Bagatellen

Reuben Radding - Intersections

Pine Ear 1

Geography’s never been much of a reliable compass or container for musical forms. In jazz, coastal distinctions, dividers that were faulty to begin with, have long since crumbled. Bassist Reuben Radding is a prime example of a now prevailing trans-coastal attitude. Hailing originally from Washington, D.C. and a transplant to NYC in 1988, he spent several years in Seattle forging ties to the Emerald City improv community and releasing several albums before heading back east. Despite a routinely active dance card the scope of his interests remains only partially represented by his discography. Like many of his peers he decided to launch his own label, Pine Ear, out of his apartment to combat the growing gap between tape cache and commercial releases.

Fitted with a title reflecting Radding’s bridge-building nature, Intersections illustrates both his creativity and candor. The instrumentation presents a composite of the classic Giuffre and Norvo trios and conveys their spirit if not strict form. Radding’s resonant upright joins with the arid limpidity of Oscar Noriega’s brooding clarinet and Matt Moran’s translucent vibes for a framework that is at once familiar and evergreen. Nine cuts, six scripted by the leader, evince strong chamber improv inclinations. Composition plays as prominent a role as improvisation on the majority of pieces. But just because the map is partially pre-drawn doesn’t mean the paths undertaken are predictable.

“Siren” and “North” are drone experiments largely devoid of meter that together embody one of the more compelling facets of the ensemble, the tonal congruity and overlap achieved in their measured interactions. The fit is especially keen between Noriega and Moran. There are evanescent moments in each piece where it’s hard to parse the two players apart, clarinet voicing ethereal pitches that blend with shimmering pedal sustains. Moran’s frequently been compared to a youthful Bobby Hutcherson and in this setting the likeness is particularly salient as his patterns of notes condense into free-standing rubato clusters.

Radding plays mainly pizzicato, his rich, ever-so-slightly amplified patterns favoring rounded edges and rhythmic tractability rather than sharp points and bracing stops. Noriega and Moran show a similar concern with clarity of line. It’s here that the Norvo comparisons ring most true, though by my reckoning Red never ventured into realms accessing this degree of harmonic freedom. Much of the action pivots on intuitive responsiveness. One person, often Noriega, traces variations on a sinuous motif as the others shape elastic counterpoint. Tracks like “Brush” and “Canal and Lafayette” compress the dulcet and energetic strategy into economical five-minute packages brimming with melodic activity.

Episodes of nebulous déjà vu do arise in the latter half of the program, but they’re more a product of the mellifluous instrumentation than any act of gross repetition by the musicians. Radding ends the outing with a clever arrangement of Messiaen’s “Dance of Fury” that once again brings to mind the contemplative folk form investigations of Giuffre. The disc represents as an propitious debut for Pine Ear, an imprint that will hopefully accomplish the same sort of profile-boosting outcome for Radding that Ginko Leaf mustered for saxophonist James Finn.

~ Derek Taylor

Matthew Shipp - April 2003

SIMPLY IN THEIR WORDS (Installment Tres)

Interview conducted by Tom Sękowski

This is the third of a regular series of "simply in their words" series interviews with some of the musicians from the improvised, jazz and new music genres that are making a real mark on the landscape. I don't want to add Any additional text to these musicians' responses, as my words would only clutter what it is they're trying to convey to the readers.

I remember the effect that hearing David S. Ware's Great Bliss, Vol. 1 (Silkheart) had on me. I kept asking myself, who in the world is that pianist? As it turns out, the mystery was quickly solved. The man taking full charge of the piano was none other than Matthew Shipp. Though his beginnings can be traced back to David S. Ware's infamous quartet, his first work was heard in small groupings with people such as Rob Brown, William Parker and Whit Dickey. For the last few years, he has taken the role of the artistic curator of the Blue Series at Thirsty Ear, not only releasing his own material, but also putting out records by people as varied as DJ Spooky, Craig Taborn and William Parker. What follows is an e-mail interview I had conducted with Matthew Shipp in April of 2003.

Tom Sękowski: I'd read somewhere that at a young age you were listening to Earth, Wind & Fire. I'm a huge fan of Earth, Wind & Fire (the whole disco era, classic soul, etc.), and I've always looked at your music as something that was strongly filled with pop sensibility. Can you expand on how Earth, Wind & Fire fits into the music that you're playing in 2003.

Matthew Shipp: I always approach all genres of music as equal. Genre has no value to me. I always try to melt rhythm melody and harmony down in my mind and use whatever I learn to try to construct my own music, my own idiom. So it does not matter if the source material is an Earth, Wind and Fire song or a Stevie Wonder song or a Monk song.

TS: Tell me a little bit more about David S. Ware and your long-standing association with him? What did you learn through this working relationship?

MS: David S. Ware and I have a natural musical relationship. Our vocabularies naturally work together - sort of like Coltrane and McCoy Tyner. Even thought David and I play in the same idiom, he has a slightly different way of approaching musical problems. So, I have learned a lot, seeing a different methodology than the one I usually use.

TS: On David S. Ware's "Great Bliss, Vol. 1"..."Bliss Theme" sounds to me like it could've been a hard-hitting rock song, where you're very much the leading man. Can you expand on how your pop/rock/blues sensibilities have taken a forefront in your music.

MS: To me free jazz means being able to interact with any rhythm and any type of sonic environment. Funk and fusion rhythms are something I grew up listening to and I internalized them at an early age, so the challenge now is to bring my free jazz sensibilities to it and to try to create a new idiom.

TS: Because of all the cross-pollination that you've been doing lately with music, do your "early" fans see you as a traitor to the "purity" of jazz?

MS: A lot of my fans have been very cool and given me the freedom to go wherever I want to with the music.

TS: What drawbacks/benefits are there to being an artistic director for the Blue Series at Thirsty Ear?

MS: Being artistic director of the Blue Series has been all-good. It has engendered a different perception of me since I produce other CDs.

TS: What's the main difference of making a recording for Thirsty Ear and one you would do for HatHut?

MS: The HatHut CDs form a music that is my concept of a jazz chamber music. The Blue Series CDs form a suite of music that is my own distinct distillation of American music - straight ahead-ambient-beats, all melted down, to try to find the common denominator, to try to find out why music works.

TS: What is your biggest challenge in getting the music heard to your prospective audience? Do you have much support from radio in North America, Europe, elsewhere?

MS: Getting the music heard is a big challenge because jazz is not really a part of society, so the challenge is to try to find a way to make the whole vibe around the music fun and inviting so people don't feel intimidated.

TS: You've released a good number of duo recordings. What is the main reason for playing in such a small grouping? What have you learnt from these experiences?

MS: I did a lot of duos at one time in my career because it is direct, naked conversation and a very raw and honest way of making music.

TS: Is there any one particular musician/artist that you haven't yet collaborated with, but you're dying for a chance to do so?

MS: I'd like to collaborate with Kool Keith

TS: Antipop Consortium - can you tell me about the hip-hop in your life and how it has shaped the direction your music is taking.

MS: Hip-hop is the new jazz. It's a language system here to stay. It's too powerful to ignore.

TS: Is there another major shift in your musical landscape coming soon?

MS: I do not feel there are any more major shifts coming.

TS: Where do you get your daily musical inspiration?

MS: Inspiration comes from everything. It comes a lot from mysticism and meditation.

TS: To someone who has never heard your music, is there any one particular record that you would pin-point as a good introduction, and why?

MS: My favorite CD of mine is "Equilibrium" (Thirsty Ear).

TS: What is in the immediate plans as far as recordings and tours are concerned?

MS: Plans are to tour the world playing my music.

For more detailed info on Matthew Shipp, go to: Matthew Shipp

For news of releases on Matthew Shipp's Blue Series
(run through Thirsty Ear), go to: Thirsty Ear

Recommended Matthew Shipp's recordings:

Matthew Shipp Trio Circular Temple (Infinite Zero, 1992)
Matthew Shipp Duo with William Parker Zo (Rise/Thirsty Ear 1993)
Matthew Shipp Quartet Critical Mass (2.13.61/Thirsty Ear 1995)
Matthew Shipp Symbol Systems (No More Records 1995)
Matthew Shipp Duo with Roscoe Mitchell 2-Z (2.13.61/Thirsty Ear 1996)
Matthew Shipp Before The World (FMP 1997)
Matthew Shipp's New Orbit (Thirsty Ear 2001)
Matthew Shipp String Trio Expansion, Power, Release (HatHut 2001)
Matthew Shipp Equilibrium (Thirsty Ear 2003)
Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp Antipop Consortium (Thirsty Ear 2003)

Wallets Wither as Ictus Resurfaces

Baby New Year isn’t even out of the birth canal yet and already there’s an ambitious box set in the works that will send improv junkies scurrying for their holiday-depleted billfolds & money-clips. In conjunction with Polish Jazz and executive producer Cezary Lerski, a man who had a sizeable hand in this year’s Vandermark 5 Alchemia set, Ictus Records is putting together a 30th Anniversary retrospective slated for a street date of March 1st. Not to be confused with Derek Bailey’s Incus imprint, Ictus covered some of the same musical provinces, but with a focus on North American rather than European improvisers. The dozen discs included appear to correspond to a coveted clutch of long-deleted albums revolving around the work of the label’s artistic director Andrea Centazzo, also a percussionist/improviser/composer. A complete annotated list of the box’s contents is accessible over at the Ictus site, including mp3 samples of nearly every track. I discovered a sampler disc waiting in my mailbox upon my return from Arizona hiatus & haven’t had a chance to crack it yet, but given the scope and historical pedigree of the music I’d wager my holiday haul of ducats that this project will be one of the most talked about of early ’06.

Tsahar/ Cooper-Moore/ Drake - Lost Brother

Hopscotch 33

Collaboration is crucial to creative endeavors involving entities beyond the individual in number. To that end Assif Tsahar has demonstrated time and again his acumen at choosing and sustaining artistic alliances that encourage prosperous returns. Cooper-Moore and Tsahar share a musical kinship dating back at least to their work together in William Parker’s 90s collective In Order to Survive. The years subsequent to that seminal ensemble’s dissolution have presented various touring opportunities for the duo. A pair of eclectic albums on Hopscotch documents a partnership that continues to grow. Lost Brother takes the template and adds a third catalytic force in the persona of percussionist Hamid Drake. Tsahar has tapped Drake in the past for various performances and recordings so the pick isn’t a complete curveball, but it’s still impressive how well the drummer’s multifarious rhythms augment the energy reservoir of the three.

C-M avoids piano completely and pares down his usual bulging satchel of instruments down to just three specimens. The record opens with the harsh scratch of what sounds like a splintered stylus gouging into a slice of spinning vinyl. It’s actually C-M plugging in and calibrating his twanger, a stringed contraption that generates brittle trampoline-like tonalities of often Laswellian-sized proportions. The diddley-bow is similar in construction, but generally much cleaner in tone, sounding akin to a fretless electric bass, which it essentially is, albeit in single string form. C-M’s works around the limited harmonic latitude of both instruments, shaping vamps and anchors that on occasion rival those of Jamaladeen Tacuma in terms of visceral pocket-seated grooves.

Drake renders his role with customary finesse, generating a felicitous range of beats for each setting and purpose. On “Departure” his frothy snare cadences congeal with C-M’s burbling diddley-bow to form an undulating spring-loaded funk mattress for Tsahar’s tenor to bounce and bluster atop. “The Coming of the Ship” favors an even tighter fit and by the time the laser hits “Goin’ Home” the three have sketched a syncopated ensemble schematic that sounds uncommonly close to Spaceways Incorporated, Tsahar chewing through a string of gnarled riffs that would probably make Vandermark crack a smile.

Sequenced between the handful of tenor-fronted ‘groove’ tracks are a series of more meditative excursions. On these C-M turns to malleted ashimba. Drake plays frame drum on the first piece “Falling Leaf,” but turns to supple tabla for the remaining four. Tsahar straps on his bass clarinet and evinces the breadth of his growth on the instrument. His lush articulation and emotive phrasing conjure rustic aural scenery ranging from African savannah to Israeli desert against the plush and soothing percussive backgrounds woven by his partners. I found myself queuing “Dugong the Sea Cow” several times in succession and slipping into a relaxed semi-trance under the aegis of the delicate and earnest interplay.

December always seems to become something of a Dead Letter Office for new releases. Albums released during the month frequently miss the cut for inclusion on year-end lists and it falls on elephant-minded critics and consumers to crow about the cream of the late-harvesting crop over the course of the next annum. In the interest of bucking that troublesome trend this disc sits comfortably among the best two dozen discs I’ve heard during this swiftly waning year. And I'd advise anyone with an interest in the work of these three men to pull the trigger on an immediate purchase.

~ Derek Taylor

29 January 1930, Sheffield. 25 December 2005, London.

Dear Derek,

Free improv fans are a funny lot. They attach so much importance to making pilgrimages to see their heroes in the flesh at least once, but it's always a crapshoot to catch a free improvisor in the combination of players that tickles a particular person's fancy. We blithely make all kinds of elaborate private predictions about which gigs will be worth trekking out to, despite the genuine unpredictability of these things and the futility of expectations about moments that can't be determined ahead of time. So some years back I was checking the listings for one of your multi-day affairs at Tonic and thinking I really needed to make the three-hour trip into the city for at least one of them. But for a wide-eyed improv fanboy looking at all the big names it's like being a kid in a candy shop and it's a bit of comically baroque dilemma to choose. Thank goodness for intuitions, though, because when I saw an evening where you and Susie Ibarra would play as a duo I just knew it was the one for me. I'd never seen her play either and I was only passingly acquainted with her playing from a record or two, but, gee, you know I really like strings and percussion. It wasn't the flashiest or most star-studded night in the series, but the best stuff often comes with the least fanfare.

Sometimes nothing flies out and hits you in the face as a little nugget of musical gold, but every sound just seems to flow from some other sound like it's part of a timeless, basic biological process we can easily observe but not really understand. When you played with Susie it was a case where there was nothing on my mind but sounds. The normal passage of time was suspended, and when it was over I knew something had happened but it was entirely unclear what it was. Every sound seemed to belong exactly where it wound up, but was slightly surprising when it happened. Motion, stillness, pauses, textures, miniature arches, the whole works. Well, anyhow, I don't think I could've heard you in a better way than that night. Everything was right with the universe that night and I knew I had shared an experience with a community of people who cared about it as much as me. It was the precise and full realization of the musical and human promise of this crazy idea you and your colleagues got back in the 60s to make music in a different way, renewed yet again, an eternal proposition about the musical and human moment.

So some months later I saw that you were hopping the pond again and would be playing in various new combinations, but there was a duo with Susie listed again. A logical free improv fan decision would be to hear you in a different situation, but I remembered how I felt that night during and after that gig and drove up to see the duo again. You work in the unrepeatibility business, so I felt a little silly going for a second helping of that singularity, but amazingly enough the same thing happened. I guess I should say "equivalent", and not "same", but you know what I mean. I guess all the rhythms and melodies and so on were different, but every sound felt like a gentle revelation about how sounds could move along, just like the time before. It was just as understated and ecstatic. I thought, gosh, these two are really on to something. Then sometime in the next year you had yet another duo gig with Susie at Tonic, and by that point l was entirely compelled by the forces of sensible living to make the journey again. This was becoming a routine, something loosely periodic like a holiday. I was convinced that this was my personal "ideal Derek Bailey experience". I knew I was pressing my luck, but I was not about to take a chance of missing the sort of experience I'd had those two times. I know a lot of people would have a hard time believing this is true, but at least we know it's true that it did indeed happen again, the same goldmine of moment-by-moment magic. We had quite a streak going there. I'll remember those three gigs for the rest of my life, not the actual sounds of course, just the elation. As far as the sounds themselves, I suppose it's best to dispense with them once they've done their job, just like cells in a living organism come and go in the endless cycle of repetition and differentiation.

I suppose it was probably this third time that I finally got up the courage to impose on you for a bit of conversation and share my observations about this happy state of affairs. It wasn't an especially crowded evening and there was a relaxed atmosphere at Tonic as a small group of people lingered after the gig. You remarked upon the the curious and anomalous aspect of your duos with Susie and how it had recently occurred to you that among all the musical partners you'd had in the past few years, you'd played with her more often than anyone else, something like four or five times in a two-year period. Something like that. Not exactly a lot of gigs, but more than you'd had with any one other musician. One way or another, it's pretty amazing that someone could perform in public as often as you and so rarely repeat your collaborations. Your generosity in testing new playing situations was hard to fathom, especially since you'd been at it for a good few decades. You taught the world new lessons about the way a life could be spent making music. But like any great teacher, you offered hints and examples, leaving the real knowledge to be constructed and completed anew by each student.

I think the lessons apply as much to non-musicians like me as your fellow improvisors. In my last year of high school I'd been soaking up free jazz for about a year, thrilled by its challenges to safe and repeatable musical structures. That's when I read your book and I saw the big picture about improvisation and the possibility of making music that didn't refer to idioms or traditions, but rather invited me to decide for myself how sounds could be organized into music. You really laid it out in that book. I'd still not heard any non-idiomatic free improv to speak of at that point, but everything you said made sense and I soon found opportunities to experience your ideas first-hand with recordings and concerts. I really admire you for talking about your art in a straightforward, honest way and not trying to shroud it in mystery. A little self-understanding goes a long way. I reread that book just a few years ago and found passage after forgotten passage that renders subsequent discourse as wheel-re-invention. I'm looking forward to someday passing my copy along to a grandchild in a formative period of musical curiosity.

As much as I've enjoyed your music, I feel like I'm trying to thank you for an entire worldview here, which seems rather momentous to me. After all, a person only acquires new worldviews a few times in life. I want to convey the pleasure of meeting you, but also the amusing irony of being awestruck by a person who seeded a worldview in which the whole business of being awestruck by "stars" is obsolete. I want you to know that even though I was a naive, wide-eyed kid in his mid-20s feeling rather out of place talking to you, I do understand, at least in theory, that you were a regular fellow with counterparts all over the world that can do a similarly fine job of tending the musical moment. I'd like to say a little more about what this idea means to me in practice to reassure you I'm really not a victim of idol worship or whatever, but let me relish the irony a little further because there's pleasure in even the most mundane aspects of a person. I haven't met many English/British (I don't know what the socio-linguistically correct word is) people in my life, so I want to say I think I learned from you what people mean when they talk about "gracious, charming British gentlemen" or the like. I'll always get a good chuckle thinking about how dumbstruck I was when you earnestly offered to buy me a drink as we sat at the bar, as if I was some okay fellow you were happy to be passing time with at a pub and not the nervous, utterly intimidated kid I actually was, entirely unsure of how I ought to be disposing of myself. I suppose I'm lucky to be a lifelong teetotaller, because I haven't the slightest experience in that kind of social ritual and hopefully could've been excused for not being the one who offered a drink! I'm sure this was nothing but an ordinary life moment for you, a scenario repeated thousands of times, but it was a disarming, befuddling, and utterly comical moment for me I'll always carry with me as a memory of you as a person aside from a master musician. I don't know if I've ever met a more gracious person, though I won't deny the possibility that I simply don't get out often enough.

Hopefully entertaining confessions of a socially inept schmuck aside, I want you to know that your example of anti-pretentious music-making and community experience is truly being followed and I don't just sit at home listening to Incus records and ignoring the folks who are honoring your music the most by retaining its methodology and not its specific sounds. There's no point in trying to simulate the experience of being around in the 70s to hear you around town in London with ten other wayward listeners. Your world was a different time and place than mine, and I hope you'll be delighted to know that I've found master musicians I can go out and listen to live on a regular basis in my own time and place. I even found a fellow named Jack Wright who I think has a depth of musicianship and conceptual commitment to non-idiomatic free improvisation just like yours. I hope you'll be relieved to learn that I regularly banter around with him as if he were just a friend or an uncle even while holding him in the highest possible esteem as an artist like you. I feel I can state with certainty that the cultural possibilities you did so much to set in motion will thrive indefinitely. Folks like Jack are the proof in the pudding. You made the world a permanently better place and ennobled some of the most fundamental aesthetic impulses of humans. Now more than ten years after discovering your world I fully realize that non-idiomatic free improvisation has permanently become more than just a kind of music I enjoy more than most others at a purely aesthetic level, but a pivot around which my life revolves as a social and ideological commitment to reclaim art for unrepeatable moments and communities away from museum artifacts and institutions. Also, I rather agree that "musical scores" should be regarded as little more than an esoteric branch of literature, though certainly deserving of a little niche as a diversion from improvisation. Thanks for hitting that nail on the head in your book. Ink schmink.

Anyway, this week I'm gonna pull out a few of your albums and not take this whole "different world" thing too seriously! There will always be a place for other times and places to be preserved and cherished alongside all the great moment-replenishing scattered around in countless pockets of the earth. Probably I'll start with the duo with Susie, because it's most sentimental to me, but then I think I'll go back to the feedback disc (String Theory) because I had that on just a few months ago thinking about how ahead-of-its-time it was in relation to some recent directions improvised music seems to be taking. Then I'll savor that video with Min Tanaka again because it's a special favorite I have often reflected on after seeing combinations of music with post-butoh. It's rare to have a visceral, unequivocal experience of beauty while simultaneously being prompted to reconsider the very nature of beauty. Usually it's only one or the other. Next chance I get I'll finally buy a copy of your video with Will Gaines, because happily I made it out to some of your gigs besides the Susie duos and probably my favorite was when I saw you with that astonishing tapdancer. It was an explosion of rhythms and I remember how happy you looked playing with him, like it was challenging you. More than anything, your sheer pleasure in the act of playing music with other people was unmistakable. In my mind you represent the undiluted joy of music as a physical activity at least as much as anyone.

One more thing. I was at a free improv gig last night when I experienced something for the first time--a conversation about you that didn't make my eyes light up with joy at the prospect of exchanging lively opinions with another listener. It was the kind of conversation a person can never be prepared for, sort of brief and unsuited to elaboration. When the next set kicked in I found thoughts of you lingering longer than they ever had before, a lot of thoughts. I figured I would jot some down because I know there are a lot of people thinking about you right now. It's funny how music sometimes isn't something to listen to, but a space to be inside of while a mind attends to other matters. There's all kinds of stuff more important than sounds. I'm glad I had some sounds to bathe those thoughts in. Also, by random chance I bumped into one of your close friends at the gig last night who I remembered from those Tonic gigs, so I passed on the news that you'd retired from music earlier in the day. She was one of many people in the room who love you and were thinking of you. Some of your pals from Japan were there, Yoshihide Otomo and Tatsuya Yoshida among them. We will remember you forever in our many countries.

A fan in Pennsylvania,
Mike

~Michael Anton Parker

Derek Bailey 1930-2005

"There has to be some degree, not just of unfamiliarity, but incompatibility [with a partner]. Otherwise, what are you improvising for? What are you improvising with or around? You've got to find somewhere where you can work. If there are no difficulties, it seems to me that there's pretty much no point in playing. I find that the things that excite me are trying to make something work. And when it does work, it's the most fantastic thing. Maybe the most obvious analogy would be the grit that produces the pearl in an oyster, or some shit like that." - Jazziz, March 2002

Lee Konitz & Warne Marsh – London Concert (Wave)

[The sorrowful news of Derek Bailey’s passing should alone warrant a platter by the plectrist holding this spot. Alas, I’m at my parents' place for the holidays and didn’t pack any of his catalog for the trip. Since I don’t feel comfortable attempting to do any album justice solely from memory, it’ll have to fall to someone else to handle the eulogistic duties elsewhere on-site & I sure hope someone does.]

Considering their common Tristanoite origins, clambakes between Konitz and Marsh were comparatively rare over the course of their careers. On occasions when their schedules did overlap the outcome was certain to yield memorable musical repartee and synergy. The mid-70s represents an especially prosperous time for recordings by the pair. This archival set released on Peter Ind’s Wave imprint dates from a stretch when several European tours were organized in succession. It’s basically a straight reissue of the original LP with no material added, but what’s here is relaxing and exhilarating in equal measure. Ind and drummer Al Levitt, mostly on brushes, cloak the horns in a transparent halo of supple, responsive rhythm, one that fits snugly, but never stifles or constricts. Proof of shared improvisatory bravado, the principals also repeatedly jettison the support for brief spells, braiding helium-light lines in acapella tandem on pieces like the jovial Bach fragment “Invention in a Minor.” The majority of other pieces resolve through lithe improvisations based on basic chord progressions of denuded standards like “It’s You or No One” and “All the Things You Are”- the general preferred diet of both saxophonists, Marsh’s palate in particular. Each man sits out on a tune apiece, leaving his colleague to coast and cavort in the company of the rhythm section alone. Konitz tackles “You Go to My Head,” his wistful gauzy tone voicing a lilting extemporization built on lucent legato phrases. Warne’s ingenious reading of “Easy Livin’,” rendered under similar conditions in a mere (4:24), arrives as a high point amongst already skyscraping peaks. Conventional wisdom argues the apogee of Konitz/Marsh encounters as being the now out of print 3-disc Storyville set preserving their meeting at Montmarte in 1975. I wouldn’t know as I haven’t heard it! So at the risk of revealing the true reasoning behind this ROW & in the spirit of St. Nick, is there anybody out there who might be able to help a fellow music maven out & burn them for me? I’ve got an extra copy of this disc that I’d be more than happy to offer up in exchange.

Philadelphia Cobra Heritage Preservation Society

A tentet of young Philadelphia musicians gave an outstanding unauthorized performance of John Zorn's Cobra on October 21st, revealing happy truths about both the musicians and the composition. It's not rare for the piece to be attempted without Zorn's involvement. The dissemination of the work beyond Zorn's sphere is largely due to Stephen Drury, who compiled instructions for the piece in the mid-80s while working closely with the composer and went on to distribute them widely among his students for the sake of propagating Zorn's game piece legacy. Drury organizes and prompts (the term used for the conductor-like actions in the piece) Cobra every once in a while via his academic post at The New England Conservatory, and Dan Blacksberg is an undergrad there who lucked into this experience and decided to stake out a home for the piece in his hometown of Philadelphia while staying there and dabbling in the local improv scene in between his semesters in Boston. Currently a senior at NEC, Dan is also promising trombone improvisor tuned into the current trend of austerity and restraint, as I learned from some rewarding performances curated by Jack Wright in Philly last summer.

I'm embarassed to admit I've never been able to attend one of Zorn's own Cobra performances, so I can't offer an informed opinion about the level of fidelity Dan achieved. Existing primarily as an oral tradition, it's easy to imagine the full complexity of the piece being compromised along the chain of transmission, while at the same time it's easy to imagine Drury's unassailable integrity and artistic devotion doing justice to the piece. Among "renegade Cobra" performances, I'd hazard an educated guess that Dan's was one of the best. The performance was the culmination of considerable serious work by Dan organizing, teaching, and rehearsing adventurous young musicians, a process that actually began this past January when he did a few private and public performances of the piece. I attended a public performance on January 14th, 2005, so I can attest to the vast improvements made in his recent second round of Cobra operations.

Held in a now-defunct and sure-to-be-mythologized loft space in South Philly called The Athenæum, a modest crowd gathered on a cold winter night to watch a ramshackle but respectably-well-rehearsed ensemble lurch and laugh their way through the piece. It was a memorable night for me because I'd rushed over after seeing a transcendental, mind-blowing concert by a quintet led by Mat Maneri (with Randy Peterson, Craig Taborn, Michael Formanek, and Tim Berne) in another part of town. I was firmly ensconced on cloud nine after that Maneri gig (the feeling lingered for days), so I really didn't care what those kids were doing in the name of Cobra; I just took it as a fun and surprising event, enjoying it as a spectacle and catching the odd fragment of magic here and there. It was pretty clear they got lost in the real-time labyrinth a few times. One of the highlights was a wild electric bass guitar freakout by Evan Lipson, who played in contrast to the timidity of some of the others. His unexpected explosion reminded me of the bizarre interjections of rock in the performance of Cobra on Tokyo Operations.

The lineup for this January performance was Diane Brown (violin), Ann Goering (viola), Nate Farrar (electric guitar), Dave Smolen (amplified snare drum, etc), Evan Lipson (electric bass guitar), Natalia Quinteros (violin), Joseph Whitt (didgeridoo), Pete Angevine (toy percussion), Dave Fishkin (tenor sax), Carlos Santiago (violin). One thing I found especially amusing about the performance was a number of gestures presumably inspired by Zorn's 80s work, or at least a passing awareness of it, especially Pete and Dave, who indulged in a number of convincing cliches like mouthpiece quacks and toy sounds. It was as if they were trying not only to perform Zorn's composition, but also replicate some of the specific musical personalities historically associated with it, despite the fact that Cobra is compatible with any musical personalities in theory. I think the piece encourages a kind of soundbite mentality, which can lead to the somewhat superficial and gimmicky gestures I saw in this performance, but which also constrains the improvisor in a way that can lead to the profound innovations in rhythmic organization that can be heard in masterpieces like the 1985 and 1986 performances released by hat HUT or the more recent performances released by Tzadik. I really enjoy hearing musicians pack their ideas into little soundbites instead of potentially wearisome narratives. It leads to a constant renewal of material and unpredictable juxtapositions, a large part of the appeal in many examples of traditional non-idiomatic free improvisation like John Stevens' SME. The beauty of Cobra is the way it can harness and intensify this kind of complexity by disabling the macrostructural decision-making processes of the musicians and reallocating their creative resources to microstructures like individual phrases.

Dan clearly learned a lot from those Philly Cobra operations this past winter, as did the five musicians from that group who also performed in the recent sessions. Or maybe they just had an especially good day, because the music vastly exceeded my expectations. Like the successful Zorn-led Cobra performances that have been publicly released, the music was full of thrilling juxtapositions, rhythmic tightrope-traversals, and even a lot of convincing unison ensemble playing. The lineup for this October performance was (going from left to right around the semi-circle in the photo above) Natalia Quinteros (violin), Rob Ludington (drumkit), Joseph Whitt (doublebass), Dan Peterson (contra-alto clarinet, unidentified metallophone), Nick Millevoi (electric guitar), Dave Fishkin (tenor sax, b-flat clarinet, Gibson Maestro sound system for woodwinds), George Korein (electric guitar, voice, movement), Pete Angevine (drumkit, toys), Evan Lipson (doublebass), Pete Veloski (trumpet). The talent and conviction of these players really burst from the stage, and it was also a pleasant discovery hearing the four musicians (Rob, Dan, Nick, Pete) I'd never encountered before in any form. Some of the musicians have a jazz background and do a lot of gigging around the city, and I was happy to see them comfortably mining their strong points with a few jazz-based ensemble passages that were both spontaneous and tight. For example, Pete's trumpet playing was in a confident and compelling hard bop style that soared over some impromptu grooves by the other Pete's drumkit and Evan's doublebass. I think that improvisors should stick with what they understand and can play well instead of falling into the trap of aiming for some preconceived notion of what improvised music should sound like. After all, any musical idiom can be taken as improvisational material and used in equally meaningful ways. So instead of the half-assed Derek Bailey or Sonny Sharrock imitations we've all heard too many times from improv neophytes, I was happy to see Nick playing his guitar in an essentially conventional note-based way with some brilliant irregularly paced runs and a gentle biting tone. It strongly reminded me of Fred Frith's playing in the 70s with Henry Cow (a slightly jazz-rock-flavored guitar style he rarely returned to later in his career) or Rich Woodson's comparable linear inventiveness in his maverick work, a kind of "rock serialism" feeling. Maybe I'm just biased in favor of this style, but I was seriously digging Nick's playing throughout the set, especially because he was confident enough to play fairly often, but never fell into oblivious soloism or overplayed.

At the risk of sounding like the free improv snob I can't pretend not to be, I honestly don't think most of these players would be interesting as non-idiomatic free improvisors, though they're all quite talented. Among the exceptions, the most obvious to me is Evan, an exceptional musician well-abreast of the full range of avant-garde music who I've heard do killer free improv plenty of times. I'm not aware that any of the others actively participate in the free improv scene; I think they mostly pursue jazz, rock, and academic notationalism. I only offer this curt impression for the sake of understanding the relationship between what Cobra brings to a given performance as an invention of Zorn and what the performers bring themselves as improvisors. Because a performance is a concrete entity comprised of human actions and associated phenomena like sound events, whereas things like paper, ink, words, and memory are formally arbitrary and heterogeneous entities difficult to analyze in relation to each other, a composition can usefully be taken as the intersection of a set of possible performances such that the subset of actual performances serves as a fruitful ostensional epistemology. Since Cobra is defined methodologically and not in terms of musical material, its existence as a composition is potentially vacuous and the key question I think I observed a resounding affirmative answer to is whether the method translates into musical content. It was a clear case of wonderful music emerging from collective interaction even when the individual parts were bland, and it's this collective interaction that was constrained and regulated through Cobra. From this perspective, Cobra can be reconciled with the composer/performer model of recent centuries in which the composer is given specific credit for a performance they had no direct connection with. In other words, I believe this was a great performance primarily because it was an accurate rendition of a great composition, and only secondarily because of the performers' self-generated content.

The piece was dominated by call-and-response structures in which timing was often more important than specific gestural content. It's a piece in which gestures are framed by expectations about pacing and transitions that imbue drama in ordinary musical fragments. Yet some gestures were more interesting than others, and it was George Korein whose imagination and improvisational agility proved the most compelling. A curious case to say the least, I simply wasn't expecting such sublime moments to come from someone who rarely performs as an instrumentalist or improvisor and is known more for eccentric studio wizadry. For starters, he primarily used an electric guitar in this performance and crafted delicate brief shapes of soft distorted tones that brought an element of today's subtle electroacoustic improv into a mix otherwise dominated by conventional musical vocabularies. His playing was also based more on a virtuosity of listening and comfort with the improvisational moment than the virtuosity of instrumental technique that the others tended to rely on. In any case, he was the wild card of the ensemble, coming from a totally different background than the others (all music-school type players) and being a last-minute addition to the ensemble the day before the performance, for which the ensemble had been selected and prepared well in advance. Having gotten a feeling for George's sensibilities from the occasional encounter around town at gigs and such, I suspect he has musical intuitions that made him especially amenable to a crash-course in Cobra. While his subtle guitar bits were quite nice, it was gestures of an entirely different sort that have left me with no choice but to cite him for that ineffable rare spirit common to true free improvisors. Surely noone in the room could've predicted that he'd vocalize during this concert, but when he suddenly issued relatively high-pitched yelping notes from his mouth they were just perfect in every way, separated by juicy pauses, with even pitch and timbre, and without a trace of gratuitous variation. Far from being novelty, these were compelling sounds that lost nothing in successive vocal episodes. In fact, they were nothing short of electrifying as George made slight increases in pitch and intensity at one point. Just as effective was George's use of movement instead of sound during an extended call-and-response sequence between several musicians. He whipped his hair from side-to-side by vigorously shaking his head. The timing was perfect and the soundlessness engaging.

The highlight of the evening came when George entered into a spectacular synthesis of sound and movement resulting in his position on stage as a crumpled heap, depicted in the photo above. Compare this photo to the group shot above in which George is seated with a red guitar and raised hand on the left side of saxophonist Dave Fishkin. The sequence was breathtaking. George began slowly detuning his guitar while making a sporadic sound gesture, decelerating with Reichian ineluctability to the point of dramatic tension that gradually drew his body forward on his chair. In sublime slow motion the process continued until his body crashed to the floor without the slightest bit of resistance. The sheer awkwardness and processual honesty of his resultant and sustained crumpled position was a continuation of the solo. Therein lie the real promise of improvisation. George's stunning performance this evening came on the heels of puzzling gossip on the improv scene about an event that had occurred the previous week but I had sadly missed. If I have the story correct, George (again, not at all known as a free improvisor) suddenly jumped on stage in the middle of a performance by Ensemble Ciutadella (an improv group I believe to be comprised of Stephen Hastings-King, piano; Hilary Baker, soprano saxophone; Samuel Belkowitz, drumkit; Eugene S Lew, drumset; Helena Espvall-Santoleri, cello) and began playing disruptive rock beats on a drumkit and the like, generating a controversial spectacle I've heard reactions to ranging from bewilderment to whispered admiration. Taken together with previous data, I'm beginning to sense the emergence of a new generation's answer to Jason Willett, Baltimore's infamous inscrutable genius of Megaphone/Leprechuan Catering/Half-Japanese/Ruins/post-RIO-dada notoriety. Both worrisome and thrilling, this prospect.

Recounting a few other individual highlights, I was puzzled by a wonderful sound in the mix at various points, a really warm, analog, electronic and reedy sound that carried strong solo lines I couldn't attribute to anything happening on stage. Only afterwards when I glanced about the equipment on stage did I discover it was Dave Fishkin using a vintage woodwind processing unit on his tenor sax and clarinet. Incredible sounds, and Dave's playing was both subversive and seriously skillful. Always a sucker for good reedwork, I was consistently thrilled by the playing of Dan Peterson, an unmistakably advanced player in control of the rare tall and skinny beast that is a contra-alto clarinet.

All told, this was a unexpected musical triumph met with tremendous enthusiasm by a huge audience that filled all available seats and ran upwards of 120 by the best estimate. Held in a gorgeous old building at the University of Pennsylvania at the hub of the city's grass-roots performance culture with free admission and given a strong plug by local newspapers, it drew all sorts of unfamiliar faces clearly indifferent to the dreadfully attended but frequently monumental improv events that occur in Philly fairly often. While all promotional materials clearly indicated that Zorn wasn't affiliated with this performance and would not be present, somehow I suspect his name alone garnered this attention. It's attention well-deserved and, following some of my reasoning above, it's only fitting that it has the sociological parallel of a Stravinsky or Ligeti performance that likewise draws large crowds by virtue of a composer's well-known creation. I suspect this can't be said of many "renegade Cobra" performances, but I think the seriousness and skill of Dan and his motley crew served as fair compensation to the composer in an important sense because it was concrete and bountiful evidence that Zorn created something of profound substance and resilience, much like a great performance of a Stravinsky or Ligeti piece honors the legacy of the composer. While traversing the gray area between an autonomously replicable composition and a fragile segment of oral tradition, I think everyone came out ahead with this one. In the January edition of Dan's Philly Cobra operations, he placidly announced his ensemble as "The Philadelphia Cobra Heritage Preservation Society". I don't recall him using the same name this October, but all (side-splitting) humor aside, it convinced me that the Cobra heritage not only should but can be preserved, the latter a far from obvious possibility.

It wouldn't be Cobra without some hat action, so here's my tribute to the diverse headgear of the evening. It's aspects like this that symbolize the visual spectacle of the piece, and much like I'm told Zorn's own Cobra realizations run, the performance also showed it's possible to take something very seriously and still have fun. I'm firmly opposed to the concept of fun in music in general, but here was a rare case where humor and theatricality didn't conflict at all with musical focus. The group ran through three distinctive takes on Cobra during the set and had so much momentum and great music behind them it felt appropriate and wonderful when Nick Millevoi dug into a Black Sabbath riff ("Iron Man" as I recall) during the especially colorful and playful brief final piece.

~Michael Anton Parker

I meant to run this entry in a more timely fashion, but it was set aside in nearly finished form for more than a few weeks as I became backlogged on music babbling. Many apologies to all concerned.

Butcher's Tale

Just a quick note to hip folks to the second installment in Tom Sękowski’s continuing “Simply in Their Words” series. The teensy-weensy link under the Interviews heading over to the right is easy to miss, so please feel free to use the bolded text above. There might be a slight delay in next Monday’s entry (as I have every intention of being lost in the desert somewhere between Tombstone and Safford, AZ on that particular date), but after that things should settle back into a regular weekly schedule.

John Butcher - March 2003

SIMPLY IN THEIR WORDS (Installment Dos)

Interview conducted by Tom Sękowski

This is the second of a regular series of "simply in their words" series interviews with some of the musicians from the improvised, jazz and new music genres that are making a real mark on the landscape. I don't want to add any additional text to these musicians' responses, as my words would only clutter what it is they're trying to convey to the readers.

John Butcher needs no introduction whatsoever. Over the past two decades, he has made music that is true: true to himself, and true to his audience. Though the jazz community at large (many will argue, that's not where he belongs anyhow) has shunned him, he persists. John survives as he knows what he has to say through his music is needed in this day and age of boredom and complacency. Maybe he's not a new face anymore, but the statements made through his mouthpiece are relevant and fresh.

This is an e-mail interview I'd conducted with John Butcher in March of 2003.

Tom Sękowski: You've had several opportunities to document your solo saxophone work to date. I'm wondering if you can tell us what is the approach to preparing and producing such a recording? Do you have any "strategies" for playing solo gigs?

John Butcher: The recordings span a bit over 10 years now, so the approaches have obviously evolved and changed over that time. The first, Thirteen Friendly Numbers (Acta), was a studio recording - and at a time when I only had a few releases - and my solo work wasn't well known. So I wanted it to capture convincingly the ways I had been working in concert. But I found this very difficult (playing to just a microphone and an engineer), - the way I like to improvise solo needs an audience and the sense of a one-off event where you can't stop and start and choose (as in a studio) but have to battle through a unique playing situation. As a consequence the eventual pieces were partly planned (structurally, if not in details) and the multitracks (a response to my dislike of most saxophone quartets) were thought through, but done in real time without editing, to try to keep the freshness of improvising.

London and Cologne (Rastascan), and Fixations (Emanem) come (except for one multitrack) from concerts in Europe and the USA. I found this approach made more sense. The pieces have the sense of occasion of live music evolving in front of people, with all the different acoustics and geographies - but I could program it for CD, a different listening experience.

The newest, Invisible Ear (Fringes), takes a different approach - digging more deeply into some ideas I used to work with back in the early 80s. Amplification and feedback. I'd been developing this a little more in concerts recently - especially when playing with the increasing number of electronic/laptop players around - and wanted to push it further for a solo voice. It's mainly a studio recording - solos and multitracks. Two of the multitracks are acoustic and I never try to sound like a saxophone 'group'. "What Remain", for instance, works with tape derived ideas of synthesis through layering - superposition to create new sounds, and should sound like a giant imaginary instrument.

One thing in general, - I try to avoid playing preplanned routines, the curse of solo improvising. It's terrible when solos sound like they're trying to demonstrate some instrumental discovery. I like searching out new connections and hearing reasons for a piece to develop the way it does.

TS: Is the Durrant / Russell / Butcher trio still a functioning one? Can you tell us a little bit about the beginnings of this infamous trio?

JB: It's came to an end - mainly because Phil Durrant's violin playing interests are now almost exclusively with ultra minimalism. I met Phil around '85 at a workshop run by Phil Wachsmann. He'd be playing with John Russell for a few years, and invited me to play with them. It went well. Somehow the three 'melody' instruments found ways of getting inside each other's sounds and keeping their space at the same time. We rehearsed weekly at John's house for about a year, doing a few local concerts - and it grew from there. It was with them, and, earlier, with Chris Burn, that I started developing a language away from most conventional saxophone styles. Something flexible that I could work with. I think it was influential that they were all string players (Chris only played directly on the piano strings). A vibrating string has so many colours that can be brought out by different bow pressures, attacks etc, and I tried to find ways of manipulating saxophone colour with the something like the subtlety they could bring to it.

TS: Acta - Your own label that you've been running now for over 15 years. Why did you start it? Was it simply to have your recordings made available to the public? Why are the releases so sparse recently? Is it officially dormant? Have you laid it to rest?

JB: It was started to put out the LP "Conceits" by Butcher/Durrant/Russell. Pre-CD it was a major undertaking to release material, and also more of a special event; (there's a discussion worth having about ease of CD production versus quality control). Anyway, we were only just beginning to play outside of England and it was a way for more people to hear what we were doing. I just don't have the time now, so Acta's over.

TS: How did you begin your working relationship with Polwechsel? Did you approach them or did they approach you? What's in the works for the quartet?

JB: In '97 I got a phone call from Werner Dafeldecker. Radu Malfatti had just left the group and Werner asked me to come to Vienna to record what became Polwechsel 2 (HatHut). I didn't know any of them at the time, although I knew the first CD. In Vienna we played a mixture of compositions and improvisation. I like working on compositions for recordings, but am not so interested in going out and playing them in concerts, so I'm pleased to say that recent Polwechsel concerts have been largely improvisation. (The first time we worked like this was on a Polish tour in 2001). Recently we have been playing with Christian Fennesz, and have a US tour later in the year.

TS: Will News from the Shed ever be resurrected or do all four musicians see it as a short-lived experience?

JB: We played together from '89 to '94. Radu Malfatti - for similar reasons to Phil Durrant, (his interest in ultra minimalism) - is not interested in working with this kind of improvisation any more. I still play with Lovens whenever possible, most recently in trio with Steve Beresford. The 1989 LP News from the Shed (Acta) will soon be re-issued on John Corbett's 'Unheard Music' label. There will be 20 minutes of additional music from the original session.

TS: Can you tell us a little bit about your musical history with Chris Burn?

JB: We met at Surrey University, where he was studying music. I was doing physics. Initially we played various types of jazz together, from quartets to big-bands (somehow picking up a BBC award for the latter along the way). But both of us knew it was a student activity, to do with learning about past music, and we had to find a way forward that was not so second-hand. We evolved towards free improvisation - which involved a period of trying to completely discard the ways we had previously been playing our instruments. Chris worked only directly on the piano strings, and I would avoid anything that sounded like traditional saxophone notes and try to work without creating 'lines' which seems to be the natural saxophone language. We rehearsed privately for about a year before really giving any concerts and released an LP Fonetiks (Bead) in ‘84. By this time we'd re-introduced some more conventional musical language back into our playing, but had managed to re-think their significance (for us) - to break away from the more jazz derived instrumental clichés.

From then on we've played together in many settings - and in the late '80s formed the large group Ensemble - with the aim of developing a more chamber approach to large group improvising. Trying to improvise, where everyone has a voice - but no-one leads the music.

TS: What effect did playing with John Stevens and Spontaneous Music Ensemble had on your life as an improviser, as a musician?

JB: Strangely, I knew very little about the history of the SME when I started playing with John. But their approach had had such an influence on the London scene over the years that it had rubbed-off on many things I had been listening to - so it felt very natural to work with him.

Just before this was at a time when I wasn't very interested in playing with drummers (too continuous and dominating) - so it was a revelation to me how incredibly transparent John could make his playing, but still give it great drive and propulsion. And I always felt the direction could be changed by quite small musical movements from me or Roger, as John was listening on a very close and detailed level, prepared to change his own playing in a split second (which is a quality I like in most improvising). Another thing, is that he generated a sense of the importance of each, specific concert - as a never to be repeated, special event - even if the actual circumstances were less than ideal.

TS: Can you pin-point one of your recordings, which in your opinion, encompasses every aspect of John Butcher? Or perhaps, do you not subscribe to this theory, that one recording is able to capture "all" of you?

JB: Well, it's a mistake to try to put everything into each performance. Improvising means choosing, excluding, and inventing according to whom you're with. And, a recording is often a way of moving on. After making it you think "that's done now - so what next." I have favourite recordings - but they're all attached to circumstances and particular times rather than being all-encompassing.

TS: Do you have a favourite duo / trio / ensemble formation that was regrettably too short-lived, that you'd like to resurface again?

JB: Groups usually live the right length life for their musical possibilities.

TS: At this point in your musical journey, is there anyone with whom you've not yet had the chance to play with?

JB: It's important to have a proportion of new encounters each year, both players you know and those you haven't heard. A new venture that almost happened this summer, with Keith Rowe, is one I'd like soon, and there's plenty more.

TS: You've played with quite a few vocalists - Vanessa Mackness and Phil Minton among them. The question remains what do they add or take away from your playing? What challenges are your faced with?

JB: Voice and sax - well, we're both breathers and the process of making sound is very physical, so it's very intimate. The combination can be claustrophobic, and people tend to interpret voice sounds in very direct, emotional ways. I suppose we're programmed to - but vocalists are often working quite abstractly with sound - it is the listener creating associations that may or may not be there. I like this ambiguity.

TS: When I saw you last at FIMAV (Victoriaville) in May 2002, shortly afterwards, you were headed for a Polish new music festival. Was this your first time playing in Poland? Do you have any plans for future concerts there?

JB: I've had three trips to play in Poland. Solo in 2000, with Polwechsel in 2001 and then this Festival with Ensemble (Musica Genera Festival in Szczecin, Poland). Robert Piotrowicz has done great things in bringing many improvising musicians to Poland. No current plans to revisit - unfortunately.

TS: Many people that have interviewed you in the past make a lot of noise about your university background (physics degree and a PhD in theoretical physics). Did you (do you) in fact tie in your educational background to your improvisations in any way? Can you expand more on the dilemma of playing with your gut vs. over-analytical improvisations.

JB: I think that most of the analytical work is done in preparation for improvising (listening, practicing, thinking), and the actual performance works at a much more intuitive, almost sub-conscious level. I try to enter an improvisation with something close to an empty mind.

Over the years I've done quite a lot of work on learning to control aspects of the saxophone that are on the edge of instability - and this has led to discoveries and surprises which I've correlated and partly systematized. Maybe this has some connection with a temperament that led to me doing physics research - but I think the actual musical concerns and performance practices have almost no tie-in. In science, imagination and inventiveness mean nothing if they don't agree with physical reality - in music you can create your own reality, a subjective world that might contradict and challenge many others.

TS: Who was the most significant model for you when you first took up playing?

JB: Everyone's playing history goes through all kinds of changes and developments, and there's a mammoth, and expanding list of musicians I've enjoyed and admired over the years. But I never know what to say when people ask about influences - everything, perhaps - positively and negatively. (Deciding that you don't want to play like certain people is pretty important).

In terms of free improvising, the most direct influence has come from the practical business of playing with people. Being able to experiment, in the 70s/80s, with musicians of my generation (Burn, Russell, Durrant etc) rather than playing with more established people was important. We could try to find our own way (even if it meant re-inventing the odd wheel here and there).

TS: Since you'd started playing, have you seen opportunities to play live and to put out your recordings increase or dwindle?

JB: Increase, definitely. In my early free improvising days there was very little interest or support, apart from other musicians (which was vital for sustaining the work). And the 80s were a terrible time for non-commercially motivated activities.

TS: What does the future hold for you in terms of new recorded works?

JB: Out March: Invisible Ear (Fringes) - solo, amplified, feedback and multitracked saxes; Thermal (Unsounds) - with Thomas Lehn (synth), Andy Moor (guitarist from the EX); Optic (Emanem) - with John Edwards (double bass); Tincture (Musica Genera) - with Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), Michael Zerang (percussion)
Out May: Chris Burn Ensemble - Live in Szczecin (Musica Genera)

For more detailed info on John Butcher's discography, tour information and article links, go to the Butcher page at European Improv

Recent or selected recommended John Butcher's recordings:

News From The Shed (Acta, 1989)
Frisque Concordance Spellings (Random Acoustics, 1993)
Butcher/Durrant/Russell Concert Moves (Random Acoustics, 1993)
Spontaneous Music Ensemble A New Distance (Acta, 1994)
John Butcher/Vanessa Mackness Respiritus (Incus, 1995)
John Butcher London and Cologne - Saxophone Solos (Rastascan, 1996)
Fred Van Hove t'Nonet Suite for B... City (FMP, 1997)
Chris Burn's Ensemble Navigations (Acta, 1997)
Polwechsel Polwechsel 2 (HatHut, 1999)
John Butcher / Gerry Hemingway Shooters and Bowlers (Red Toucan, 2001)
John Butcher Fixations (14) Solo Saxophone Improvisations 1997-2000 (Emanem, 2001)
John Butcher / Derek Bailey / Rhodri Davies Vortices and Angels (Emanem, 2001)
Polwechsel Polwechsel 3 (Durian, 2001)
John Butcher / Phil Durrant / Peggy Lee Intentions (Nuscope, 2001)
Chris Burn's Ensemble Horizontals White (Emanem, 2002)
Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn / John Butcher Thermal (Unsounds 2002)
John Butcher / Mike Hansen / Tomasz Krakowiak Equation (Spool, 2003)
John Butcher Invisible Ear (Fringes, 2003)

Decision Dream - Steamroom Variations

Red Toucan 9328

It tickles me to imagine that I’m hearing some futurist or alternate universe version of a Jimi Hendrix group when I listen to this manic outgrowth of the power trio. Well alright, maybe the freer moments of Hendrix at Woodstock meets a more reflective Fushitsusha. Anyway, it would have been easy for an electro-blowing session such as that on offer here to have deteriorated into shapeless noodling, but somehow, to group credit, I hear very little excess on this disc. In fact, repeated listening reveals Steamroom to be fairly frenetic but streamlined, transparent without loosing viscerality or power.

Recorded in one afternoon in London late this past summer, the platter’s basically one mammoth three-part suite with a brief coda for good measure. From the outset, guitarist Magnus Alexanderson, bassist Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and trapist Anthony Bianco serve up a mixture of drone, scree and clatter that manages order through constantly on-the-toes communication, all of which begins fairly softly with vaguely “jazz” inflections in drum timbre. Within the first five minutes though, the line between jazz and noise is straddled, which happens more and more frequently as the disc unfolds in slow jagged arcs. At one point, things die down to near silence, an astonishing and well-executed effect, but it is short-lived.

I don’t mean to give the impression that order is lacking here—it most certainly is not, but it usually comes in bizarrely interconnected loops, each one coming off like a microcosmic manifestation of the disc as a whole—organized asymmetry—and so the loops tangle and unwind themselves in perfect counterpoint to everything else roiling and bubbling in tandem. The drums are beautifully recorded, producing some fun spatial allusions if auditioned in “the sweet spot” and it’s often hard to tell bass from guitar, so effect-laden and inter-registral is almost every utterance. Do I even hear occasional delay on the drums—they’re remarkably dry otherwise.

Maybe, and despite my inability to articulate in kind, the best thing about the disc is just how clearly presented everything is. No matter how many levels of feedback, distortion and whatever else is piled atop the remnants of what I’ll jump right on out and call instrumental purity, the trio identity is refreshingly ever-present. This is commendable, and I look forward to hearing wherever these folks take music that I have no qualms whatsoever about labeling fusion.

~ Marc Medwin

Dieter Scherf - Inside-Outside Reflections

Atavistic/UMS 255

In the heyday of German free improvisation, as in the United States, the music had its epicenters even as it carried on in a creative-guerilla fashion throughout the country. Though a significant amount of activity occurred (and still does) in Berlin and Munich, and these seem to get the most press by virtue of Free Music Production and the Berlin Jazzfest, Frankfurt was the locale of one of Germany’s major (and most forward-thinking) jazz festivals in the 1960s and ‘70s, and its suburbs the breeding-ground for two of the most interesting collective ensembles in (then West) Germany’s improvisational halcyon: the Modern Jazz Quintet Karlsruhe (featuring trumpeter Herbert Joos), and the Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden (Scherf’s alma mater). Somewhat tellingly, neither band recorded for any of the music’s normal channels – FMP, ECM, Japo, or Calig – choosing instead to release their music on private imprints in small, artful runs whose distribution relegated them to footnotes of German jazz history.

The Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden, a quartet with the odd instrumentation of reeds (Scherf), trumpet (Michael Sell), guitar (Gerhard König, who also played flute) and percussion (Wolfgang Schlick), released two appropriately schizoid LPs on Scherf’s LST label in 1969 and 1971 (Frictions and Frictions Now, catalog numbers corresponding to the dates recorded) before disbanding. Scherf continued working and recording for at least the next few years, producing Interaction in 1973 with three similarly obscure characters (though drummer Mano Weiss had worked with Joos), a somewhat typical free blowing date excepting a tour-de-force of overdubbed percussion and reeds, the oddly-titled “Folk Rock.” Interaction is probably more notable for its cover, an Uwe Zimmerman classic featuring a melting, screaming head, than the music contained therein. Inside-Outside Reflections, Scherf’s fourth and final appearance on LST is the more interesting of his two as a leader, a turn of the ‘power trio’ format on its head, joining the reedman with Aachen-born drummer Paul Lovens and the wonderful Polish bassist Jacek Bednarek for six pieces recorded both live and in the studio late in 1974.

The set opens with the title track’s circular-breath clarinet over rustling percussion and Bednarek’s weighty lines (see “Atemzirkulation” for more of Scherf’s circular talent), Lovens getting a brief solo before bass and bass clarinet enter at an ominous slow wail to take it out. “Daijededa” features Scherf in Roland Kirk-mode, deftly tripling alto, baritone and bass clarinet before one of his thoroughly bop-schooled alto flights emerges, a gritty and keening extrapolation of Konitz that makes the choice of Lovens all the more curious. Scherf switches back and forth between tortured bebop and a manic, acid bass clarinet technique, in a way giving the lie to the album title’s implications far more than the opener. Lovens’ “Drum und Dran” dances with fractured rhythm as Scherf and Bednarek occasionally inject burnished lyricism into the proceedings, a see-saw of mania and placidity that is more than a two-way mirror. “Prozess” is a live recording from the Jazz House Wiesbaden, and despite its ‘blowing-session’ nature, is probably the centerpiece of the record – two stunningly scorching alto solos, the first of which would make Arthur Jones proud, though Bednarek is probably given center stage as the one most able to gird the often disparate proceedings. Closing out the session is “Klänge über Linie,” Scherf providing a repetitive piano rustle over which Bednarek gives a vicious arco workout in tandem with Lovens’ dissociative surges, a tense end to a tensile set.

Inside-Outside Reflections is among what the best of the Unheard Music Series has to offer – namely, through a single release, providing a window into an area of free music that few people would otherwise have the chance to experience. Though Scherf will be far from a household name in even the hippest of households, the re-release of this music is truly a welcome one. Unfortunately, though the CD edition provides interesting photos of Scherf and a comrade in their broken-down tour VW van (evidently they ‘jam econo’), the lack of liner notes makes context a bit daunting. It isn’t too much to hope for that the next UMS nugget alleviates this potential problem.

~ Clifford Allen

Three with Jack Wright

Jack Wright/Paul Neidhardt/Andy Hayleck
Whoosh
Spring Garden
SGM 15

NOM TOM (Carol Genetti/Jon Mueller/Jack Wright)
Nom Tom
Spring Garden
SGM 14

Todd Whitman/Jack Wright
Twist and Thrall
Spring Garden
SGM 13

As long a time as one spends around improvised music and as wide a net as one chooses to cast, there are inevitably people whom you simply never get around to hearing. I’d heard Wright’s name and read a reasonable amount about his work for who knows how many years and I’m sure I’ve heard a sampling of his music on radio now and again but I really didn’t know much about him nor had I really listened to his work. I say this only as a preamble to the reviews below so that people understand my (non) history as far as Wright’s music goes and my utter inability, therefore, to place these recordings into the context of his prior work.

“Whoosh”, recorded barely three months ago as I write this, is one of those old-fashioned sax/percussion/saw trios and is also my favorite of the bunch, probably due in large part to its generally subdued nature. Four tracks, between 10 and 16 minutes each, giving the group ample room to breathe and create living space. There’s a gentleness at work here, Wright beginning the first piece, “Scratch”, with fluttery trills and shakuhachi-like intonation, Neidhardt entering with soft patters and Hayleck supplying slightly bitter scrapes of the saw, leavening any overly-delicate aura. The music spools out in unhurried fashion for the most part, allowing bits of agitation that are soon smoothed over, though with a tangy hint of unease left behind. The inevitably titled following track, “Sniff”, suffers a bit from excessive action where it’s not required, nervous energy for its own sake, lending some aridity to the improvisation. “Blow” is the strongest work here, everything coming together: Wright’s soft cries, Neidhardt’s rubbed drum heads, Hayleck’s plaintive saw, all carving out a convincing space, the swirling activities within as natural as leaves in a breeze. (It reminded me of a fine nmperign performance.) The final piece, “Bow”, also treads lightly, all sputters, squeaks and patters morphing into hushed sustained tones, bringing the disc to a satisfying conclusion. Recommended.

The Nom Tom trio date yields two improvisations from September of 2004, Wright joined by percussionist (snare drum) Jon Mueller and vocalist Carol Genetti. Our own squire Warburton has written this up for Paris Transatlantic and derives more pleasure from Ms. Genetti’s work than I but that could have to do in large part to my historical (genetic?) lack of patience with free singers, the inherent difficulty a listener (or, this listener at any rate) has in “losing” the vocalist among the other instrumentalists. I tend toward extremes in this regard, desiring either an in-your-face Galas or someone whose sound I wouldn’t recognize as having issued from vocal chords. Too many of Genetti’s tacks on the first track struck me as by the free improv book; too little risk taking of one kind or another. Mueller, on the other hand, is quite enjoyable to listen to, mining a far wider aural lode than fellow snare-exclusivist Meehan but always with a careful ear and one tuned to the surprisingly rich sounds one can generate from that fashionable drum. The second cut is more boisterous, Wright beginning with elk-like buglings, Mueller thrashing and banging, Genetti investigating Tuvan realms as well as some sharp-intake, semi-melodic figures which work quite effectively (though her bleating about 11 minutes into the piece, I must admit, sorely tested me). Still, it’s a more solid improv and holds sonic interest throughout with a wide palette and a spacious feel.

“Twist and Thrall” is the earliest session of the three, dating from 1999, and finds Wright (soprano, alto and tenor) paired with Todd Whitman (alto and baritone) in a series of reed duos with a handful of solo improvs thrown in. Of the three releases reviewed here, it has the clearest connections to free jazz, sometimes reminding me, in fact, of that old Julius Hemphill/Oliver Lake date on Sackville, “Buster Bee”, a similar sinuosity. While, on a personal level, it’s not the sort of structure I’m very interested in these days, Wright and Whitman do what they do very well, filling the space, intertwining skillfully around each other’s lines, exploding into flurries of impassioned notes (as on “kissed”, the longest of 14 tracks here, “blissed” and others) and generally conversing in a spirited, friendly manner. I can easily see “Twist and Thrall” having great appeal for fans of free jazz saxophonics.

There’s a little something for everyone here. While Wright aficionados will doubtless enjoy all three (all CDR, btw), others might prefer to pick and choose depending on the alignment of his particular explorations with their own preferences.

Joachim Kühn / Mark Nauseef / Tony Newton / Miroslav Tadic - Let's Be Generous (CMP)

This 1991 release is a pinnacle of avant-fusion and most of the credit goes to Joachim Kühn's gloriously raw and distorted electronic keyboard sound. As a guitarist, it's hardly surprising that Miroslav Tadic would summon prototypes of ecstatic electric music like Jimi Hendrix and Allan Holdsworth, but for a musician best known as a pianist, and occasionally a rather bland one, it's a real shock to hear the same prototypes summoned by keyboards. The timbres don't overlap with Mike Ratledge's mythical playing in The Soft Machine, but the intensity and dirty analog feeling are comparable, a rare achievement to say the least. The combination of Tadic and Kühn equally assaulting a bevy of warm jazz melodies and harmonies with slurred, fuzzed, blistering fury is a feast unlike any others I can cite. It's easy to hear the similarities to the heavy guitar attack of stuff from the same rough time frame like Ronald Shannon Jackson's fantastic Red Warrior, Sonny Sharrock's uneven rock-oriented platters, and the Christy Doran / Stephan Wittwer collaboration Red Twist and Tuned Arrow, but even as he explores sonic territory typical of electric guitar Kühn's sound here is so distinct from any guitar sound that his blend with Tadic is a singular wonder.

If you put this amazing blend on top of a hot rhythm section playing typical fusion pulses and grooves, you'd likely get a masterpiece. Instead of this, electric bass guitarist Tony Newton and drumkitter Mark Nauseef did something slightly better: they deconstructed fusion rhythms into multidirectional, unpredictable, unstable motion. In the same sense we often speak of free bop, this music is a perfect example of free fusion. Newton and Nauseef's playing is almost as adventurous and intriguing as Tadic and Kühn's, and the conventional bipartite structure of rhythm section and lead instruments often collapses so that the entire quartet becomes a rhythm section and Newton often deals with pitch material as much as the guitar and keyboards. A great example of Newton's virtuosity and flexibility is the three-way interlocking geometric phrases in "Don't Disturb My Groove", but Kühn probably deserves even more credit for this passage as the composer. He's clearly the conceptual engine behind the project; almost all of the original material on the album is composed by him and the three very short pieces from the other three musicians' pens are interludes that serve the album only by way of contrast to its main stylistic thrust.

Newton's bass guitar also occasionally gets almost as dirty and wanton as the guitar and keyboards. One of his best moments is the ingenious subterrenean locomotive growl-riff-chugging he does towards the end of "Heavy Hanging", elevating an already fascinating passage that trades the quartet's signature gourmet skronk for a fairly sparse passage of clever, uncliched call-and-response interplay without any idiomatic references to jazz, rock, or fusion, including some great clean, jagged, spiky guitar lines from Tadic. The album is nearly as impressive for its compositional cleverness as for its bristling raw energy and rare timbral blends.

This disc can put a gut out of commission right from the gate with ten minutes of mind-blowing avant-shred to the tune of Dolphy's "The Prophet". The only version I know of this piece is the loquacious reading on the 1961 Five Spot set. Curiously, there's yet another Dolphy cover on the program, a take on the post-"Hat and Beard" chill-out "Something Sweet, Something Tender", short at only 3 minutes. The core melody is there, but it's hardly recognizable otherwise. And not just because of the dirty electric sounds, but in terms of the entire arrangement. Newton and Nauseef take a pretty generic constant-activity approach in contrast to the measured and brief pizzicato episodes of Richard Davis that magically offset the floating harmonies in the original. Unexpectedly, the intrigue of this liberal variation on "Something Sweet" has little to do with Dolphy and presents a strange connection to a certain musician that lurks right below the surface of this music for much more obvious reasons. I find Tadic and Kühn's flowing long lines in the piece to be incredibly similar to Allan Holdsworth in their specific harmonic content, and it becomes for me a tantalizing glimpse into the post-bop jazz sources of Holdsworth's music that are often obscured by his timbral and phrasal innovations.

A strange connection, but it's downright uncanny to consider Newton's history. In fact, I know nothing of Newton aside from this album and his work on the two albums by The New Tony Williams Lifetime where he lent a warm subtle funk-tinged muscle to some peak excursions by none other than Allan Holdsworth. 1975's Believe It is one of the landmarks in fusion history, foreshadowing numerous developments in the next decade and holding up damn well 20 years later. 1976's Million Dollar Legs holds up quite well too in its peak moments (e.g. the explosive ending track "Inspirations of Love"), but of course suffers from a few throwaway cuts and greater concessions to the commercial funk fusion zeitgeist. Williams' supple, loose heaviness was just the icing on the cake of memorable melodies and warm, round, legato heaviness, though Alan Pasquale's electric piano work in that group sure seems timid and merely functional if we're thinking about Kühn's scorchery here. The unforgettable melody of "Snake Oil" that leads off the 1975 classic is taken for a 81-second ride here, surely with light-hearted intentions as Nauseef spits out some fucked up electronics and digital drum sounds into the slashing splatters that overlay the repeated catchy core melody. It bears observing that the overdriven dirty sound of the disc is actually closer to the original McLaughlin/Young version of Lifetime, while at the same time Newton's bass guitar is firmly planted in the Believe It-->One of a Kind-->Brand X-->Atavachron-->Tribal Tech-->etc continuum and Tadic's guitar playing owes much more to Holdsworth, not to mention Starless and Red era King Crimson (an aspect of the Tadic/Nauseef synergy best heard on Dark's Tamna Voda, an album as mind-blowing and intense as the present one), than to McLaughlin. For my tastes, any combination of all these fusion building blocks is bound to be bountiful.

I found this rather strange remark about the album buried in a Kühn bio page during my googling for this review: "Here, combining the influences of Béla Bartók, Eric Dolphy, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, and Tony Williams' Lifetime, he set new standards for a contemporary and distinctively European blend of concert music, rock, and jazz." Sure, there are two Dolphy covers, fair enough, though they sound almost nothing like Dolphy save for the lifted harmonies. The Hendrix and Lifetime bits are pretty obvious, but I don't get the Bartok and Beefheart references. Maybe it's just that I take for granted the sort of great, asymmetrical Drumboing around Nauseef dabbles in here. But I thought it would be fun to share this quote if only for amusement value. "distinctively European"??? Whoa, where did that come from? A bizarre nonsequitur if I've ever seen one. The world could get along quite well without nonsensical PR blather like this. At the least the author has great taste in music.

The Bill Bruford flavorings of Nauseef's playing here is almost too obvious to mention, and somehow it's not suprising to see a quote on the Nauseef/Tadic joint website from Bruford (1991 interview in the Wire) praising it. I recommend visiting that page if you don't have this album, because there are three sound clips you can weigh against my present gushing. They also quote Henry Kaiser's effusive praise, and with his well-documented love for electric Miles, it definitely makes a lot of sense that he was blown away by this album. After all, major rhythmic differences aside, that is the most obvious dirty avant-fusion this album owes a major debt to and I think this album would be as likely to thrill an electric Miles fan as a King Crimson fan or a fan of the more creative strains of 90s fusion like Scott McGills' Hand Farm, Attention Deficit, etc.

CMP has an impressive and singular legacy, but I can't think of another CMP release (not counting the priceless ethnomusicological stuff) that has stung me this hard. Bill Milkowski's nice historical overview of the label suggests I'm not the only one accounting this album in a special category.

~Michael Anton Parker

The Muddy Waters of Polka?

On the odd chance there are Bagatellen readers not yet acquainted with polka icon Li'l Wally, I'd like to present one of the most fascinating articles on music I've read recently. Robert Andrew Powell's remarkably well-researched 1999 mega-feature in Miami New Times was a pot of musicological gold when I took to the information superhighway in search of any morsel about a man whose unbridled, um, happiness struck me as the trace of a lost mythology while my mind boggled in delighted disbelief bathing in the garish glories of an especially eye- and ear-catching thrift store vinyl acquisition. My jaw and head had already moved in their respective directions a few months earlier while giving the relic a hasty audition, and today I was bitten by the Li'l Wally bug again. I hold the jazz-equivalent reed/brass/drumkit timbres and punk-equivalent energy of polka in enough esteem to add any slab of the style to my "educational vinyl" queue when the price is right. I've long felt a storm cloud of polka obsession gathering momentum somewhere in the tangled trails of my future musical journey, and so it's sheer practicality that honors opportunities for preparation. While my polka stash continues to gather dust, the "suggestive and hot" provocations of Li'l Wally couldn't go ignored.

My parents met at a polka dance. Faint childhood memories linger of the infrequent occasions where me and my brother would be forced to soldier the tedium of a festive polka powwow as my parents indulged their horrific hobby. Such events really had little to offer to a five-year old with only the weakest affiliations to Polish-American culture. I was frightened of all the ferociously friendly adults who'd take the occasional stab at entertaining me and my brother in our stranded situation at some table aways from the dance floor, and the colors, costumes, music, and stench of a sagging subculture begat sensory suffering. This would've been around the greater Philadelphia area, including New Jersey. I believe polka still holds its own quite well in some parts of the country, and none of my memories about this should be trusted.

Fast-forward twenty-some years and I find comfort in having some polka fixes on hand in both digital and analog media. There's no special reason; it's really just that at this stage of my listening pathology there's not a single style of music I don't enjoy if it has some character of authenticity, regardless of geographical and genetic affiliations. I'm sure many music-addicts find themselves in the same spongy situation of universal aesthetic compliance. The only music I honestly can't abide is the saccharine, slick forms of modern R&B and gospel, but give me the old stuff and I'm all ears. Now, on any given day of the week I'll take some klezmer over polka (and my genes are approximately 0% East European and 0% Jewish, incidentally; I'm an Nth generation West European American), but every musical form has its unique charms and polka is far from being an exception. Fact is, polka kicks ass. Toss me in the middle of a polka party at this point in life and they'd have to drag me off the dance floor at 3am before I'd lose my groove. This is all hypothetical of course; for the foreseeable future I'll continue to restrict my public pleasure-seeking to sterile avant-garde improvised music concerts, rare groove hipster hoedowns, and the like.

Take a look as this album cover.

Take a look at the reverse cover.

Let's talk some Wally. This album is more than hot and happy polka jams; this is the reckless, refined outpouring of a polka genius tormented by indestructible happiness. This is mythologically extreme happiness, happiness taken to fantastical, transcendent extremes as the mirror image of the deepest blues. Little did I know that my faint suspicions were the tip of the joy-terrorism iceberg. I just thought "this cat is really hardcore" and couldn't believe the boldness of vocal stylings and lyrics I was hearing. This is no ordinary happy polka singer. I mean, just check his credentials: "star of radio - tv... a great performer, composer - arranger - singer- drummer - concertino player, announcer and executive"; just look at the dashing outfit he sports on the cover; just ponder titles like "She Hugs Me Very Nice". "millions sold"?! I'd never heard of this guy before, but somehow this had the makings of more than just another disposable, generic polka album. And the music! Well, instrumentally it's airtight, but nothing to write home about; it's all about the vocal delivery, which is nothing short of surreal. What's more, I didn't really notice it at first, but this stuff actually is "suggestive and hot"! Here are my transcriptions of "She Hugs Me Very Nice" (minus indications of repeated verses) and "Better In Than Out":

She Hugs Me Very Nice

She hugs me very nice
She's full of love and spice
She is my doll
Really knows how
I like it once
But prefer it twice

Oh and you hug me dear
And whisper in my ear
Feeling is such
I love your touch
Oh darling, baby, you mean so much

To me you are my world
You are my lovin' girl
You flip me up
My buttercup
Cause when you hug me
It rises up

Just hug me like you do
You make me to love you
You have that touch
That means so much
You have me baby
Oh through and through

Better In Than Out

[wild whoops, hoots, yelps, etc in the background in between verses—not rare for polka]

When you're with me you just thrill me; please don't let me go
Cause you have that special something and I love it so
Cause you have that special something and I love it so

When you feel me, when you're in me it's better than out
Cause when I am in you baby I just don't want out
Cause when I'm in you baby I just don't want out

Leave it in you; leave it in you and enjoy it too
Cause it takes the two to make love like the birdies do
Cause it takes the two to make love like the birdies do

Hugging hugging then a-cuddling, that's the beginning
Better in than out of love and love is everything
Better in than out of love and love is everything

But the iceberg is right there in the article I linked above. Read it. Some choice quotes:

"Li'l Wally was an extremely important figure from a polka-history perspective, comparable to Charlie Parker in jazz," says ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, coauthor of Polka Happiness(Temple University Press, 1996). "He turned the whole style around, as much as any single individual."

"Imagine if you listened to the blues and all you heard were the biggest songs of B.B. King,or maybe somebody even blander than that," Hedeker continues. "You'd say that the blues don't have much power to them. Then all of a sudden you discover Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson, and you realize that the blues are amazing. That's what happened to me when I discovered Li'l Wally. He's right up there with those great American artists. I have to say he's one of the true undiscovered musical gems left in this country."

[...]

Wally's fans often send him jokes in the mail... Then there was one from the former editor of Polka News: "He says that this guy dies and he goes to Heaven, and he hears polka music and drumming and singing, but especially drumming. And so he tells Saint Peter that he didn't know Li'l Wally was here in Heaven. And Saint Peter says, 'That's God playing the drums. He only thinks he's Li'l Wally.' I think that's very cute."

One often hears talk of singer-songwriters like Lata Mangeshkar and Sinn Sisamouth in terms of their sheer prolificacy, but Li'l Wally's analogously prodigious output has a twist to defy belief: "In the 61 years he's been performing, Wally has composed more than 2000 songs, all of them happy." On the matter of record releases, Rod's Music in Minnesota has no less than 96 Li'l Wally albums listed in their online catalogue. Neither the record jacket itself nor Google can give me any hint of the year this particular record was made, though I've ascertained its official title as Suggestive and Hot in the face of the less than straightforward textual format characteristic of a bygone vinyl era. Speaking of websearching, I nearly resigned myself to the conclusion I was pursuing a hopelessly obscure figure requiring more than casual sleuthing when my initial queries came up with paltry googits of a curiously unrelated flavor, and it's only when I tried some alternative keyword strategies that I chanced upon Powell's great piece and eventually realized I'd accidentally but repeatedly misconstrued Mr. Jagiello's name as "Li'l Willy" instead of the correct and googit-heavy "Li'l Wally".

Though my polka-loving father is still perfectly alive, his record-listening days seem behind him and for whatever reason a stack of his polka records was passed along to me some years back. As it were, I didn't even have a turntable until fairly recently. Writing up this quick entry I'd be remiss not to dig them out of the closet and see if there might be a Li'l Wally in there. Nothing of the sort. In fact, perusing the twenty-odd platters and playing a few for the first time, I'm struck that they seem to be part of a different polka lineage than Wally's. Spinning through well-worn discs like Bernie Witkowski Orchestra's Chicken Hop Polka, Connecticut Twins Orchestra's My Girl Duda, Frank Wojnarowski and His Orchestra's Polka Party with Frank, and Ray Budzilek's Domino Polka, I hear little of the raw humanity of Li'l Wally and the emphasis is squarely on more flashy playing or conventionally pretty vocals. In some ways I think I prefer the faster instrumental polka style some of these other groups refined to impressively virtuosic levels, especially the ripping clarinet playing. I frequently listen to 33rpm records on 45rpm to give a lift to boring music and even not-so-boring music, but some polka albums have the rare distinction of sounding like they're on 45rpm even when they're played on the intended 33rpm speed, though Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Music crew are certainly kindred spirits. Nevertheless, there's an element of songcraft in the Wally school that connects to something less tangible and more endearing, and the master himself clearly has that spirit and personality defining the singularities in any genre.

~Michael Anton Parker

Joe Fiedler Trio - Plays the Music of Albert Mangelsdorff

Clean Feed 49

Critic Steve Loewy makes a cogent point in his liners to this new Clean Feed release. Why hasn’t Albert Mangelsdorff received posthumous laurels in the form of tributes? Peter Kowald pocketed a deserved slew after his passing. But the departed European dean of trombone multiphonics is still awaiting his due. Joe Fiedler’s lucidly titled Plays the Music of Albert Mangelsdorff is the first project to redress the oversight. Choosing nine choice compositions from the Mangelsdorffian songbook, a tome surprisingly not often cracked by peers over the years, Fielder, with bassist John Hebert and drummer Mark Ferber (dig the structural similarities of their surnames) delivers a survey that is at once deep and uncompromising and still decidedly accessible throughout, traits emblematic of the dedicatory maestro himself.

Fiedler takes an adage once avowed by Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis into practice, evincing plenary command of his brass from the start, especially when it comes to scorecard of tonal expressiveness. An even more impressive aspect is how effortless he makes it appear. “Wheat Song” opens with a menacing preface of growling multiphonics, but Fielder soon switches to slipping and gliding, working his lubricated slide to voice bold intervallic jumps. Hebert lays down a hulking funk-infused vamp, his bass strings assuming the weight of marble columns, and Ferber caulks the clefts with a bobbing flotilla of beats. Blessed with an everlastingly catchy African-influenced theme and a sense of slowly smoldering tension, “Now Jazz Ramwong” stands arguably as Mangelsdorff’s masterpiece. Fiedler does it every bit of justice, starting solemn and glissading into an eloquent solo alive with rhythmic virility. Ferber’s lissome sticks are wonder here too, barely grazing skins and cymbals much of the time and still conjuring a plush flying carpet of propulsive, yet unobtrusive patterns.

“An Ant Steps On An Elephant’s Toe” comes on like a representative of the Ray Anderson or Rebirth Brass Band repertoires and once again illustrates the breadth of the Mangelsdorff’s influence. Ferber locks on a tandem snare and cymbal break beat while Hebert traffics in bulbous pizzicato. Fiedler saunters on top, shaping a soulful serpentine line that originates from deep in the bowels of his bell. This one had me dancing a knee-popping, arm-windmilling jig around my listening room in synch with the contagious street band-style rhythms. More burrish muliphonics braid on the dour “Mayday Hymn” a tune that gives full license to Fiedler’s powers of circular breathing, a tone poem with funereal overtones.

“Lapwing,” “Zores Mores” and “Wart G’Schwind” amble ahead as a loose trilogy of groove cousins, the middle tune taking shape as a startling exercise in split tones. All three pieces open up lots of space for Herbert and Ferber to embrace heavy syncopations between flurried ‘bone breaks. The capper “Do Your Own Thing” consists of an extended unaccompanied improvisation. Fiedler shapes a rhythmically-rich monologue of punchy, textured phrases that segue from dry gutteralisms to gelid smooth notes and back. Memory of Mangelsdorff will likely never fade, but Fielder’s venture does salient service in bringing the German master’s oeuvre back into focus. It certainly prompted me to rifle through the collection and re-audition his sextet of albums on MPS. Hopefully others in the trombone fraternity will opt to follow suit and a Mangelsdorff renaissance will result.

~ Derek Taylor

Tomas Korber/Dan Warburton - Conspiracy Theory

Tomas Korber/Dan Warburton
Conspiracy Theory
l’innomable
05

I’ve heard of these guys somewhere.

The disc jacket only references “sounds and transformations” by the pair so I’m unsure how much, if any, of the two performances here was live improv, how much post-collaged, who was responsible for what, etc. I don’t particularly care and I imagine they’ll fill us in, if so disposed, anyway.

I find each track off and on fascinating but ultimately not fully satisfying (though I far prefer the second), each for similar reasons. Both consist of sequences of widely varying sounds, some of them intriguing and fun, others seriously annoying. But neither coheres the way I’d like them to, each too episodic and chunky for my taste though, of course, that (like the annoying sounds) may have been intended.

The first cut begins with several of these irritating sound globules, spacey pinging, loopy drones and such ricocheting about; you feel as though you’re descending through some sci-fi cartoon atmosphere, landing at the planetary astro-port, escorted away by a pair of wacky ‘droids. Happily, this only occupies the first few minutes and the piece settles in nicely for a while with some deeply reverberant, spacious hums and burbles. For a couple of minutes, that is. Things grind to a stop. Some more semi-comic bleats leak out over sharply pounded, echoing bangs. A lot of the sonics recall, for me, Sun Ra’s noodling around on the clavioline or whatever he was calling his proto-synth on a given day in the mid-60s; in fact, more than a few vestiges of “The Magic City” or “Atlantis” can be picked up here, doubtless coincidental but not nearly packing the wallop of those classics. The remainder of the piece fluctuates in this manner, careening from absorbing flutter ‘n’ drone to squiggly boinks and blats that I found unfailingly distracting. It ends nicely in more subdued, lusher territory but on the whole, I was left with more a collection of scenes and hearing little compelling reason for them to have been placed alongside each other.

Harsh—very harsh—bursts of electronics open the second track, quickly dissolving into pointed shards; enjoyably abrasive, though again, loopier sounds begin to percolate through, dousing the initial excitement a bit. This is soon supplanted by a wonderful, smooth buzz saw drone which…disappears in a nonce in favor of hushed whirs and scrabbling. The piece was beginning to almost have the feel of its predecessor but here, somehow, I felt a bit more cohesion, a little bit of dream-logic in the whys and wherefores of the sound placement. About halfway through, the proceedings are commandeered by a rich, organ-y drone that sweeps away everything in its path, luxuriating in its own complex strands. For a while, anyway. It hits an immoveable wall, ruptures into diverse fragments, reforms at its base, gathers momentum and continues on, hurtling toward the performance’s conclusion, although not without a final raspberry of splats, just in case I was enjoying myself too much. Perhaps the shaky start makes the ending feel all the more solid but I much preferred this cut and it just about tips the balance in favor of recommending “Conspiracy Theory” to interested listeners.

Joe McPhee & John Snyder - Pieces of Light

UMS/Atavistic 256

Current cognoscenti might not be comfortable with the claim, but Pieces of Light makes a convincing case for Joe McPhee’s place as a pioneering force in electro-acoustic improvisation. To be fair, his contributions to this 1974 saucer of vinyl adhere solely to the acoustic side of the spectrum. The ‘electro’ end falls to early ARP synthesist John Snyder who inserts his plugs and twiddles his dials to propagate a mostly responsive sounding board for McPhee’s improvisations. McPhee refers to the end products as a “music of tone colors and textures to be experienced physically as well as aurally.”

Snyder’s biographical details are few. But indicative of their varying degrees of musicianship the fit between him and McPhee is occasionally like oil and water. The best portions of the program occur when McPhee fares forward alone. Their differential is definitely in place on the opening “Prologue/Twelve” which starts with seven plush minutes of prime, tonally-adventurous McPhee tenor. Snyder’s successive turn in the concluding segment can’t help but sound incongruous and dated by comparison, starting out like a volley between dueling Pong paddles on an antique Atari game console and expanding to a vintage Vangelis vista by the close.

McPhee’s decision to pad his own palette AACM-style with a small cache of peripheral instruments proves another distraction from his work on his principal horns. Ceramic and bamboo wind chimes color the shapes on “Shadow Sculptures” while Nagoya harp and flute add welcome organic counterweight to the synthetic elements on “Windows in Dreams,” but neither piece ends up all that memorable in the larger scheme. “Les Heros Sont Fatigues” is more like it. McPhee doles out another dose of dolorous tenor, blowing a vaguely spiritual line unaccompanied prior to the entrance of Snyder’s reverberating constructions which take on the tonalities of Missile Command ordinance detonating over space port cities. Track demarcations during this center section of the disc are a bit confusing with “Red Giant” apparently tacked onto the end of the aforementioned piece rather than standing alone as indicated on the tray card. And speaking of the packaging, while it can’t replicate the album-as-art beauty that was the original vinyl pressing facsimiles of the inserts and McPhee’s thoughtfully-scripted liners stand up as a fine substitute.

“Colors in Crystal” occupies the entirety of Side B and takes the call and response tactics of the earlier tracks to temporal extremes. Individually McPhee makes strong statements on various brass and tenor, blowing vaporous trails on the former instruments and hard-bitten tonal morsels on the latter. Snyder’s responses fail to carry the same weight, sifting the same array of 70s sci-fi soundtrack sine oscillations. McPhee even does a glottal impression of Phil Minton as the vinyl’s inner edge draws nigh, before reinserting tenor mouthpiece and dueting with his own trumpet. Snyder takes the excursion out with a sustained drone and fleeting Doppler signal sign-off. This album’s last place entry in the Unheard Music Series project to reissue the trilogy of early CJR titles isn’t all that surprising; it’s easily the weakest of the three. But there’s still enough here of interest to recommend it reservedly to any listener enamored of McPhee.

~ Derek Taylor

Syriana

Long it’s been since big cinema has produced an experience like Syriana. Several reviews complain that the film as finished product is a far cry from the one promised by the trailer that ran in theaters several months ago. That trailer played much like the typical high concept, new millennial thriller, something akin to Firewall, the upcoming Harrison Ford vehicle that toes every Harrison Ford movie trope: grainy footage, jump-cut editing, an All-American protagonist up against an array of shadowy, ostensibly faceless foreign adversaries, and a plot that feigns ambiguity, but ends up tracing a popcorn-friendly path from point A to point Z. Syriana is anything but streamlined, and it’s hardly formulaic.

The film is a landmark in modern filmmaking. Similar in structure to its predecessor, Traffic, Syriana in a way marks a return to the paranoid political thriller of the 1970’s. It picks up where movies like Network, The Parallax View, and The Conversation left off, and it’s as thoughtfully reactionary to today’s crises. By the early 80’s, the paranoia produced by Watergate and the Vietnam War had largely worn off, and the major studios filled their pockets off dividends from scripts that dumbed down audiences, wowing moviegoers with special effects and the 101st way to tell a love story.

Thankfully, Syriana is unspoiled by any sense of blockbuster mentality, opting to tell a complicated story that would rather perplex the audience than serve it with reassuring twists. In fact, there are no plot hooks at all. The movie’s greatest strength is its willingness to stick to its own language. Unlike Sydney Pollack, a once-great director who now prefers to spoon feed his audience the details, Stephen Gaghan baffles us with information. You almost need a primer in international commerce and modern foreign policy to pull off even an informal understanding of the forces at play. Gaghan is more than willing to provide the details, but wholly on his own terms.

The difference between Syriana and its earlier predecessors is a refusal of its own political consciousness. Instead, there is the affirmation of a large, complex machine at work, its operators blind to the many systems it sustains. The film reveals no concrete enemy, and the variables are so tangled that even China, a market competitor whose legitimate dealings in Kazakhstan for the nourishment its own economy (and an entity whose vilification would be welcome among most conservatives in such a story), cannot be directly credited for what is to come.

What we get is a jazz opus with no rhythm section, and the main instruments are oil, radical Islam, international law, and corruption-as-business-strategy. During the film’s opening scene, Clooney’s CIA operative under other circumstances might seem out of place kicking back with young Iranian socialites in downtown Tehran. Perhaps, with so many years of Middle Eastern strife having become water cooler banter, we are hardened to such scenarios. We get the feeling that this exchange is crucial to the story, so we follow it closely. The linear flow of the initial scene, to its explosive culmination, then becomes the first irony of Syriana. At this point Gaghan could easily have settled in to a script that plays out like a two-hour episode of C.S.I. No, the plot exponentially thickens, and with each following scene becomes thornier.

Examining the plot is futile, at least upon first viewing. The film must contain, even at a conservative count, thousands of edits, especially in its initial hour when characters and situations fall onto the screen like air-dropped pamphlets detailing so many ideologies and coded political agendas. It’s this first half that is maddening and, at times, exhausting in its complexity. Some scenes register for only a matter of seconds. The camera globetrots, teleporting from Texas to Beirut, Tehran to D.C., and back again with only fleeting subtitles announcing dizzying shifts in locale. The principal characters, let alone the dozens of supporting ones, are hardly fleshed out at all. Instead, they’re part of a labyrinthine temporal mechanism that clicks away inexorably toward a conclusion that, given the larger geo-political forces at play, seems as inevitable as the tides.

Amazing and numbing in equal measure is the amount of information packed into each frame. Even the shortest scenes carry weight and leave the viewer wanting to scroll back to make certain that nothing slipped by. The effect is like being strapped to a chair (a fate that befalls one of the chief characters), having the pages of a Joyceian novel turned in front of you at intervals beyond your control and being expected to track the flood of information funneling from the prose. Blink and you’re literally liable to miss something. There are red herrings too, but even these feel as if they’re elemental to Syriana’s flow.

Liberal bias is certainly no surprise given Clooney’s involvement as star and producer, but the level of the film’s indictment of the current Western-centric status quo is still striking. So is Gaghan’s decision as to where to couch the greatest nobility of character and to do so with such a bedrock intellectual bulwark in place. Coming to terms with the tragic emir’s vision for modernizing his country’s economy, it’s hard to fathom that any rational person could argue against it without also embracing historically imperialist ideals.

As such, there are no partisan resonances, as the subtexts remain free of criticism. One might expect a passing examination of Islam. While there is none, its ideals, however undefined, play a palpable role. The paranoia that arises from the story is unresolved, as is the underlying theme that a structure as vast as big oil runs on its own fuel.

The movie’s weaknesses may or may not be intentional. Who bottom-lined the sound editing, particularly for those hushed conversations in dark corners? Are we to fully understand the effects of William Hurt’s character on the film’s climax? And is there a climax at all? Perhaps, but only if you hold stock in the absence of development in the icy characters. Character development takes place off camera, as the aligning of larger fates is the true centerpiece of the film.

Two hours having moved furiously by, we are left in a haze, with confirmation that corporate oil dealings are corrupt, and that the conquest of natural resources for power is hardly an enterprise that will make you friends. With the international validity of the mega-networks of the European Union, the Kyoto Protocol, and the United Nations forever under scrutiny in our world, it’s a wonder that we sleep at all. It’s that tangible doom that Gaghan wants us to feel, and further emphasize just how out of reach peace truly is.

~Alan Jones and Derek Taylor

Simply in Their Own Words

Just a quick newsflash to alert readers of some appealing new content on-site. Toronto-based freelancer Tom Sękowski has generously offered up an archive of interviews for reprint at Bags. The pieces originally ran at another music site under the catchy & apposite title "Simply in Their Own Words". We kick off the series here with a January 2003 confab w/ Gerry Hemingway. Future installments find Tom trading Q&A with the likes of John Butcher, Frank Gratkowski and Guy Klucevsek, among others. Tom’s background includes writing for The Newspaper, Coda, Exclaim, Fringe Benefits, The Whole Note and Jazzi Magazine. For over five years he also hosted an improvised/new music radio show at CIUT FM 89.5 FM in Toronto called “Flashes of Timeless Joy”. So please cue a standard 21-sousaphone salute welcoming Tom to the Bags bullpen.

[And nope, that isn’t a picture of Tom above. It’s a shot of Crazy Narvel, my second cousin thrice-removed. He’s been hounding me for months to post his photo on the homepage in hope’s of drumming up business for his eponymous TV & VCR Repair franchise located at 17229 Chagrin Rd (intersection of I-271 & US-422) just outside Cleveland, OH. Those in the area, please do me a favor & drop by the joint- there’s free buttered popcorn & possibly the largest collection of vintage transistor radios in the Midwest proper on display.]

Gerry Hemingway - January 2003

SIMPLY IN THEIR WORDS (Installment Uno)

GERRY HEMINGWAY

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular series of "simply in their words" series of interviews with some of the musicians from the improvised, jazz and new music genres that are making a real mark on the landscape. I don't want to add ANY additional text to these musicians' responses, as my words would only clutter what it is they're trying to convey to the readers.
First on the agenda is someone who has been very close to my ears for almost two decades now; percussionist, composer, improviser-extraordinaire, and most recently, a song-writer (!!), Gerry Hemingway. This is an e-mail interview that I'd conducted with Gerry at the end of January 2003.

Tom Sękowski: Are there any duo/trio/quartet/group scenarios that occurred simply by chance that have turned into long-term working relationships? If so, which ones have been too short lived, and which ones of these short-lived ones do you wish you had made a recording of?

Gerry Hemingway: Generally speaking, most of the improvised groups/combinations that have come together over the years originally had some ingredient of chance. The now 12 year old trio with Georg Graewe and Ernst Reijseger evolved out of a larger project and was at first a quartet with Radu Malfatti, but when Radu could not make a gig, the trio "discovered" itself as a trio. The duo with John Butcher came out of John seeking help on a solo tour in the US, which I offered on condition that we book a few duos as well. One thing led to another and we have established a working duo, which we continue (we are working on second CD). And so it has gone with many of the improvised music projects I am involved in...

Regarding the short-lived experiences. Hmmmm, not much has gotten by me, that hasn't been developed to some degree, either by me or by others. I would like to do the duo with Cecil [Taylor] again, that definitely could go further. Also enjoyed playing in a trio with Reggie Workman and Sam Rivers which shows up on Reggie's record for the now defunct Postcards label "Cerebral Caverns". I would like to do more with Evan Parker, we had a nice trio together with Mark Dresser, and also the same holds true for a trio I did with Mark Dresser and Joe Lovano. A dream not likely to happen would be to do a trio with Mark Dresser and Sonny Rollins.

TS: Sun Ra always hated to play in small bands. He liked to surround himself with dozens of musicians, so that (for the most part) he could drown out the sound of his own piano.

GH: Is this true? When did he say this? It sure never sounded that way based on the music that was created.

TS: Until his untimely passing in 1993, Sun Ra recorded no more than 2 or 3 solo records. Why are solo percussion records so crucial to you? Do you use them as marks in your musical growth?

GH: Solo recordings and performances are an area of my work that among other things have served as a kind of a laboratory for clarifying and refining my musical concepts and ideas. This was most true when I put together the first solo recording, "Solo Works" which was developed and produced at a fallow period of musical opportunities, shortly after I had moved to NYC in 1979. In other words, it was one of the only periods in my musical journey where I made a living doing something other than music - construction in this case - which was in place of playing musical work I was not interested in. Those pieces and the ones that I developed, performed and recorded in the early 80's (released on "Tubworks") emerged out of a concerted effort to codify my personal musical vocabulary into a flexible musical language that served my compositional vision. However more recently my interests as a percussionist and a composer have found more or less equal levels of development in my work as an improviser, a teacher, a composer of more thorough-composed work, where I have been forced to clarify, and re-clarify my musical raison d'ętre. The "Song" project did this even more so, since my desire was to challenge myself to dig deeper inside myself for new and compelling musical creation, which is what the solo work was and still is all about.

TS: When I'd talked to you back in 1997 or 98, you had just learned (and were quite upset) that HatArt left only "Down to the Wire" as the only in-print recorded output of perhaps the world's finest, most thought-provoking and otherwise brilliant quintet. Did you ever learn why Werner X. Uehlinger decided to delete the other three [Gerry Hemingway] quintet records? Was there an outcry over this issue from your fan base? Are there any plans for the near future for the quintet to be re-born? Recordings? Concerts?

GH: Thank you for such strong words of support to what was a wonderful run we had with a very stimulating combination of musicians. I have at this point unconfirmed news that Werner intends to put the quintet recordings back into print as 4 CD box set. [We don't have confirmation of a release date for this box-set.] He didn't delete any of the recordings, he just ran out of stock and chose (understandably, given his large catalog) not to immediately reprint. I continue to get regular emails regarding these recordings from interested listeners, so I hope this upcoming re-release will stimulate renewed interest in the quintet. Meanwhile you can read on my quintet page of my site (www.gerryhemingway.com) about a new quintet that I have formed with a very similar instrumentation to the 90's quintet. We performed and recorded brand new repertoire in Lisbon this past October and I will be mixing editing and looking for a home for this recording in April and May of this year.

TS: While we're on the topic of record labels, what happened to Pedro de Freitas and his Sound Aspects imprint that released the quintet's debut recording back in mid 80' "Outerbridge Crossing"?

GH: From what I have heard he accrued so much debt that he had to extract himself completely from the business of recordings. I have no precise details but nobody I know who recorded for him has been able to successfully contact him regarding any leftover stock or to recover masters. I have not tried so far.

TS: Tell me a little bit more about the process of recording "Songs". Whose idea was it?

GH: It was my idea long before I was urged on by the manifesto of "Between the Lines" which suggested to me a real investigation of categorical boundary crossing. I am grateful that Between The Lines offered the invitation to challenge my own musical possibilities. [more about what you ask can be found in the posted interview on my web site, www.gerryhemingway.com - page "songs"]. This project went through numerous changes of form before it was completed in the winter of 2002, and I wonder if I would have generated this project without BTL gently reminding me that I had a deadline (which I delayed 3 times!!!).

TS: Why did you decide to record / compose for a vocalist?

GH: There are many reasons, one of which was that I wanted to try a more direct approach to the subject matter I had been exploring with instrumental music for some time.

TS: Do you see this as a touring ensemble?

GH: Not the whole personnel of the record but a paired-down version that could play festivals. The first live performance of this project will take place on March 30th at Joe's Pub in NYC. [see site page for details]. I hope to book this project in the 2003-4 season in Europe and maybe in Canada and/or the US.

TS: Do you have any favourite (for personal or professional reasons) festivals...ones where you'll never decline to perform at...ones that you always look forward to coming back to?

GH: It's not too likely I will ever decline an invitation from a festival, and I am not so inclined to pick favorites, as most of the festival producers with whom I have a relation work very hard for their festivals to succeed and to continue, and I have nothing but respect for the time and energy they put into the presentation of interesting music. I try when financially feasible to support some of the festivals who have little financial/commercial support, such as the Guelph festival in Ontario [Canada] which I recently played a benefit for.

TS: How did you maintain BassDrumBone for a quarter of a century as a working ensemble?

GH: BassDrumBone is a collective band, so I can not say that I alone have kept it going. I would say that the band continues, now more than ever (2003 will be a busy year for the trio, three short Euro tours), because we are old friends that continue to enjoy each others company, not to mention musical growth, and the chemistry that ignited the band in the late seventies is still very much in evidence today.

TS: Tell me how your duo with Cecil Taylor came about? What did you learn from that performance? Is there a recording of this show?

GH: It came about because Hugo de Craen, who has been curating De Singel in Antwerp, suggested producing the duo, based on an interview I did where I stated that it was a project I wanted to see happen some day. Before that offer we had tried to pull off another desire of mine to do a big band production, with the NDR big band and an African rhythm section featuring Habib Faye (of Youssou N'Dour's band) on bass. But we could not rally the funds to pull it off. The duo was wonderful and yes there is a magnificent recording of it, and I hope to find a home for it some day. Anyone you know interested?? And I would like to do more with Cecil, I just haven't been able to give it my attention.

TS: Can you describe some of the compositions that you're working on at this moment? When will they see the light of day?

GH: All of my focus until the end of this month [February] is on completing the first draft of "Sideband: Concerto for Three Improvisers and Orchestra", which will be premiered at Cal Arts on March 8th of this year. It will be my second orchestral work. I will likely seek funding for a third and maybe some day get all three released on CD. I also plan to give a lot of focus to my collaboration with video artist Beth Warshafsky whose past work together I plan to post on my site sometime soon.

TS: Is it still easier for you to attract audiences in Europe as opposed to North America? If so, why do you think most of the adventurous types live in Europe?

GH: I find no difference in the audiences, and I can say that having toured significantly in the US in the past five years. The difference is in the development of festivals with many different kinds of programming, which Europe, more or less, still holds the lead. More lately though, I have played less packed houses in Europe, for some of the more challenging projects, which would suggest that audiences are fickle everywhere, or the economy does not afford this form of input, or that audiences are more often following the corporate lead, drawn to whatever trend is being pumped by the glossy press and broadcast media.

TS: Looking back over time, is there any single project that you feel was not worthwhile? ...where you might've invested your time more wisely?

GH: In that fallow period I mentioned earlier, BassDrumBone (then called Oahspe) temporarily explored being a quartet with the addition of guitarist Allan Jaffe. The reason for this idea was to create something different than Barry Altschul's trio, which both Ray and Mark were members of, and which ostensibly rendered our trio dormant at the time (79-83). Allan and I labored over trying to book this group up and down the East coast college concert circuit, and hundreds of phone calls, faxes, demo tape-promo packages and thousands of dollars of invested money we yielded, one, count'em one! gig. But in a way, I learned a lot, and as dismal as that outcome was, I don't regret what happened. It oddly kept the trio alive for instance.

TS: Is there any particular musician with whom you've not yet collaborated? Are you working on collaborating with this individual?

GH: Well there are a few duos in development that I hope to develop further. A duo with Hamid Drake, which has occurred twice so far at Guelph and Victoriaville [Canada], and which we hope to go into the studio and record. Nobody comes to mind at the moment that I have not yet worked with, other than exploring some r & b players in relation to the Song project.

TS: What forthcoming recordings can we look forward to in the near future? Out of a multitude of your recent releases, which one in particular would you recommend to our readers and why?

GH: Songs [Between The Lines], is a major work. If you have any interest in my work of the past 25 years, I urge you to find it and buy it, you will not regret it. Upcoming in May 2003 is another major release of my present working quartet with Ellery Eskelin, Ray Anderson and Mark Dresser, called "Devil's Paradise" which will be released on the Portuguese Clean Feed label. Eventually, there will be new quintet recording to look out.

TS: Finally, I wanted to get your thoughts / comments on the state of improvised music as you see it, wherever you tour around the globe.

GH: I think improvised music continues to thrive and offer the world a very powerful concert experience, the kind of which can form some kind of an antidote to such an insane world for which the human condition seems all but ignored. I think the pool of players who have devoted all or a good part of their musical career to the development of this musical path, have not stopped searching and investigating the unique way in which we communicate with each other and to our audiences through this medium. And that keeps this form vital and engaging.

Gerry Hemingway's web-site (Everything Gerry: tours, recordings, photos, distributors, etc.)

Recent or Selected Recommended Gerry Hemingway recordings:

Gerry Hemingway "Songs" (2002)
Gerry Hemingway Quintet "Outerbridge Crossing" (1987)
Gerry Hemingway Quintet "Demon Chaser" (1994)
Gerry Hemingway "Electro-Acoustic Solo Works 1984-95" (1996)
Gerry Hemingway "Perfect World" (1996)
Gerry Hemingway Quartet "Johnny's Corner Song" (1998)
Gerry Hemingway Quintet "Waltzes, Two-Steps & Other Matters of the Heart" (1999)
Marilyn Crispell / Barry Guy / Gerry Hemingway "Cascades" (1995)
Georg Graewe / Ernst Reijseger / Gerry Hemingway "Flex 27" (1994)
Georg Graewe / Ernst Reijseger / Gerry Hemingway "Counterfactuals" (2001)
Michael Wintsch / Gerry Hemingway / Banz Oester "Open Songs" (2002)
John Butcher / Gerry Hemingway "Shooters and Bowlers" (2001)
Michel Wintsch / Martin Schütz / Gerry Hemingway "Wintsch / Schütz / Hemingway" (1995)

Interview conducted by Tom Sękowski

Franco Battiato - Pollution + Fetus (Bla Bla)

Like a woozy greco-roman art-deco sun-marine destroyer, "Pollution" is the revolution in sound abounding like a cantankerous cacophonic cloud surrounding the shrouding pale. Franco Battiato's first two masterfully pieced-together reliefs give more respite and resolve than any reconstituted weed or leaf between your gritting teeth. This is and was evermore shall beast. It beat and bleat and breathe avant-garde idiomatically auto-didactically entrenched inestimably on electronic stifled sullen proclamation. In rough-hewn dedication to breaking fashions and hodge-podging his own meshed sonic clothing exterior marked refuting to be sparked by nothing less than cyan matter not no god art alive, striving writhing googolplex cortex brain matter splatter jumble yaya across the plains rebuffing sage and subtly sprayed with the age of 'future we upon us,' this classic from the early year of 1972 and paired up toddy-boo with it's predecessor "Fetus" stressing and genuflecting before this newly constructed shrine spine supper sublime. These are two distinct and spectacularly brilliant albums shining brightly to the foreground of the mind's eye imagination-speak. It is simply no wonder that they are still aeons ahead of their time. He and those works are a haze pathogen to the very core and crux of the creative lifeforce itself - nevermores and wheretofores will undoubtedly not be able to be refracted sharply enough from the stuff of alien threshing heaving the chest, rings the navigation incessant, blessing the present most pleasant.

I'm Not Crazy. You're The One That's Crazy.

Every once in awhile, straight-up nostalgia will cause me to re-purchase stuff I’ve owned and sold before. Gawrsh, I’ll think, I haven’t listened to those records in years. I haven’t even wanted to listen to them in years. But all of a sudden, I can’t imagine why I ever got rid of them when I did, and I can’t face life without them. So out comes the credit card, and home I go with some CD that causes my wife to look at me with the wary eye one casts upon a possibly rabid animal. My latest acquisition of this type? Three albums by Venice, CA thrashers Suicidal Tendencies.

ST came roaring out of the gate in ’83 with their self-titled debut, which featured the classic skate-rock single “Institutionalized,” which for those who don’t remember wallowed in adolescent angst while sending up parental misreading thereof. At the song’s hilarious climax, vocalist Mike Muir is in his room, “just like staring at the wall thinking about everything, but then again I was thinking about nothing. And then my mom came in and I didn't even know she was there, she called my name and I didn't even hear it, and then she started screaming ‘MIKE! MIKE!’ And I go: ‘What, what's the matter?’ And she goes: ‘What's the matter with you?’ I go: ‘There’s nothing wrong, Mom.’ And she goes: ‘Don't tell me that, you're on drugs!’ And I go: ‘No Mom, I'm not on drugs, I'm okay, I was just thinking, you know, why don't you get me a Pepsi.’ And she goes: ‘No, you're on drugs!’ I go: ‘Mom, I'm okay, I'm just thinking.’ She goes: ‘No, you're not thinking, you're on drugs! Normal people don't act that way!’ I go: ‘Mom, just give me a Pepsi, please. All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me. Just a Pepsi.”

The album was a huge underground hit, as much for its sound – a mix of hardcore punk and thrash metal, fronted by Muir’s whiny-but-emphatic vocals and stinging guitar leads – as for its lyrical content and the band’s instantly recognizable image. Suicidal Tendencies didn’t look like any other contemporaneous band. Muir was a long-haired white guy who dressed like an L.A. gangbanger; lead guitarist Rocky George, who joined with their major-label debut, was a black man, never seen without his trademark Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap; and the back line was a rotating mixed-race lineup of white boys and Mexicans. ST did one more album for their indie label, 1985’s Join The Army, and then they were snapped up by Epic Records, which is where they really came into their own, sonically.

How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today, is probably the ultimate statement of their musical and lyrical vision. The riffs are fast and blurry, prizing hardcore’s wall-of-sound approach over the high-tech crispness of speed metal. Indeed, the guitars are frequently louder than Muir’s vocals. Never a bellower, he was given to a menacing murmur, allowing his tales of melancholy and desperation to seep into the listener’s ear like bad dreams, while George (following the pattern established by his predecessor on “Institutionalized”) frequently soloed through entire songs.

It was this introspective lyrical focus that really differentiated ST from their peers, though. While Slayer, Metallica and Megadeth were busy tackling the horrors of war and the hypocrisies of organized religion on their records, and Anthrax were just goofing off most of the time, the Suicidals were releasing songs that lived up to their band-name. Muir wrote about depression better than anybody since Henry Rollins, but he didn’t seem to have the rage to back it up. Despite his muscular physique, the ST vocalist often seemed on the verge of tears. It was, and remains, a fascinating dichotomy, never explored better than on the titular single from How Will I Laugh Tomorrow…. “The clock keeps ticking but nothing else seems to change,” Muir sings. “Problems never solved, just rearranged/And when I think about all the times that I've had/Some were good, most were bad/I search for personality and I look for things I can not see/Love and peace flash through my mind/Pain and hate are all I find/Find no hope in nothing new and I’ve never had a dream come true/Lies and hate and agony, through my eyes that's all I see/If I'm gonna cry, will you wipe away my tears?/If I'm gonna die, Lord please take away my fear/Before I drown in sorrow, got one more thing to say/How will I laugh tomorrow when I can't even smile today.” This is not exactly the chest-beating content most thrash metal listeners were supposedly seeking back in the 80s, but ST connected with a large audience nonetheless.

They followed up How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… with a stopgap EP, Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit…Déjà Vu, which contained the hilariously bleak track “Waking The Dead,” in which Muir expressed his anger at the injustice of dead folks resting in peace while the living suffer daily torments. Again, this utterly desolate vision of existence was the single. Their 1990 album Lights…Camera…Revolution found them broadening their scope somewhat. Muir finally dried his tears, opening the disc with the anthemic “You Can’t Bring Me Down,” which featured the hilarious line “Who the hell you calling crazy? You wouldn’t know what crazy was if Charles Manson was eating Froot Loops on your front porch!” I saw them live supporting this record – their opening acts were Exodus and some band from Texas nobody’d really heard of yet, called Pantera.

The day these three CDs arrived from Amazon, I slapped ‘em into my iPod, and cranked it up on the train to work the following morning. (My new job as managing editor of the world music magazine Global Rhythm doesn’t allow for much metal-playing time.) They sounded as good as I remembered. Even better, in fact, because I’d had ‘em on cassette before. Inside the CD booklet for How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… is the epigraph, “If you’re not now, you never were.” I guess I still am.

Panic in Year Zero

B-movies have always been a reliable fixture of the Hollywood celluloid mills, flicks made on the cheap to cash in on a current craze or cater to formulaic audience expectations. Welsh-born actor Ray Milland made some doozies. But his career didn’t begin on such a back lot trajectory. Groomed as a romantic leading man through a steady series of comedies in the 30s and early 40s, he hit the big time with a Best Actor Oscar win for his portrayal of a dipsomaniac writer who swims to the bottom of the bottle in The Lost Weekend. I don’t know much about Milland’s biography, but a not-so-fictional case of that affliction may have had some part in the string of bad choices that dogged his career in the ensuing decades. Amidst indefensible dreck like Frogs and Quick, Let’s Get Married Milland made a film that still stands out today as a unique entry in the hard to corral corpus of B-cinema.

Financed by the notoriously penny-pinching American International Pictures, with Milland occupying the director’s chair and pole position on the marquee, Panic in Year Zero is a flawed, but undeniably entertaining artifact of its era. It’s one of the few post-nuke films to openly explore the aftermath of such an event in at least semi-realistic terms. On the Beach still wins the prize for fatalism, but Panic contains a fair share of creepy and even harrowing moments along with a few unintentionally hilarious ones. The rice-paper thin funds preclude any direct indications of the cataclysm other than a few overturned cars and debris-strewn residential streets, and the ‘mushroom’ cloud that engulfs the Los Angeles region looks more like a glowing bonnet of cotton candy than a death-dealing radioactive miasma. There’s also an inordinate amount of footage of cars racing recklessly down highways, presumably meant as emblematic of the hysteria gripping the American populace after the attack. And the film’s chief antagonists end up being a trio of dope-smoking beatnik delinquents instead of dreaded Kalashnikov-toting Communists.

Milland directs with a lean style and a notable attention to atmosphere. The characters are mostly cardboard cutouts and the plot doesn’t carry much weight either, but given the catastrophic circumstances at the root it doesn’t really need to. It’s the simple set-up of a family-of-four vacation gone to hell when the Russian missiles hit. Milland plays Harry Baldwin, an average Joe who takes the onset World War III in stride and responds as if he’s spun a copy of If the Bomb Falls LP to the point of the stylus cracking, quoting survival tips regularly like scripture. The truly atypical thing is that he’s far from a sympathetic character, a guy who responds to stress by becoming an irascible jerk much of the time. Also in the core cast: Jean Hagen as Baldwin’s perpetually distraught wife (panicky yin to his cool-headed yang); cherub-faced Frankie Avalon(!) as son Rick; and Mary Mitchel as largely disposable daughter Karen. The four head for the hills in their trailer-towing sedan, encountering example after example of unraveling social order along the way, but curiously always have enough pomade and hairspray on hand for perfectly-styled coiffures.

The film’s budget and its adherence to Conelrad-era dogma, not to mention the suspicious absence of any real nuclear-related danger (fallout and radiation-poisoning are mentioned, but neither ever appears a true threat), further undermine its realism. Also weird is the score by Les Baxter, which blends lasciviously bombastic ‘crime’ jazz with moody orchestral interludes dominated by flutes and strings. The use of the former music during a scene describing an assault on Baldwin’s daughter amplifies the melodrama to the point of inadvertent parody. But what is unexpected and consequently unnerving is how ruthlessly Baldwin carries out the tenets of his armchair survivalist training, resorting to petty crime and even murder in the quest to ensure his family’s safety. One of his most quotable lines: “when civilization gets civilized again, I’ll rejoin.” In that sense the film feels very much like a slice of Social Darwinist propaganda, suggesting that under extraordinary circumstances ends inherently justify means. The moral quandary isn’t explored all that profoundly in the 90+ minutes, but given the film’s pedigree it’s peculiar to see it addressed at all.

When I was twelve, The Day After frightened the pants off me, feeding a fear that had been gestating for years. Panic is that film’s benign, black & white 60s cousin, but it still makes me wonder what sort of reception greeted the release. Were the kids catching it at the drive-in chilled and sobered by the possibilities it portrays? Or did they laugh it off like the sensationalistic entertainment it was primarily intended as? Either way it’s an appealing antique aperture to an era when the average American believed that an atomic war was not only a survivable, but a winnable, proposition.

A Man Named Milland

B-movies have always been a reliable fixture of the Hollywood celluloid mills, flicks made on the cheap to cash in on a current craze or cater to formulaic audience expectations. Welsh-born actor Ray Milland made some doozies. But his career didn’t begin on such a back lot trajectory. Groomed as a romantic leading man through a steady series of comedies in the 30s and early 40s, he hit the big time with a Best Actor Oscar win for his portrayal of a dipsomaniac writer who swims to the bottom of the bottle in The Lost Weekend. I don’t know much about Milland’s biography, but a not-so-fictional case of that affliction may have had some part in the string of bad choices that dogged his career in the ensuing decades. Amidst indefensible dreck like Frogs and Quick, Let’s Get Married Milland made a film that still stands out today as a unique entry in the hard to corral corpus of B-cinema.

Financed by the notoriously penny-pinching American International Pictures, with Milland occupying the director’s chair and pole position on the marquee, Panic in Year Zero is a flawed, but undeniably entertaining artifact of its era. It’s one of the few post-nuke films to openly explore the aftermath of such an event in at least semi-realistic terms. On the Beach still wins the prize for fatalism, but Panic contains a fair share of creepy and even harrowing moments along with a few unintentionally hilarious ones. The rice-paper thin funds preclude any direct indications of the cataclysm other than a few overturned cars and debris-strewn residential streets, and the ‘mushroom’ cloud that engulfs the Los Angeles region looks more like a glowing bonnet of cotton candy than a death-dealing radioactive miasma. There’s also an inordinate amount of footage of cars racing recklessly down highways, presumably meant as emblematic of the hysteria gripping the American populace after the attack. And the film’s chief antagonists end up being a trio of dope-smoking beatnik delinquents instead of dreaded Kalashnikov-toting Communists.

Milland directs with a lean style and a notable attention to atmosphere. The characters are mostly cardboard cutouts and the plot doesn’t carry much weight either, but given the catastrophic circumstances at the root it doesn’t really need to. It’s the simple set-up of a family-of-four vacation gone to hell when the Russian missiles hit. Milland plays Harry Baldwin, an average Joe who takes the onset World War III in stride and responds as if he’s spun a copy of If the Bomb Falls LP to the point of the stylus cracking, quoting survival tips regularly like scripture. The truly atypical thing is that he’s far from a sympathetic character, a guy who responds to stress by becoming an irascible jerk much of the time. Also in the core cast: Jean Hagen as Baldwin’s perpetually distraught wife (panicky yin to his cool-headed yang); cherub-faced Frankie Avalon(!) as son Rick; and Mary Mitchel as largely disposable daughter Karen. The four head for the hills in their trailer-towing sedan, encountering example after example of unraveling social order along the way, but curiously always have enough pomade and hairspray on hand for perfectly-styled coiffures.

The film’s budget and its adherence to Conelrad-era dogma, not to mention the suspicious absence of any real nuclear-related danger (fallout and radiation-poisoning are mentioned, but neither ever appears a true threat), further undermine its realism. Also weird is the score by Les Baxter, which blends lasciviously bombastic ‘crime’ jazz with moody orchestral interludes dominated by flutes and strings. The use of the former music during a scene describing an assault on Baldwin’s daughter amplifies the melodrama to the point of inadvertent parody. But what is unexpected and consequently unnerving is how ruthlessly Baldwin carries out the tenets of his armchair survivalist training, resorting to petty crime and even murder in the quest to ensure his family’s safety. One of his most quotable lines: “when civilization gets civilized again, I’ll rejoin.” In that sense the film feels very much like a slice of Social Darwinist propaganda, suggesting that under extraordinary circumstances ends inherently justify means. The moral quandary isn’t explored all that profoundly in the 90+ minutes, but given the film’s pedigree it’s peculiar to see it addressed at all.

When I was twelve, The Day After frightened the pants off me, feeding a fear that had been gestating for years. Panic is that film’s benign, black & white 60s cousin, but it still makes me wonder what sort of reception greeted the release. Were the kids catching it at the drive-in chilled and sobered by the possibilities it portrays? Or did they laugh it off like the sensationalistic entertainment it was primarily intended as? Either way it’s an appealing antique aperture to an era when the average American believed that an atomic war was not only a survivable, but a winnable, proposition.

bagatellen listen series

I'm happy to announce a new little feature we're hosting: the Bagatellen "listen" series.

Here's the deal:

Each month we're going to host a new, original piece of music written specifically for the site and its readers. The music will be available for download for a period of three to four weeks, then a new one will rotate in. After it disappears you're pretty much on your own, but the associated page will remain.

Props to Tomas Korber for such niceness. It's a fantastic initial installment and we're excited to have it up for the sharing.

Next month, Jeff Gburek. And it kills.

Bon appetit.

tomas korber, silkworms (lanikai)

Abandon all idioms! For the inauguration of Bagatellen's listen series, Swiss craftsman Tomas Korber shows his range as sound stylist and engineer. The music here is not as gentle as one might expect; Korber is known for his attention to texture and, in collaboration, for an acute sense of timing. This ten minutes of music fills all corners and all space between. A talent for "listening" is perhaps what is most evident in Korber's discography, and here in "Silkworms"'s expanding rings and meshing layers of feedback, that most basic of senses is enlightened. The Feldmanesque scale at the piece's end resolves the congruent noise rows, guitar faking dissonance.

The piece was composed specifically for the bagatellen 'listen series', and that custom will follow. "Silkworms" was mastered early last month. We thank Tomas for the music.

Rich Halley Trio - Mountains and Plains

Louie 35

Surprise! Another sax, bass and drums disc: seems like I cover an inordinate number of those here at Bags, probably to the point of fault. But the exceptional aspect of this particular specimen is that a genuine sense of surprise does indeed suffuse the album’s nine cuts. Corvallis-based saxophonist Rich Halley leads his trio with Canadian Clyde Reed (bass) and fellow Oregonian Dave Storrs (drums) through a program or originals that revel in and rely on metrical unpredictability. The continually fluctuating time signatures, rife with stops and rests, fall flush with the prevailing topographical theme of the set.

Halley’s tenor vernacular is of the burnished, full-bodied sort, think Rollins’ burly extrapolations circa “Jungoso” laced with a dash of late-Coltrane mellifluous cacophony. He’s not prone to any particular register preferences and exploits of the whole of his horn, launching enveloping bursts of notes that ride the morphing rhythms without slip or stumble. There’s even a small amount of space reserved for his soprano on “Three Way Shapes” where his pastoral Lacy-like phrasing stands apart from the tension-threaded counterpoint of his colleagues.

The opener “Problematic” lopes along on a wide-stepping line fashioned by Reed’s ricocheting plucks and the brittle chatter of Storrs’ stick on snare. The final few minutes of “Long Valley” allow another close look at the drummer’s ingenuity as he builds a spacious improvisation out of interlocking small percussive patter. Amidst the perambulatory interplay of “The Rub” the bassist rolls back into minimalist mode slicing Storrs’ sliding beat with precision-placed thrums as Halley shapes a raspy succession of phrases on top. A porous groove solidifies with enough propulsive potential to move the land-masses named in the disc’s title. “Intermountain Rhumba” offers another ace example group mutability via a transitory string of rhythms that refuse to be tagged and bagged and Storr’s onomatopoeic-singing. At repeat junctures the three players appear on the verge of closing themselves off into corners only to reverse up, reconvene and execute electrifying escapes to fresh terrain.

This is a record that builds significantly on the ones that preceded it while still upholding Halley and crew’s credo of fashioning accessible, but still dependably adventurous, freebop. With most ears commonly cocked East, the Left Coast doesn’t garner nearly enough attention as a spawning ground for this sort of talent. Players like Golia and Ochs represent the California contingent while a loner like Wally Shoup holds the line in the Evergreen State. I feel safe in nominating Halley as the surefire delegate from Oregon. Do yourself a favor and test spin this disc as convenience permits. I’ll bet a copy of the next sax-led trio disc that comes down the pike that it stays in your play pile for a prolonged period of time.

~ Derek Taylor

Louisiana Red – Sittin’ Here Wonderin’ (Earwig)

There’s a particular scene from the too-little-seen The Woman Chaser, a film based on Charles Willeford’s pulp novel of the same name, that periodically pops into my head. In it the story’s protagonist, a sociopathic used car salesman turned movie director, hires a young blues guitarist to score his fledgling film. His one directive: “I want you to play as loud & mean as you can.” I’m always on safari for this sort of thing- music played by guys (and occasionally, gals) who take the Modern label sides of John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins as their templates for frying fuses and blowing amps, tone and attitude trumping finesse and technique. Luckily there are many that fit the bill, from pioneers like Hop Wilson and Slim Green to more recent purveyors represented by much of the Fat Possum roster. Louisiana Red also belongs among the anointed and this album from ’82 originally waxed for the B.O.B. label revels in a stripped-down, speaker-imploding sound. Red plugs in and unceremoniously plays eleven tracks, sometimes pausing for anecdotal asides, but generally sticking to the task of keeping the needles angled well into the red. The slashing opener “E Street Bridge” sets the bar for intensity, a single excoriating chord scalding the mics with acidic electricity. Crank the volume dial and the effect cements into an all-enveloping auditory ring. Red’s vocals aren’t particularly fetching or inspired, scarred by the dual pipes-eroding agents of liquor and cigarettes, but they do the trick. Besides it’s the tone and feel that matters most here. “Sadie Lee” and “Back Door Friend” are all broken glass strums and barbwire string shredding, millionth-something missives aimed at enterprising two-timing women. Thankfully, Red reels back the ugly misogyny that pollutes some of his earlier work (see his tune “First Degree” on the Tomato label for a bitter taste of that fetid fruit) and turns in a tight little record, heavy on jangling primitive riffs and free of the feel-good sentiments that pass for the blues in friendlier, less socially-crippled circles.

Brrrrrrrr

I have all my life occupied myself in a part of the world where one can talk about seasonal change only in couplets consisting of extremes: freeze and fry; storm and calm; flood and drought. Seasons in East Texas either last for days or for half-year stretches. Summer for us begins in May and ends in October. Winter is usually over by the first week in March. The weather round here is nothing to me but obvious, and, although I react to it, I refuse to pay it any mind. So many tongues here wag a babble of questions and complaints and cheer about the weather, as if it had wisdom away from which it could will. We all have lightning strike stories, hail stories, tornado stories, ice storm stories -- a sheet of it 6 inches thick on everything in February of 2003; with the sky blanked by stratospheric and motionless cold, life in Dallas that week was slow passage through a hollowed-out bone. Eventually, some event related to the climate reminds me that winter always penetrates the protection I've layered around myself and touches me. It finds a protuberance of soft tissue on which it can seize, locates a joint whose tightness it can worry, or reveals exposure where the viscera are most folded in upon themselves. On a truly frigid day, I may rinse out the same coffee cup 5 or 6 times. Trillian, my IM [Instant Messenger] software, softly gurgles when a "buddy" logs on or changes his / her status (i.e., is there but not available, or not speaking; at the other end of... so not there insofar as "there" is anything immediate); a single sound, but each action the sound describes is potentially different. A dumb sound, actually, and all it can mean (by not saying anything substantive) is "attention", but I pause differently each time and, and, in doing so, if I happen to look out the office window and see steam rising from the basement vents blotching translucent gray against the deeper drabness of a December afternoon, I might, with a sense of expectancy even I don't fathom, compare the chime to that of a freshet breaking through the crust of what's not yet thawed. There is a fat patch of scaly skin on my left fore-finger. Once it was a callus, one put there by morning after morning of helping my father tighten the laces on the Buster Browns that were bolted to his braces... think of how cold those must have felt before sun-up in February... he wanted those shoes to be closed like vises around his feet. It took elbow grease to snug them. Before work, before coffee, wiping the grit of sleep out of my eyes, I would tug, take up slack, tug again. I knew when he no longer complained that I wasn't "doing it right" that my father was seriously ill. No need to put on your prostheses if you are going to spend your day prone. Eventually, he would only allow my mother to assist him. Still, the callus never "healed", and, the past two or three winters, that spot on my hand has whitened and cracked well before my lips have ever chapped. One of my co-workers confesses to me that, in winter, taking the 4 to 6 shift (the last afternoon shift before the evening shifts begin) makes her feel as if her soul were being crushed. By 5: 30, the sun has set, and she leaves work as she arrived at work, in darkness, a darkness moonless and starless and swarming with headlights and taillights and porch-lights and lighted shopping centers. Has she logged so many hours at work that she missed any glimpse of the sun? Chinks of warmth falling through her Venetian blinds do not count. Photosynthesis cannot happen in her corner cubicle. While she was approving purchase orders, shuffling old email messages into specially designated folders, and scooping cinnamon disks out of her candy dish until she reached the last one, sticky through even the cellophane wrapping, did Texas stealthily shift away from the equator and wander into the Arctic Circle? Or is she the one who took a wrong turn out of the building, through a basement door that does not lead outside but deposits her on the edge of some subterranean metropolis? Is it dusk or is she going blind? The winter 9 to 6: is this what dying is like? She is jolted out of the void, participates in a chaotic revisitation of some well-worn personal experience, is bathed for a long time in a light that only too late she understands to be a beacon, and, straining for the apex of the cone, the source of the illumination, finds herself utterly outside it, stranded, terribly awake. (But how we shun the day in August.) November, and Halloween calico is put away and now scarves -- stale, smelling of the scalp's oil -- need airing. Sleeves are tugged down and balled in fists for comfort, but feet are left chilly by the inefficiency of central heating. Attic furnaces warm upper volumes of air that, true to convection, won't fall. And coats rise from the backs of closets like cuddly ghosts. At the coffee shop that suddenly packs full after 2 AM, last call in the city's limits, a young woman leans on my table and tells me she's like to borrow my Goodwill-salvaged, $25 Woolrich (Est. 1830) peacoat so she can go have a smoke outside. As Dallas city ordinance requires. Thin, tall, kinky hair, freckles, diastema; nearly curveless, gangly even, but not lacking some suavity, and some allure (though its mostly the memories of another brown-skinned woman I superimpose on her). And hung loosely in a dress not made for this evening. This is two nights after Thanksgiving, and the stripped trees are inky with the rain that fell this morning. I'm congealed in some incipiency. Maybe the beginning of the next sentence in whatever novel with which I'm scourging myself, maybe a draft of this very paragraph, perhaps some talk I just overheard and think could be recast as dialogue in a story yet to be written -- the later "-ber" months are often unfriendly to new projects. Or it could be that the fluorescent desolation of the cafe is about to exist, about to blink into a new shade of glare, or I am waiting for the leading whirl of iridescence in my second-to-last cup of House Blend to stray into view. Contemplation becomes hesitation, and into this he she inserts that she is an artist, she announces she is. Actress, painter, mother, administrator, mentor, alive. "I noticed you and your friends, all into each other. Into your own little crises. So serious." (So my friends have left... that is why there a quarters and crumpled bills on the table.) She continues. Whatever it is I have to write, I need to write, but I should not act as my own editor. Huh? Did she really say that? There is Scotch on her breath, acridly warm, hickory, a less than unpleasant vapor. How slow must I be moving for her to have gleaned all this from the few, calculated gestures of my earlier observing of this place, the people in it? I've placed the coat in her hands, but I'm keeping the rest of her Marlboro Reds as an insurance policy. (If there's one thing a smoker can't do without, it is their smokes, especially if they are their brand.) It is not as if I mind if the garment being returned smelling of parking lot and second-hand smoke. A winter coat requires a winter smell. Nor do I really fear she'll steal it; even if her companions seem to be ignoring her all of a sudden, she is not here by herself. But she has to smoke alone, one arm wrapped around her waist holding the coat closed as if to button it would be a waste of energy, the other arm straight against her chest and cantered palm-up so that all she has to do it flick her wrist to get a puff. She bobs from leg to leg, 1-3-2-3-1-2-2-3-1-3, occasionally raising her foot completely off the ground and flexing at the knee like a sprinter absenting her mind before the starting pistol. Never once does she smile her gapped smile back at me through the broad, smudged (finger and tired heads leave skidmarks, too) coffee-shop window, nor does she offer any further insight or advice when she brings my coat back to me -- though she does remove it in front of me. Damn, she looked good in it. If only there were some stillness to her. Either she is as ablaze as she wishes to be, or the edges of all the shapes in this instant's world are crackling with interference introduced by my own exhaustion. I notice then that there is shadow (rose) over her right eye only. Never applied or...? For a split-second, I'm torn between lusting after commiseration and being revolted at the very idea of what it would entail. I cease speculating. I don't want this electric woman coming on to me. It is one thing to walk briskly through the cold, to endure it on your way to a destination, to crane your head into the cruel whistling of the north wind and mutter chattering curses under your breath, even as you try to force the heat of those dire exhalations down the front of your sweater. But it is another matter altogether to stand in the cold, miserable but not quick about it, to tolerate the grip of the cold because you cannot bear to break the embrace of your excesses. My M-F, 6 AM jog at the University: they've resurfaced the all 8 lanes of the this quarter-mile of track, but no paver -- or engineer for that matter -- can alter the actual lay of the land, or the cardinal orientation of the brick-red loop itself, and it is still a carousel for the wind. Occasionally a stream of Gulf air (not the Gulf Stream) prevails from the south and it runs smack and countervailing into your face against you for the first half-lap. And just as often the wind blasts in from the prairie-d north and blows like another laboring and inconsiderate runner at your back as you round into the initial half-lap. Or this is all spun and no schedule declaring that on even days we run clockwise, on odd counter-clockwise can make you run into the wind. On the clear Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving, the bitterness came in from the N-NE. My navy blue sweatshirt kept my chest warm, but my sweatpants (gray) were oddly of no help, much less comfort. My legs, especially my thighs, felt weighted down by the flesh that had become more numb than my nose or ears -- both of which are just cartilage (like sharks). Legs so dead I was aware of my skeleton and the load it bears. Dead so much so that I almost felt I had an excuse to slow my pace. Nature knows how to torment. Even to torture. Nature is as if it knows it can exact a change of my mind by inflicting prolonged agonies on my body. When I get to thinking this way, I read temperature as a gauge just how alien the world around me is. That it is the inhospitable which has subdued the earth. Why break the seal? Why venture out into it? Why not goggle at it from afar, i.e., from a place that is well beyond the range of touch? I fling my thoughts northward, toward the upper Midwest and Canada, where the thermometer often reads 0 or below for weeks and months at a time. Where this is "normal". Those expanses are to someone of my upbringing as warranting of long-distance surveying as the giant planets at the outer rim of our solar system, where clouds are tuberous columns of gaseous ice, nitrogen is slush and hydrogen metallic, and layers of latent solar fuel are torn by storms in which drops of precipitation are icicle daggers thrown from a blizzard. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune; their atmospheres aren't transparent, thin shells but very thick outlines of cosmic volatility. Bright orange or sullen yellow or cerulean, the underside of which is the darkest brown, there's no surface there, only gelid sulfur and methane and ammonia that lap pulverization over you like the tides of an insane (thus sentient) ocean. The cold those millions of miles away would turn your body to crystal, you would be a mummy for an instant, then the finest powder -- maybe your atomic colors would streak the troposphere, but so momentarily and so minutely that perhaps an unblinking spectroscope would record it, but certainly no eyesore astronomer, even that one dedicated soul working well past midnight wrapped in blankets and sipping hot tea with honey and lemon, could witness it. Easy to exaggerate fancifully when you live in a metropolitan area whose population density is due to the inventions of gas jets and refrigerated air. Blame nature, would I? A good and since-lost high school friend told me this story in the first months of 1988. Temporarily evicted after an ugly disagreement with his mother, he slept in his car where it was parked on the street in front of the house. The next morning he awoke cramped and dazed, in a great blur of fogged glass and some quickly billowing white. First he feared that he had wrecked, spun out into a swamp whose mists were seeping in all around him, then that the gray concentrations of noxiousness -- now he could smell gasoline -- were evidence of something burning nearby, or even within. But finally he noticed the cars and trucks all around him, and the panic he experienced was that of the exhausted driver who wakes to the sight of the steering wheel turning back and forth all on its own. Except where had everyone gone? These cars and trucks were running, but driverless. And then he understood that he was still "home", and, all up and down his block, the running vehicles were as motionless as he was. He cranked down his window -- a slow whirr and the protests of frigid rubber bands -- and heard the staggered rhythms of engine idles overlapping, and like a whine or smug high-pitched hum above that the sound of car stereos behind other windows blaring morning talk, news, antics, accident reports, Top 40, some so loud that the entire automobile acted as a kind of amplifier, resonating with guttural frequencies, ringing like the exposed steel frame of an unfinished piece of architecture when a hard wind blares through and drops the temperature all around those interlocking girders. (Even a tower in which the bells are cracked can still make a sound.) He was relieved. See, those Volvos and Datsuns and Fords were being "warmed up" and meanwhile their owners had scurried back inside to shake off the initial shock of the weather, to clap their hands back to life, to strike sparks of ruddiness in the palms, to rub their seats to the kindling point and I suppose in all this agitation to surround themselves with a halo of heat that would not diffuse on the trip back to the curb or as soon as they buckled themselves into the cabs that had to have been left out overnight. Even though he had not woken in mid-commute, the fact that so many of his neighbors had to be somewhere by a common certain time, the fact that they had all decided they could beat the rush by rising a bit earlier and making the proper preparations, my classmate was still stuck in traffic. He was not about to budge; he needed a shower, breakfast, a change of clothes. And, above that, there was something beautiful in his confusion. The clouded, coarse-crystalled pollution was a shimmer in which the light had been extinguished, and it hung over the scene like anything that has had it ordinariness transmuted into mysteriousness by the circumstances of surprise. It was ghostly, he said. Ghostly: that is, vacated but not peaceful, just as Dallas' Lower Greenville Avenue is soon after sunrise on a Saturday morning: empty bottles standing on every street-corner, dim storefront windows through which you can see the chairs standing on the tables, valet stands chained back along the alley walls. And, in winter, thick drapes of tropically translucent plastic, poked with grommets like giant shower curtains, over restaurant patios.

Autumn and winter... seasons that ask for retreat to the kitchen. During the day, it is the hottest room in the house. At least in the afternoon and early evening. Red spatters from the tomato "gravy" (my mother's designation) simmering in the Dutch oven dot the yellow range-top. The dry aroma of bread baking. Caramelizing vegetables. A pot of black coffee left on the burner and turning ever more black as the day grows weaker. The kettle whistle. But the cold and dark scurry into the kitchen late at night. When I was in college, I did much of my jazz listening as I washed the previous day's dishes just before starting that night's dinner. Our house, never a terribly private place, all to myself. Orangish, ripe, low-falling light -- of course, there was a window just over the sink, facing West, towards a full block's worth of backyard trees, high fences, and sunset -- and the never-to-be-duplicated, muffled resounding of my favorite cold weather records playing loud in the living room. Farmer and Gryce, Muhal and Malachi on Sightsong, solo Monk, Curtis Fuller on Savoy, Mingus' "Self-Portrait In Three Colors" and "Song With Orange" (the Tentet arrangement from Mingus Dynasty), Sun Ra's Jazz In Silhouette, the Verve Bley / Giuffre / Swallow trios, Booker Little's Time date, Kenny Dorham's Cafe Bohemia recordings, Andrew Hill's live date from Montreux 1975, Herbie Nichols' "Spinning Song"; the music made its way around overstuffed furniture, through open doorways flanked by tall stacks of books, and down the long hardwood-floored hallway already crowded with the slow undulations of warmed air vented from gas space heaters (living room, master bedroom, both bathrooms), and I could listen to those gold sounds over the splash and rattle of dishes being scrubbed, rinsed, and put away. Accompanied by deep blue hard bop ballad playing, like on Jackie McLean's Prestige quartets with Mal Waldron, or Horace Silver's "Sweet Stuff", all of Tina Brooks' True Blue (especially "Theme For Doris", my God...), the first three piano-less tracks and the title performance from Coltrane's Lush Life, the Davis Quintet's "Fall", a cigarette smoldering after the strange consummation that is "Nefertiti". Solstitial. Mingus in the 50's especially makes me think of December PM, music heavy in the bass clef, as if its been spiked with cough syrup... think of those recordings with trombonist Eddie Bert and tenor saxophonist George Barrow. The Elmo Hope trio record originally released on Hi-Fi Jazz, with Jimmy Bond and the tragic Frank Butler, a record whose aim it seems is to extend the night, stretch it until the stars fall out like rhinestones from rent fabric, yet in "Barfly" and "Ee-jah" features two of the most effective early morning ballad-tempo pieces in all of hard bop. When I remind myself of these records, or handle them again, I can't help but recall those autumns past. Jazz then was for me a domestic music, not clubby, not about the street. Interior, but in the manner that a fjord is somehow interior. A studying fool was I, and for me jazz sounded best echoing in the ravine made by a book cracked open to a high-lighted passage. Long private nights from my college years, in the days before computers that could sit on your lap like a slumbering cat (itself but a fur-lined and sweetly rumbling incarnation of separation anxiety). How did this happen, this Proustian operation? What forged the links, or fused them in this frozen mixture? My twenties, of course, a decade -- give or take -- I thought some lesson, and months with no company but the CD player. The ambivalence I have about solitude is tied up in the associations I have with this music. (All the things that were done for you as a child you no longer understand, and despite the fact that you can now do them for yourself.) Once the moon comes up: no baying, a good bit of head-scratching, a little typing at the Brother. The outside experienced only by the noises it made, sounds that no pair of headphones could keep from flicking a tingle at the back of my ears. The pattern of creak made by the turban fan turning against its own rustiness in a sudden high wind. Wind chimes driven crazy. The tremolo of the wind itself. Grackles bickering early in the morning. Wind warbling over the mouth of open utility piping, white PVC bound to a telephone pole her by this stoplight on a morning drive, raising a lonesome, faint flute sound that I can hear even though my defrosted windows are sealed tight. Muffled night club music; doors aren't open to the street on nights like this. The whistling made by the Nerf football, pocked and flaking bright paint and tiny sponges of inner foam, as it sails out my younger brother's expert, fingers-athwart-the-fake laces grip and towards my nose. The black V ("vuh"? "vee"? a loud pursing of the lips? a long rolling of the tongue, as around Iberian "r"'s, only with a different result?) of birds flying in a long, thin huddle of instinct. The formation swells and breaks along its point, some birds surge forward, others fall back, the whole shape shears to the south, swells and breaks. The sky is so blue it turns white. The voices of the waking world heard through the layers of duvee and blankets. The seen breath of one alternateen, wearing an overcoat over her fatigue green hoodie talking, with another at the bus stop. They are visibly laughing, but there is some thing in the exchange that calls to my mind the slow, steady hush of hibernation.

There is a place on the other side of all the old jazz and related discographical data I injected into my personality in the hope that it would give me a new life. That's where I began to discover other winter records. Beck's Mutations, maybe only because the first words on the album are "cold brains", Beck-ese for Wallace Stevens' "mind of winter", and, lyrically, the whole thing is obsessed with decay and death, with the interstellar distances separating people, one from one, one from many, many from many. Beck's person throughout: the bard whose language has the boiling energy of anger, but whose delivery is that of the sadsack. The two "blue" Echo and The Bunnymen albums, Heaven Up Here and Ocean Rain (not Porcupines, snow-encrusted cover art aside; its obvious there's copious steam heat lurking beneath all the blankness), the former especially all imploringly reverberating like a dead-end tenant in an empty, unheated flat. And pre-Woodstock Dylan, the Dylan of the Suze years, the Dylan with the buttoned-up overcoat and pink cheeks who somehow resembles Barbara Streisand on the jacket of his very first LP. But Dylan not so much when he is ranting in meter about the wages of sin ("With God On Our Side"), rather when he is singing about the declining fortunes of Hibbing or, more indirectly, about how speed made him such a verbally gifted asshole, which would be all of Blonde On Blonde, especially, "4th Time Around". "And I, I never took much / I never asked for your crutch / Now don't ask for mine." The first two Soft Machine records, especially 2, the reels of which sound as if they had been buried under some really dirty slush. Tangerine Dream. Permafrost grooves, you know?

It is mere days before Christmas 2004 and I am laying nearly on my back in a planetarium in Fort Worth. The program? What was the star of Bethlehem, really? ("Blue as a welder's torch" in a song lyric devised by Grant Lee Phillips, Copperopolis.) Maybe this is an unwanted but unavoidable meaning of "music of the spheres": music whose elements are so rare, tones so pure, logic tight, speed frictionless and inertial, the music threatens to asphyxiates us. Yet the music came from earth.... Why want to key your moods to the feeling of that you are keeping at bay? You wall off the cold and damp and dark, the 5 o'clock sunsets and steaming storm drains and trembling stiffness in the fingers, and then you surround yourself with music that you think captures the essence somehow of those things. What is this endeavor that feels as if it is leisure? Is it a form of complaint, one that tries to escape being obvious? Are we trying to convince ourselves of something? Commiseration? Correspond. Are we out to remake the world as it feels to us? Yes, we do it to ourselves. A form of intimate theater? If we use ourselves this way, is it any wonder we will use others? If so, acknowledge that this remaking involves only a little in the way of actual creation.. I think maybe it has to do with a strange ability human beings have to turn impotence into power. This experience, this alteration, is elective. It comes and goes as I please, I indulge it, I ennoble it, I decorate it. I want to make the outside come inside and cancel out -- like detests like -- the winter in my soul. To stay up late into the frigid night, until the quiet conquers you. Beyond sad. When we are sad, we often want music that makes us more sad. But when we are cold, do we really want to be more cold? Hardly, I think. This question of how music is stored up and digested -- it goes beyond belonging. Beyond depression. Beyond affect, I think, though somehow the center of it is still affect and it is not affectlessness. "Music" and "soundtrack" are not synonyms -- I don't want to grace a moment, a time, a circumstance, with more than it deserves by assigning some music to it. I just want to feel comfortable in the knowledge that the music will help me retrieve the experience and perhaps even realize that, yes, there was something more momentous about it than I first thought. But the integrity of the music, too... is it displaced by this act? If so, it is displaced over and over again, to an extent that suggests it has no integrity.

When Stevens does write in The Snowman that "one must have a mind of winter," how much stress does "must" receive? One should, one is required to? Or is it an "if... then". If one does not "think /... of any misery in the sound of the wind" then one's mind is allied with, unified with winter's? Thus dead? Selfless? Nothingness simultaneously is and isn't. A paradox created, nurtured by recognition.

Commuters are those who cannot live near their work, they enact imbalance. The landscape reflects their lifestyle: poles apart, filled with treeless and zip-in, zip-out convenience. The country recedes from the city, downtowns and outlying areas; to keep these things apart we will destroy each equally in making this no man's land. Desert. What we perceive and feel as "the environment" is chiefly some replaying of our own actions. What we can do so quickly and without much consideration it might take nature a long, long time to undo. We are our own natural order. The predator that threatens our survival is consequence, good and bad, predicted and unforeseen. But we cannot despair over this connection. A. R. Ammons, both Wordsworthian and anti-Wordsworthian, from Tape For The Turn Of The Year that poem he wrought / journal he kept from 6 December 1963 to 10 January 1964, writes on the day before New Year's Eve that

soilage spreads
&
nature is trying to get
everything back
into the mill:
we exist because we're
afire (& burning out):

This sounds a little like Dante's hell, infinitely distant from the warmth the God's love, Satan's wings fanning not flames but flapping out winds that freeze, thus only sink him more securely in his excrescent ice, and as labors towards self-sovereignty are worse than ineffectual. This is innate justice of even the most seemingly venial evil. The old proverb about consumption says one thing but warns of another. You may be what you eat, OK, but, more to the point, what you breathe is you. Are you something you can convert as easily as you can convert other people into utilities, succor, knowledge, respect, love? We afflict ourselves or we disappear, colonists become refugees. Think of the spots where our atmosphere has thinned and worn through. Human beings may not have created these extremes, but they have helped shape and spread them. However much we civilize ourselves and thus engage in a huge and hugely wasteful project of contradistinction, we remain natural beings, we are part of the wilderness over whose decline we so often mourn.

Ammons, again, on New Year's Eve:

if we looked only by
what we know,
we couldn't turn our
heads:
if we were at the
mercy of what
we understand,
our eyes couldn't see:
discovery is
praise &
understanding is
celebration:
but understanding
is to see itself
fallen short.

Jazz still infects my imagination. In my mind, it is always winter in Central Park where Horace Silver is reading his morning paper, Bennie Green can never get a cab, and the marquee, partially obscured by feeding pigeons behind Thad Jones, will forever read "Show Boat". Dizzy Reece's Soundin' Off, if I mention it I prove so much, so few having heard it. Anyway, on the cover the Jamaica-born trumpeter stands pensive, sweater-vested, poised with his horn against the black of never tendered / burned out coal. In reality, the encompassing bleak is only a warm, dimmed studio, and the trick is all in the cropping. (Likewise, cool jazz to me is warmth pretending contempt for heat. A guy who goes to the beach and refuses to put on any sunscreen. A shady spot on the sand, tussocks of pale grass, a salt breeze. The clouds interfere for a moment with the sun, or it falls through screens.)

The world of this snowblind imagination, tired, rueful, fixated on an assumed future, its a snow globe in which the actual is miniaturized and subject to storms that always settle no matter how agitated each is at its outset.

~ Joe Milazzo

Sonic Youth - Goo: Deluxe Version

Geffen B0007ZIYWY

At this point, saying that Sonic Youth are the most influential rock band of the ‘90s is pretty much like preaching to the converted. But equally true is the fact that there is now quite a bit of distance between its members and their recent projects (not to mention what they do as a band) and what made them valuable in the first place. It wasn’t that long ago that I witnessed an intense display of Thurston Moore and drummer Chris Corsano producing a pummeling set at Minneapolis’ Fine Line (Jim O’Rourke was ‘onstage’) that actually had far more to do with the Ray Russell-Alan Rushton duets on Secret Asylum (Intercord, 1973) than any Downtown ghosts or flowers would belie. This was white noise and circulatory expansion at its art-garage finest, but how did they get here from punkville? After all, Sonic Youth were always harbingers of other things and areas of interest beyond their microtonal string-buzzing and helices of vocal non-sequiturs – if not a direct conduit to Arthur Doyle and Embryo, at least one did (or does) get the feeling that they are a window to the other side.

About a dozen albums and numerous side projects ago, Sonic Youth stitched up a trilogy in what some might call their finest hour (or least the most cohesive set of LPs of their career) with 1990’s Goo, their first for a major label and yet in hindsight one of their most overlooked recordings. If one looks at the stylistic arc of Sonic Youth, there is a trend for sure – 1986’s Evol (SST) was their first with drummer Steve Shelley, and certainly his approach made the difference between the primal urgency stemming from Bob Bert’s upturned trashcans and the fleet-footed, Mo Tucker-on-speed-and-Rashied fires of subsequent recordings. Evol had inklings of true cohesiveness in songs like “Tom Violence” and vulnerability in its rawness (Kim Gordon’s “Shadow of a Doubt”), but the next year produced Sister (SST), a more opened-up series of aural vistas that Evol could only allude to – reaching a collective understanding of how to let these currents flow in the span of a three-to-five-minute piece. Looking back on tunes like “Star Power” (from Evol), it is interesting to hear how at odds they were with themselves, reigning in something that shouldn’t necessarily be confined. Sister, of course, delivered one of the most frightening ‘airplay-worthy’ tunes of the decade, the album-opening “Schizophrenia,” at the outset a loose and jangled pop song with sails of detuned guitars and a mast of cruelly-advancing hooks that might find their way into being the inverted twin of an Aussie ‘80s hit machine. The funny thing is that, despite a tripartite structure that might seem constraining, the group was propelling itself more deliberately and was itself propelled more naturally here – they had honed it. As Moore and no-second-banana Lee Ranaldo let loose with frantic guitar interplay all over “Catholic Block,” it is orchestrated and driven, directional rather than continental drift. When feedback-drenched plateaus begin to drag against the ears, they come on the heels of panicky rave-ups like “Pipeline Kill Time,” not as the beginning and the end. Following Sister was something altogether different. Daydream Nation (Blast First!, 1988) is of course the double-album opus, the middle son of three, their own “take that, Hüskers!” and a reconciliation of boxing-in to driving those vertices forward.

One of the interesting things about Daydream Nation is that, unlike Sister, which starts off inordinately strong and seems to lose steam by the end, it steadily picks up its mass throughout the course of two LPs, making its closing statements into something one can look back over the entire set and discern a sense of wholeness to the proceedings (even if a few early cuts are somewhat dunderheaded). Slint’s Spiderland (Touch & Go, 1991) and Sebadoh’s III (Homestead, 1991) fall in this editorial camp as well. Daydream, like Goo recorded with Nicholas Sansano, offers some of the most cleanly-recorded guitar skronk you’ll ever hear – there is something to separating the walls of feedback- and fuzz-drenched guitar that, rather than defeating the purpose, actually brings complementary paths together more fluently. One can hear where they come from and what they respond to. Being hit with a sound you can physically experience as mass is one thing (see 1983’s Confusion is Sex or even live versions of “Pacific Coast Highway”), but being able to know that mass is another. Of course, that seems irrelevant when the opener, “Teenage Riot,” could’ve been ghost-penned by Alex Chilton, but when it segues into channel-specific ducking and diving from guitars tuned to a sine wave generator, it’s obvious they are in full stride half a side in. There is an easy peace of cymbal wash and strumming-with-drang closing out the side, a cascade of Swans/Spacemen/Kevin Shields/Guru Guru/Future Days that, whether true or not, always seemed to me like the first inkling that the group were really into something far beyond covering “Hotwire My Heart,” a world of pre- and postdating sound that they were caught in the middle of and were ever so happy to lead the curious into. Though it might seem preposterous to equate the SY maelstrom with free jazz, listening to a tune like “Cross the Breeze” one does get the feeling that they have found a way to play cohesively faster than semi-conventional rhythm allows. Thurston and Lee in tandem are like Albert Ayler playing with Beaver Harris; there is no way other than free time that these flights could be equaled rhythmically. Nor are they afraid to improvise at length, as three-fourths of “Total Trash” attest to. Ranaldo’s beat-poet excursions have finally settled aurally; whereas reading-with-noise prevailed on earlier recordings (and continued on some of his own solo releases), “Eric’s Trip” and “Hey Joni” present music that can match his frantically pleading delirium. The “Trilogy” (particularly its first two parts) that closes the record, “The Wonder” and “Hyperstation,” is, for lack of a better word, a motherfucker – the former spending its few minutes as an attempt to get away from itself tempically before it falls into the latter, a tense interplay of flying shards in an aural holding pattern while Thurston waxes poetic: “I put on a Sun Ra tee and I’m out with the door.”

But Daydream is the litmus against which all other indie-rock records are measured – “Polvo’s Daydream,” “Bright Eyes’ Daydream” (ugh…) – far be it that there was a slew of Sonic Youth records following it, most of them actually pretty good, and its direct follow-up a pure refinement of the fractured and fueled Stooges-by-Düsseldorf insanity that closed out side four. 1992’s Dirty is viably considered their pop-cultural breakthrough even as it purveys racket, while Goo at the time critically inching towards ‘sellout’ bait (notwithstanding the original Blowjob? title), became somewhat forgotten as it slipped into the chronological nether regions between underground classic and MTV’s Buzz Bin. Of course, “Kool Thing” was on MTV, usually late at night, as it featured guest vocals from Chuck D (not to mention Gordon’s bite) – in fact, that was the reason I first bought it on cassette back in 1991 as a gangly fourteen-year-old. Now, as part of what looks like a real repackaging strategy, Goo is presented as the second four-LP box set in two years (Dirty was the first to get this treatment), complete with an LP-size book and both EP extras and studio outtakes that, if it were silkscreened and pressed in a 200-copy run, might give the FMP vinyl box sets a run for their money. Again we come to the quality of production, which is given the same bell-clear ring that Daydream has, but now remastered in a way as to present that stoney-phone clarity of separation in real space. Pieces like “Dirty Boots” and “Disappearer,” always monumental in their blissed-out intricacy carry it here into a stereo-demonstration level of depth and breadth.

Essentially, Goo is a very deliberate record – more so than Daydream, as there are few if any cases where one gets the feeling that the music seems to be getting away from the players, as ecstatic and powerful as such a vibe might be. Sometimes this deliberateness is to a fault – “Titanium Expose” needed the bit removed from its mouth, but focusing the proceedings grants it weight that would have escaped otherwise. But this deliberateness also yields itself, in the end, to one of Sonic Youth's most perfectly balanced records. “Dirty Boots” is an update of the sprawling landscapes of Daydream’s first two sides, condensed with a slinkier rhythmic approach at its outset and a B section that seems somewhere out of Sister’s thrashier moments, in many ways a summation of “Sonic Youth up to now” – as much as ever could be in a first cut. It wouldn’t be out of line to call the following piece, an afterlife-homage to Karen Carpenter, a more polished take of “Cross the Breeze” with its linear kinetics given over to fame and body-image misfortune. That funky slink is something that wasn’t always obvious on earlier records, but Goo finds it in spades. “Kool Thing” flirts with the sonically retrograde while lyrically progressive – “are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” to Chuck D’s encouraging “Hell yeah” – nearly a fuzzed-out new wave anthem. Ranaldo’s “Mote” might be the best song the Hüskers never wrote, its first half full of characteristic haunted yearning and obsessive forward motion, fleshed out with shimmering electric crepuscles until it abruptly collapses into free-rock sludge that would have fit perfectly on a Mahogany Brain set. “Disappearer” might be the most absolutely gorgeous psychedelic tune that the band – or indeed any of their fuzzbox peers – produced, helped along tremendously by the fact that Moore’s loose-stitch lyrics actually connect in their imagery with the intricate resonance of the music, for the first time in a while lacking in obvious nihilistic tendencies thereby opening up the proceedings significantly. In some ways hearkening back to the orgiastic pummeling of early Gordon-fronted aural megaliths, “Cinderella’s Big Score” and the related “Scooter and Jinx” are essentially orchestrated improvisations to the tune of characters from Raymond Pettibon’s artwork (indeed, “Goo” is also a Pettibon character, and his artwork graces the LP box). As spoiled as it might make one thinking that crisp audio and refractive Fripp-style overlays are necessary to making Goo what it is, the more primitive-sounding rehearsal variants of songs like “Tunic,” while ‘realized’ as complete songs, don’t carry the monumental tapestry that their final takes exhibit (I won’t even go there with the limpid “Disappearer” [a.k.a. “Number One”] outtake). Yet somehow hearing “Dirty Boots” almost collapse on itself several times through the course of a take is a refresher, like most of these rough variants keeping the second half of the band’s moniker intact - a listener’s conundrum indeed. Then there are the covers: “That’s All I Know Right Now,” a dusty drunken glam escapade originally penned by Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine; the Beach Boys’ “I Know There’s an Answer,” and the purposely derivative instrumental “Can Song/The Bedroom,” which somehow transgresses the line between a Soundtracks outtake and something The Golden Earring would’ve recorded.

None of these three records – Goo, Daydream, or Sister – are a definitive slice of Sonic Youth that could be presented as time-capsule worthy on their own, but as a set they mark as clear an evolutionary statement as any in the history of recorded music. Of course, the band have since tried to make similar cohesive sets – the SYR quintet, about which the coolest thing was that their artwork ripped off EMI’s late ‘60s Perspectives Musicales avant-garde series, and then the recent NYC trilogy – but neither of those efforts have the dumbfounded conviction of these sessions. The records that we used as a window onto some other world of sound, that it was possible to have a crateload of uncategorizeable beauty and compelling movement from dissonance, strange tunings and blasts of improvisation controlled or uncontrolled, are to be found here. Many of us would not have known what was possible in creative music without records like Goo. Punkville is ‘here.’

~ Clifford Allen

Four more from Creative Sources

Doug Theriault/Bryan Eubanks
Big Clouds in the Sky Today
Creative Sources
CS047

Barry Weisblat/Alfredo Costa Monteiro/Ernesto Rodrigues
Diafon
Creative Sources
CS041

I Treni Inerti
Aerea
Creative Sources
CS050

Tisha Mukarji
D is for Din
Creative Sources
CS046

There had been a good deal of discussion here in prior months about small labels issuing, arguably, too much product. As a rule, I’m one of those in favor of more things being available rather than less, even to the point of saturation. While I feel this way generally, that feeling is, of course, enhanced by virtue of the fact, more often than not, that I receive my copies gratis in return for reviews. Were I a “mere” consumer and had I spent $60 dollars on the four discs reviewed below, I might not be quite so sanguine as none of them, it turns out, get me very excited. Well, maybe one. A little. Still, given an either/or choice, I think it’s a “good” situation that the music’s out there, if only for garnering a more complete idea of the musicians in question, warts and all.

Doug Theriault and Bryan Eubanks, both names new to me, work the guitar/electronics drone field. Two cuts are presented here, 21 and 41 minutes long, giving the duo plenty of time for allowing ideas to unfurl. Generally speaking, a quasi-tonal, often pipe organ-y drone stretches along a piece’s length, overlaid by harsher, slashing electronica. The details vary and different moods are established, but this approach—an entirely respectable one—is pretty much maintained throughout. This doesn’t preclude some fine sections. The first piece concludes by splintering effectively into shards of noise and the second reaches a wonderful point where foghorn-caliber blasts cross with sizzling sparks. But I hear more “effects” than a unified whole, than a thought-about creation. I’ve opined before that, over the last few years, this level of adequacy seems to me to be pretty readily attained, that a reasonably captivating sound matrix can be achieved without…not “effort”—I don’t want to give that spin to it—but without so much “reason for being”. For these ears, that urgency needs to materialize somehow (not that quantifying it is so easy), something I hear, for example, in works from earlier this year by Tomas Korber or Brendan Murray. The pieces of “Big Clouds in the Sky Today” are perfectly fine but, in the context of other recordings being produced these days, fail to distinguish themselves as something meriting special attention. A lot going on, not enough being said.

“Diafon” is a shortish (35 minute) set from 2004 featuring three players whom I’ve enjoyed quite a bit in different contexts over the last several years (Costa Monteiro, here, is on “pick-ups on turntables” while Rodrigues plays violin, pick-ups and objects; Weisblat presumably is using his standard electronics set-up). It’s pleasantly scratchy, sometimes bracingly harsh, travels through diverse areas but…nothing about it stands out particularly from any dozen such performances one might see at a given festival or on a given night at your favorite local, eai-bar. On the other hand, it’s “good”, in a sense. There are enjoyable passages but, as a whole, it doesn’t congeal for me. I wouldn’t have been disappointed had I witnessed the event; it’s just that I don’t think I would have remembered it a week later. This might be fine, dunno.

Monteiro, here on accordion, returns with fine trumpeter Ruth Barberan as the palindromic pair, I Treni Inerti, on “aerea”, decidedly my favorite of the four releases covered here and, in all likelihood, the one I’ll return to from time to time. The first track, “Luz Azul”, finds both instruments wielded in relatively traditional fashion, laying out thick, deep waves of sound, washing against one another in long, languorous sighs and moans. “Ici” contains more in the way of breath tones and scrapes from Barberan, wheezes and clatter from Monteiro and, as such, works wells enough but not substantially differently from much music we’ve heard before from them and others. It falters some over its 18 minutes, though it picks up steam now and then toward the end. On the brief final cut, “Era Mala Mare”, Monteiro stays in more abstract territory while Barberan reverts to the deep tones heard on the first piece, all to very strong effect. Perhaps not up to the best work by these musicians as heard on other recordings from this label, but a pretty nice disc and one worth hearing.

Another new name, Tisha Mukarji (I’m guessing female, but I’m not sure) plays “square piano frame” on this solo release. It’s entirely acoustic and the catalog of sounds produced is impressive right from the get-go, a small avalanche of rapid, high string plucks and the clatter of, I think, various objects rolled or otherwise jostled around the frame’s interior. But almost as quickly as one processes the novelty of the sounds, one is left wanting to hear much more in the nature of ideas and general conception. I was growing severely antsy long before the first cut’s abrupt cut-off after almost 18 minutes. The second track, “Brush Piece (Jagged)”, works much better; it sounds as though a bow is being deployed in addition to brushes, but whatever the case, a convincing, detailed soundscape is produced by simply remaining in a distinct area and taking the time to hear and appreciate what’s there, though even here she drags things on for a few minutes longer than necessary. “Screech” has the joint virtues of comporting with its title and brevity while “Whispers” is effectively dark and brooding, not unlike the brush piece but, happily, of excellent length.

Caveat emptor.

Gospel Keyboard Trio - Heavenly Keys

The Sirens 5012

Music has always been an important aspect of African American religious worship and in the originality sweepstakes the Gospel Keyboard Trio earns an instant edge. As far as I can figure, their chosen instrumentation is unique within their idiom incorporating as it does acoustic and electric pianos along with Hammond B-3 organ to assemble an arsenal well-stocked with keys and pedals. Not that the Chicago-based band is strictly idiom-bound. Ample borrowings from funk, blues and jazz season their music to create an album far more inclusive and diverse than the average gospel platter.

Reverend Dwayne Mason claims the erstwhile leadership position and spends about equal time officiating from acoustic and electric ivories. Leonard Maddox mainly plays organ, but also sidles up to the acoustic Baldwin Concert Grand on occasion. Willie Jones completes the core trio and his role is the most unusual, furnishing bass lines for the group from behind electric piano. If this roll call reads a bit confusingly, rest-assured that the changing musical chairs that accompany each track are all annotated in the session notes. Supplying the rhythmic tinder for the band on all cuts is drummer Curtis Fondren whose sizeable session credits include gigs with Lester Bowie and Fontella Bass.

The dozen tracks in the program prance by swiftly mixing gospel standards and traditional spirituals with the stray original like the galloping Maddox-penned “Church House Rock,” which opens the disc with an ebullient rush of jaunty syncopations. Two electric pianos and an organ converge atop a romping cadence, weaving in stride touches and playful pulpit fervor, but never stepping on each other’s keys. “Pray For Me” scales the pace back to a slow loping blues, Mason drafting a robust lead line at the Baldwin while his partners comp soulfully at his flanks. The bulbous breadth of Jones’ bass tone coupled with a surprisingly nimble touch when it comes to crafting solos makes his contributions all the more meaningful.

Several later pieces find the keyboardists engaging Fondren in duets. Best among them is the pairing with Maddox on a lengthy and reflective reading of “Cavalry.” The two shear the setting down to acoustic ivories and brushes and delve deep into the sentiment of sacrifice at the nucleus of that bittersweet tune. The requisite medley arrives with a rollicking trilogy of spirituals strung together on the wailing thread of Maddox’s greasy Hammond and a jubilant chorus of overdubbed tambourines. But the program falters a bit in its final few cuts, trading the fire of earlier numbers for a syrupy, more adult contemporary, vibe.

The Sirens specializes in this stripe of Windy City religious roots music; about the only other labels that come close to providing the same sort of service are Delmark and Arhoolie. Recorded by Bradley Parker-Sparrow at venerable Sparrow Sound, the fidelity of the date is clean and bright to complement the mood of the four testifying musicians. Sidestepping stereotypes, they succeed in summoning sanctified music without sounding the least bit sanctimonious.

~ Derek Taylor