Democracy now // Ari experienced

Wanted to comment on just a few items, as I prepare to head back to my ancestral homeland for the holiday.


















First, you've no doubt heard the racket over Chinese Democracy? Read my take here. Hint: I was more Fricke and Klosterman than Pareles.

I have found it fascinating to observe and participate in the superheated dialogue this thing has wrought. As you'll read above, no one is really lukewarm on the record at all. I've had like five or six people stop by my desk over the past couple days to express either disbelief at the opinion I chose to publish or a kind of somber solidarity, as though I had elected to undertake a suicide mission of some sort. My favorite bit on the album that I've read so far comes from the Klosterman piece (say what you will: the guy is an outstandingly entertaining writer):

"On the aforementioned 'Sorry,' Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ('But I don't want to do it') in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the 'Sorry' vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, 'You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human.'"

YES! And btw, he's not exaggerating at all--about the vampire talk. That's a brilliant song, one of many the album contains.

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Second, I was fortunate enough to catch the Ari Hoenig Trio (or try MySpace) live at Smalls the other night. Among other lessons I learned was that it is not in any way okay to assume an apathetic or been-there-done-that attitude toward what I often perceive to be "straight-ahead jazz."

I knew a little of Hoenig--a local jazz drummer who plays various downtown clubs so often he's dangerously easy to take for granted--before checking out this show. I had seen him play with Sam Yahel opening for Steely Dan a few months back. That gig piqued my interest and led to this review of his latest CD, Bert's Playground.

But that was written before I had caught Hoenig in his native setting. He plays Smalls pretty much every Monday night with one band or another and to hear the club's owner, Mitch Borden, tell it, Hoenig pretty much has the run of the place. Waiting with Laal in the entryway to the club on Monday night, I listened with Borden to a wicked drum solo that concluded the previous set. "Wait till you hear Ari Hoenig," Borden said, with two raised eyebrows. "Sometimes when he's playing a solo, the sticks are just a blur."

The club was as cozy as I remembered it. We scored second row seats and waited as the good-natured chatter swelled and subsided. Couldn't believe how packed the place was on rainy Monday night during the week of Thanksgiving, but again, that was just my underestimation talking.

How to describe Hoenig on the bandstand? I guess I would start with the word devilish. He announced the band--a lean trio with Gilad Hekselman on guitar and Orlando Le Fleming on bass--conferred with them for a sec, and then they hit it. Hoenig started off sparse. His face slowly curled into this odd sneer as he hit a stride. It's his trademark grimace, it turns out, and it signifies the demeanor of his drumming. His playing tends to work its way from pure poetic lightness to demonic density and bashing catharsis. And there's a definite wicked-gleam-in-the-eye glee about it. Hoenig loves playing for an audience, clearly, but more so, he seemed to be playing for his triomates. He kept staring them down with this crazed, superfocused smile, as if to say, "Beat that!"

And they smiled back, clearly high on his turbulent grace and kitchen-sink inventiveness (e.g., the way he meticulously renders melodies on the drums via ultraprecise muting; it verges on a vaudevillian cheese but ultimately comes off as dazzling, fearless high-wire entertainment). No tunes were announced while I was there, but I simply could not believe how tightly these three played together. No coasting at all. Very long forms, not like detectable choruses, but with everyone hugging the contours of the tunes at all times and hitting these unison accents out of nowhere. There was some minimal sight-reading and counting going on, but these players clearly knew this music.

Hekselman makes a great sparring partner for Hoenig. He was another preconception exploder. I'm not really a fan of jazz guitar per se, but there was no denying what he was doing. Burning, deeply bluesy, passionate, sick. He was just ablaze.

And Hoenig is just someone you have to see. The poetry and kineticism and, best of all, the strangeness. A marvelously eccentric player, and most refreshingly, there's nothing self-consciously avant-garde about what he's doing. But it always feels entirely fresh. He's the type of player that can sound utterly revolutionary while simply playing time. Again, no coasting. He could be criticized for being overly bombastic. He does not accompany in this band; he leads. It's often considered fashionable of late for a drummer who leads a jazz band not to command too much attention, but no, this is Hoenig's show.

And he will, I promise, screw with your mind. The suppleness verging on flashing, almost reckless outbursts. Just the strange tension of what he does. He doesn't make it look easy. He makes it look like white-water rafting or something. Always on guard, always looking for a way under, over, inside, outside the beat. His role is that of an agitator. It was--or, crucially, it at least appeared to be--a by-the-seat-of-the-pants performance, remarkable for a working jazz band. This was loud, commanding, turbulent music, but again, not in a free-jazz way. There was no pretension of mumbo-jumbo ecstasy or anything like that. It was emotional concentration, dancing poise. It was, I guess, all you'd want to hear from jazz.

Next time you're bored on a Monday, go hear Ari Hoenig at Smalls. This is the kind of thing that I would feel completely comfortable dragging the proverbial Friend Who Doesn't Like Jazz to. Wild, visceral poetry is what it was.

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Appropriately, Hoenig's Bert's Playground figures into my 2008 Jazz Top Ten, posted via the Jazz Journalists Association.

Un-Cynic-al

My review of the new album from Cynic, complete with some streaming audio. Amazing artwork,no? I apologize for the dearth of posts recently. Don't count me out. Thanks for reading, as always.

Astral-agy: Van Morrison at the Hollywood Bowl - 11/7/08

Greetings. I promise I've not been as idle as it seems. Am ushering what is for me a semimajor and long-incubating journalistic project toward completion. I won't put too fine a point on it this minute, but if you've been reading this blog even a little bit over the past, say, six months, you can probably guess what I'm talking about. Anyway, more to come on that.

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Right this minute, let us discuss Van Morrison. The whole Don't Look Back concept--wherein an artist revisits a classic album in concert--is commonplace these days, some might even say it's completely run its course. But when I heard a few months back that Van the Man was re-creating Astral Weeks live at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., which he did this past weekend, I knew this was something I wanted to check out.

Laal was onboard and we've both got relatives out West, so we decided to splurge and make the trip. One of the main draws for me was the tidbit of advance info that Richard Davis would be on the gig. I don't really even have to think twice about naming this man my favorite jazz bassist of all time; I've gushed about him on here before, but let's just briefly name Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, and Dolphy and Booker Little's Live at the Five Spot sessions, agree that these are some of the very finest jazz records ever made and reflect on the fact that they would not necessarily be so--or so utterly so--were it not for Davis's wizardly mastery. Let us add to this illustrious--and merely surface-scratching--list the fact that Davis not only performed on but straight-up fueled Astral Weeks, surely one of the most strange and visionary albums ever made, period, and we'll agree that the man is a giant. (And if we're still not convinced, we'll sit right down and watch this insane duo version of "Summertime" with Elvin Jones.)

But heartbreakingly, Davis was not on the gig. There were two sets at the show, the first one a sort of greatest-hits dealio with Van's regular band, and then Davis and Jay Berliner (who played classical guitar on Astral Weeks, not to mention Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady) were slated to come out for the Astral finale. 'Twas, for whatever reason, not to be: The same bassist from the first set, a Caucasian gentlemen whom I didn't recognize, emerged after the break and performed on all the Astral material.

I was reeling, believe me, but this was no waste of time. There is nothing lightweight or trite or over-the-hill or unriveting whatsoever about seeing Van Morrison live on a stage. To use a word from Astral Week's uberpoetic "Beside You," the man is a dynamo. We were seated in the middle of the amphitheater, and he was really just a little dot down there, but the Jumbotron was all fired up, so it was all good.

Watching the concert, the phrase that kept running through my head was "extended techniques." You see this term a lot in writing about experimental improv; basically what it means is using an instrument in a way it isn't traditionally supposed to be used, like, say what people like Axel Doerner or Greg Kelley on trumpet. In that world, a lot of these sorts of techniques ceased to be experimental years and years ago--my buds and I often refer to the excessive or gimmicky or ostentatious deployment of them as "thingin'"--but in Morrison's hands they seemed genuinely adventurous. I know that Morrison can be a ham as well as an experimenter and that some of his seemingly spontaneous tangents are merely routine cliches (during "Cyprus Avenue" at the Bowl, Van replicated the "my t-t-t-t-tongue gets tied" bit that he's been trotting out since at least the mid-'70s, to judge by the live album It's Too Late Too Stop Now). But I could swear that during a lot of this concert he was just throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick, in the vein of the iconically sore-thumb-ish "...really wrong, really wrong" groan-out in the middle of "Caravan" from "The Last Waltz," a performance which, criminally, has been removed from YouTube as part of a massive seemingly Morrison-sanctioned regulation of all his clips on the site.

Anyway, but unless his band members were faking it, they were on their toes during this entire show. Morrison performed a lot of familiar tunes during the first set--"Saint Dominic's Preview," "Moondance" (Van took an awesome, brief and somewhat Lee Konitz-sounding alto-sax solo on this one) and "Brown Eyed Girl" (in a very elegant, folky arrangement)--but he also stretched out on some pieces I didn't know well: one called "Troubadour" and some others I'm forgetting. I don't remember the songs so much as isolated moments of weird, inspired spontaneity. "I want to tell you a story," he blurted out in the ;middle of one tune. "It doesn't have any words." This set off a lengthy scat section, wherein Morrison worked himself into a tongue-speech lather and eventually began emitting rapid-fire grunts in a seeming imitation of a machine-gun. In another tune he looped the line "Way down in the backstreet," then paused and shouted, "That's where I come from, man!" There was a sense of real channeling during the best of these outbursts. Morrison stays planted when he sings, punching his right arm horizontally at the air, as though he's warding off, or maybe inciting, a spirit. He's got no autopilot, or at least he could've fooled me; he really grapples up there.

Some of the most inspired moments of the show didn't involve his voice at all. "Slim Slow Slider," the brief, elegiac wisp of a song that closes out Astral Weeks, got stretched way, way out live (perhaps in honor of the fact that the recorded version was apparently edited big time, as related in various accounts). Van didn't play too much guitar during the show--a fair amount of rhythm strumming and some nice, twangy, pickless self-obbligato playing here and there--but as "Slider" kept on churning, something seized Van and he grabbed the acoustic guitar and started to hammer at it, working up to a harsh, blurry, brutal sort of strumming. It was dissonant, it was anti-technique; it was like some sort of hamfisted heavy-metal mariachi playing. The first thing I thought of was Sonny Sharrock's meaty, vigorous dicing of the instrument on Black Woman.

Speaking of the avant-garde jazz vibe, I felt that heavily in Van's harmonica work. If I remember correctly, he did do some conventional soloing on the harp, but what I recall more were these moments when he seemed to become obsessed w/ the instrument's pure-sound potential and blew messily into it while humming at the same time, producing a weird, airy, slobbery multiphonic din, like something you might hear George Lewis attempt on trombone.

And then there were the patented Morrison mantras--long stretches of trancelike repetition--from the familiar ("the love that loves to love the love that loves the love to love," etc. in "Madame George") to the thoroughly weird and unexpected (he kept injecting the phrase "Get on up," seemingly a la "Sex Machine," throughout the show; at one point he broke without warning into the first verse of Ronnie Hawkins's "Who Do You Love?"; and at the end of "Madame George" he went into an odd riff centered around the phrase "This is a train," before strolling offstage, mike still in hand.

I remember these isolated moments much more than the songs themselves, though I generally found the non-Astral Weeks set to be looser and more enjoyable. Some of the AW stuff felt straitjacketed, e.g. "The Way That Young Lovers Do," which was a spitting image of the original. Most uninspired was "Beside You," a poem of ecstasy on record that had the life sucked out of it onstage. Richard Davis and the other players at the original sessions understood how to let these compositions breathe, but Van's current band seemed to want to normalize the material; the drummer, for one, kept slipping into a backbeat where none were needed, and it felt like a crutch.

But Morrison is well worth catching live, no matter what the setting. He didn't talk much to the crowd, but after "Moondance," when the audience went wild, he said, "Ah, now I get it," alluding to our hunger for the familiar. Morrison's known as horribly cantankerous, but he seemed warm onstage and most of all, inspired. As described above, there's a real sense of grappling, of searching. He's got to be one of the most restless-seeming rock singers I've ever heard live; he's just got this itch to probe and prod his songs, to wring all the weird tics out of them that he can. It's this quality that makes him not just a great singer but a great improviser. He often writes of mystic quests and spiritual journeys, and even though his current band comes off as slick--and even sleepy sometimes--you get the sense that Morrison goes down those metaphysical paths every time he gives a concert.

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*I leave you with a song from Van's latest, Keep It Simple. This disc didn't grab me much when I first checked it out, but appropriately, a few isolated tics stuck with me. I love the stubborn repetition of the title line on this tune, the way van just swings with and against the background rhythm. It's a virtuoso tightrope moment disguised as a senile zone-out:

Van Morrison - That's Entrainment
(Wikipedia sez: "Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms with whom they interact socially. Examples include firefly flashing, mosquito wing clapping as well as human music and dance.")

*Also check out this very cordial and forthcoming Van email Q&A from the L.A. Times. Dig how fond the man is of ":)"--gotta love it.

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In other matters, hail Traced in Air! (I don't think I really realized how eagerly I was anticipating this until I got my hands on it.) More on that soon.

Yes.

Hell yeah.

There's nothing political whatsoever about The Elephant Riders by Clutch, but it's one of the most rousing, celebratory songs I know, so why not? Crank it.

(By the way, I'm sure many will say so, but I thought McCain's speech was way dignified.)

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P.S. Destination Out recently concluded its tribute to another great African-American, Anthony Braxton. My voice is a small part of the chorus.