Nice review Brian. This sounds like an excellent overview of current strategies. I just got done listening to an older duo of Jerman's called "Rescue Mission" with Wally Shoup and it's an energetic free blowing session. Then threw on Jerman's duo with Greg Davis, "Cottonwood, Arizona" for contrast of then and now. Wow. It's as restrained as the former is garralous. Quietly crunchy with soft xylophonic bits of wood rattling things up. The occasional clatter counterpoints quite nicely. Jeph has come a long way. He's had a very interesting journey, for us as listeners as well.
I should be able to make the NY gig just before the quake so hopefully they'll have the disc Ku there for me to pick up.

Hi. Jeph has come a long way? Man, you don't know jephs music at all. Ever hear of hands to? He was one of the first people to do this kind of quiet improvised music using found objects over 14 years ago. It's funny, I've been reading comments for the last year and a half about jeph, Keith Rowe, etc., most of you don't have a clue. And the fact the 'Jeph has come a long way'? what does that mean? Jeph explores many different areas of sound. Many of you who post to this list have ONE idea of working with sound. I'm not singling you out Letchhausen, but bagaetten in general always has the same 8 people posting arguments and banter. Get over this idea of a movement, why aren't you more concerned about innovation? You are not. Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey are all about a movement in a certain direction. This is old thought, and most of the comments i read on here seem very old to me....

this isn't a list, the site's not named "bagaetten", and it's lame to slam people anonymously, especially while not offering anything more interesting yourself. if you have something to say, no one's stopping you from saying it, go nuts.

And tell us your real name you GODDAMN SISSY

thanks for the nice review brian.
'ku' has no electronic instruments or sounds in it at all. its all put together from acoustic improvisations that jeph and i recorded in cottonwood AZ at his house over the course of 3 years. each piece has layers or collage of several recording sessions on top of each other. as for post-processing, there is a little. it is very minimal. in the first piece, i used a little EQ to bring up the white noise hiss on the recording and emphasize that blanket of sound. on the second piece, i just distorted the final mix some overdrive. and on the third piece, there is a very subtle room reverb on it to add some space and depth.

letchhausen, we will have plenty of copies of KU for sale at erstquake. be sure to say hello to us there. im looking and listening forward to the festival. should be fun.

the thing i really admire about jeph is his uncompromising ideas on sound and listening. and that he just does what he does and doesnt really care or follow trends in the music scene and isnt worried about being a professional musician. he is making music constantly and puts them out on cdrs (and sometimes other labels) for the people that want to hear his stuff. i think jeph's music has gotten quieter and more sparse over the past few years. most of the hands to stuff is quite a bit more noisy and dense. but its true, he has been doing his thing for many years. but jeph certainly has his influences and inspirations too. cacti and shells and branches improv comes from cage. rocks and stones comes from akio suzuki, etc etc.

as far as i know, jeph hadnt heard any keith rowe until very recently. when we were in australia, he bought the new rowe/nakamura disc on erst and i remember him saying 'ive never heard keith rowe before, thats why i thought id check this disc out'.

-greg

I've only given this one spin so far but I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the post and the details, Greg. Room40 discs have been piling up here for a while - time to do a serious roundup article. Two new super Samartzis outings too on the label.
You mention Akio - do you know Christian Wolff's piece Stones? A forgotten masterpiece of ultra minimalism if ever there was one -
Also (on an unrelated note) sad to see James Tenney, another oft overlooked master, has died

lawrence is prolific with the room40 label. great guy, a real go getter.

yeah that christian wolff piece is great. ive performed it a few times over the years. and yes, sad to hear about tenney. i hope more folks will start discovering and recording his pieces now....
-greg

By the way, I saw a copy of the Jerman/Gunter CD 'Buddha with...' yesterday and was twirling it around my fingers. Should I have brought it home? I keep passing on all these Trente Oiseaux releases all used at the local shop because I am so out of touch, anyone care to make some suggestions?

Hate to get off topic but I think saying Tenney is a master is a little too strong a statement. I am sorry to hear the news though and have been interested in his work for some time (even though it was so difficult to find for so long). I became interested in him when I was at SFAI and Carolee Schneeman was there showing films. No, it wasn´t his performance as the stud in Fuses but a composition he made for a film cutting up pop songs and other music for a soundtrack for another Schneeman film, Viet Flakes. This was way before the internet and it was so hard to find anyone that heard of Tenney and this composition is still, I think, nowhere to be found except on the film. Anyone know of where I could get a copy of it? When Tenney´s work started to get released on CDs in the 90s, I had hoped that it would be on one of them but no luck.

James Tenney not a master?
Under-recorded yes, un-appreciated yes.
Not a master? NO.

James Tenney not a master?
Under-recorded yes, un-appreciated yes.
Not a master? NO.

Let's not be petty. What is a master? He was a guy, probably a decent one. And now...

Now that's petty.

"most of you don't have a clue"

Mr. Olewnick, otoh, is a veritable Guru.

Well I had managed to avoid this thread until now, partly through illness, and partly because I think the world has heard enough of my opinions on Jeph Jerman, but FWIW I like KU a lot. Its quite different in places to the previous discs from this duo, so it took me a couple of listens to adjust, but on subsequent listens its really impressed with me, nice one again G and J.

So is the "someone that knows Jeph" the same one that appeared in my IHM thread? I suspect not, as that person would know that Letch has been listening quite a bit to Jeph's work and is a pretty intelligent guy that listens to a great deal of very varied music. Not sure why you jumped down his throat quite so much. I don't think its an insult for him to suggest Jeph has developed and gotten better at what he does, I don't think I'd argue with that. i'd certainly recommend using a proper sign-in name though, people would take you far more seriously, and anonymous names just wind people up.

On other topics, Ted if you can be bothered to search, a review of 'Buddha with....' can be found amongst this lot: http://ihatemusic.bagatellen.com/viewtopic.php?t=3063

Dan, the version of Wolff's Stones on Wandelweiser is a real favourite of mine. That alongside the version of Cage's 'Branches' on the same label have been played at Pinnell Towers as much as anything else this year and both are recommended highly to Jerman/Davis fans!

As for Tenney, does it really matter if he was a master or not so soon after his death Ted? Just seems the wrong time to be questioning what is after all a triviality.
I have come to Tenney very late, only hearing his stuff this year for the first time, but since buying up most of his catalogue. Pika-Don on Hat is my favourite, and the world of music lost yet another great name this year.

Yes, I can be bothered to search, thank you very much, but your lengthy posting meant little to my decision making. And, no, I don´t think it is wrong to be clearing up overstatements so soon after his death. I don´t think it is trivial at all. Tenney was no master and let´s reserve these very specific terms for those who earn it.

the Jerman/Gunter is a very nice disc, albeit short (a little under 22 minutes), and I believe long OOP, so you could resell it on eBay for a likely profit if you didn't dig it.

"master" is kind of a silly term to be fighting over, but I'll say that Tenney's music speaks to me personally in a way that most classical music I've heard doesn't. RIP, sir.

How many Tenney pieces do you know, Doug, just as a matter of interest?

mas‧ter  /ˈmæstər, ˈmɑstər/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[mas-ter, mah-ster] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a person with the ability or power to use, control, or dispose of something: a master of six languages; to be master of one's fate.
5. a person eminently skilled in something, as an occupation, art, or science: the great masters of the Impressionist period.
6. a person whose teachings others accept or follow: a Zen master.
8. a worker qualified to teach apprentices and to carry on a trade independently.
16. a person who has been awarded a master's degree.
29. being a master of some occupation, art, etc.; eminently skilled: a master diplomat; a master pianist.
All of these definitions apply to James Tenney, methinks. Maybe you'd like to provide us with YOUR list of people who qualify?

I think Ted's the one you should be asking, Doug agreed with your initial use of the term (although the double negatives are a bit confusing).

Twin posts seem to happen a lot around here. ( Ha )
He was indeed master by any definition.

For Ann Rising, was the first first piece I heard. I mean, someone HAD to make that piece, right? I heard it on a compilation put out by Ear magazine ( on the " improvisation " disc. sheesh ) Then those hat hut ( hatART? I don't remember ) recordings. They were the easiest to find. Postal pieces. The frog peak thing.

But I'd like to find out why Ted has reservations about tenny.

I´ve heard a fair amount as I have been looking for this piece for some time. A couple of the Hat Arts and the Selected Works disc. All interesting stuff but I would reserve Master for the top shelf. Cage, Feldman, that sort of thing. Tenney composed in a variety of formats but did he master any of them? Maybe his computer music work but I don´t think the quantity and quality of his work in other areas applies as mastering those languages.

Sorry Doug - double negatives always confuse me ;-)

Sorry Doug - double negatives always confuse me ;-)

Doug wrote: For Ann Rising, was the first first piece I heard. I mean, someone HAD to make that piece, right?

Yeah, that's probably true. In fact, I've wondered whether Tenney actually "discovered" the phenomenon or culled it from some acoustical research elsewhere. Remember that Scientific American Library series of books that appeared in, iirc, the early 80s? The one on "Sound" includes a flexidisc with an example of a "perpetually rising tone". Not sure if Tenney is cited therein (I'll check when I get home) but it any case, I happened to hear the piece long before I heard "For Ann (Rising)" so the immediate effect wasn't as stunning as it might have been had I heard Tenney's original around when it was written.

Yeah, how many inventors of the wheel were there?

I think I once saw some short film that used a perpetually rising tone in it's sound track. Whether it was Tenny or not I don't know.
It is a fairly well known acoustic phenomena.

Still all the same, it'll now forever be Tenneys.

hadn't heard of Tenney's passing until right now. he was just at a performance of one of his own pieces in dowtown los angeles about a month ago. people were talking all night about how they'd heard he was sick, but that he looked okay. i only met him once, but my friends who knew him all thought of him with great affection. very sad.

i think it's more than a little tacky to crap on an artist for being overrated, mere moments after his death, regardless of your opinion of his work.

Give me a break, this isn´t his funeral. I was just saying that I thought "master" was too strong a title for him.

I just heard this sad news last night from John Bischoff, who studied under Tenney as an undergraduate, and he said his cancer came back and got him.

Tenney is under-represented on disk, and that's a damn shame. Some of his just-intonation stuff is crazy hard to perform. Those who doubt his "mastery" should maybe have a look at his curriculum vitae. What's harder to grasp is the huge number of students he had. His influence is deep and wide in America and Canada.

the continually rising tone is called a shepard tone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

tenney put the idea to use and scored it for musicians. tenney learned it directly from roger shepard who was also working at bell labs in the early 60's.

the use of the term master is totally relative and subjective and quite arbitrary. master or not, tenney composed a lot of great music and i hope that more of his work is performed and recorded.

I really had no idea he composed so much. I was looking him up last night and was totally surprised. When I looked into him back in 1990, there was nothing. I mean nothing. I think I found one reference that was probably just referencing his work for a Brakhage or Schneeman film and that was nothing new to me at the time. I did a lot of searching and every record shop, any Professor and whatever computer search engine/resource they had back then was used to find out about him. Believe me, I was no slouch at investigating someone I was interested in back then and the lack of information only pushed me more. It wasn´t until that Selected Works disc came out that I got my hands on anything. What I was saying was only based on what I thought was a limited output. I really didn´t consider that he was composing plenty of work that wasn´t getting recorded. I am defending myself so adamantly because I don´t want it to look like I am putting down the man at all. Especially someone who helped inspire a whole world that opened up when I tried to find out more about him.

Ted, the more you dig into Tenney the more you find how wide-ranging his music was. Maybe that's part of the "problem"! He was also an awesome pianist - check out his playing on Stockhausen's Kontakte with William Winant, a researcher in microtonality, graphic notation, you name it. The Postal Pieces and Forms I-IV are among my favourites. Have fun discovering the work of the master :) !

Well, if you know where to find that piece from Viet Flakes, please let me know. It would end a very long search.

Also, Dan, I always wanted to thank you for introducing me to the work of Denyer from your interview with him. I picked up Monkey's Paw a little while back after reading your interview with him. I play it often. Maybe the title track a little less so but I hope to hear more.