. Don’t get me wrong—it’s gorgeous! The recorded sound is vivid, the acoustic is rich and hugely ambient, and the playing is polished to the extreme. Buhler’s tone is full and round; Moskow’s playing is even more subtle than before.

I see the disc’s failure as a result of the disconnect between conception and execution. The Dreamscape website is touting it as a meditation piece based on traditional ragas without a conscious attempt to render them in traditional fashion; perhaps this is the problem. While my understanding of Hindustani music is very limited, this recording seems to be missing any sense of tension/release, both of more “authentic” Indian classical recordings and of more recent trends in improvised music. Instead of highlighting certain pitches of the scale by tantalization and return, tones float effortlessly over a drone, seemingly without any other purpose than the achievement of bliss. Buhler’s wonderful multiphonics are nowhere to be found here, and the whole project is too redolent of the “new-age” trope that the earlier disc avoided so cleverly. While pleasant at the start, the seamlessly connected group of pieces soon becomes long, first inducing relaxation and then some gentle but forgettable dreams. It’s too bad that a project with such promise had to be executed in such a generic fashion.

~ Marc Medwin

Peter Brotzmann and Nasheet Waits - Live at the 'Bottle' Fest 2005

Eremite/Brö A

It might have something to do with counterbalancing such scorching approaches to reed playing as the lung-busting and sometimes unaccompanied tenor solos that pepper recordings like Nipples (Calig, 1969, reissued on Atavistic’s Unheard Music Series) or Alex von Schlippenbach’s The Living Music (Quasar/FMP, 1969, reissued on UMS), but Peter Brötzmann has always had a knack for choosing drummers. And what a variety of percussive approaches these meetings have engendered: Sven-Åke Johanssen, Han Bennink, Louis Moholo, Andrew Cyrille, Hamid Drake, Milford Graves, Walter Perkins and now Nasheet Waits, late of groups led by pianists Jason Moran and Andrew Hill (his father, the late Freddie Waits, worked with artists as diverse as Lee Morgan and Bill Dixon). In what seems to be a trend in revitalizing the “BRO” label (initiated in the late 60s with handmade art-records For Adolphe Sax and Machine Gun, both later reissued on FMP), the third new release finds Brötzmann in duo format, sparring on four varied and untitled free improvisations. Granted, Live at the Bottle Fest is not a commercial album – unlike the vinyl-only duos with Bennink and Perkins, it is a tour-only CD now available only from the Eremite website, but nevertheless a harbinger of probable things to come with the eventual release of the next BRO LP.

Brötzmann once told me that the freest thing he ever witnessed (musically speaking, anyway) was an impromptu duo with Jackie McLean and Art Taylor at the American Center in Paris in the early ‘70s, who apparently played with such speed and unbridled fire that pianist Siegfried Kessler and bassist Patrice Caratini dropped out, leaving the altoist and drummer to soldier on as a frantic pair. So, one might suppose it fitting that BRO-A starts off with an alto-drums duo, Waits’ approach a measured series of surges that recall several directions at once – Blackwell, Roy Haynes, Moholo, Rashied – while beholden to no particular school. At times this is the percussion of breathing, of opening and closing the circulations of rhythm, at other times infinitely rising press rolls or frenetic accents on Brötzmann’s ebullient grit. What is immediately striking from the first salvos, and what cuts through such cutting freedom, is the empathy that Waits and Brötzmann have as compared to recent sparring partners – Graves and Drake don’t seem to listen much, and Perkins passed on before the two could really develop together. The second piece begins on clarinet, Waits rustling along and continuing down the darkened path that closed the first piece in a slinky rumba, Brötzmann’s vibrato wide and guttural enough as to think he might be playing his clarinet in water (indeed, he has – see Schwarzwaldfahrt, FMP/UMS). Midway through the piece, the horn is switched to tenor and Brötzmann starts off in a rather Newk-ish mode (of course throwing in a bit of that biting skronk for good measure), Waits moving from brushes to staccato jounce as the swells rise in a stack of free-blues ingots. For the third piece, the Romanian single-reed tarogato (or taragot) is employed, an odd and nebulous tonal area between the woodiness of the clarinet and the metallic heat of the saxophones. Brötzmann doesn’t get as much range out of this instrument – it seems a necessary evil in order to employ its unique tone – and Waits seems resolved to repeated cross-rhythms (some almost recalling Drake) and an extended solo that, while beginning in a sort of drum-pad minimalism, shows his true bop roots in an update of Bu for the free set. The pair close as they began, with an alto-drums stormer finding Brötzmann in a somewhat more Aylerish mode both thematically and soloistically, electrifying multiphonics in full view (there are a few things even Waits doesn’t know how to respond to) for a paint-peeling and exuberant finale.

Live at the Bottle Fest presents not only one of the most empathetic pairings of reedman and percussionist in recent memory, but also a prime example of the format. Consider this vote cast for the next BRO record and for a vital and fruitful relationship in the years to come.

~ Clifford Allen

Peter Brötzmann & Han Bennink – Schwarzwaldfahrt

UMS/Atavistic 2542

Reading the wonderful back-story behind Schwarzwaldfahrt I was curiously reminded of a Howard Rumsey Lighthouse All-Stars album for Contemporary. The cover of that record pictures the band set-up in the Hermosa Beach sand presumably preparing to play to a crowd of sunbathers, off-camera. Brötzmann and Bennink’s chosen locales are a near opposite, the post-winter environs of the Black Forest under gray skies and inclement weather. The pair packed relatively lightly. The Dutchman left his drum kit at home and took along instead an assortment of reed and string instruments. The German made do with an unspecified number of clarinets and saxophones. Bennink’s car served as transport with provisions and borrowed portable recording equipment occupying remaining trunk space. They took to the wilds for a week, stopping periodically to play in natural settings amidst wooded glades and streams as the whim struck them.

Originally released on FMP as a single LP, the album culled from the travels still stands a unique and instantly endearing entry in the oeuvre of each player. The Unheard Music edition adds over an hour of unissued material by way of a second disc. Everything receives a fresh studio scrubbing, but the raw verité feel of the recordings remains intact. Edits are often blunt with one piece ending abruptly and the next opening in progress. Over the course of both discs the duo moves about freely over the terrain, their shifting proximity to the microphone(s) adding a vivid spatial dimension to the music, the environment itself becoming an instrument.

At one point early on Bennink beats a choppy rhythm on a log while Brötzmann twitters away on clarinet, the latter man gradually wandering away until he’s out of range of the mic completely only to return a minute later. The distant buzz of what sounds like a chainsaw undergirds the entire exchange, even spilling over into the next track. Several pieces later the fleeting drone of jet aircraft augments an argument of dueling penny whistles. It’s an aerial occurrence repeated late in the ninth inning of Disc Two. Ambient birdsong of several stripes is also regularly audible across much of the program along with burble and babble of various-sized waterways. The two make direct use of the aqueous topographical features, submerging their respective reed instruments, blowing freely and taping the results. Taking the tactic to an extreme, the final cut of the original album consists of almost completely of an impromptu symphony of splashing sounds generated by hands, feet and dropped objects.

Bennink’s customary playfulness comes through in the multitude of means he devises to make noise. Brötzmann adopts a matching level of open-mindedness and it’s a pleasure to hear him embrace such a sense of frivolity in the shared ad-lib approach. The two rarely seem concerned with adhering to any sort of agreed upon aural map at all. Their interplay is of the moment and lends a welcome aleatory air to the whole aural journey. The pinnacle comes on the companion disc during a 12-minute safari for tandem bass clarinets, the two giraffee-necked horns exploring the sound space beneath a peaceful arboreal canopy.

Other improvisers have recorded outdoors over the years with mixed results; the CIMP meeting of Joe McPhee and David Prentice springs immediately to mind. Still the number of albums in this vein remains surprisingly few. With this pioneering project thankfully back in print others will hopefully find it a catalyst to organize field trips of their own, digital tape decks in tow.

~ Derek Taylor

Reviews Deluge

Sometimes its feast or famine here at Bags & fortunately right now we’re in the midst of the former condition, at least when it comes to album reviews. Consider this a friendly cue to peruse the ever-swelling list there to page right; the write-ups are coming so fast and furious, it’d be a shame for any to be submerged by the cresting waves. Fingers crossed that the flood continues…

Anthony Braxton (+ Duke Ellington) - Concept of Freedom

Hatology 614

A nice, even natural idea, this. The innovative “collage logic” strategy developed by Braxton in the 80s, allowing his musicians to, at any time, interpolate any of his compositions into whatever piece they were ostensibly performing (an approach I’ve always regretted not having been taken up by other musicians working in areas that afford a mix of composition and improvisation) has here been extended to allow a group of performers to bring work from outside of Braxton’s oeuvre into one of his pieces. The very capable quartet of Roland Dahinden (trombone), Hildegard Kleeb (piano), Dimitris Polisoidis (violin) and Robert Holdrich (electronics) perform Braxton’s ‘Composition No. 257’, a 130 stave, single line notated work written in the manner of his Ghost Trance music. Not only do they inject portions of six other Braxton compositions (for those counting, #s 30, 31, 46, 69, 90 and 136) but they also include improvisations on extracts of some Ellington themes from the Second Sacred Concert. Though unfortunately I’m not familiar enough with the Ellington to definitely pick out the thematic material used, I think it’s safe to say that, especially to the extent to Braxton material itself doesn’t seem to much resemble other Ghost Trance pieces, a substantial portion of the music on this disc comes courtesy of the quartet’s free interpretations of their sources.

The disc is divided into seven tracks, the end markings for which appear to signal the transition from chiefly Braxton material to mainly Ellington, though I’d be curious to know how much overlapping occurred, whether or not individual members made the decisions on the spot, if some such nexuses were preordained, etc. As a generalization, one might say (unsurprisingly) the Braxton sections are spikier, the Ellington territories more tonal and lush, though any melodies in the latter are merely hinted at. (Is the theme from “Come Sunday” included as a part of that Sacred Concert? There are points where its basic tonality seems to be referenced.) If Kleeb’s playing is sometimes a bit too dry for my taste, well, so is Braxton’s on occasion; can’t really complain. Some of the more beautiful parts here are created in tandem by Dahinden and Holdrich (a name new to me), both tending, in the Ellingtonian sections, to stay in the lower regions of their instruments, batting around sub-aqueous tones and wallowing in some lovely, nether gurgling. But the group blends pretty well throughout, never more compellingly than in the final portion (a kinda Duke-ish one), where Kleeb initially lays gospelly chords over a chaotic but sonically distant welter of electronics and muted trombone before that faraway storm overwhelms her, leaving behind a harsh and guttural jetsam of violin sawings, deep brass moans and, ultimately, after the waters recede, the piano returning, agitated but unbowed.

“A Concept of Freedom” works quite well overall and employs a strategy I’d love to hear explored by others. Somehow I doubt I will, though.

Agustí Fernández & Mats Gustafsson – Critical Mass

Psi 05.06

The Mad Swede and the Spaniard Fernández have been moving in similar professional circles for awhile, most recently as members of Barry Guy’s New Orchestra. Critical Mass presents a mano y mano studio encounter recorded summer 2004 in the pianist’s home base of Barcelona. The duo framework is one frequently favored by Fernández as past pairings with the likes of Derek Bailey and the Parkers, Evan and William, demonstrate. But rather than the marathon slugfest one might expect this meeting centers instead on a succession of texture-driven dialogues steeped in extended techniques.

Gustafsson communicates in his usual lexicon of slippery reed pops and tongue slaps, tension and friction sustained by clenched teeth and pursed lips. Fernández spends as much time under the piano hood abusing hammers and strings as he does pounding the keys proper. On the opening track it’s as if he’s typing away maniacally at some monstrous adding machine, serrated metallic ticker tape spooling out with every keystroke. A later segment simulates rusty rake tines dragged across a lattice of tightly-wound bed springs. At another he attacks the strings like a jackboot going to work with a set of heavy iron calipers to extract a confession. Elsewhere tight clusters of barb-tipped notes vie with blustery bursts of overblown baritone, the latter salvos echoing the storybook wolf attempting to topple each pig’s house with typhoon-sized huffs and puffs.

The duo alternates these id-based excursions with others that carry brooding, ethereal content, the spectral tonal patterns of the recital’s fifth part offering one example. Neither man concerns himself with employing his instrument in much of any sort of conventional manner. Gustafsson makes use of the whole of his horn as a percussive device. Mouthpiece, reed, pads, even the serpentine metal tubing that comprises the saxophone’s lower anatomy, all become viable orifices for the escape of rhythmic vibrations and breath. These sorts of percolating displays of embouchure control coupled with precision fingerings are akin in weird way to Evan Parker’s stylized argot on soprano, instantly attributable to the architect and fascinating in their sustained singularity.

The disc’s final piece embodies the closest thing to a free jazz blowout with both men pulling the stops and aiming volley after volley at each other’s corner, the zero hour condition of the title finally reached. The uniform obduracy of these exchanges can prove challenging, but close, open-minded listening pays off by revealing a strong underlying rapport between the two players. And for an enjoyable exercise in dichotomous listening try spinning this back-to-back with, say, Warne Marsh’s Ballad For You or the Brubeck/Desmond duets.

~ Derek Taylor

Doctor Umezu Band - Eight Eyes and Eight Ears (ITM)

Out of the many records cut by the Doctor Umezu Band during the 80s, this 1985 session released by the German label ITM is the only one I've come across. If this discography (Japanese only) is accurate, it's their sixth album, so I can only wonder how their music developed. In any case, it's a wonderful early slice of the soulful and vibrant sound Kazutoki Umezu has continued to mine for the past twenty years and it marks the period when he first came into contact with the thriving post-jazz underground in Manhattan, then in the peak phase of the celebrated "downtown scene". Umezu would go on to collaborate extensively with downtown folks, making the trek over from Tokyo often enough to become a familiar presence at the Knitting Factory and releasing a handful of notable records, highlighted by 1987's Abandon in duo with cellist Tom Cora and the 1992 masterpiece Eclecticism, possibly the finest hour for both Umezu (not counting Omedeto) and guitarist Marc Ribot (sitting right alongside his monstrous Rootless Cosmopolitans) and one of the truly essential documents of that era that captures a prototypical downtown synthesis of post-Ayler jazz, rock, swing, blues, surf, and funk.

Eight Eyes and Eight Ears is an unmistakably dated album; Takeharu Hayakawa's electric bass guitar and Takashi Kikuchi's drumkit never stray from the sort of lockstep stiff funk grooves that ruined countless albums in the 1980s as the human race suffered through the growing pains of drum machine technology. I generally can't abide that slick, mechanical rhythmicality, but I count this disc as an example of how great music can be made within any aesthetic framework, no matter how depraved. I won't go so far as saying these grooves actually breathe (to hear that achieved in the most profound way within the same rhythmic zeitgeist, look no further than Bill Connors' timeless work from the same period), but they do move in all the right directions to enhance the explosive joyfulness of Umezu and Hiroaki Katayama's catchy riffing and squealing, so the music transcends its dated sound. There's also an impressive level of nuance and craft in Hayakawa's playing on the ever-problematic bass guitar.

In "Dekoboko-Yama/The Bumby Mountain on the Bank", Hayakawa and Kikuchi jump from the gate with a punchy, slightly jagged groove that could almost pass for something off Massacre's Killing Time (but of course neither this album nor any other album ever made short of The Stick Men gets anywhere close to the rhythmic ecstacy of the mythical Frith/Laswell/Maher unit). Somehow these clipped and clear rhythms remind me of a video game that I played a few times when I was a kid called Pac Man, in which the player maneuvers a crude round yellow thing with eyes and a pie wedge mouth meant to suggest a head whose sole purpose is to traverse a maze and chomp on little electronic nuggets without getting eaten by other critters from the zoo of vintage digital minimalism. Curiously enough, via overdubbing Hayakawa also provides some soft background electric guitar spikes alongside his ripping bass line, as if to make explicit reference to Massacre, though only briefly and weakly before Umezu and Katayama take over with twin sax riffing and the tune playfully bounces between themes and tempi with a passing episode of jackhammer breakdowns a la Etron Fou Leloublan.

The use of overdubbing, while fairly limited, tasteful and effective (except Umezu's superfluous piano jabs in the first track), is another aspect of the album that pins the music down to an era when jazz records became produced more like pop albums than attempts to capture the feeling of a live band. Happily Umezu survived this with a session that invigorates and delights twenty years later instead of the hideously popified skeletons in the 80s closet of creative jazz peers like Oliver Lake and Jamaaladeen Tacuma.

While I can't say there's anything truly great about the rhythm section playing here, it maintains a consistent creative edge and justifies the post-funk alternatives to bop rhythms as an expansion of the jazz lexicon that isn't limited to slick commercialism. What makes the record great is Umezu's tunes and his killer alto sax and bass clarinet playing in tandem with Hiroaki Katayama's tenor sax. Their styles are so idiomatic they almost seem quotational (Rollins, Ayler, Adderly, etc), so everything boils down to good old fashioned melody and soul carried on a fat, beautiful tone. These guys have the gutbucket soulfulness and melodic clarity of George Cartwright in the classic early days of Curlew, most certainly a kindred group in the pursuit of avant-garde party music at the time and probably the most musically successful. The sheer tunefulness of the music is hard to resist; almost every melody on this album sounds lifted from a traditional folk tune of some East European or Mediterranean variety or another, and counts as an early entry to the rich explosion of klezmer-infused creative music of the past two decades. A precursor to some of Ken Vandermark's great reconciliations of post-Ayler reed rawness and concrete grooviness, tracks like "Keep Your Hands Off the Door" find Umezu and Katayama in hard funk riffing synchrony with bass guitar and drumkit grooves going hard and deep into the pocket, only to rip into unbridled screams of passion a moment later.

Free of any blemishes I could cite, Eight Eyes and Eight Ears is a minor classic of light-hearted post-jazz that's gassed me up everytime I've pulled it out since it first passed through my stereo some six years ago and I've yet to be disappointed by an Umezu disc.

~Michael Anton Parker

Broken Hands/Lucky Rabbit - Lucky Hands

TwoThousandAnd 2+11

A live recording on Resonance FM featuring the two duos in various permutations. I confess to having a pre-existing predilection for Broken Hands, having greatly enjoyed the work of Anthony Guerra and Michael Rodgers in this and other contexts, and that opinion was borne out by this set. The first two tracks split up the teams into two other possible duos, Guerra with saxophonist Seymour Wright and Rodgers with guitarist Ross Lambert. Both are ok, the first contrasting Wright’s ultrahigh squealwork with staticky pops, the second setting (I’m guessing) Rodger’s more laid back, tonal approach with Lambert’s noisier one. OK, but nothing too special. The third and fourth cuts are Lucky Hands, the former a rather unfortunate piece with Wright producing some human beatbox imitations, quasi-throat song and desultory splutters over drone-y then spatter-y guitar, the whole thing sounding something like an outtake from an early 80s Zorn session. The other improv is far more involving, Wright (I think…) generating delicate, light-stepping percussive sounds (via his alto?) complimented obliquely but poetically by Lambert’s mixture of scrabblings and long tones.

But it’s the two tracks by Broken Hands that make the disc worth owning. That conflux of laid-back yet intensely contemplative guitar, with its evocations of Fahey, combined with equally finely observed noise is a potion that still causes my knees to weaken. Both pieces are luxuriant and lovely with exactly the right amount of harshness, allowing the feathers to prick from inside the pillow. When the second one finds itself, toward the end, in down and out blues territory, it feels unexpected, wonderful and appropriate. The final cut brings all four musicians together and, as on the initial two duos, the results are perfectly ok but easily a step or three down from the heights of the Broken Hands performance, though this track seems to have been cut off part of the way through, so who knows?

The typically fine and intriguing TwoThousandAnd packaging plus the two Broken Hands pieces make this rather mixed bag something to pick up.

So Sayeth Stollman

Nope, not that Slavic patriarch of Esperanto, though it’s a pretty nifty pair of Classics Illustrated page panels just the same. Just a quick note to alert readers of a recent interview with another mover/shaker in the world of pan-European linguistics and by proxy, free jazz history. Straight from the pages of AAJ-NY, Cliff Allen breaks bread with controversial ESP-Disk owner/operator Bernard Stollman and comes away with what is to my knowledge the most in-depth exposé yet on the man & his work. It’s bound to re-raise some hackles, but if there’s a better, more revealing Stollman confab to be found, net-based or otherwise, please point the way.

Two with Nakatani

N.R.A.
Untitled
H&H
HH-7

Tatsuya Nakatani/Audrey Chen/Susan Alcorn
Limn
H&H
HH-6

N.R.A. (Tatsuya Nakatani, percussion; Vic Rawlings, open-circuit electronics; Ricardo Arias, bass-balloon kit) is heard in a raucous, lively 2003 performance. Balloons, eh? Bass balloons at that. I don’t think I’d previously encountered Arias and going in, admittedly, I was a little skeptical. Not at balloons as a sound source, necessarily, but at what struck me as a reasonable likelihood that they’d be “abused” to some quasi-comic effect. Not to worry. Arias does fine work here, essentially creating sounds that might otherwise emerge (more or less) from extended bass techniques but with an added thwoomp that bespeaks of rubber enveloping compressed air. The pieces presented appear culled from longer performances (or, maybe, a single performance). They tend toward the active, even rampaging as on the fine fourth track where Nakatani and Rawlings set off some blistering explosions that send the trio careening and ricocheting wildly. The eight tracks are fairly short (the entire disc clocking in at around 40 minutes) and possibly the more effective for that as it concentrates the noise into digestible, tasty chunks. But the final cut, at a relatively sprawling eleven minutes, might actually be the most successful, more brooding and expansive, with Arias generating dangerous-sounding near-pops and the others producing more sustained tones with dark underpinnings, leading to a coda of furious sawing. A good, solid platter of noise, this one.

“Limn” is also sectioned into short tracks, 15 over the space of almost an hour. Nakatani is joined by cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen and, on several tracks, pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn. When Chen sticks to the cello, the results are strong and captivating, Nakatani routinely laying down creative and varied sounds and Alcorn, when present, filling out the space with shimmering (even Frisselian!) colors. I realize it’s become almost a cliché of free music criticism, but when Chen ventures to include vocals, as occurs on the majority of the pieces, things take a decided downturn, at least to these ears. Sometimes, as on the minute-long “Trilling”, her ululations cohere well with her companions’ material but more often, as on the first half of the longer (9 minutes +) “Eating a Volcano”, they’re distractions and aggravating ones at that (things calm down nicely in the improvisation’s latter half). Similarly her lip-thwacking scat singing on the appropriately titled “Liplash”. Outside of these episodes, it’s an enjoyable mélange of a disc. Chen’s vocals are actually offset rather well by a train whistle on “Dragon’s Den” and ably complimented by a wonderful, Nakatani-produced clatter. He’s in rip-roaring form on “Zipped”, a solo feature (if I’m not mistaken) that finds him rocketing through the space, shards of percussion banging around at impossible angles. For myself, “Limn” ends up ultimately as something of a mixed bag though, of course, others may find the vocal stylings right up their alley.

Dave Fox - Dedication Suite

Umbrella 31

Dave Fox, a pianist from North Carolinian environs, presents a solo piano suite that straddles the boundaries between the post-Cecil Taylor jazz avant garde and the contemporary pianistics of composer/performers like Frederic Rzewski. The cover photo shows an up-close panorama of the instrument’s interior and Fox does on occasion dip into that box, though the majority of time here is spent on the keyboard, often using preparations on the strings. After the initial “Prologue and Invocation” (admittedly, I could do without most of the titles used here) which does indeed involve some messing about the piano’s interior, Fox plunges into “Mayday”, beginning with a jaunty little figure that recalls some of Abdullah Ibrahim’s ruminations before expanding into what appears to be a freely improvised section. This is the first of several times I was reminded of Ibrahim, not so much (unfortunately) with regard to the great South African’s pure musicality but to a type of compositional line he often used in his early solo work, a kind of bumpy, rambling approach, like someone wending his way downhill along rough and narrow streets. Here, as elsewhere on the disc, Fox’s sound is quite clear and rich, the technique formidable but maybe a bit steely. He has some of Rzewski’s vigorous, iron-fingered attack but not so much of that composer’s lyricism and the one without the other can make for some tough going.

Fox is extremely active and busy throughout the disc and perhaps this is one of the elements that trends the session toward a certain amount of sameness. There’s too little contemplation, no apparent interest into listening to what one has done before charging to the next section. The improvisations (I didn’t pick up anything that sounded composed, though I could be mistaken) hover around a relatively small conceptual area, differentiated more by the specific technique employed in a given piece than any breadth of musical ideas. At best, when things get roiling and chaotic, as on the aforementioned “Mayday” or “Dedication #3: Toccata”, Fox achieves a level of involvement that one might expect from any self-respecting, post-Taylor pianist and that’s fine but those instances are rare. I can imagine the disc having some value for listeners looking to extend their ears beyond avant jazz pianism a little bit into contemporary “classical” concerns including some extended techniques (though they might be better served trying out someone like Denman Maroney) but for myself, “Dedication Suite” generally failed to sustain interest.

Bob Bellerue/ halfnormal - Threat Level Charlie

AnarchyMoon anok1

Using “glass, metal, suling , electronics, programming, space, body, and power,” Bob Bellerue’s Threat Level Charlie reveals meanings being sounds. He chooses “engineered materials that are emblematic of the consumer need for protection and comfort” to make music out of the substances of our lives. Threat Level Charlie is a harbinger of what’s already happening in your body. You just don’t know it yet, until you listen. Then you remember, and realize. Our body is a locus of forces at combat, and we do not control which forces win out. We try to, but we can’t. Bellerue translates this process into sound and matter, conjoined. Glass gets bown and blowed. Contact mics pick it up. The glass is actually hanging.

Download file

Eep. Evocative whistles like alien landing signals and gristly bubbles and hypnotic resurgences of mild feedback – in and out, like a cave breathing deep – cause the whispery, respiratory air of the first track to absorb concentration. This beginning slows down your biorhythms; it gets you in a place where you can listen. You are a listening machine in fact. Something molten crinkles;
a cauldron of stirring tones glimmer thickly from a satellite to a star: bloodflow reorganized. It ebbs you in, it makes you receptive, and, once you’re ready, and the materials have undergone adequate preparation, density and nuance are checked and re-checked to assure absolute surrender. This track ends on the gentle fade of a passing star, but not before a sudden surge in the sixth minute makes it clear that no matter what is happening on the surface, something else is at work within.

Swervy abstract sirens whirr in the distance of the second track, but they’re not pure; they just rotate in sonic space the way a visual siren would. So many layers. Digital eagles swoop down, but not to attack, rather, to condemn us for not flying. Wildly pinging claps and swats are eaten by the static of the sounds surrounding them, and the skitterish radio tuning that began the track supports our concern: are we being infiltrated? Internal shrieks made audible would seem to corroborate the findings of the panel, but there is often no place to turn when you know you’re right. Thwispy washes of unselfish discipline emerge and recede to raindroppy thwacking. The layers of sound events disappear, appear, and dissipate. We can fight to disbelieve what surrounds us, or we can submit like reluctant angels to the fray.

A sharp transition demarcates cut 2 from 3, where a cellar door swings and screams. Glass is bowed, and the horror of a complex brain replete with too much psychological foiling draws attention to itself. Long streaks of bow action skip and squeak like car wheel brakes. A ball of jelly is strapped to a contact mic and slapped on a clean wood floor at the four minute mark.

By the time it finally explodes you’ve been begging for it. You want to turn it up and grimace in pleasure. Let it ride over you and overturn your cathartic ass. We are subjects and we are subjected to this harsh atmosphere and we do demand it. Acoustic scrapes and electronic hums come together, thrillingly inside each other, the one projected through the other, using the other as a resonating device. Howl and border.

An apron sexually torn.

You literally hear the electronics through the acoustic material.

There is something refined and bitter about the ending, like a friend that is out of control naturally, but somehow not fretted over. Bellerue harnesses the volatile energy of feedback like it’s a slinky, or his best friend, or a glass of water, or silly putty. Enter a Doppler-ish fade of swirls. This is physical and deeply abstract: the sounds could be the narration of a completely internal crisis, or they could be a status gauge of contemporary political life. A radio gets tuned in near the ultimate end of Threat Level Charlie , and it gets received through the very materials of our security and panic. Radios deliver news, and it is in these materials, traveling through them, whether we admit it or not, that the attitudes of our times are carried. We only have to tune them in to know it. We like to think we are safe, keeping ourselves secured and sheltered from the news – “it’s all in our minds/hearts/opinions/beliefs/votes” – but we’re not. The basic objects around us carry the waves, receiving them and holding them and shaking with their storehouse of atmospheric pulses. All it takes is a well-placed mic to hear them. I know I’m repeating myself. Do you? Are you repeating this? Where do repetitions come from? How does a threat work?

The news is always within objects – sometimes silently, sometimes not. The materials contain the broadcast, the news, the signals. It’s harrowing, gracey.

- Andrew Choate

This recording was done in 2002 in several different locations, then edited together later to form the composition. Here are lots of other details including a halfnormal statement about Threat Level Charlie.

Jack Wright and Bob Falesch - Clang

2002 Zero Eggzie 0x-2bdf

From the first warm saxophone notes wrapping around even warmer piano notes, it's clear that this is no ordinary Jack Wright record. Then again, every Jack Wright record is a bit of a shock, so that's a rather nonplussing statement. A particular quality that distinguishes this one is a luxurious "chamber" sound, with the conventionally tuned notes of Bob Falesch's piano resounding at every turn. It plays a bit like a Roscoe Mitchell and Matt Shipp duet. Beyond this overall surface feeling, the disc is packed with Wright's trademark un-trademark-able flood of reed newness.

Enhancing both the surprising conventional aspect and the characteristic anti-conventional aspect, the stunningly vivid recording quality (courtesy of Bob Falesch's mysterious and elaborate machinations) makes this a disc that will seduce just about anyone plugged in somewhere to the broad spectrum of post-jazz improvisation; those already primed to savor the raw edges and unsafe trajectories of Wright's saxophone will do a double-take and then proceed to play the disc repeatedly, and those who are generally a bit queasy about this sort of thing will find their attention drawn beyond the details of Wright's playing and into the larger flow of conventionally rich and beautiful instrumental sound, finding the piano to be a counterbalance to any suspicious reed episodes.

Some qualification deserves to be made concerning the term "piano" here. Instead of a conventional acoustic piano, Falesch's instrument is a MIDI keyboard interfaced with music software, a setup he calls "metaPiano". As to be expected, he makes use of the consequent flexibility for processing in his work in general, yet on this record he restricts himself to a simulation of a grand piano with great acoustic samples, at least as far as I can tell. As a result of several centuries of being tastelessly overexposed (via the same cultural mechanisms responsible for table sugar, baked goods, television, professional athletics, etc) and servitude as the self-fulfilling icon for the militant and unrepentant fetishization of equal temperament, the piano is a truly objectionable and disgusting object that I'd love to see suffer forced extinction in a global mass burning ceremony. As such, I avoid piano music as much as possible within the constraints of sensible living, and hence lack the perceptual resources to find any significance in the distinction between a conventional piano and Falesch's version, although I can imagine that there may be others with ears more finely aware of the piano's acoustic nuances who would find this matter to be of greater interest. Actually, this silicon version would be great to have if we changed our minds or got sentimental after the mass burning.

Falesch's metaPiano concept is rather more interesting and complex than my description may suggest, so I recommend reading his own description. I've had the great pleasure of seeing Falesch perform improvised music (during High Zero 2000) on his metaPiano, and my impression is that he's gone quite a ways towards putting his ambitious concepts into practice. Looking through his intriguing catalogue of works, a person might get the impression Falesch is primarily a conceptualist and creator of notated and computer-constructed music, but to my ears Clang and his similarly explosive, varied, lucid, and nuanced disc of duos with Bob Marsh (mostly on cello, but also flute and voice), Co-Lage (a 1999 recording also released on Zero Eggzie and well worthy of a serious review in itself) reveals him as a deeply inspired pianist with considerable technical resources. While Co-Lage is especially recommended as a representation of both Falesch the pianist and Falesch the electronic experimentalist, the Falesch/Marsh duo disc Water Music is the one to check out to hear the truly bizarre, hazy, and subliminal side of both musicians and well represents the metaPiano sounding thoroughly unlike a piano. A live improvisation recorded on Philip von Sweck's University of Chicago radio program on June 25, 2000, it's an album of endearing mystery that I've never been blown away by, but have found myself playing repeatedly with a kind of unfamiliar and understated warm pleasure that never wears thin.

While you're visiting Falesch's rather attractively designed website, be sure to read his classic essay about Tatsuya Nakatani and Nmperign.

When compared to most of Jack Wright's other work, this duo with a conventionally played piano is a really unusual situation because of the timbral consistency and the overall evenness of dynamics and density in Falesch's playing. I think it brings out a more lyrical and long-toned side of Wright than we often hear, and it's yet more evidence of his versatility and depth.

"Prelude and Fluke" contains many passages where the interaction of the two voices is very clear, and would be a good piece to play for somebody who has trouble discerning togetherness beyond simultaneity in free improvisation. The piece begins with about 40 seconds of Wright alone, a striking passage with a sense of linear development through undulating melodies played in succession at various velocities, a contrast to the jagged discontinuity of most of his solo work. This is not to say that even in the short space of 40 seconds the line doesn't fall off a cliff a few times, however. This passage is also noteworthy in the way Wright manages to wring strikingly non-Western timbres from his soprano saxophone, an important aspect of his playing in general. I can't quite put my finger on what reed instrument he simulates here, but it's somewhere in-between a shenai and a kazoo, with the pitch inflection one would expect from such an approach. (Maybe it just sounds like a soprano saxophone?) In contrast to some of his other work, there's a large percentage of music on this album where Wright doesn't foreground his timbral flexibility, instead making use of conventional saxophone technique with subtle gradations between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Following a pause after the clear conclusion of a saxophone phrase, Falesch enters the piece with a delicious three-note phrase on piano that Wright responds to with a single note of similar duration, volume, and decay as Falesch's third note, uniting the two instruments and setting the pace for the next few minutes. What is so exciting to me about these four notes is that Falesch's phrase unfolds with a self-contained logic, but at the moment when it can be savored as a stable formation it is forcibly re-stabilized as the trigger or prelude to Wright's note. This is the same sort of reconciliation of intra-phrasal clarity and multiplicity that I often relish in Morton Feldman's music.

After this wonderful event an appropriate pause is then taken, perhaps because the musicians heard it as a wonderful event. Wright then delivers two very rapid sub-phrases of two notes each, followed by a long tone. Because of the similarity of the notes within each sub-phrase, and the similarity between the two sub-phrases, there is repetition at two levels of structure. This combines with other structural elements that the present discourse is not positioned to identify to generate an unresolved initial segment of momentum that the long tone counterbalances.

This in itself is not some rare species of musical event, and in fact is probably a cliche at some level of abstraction, but it is noteworthy in at least three ways. First of all, it exists. Secondly, it happened. And additionally, Bob Falesch happened with it. It has a clarity and balance that is deeply rooted in the human musical experience, and it concurs with all sorts of tangible micro-structural complexities, like the breathiness of the second sub-phrase, the dynamic contours within the sub-phrases, etc. It also exists in the context of other musical events, such as the above-discussed four-note phrase, that prime the listener to engage it with focused attention. As such, a highly desirable aesthetic state can be attributed to its existence.

The fact that it happened provides insight into general methodological aspects of free improvisation. Specifically, it exemplifies a mode of sound-production that tends towards a minimality of effective structure. In this musical event, we find two instances of repetitional minimality, as both the intra-sub-phrasal and inter-sub-phrasal repetition are only two units in length, yet they are still fully functional as a source of the above-mentioned rhythmic effect. I speculate that this minimality is a result of uncertainty about each passing moment of sound-production, a mode in which the perception of a structural effect is acted upon at the earliest point of its emergence. While much free improvisation is clearly not conducted in this mode, it is probably quite common, and it goes a long way towards characterizing the music of Jack Wright.

As mentioned above, this event did not only happen, but also happened with Bob Falesch, who inserted a quick two-note sub-phrase of his own between Wright's second sub-phrase and long note. The result is that the role of Wright's second sub-phrase is unexpectedly mapped onto Falesch's sub-phrase, introducing a concomitantly faster tempo that co-occurs with the tempo internal to Wright's notes. If this don't float your boat, you ain't in the water.

Nothing could have prepared me for what happens two notes later, a mysterious sound shape from Wright's saxophone that feels like the channel has accidentally switched for less than a second and picked up a snatch of programming from another planet. It almost has the feel of a synthesizer swoosh that plays in reverse as soon as it finishes. This surreal phrase sits between reasonably ordinary parries and thrusts of piano and saxophone, as if nothing unusual had happened, although Wright does seem to attempt a follow-up right away, but it lacks the Mobius curves of its predecessor and comes out instead as a fairly ordinary, but still complexly detailed, long tone. Regardless of how much wonderment one intrinsically finds in this mystery phrase, it cannot be denied that it's mercurial in this context, a testimony to the potential of free improvisation to be unceremoniously revelatory. It is frankly inconceivable that someone would ever sit down in front of a piece of paper and prescribe such an event.

It should be noted that thus far into the piece there is no temporal overlap between the two instruments, a texture that dominates well into the next minute or so. This illusory simplicity of vertical structure seduced me into the above superficial discussion of a few transparent structures, but it should be emphasized that we have only dealt with a tiny fraction of the content in that segment of about 10 seconds. Over the next few minutes, the vertical structure of the piece reaches dizzying levels of density that would require hundreds of pages to even hint at, and many thousands of pages before that so we would even know how to talk. The best I can do here is say that any opportunities for music thrills in that short segment are multiplied not by a few hundred but by several million over the remainder of the piece. One general remark about the events in question is that, as with much free improvisation, the freedom from notationally induced pitch-centric dispositions facilitates the development of vertical relationships besides harmony. For example, there are continuously overlapping episodes of compatible, but not necessarily shared, amplitudinal motion (attack, decay, duration, etc), as if they are always going somewhere together, but rarely arrive at the same time or place. Heck, it's only two instruments; our brains can try to keep track.

In any case, this piece is an almost miraculously sustained example of joint structure-building. However, starting around the 7:01 mark, I have trouble consistently hearing relationships between the two instruments, as if the momentum of the piece finally seems to have thrown the two musicians into separate worlds. At times, Falesch's piano-ing becomes imbalanced in its aggression, attracting attention to itself at the expense of the musical whole. Needless to say, impressions such as this mainly reflect the listener's expectations, and it could be that I was unwilling to accept the expiry of certain interactional threads that had engaged my attention earlier in the piece. We all want to hear certain things.

While "Prelude and Fluke" is a remarkable piece of music, the rest of the album is equally remarkable, with hundreds of special events distributed throughout. In "Bee in your Boppet" they achieve controlled, light, and rapid forward motion that makes the piece's seven minutes seem much shorter. As each phrase flies by, I'm amazed that two people can achieve such an equal balance while continually reinventing their thematic material.

Titular kin "Clang 1" and "Clang 2" can be compared to each other in a general way, as they both adopt a slow, brooding mood, yet the former is the only piece on the disc I can't claim much enthusiasm for. It seems like they got trapped into projecting a certain type of emotion that sapped their creative energies, with Falesch's playing striking these ears as an endless string of cliches. In stark contrast, "Clang 2" is a stark masterpiece of restraint and emotional agitation, achieving an effect that "Clang 1" sounds like a failed attempt at. It was wise to make this the final piece on the CD, as it produces a state in which it is not possible to listen to another piece of music right away. Wright's playing between 1:35 and 2:09 is an example of the sort of simultaneous depth of feeling and fragile abstraction that I can't imagine coming from any other saxophone player I've ever heard. "Clang 2" should be heard by all fans of contemporary music.

Because it deals with many familiar phenomena, like pulse, momentum, long phrases, melody, etc, I find this to be an album that can be played all the way through without any loss of interpretative stamina, in contrast to some of Wright's other work from the same rough period (the recordings on Clang were made in late 2000 and early 2001), like Double Double; The Darkest Corner, The Most Conspicuous; Signs of Life; and Places to Go, which effect transcendental exhaustion with frightening rapidity and rank among my very favorite free improv recordings from any time or place. There's also a piano duo (with Wright on A=440 and Falesch on A=432) well situated in the middle of the disc, offering both timbral relief and continuity. This recording is a major achievement in both musicians' oeuvre, and I think most listeners would find it at least as rewarding as a Gratkowski/Gräwe or Parker/Schlippenbach duo.

~Michael Anton Parker

SHAMPOO - Volume 1 (Motors)

Bouncy merry. Elastic plasticene walls crumbling all around you.. this is the sound that first emanated from Kentish England: the thrall of Canterbury is difficult to resist and it persists in elevating spirits to lofty regions of heaven-soaked, lighthearted jazzy cakes tenderly eked out from the ovens of Miss Bliss Blitz. There is hardly a genre that exudes hopping mad happiness and a life devoid of strife than this.

Non-native purveyors we have here, spilling into our ears with their whalloping dose of syncopated perfection, a confection to be treasured above others. "Volume 1" is all there ever was and evermore shall be - an exercise in Belgian finery of the aural kind - melting euphoric chutzpah and hoo-hag-haw. In the 70's, there is much to the reflection of comely musical goodness to appear peeking from this corner.

Strains of tippled sax lines ripple from the stratosphere, doubling over and frolicking with hefty swatches of patched keyboard jelly in a near-acrimony.. conversing in playfully teasing, tersely intertwined, jocular retorts.

Lumpy-bumpy beds of "I can't believe he just chunked me, all thumply and bo-humply with the four thick-stringed splatter, haltering to falter all over my face," leaving crinkum-crankum splotches of bass in its place.

Drum somersaulter kicks the kit, stop-start her, time-keeping grandfather tick-tockler, filling the crevices in the morass of this musical crevasse. It's no wonder that it is easy to get lost in this marmalade jammed all up onto the shelves' high cupboard.

Guitar lines snake.

Vocal discourse woos.

- - - - -
Wash your own hair clean and listen for yourself, never officially issued on CD:

SHAMPOOOOO... OOOOH.. OOH!

~Cesar Montesano

Poking Pencil Holes in Amps

There’s a rumor circulating ‘round the net of Link Wray’s passing on Friday. I hope it’s a hoax on the order of the Lou Reed overdose a few years back. But the “Grandfather of the Power Chord” (an honorific that pigeon-holed Wray’s music to an unfair degree) was pushing 77 so it’s more than possible he’s shredding guitar picks with the cherubim and seraphim right about now. I never got hear him live despite two near-misses, once at the Club Congress in Tucson back in ’96 and another at The Quest here in Minneapolis in ’03 (the roof of the latter joint caught fire the night Link was supposed to play) & definitely regret it. Wray sits slanderously sandwiched between Vernon Reid and Jerry Miller (of Moby Grape) on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time- proof again of how wack such subjective heirarchies can be, especially when the afore-mentioned Reed outranks him by 15 slots and Jack White of The Stripes perches pretty at “17” (what?!?!). Add to that the fact that Lonnie Mack isn’t even listed & I'm ready to lob sulphurous eggs! Even with these ignominious indignities there’s still nearly a half-century’s worth of Wray recordings to revisit. I’m jumping in my jalopy, charting a course for the open asphalt & starting with the Norton set Mr. Guitar covering the Swan era, then moving on to Guitar Preacher: The Polydor Years…

Accelerated Ghost Trance

It's not everyday you get 400 people to pack into a theater and listen to a low-energy web of non-repeating sound that makes Boulez or Carter sound like easy-listening music. It's also not everyday that Anthony Braxton brings his music to Philadelphia. Not even every decade. With a demanding continuous piece furrowing any number of inscrutable paths for well over an hour, on November 4th, 2005 Braxton and five of his dedicated interpreters gave the first American exposition (as an isolated form) of the latest development in his grand compositional scheme, surely to the bewilderment of many present who were lured more by the hushed reverence afforded the new sexagenarian than any engagement with his current aesthetic agenda. At the very least, the music offered listeners a layer of accessible individual narrative to latch onto, with Braxton himself taking a handful of characteristically scalding and sublime alto sax solos and Jay Rozen (pictured above), Aaron Siegel, Jessica Pavone, Carl Testa, and Taylor Ho Bynum each stepping into the foreground on occasion to reveal a tremendous level of creative musicality.

After intensively developing an expansive compositional framework called Ghost Trance Music for over a decade in three distinct phases, Braxton has conceded its inadequacy for accomodating his full range of aesthetic desiderata and written a new chapter designated as the Accelerated version. Pushing the envelope of complexity and foregoing the foothold in regular pulse structures of the earlier versions, Accelerated Ghost Trance Music places unusual demands on the musicians. As such, it's ideally suited to a dedicated crack ensemble of musicians well versed in Ghost Trance Music who might be hankering to play at the edge of performative possibility long established as a hallmark of the Braxtonian aesthetic. As Braxton half-seriously quipped after the gig in the wake of Jay Rozen's boggling virtuosity on tuba, with a musician like Rozen to keep busy he had to take the concept one step further. This specific group of musicians (modulo Carl Testa newly replacing doublebassist Chris Dahlgren) have been conducting public researches into Accelerated Ghost Trance Music since their European tour in April this year, veterans of an acclaimed performance at the Victo fest in May and subsequent European appearances this summer. As part of the recent 60th birthday celebrations for Braxton, in September in Connecticut the sextet was expanded to 12 musicians that used both Accelerated and earlier forms of Ghost Trance Music in the same performance, something of a landmark in terms of ensemble size and methodology. So it's worth noting that the Philly performance was an example of a new compositional framework still in an experimental stage of usage, accounting for the sense of thrilling discovery for both performers and experiencers (well, at least a few of us I suppose).

The evolution of Ghost Trance Music through its four phases (or, more accurately, three plus one phases, as Braxton told me he considers it an instance of a more general "3+1 logic" in his systems) strikes me as a gradual erasure of the formative "trance" concept to lay bare the underlying methodology for interpolating materials into a large-scale form in its bewildering aesthetic generality. While temporal extension and continuity alone can account for elements of trance experience, I think that rhythmic regularity is the primary trigger. With its exclusive use of unmetered 8th notes in the primary layer of melodic structure, Ghost Trance Music Species One offered rhythmic regularity in the most explicit form possible, whereas Ghost Trance Music Species Two and Three introduced successively greater degrees of rhythmic subdivision in the form of episodic abruptions, as I believe Braxton refers to them. Now with Accelerated Ghost Trance Music, the 8th notes have disappeared entirely, and with them a hypnotic quality. Referred to as a template, the primary structural material for any Ghost Trance Music omposition is an extremely long sequence of non-vertical sound events notated with Braxton's diamond clef to be neutral with respect to clef and transposition. As such, each instrumentalist in the ensemble is referring to the exact same notational object and unison playing is a common feature of the music. In Ghost Trance Music Species One and Two the sound events were ordinary discrete notes, so the template was essentially a marathon melody, while in Ghost Trance Music Species Three slots for undetermined textures were incorporated into the sequence, a practice continued in Accelerated Ghost Trance Music. An additional development is the use of color coding in the score, but as I understand it this structural dimension is only beginning to be explored and didn't factor into the performance I experienced.

Aside from these significant changes in the templates, the essential spirit of Ghost Trance Music remains unaltered. While containing its own modular system to enable spontaneous deviations from the template, it also interfaces with Braxton's pre-existing master scheme for organizing material into modules that can plug into all his work. In a sense, Ghost Trance Music could be taken as an overarching system that encompasses Braxton's entire career in a format accessible to any of the musicians that might pass through his ever-shifting pool of willing interpreters. It's this inclusiveness that struck me during the performance. I could hear little episodes of so many different aesthetic directions Braxton has pursued over the years, whether it was different sound parameters taken as loci of variation, different methods of group interaction, different idiomatic references, or simply different degrees of improvisation. In a manner typical of many varieties of improvised music and definitive of non-idiomatic free improvisation, individual instrumental personalities were allowed to function as source material to some extent, offering that familiar and potentially appealing experience of music as a theater of performer psychology. In a manner typical of many varieties of notationalism, the musicians were also reproducing predetermined material of a character unlikely to appear in improvised music, offering an expression of Braxton's private imagination. While this sort of complex interplay between improvisation and notationalism is not especially rare and has seen comparably ambitious and successful realizations in works by folks like Simon Fell and Scott Fields (the performance roughly reminded me of Fields' epic and wonderful 96 Gestures but the music was vastly more subtle), I'd like to suggest there is something yet more inclusive about Braxton's music in the way it embraces a full human experience. While he pursues esoteric aspects of sound organization alongside the best experimentalists, Braxton embraces very traditional music experiences and leaves a space for them in most of his work. Taken as a whole, I think Braxton has created a complete music, a music that synthesizes a full range of aesthetics across the gamut of deep traditionalism and deep experimentalism instead of being restricted to isolated aesthetic concerns. This is such a rare achievement that the only other artist I can think of who's created a complete music in the same sense is John Zorn. As vague as these remarks may be, it's my concrete feeling that Ghost Trance Music is an aesthetic ecosystem more than just a compositional framework.

I'm not foolhardy enough to attempt any exegesis of Ghost Trance Music mechanics, were I even privy to them in full, but certain aspects are transparent and worth mentioning to convey a methodological gist. The use of parallel independent subgroupings was well represented by a memorable passage in which Taylor Ho Bynum issued an extended freebop narrative over a barnstorming pulse movement by Chris Dahlgen's burning doublebass and Aaron Siegel's percussion, which temporarily assumed the flavor of a conventional drumkit even though his setup was totally unlike a drumkit. It's worth noting that this was one of very few passages in which jazz occurred. For a large part of this trio segment the other musicians didn't play, but then Jay Rozen (tuba) and Jessica Pavone (viola) exchanged some hand signals and cryptic glances in order to launch into a tightly connected duo passage without any interactive relationship to the trio passage, which continued unperturbed. It was sublime to hear each subgroup retain its internal logic and resist merging logics with each other. My take on the rough structure of a case like this is pretty straightforward. First, I assume that individual-level relationships (relationships between single musicians) tend to have perceptual primacy over group-level relationships (relationships between groups of musicians) when both are in an overlapping range of informational density. Second, it's not that the subgroups have no relationship to each other, but rather that all individual-level relationships are encapsulated in the two modules so that group-level relationships between the modules aren't masked by individual-level relationships. In other words, it opens a higher order relational space by subtracting a lower order relational space. It strikes me as yet another nice way to avoid those good old pitch relationships that have worn out their welcome in human culture.

Taylor Ho Bynum, a ten-year guinea pig of Braxton's musical laboratory, was the dominant soloist this evening, with an especially uninhibited take on Ghost Trance Music's flexible parameters. I lost track of how many times he whipped out a different instrument and played it with polished vim, but I believe his main tools were cornet, trumpet, trombone, conch, finger cymbals, kickable objects, and flugelhorn. He took a flugelhorn solo that completely blew my mind, easily one of the five best solos of the evening alongside a few Braxton alto excursions and Rozen's insane tuba workout to be recounted in an upcoming paragraph. Bynum also has an animated and invigorating stage presence, an asset he deploys to special effect in the free jazz contexts that have earned him a healthy reputation in the avant-garde jazz world. I have to admit I've had a favorable bias ever since first hearing him alongside Eric Rosenthal and Jack Wright on Bhob Rainey's pre-lowercase classic Universal Noir some five years ago.

Bynum's readiness to step outside the brass family casts him as a classic example of Derek Bailey's conceptualization of a type of improvisor who regards their instrument as a means to an end and not an end in itself, certainly a minority in the post-jazz demographic. I recall a performance from a few years ago in Boston during the James Coleman -curated Autumn Uprising festival that perfectly captured this aspect of Bynum's musicality. Forgive me for some haziness on the specifics here—it would be great if someone graced the Commentellen below with a more accurate version of the story—but the occasion was a short tribute to an eccentric inspirational figure of the local avant-garde scene (perhaps a trumpeter/composer who had passed away?) in which several trumpeters gave a one-minute interpretation of a graphic score by this fellow. I think there was four players (who also did a trumpet quartet in the same set), and I think one of them may have been Tom Halter (but if not, he's a fine player!), but I'm pretty sure the other three were Bynum, Mark Harvey, and Greg Kelley. Needless to say these are advanced players who could be expected to offer radically different responses to the squiggles or blobs or whatever were on that piece of paper, but Bynum's reading epitomized the poetry of surprise. As I remember it, he engaged in a mini-epic struggle to tie and untie his shoelace around the bottom of the music stand's pole with the full-body vigor of someone fending off a swarm of bees. It was a beautiful piece with a frantic tempo and a true sense of naked humanity. (I also remember Kelley's reading being a single heart-stopping virtuosic blast of static and extreme circularly-breathed trumpet sound.)

I offer that anecdote as a pleasant contextualization for the most poignant moment in the concert, which for me is an even better symbolic rendering of the wondrous and ineffable human spirit of Anthony Braxton than his widely reported (with amusing telephone-game variations unique to each reporter!) recent onstage communication of a Wolf Eyes song title (which, granted, I didn't witness first-hand). In what I'm assuming to be a reading of a texture space from the template (or perhaps a module of one of Braxton's language types, a common interface with Ghost Trance Music), Bynum suddenly began capriciously kicking the mutes and other objects on the floor near him. Bynum plays soccer. Bynum keeps playing soccer. Bynum's soccer takes him many feet away from his allotted spot on stage. Bynum's bouts of soccer attain spectacle-hood. Jay Rozen nonchalantly crinkles a tin foil pie plate in textural sympathy. Sir Braxton intently peers at the score, listening. Sir Braxton keeps intently peering at the score, listening. Sir Braxton smiles so hard and long his whole body is moving, still peering at the score. Sir Braxton is rocking from side to side and shaking his head with pleasure, still peering at the score. Sir Braxton exudes more joy than a kid stepping into a candy shop or a conductor reaching the climax of his favorite symphony in its best reading, still peering at the score. Jessica Pavone is standing closest to Braxton a few feet away, holding her viola in the "off" position, head down, concentrating, listening, expressionless. Sir Braxton is radiating enough joy to burn the back row of the theater. Jessica Pavone looks up at Sir Braxton and smiles with the understated warmth of a person just reminded of why they love this complex man in a cardigan.

What can top that? How about a contrabass saxophone? Can't say I'd ever seen one of those before. Probably the biggest wind instruments I'd previously encountered were whatever kind of massive clarinets (probably contrabass) Wolfgang Fuchs, Peter van Bergen, and Hans Koch were using when I saw Holz Für Europa some years back and I've seen Robert Dick play contrabass flute too. This was a special occasion and our main man in the cardigan didn't just stop at bass saxophone, which was itself a rare treat requiring a special wheeled stand; he treated Philly to the big one. Have a gander at the photo above for a gist of the dimensions. Braxton wheeled the behemoth over in front of his music stand on a precious few occasions and put some astounding elephantine roars into the mix. An especially sublime passage blended the contrabass sax with Bynum's conch, Rozen's quiet shakers, and Pavone's slicing viola harmonics.

Probably the best way to understand why there was a musical justification for these exotic sounds is by considering the crucial role that an expanded timbral palette plays in Braxton's music. In fact, I was entirely surprised by the extensive use of extended techniques during the concert. While of course he is a pioneer of extended techniques in his role as a reed instrumentalist, Braxton's conception of notated ensemble music is as exploratory as Iancu Dumitrescu or Helmut Lachenmann in this way. In fact, the theoretical apparatus he developed in tandem with his reed research lends itself to applications independent of instrumental identity, like his language types and Cobalt System Structures.

I was really pleased to hear some substantial overlap in the music with recent experimental free improvisation of a sort Braxton has never gone on record performing that I'm aware of, both in the use of certain sound vocabularies and extremely low dynamic levels. Aaron Siegel's percussion was critical in this regard. One of the highlights of the evening for me was a sustained passage of faint scraping across the surface of his giant floor tom, recalling some of my favorite percussionists like Lê Quan Ninh, Paul Neidhardt, and Burkhard Beins. This "concert drum" afforded some deeply resonant tones, especially when Siegel dowelled on it; I'd never heard anyone dowel on such a large drum before, so it was a bit of a revelation. Siegel's virtuosity and timbral diversity was put to good use throughout. He ripped through tricky abruptions on vibraphone and alternated rolls on his small drums with such finesse they became textures.

Easily the most extraordinary example of extended techniques in the concert, as well as of one of the most musically compelling moments, came from Jay Rozen's tuba. At some point I began hearing a miraculously beautiful line that I could only imagine coming from a tenor or baritone sax, but which was yet unlike anything I'd ever heard. I was puzzled because it clearly wasn't coming from Braxton's corner and while Rozen was the only explanation I was at a loss to understand the relationship between what my ears and eyes were processing. Rozen was playing his tuba with a tin foil pie plate in the bell, which simply couldn't account for the sound I was hearing. What I found out afterwards from Rozen was that he was actually producing four distinct layers of sound at the time: an ordinary tuba tone, a sound derived from a small object (a whistle?) he had wedged inside the mouthpiece, a vocalization amplified by the tuba, and the buzzing from the tin foil. Go figure. Turns out he was as surprised as I was by this confluence of techniques; it was a real-time improvisational discovery for him and he nursed it for a good long stretch to serve several musical functions. Another astounding passage from Rozen (there was quite a few!) came when he used a saxophone mouthpiece on his tuba, which creates a gloriously complex and aggressive sound that must be heard to be believed. The first time I heard someone play a tuba with a reed mouthpiece was just a few months ago and it wasn't until many weeks later that someone explained it to me. It was Per-Åke Holmlander during a Brötzmann Tentet gig, and at the time I was totally freaked out by the sound and could only imagine that some serious electronic processing was being used.

Braxton is a really famous guy. Part of that has to do with his singular body of theoretical and conceptual material wrapped around his music, but the simple fact is that people wouldn't've taken him seriously in the first place if he wasn't one of the most brilliant jazz and post-jazz saxophonists in history who quickly created a body of work based around his reed work, especially alto sax, that's both accessible and mind-blowing to the typical avant-jazz fan. I have no doubt that there are people who go to a Braxton gig because they've heard records like For Alto, New York Fall 1974, his jazz tribute projects, the Hemingway/Crispell/Dresser quartet records, etc, and wind up totally mystified by the sort of radically unconventional non-jazz experimental ensemble music he's developing with Ghost Trance Music. And as much as I enjoy the manifold challenges this music presents me and even manage to overcome enough of them to tremendously enjoy the music itself, I still have as much hankering as the next person to experience Braxton, Alto Sax God, so I couldn't help notice the nature of my listening experience completely shift into a more immediate and visceral sort of pleasure on the handful of occasions when Braxton put the trusty little horn to his lips and filled the air with invisible liquid gold. In fact, the only passage in the concert I'd call truly transcendental for me was Braxton's sole unaccompanied alto sax solo towards the end. It was an extended bout of raw physical engagement with the instrument that set his whole body into poetic gyrations and it was a flashback for me of the only other time I'd seen this man perform in the flesh, his monumental two sets of solo alto sax at The New York Ethical Culture Society on May 24, 2002, one of the milestones in my modest journey through a human life. All of Braxton's alto solos killed me during the Philly gig though, and they covered quite a range of aesthetics from harsh bluster to winsome melody, surely giving everyone in the audience at least one Braxton alto sax moment to take home in their basket of precious memories. There was even one that distinctly reminded me of Jack Wright (my favorite saxophonist and in my honest and considered opinion the greatest free improvisor in the world) in its implosive, bottled intensity and tortured quietness with sparse loud notes conjured with dramatic effort from the fiercest silent boogie. At the same time, Carl Testa was quietly rubbing the body of his doublebass and it was a heavenly episode of the quiet and dramatic improv I tend to favor these days.

It was also representative of the low dynamic levels of most of the evening, a matter that was rather badly matched to the music's environmental conditions. For starters, I'll have to get a little rant off my chest here. There was a horribly insensitive woman wearing hard-surfaced high-heeled shoes of some sort, evidently an employee of the venue (a ritzy large theater reflecting the ample resources of benefactors of the University of Pennsylvania and typically used for film events) who felt it was her job to inspect the audience and determine whether any seats were available as people trickled in after the venue was packed to capacity. She repeatedly walked on the wooden floor of the long hallway along the side of the seating array. So for each of several informational excursions she undertook during the first half-hour or so of the concert, that's dozens of footsteps that were louder than the music. Sir Braxton did not require the services of an inept and loud percussionist for his presentation that evening. Besides the utter horror of this act and the yet worse specter of its repetition, the venue took an abominably cold and irrational approach to the seating situation, actually refusing admittance to a good many people (including some friends of mine who had journeyed all the way up from Baltimore for the concert—I suspect a lot of people travelled from distant places for this rare and special event) until someone left the concert and vacated a seat! As it were, the hallway on either side of the seating array was by itself larger than a typical improv venue and could've easily held fifty people standing within comfortable earshot of the music while still maintaining a wide walkway. There was a ton of space available! The place was huge. Sheer bullshit.

It reminds me of the time I went to see Hariprasad Chaurasia perform with a carful of college friends. Our long journey to some opposite region of the greater Chicago area found us arriving a bit late. The performance hadn't begun yet and every seat in the moderately large but cozy theater was filled, no surprise considering that Chaurasia is one of the greatest master musicians alive today and a cultural icon. The first few rows were surely filled with prominent local benefactors of the concert series. People began to settle on the aisle floor. Yet the sensible and culturally-sensitive folks running the event graciously escorted our motley crew to the comfortable carpeted and raised platform between the stage and the first row (at eye-level with the muscians no less!) and we happily took to the floor and took in some truly transcendental ragas that evening in the profoundly intimate vicinity of the performers.

For better or worse, folks presumably unimpressed with Accelerated Ghost Trance Music did vacate their seats in due time. There was a distracting trickle of people leaving the concert that steadily increased from midway onwards. I'd estimate that upwards of a hundred people decided they had more valuable uses for their time than sticking out a full presentation by an international cultural treasure and arguably one of the five greatest musical figures of the past century. It was bad enough that a few dozen people gratuitously applauded twice in the middle of the piece after solos (one by Bynum and another by Braxton)! Hello? This isn't bebop. Would you applaud in the middle of a Scelsi performance? Did you not catch on to the fact that a delicate weave of ensemble interaction was happening during and immediately after the solo? Damn philistines.

Such are the compromises of an event of this scale and uniqueness, and all told it was a smashing success and mind-boggling achievement for the impresario, Mark Christman. In fact, this is precisely the ideal occasion to celebrate Mark's profound contributions to Philadelphia culture. The concert was in fact just one of an entire series Mark is curating to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the AACM under the aegis of his avant-jazz promotional organization Ars Nova Workshop. The series began last month with an historic pairing of Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams in quartet with Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal, and it continues next month with Wadade Leo Smith's Golden Quartet (Smith with Vijay Iyer, John Lindberg, and Ronald Shannon Jackson) and extends to the early months of 2006 with the current version of Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble featuring Joseph Bowie and Ernest Dawkins, a Leroy Jenkins and Myra Melford duo, and a giant in my post-jazz pantheon, Henry Threadgill, with his Zooid ensemble. The series is just too good to be true, but Mark somehow corralled various resources to make this historic and bold statement to the Philadelphia region. The significance of the AACM in American cultural history cannot be overstated.

As impressive as this special series is, the totality of Ars Nova over the past five years is vastly more impressive. My personal tribute to Mark here comes after enjoying more great avant-jazz concerts he's curated than I could possibly recount. My gratitude is incalculable. It's been a critical and formative aspect of my experience as a fan of creative improvised music, almost to the levels of Baltimore's miraculous Red Room. Just off the top of my head I can think of three Ars Nova gigs that would likely find a slot in a list of the ten most profound concert experiences I've had so far in life (Gregg Bendian's Interzone, Tim Berne's Hard Cell, Joe Maneri Quartet) and Mark's connoisseurship of avant-jazz is so impressive that virtually everything he's put on is worth attending, no filler. He has curated a truly accurate representation of the true current state of jazz as a creative art form without any compromises. Just check out the archival list of performances on the Ars Nova website. In terms of making Philadelphia a vital center for creative musical culture and saving people the trouble of trips to NYC or Baltimore, only Jack Wright and his miraculous No Net events are comparable in significance to Mark's curation of the Ars Nova Workshop.

Mark's professionalism and dedication is astonishing. His promotion of events is thorough and effective, routinely drawing larger crowds than typical for avant-jazz. And to set up this Braxton gig he actually drove all the way to Connecticut to approach the secluded Wesleyan professor in person after a gig! In fact, he went home empty-handed after his first trip up there for this purpose, due to some weather situation or gig cancellation or something, so he actually made a second trip and began the dialogue that eventuated in the unforgettable concert I've recounted above. There's nothing hyperbolic in my tribute to Mark here, and I'm not just saying all this because he's a fine person whose favorite musicians (e.g. Tim Berne, Nels Cline) conveniently happen to be the same as mine!

While some may balk at the potentially contrived nature of this connection, right before zipping over to the gig that evening I attended a gallery opening of a show that genuinely struck me with Braxtonian resonances. Combined with my reverie in Braxton's Composition n. 247 (one of my top five Braxton discs for sure) while driving to the gallery and the gig, Paul Santoleri's Linear Interference offered a sense of immersion and scale that put me in a real Ghost Trance Music zone. Spread over two floors and covering entire walls instead just ordinary modular hanging rectangles, it was full of so much intricately woven detail that I'd guess it took many years to complete if I didn't know any better, but as it is Paul is a remarkably prolific visual artist with several large shows in just the past few years. A close-up shot appears next.

I think the concept of scale is essential to Ghost Trance Music. Braxton's pieces routinely last upwards of two hours. The Philly gig was probably in the neighborhood of an hour and a half, but that's just a guess. His scheme is partly modelled after the epic ritual music of various traditional cultures. Ghost Trance Music similarly demands a willingness to enter a non-ordinary state of mind. One of Paul's primary media is public murals; his conception of art is epic and inclusive. After over an hour cycling through the different regions in Paul's work, I felt I'd been transported to a self-contained parallel world with its own ecological niches and untraceable geneology of pattern. Like Ghost Trance Music, Linear Interference redefines the parameters of continuity. Material seems to derive from an ever-present template, but it coalesces in diversionary modules and sometimes feels imported from a distant land.

In the segment shown above, you can see how Paul superimposed independently created modules while retaining an overarching contextual logic. I couldn't help but noting the analogy with Ghost Trance Music. For almost the entire time I was there the visual experience was aligned with a duo performance by cellist Helena Espvall-Santoleri (Paul's partner and a glowing presence in Philly improv culture) and percussionist Shawn Hennessey (tabla player Lenny Seidman had interlocked with Helena earlier in the evening before I arrived). They generated a burning and powerful continuous groove that revealed the core human implementation of trance music in stark contrast to what I heard mere minutes later in a different part of town. It was a most serendipitous evening in Philadelphia.

~Michael Anton Parker

Special thanks to Taylor Ho Bynum and Anthony Braxton for graciously explaining certain aspects of Ghost Trance Music to me. James Fei's fabulous liner notes to Composition n. 247 also proved very useful, and please get that disc if you haven't already; it's mind-blowing and totally unique!

Partita Radicale – Frutas Azules

Free Elephant 6

Gunda Gottschalk’s Wassermonde was one of my most coveted discoveries of 2004. Her solo violin recital shrugged openly at the more garish signifiers of virtuosity and centered instead on creating an intimate fusion of player and instrument. Gottschalk’s extended techniques were and remain toe-curlingly provocative. But what most pulled me in and kept me enamored was the concentrative totality of her approach, tornado speed harmonics giving way to the tiny tug of a lone microtone.

Partita Radicale’s music advances from a similarly inclusive micro-bridging-macro mindset. Operating as an improvising entity since ’91 the ensemble, which also includes Karola Pasquay and Ortud Kegel on assorted flutes, Thomas Beimel on viola and Ute Völker on accordion, engages in a transitory interplay of minute gradations and increments. The unusual instrumentation remotely echoes the anatomy of a classical winds/strings quintet both in structure and temperament. Six tracks, ascribed the titles “Cancioneros,” or songbooks, regularly encourage ensemble subdivisions. It’s these groupings that yield the majority of music, mixing strong rapport with a willingness to test and provoke. The sound of surprise is most definitely alive in these calefactory chamber music interactions.

One of the most startling aspects of the unit is how often the five are able to match and overlap the timbral signatures of their instruments. Völker’s whirring squeezebox tones take on the resonance and reach of a pipe organ, gothic drones and suspirating sustains converging as regular facets of her repertoire. Pasquay and Kegel breathe through their flutes in ghostly shakuhachi rasps that touch the edges of inaudibility. The strings of Gottschalk and Beimel pop, scurry and scrape delicately like the patter of tiny clawed feet. These layering elements resist strict form or notational structure, favoring ethereal atmospherics and constant mutability. Herein resides the group’s core appeal, harnessed energy and animated, intricate activity balanced with a consistent consensus to play quiet and listen.

Melodic motifs do arise, but they’re frequently fleeting and prone to dissection. At one point the flutes twine in a mellifluous tandem, strings and accordion braiding a shimmering ring of counterpoint beneath their aerial flight trajectory. Vocal outbursts also enter into the exchanges, by way of whoops and muffled screams, though specific throat ownership proves difficult to pinpoint, as do the instrument-generated sounds on occasion. The ensemble’s expert attention to dynamics capitalizes on the capacious interior of the museum recording site, adding a deep spatial element to the music. Gottschalk waits until the concluding track to summon her signature dervish harmonics and propel her partners into an exuberant finale; evidence again of abiding premium the ensemble places on restraint. The mysterious blue fruits mentioned in the disc’s title are never identified, but the musical pulp bearing their name presents a juicy and satisfying repast.

~ Derek Taylor

Paraphrase - Pre-emptive Denial

Screwgun Records 70016

This is easily my favorite jazz CD of 2005, even edging out the amazing Hard Cell disc Berne released recently. It's also a perfect example of why Berne is in a category of his own both musically and in terms of the way he manages his career. I can't think of any other leading jazz musician who has more sheer common sense. He played a ridiculously great gig a few months ago; somebody recorded it "to no budget"; now it's available for people to enjoy the world 'round on a superbly mastered compact disc in the company of characteristically bizarre and wonderful artwork from Steve Byram, an eminently sensible object produced by Berne himself under his own no-nonsense imprint. If only the music world would usually follow such clean logic. By the way, the sound quality is perfect to my ears; I feel like I'm at the gig in one of those rare transcendental states I find myself in disproportionately often as a result of Tim Berne's music, and in fact this was recorded at one of the best venues to have a profound and intimate experience with music, The Stone, John Zorn's lower east side oasis of creative music communion, and a place where I had a transcendental experience seeing Tim Berne and Tom Rainey (in trio with Erik Friedlander) only a few weeks before this Paraphrase set took place. Somehow I missed this gig, but I can imagine myself there anyway, gasping in disbelief as Rainey works a sick groove into a percolating frenzy with Drew Gress' bass breath and brawn and Berne's sweet and sour soul riff permutation narrative feeling like it could and should go on forever. That's a great thing about Tim Berne's live performances; the pieces go on for a long time, because it's just too good to stop any earlier. So this disc is two very long tracks adding to up to about 50 minutes and they go by so fast ("time flies...") the only way to compensate for their shortness is just to play the disc often.

When Paraphrase started as an active project in the late 90s, it was a dramatic departure and bold experiment for Berne because it was his first project without any charts or tunes prepared in advance. It was a free improv workshop and totally equal partnership with two very special musicians also accustomed to predetermined material and some jazz-related aesthetic premise. Like Joe McPhee, these guys are just as comfortable playing a highly customized version of jazz as they are abandoning it entirely for non-idiomatic passages of ritualistic sound mystery, and they also have similar knack for merging tenderness and abstraction. But let's be clear about one thing here: Tom Rainey is in this group. The groove explodes early and often. If there's a clear stylistic difference between this and the two older Paraphrase albums, it's that Rainey has gotten even more aggressive and confident with his slippery breakbeat teasing. His grooves are overpowering, and always resist the numbing regularity and predictability of lesser drumkitters. Like Bloodcount at its finest, the groove can be massive yet always on the brink of falling apart. I think that's the special feeling in a lot of Berne's music that really hooks me in, that constant flirtation with thematic disintegration. He also just works some damn great melodies on that horn. The simple point I'd like to make here is that whatever makes Berne's music great when he uses his standard part-chart part-free format is the same as whatever makes Paraphrase great. Paraphrase isn't a bold experiment anymore and it probably wasn't once their very first gig was over; it's a fragment of the same musical cloth all Berne's music is cut from. Take a chunk of this music and it could almost be right out of an extended piece by Hard Cell, Science Friction or Big Satan, with the special twist of Gress' elastic pizzicato and mourning arco. It's the ultimate achievement for creative improvisors: the unification of advance decisions and real-time decisions. This magical stuff just oozes from their pores.

~Michael Anton Parker

Christian Fennesz / Sachiko M / Otomo Yoshihide / Peter Rehberg (ErstLive004)

Erstwhile ErstLive004

So here's an odd and pleasant thing. I pulled this CD out to get a flavor of it and have some background music while I wrote a jazz record review. It's not a new CD, but I'd not gotten around to hearing it before. In any case, it's fairly recent, a live recording from May, 2004, part of a festival in Germany related to Erstwhile, the record label. I put it in and just kind of stood in front of the stereo for a few minutes to listen a bit before moving along to the task at hand and I started studying the photograph printed inside. I thought to myself "Peter Rehberg? I've never heard of him, wonder which one he is in the photo. Christian Fennesz, hmm, funny that I've heard a handful of (lovely) CDs with him but I've never seen him in person or even seen a photograph. Sachiko M and Yoshihide Otomo, okay, those two are familiar visages from websites and magazines though I've never seen either of them in person, and I've heard more CDs by them than I could easily recount."

But those are rather boring thoughts. What really took my attention was all the equipment. It's not that I haven't been to countless concerts in which tables spilled over with wires and knobs and gadgets, but there's something about holding a photograph in hand that pushes thought in a different direction. Maybe it's the lack of distractions of a concert situation, which is predominantly a social situation and involves many layers of stimuli. After all, I was just enjoying a quiet evening at my cozy home alone with a little crackle and squeak from the woodstove doing its thing as the cold days of late November began to make themselves known. So I kept looking at all those wires and knobs and thingies, and sparse crackles, clicks, rumbles, and soft bassy tones came out of my speakers. There are four people arranged at 90 degree angles and facing each other, each of them with a table or two of stuff that would've sent the imaginations of science fiction fans into a tizzy a few decades ago. And these four people are intently interacting with their tables. They're like lab techs in some space station. And there's people seated in the dimly lit background (some with rather bad posture—I worry about people's spines—I hope they do yoga). I wonder if they're science fiction fans, Trekkies or whatever. I'm not. Well, I guess I read a few books by Asimov, et al when I was a wee kiddie, but that's about the extent of it. Maybe those guys sitting there really dig the whole wire and knob vibe, like it grooves with their thing or whatever. I wonder if I know any of those people? It's too dark to make out any faces. I bet senior Bagatellen commentator Jon Abbey is in the dark somewhere there. He goes to a lot of gigs by these musicians. Gosh, it was dark in that room, and there's like some kind of lone corny spotlight in the air mix. It's like some ritual on an alien spaceship. But, actually no, it's not. I know perfectly well it's a performance of experimental music. That's my scene. I'm a typical guy who sits in dimly lit rooms like that and observes people interact with tables. How I did I ever wind up this way? Well, nevermind.

Man, there's a lot of wires there. Check out the jumbled mess on the floor. It must be a major pain in the hiney to lug all that stuff around and set it up. These guys go to a lot of trouble to make these sounds. Is all that stuff really necessary just for some crackles, clicks, rumbles, and soft bassy tones? Maybe they should all just stay home and do this in their studios and just publish recordings to make their lives simpler—more walks in the woods, time in the hot tub, etc. No, that's a stupid idea, because they would miss out on the whole angle of spontaneously interacting with other musicians and creating works of art defying the imaginations and technical resources of any single musician. Yes, this wire and knob music is really suited to live group improvisation. The sound vocabularies are so underconstrained by the technology they derive from that the musicians need to test out different sounds in combinations with other musicians to see what works in the high-pressure situation of performance, which presumes they're creating the informational conditions for pleasure for the audience and/or themselves. It's like a method for introducing focus and structural constraints into the system. I'm getting a warm tingly feeling. It's like cutting-edge aesthetic research. I guess I should also state the obvious and say that they are mostly working with unknown musical parameters entirely removed from the familiar ones like pitch and pulse.

But all those gizmos. Yikes. What a different set of physical conditions than instruments using wood, strings, metal tubes, etc, which are so easy to lug around and whip out and play with no electrical labyrinthes. But of course they can't make all these neat sounds I'm hearing right now. Well, but then again they can make so many other neat sounds that we'd hardly feel deprived without the electrical stuff. Then again, possibilities are addictive. I think I've said this before, but I think art is essentially the toilsome approximation of water seeking its own level. These fascinating sounds coming out of my speakers are like the hidden nooks and crannies of recent technology, revealed by chance, design, or trial and error. This is technology-driven experimental music. In fact, maybe we should call it "techno" as a convenient label in everyday discourse? Wait, nevermind, that name is already taken.

I'm already a good two or three minutes into the disc and it's just too good for me to listen to as background music, so I'll keep lingering in front of my stereo in attentive mode. I'm really engaged by this mix of sounds, especially because some of them have that technological-failure aesthetic I really enjoy. There are the analog failures of Otomo's turntable and/or M's "contact microphones on objects", with the grainy scratchy electromagnetically-based sounds I somehow find intoxicating in their complex internal structure and largely account for my tremendous enthusiasm for Howard Stelzer's cassette-abuse music. And there are the digital failures of Fennesz and/or Rehberg's irregular clipped fragments. At the same time, there is the skeleton of a somewhat traditional textural electronic layer low in the mix. I'm finding the balance of the irregularities (my usual preference) and the regularities (ambient music is often fine with me but doesn't rouse my passions) to be very enjoyable. But there are some sounds in the mix that are bothering me a little, the occasional crude and generic electronic tone inserted for no reason I can appreciate. I'm starting to worry that this sparse beginning passage I find very satisfying might give way to the ubiquitous bleep and boop muckery I struggle to abide yet so many of my peers relish. (I'm in a charitable mood, so I'm not using my preferred term, "laptop wank".) I like my music soft and delicate. I like isolated irregular gestures and rhythmic conundrums.

Now it's a good five minutes into the piece and the density and volume has increased a bit, but my attention is still strongly engaged. I'm hearing a fine balance between the musicians and also a good helping of the sounds I like. I'm also hearing gratuitous laptop cliches like cold bass notes bereft of their rhythmic usefulness in IDM contexts. As it continues the primary virtue of the music seems to be a sense of sounds moving together at a consistent relaxed pace despite considerable phrasal modulation and timbral diversity. If that's taken as an aesthetic criterion then I'm hearing a lot of mistakes, but not enough to ruin the overall effect. At some point gesturalism has given way to texturalism and it seems there are ominous sustained low frequencies serving as structural fulcrum to mitigate the gratuitous busyness of most of the sound sources. In a word, the music is cohesive. In six words, the music lingers at the edge of cohesion.

After about fiften minutes or so I started to feel ready to shift into the planned background listening mode, but I had found so much of interest up to then that I decided to launch a new screen on my word processor (Jarte—it's very elegant freeware I highly recommend) and record some of my thoughts. Heck, why not just make it a record review and share it with the fine folks who read Bagatellen, since many of them take an interest in these musicians. It will be a quick one or two paragraph note about how I found a lot to enjoy in this disc (though mainly in the sparse first few minutes) while also finding a lot of elements I'd prefer to be different. My grand conclusion will likely be that my overall experience was pleasant; I enjoyed looking at the photo; and it's a rewarding document that reveals the exciting potential of technology-driven experimental music when conducted as group improvisation using a balance of analog and digital sound sources. I could even throw in a cheerful send-off like "recommended to fans of moderately restrained laptop improv".

By the time I shifted into text mode, the music felt ordinary and my attention faded. Lost in some rumination or another, I suddenly heard the loud texture fall off a cliff and I couldn't readily make out any sounds coming from my speakers. I thought "Yes! Here comes another good part!" and I excitedly returned total attention to listening. It's always a good sign when it's hard to tell if any sounds are happening. But then I went over to the CD player and discovered the piece had ended and the whole CD is just 24 minutes long. I can definitely see the logic in releasing a single relatively short piece of music by itself like this, and it would appear that the driving concept was to document a live set.

Well, now that I'm done with my accidental record review of ErstLive004 I think I'll treat myself to a second listen to this piece, especially with its sensible and non-excessive length. I could also put it on repeat for background music, which nearly all of the Erstwhile discs I've heard (I've heard about half the catalogue) serve splendidly well as in equal or greater measure to foreground music.

~Michael Anton Parker

Plectral Perfection

Box sets prey upon my built-in laziness, a condition that intensifies exponentially with the torpidity-inducing onset of winter. It’s not that much more effort to pull one of their number from a shelf and extricate a disc for play, but for some reason I’m far more predisposed to fetching a single from the stacks to spin. To combat this condition I’ve taken to picking one set a month to revisit. November’s choice is The Complete Roost Johnny Smith Small Group Sessions and I’m marveling anew at both the set and its historically inconspicuous subject.

Simple and to the point, Johnny Smith is a magician. A guy prone to wearing gray-flannel & starched collars, bespectacled, with a receding hairline and soft-putty mug, he looks more like a C.P.A. than a jazz guitar virtuoso. But few, if any, are more deserving of that superlative honorific. One of Smith’s most pertinent traits is his quiet improvisatory genius and it saturates the hundred odd tracks in the box. Big names like Stan Getz and Zoot Sims grace the first disc. But the bulk of the exhaustive program is devoted to Smith’s own largely anonymous combos, including a particularly sympathetic teaming with vibraphonist Johnny Rae. There are fleet bebop numbers, genteel swinging standards, solo improvisations, pop tunes and the occasional smattering of originals, among them “Walk Don’t Run” so famously covered by The Ventures years later. Smith’s tone is usually clean as polished crystal, but he can shape slashing bop-informed runs with the best. Rapid-fire single notes, shimmering chords, rippling octaves- they’re all within easy reach of his enterprising fingers. I’ve used the Clark Kent analogy before with other musicians, but it seems to fit Smith flawlessly, a mild-mannered fellow who dons an invisible red cape & blue leotard when he picks up his hollow-body and begins a piece.

Tracks like “Little Girl Blue” and “Black is the Color (Of My True Love’s Hair) [both disc 3] are masterful miniatures of individual creative invention. I had to cue my stereo’s repeat function on the latter and replay it a half dozen times before moving on to properly drink it all in. Hauntingly indelible doesn’t even describe the half of it. The set’s customarily lavish booklet describes the details of Smith’s career --one spent surprisingly often skulking in the studio shadows-- a guitarist’s guitarist whose impeccable phrasing and articulation was seen by some segments of the jazz public as too pretty, even saccharine. I guess I can fathom the logic behind such swipes; digesting the discs in succession brings Smith’s penchant for graceful playing into sharp focus. But there are voluminous examples in the box go a long way toward discrediting such summary dismissals. Even heard back-to-back the jam-packed discs have an uncanny ability to monopolize the ears. What’s also a treat is how you can hear slivers of other guitarists in Smith’s method and execution (especially Charlie Byrd). And I’d wager that the flow influence is outward rather than in reverse.

Tal Farlow, the subject of another priceless Mosaic box, is often touted as a paragon of post-Christian plectral skill. No argument from me on that point. But I actually prefer this Smith set, both for its variety and the unprecedented aperture it opens into the career of a figure far often overlooked in discussions of modern jazz guitar. On to Disc Five as the winds whistle frigidly outside my window…

2 New Hats

Max Nagl Ensemble
Quartier du Faisan
Hatology 621

Theo Jörgensmann
Fellowship
Hatology 616

The Hat labels have long cultivated an interest in reassessments of improvising traditions, sponsoring the radical interpretations of Joe McPhee, Franz Koglmann, and the Vienna Art Orchestra, among many others. Over the last ten years or so, Werner X. Uehlinger’s imprint has cultivated a number of more direct engagements with traditional source materials or, without beating too much around the bush, just plain jazz. Few could have predicted that folks like Lee Konitz or Marc Copland might one day appear on the Hat roster, and yet this is the case. It’s often quite fine jazz, too, and this direction makes the appearance of discs such as these two a little bit less startling.

Nagl is an interesting and somewhat enigmatic figure to me. Part of the crowded and provocative Viennese scene, he’s never gravitated fully towards either the Burkhard Stangl end of the music (though he has played on some interesting dates with Josef Novotny, among others who play electronics) or the arch constructions of Franz Koglmann. A fine alto player with a flair for arranging, he’s always had a healthy mischievous streak. This was certainly audible on the Big Four disc from a couple years back (where he paid tribute to Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier) and it’s quite pronounced on this large ensemble recording from a residence at Vienna’s Porgy & Bess venue. Nagl sticks to his sole horn here (though he ventures out on melodica on “Patient”) and is joined by Clemens Salesny (alto and bass clarinet), Franz Hautzinger (quartertone trumpet), Lorenz Raab (trumpet), Martin Ptak (trombone), Clemens Wenger (piano), Novotny (electronics and piano), Achim Tang (bass), Lukas Knofler (drums), and Luis Ribeiro (percussion). It’s light-hearted stuff, not so much revisionism as reappropriation. There are echoes of Braxton’s early Creative Music Orchestra disc and very strong Breuker allusions throughout (never a bad thing). Though the nine pieces are all written by Nagl, the ensemble charges through with a sensibility similar to Herr Schlippenbach’s hardcore Monk band (especially on the poly-idiomatic “Bycykell,” where Wenger does his best Schlipp to Mengelberg impression). Occasionally there are moments when, in the midst of some abstracted reference to Saint-Saens or somebody, Novotny creates some unpredictable (and frequently ominous) backgrounds. But this disc is mostly a spirited romp. Consult the juiced-up “Bat Chain” (a reference to the Captain?), with quirky organ and sinewy funk and slowly morphing horn sass, or the similarly raucous “Luis.” The tone poem “Patient” features a splattery Hautzinger solo, which contrasts excellently with the polish of the arrangement (the piece picks up and morphs into a spasmodic Kollektief-like reel). In other words, while the basic materials may be familiar ones, the energy of the ensemble and its soloists keep things enjoyably unsettled.

Dating back to 1998, Theo Jörgensmann’s Fellowship assembles a supple sextet of players (the leader on clarinet, Charlie Mariano on alto, Petras Vysniauskas on soprano, Karl Berger on vibraphone and piano, Kent Carter on bass, and Klaus Kügel on drums) to play three lengthy pieces. Should be hot, should be spicy, but I found the proceedings actually a bit bland. On Berger’s “Nameless Child,” for example, there is a real ECM-ish quality to the playing – not just in the somewhat boomy production but in the preponderance of pastoralisms and that soft piano-and-horns bustle that recalls (inevitably) some of Jarrett’s mid-70s groups. About eight minutes in the piece starts to gallop a bit (and Kügel does his best throughout to shake things up and Vysniauskas generates a fair deal of heat too) but there’s too little of this kind of brio. Mariano is the most interesting player on this tune by far, as his angular quirks keep Carter and Kügel on their toes and prevent the blow from becoming too conventional. What’s most problematic to my ears is Berger’s playing, which is at times too ponderous and at times to ethereal. Jörgensmann’s “Nightmare” is somewhat more interesting structurally; despite this band’s gifts for propulsion, I find their playing to be more successful on abstracted pieces such as these (closer to Jörgensmann’s explorations on To Ornette: Hybrid Identity). Perhaps significantly, Berger’s vibes sound miles better than his piano. The leader’s tasty solo perfectly exemplifies the idiomatic combination he always strives for: chamber cool and post-Bop heat. And there are even more craggy shards of bop flying about on Carter’s rumbling “It Will Come” (again Mariano takes honors with some out, abstracted blues fragments), with a fine and unexpectedly atmospheric ending (catalyzed by Carter’s fine arco). So yes, there are some good blowing moments, some good group sections, and some decent writing. It’s fairly nice small group jazz but nothing to lower your jaw overmuch.

Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes

1970 Festival FLDX 531

The world stops. The skies open. Sounds surge and whimper. She sings. Thousand-foot wild beasts thrash their claws against the sky. A tender ballad drifts through the meadow. We are alive.

~Michael Anton Parker

Underground Tremors - ErstQuake 2 Festival

ErstQuake 2 – New York City, 23rd – 25th September.

The vaguely defined boundaries of the genre of music we have come to know as EAI seem to be in a constant state of flux. As this youthful field of activity continues to grow and expand at an alarming rate new directions appear, pulling and expanding the music towards new tangents, keeping it fresh and creatively vibrant.

The ErstQuake festival held at the Collective: Unconscious venue in downtown TriBeCa was a living example of these ongoing developments. Co-curated by the Erstwhile and Quakebasket labels, this second annual festival brought together a combination of established performers with a healthy sprinkling of the younger blood seeping into the music to create one of the most interesting and provocative collections of musicians in one place for a few years. The small but perfectly formed venue was filled to the brim on each of the three nights, as musicians and audience alike descended from all corners of the globe in a remarkable display of the multinational interest in this music.

The first night opened with the established Scotch of St. James combination of Tim Barnes and Mark Wastell, the duo responsible for one of my favourite albums of the year to date. Here though, Wastell’s amplified textures and Barnes’ close-miked snare from that recording were put aside, replaced with matching tam tams, set up back to back so that either musician was blind to what the other was doing. With only a small selection of instruments with which to address the tam tams and a small collection of other tuned metals, the pair set about creating a deep ritualistic sound world ranging from lengthy drones to momentary interventions. The music filled the room, a sensuous sea of billowing washes punctuated by lighter chimes and the occasional poignant silence. At times the music reached an uncharacteristically high volume, belying the fact this was the only all-acoustic set of the festival. On one occasion Wastell’s energetic hammering of his instrument sent it swinging dangerously close to the microphone situated just behind, stopping just short of disaster. Unknown to all at the time, this set pointed the direction for much of the festival to follow as extreme volume levels became a recurrent theme over the ensuing three nights.

Near the end Barnes embarked upon a substantial attack on his instrument, building the sound into one intense metallic roar for over five minutes. Throughout this period Wastell ceased activity, a fact probably unknown to the fully consumed Barnes, until, as the prolonged onslaught came to a crashing halt, it was instantly countered by the very slightest jingling of a tiny high pitched bell from Wastell, underlining the remarkable focus and control that characterised this sublime performance. Any initial disappointment I might have felt about the absence of the electronics that filled their AMPLIFY performance were soon forgotten by this invigorating and inspirational opener.

Next up were the table top guitar pairing of Keith Rowe and Tomas Korber, the collision of youth and experience very apparent here with almost four decades separating the ages of these two musicians.
Whilst both took an electric guitar or the remnants thereof as the initial source of their material, Korber seemed to use his instrument more as a generator of sound that he then manipulated using a series of treatments, whilst Rowe’s familiar and yet constantly evolving methodology saw him work more directly with electric fields surrounding the guitar’s pick-up and the vibration of the strings themselves.

The set began well with Korber triumphantly crashing the body of his guitar into the table and Rowe responding with early rasps of radio static, but things soon slipped into a pattern of overlapping drones that didn’t contain a great deal of interesting shape. Whilst very pleasing on the ear this section of the set seemed to settle into a plateau with neither party particularly challenging each other to take the music into new directions.

Two thirds into the set, however, the music built to a crescendo before dropping away in submission to a loud bass drone from Korber that loomed large in the room for a few moments before Rowe’s blankets of static fizz and Korber’s swelling electronics combined in a flurry of colourful activity to take the music to a new high. This final inspired section came to a close too quickly for my liking, but pointed the way to a potentially fertile future for this duo.

The pairing of Dion Workman and Julien Ottavi followed. Throughout the festival Ottavi in particular revealed himself to be a highly intelligent and likeable yet creatively confrontational character both musically and in conversation. His involvement with the equally adroit Workman over recent years has proved increasingly fruitful, resulting in the recent laptop soundscapes of their Erstwhile release misenlian.

Here they set about projecting the audience and sound engineer into a state of confusion by replacing the detailed electronic drones of misenlian and their earlier thunderous soundcheck with a barely audible series of gassy hisses spaced apart by periods of awkward silence. At times the music was so quiet it became lost in the room, subsumed by ambient sounds from the audience, the creaking of raised eyebrows and angry wall banging from the venue’s neighbour, who took the opportunity of this quieter moment to complain about the noise preceding it.

It took real effort to focus on this music, but on the occasions this was possible it revealed moments of glacial beauty, sheer lines of silvery dissonance pockmarked with the briefest spikes of digital animation. This was a beguiling but infuriating listening experience that I would like to hear again without the outside contributions.

Joe Colley and Jason Lescalleet formed a formidable presence placed behind their assorted electronic shrapnel and reel to reel tape decks respectively. Both way over six feet and carrying the presence of a couple of bouncers that decided they’d rather be on the stage than at the door, they proved to be an enthralling spectacle to watch. Colley in particular danced awkwardly about his apparatus, lost in the act of creation whilst Lescalleet scurried about the floor setting dishevelled tape loops running between four impressively large old tape decks.

The music reflected the visual theatre, growling about its way in a similar manner with Colley throwing microphones about the floor and Lescalleet churning crunchy tape sounds together, allowing the music to erupt into a muscular flow. On occasions the ceiling sought to shower Colley in a cloud of dust as the volume reached the highest peaks of the evening so far.

The set closed with Lescalleet kicking his chair into the tape machines and striding away, providing the set with a fitting finale. I enjoyed this performance a great deal, but shorn of the visual theatre the music itself may not have held my interest as well. It followed a well-worn pattern of building loops of sound and feedback to a crescendo but it seemed without a great deal of detailed communication between the two musicians. Whilst there was a lot going on in this cement mixer of a performance it was perhaps a little predictable. Beyond the visual antics, there were no real surprises or compositional twists here. As a live performance, however, this set stuck two large burly fingers up to those detractors of EAI that criticise the absence of anything to watch at a concert. Rousing stuff.

The closing set of each night of the festival was unfortunately affected by unpredictable technical gremlins. Tonight the undeniable mastery of Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura was stopped after ten minutes when a blown transformer left Rowe without power. Up to this point the subtle shimmer of Nakamura’s no-input mixing board and Rowe’s hand held fan drones and magnetic static fields had grown slowly together in familiar fashion, pushing aside rumoured expectations that they may play in a more fragmented style.

After the interruption the pair took a while to return to the same level of focus, but gradually the music began to sprout shapes and repeating motifs, developing to a point of heart stopping beauty as Rowe weaved finely detailed drone around a slow rhythmic figure Nakamura left hanging in the air.

The Rowe/Nakamura duo showed glimpses of why they are possibly the most consistently exciting and powerful combination in this music today with only the misfortune of equipment failure keeping them from the best performance of the entire festival.

Day two began with a solo performance from Joe Colley. Sauntering on stage with his hands thrust into his pockets it soon became apparent that he was manipulating two tiny secreted objects, each emitting a high pitched squeal that he controlled by opening and closing his grip around them. He then placed these tiny generators into small glass jars on the floor as if nervously capturing a couple of runaway spiders. Hunched over them on the floor, he then set about adjusting their position slightly to vary the sound before finally leaving them to pulse directly into a microphone.

Turning to a small mixer and assorted other electronic detritus, Colley took the sound to a buzzing swarm of cracked drones and industrial squall, contorting his body around the small table supporting his equipment before bemusing the audience by crawling off amongst them to start up some kind of tone generators hidden under seats.
The sound built in volume as the set moved on, similar to his duo with Lescalleet, but alone Colley seemed to have more control over the direction of the sound, at least until nearer the end when he resorted to throwing every switch and wrenching every knob to fold the music in on itself before bringing it to an impressive conclusion.

Joe Colley’s recent solo work on CD has leant towards a more considered form of composition than his performance here, but what his solo set lacked in careful structure and variety it gained in its raw visceral power and the remarkable sight of his onstage persona.

The following set from Sean Meehan, Toshi Nakamura and Taku Unami could not have been more different as it sat in the lower reaches of the volume scale. This performance achieved a similar yet very different level of intensity, but whilst Colley prowled about like a man possessed this trio sat as still as much of their music, allowing the sounds and the silences that framed them to make their own statement.

The enigmatic Meehan focused his contribution entirely upon the fragile and spacious drones that characterise his recent stunning solo release. Nakamura’s shimmering lines of feedback merged well with this to form a sparse bed into which Unami placed brittle blocks of unwavering austerity.

Unami was the loose cannon in this set. His setup for the weekend involved a small selection of simple motor-driven devices and stripped down speaker cones within which he vibrated small objects, stones and pieces of broken glass. Using a laptop to send signals to these objects, Unami had limited control over the sound he created. Whilst being able to make a device simply work or not, he was less able to dictate the precise outcome as the speaker cone occasionally spilled the glass onto the floor and the motorised objects collided with one other.

Unami’s stark, angular improvisational style challenged his two companions here. Whilst Meehan and Nakamura’s sounds work well together, Unami’s contributions continually lifted the music into new areas, not allowing it to settle into familiar patterns. The element of uncertainty and chance kept the music simmering and forced the other two to continually re-evaluate their playing. This was a fascinating set, a tense, thoughtful affair that often presented us with moments of real beauty.

Tim Barnes and Tomas Korber followed with a duo that I personally struggled to come to terms with. Here Barnes chose an intricate set up based around a single snare drum with contact mics attached to the skin. He then made microscopic assaults on this arrangement with a variety of objects, magnifying the sound through a basic mixer to extreme high volumes. Korber matched this with claustrophobic swathes of bass and piercingly high feedback notes again all at ear splitting levels. The duo developed a simple process of taking the music up sheer inclines before cutting things short and starting again. This produced a basic structure for the set, but beyond this I felt the music lacked in detail, any intricacies strangled by the intense volume. The wall of sound that rose and then fell as the music moved along was hard to penetrate and I found the subtleties within difficult to ascertain.

Speaking to others afterwards, this set was well-received by the majority in attendance, leaving me confused as to what I missed with this pairing. My position to one side of the performers may not have helped as this placed me in close proximity to one of the speakers, but generally I found this set disappointingly unrewarding considering the talent involved in its creation.

The nmperign duo of Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey joined forces with Jason Lescalleet for the fourth set of the evening. Never having managed to catch nmperign in a live setting before, I was initially a little disappointed to see all three musicians setting up unfamiliar instruments here.

Kelley and Rainey chose synthesizer and laptop respectively, with Rainey’s computer-producing sounds not far from Kelley’s swathes of analogue warmth. Lescalleet placed aside his tape decks in favour of a collection (I think I counted five) of old Casio sampling keyboards. These museum pieces were capable of capturing just a few seconds of sound through a basic onboard microphone, and Lescalleet spent much of the set grabbing samples from the sound that filled the room and looping them by taping down the keys on the samplers.

The set began with an almost musical series of slow notes from Kelley that quickly grew as they were joined by Rainey’s loops of digital synth and layered into looming clouds of sound. This set differed from just about everything else in the festival as any development was gradual, the musicians seemed to be almost refusing the urge to respond to each other, allowing the music to change very slowly. On the surface there seemed to be little to listen to, but closer attention revealed textural layers of constantly shifting sound, adjusting itself over time as the different elements evolved and moved across each other.

As the set moved on the sound slowly degraded away from the harmonious wash it began with, possibly the result of Lescalleet’s keyboards sampling themselves, breaking the music down into progressively grainy layers. Whilst perhaps not the most original music on display at the festival this set worked for me, providing a satisfying interlude following the extremities of the performances preceding it.

Much expectancy was placed upon the duo of Keith Rowe and Julien Ottavi that brought the evening to a close. The ensuing performance was built mainly around the pair adjusting the tuning on a series of shortwave radios, feeding a combination of static and random broadcasts into the room. Rowe and Ottavi dueled with overlapped news broadcasts complete with reports from New Orleans and Baghdad, sickly classical music stations, hip hop and the scribbled mess of shortwave transmission static. Beyond some distortion fed from a patch on Ottavi’s laptop, the sounds here all seemed to originate from the radios, further developing the shortwave experiments the pair have recently worked with in the group [N:Q].

At the time, I found this set to be in equal amounts interesting, frustrating and amusing. The layering of radios in this manner to cut and splice between extremes is nothing particularly new, and with Rowe’s guitar all but absent from the performance I felt the set lacked any real musicality, resembling more of a random performance by the Scratch Orchestra of whom Rowe belonged in the 1970s. At one point great pleasure came from witnessing Rowe (in his sixties) countering a blast of noise from Ottavi with a lengthy burst from a New York rap station, the absurdity of this situation soon cut short by a garish report from the New Orleans hurricane aftermath.

Ottavi had struggled with his technology from the beginning of the set, having to resort to using a different amp that apparently made it hard for Rowe to tell who was making what sound. Right at the end, Ottavi lost all output and was left with a radio in his hand playing a gentle, unidentified classical melody quietly through its own speaker. This brought about a remarkably powerful ending. Rowe silenced his radios, and got up to leave the stage, virtually dragging Ottavi with him, who departed leaving the radio playing softly under the spotlight. The audience sat in a highly charged hush as the radio played on, and a few minutes passed before a tentative applause broke through and the lights came back on.

Speaking to Rowe afterwards revealed more to me about the set. He told me that it ‘had little to do with music’ and instead concerned itself with ‘bringing out there into here,’ perhaps meaning by this the intensity and confusion of American life and the highlighting of these extremes and vulgarities in a creative performance. He stated that getting up and walking away at the end was an important thing to do, hereby making an overt political gesture.

This conversation allowed me to see this set in a different light. On a purely musical level I took very little from this performance, but although my understanding of its conceptual meaning could be flawed, it clearly had a lot more to offer at this level.

Day three began with the trio of Greg Kelley,(returning here to his more familiar trumpet), Sean Meehan and David Daniell, formerly a guitarist now working with a laptop.

This set allowed Meehan’s rubbed dowel technique to breathe, the gentle acoustic drones he magically produced set the tone for this uneventful yet charming performance. Kelley’s muted growls and hisses found their place in conversation with these frangible lines of sound, with Daniell’s restrained selection of processed field recordings settling into the background almost as a canvas for the other two to work within.

The music remained minimal yet rarely fell into complete silence. Early in the set passing sirens outside the venue threatened to scupper the subtle balance between the trio, but concentration held and the set developed steadily within a delicate framework, with the musicians demonstrating poise and attentive respect for the fragile structure of the music.
This set just worked for me. There were no fireworks, no dramatic shifts in dynamic, just three musicians creating restful, contemplative music via a common language, maybe nothing groundbreaking but a very enjoyable performance all the same.

On paper the duo of Mark Wastell and Keith Rowe was an intriguing combination. It had not been immediately clear how the modus operandi of the two musicians could work together, but the resulting set proved to be hugely rewarding.
Rowe began with a stream of static drones, hovering gently with a few sprinkles of agitated sound dropped into test the waters. Wastell returned to his amplified textures set-up for this set, but with the volume turned up a few notches. He met Rowe head on with detailed volleys of gritty abrasions as contact mikes were rubbed, caressed and otherwise abused by a variety of objects ranging from a cello bow to a ball of steel wool.

The resulting music was a dense, continually changing and highly involving half hour of sculpted sound. In places the volume rose to high levels, yet never did this feel unnecessary, and the music retained its transparency. The fine details within the music retained their clarity, though they came so thick and fast it was often hard to take in the developments as they occurred. This is one set I would very much like to hear released on CD.

Wastell rocked about in his chair and tackled the dials of his mixing desk with grand flamboyant gestures whilst Rowe remained largely motionless, experienced ears processing each event, and dramatic changes in the shape of the music originating from the slightest movement of his hand. About two thirds into the set Wastell sent several bursts of high pitched feedback into the fray, letting each explode across the music for a few seconds before cutting them off abruptly to allow the negative shapes between to take on their own resonance.

This was a powerful-yet-controlled performance that served to underline the creativity and versatility of two great musicians and proved the highlight of the festival for me.

Margarida Garcia and Taku Unami then set about producing a performance that proved both perplexing and enthralling in the same moment.
Garcia began alone, working some soft growls and scrapes from her electric double bass, leading into mournful moments of bowed sound, stopping every so often, as she seemed confused as to why Unami was not joining in as he sat motionless and soundless.

This in fact continued for the first six or seven minutes of the performance, with Garcia pulling some very nice textural vignettes from her instrument until Unami finally took up the opportunity of a break in her playing to introduce one straight line of dry clatter from his laptop and speaker cone set-up before cutting it dead and returning to inactivity.
This process repeated itself and then continued for some time, and it was in fact not until around the twenty five minute mark that the two played together at the same time. Garcia’s explorations of her instrument’s expressive possibilities contrasted completely with Unami’s emotionless constructivist interventions, creating an intriguing imbalance between the two that somehow enriched the music rather than rendering it unworkable.

The cumulative effect reminded me of the call and response methodology of more traditional free improvisation, yet slowed to snail pace so that the conversation between the two musicians was broken down to the point it verged upon the incomprehensible. Placed into the context of the other music at the festival, this set provided a welcome pause for thought, a reminder that there are other extremes possible beyond those concerning volume.

Before beginning his set with Tomas Korber, Julien Ottavi politely informed the audience that the following music would be very loud, and recommended that anyone with sensitive ears should think about leaving the hall. He wasn’t kidding.
The set began with a series of drones, mostly from Korber, growing steadily louder but not reaching any real extremes, until a few minutes in Ottavi dramatically attacked his laptop with a movement equally as violent as the sounds it triggered. An electronic blast of sheer noise rippled across the room, bringing a gasp of exclaim from the audience despite the warning. The severity of the attack, coupled with its hard edged metallic content forced hands uniformly across ears, and caused one of the speakers to give out with a dramatic orange glow.

The set was very short and Korber spent the majority of it looking completely uninterested, possibly because Ottavi’s barrage had left him no room whatsoever, or possibly for technical reasons as the expired speaker and the sheer volume could have made it difficult to hear what was going on within the music.

This set communicated absolutely nothing to me other than a harsh wall of noise. I found it completely uninteresting beyond its vague possibilities as a piece of performance art, and it proved to be the only set of the weekend I wish I had stepped outside for. I have no idea whether it achieved any aims it set out with, but all I took from it was a minor bout of tinnitus.

A long interval followed as emergency repairs were made to the PA system. This enforced break really tested a tired and restless audience, but somehow things came back together for the final set of the weekend, the Tim Barnes and Mark Wastell duo that opened the festival, augmented now by Toshimaru Nakamura. Here the Scotch of St. James pair returned to familiar instrumentation, Wastell’s amplified textures joined again by Barnes’ contact-miked snare and now Nakamura’s mixing board.

The preceding events made focused listening difficult, but those in the audience that had the stamina were rewarded with a beautiful flow of contemplative musical conversation. Nakamura’s wafer thin filigree whispers wrapped around Barnes and Wastell’s intricate constructions of scrapes, chimes and sinewaves, creating a slow relaxed music that captured the attention without having to force itself upon anyone.
The set had no obvious beginning, middle or end, instead developing as a string of small beautifully assembled segments, sometimes flowing into each other, sometimes dropping away into extended silences. When this final performance slipped to a close it felt like it had only just begun, suggesting that this trio would benefit more from a longer performance together, allowing the music to unfurl fully at its own pace.

The half hour that we were treated to, though, served as a fitting finale to a great three days of music. The standard of musicianship and the intensely charged atmosphere of creativity all around ErstQuake 2 was of a level I have never witnessed before. All fifteen sets across the three days saw musicians pushing and pulling at each other to try and take the music to new creative and emotional highs. Some sets worked fantastically, others less so, but overall the festival provided a knowledgeable and expectant audience with three nights of deeply inspirational and satisfying music. Congratulations are due to Jon Abbey, Tim Barnes and Chris Wolf. You can be very proud.

~Richard Pinnell

Pictures by Richard Pinnell and courtesy of Robert J Kirkpatrick.

John Stevens Quartet - New Cool

Emanem 4117

Though Emanem has long been synonymous with state-of-the-art English free improv, Martin Davidson also annexes catalog space for the occasional free jazz project. These entries may constitute a minority, but as this recent John Stevens reissue assays, their quality is often on excellent. Stevens was a consummate ambassador to both camps and was especially adept at blurring, sometimes even erasing, the boundaries between the two. New Cool follows on the heels of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s A New Distance released earlier this year in presenting one of last free jazz ensembles, taped in performance at the Crawley Jazz Festival several years prior to his passing.

Describing Stevens’s skills and influence as a drummer and improviser, the temptation often exists to employ that trite journalistic device of comparing him to other influential bandleaders. There’s his Blakey-like aptitude for discovering and nurturing talented younger players, a skill on substantial display here through a quartet rounded out by then twentysomethings Byron Wallen, Ed Jones, and Gary Crosby. Stevens treats them as peers and the disc’s five tracks, including a previously unreleased alternate of the Ornette-oriented freebop homage “Dudu’s Gone” dedicated to the dearly departed Pukwana, encompass ample space for discursive solos.

Oddly enough, or perhaps not, Stevens’ playing suggests the spirit, if not the letter, of Shelly Manne: lithe and effervescent rather than punishingly fast or loud, and possessing a similarly orchestral sense of percussive color. His sticks skip across the skins, never prodding or shoving, but instead coaxing malleable rhythms for his colleagues to ride. His supple brushwork shaping textured rolls on “Do Be Up” and “2 Free 1” is just as responsive and nuanced.

Jones shares Coltrane’s reed choices and his improvisations evince a comparable note pregnant style, phrases spouting from his ceiling-angled saxophone bell in a bobbing phraseology that also recalls Rollins. Byron Wallen’s brass personifies the intimations of the album’s title, particularly when he opts for flugelhorn. His improvisations exude a breezy nonchalance and tone largely devoid of smear or slur that made me mindful of Kenny Wheeler. Lastly, there’s the proactive Crosby who receives the favorable comparison to Wilbur Ware in Steve Beresford’s original liner notes. Wielding a roly-poly articulation and adaptable harmonic acumen, he not only plugs the cracks, but also propels the band right alongside Stevens’ signaling cymbal flares, particularly so on the disc’s centerpiece “You’re Life.”

As mentioned track lengths are uniformly long and the Emanem standard of maxing the capacity of the compact disc medium is maintained. The loose, relaxed mood of a band in their element plying the solace of melodic improv to receptive audience sustains for the duration. Reveling in the music of this disc it’s hard not to miss Stevens’ elder statesman presence on the British scene all the more.

~ Derek Taylor

The Red Norvo Trios (Fantasy)

The pleasures of Kenneth Norville can be a tough sell to listeners weaned on the lingoes of hardbop or free jazz. Norvo’s xylophone-derived style on vibes favors the instrument’s most dulcet and mellifluous associations. No quadruple mallet dissonance a la Dickerson or Hutcherson here. No eerie, gravity-nullifying sustains either. But what’s not always appreciated is his placeholder as one of the progenitors of free jazz. “Dance of the Octopus,” waxed way back in 1933 with the spare chamber combo of guitar, bass and Benny Goodman’s bass clarinet presaged the free-interplay of Tristano’s “Intuition” by fifteen years. Taped two decades later these trio sides for Fantasy were as adventurous in their own way and an evolution of Norvo’s earlier incarnation with Charles Mingus and Tal Farlow. Bassist Red Mitchell succeeded Mingus in ’52 while Jimmy Raney joined as a replacement for an injured Farlow in ’53. Norvo recalls that formal arrangements were rarely if ever employed and that collective improvisation was the strategy on every tune. The extrasensory nature of the trio’s rapport makes the absence of charts all the more suprising. Norvo may be the nominal leader, but when the three leave the starting gate all are equals. Raney swaps lead and accompanist roles without ceding a single wrong note, his delicate strumming approximating the scuttle of a brushed snare beneath his partners’ solos. The placement of Mitchell’s rotund pizzicato is always the harmonic equivalent of a bull’s eye. His may not be as edgy and angry as Mingus’ arco stylings in the earlier unit, but the trade-off arrives in a more consistent and cohesive swing. Norvo adjusts amicably to his colleagues youthful bop proclivities, encouraging their swift interlocking runs on tracks like the mercurial “’Deed I Do,” a number that finds Raney and Mitchell in full gallop race of neck-and-neck single notes. The three are like super-intelligent laboratory rats negotiating the twisting contrapuntal mazes of each track, the figurative cheese earned through flawlessly executed circuits from start to finish. Appended to the original fifteen titles are four more commemorating Farlow’s return to the ensemble. Sweet and charming on the surface, the extrasensory interplay in abundance here could put the vast majority of harder hitting ensembles to shame.

[this ROW respectfully dedicated to Tom Djll- mallets & planks, amigo!]

FME - Cuts

Okkadisk 61

A simple three-letter acronym, FME represents one of Ken Vandermark’s least esoteric band names. The trio’s music is a similarly accessible, artifice-free blend of reeds, bass and drums conjoined for the purpose of improvisation loosely structured around compositional signposts. Vandermark’s more lofty and artful aspirations take a welcome backseat to a preference for brass-balls blowing, at both full-tilt and slow smolder speeds. Bassist Nate McBride and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love do far more than simply abet or accompany. Without the talents of either man the music would likely founder or possibly even sink under Vandermark’s susceptibility to repetition and stock licks. They distance him from his safety zone and it’s a kick to hear him so tested.

Recorded in a moss-covered cement bunker in Oslo, Cuts follows up the band’s earlier Okkadisk outing Underground and finds them equally enamored of long-form energy-exuding interplay in common with cousin power trio The Thing. What’s most noticeable on this extended five-part set is how Vandermark makes the most of economical source material. The opening medley “Other Side Up/Boadas” morphs from a chest-thumping baritone-driven blowout worthy of pal Mats Gustafsson into a somber clarinet shuffle using little more than riff material as its central fuel source. McBride and Nilssen-Love are instrumental in fleshing the bones of the piece with textured sinew and muscle, the latter’s bass vamp super-gluing the two halves together with massive strumming epoxy.

“Part 2” encompasses three more interlocking episodes, vaulting forward with the freewheeling fast break “Necessary?” where tenor erupts in geysering rhythmic blasts against a surging cymbal-fed backdrop. Vandermark segues into “Reset” with a smattering of percussive reed pops, snapping pizzicato and bowed cymbals adding icy color. But it’s McBride’s bass that rules the final segment “Slip,” shaping another corpulent undulating ostinato, this time with heavy grease-slicked groove affixed. Vandermark switches to baritone and summons a swaggering R&B send-off that wrings the core riff to the point of desiccation. “Static (A Hundred Years) Static” arises out of equally pervious origins echoing the album’s title in its assemblage of fragmentary phraseology sewn together into a brooding patch quilt sum, seams intentionally frayed and exposed.

“Broken (Sentence) Broken” is similarly chopped into sharp-edged rhythmic troughs and ridges. Nilssen-Love slices and dices a chugging groove with sticks while McBride’s bow cuts coarser cleaver-like swathes on amplified strings. Vandermark rides the crenellations with a protracted volley of rhythmic honks and skronks. The second half scales back momentum and settles into dour, drone-dominated tone poem of overlapping tenor and bass before another bruising slugfest finale. A contemplative clarinet closer “Heavy Light” caps the date with another extended bout of inward-gazing tonal explorations. The length and intensity of these tracks may prompt impatient listeners to blanch. But repeat spins reveal both the reasoning and worth behind the girth. Pared down reeds-bass-drums vehicles just might be the optimal conveyance for the zealous side of Vandermark’s musical personality.

~ Derek Taylor

Tomas Korber - Effacement

Cut 015

I’ve commented before how much I enjoy, in this music and elsewhere, a certain approach I associate with obsession. The act of taking a (seemingly) small slice of material, working and worrying it no end until, almost miraculously, new substance appears, previously unnoticed relationships emerge, etc. Of course, it’s not the case that any piece of stuff or any arbitrary attack will produce results I end up deeming worthwhile (or is it, were I to use my ears a little better?); it requires a kind of poetic appreciation, both on the part of the creator and the recipient. Of course, here we inevitably reach the point where people’s tastes begin to diverge. Some might listen to “Effacement” and hear too much dwelling in areas they think of as having been mined of the last trace of value, resulting in an overbearing quality. Not me. I can’t get enough of it.

Divided into six tracks, “Effacement” can nonetheless be heard as a single entity, though one which shifts gears several times, offering views out several apertures. The opening section, “Thermo”, wells up from nothingness, initially producing a series of sharp, rhythmic ticks that almost sound like taps on a snare cymbal lending the work, momentarily, an oddly disjunctive jazzy sense. Within minutes, however, those ticks are enveloped by an increasingly voluminous array of engine sounds (recordings of actual motor engines, perhaps, at least in part), rotors, whirs and other effluvia including, if I’m not mistaken, voices buried somewhere inside. It’s a long, gradual crescendo, hammered at incessantly, revealing layer upon layer of lovely detail that abruptly peaks around the 15 minute mark, threatening eardrum damage before suddenly subsiding into a cool wash. It almost disappears entirely, just enough traces left behind to once again grow into a related but noticeably different creature, one composed of soft steam emissions blossoming out stereophonically over a hum that is, at first, slight and unobtrusive but later, after a brief pause, heavy and threatening, the steam forced to higher levels of pressure to compensate.

The third section, curiously titled “Fred Astaire”, introduces some surprisingly recognizable guitar content embedded in the static stream. Sonically, it reminds me a bit of parts of Frith’s ancient piece, “No Birds”, using what sound like open-palmed slaps of the guitar strings. At first, the overtness of the sound renders it almost banal but as Korber’s obsession sets in, as he relentlessly focuses on that narrow area, it opens up and manages to sound like something more than itself; one ceases to recognize the swats as such and simply hears music. Again, there’s a movement toward increased volume, the bangs expanding out into twangs and pings (another reference, I imagine entirely coincidental, flits in and out: Branca’s “The Spectacular Commodity”). It unwinds into a lovely, organ-like tone that further, and unhurriedly, evaporates to several increasingly lighter, shimmering ones. Korber obsesses even on pure tones. One of my favorite moments occurs in the following portion, where barely decipherable voices, as from some faraway garbled transmission, appear beneath the tone which itself begins to roughen and disintegrate. The voices reside just outside of interpretation, recalling Ashley’s sleep mumblings, a wonderful, mysterious effect. The piece continues to granularize into a soft rumble before a split second of silence prefaces a propeller-driven assault; you feel as though your back is pressed up against the housing of a helicopter engine. Another silence—but it’s not; there are slight beams of extremely high pitch that lead into yet another surprising area, probably the most “traditional” sounding of the disc. A section of shuffled (backwards?) sounds introduces a massive, descending two-note motif awash in a melancholy grandeur. “Effacement” closes with a disquieting track that begins with mingled static, voices and street noise and vortexes into an odd stereo ping pong of thudding tones as though all the previous music is being dabbed clean, mopped up by some unseen, insistent hand. Effaced, as it were.

An excellent, hyper-imaginative, blessedly obsessive work.

Triggered Zone

Regarding musical epiphanies and my personal history. Here's something I wrote 4 years ago in order to try to make creative music accessible to people not familiar with it. I have no idea where I thought it could be published and it never was. You will never think of me the same way again after reading it, and it is a bit embarrassing, but not overly nor ultimately. (The first seven paragraphs - yes, it's long - are the intro to the album review...)

I used to listen to the Grateful Dead. It’s embarrassing. I didn’t even have the excuse of drugs for my attraction. When I was 13 I went on a ski lift in Alaska during a summer rain. The lift was empty, I was alone. The guy selling coffee and snacks at the top of the lift was alone, listening to Grateful Dead concert tapes. I knew enough about the Dead from their studio albums and enough about Classic Rock culture to enjoy a decent conversation, but I had never heard a bootleg before. I told him this and he gave me one. He told me that every concert was different, every list of songs for every concert was different and every version of every song was different, intentionally different. Whhooaahh/wwoooww went my thirteen-year-old mind. I thought about it on my way down the lift. “No two performances by any band are ever the same,” I realized “but the Dead, and their audience, focus on the differences. They improvise, consciously.”

This was a revelation. And I knew it right then. This band recognized that the ideal of performance should not be the recreation of pre-established material. Not only that, but their performance kindled sensitivity to the multiplicity of directions the music could go in. They made reacting to each other and their environment—improvising––an explicit emphasis of what they were about. The incentive behind my listening was the richness of experience available when performers openly acknowledge and engage the influence the changing environment has on their work. I started listening to concert tapes, wondering about the exchanges—intangible, immeasurable, yet real—taking place between the environment, the musicians, the movement of music and the movement of time. That sounds abstract, but the flowing existence of the music made it an undeniable, though unpinpointable, reality. My ears were seduced by the music and my mind was enthralled by the process of active creation, evaluation and response put on display in real time.

I had discovered the college radio station in my hometown––the University of South Carolina’s own WUSC 90.5––at way too impressionable an age, 12. Hearing the bizarre band names, song titles, and lyrics inspired a friend and I to record our own “indie rock”, a term which meant little more to me then than “weird music”, though it did signal that we were free to do or say what we wanted. We were The Headbangers from Hell and our debut recording featured 39 songs in 44 minutes––vocals only, including vocalized guitar and drum simulations. The long-term effect of the radio station’s discovery was the conviction that everything was possible in music, and nothing was to be dismissed on anything other than musical grounds. I had a letter published in the August 1990 issue of Alternative Press magazine two years later defending Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead to the masses of fans devoted to alternative rock. (The magazine had run an ad making fun of Led Zeppelin and published an album review implying that the music of the Grateful Dead was below its readership; I couldn’t stand the elitism.) My aural desire in music was distributed between classic rock dinosaurs like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones, and alternative music gurus like the Talking Heads, the Pixies and Joy Division. I read Alternative Press magazine to get turned on to bands I knew nothing about–– I just wanted more information about more music. I sang in emphatic euphoria to punk, classic, and oddball rock; I shook my head in mad nods of approval to pounding beats and shifting rhythmic changes. MTV got me addicted to music, my dad’s record collection made me love music, and college radio showed me how wild and diverse it could be. All this happened before I started listening to the Grateful Dead and before I started thinking about improvisation, but it colored how my ears responded to the music.

By the time I was introduced to free jazz (Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray) and out-rock (Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica, The Soft Machine’s first two albums, Faust) when I was 16, I was more than ready to lend an ear to music that I didn’t immediately understand. I liked not being able to comprehend exactly what was going on at every moment: being led in one direction by the guitars and another by the drums (Beefheart), hearing dozens of tightly constructed psychedelic rock songs morph continuously into each other without breaks and, even more astonishingly, with no self-indulgent spaciness (The Soft Machine volumes 1 and 2), swinging my head to one oblong rhythmic pattern made from a jerky synchronicity looping, only to have it spliced away, the next juxtaposed section of magnetic tape featuring a funky bassline, a slapping punk drummer and German shouting (Faust). The superficially chaotic self-expressivism of free jazz—the frenetic piano bashing, loud saxophonic wailing and growling, drummers pounding cymbals–– was, quite simply, liberating: adolescent rage and confusion inspiringly, vociferously, articulated.

On April 7, 1993 I bought my first record of completely improvised music; I didn’t know this at the time. The record is called One In Two-Two In One and it is the documentation of a 75 minute continuous musical encounter between Anthony Braxton (playing alto, soprano, sopranino saxophones, contrabass clarinet, clarinet and flute) and Max Roach (playing percussion, gongs and tuned cymbals). It was recorded on August 31, 1979 in Switzerland and is probably the most influential album in my history of sonic understanding and musical appreciation.

There is no predetermined anything and there is also no score, however miniature or abstract, to gravitate back towards if things fail, and they do, irregularly. It is 75 minutes of two people attempting to interact with each other through musical instruments with no compositional or directional elements to fall back on. Without any of these distractions, they were free to explore sounds and the play of sounds in time: rhythms to jumpstart each other, squeals and crashes to interrupt each other, sounds that simply sound good. Sounds that fit. Unlike free jazz, there is no basic theme, no choruses, and no sequence of soloists. What there is is a whole lot of crazy fucking musicmaking. Listening to it, I was startled, wide-eyed, speechless and a little lost. I couldn’t place it. I had never come across something that showed such a complete lack of restraint in terms of musical material and such an absolute focus and dedication to openly experimenting with the effects capable of being produced by this material. 13 and a half minutes into it you hear these happy little bell-like tinkles, light with gaiety and hope, almost like a wedding ceremony. Then you hear Braxton, first distantly, then with more force and audibility, as he has somehow submerged some of his contrabass clarinet (not an agile instrument) into a bucket of water. He blurbles a deep-bass, wet-farty, kind of rumble while intermittently vocalizing through the instrument and biting the reed, sending out tweaked high squeal-beeps as Roach merrily taps away on his mini-cymbals. “What the fuck?!?” was my most intelligent response. “What the fuck?!? Hell Yah!!!” was my more immediate, emotionally joyful, response. These sounds were monstrous, irregular, incomprehensible; they had no reference to anything I’d ever heard or thought about what music was. Those concerns proved to be irrelevant to this music; they only occurred on the first listen if you tried to categorize it. The fact that these guys were playing with each other, next to each other, and not resorting to mimicry or a kind of overt call and response (both all too common pitfalls of jazz and free jazz) sent delirious smiles of surprise, pleasure, and uncontextualizability running through my mind. Unlike most free jazz, the music wasn’t centered on rotating displays of aggressive self-expression; instead, the music concentrated on conjuring environments aurally.

Listening to One In Two-Two In One alongside Brian Eno’s Another Green World (bought February 27, 1993) gave me a whole new understanding of what I liked in music and what I wanted from it, what it was capable of. Eno’s album, originally released in 1975, became the flipside of improvised music for me. They both accomplished the same thing in my mind’s ear—they invoked potent, detailed, shifting atmospheres––through different, supposedly irreconcilable means (studio electronics versus acoustic real time improvising). Combining electro-filtering, fuzzy orchestrated humming, and artificial distortion with an incomparable sense of pop, Eno densely layered textures of multiple sound-sources into fantastically evocative moodscapes that were also infectiously memorable. Whereas Eno took advantage of the slow deliberating available when in a recording studio to create wholly other worlds, Braxton and Roach used acoustic instruments in real time, interacting with the actual environment of the Willisau Jazz festival in 1979 to conjure another environment, sensually and intellectually. Both musics create, and almost impose, atmospheres on the listener– from sentimental to somnambulistic, delusional to dangerous. Since sounds don’t remain still, the situations that they invoke are never constant. Enjoying the music requires interacting with it. Attention and engagement as a listener involves the luxury of being able, and the responsiblity of being forced, to both absorb and project the significance of the music. Rapid movements into and outside each interposed ambiance sometimes leads my ears to an aural hyperventilation: I process the music at a rate different from that in which it washes over me. Sometimes I take in only small chunks at a time, wondering and lingering within them as others pass by unnoticed and unassimilated, and sometimes I’m unable to ingest one moment, stuttering and stopping short of a single comprehension. The saturation of worlds within sounds on Another Green World accustomed my practice of listening to a state of active interpreting. The Grateful Dead made improvising fascinating, Anthony Braxton and Max Roach used it as a powerful tool of conjuration and Brian Eno gave my ears the ability to hear sound, including electronic and inhuman sound, as an external manifestation of many possible scenarios. Sounds construct the spaces we inhabit.

A doublebassist booms with one thumb thwack on a string. Before the echo is halfway over a trumpet meows quizzically, stopping abruptly, making a percussive silence at the arch of the question. 1 second. Bass strings get pulled out and snap click chooõng back against the wooden neck of the bass. 3 seconds. A muted violin string is plucked, the bass plugs, stop, on, and, off, percussive rolls of 5 or 6 patters quietly ebb in and out of earshot, braking and accelerating inbetween the thwopping, punctuating bass signals. 10 seconds. At once, the drummer strikes a chunk of wood resting on his tom drum and stops as the bassist strokebends a note that quickly dissolves. 1 second. Silence. 4 seconds. A trombone toot-pops, eliciting a quick string snap from somewhere, a twitching flutter of bass clarinet vibrations, percussion fwaps wiggled across drum skins, a trumpet whiff, strings creaking under awkward bowing angles, another trumpet shot and continuing drumstick wiggles and fades. 7 seconds. Silence. 3 and a half seconds. Shhhcraping, whooshing, hissing, juhjuhjuhjuh, brushing, inhaling. All these sounds breathe into each other until a short squeak pierces this deindividualized texture for a moment and disappears. Shaking, lipsmacking, whishihing, continues unphased. The bass clarinet blasts a low continuous purr that punctures the soft sound palette. 11 seconds. Silence. 6 seconds.

That’s the first 46 seconds of the most recent King Übü Orchestrü album, Trigger Zone, released on the German label Free Music Productions. There are 9 more minutes and 28 seconds in the first track, 67 minutes and 49 more seconds in the album. Trigger Zone was recorded on November 4th and 7th, 1998 during two live concerts in Berlin by 9 people:

Wolfgang Fuchs –– sopranino sax, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet
Peter van Bergen –– tenor sax
Axel Dörner –– trumpet
Radu Malfatti –– trombone
Melvyn Poore –– tuba
Phil Wachsmann –– violin, live-electronics
Fernando Grillo –– double bass
Jean-Marc Montera –– electric guitar
Paul Lytton –– percussion, live-electronics

None of the music they play is pre-conceived in any form; it is live improvised music. The King Übü Orchestrü is an 18 year old ensemble that has released three recordings: Music Is Music Is... from 1984, Binaurality from 1992, and Trigger Zone from 1998 (released in 2001). Wolfgang Fuchs is the ‘leader’ of the group, insofar as he handpicks people to play in the ensemble for each performance they are offered; it should go without saying that there are no rehearsals, only gigs. Music Is Music Is... featured 10 people (including one “in absentia”), Binaurality retained 4 of those folks and added 6 more (all of whom were actually present that time), and their third release keeps 6 from the previous recording (including the original 4) while adding 3 new faces. Out of the 9 musicians heard on Trigger Zone there are 7 countries of birth represented: the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Uganda, and England.

What sets Trigger Zone apart from a myriad of other improvised recordings is an overwhelming sensitivity to the sound of the group and not the individual performers. Rarely is more than half the ensemble playing at any one time. I don’t even think there is a moment on the entire record where the entire ensemble plays at the same time. But that’s misleading: knowing when to be quiet is as much a sign of good playing, good improvising, as making sound. These performers aren’t quiet because they are restrained or nervous, they’re quiet because they want to hear––and they want us to hear––what is going on, what sounds are being produced, and what those sounds are doing.

The music on this CD reminds me of what it feels like to have a brain. In fact, it sounds like a musical reproduction of the chemical, biological, neural, microscopic processes of thinking: this music is what thinking sounds like. Thoughts get started in one place and finish in another, appearing and disappearing with no conscious power on our part. Sounds issue from one source then get immediately affected, -snap!- disappear, and -!boom- justlikethat reappear retransmitted through another source, like in the middle of the opening section when the bassist finishes what the drummer started with only microseconds between the two actions. That initial sensation that instantly ignites. Then a moment of rest until something else happens and before you can tell what it was the reaction to it has already come and gone and soon you’re floundering inside the speed of your own ideas and they’ve left your ability to grasp them, communicating them to someone else is completely out of the question, it’s all behind you so quickly, but your ideas, Oh, the ideas, Oh, the sounds, they’re so rich and beautiful and fertile and clear and if only you could catch up, you’ve got so much to share from the thoughts that have already passed through you, there they go, but instead you just sense the perfection of all these mental molecules resonating cuz, uh, you, just, can’t, process, all, that, so, fast.

We may try to think about one thing but then something else will pop up and forbid us from directing where that initial thought goes, like when the bass clarinet overtakes the soft, lushy texture at the end of the opening section. Even when we’re concentrating, we’re trying to push thought to move inside or around something. Exactly where we’re going to go with that thought isn’t plannable, isn’t knowable in advance, or we wouldn’t have to concentrate so much on keeping track of where our thoughts are going. It’s impossible to identify the origins of our thoughts in the same way that we can’t identify the origins of all the sounds here––was that bowed, blowed, struck, scraped? I hear Trigger Zone as an exteriorization of what thinking is like: impossible to control, exciting, aggravating, hilarious, inescapable, richly purposeful, ambiguously meaningful, potentially valuable, potentially invaluable, immeasurable, unfinalizable. Not that we always care what’s going on in our heads, but there’s always something going on, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Sometimes it’s not pleasant to listen to. 40 seconds into the 4th track some piercingly high metallic cymbal-bowing happens. Neither are our thoughts always pleasant. The scraping only lasts 16 seconds, but can we say that much of our unwanted ideas, our uninvited desires? Everything recurs, whether we like it or not. When the scraping is over, it is still present as musicians react as listeners to its effect and its memory lives and produces new sets of effects. The performer who made the sound gets quiet. When we have a thought that we’re not comfortable with, its very existence in our past consciousness may haunt us: “how could I possibly have thought that?!?”. Or maybe the way the future develops causes us to reevaluate what we’re comfortable with: “I should have never done that. That was stupid. Look at all the bullshit that that set in motion.” One thing is for sure, the music keeps moving and the effects of past actions in time continue to reverberate even when their actual presence is long gone. When the drummer starts bowing some more cymbals in the 8th minute of the same track, he does so with a jagged kind of tentative lurching, like he just wants to see what’ll happen this time. Well, he gets some eerily gentle, ghostlike yelping feedback from the wind instruments. They might feel as haunted by his past as he should be.

The 2nd track starts with some nasty bitter reed-biting then trumpet air tunnels seep in while violin horsehair bowstrings start slowly rubbing against the rough grain of the strings. The breathy trumpet stuff doesn’t sound that interesting when it starts, like a vacuum hose turned up into the air when it could be cleaning my car. But, gradually, in the context of the ear ouching high squeaks from the bitten reeds, they become interesting. The reeds acquire a birdlike quality and the trumpet becomes windlike. My ears are simultaneously irritated by what one person’s doing and comforted by what someone else is up to. The reality is split/together. Hmm, that sounds familiar, like at least one moment in every social gathering anyone has ever attended---being in one place physically and another mentally, together/split. After all, we’d be pretty deranged if we were always completely comfortable, stimulated, and content in every social situation. But, as with the music, it’s the movement of the scene, the shifting dramas created by new contexts, which provide real satisfaction and room to play in hopeful and joyous anticipation. The trumpet might whizz and the reeds might screech, but that just sets the stage for the gorgeous pointillistic rainforest of tweets, scurries, breaths and storms that emerges moments later.

Trigger Zone is a document of mixed simultaneous perspectives, congealing in the listener an experience of multiple emotional allegiances. 33 minutes and 30 seconds into the final track some metal percussion frolicking, fast clean violin back-and-forth bowing, trumpet whisphering, sax hop-popping and dive-bombing shimmies into our ears. The electric guitarist, sounding like a bored misfit, plucks out some sort of heavy metal fake-book noodling. At the first introduction of this gesture, it’s like all the other instruments wrinkle their brow, turn to the side and try to continue by ignoring it. At the 34th minute it gets really bad, and louder. By the middle of the 34th minute it has gotten so bad that it sounds like the band begins struggling and fumbling with how to respond carefully, not disparagingly or confrontationally, yet still get rid of it. At the end of the 34th minute the repetitive cliched note wanking gets drowned out by a rising synchronous wave of violin, bass, tuba, bass clarinet and tenor sax, mounting a cohesed crescendo of sustained bowing and blowing. When the crescendo dies down, the noodling has given way to a gentle wah-wah reverberating that quickly fades out. Almost everyday I’ve got to deal with some surprise obstruction to my agenda; it’s common and aggravating that I frequently self-generate the dilemma. A familiar intertwining of emotions takes place once this self-imposed problem has ceased to be: I sense an ultimately satisfying joy from the irritating necessity of crossing off from my list some duty of life administration I had to perform. That’s the kind of pleasure I experience when the guitar makes itself absent.

This type of scenario is typical of this music. You might be listening and really getting into it and then someone will come in, with an electric guitar for instance, and make some totally shitty noise that fucks up where everything was going. Like relaxing ina convivial party and having your beloved say something so dumb or so questionable, and with such assurance, that the words stamp on your desire and you’re left with the crumpled embarrassment of having been so enamoured. You love both your beloved and the music the guitarist normally makes, but, damn, how do you reconcile that with the unpleasant, downright upsetting, expressions they produce every once in a while, and which they sincerely hold dear?

And yet the music keeps going––incorporating the changes, establishing new relationships––and the ability to reignite attraction quickly becomes possible again. And that is only in the immediate aftermath. After all, sometimes things only make sense in retrospect, after reflecting on how the forces that were put in motion by one event were channeled and reworked, recreating new, potentially more valuable and earnest situations.

I’ll be listening to this album and, frequently, not be able to tell if what I’m hearing is really there. Like around the 9th minute of track two: “Did someone just bellow through some hollow pole or what?” Unidentifiable voices and groans emerge, dissipate, and lurk back up, but I can’t tell if they’re lurking in my perception or something else is feeding my imagination. It’s hard to tell whether the sounds are coming from your attunement with what is happening or the speakers are the voices in your head. The musicians possess a distinct talent for conjuring emotions that you can’t name but which slip quickly inside what you’ve always known and what you’ve been aware of, but which you’ve simply been unable to articulate yourself.

Strong, well poised, vivid silences are as much what Trigger Zone is about as anything. Most members of the ensemble, at any given time, are silent––evaluating the past, absorbing the present, and anticipating the future. Axel Dörner, the trumpet player, blows his ass off on this record, but that doesn’t mean he’s flailing his fingers up and down the keys and spastically pounding out thousand note solos on every track. No, he’s found emitting some warbled sputter tongued trumpet breath, pausing, listening (maybe thinking about his train ride home, some song he heard the club playing before the band started, what’s going on in that booth in the corner or where the hell that chugging lilt is coming from), then throwing out some wavy trumpet tunnel hum singing. The same way a musician might opt to be silent for a while, the different parts of our brain are active at different times. When everything is stimulated and everybody wants a piece of the action—thoughts coming at us from every direction—it’s hard to pay attention to anything, much less understand any of it. But we can all remember what it feels like to be so overwhelmed– to be absolutely unable to know how to proceed–, which may explain why the tensest moments on this record are so subdued––underscored with silence, intermittent action and the memory of outbursts tangling. Listen to the quiet during the 18th and 19th minute of track 4.

Enjoying Trigger Zone requires no specialized training in musical theory, no knowledge of musical history or jargon. All it requires is an ability to appreciate sound and what it can do to you. Still, I’ve put Trigger Zone on 2 or 3 times over the last month and been unable to get through more than two minutes of it. I just couldn’t take it right then. And I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’m totally in love with it, even though it is impossible to pay exclusive, undivided attention to this album for 68 minutes. That’s one reason I keep coming back to it: I’m always missing things. After it’s over, I frequently think “what the hell was going on there?” Sometimes I’ll be making dinner and it’ll sound jovial and fun. I’ll sit down to eat and it’ll sound ominous, like the anticipation of a nightmare. Or I’ll be trying to read something and it’ll get unescapably loud and irritating. Usually it just sounds like fucking weird ass shit, evoking many directions at once, full of sounds that are cool and funny, sad and unexpected, subtle and persuasive, profound and absurd. Just like my mind.

- Andrew Choate

Gustav Mahler - Symphonies 1-9 and Adagio from Symphony 10

Hänssler Classics 093130000

SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg
Conductor: Michael Gielen

Leonard Bernstein accompanied his ground-breaking integral Mahler cycle for Columbia with an essay proclaiming, boldly and unequivocally, that Mahler’s time had come. No one facilitated acceptance of Mahler more than Bernstein, and no one was more aware of his accomplishments than Bernstein, as demonstrated by the almost complete, somewhat uneven, self-indulgent but largely satisfying set he made for Deutsche Gramophon, missing only Symphony of a Thousand at the time of his death in 1990. It seems that every survey to emerge since has been either a blatant reaction against Bernstein’s largess and freedom or an imitation, homage or otherwise. On the one hand, we’ve experienced (sometimes endured?) the fascinatingly deconstructionist renderings of Sinopoli and the more even-tempered and equally rewarding readings by Boulez, both fairly far afield from Bernstein’s energetic emotiveness. On the other extreme, Simon Rattle’s traversal (Will he ever set down number 8?) often shocks by out-extreming Bernstein, Mahler’s not-so-nascent moment form pushed and stretched into sharp relief under Rattle’s merciless but obviously dedicated baton.

While towering and undeniable accomplishments, these digital cycles always leave me pining for history, for a long-gone excitement engendered merely by the effort of getting through the score rather than simply being the product of one leader’s vision, to whatever degree of single-minded unity or diversity. The sure-fire steadiness and “organicism” of Horenstein’s Mahler, the focused flexibility of Kubelik, the supposedly authentic episodicity of Mengelberg—I’ve returned to these again and again for perspective and balance. Sure, times and interpretations have changed, and part of the allure for me may be in the grittily unreliable orchestral playing itself, but these Mahler veterans somehow let each topic speak for itself while maintaining some semblance of linearity.

Yet, it may be just such a pluralistic vision that makes Michael Gielen’s Mahler symphony recordings, newly boxed and re-released by Hänssler Classics this past summer, so important, so revelatory. Recorded in rough chronological proximity to those cycles mentioned above, Gielen’s set stands out precisely because it combines a razor-sharp sense of detail and structure with an equally keen sense of history, both musical and human.

Any follower of 20th century music would not have missed the first recording of Ligeti’s Requiem, a technically flawed but thrilling and disturbing account that has not been equaled. Somewhat drier but finely chiseled is Gielen’s approach to Schonberg’s two Chamber Symphonies and piano concerto, pianist Alfred Brendel proving an excellent foil twice in the same work over thirty-six years. The same can be said of Gielen’s pioneering Moses und Aron—wonderfully structured and executed but bettered since in terms of energy and dramatic insight. Knowing these recordings, I expected similar results from the Mahler set, consequently ignoring it for ten years, there being no lack of recordings worth exploring.

Then, without any warning, entirely unaware of who conducted, I heard Gielen’s first. Perhaps the closest comparison is Claudio Abbado’s mature but tightly-wound live digital recording with Berlin; both are singularly transparent yet full at the right moments, bristling with undercurrents of demonic energy that are unleashed at points of climax. The difference is that Gielen has all the excitement coupled with an extraordinary wealth of new insight. That oft-sited cuckoo motive, the descending fourth heralding new day in the first movement, is highlighted across voices throughout, simultaneously giving the music a decidedly pointilistic bent and further unifying a consciously disparate construction. Never is energy sacrificed for detail, and the converse is also true.

Further investigation of the cycle revealed another layer of discovery, one that I’ve never heard achieved by one conductor. Somehow, inexplicably, Gielen renders both the lovelorn youth of symphony 1 and the dark death-ridden nostalgia of symphony 9, and he makes both extremes convincing, even vital. The works in-between actually seem to be one narrative, autobiography as musical construct, and never once did I feel the vision to be forced or false. In fact, I was unaware of the trajectory until I endured Gielen’s incomparably restless take on Symphony 9’s finale, the most disunified version to have scarred my ears. Totally and irreparably opposed to Bernstein’s lugubriously heartfelt digital reading, this beautifully elegiac rondo becomes a testament to change, to the uncertainty underlying the vague oneness behind change and to the process of discovering this dialectic.

Only after I’d understood Gielen’s real accomplishment could I then return to the other symphonies and perceive the path. A superficially disappointing Resurrection then became the unwitting precursor to Schonberg I’d always thought it to be; like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, it is shown to embody romanticism at it’s finest and most fatal, dying on the vine even in full bloom. It signifies a form that has outlived its relevance, and it was down to Symphony 3’s first movement to revamp and redefine formal procedures.

The whole cycle continues along a similarly dualistic road, the journey becoming the important consideration in light of, sometimes despite, Gielen’s remarkable ears, skill and intellect. Works that have been treated individually as era-straddlers by other interpreters are quite unified and logical in Gielen’s hands, notably Symphony 7, so wonderfully troublesome to Barbarrolli. Symphony 6, especially the epically tragic last movement, conveys more optimism than most other readings, the opening flourish and string melody subdued but insistent. So for once, we are given a cycle containing Mahler’s vision and the road leading to its manifestation.

The set is certainly not perfect. Some of the playing is just not powerful enough, not opulent enough, even though a remarkable consistency of balance is maintained over the 16 years of this set’s history. There are a few roughshod moments, too brief to mention, and they pale in the light of Gielen’s marvelous conducting. In fact, they provide a refreshing humanity to the proceedings. I can’t recommend the set for one or two readings, which explains why I have all but avoided detailed mention of individual works here. Every Mahler enthusiast is going to have a favorite version of any given symphony, and for him, nothing else will do. I can say that no other cycle I’ve heard in recent years has represented Mahler as completely as this one, and that each listening reinforces just how well the set works as a unit. In many ways, this is the most “modern” of the digital cycles and should be welcomed for that reason alone.

~ Marc Medwin

Cheap Jazz

Prestige Records was one of the most important jazz labels of the 1950s and early 1960s. Though the music moved beyond the bluesy blowing sessions that were Bob Weinstock’s preferred format, and labels like Impulse! and ESP arose accordingly, there was a time when Prestige and its various subsidiaries were more than worthy competitors with Blue Note and Verve – they were the home of some of the most exciting performers in jazz. The label’s single-disc best-ofs, offering quickie introductions to its highest-profile performers, have been reissued with a new name – “Prestige Profiles” – and a bonus disc appended to each volume in the series, with album tracks by various other Prestige artists that encourage deeper catalog exploration. I got four of these in the mail the other day.

The Sonny Rollins volume culls from sessions ranging from 1951 to 1956. There are some puzzling choices among its ten tracks. It’s nice to hear two selections from Saxophone Colossus – “St. Thomas” and “Moritat” – and the title cut from Tenor Madness, wherein Rollins and John Coltrane go at each other full-strength for over twelve minutes. And “I Feel A Song Coming On,” from Plus Four, the disc that was a Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet album in all but name, is a performance that any newcomer to the Rollins oeuvre should hear. But a crucial aspect of the saxophonist’s skills goes undocumented. There are no pianoless performances on this disc, and it’s simply undeniable that Rollins has made some of his greatest achievements in that format. Were it up to me, the version of “My Ideal” featuring Earl Coleman on vocals, and the short 1951 take of “On A Slow Boat To China” would be chopped out in favor of something from Way Out West – if not “Freedom Suite” itself. But I’ve never heard a truly bad Sonny Rollins track, particularly from these early years, so any quibbles are the perfect as the enemy of the very, very good more than anything else.

The disc devoted to introducing Coleman Hawkins to jazz neophytes is an intriguing proposition, but even farther from being a complete portrait than the Rollins compilation. After all, the saxophonist rose to prominence in the prewar era, recording his signature track, “Body And Soul,” in 1939. The earliest session here is from 1958 – the latest, from 1962. So Hawkins is heard not as a man playing with his peers, but as an elder statesman buoyed up by the next generation of players. And an interesting batch of players it is, particularly on “I’ll Never Be The Same,” where the backing band features guitarist Kenny Burrell, bassist Ron Carter, and...drummer Andrew Cyrille. It’s exactly this type of collision between old masters and up-and-coming avant-gardists that makes mid-century jazz albums exciting.

When I tore the envelope open, I was most interested in the Eric Dolphy disc. I’ve heard Dolphy with Mingus and Coltrane, but his catalog as a leader has been a corner of jazz I’ve never taken the time to explore, except for Out To Lunch, which I didn’t really care for. The cuts on this comp smoke, though, and they do exactly what a single-disc best-of should do – they make me want to pick up the individual albums at first opportunity. Of the 10 tracks on this 78-minute release, three are from the June 1961 Five Spot sessions – one from At The Five Spot Vol. 1, one from the Memorial Album, and one from the rarities roundup Here And There. But the two studio tracks each from Out There, Far Cry and Outward Bound are even more exciting, particularly “On Green Dolphin Street” and “G.W.,” which feature Dolphy galloping into battle alongside trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, pianist Jaki Byard and drummer Roy Haynes.

The John Coltrane compilation held few surprises for me – I own several of the albums represented, and have heard most of the others. On top of that, pianist Red Garland and bassist Paul Chambers are present on seven of the disc’s 11 tracks. Two tracks, though – “The Way You Look Tonight” and “On A Misty Night” – are from albums credited to pianists Mal Waldron and Tadd Dameron, respectively, and those were new and highly worthwhile musical experiences. Once again, though, the Prestige Profile of John Coltrane is incomplete. This is the melodic, bluesy Coltrane, not the Coltrane of hour-long takes on “My Favorite Things.” So anybody who lets this disc be their guide to further record shopping better limit themselves to more Prestige discs, at least for the first little while.

The bonus discs appended to each of these compilations are geared to the artist represented on the main CD. The disc paired with the Rollins best-of features tracks by Miles Davis (playing Rollins’ “Oleo”), Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown, Benny Golson, Dexter Gordon (tackling another Rollins tune, “Airegin”), Oliver Nelson and a cut from the Hank Mobley/Al Cohn/John Coltrane/Zoot Sims album Tenor Conclave. Choose to investigate Coleman Hawkins’ Prestige career, and you get glimpses of Gene Ammons, Benny Carter, Illinois Jacquet, Shorty Baker, Doc Cheatham, Buck Clayton, Wardell Gray and other, similarly old-school players. The Eric Dolphy bonus disc offers Booker Ervin, Yusef Lateef, Steve Lacy with Don Cherry, Don Ellis, Ron Carter (featuring Dolphy and Mal Waldron as sidemen) and two more tracks from Rollins and Coltrane. And the Coltrane extra disc covers similar territory, with more tracks from Dolphy, Lacy, Lateef, Waldron, Rollins, Mobley, Davis and Red Garland. Each of these compilations is as worthwhile as the single-artist disc it’s paired with; the collective packaging, especially when the low price is considered, makes the Prestige Profiles series one of the best marketing ideas mainstream jazz has had in awhile. Labels with deep-ish catalogs, like AUM Fidelity and Eremite, might want to consider appending similar sampler discs to a few of their releases – it certainly couldn’t hurt.

The Vejtables - Feel...The Vejtables

There are two reasons why I think this is a very interesting disc to talk about. First off, there's a clutch of songs on here I'm really addicted to; I'd rate this is as an essential obscurity for fans of the two or three 60s pop prototypes it mines. Secondly, it mines these prototypes so unabashedly and successfully that it offers a solid conceptual handle on the phenomenon of idiomaticity so central to discussions of the avant-garde music in which it often fades into the ether. So I shall regale you on my currently preferred very non-avant-garde song-drugs and hope we walk away with some thoughts more broadly useful.

Before going any further, let me as frank as possible. I'm obsessed with The Byrds. You need to know this, because there are songs on this disc that basically sound like The Byrds except with the familiar male vocals swapped for splendid female vocals. Simple enough, but, damn, this is just what the doctor ordered. I've been listening to The Byrds absurdly often for the past few years, catching up on an timeless and astounding chapter in the history of song music. Writing this review, I'm tempted to go off on some marathon tangent about The Byrds, but it's really not necessary.

Saying "sounds like" is the big point I'd like to dwell on here. I've played the first five Byrds albums literally dozens of times each in the past year or two alone, with an almost academic obsession of knowing the songs in and out, forwards and backwards. In a way I've tried to simulate the experience of being there in 1965 when the first one hit, spending time with each album and moving slowly forward chronologically as I "release" each one to myself. So I chance to get this Vejtables disc about a month or two ago and, wham, it hits me hard right away and as I play it over and over I keep thinking "damn, this has to be a Byrds cover", but I really couldn't place any of the songs in a specific way at all. What a bizarre feeling, to be playing songs over and over thinking they are covers of songs I know in and out, forwards and backwards. It drove me nuts, but only in the cognitive background as my total immersive pleasure in The Vejtables jangle-blissed out the foreground to the point where it really didn't matter. So I decide to write this review and force myself to get to the bottom of this matter. After having played this Vejtables disc a good 20-30 times (or at least the handful of songs that really kill me on here), just yesterday I finally looked at the song titles, credits, liner notes, etc for the first time. No hint of there being a Byrds cover. I played the first five Byrds albums back-to-back to see if I could catch any quotes or the like. Nada. Wow. There's not a single Byrds song that sounds specifically similar to these songs, and in fact there's only one cover song on this disc and I'd never heard the original before. These songs are originals penned by a short-lived San Francisco era band in the period of 1965-66 that only had one song to even crack the top 100 chart. But still, damn, there are a handful of songs here that really truly feel like The Byrds but with a great female singer! And they're as good an example of that formula as you'd hope for!

Then again, maybe these songs really sound like some other pop group from the same era, rendered anonymous in my mind through the boggling quantity of similar music made in that era. For several years about half of my music-listening has been devoted to the pop music of 1965-1969, trying to sort my way through the endless stream of great songs put on record in that seminal burst of rock creativity, but it still can blur together in the most unsettling ways. The blurring is enhanced by the simple fact that I don't really pay close attention to this kind of music in general when I'm listening. Once in a while, I get totally fixated in rapture, but it's generally some kind of soundtrack to other life/mind activities, and my listening concentration is generally reserved for avant-garde free improv. As well as I know a big chunk of this music, I'm continually amazed by the degree of idiomaticity achieved in this domain. Bands would literally spring up in every town across America and elsewhere virtually imitating the latest breaking development in pop songcraft. Seemingly every permutation of elements was tested for every song template. Sound familiar? Yep, this is the recipe that all traditional music follows to some extent and in a global socio-informational context like the 20th century the process can run amok. Take a look at the history of jazz and 90s dance music for two profoundly analogous examples. Idioms get beaten into the ground and every tiny twist in the formula is like a new scene, to the utter delight of the folks who've installed the right musical grammars in their minds. You like X? Well, here's a few hundred other things you're sure to like. Modulo the sociological scope of the artform, it's really no different in essence from any traditional music, whether it's Indian ragas, Italian folk dances, klezmer, or whatever. Finding a musical formula that works is vastly more useful and desirable to human beings than finding a new one. Tradition will always be deeper than novelty. 60s pop is traditionalist business-as-usual gone exponential in the incipient throes of the information era.

And thank the computationally intractable universe for it, because a band like The Vejtables counts about as much for me as any of the canonized and famed groups of the era. It's a reminder of how much a culture's canons can be arbitrary shams. For many fans of 60s pop, this disc might seem second-rate, but it's first-rate to me. The proof is in the playback frequency. I often play pop albums in my bathroom stereo while showering, shaving, etc. Half-awake and blurry-eyed in the morning, I'll just press the "play" button without having to worry about selecting music for that little chunk of quality listening time. In practice, I simply leave the same disc in the player until I grow weary of it in some way. It's a great way to really test a pop album. Last year I had one of the Byrds albums in there for over a month! So here's the data: this Vejtables disc lasted for almost two weeks before getting ejected. Actually, sometimes I feel guilty for playing something too much when I think about the hundreds of discs I've got sitting around waiting to even get a single audition. I can't say I'd really gotten weary of it as much as I'd felt I really "mastered" it well enough. Well, the only way to put this Vejtables disc to rest is to review it! In the course of playing it again and again and really paying attention in the hope of finding something interesting to say, I'm sure to wear it out. At least temporarily, that is, because there's some songs here that'll make my permanent high-rotation 60s pop canon.

"Cold Dreary Morning" sets my spine tingling with warm joy, and I can play it repeatedly without losing much of the effect. In the comically elaborate quest for the gems amongst the endless piles of filler undertaken by obsessive pop-sound-processors like me, it's songs like this that justify everything. Like those others, the song is oh so familiar sounding. I swear it could be a cover of a tune from the first Fairport Convention album or Eclection, two of the folk-rock platters I'm hopelessly addicted to. "It's a cold dreary morning. It's a drab, crabby day... Watch men live or watch men die, and there's no difference...We're a cold, dreary people; we're a drab, crabby bunch..." These bleak words are sung with such cheerful, serene, Grace Slick style authority that they stand in sublime contrast to the scrappy, upbeat, uplifting feeling of the song.

As far as the scrappiness goes, chalk it up to the fantastic drumkit work on this track. It's pretty basic playing, but the rhythms have such exuberance and vim I can focus in on them alone and get my jollies. The cymbals get absolutely smashed and bashed in an unusually dense offering of accents, a handful per measure at times. The rawness and energy reminds me of how important the drumkit work in classic late 60s Fairport Convention was to making that music folk-ROCK and not just folk. It's all in good clean time, but with a restless, almost punkish energy and she really bashes the living daylights out of those cymbals. For a 60s band, the gender is a surprise. Nowadays it's bad taste to refer to the gender of instrumentalists, though sadly still a common habit, but in the 60s it was a bold and rare phenomenon to challenge gender norms and people took that stuff pretty seriously. Having just finally read the wonderfully informative essay in the liner notes to this Vejtables disc, I'm surprised to learn that this awesome drumkit playing was the work of a teenage girl who started playing drumkit about one week before her first gig with the band in 1965! It's a nice story: her dad was a drumkitter and always wanted his little girl to take up the trapset, but she resisted until a chance event at a rock club got her invited to join a band as the drumkitter, at which point her many years of piano lessons, love of music, and natural singing talent suddenly came to the fore and made for a group that launched into a promising career before anyone could blink. Even if the original motivation to have Jan Errico play in the band was heavily based on the gimmick-aspect of her gender and nubile attractiveness (there was another band in the same scene making a big splash with a female behind the traps), she turned out to be a real talent as a instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter, all the more remarkable for her young age and lack of experience.

The group got a lot of minor breaks, but no major breaks, and Errico left the band in 1966. She wound up in The Mojo Men, a band I'm looking forward to checking out soon. Before that lineup dissolved, it had released two exceptional singles to little response and tried to release a single under Jan Errico's name as a solo artist, for which Errico adopted the name "Jan Ashton". She recounts: "I picked that name because it sounded British. I adored Paul McCartney and his girlfriend was Jane Asher." The single was never released, and the band moved on to various lineups without Errico. "Cold Dreary Morning" was the A-side and went criminally unreleased until 1985's issue of Nuggets, Vol. 7: Early San Francisco. The equally great B-side, "Smile Smile Smile" is one of the two Errico-vocal tracks on the disc that finally saw the light of day on this 1995 Sundazed reissue that collects every last morsel the band laid down. The other Errico cut unveiled here is a killer alternate version of "I Still Love You", the A-side to the band's first single from 1965.

1965 is fairly early in the game for this stuff, and here's a band who really dished it up about as well as the big names of the same months. They were from the same San Francisco scene that the Beau Brummels came from, and shared both musical qualities and the seminal support of the Autumn record label. I've spun the first Brummels album and their other early work a few times, but it hasn't stuck and is pretty well filed in the archives at this point, whereas The Vejtables are in heavy rotation. It's not just because of Errico's great female vocals, though; the tracks with male vocals that comprise the bulk of the band's output are excellent too. Historically, though, the Beau Brummels are a very important band. They were the first California band to break big and were even a significant influence on The Byrds. On the other hand, The Vejtables are a real obscurity at this point. It's really enlightening to see how all this music was happening around the same time and interacting in all sorts of subtle and retrospectively surprising ways. On a site billing itself as The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, I found a "Chronology of San Francisco Rock 165-1969" documenting a remarkable event: "May 14, 1965 “Boss of the Bay,” KYA presents the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, Beau Brummels, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and the Vejtables, at Civic Auditorium." So The Vejtables were contenders in the scene for sure. Uncovering the tangled history of these song styles and listening to some of these gems tempers the tendency to put famous bands like The Byrds, or even the Brummels, on a pedestal above the also-rans and lose sight of the arbitrariness that drives the successes and failures of the commercial music business. I'd be the last person to question the monumental greatness of The Byrds, but, damn, a few of these Vejtables tracks with Errico's vocals are right up there!

Another historically intriguing connection is the role of Sly Stone (then known as Sylvester Stewart before he became a pop icon) in the group's music. According to an excellent article on Stone, "After Stone took courses from Vallejo Junior College in music theory, he met pioneering radio DJ Tom Donahue in 1964, who asked Sly to record and produce for his Autumn Records." Errico and Stone knew each other from before the Vejtables days, and Stone was an active artistic factor in the recording of the group's early singles, cited for an advanced creative sensibility and studio panache.

There's more to be said about the un-self-conscious acceptance of the traditionalist essence and the quest for refined idiomaticity that marked these groundbreaking days in the history of pop music, which is hopelessly lost in today's sterile mass-market music culture with its tenuous adoption of the originality criterion and discouragement of cover tunes. The lone cover tune here is Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on my Mind". Paxton created the song in the Fall of 1964, and by the time The Vejtables took a stab at it in early 1966, three other acts had already hit the charts with their own versions! Mitchell Trio, Peter, Paul, & Mary, and Marianne Faithful, to be specific. What's more, according to William Ruhlmann's researches for All Music Guide, the song went on to enter the songbooks of a boggling array of acts in the following years: Charley Pride, Hank Locklin, Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton, The Move, Neil Diamond, Bill Anderson, Chet Atkins, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Glen Campbell, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, José Feliciano, Flatt & Scruggs, Anne Murray, Willie Nelson, the Seekers, and Hank Snow! I can't imagine something like that happening in the current popular music climate. In any case, it's a damn fine song, and I'd be surprised if I'd enjoy anyone's version more than the Vejtables'. Then again, Sandy Denny's takes are unfortunate gaps in my collection of her uniformly impeccable work, and she's likely to set the standard. It appears that she issued a take on 1967's pre-Fairport Sandy and Johnny and an alternate version came out on 1970's It's Sandy Denny.

If the six Errico cuts leave me with a nebulously delicious "déjà entendu" feeling, the generous helping of eleven non-Errico male-vocal tracks on the disc are downright maddening. I hardly have the fortitude to investigate the matter, especially since they largely mine a Them/Yardbirds type idiom I'm not really attracted to or versed in. As far as I can tell, they're credited as originals, but you can't get more idiomatic than a cut like "Feel the Music", with its blatant nods to the famous song "________". Aaaaargh!! Those blanks are maddening! In any case, with those six Errico vocal cuts, I'd file this disc under "essential 60s rock", but even without them the remaining cuts are strong enough to warrant a hearty "recommended for specialized lovers of the era" rating. The proof is in the playback, and as much as I pick out the Errico tracks for high rotation, I've let the full disc spin a good many times without any urges to pull the plug on the group's completely uncelebrated later work as it hobbled on its last legs through various lineups before crashing to the history books.

~Michael Anton Parker

Dexter Gordon - Stella By Starlight

Steeplechase 36036

Historically speaking, radio’s been both friend and foe to jazz listener sensibilities. Broadcasts from innumerable venues brought the music into countless homes and establishments. A large chunk of archival recordings are sourced from these classic concert documents. Where a complication lies is in the vagaries of the production customs that sometimes governed these broadcasts. Announcers intrude with regularity over the music (the insufferable Symphony Sid, anyone?). Station breaks edit solos and sets into commercial-friendly morsels. Coupled with the technological limitations of reel-to-reel tape the results can be checkered and sometimes downright vexing when it comes to what’s omitted or lost.

Witness the recent release of Coltrane’s Half Note Recordings from the spring of ’65. What’s there is incredible. But a pang of regret is practically inevitable when the purchaser realizes that nearly 35 minutes of the monumental title cut went unrecorded and the version of “Afro Blue” only survived in fragmentary form (a gaff repeated on Live in Seattle from months later, what’s with the reverse-kismet when it comes to Coltrane’s readings of Mongo Santamaria’s most famous tune?). The same sort of situation colors the music on Stella By Starlight, the latest and purportedly final installment in Steeplechase’s series of vintage Dexter Gordon broadcasts made by Danmarks Radio from the Montmarte Jazzhus, Copenhagen.

This sixth entry differs from the previous ones in a few notable respects. Firstly, there’s the presence of altoist Pony Poindexter in a second horn slot. Poindexter was on European tour at the start of 1966 and found time to sit in with Gordon’s working combo. Neither man was a stranger to two horn team-ups, Gordon locking congenial saxes with the likes of Wardell Gray, Gene Ammons and James Moody among a host of others over the course of his career. Mark Gardner’s exceptionally readable liners also make mention of an earlier meeting between the two in ’62 that included Billy Mitchell, Phil Woods, Gene Quill and Pepper Adams. Man, sign me up for a copy that one!

The program here focuses on three loquacious readings of standards. Solos are routinely lengthy and there are lots of them. Pianist Kenny Drew and bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Gordon’s regular Montmarte confreres make up the rhythm section along with guest drummer Makaya Ntshoko, pinch hitting for Alex Riel who apparently had the night off. The title track commences in media res with the front men finishing the tail end of the theme statement. Gordon takes the floor early, holding forth with a robust extended foray as Drew comps somewhat reticently beneath him. Poindexter’s solo suffers from a somewhat shrill tonality in spots. But he surprises with a lively scat-sung rejoinder as follow-up. Drew and Pedersen have their respective says in succession next as Ntshoko keeps competent, if garden-variety time. A string of loose sax exchanges and final return to theme predictably signs the action off.

Occupying just over a third of an hour “Satin Doll” follows the same general template with minor deviations and includes another priceless Pedersen improvisation. “Round About Midnight” finds the band starting to gel in earnest and contains the finest playing by Poindexter of the date as he adjusts to the smoky ballad tempo of the piece. The tempered work of the rest of the band is gorgeously on target too, Ntshoko whose minimalist brushes add just the right amount of diaphanous texture. Gordon’s sensuous baritone inaugurates all but the title number with sultry spoken prefaces to further seduce the crowd. “Sonnymoon For Two” is present only as a maddeningly abbreviated half-minute taste, those misguided Danmarks engineers possibly fading out for what might have been station identification. Then again, beggars can’t be choosers as they say. And when it comes to recorded work Gordon’s certainly falls under the header “Finite Supply”.

~ Derek Taylor

Erwin Helfer Trio - Careless Love

The Sirens 5011

Yesterday afternoon I received an ‘out-of-the-blue’ phone call that made my week, hell, maybe even my month. Jazz drummer and part-time pharmacist Alvin Fielder, a doyen in his own right, rang to discuss the prospect of an interview project documenting the life and anecdotes of Arthur Edgehill. Nearly a decade Fielder’s senior, Edgehill played with many of the bebop greats and is probably most familiar to readers as the linchpin of the influential late 50s Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis organ combo with Shirley Scott. Our conversation quickly veered off into an ad-hoc history of post-swing drummers with me the enthusiastic student and Alvin the erudite educator. After replacing the receiver an hour later I discovered my notepad scrawled with a long list of obscure, but by Alvin’s reckoning heavy-hitter, names: Art Martigan, Harold Jones, Joe Charles, Art McKinney, and so on. Any of those fellows jostle the synapses?

What does all this have to do with Erwin Helfer’s new trio disc on The Sirens? Well Helfer’s one of those sort of names, a player who usually doesn’t garner mention in popular jazz discourse, but has played an important part in the preservation and promotion of earlier forms of the music. Their numbers are near countless and the admirable work of imprints like The Sirens that ensures they remain remembered. Careless Love isn’t all that remarkable in the surface sum of its parts. Helfer fronts a trio with Chicago sidemen John Whitfield on bass and Avreeayl Ra handling drum kit. It’s a bit surprising to see the latter man in this setting given his past avant credentials in the bands of Ari Brown, Nicole Mitchell and most recently as the engine room of the Ernest Dawkins New Horizons Ensemble. But his supple and versatile touch fits right in, a preference for lithe brushwork and simple stick play adding even more bounce to already highly carbonated numbers like the opener “This is Better Than I Thought It Was Boogie.” Engineer Bradley Parker-Sparrow invests the music with a burnished, intimate fidelity and wisely leaves in the various vocal encouragements of the band members to further the feel of convivial rent party revelry.

Other tracks extend the optimistic flair of Helfer’s sturdy, frills-averse approach. The title cut strolls out slow on a gentle bass and brushes beat, the leader’s right hand shaping bright, gospel-dyed rolls. “Blue Monk” and the closing “Jambalaya” advance the merits of the trio’s inclusive ears. Helfer plays the first tune fairly straight, but slips tiny off-kilter collisions in at several points as Ra once again fashions a carefully brushed time beside him. If anything the jagged, stride-inflected preamble to “On the Sunny Side of the Street” sounds even more attuned to angular Monkish decorum than the earlier cover. “Jambalaya” salutes the influence of one time Ra employer Professor Longhair with sprightly syncopations and a plump bayou bass throb. Tracks like “Georgia” and “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” the trad jazz equivalent of hardtack biscuits and gravy, receive welcome spice and flavor thanks to Helfer’s tasteful interpolations. “Paris But I Don’t Know Why,” rendered solo, recalls the classical-fused Ragtime experiments of James P. Johnson. There's so much bellyaching going around these days about “oh, that’s been done before” and “oh gee, that sure is played out.” Seems to me we should all raise tumblers of canned heat and be thankful that this sort of historically-rich and emotionally-nourishing music is still even being played at all.

~ Derek Taylor