Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches

The storyteller: Ronald Shannon Jackson

2012-01-25T09:17:00.016-05:00

Right now my listening compass points to Ronald Shannon Jackson, specifically the Decoding Society LPs Mandance (’82) and Barbeque Dog (’83). Above you'll find a contemporary performance by the band, which then featured Vernon Reid and Melvin Gibbs; the piece is "Yugo Boy" (from Barbeque Dog), which, strangely, doesn't appear on the live album sourced from this same gig.

Jackson's drumming fascinates me in general, but during this period, he really homed in on a concept and sounded as much like himself as he ever has, if that makes any sense. I love the way he fixates on these particular pet feels and juxtaposes them in a modular way. One of the feels in question is that beat you hear him playing at the beginning of "Yugo Boy." Jackson has a manic way of going at the hi-hat, just hammering on those sixteenth notes, working up to an open-cymbal release at the end of every measure; meanwhile his bass-drum foot does a stylishly simple dance. He plays these sorts of beats constantly in the ’82/’83 Decoding Society material ("Gossip," also from Barbeque Dog, is another great example), and I love the way they contrast with what the horns are doing up top, a bedrock rhythm hurtling forward as the melody takes a more leisurely stroll. It seems to me that that was the core principle of the Decoding Society: Lay down something propulsive or funky underneath and then let the song waft along in its own ethereal space.

"Yugo Boy" is a fairly static piece, rhythm-wise (though I love the way that Shannon shifts to the ride for the bass solo at 1:45 in the vid above, offering a textural twist while keeping the pulse racing), and Shannon often seemed cool with this sort of approach: picking one beat and sticking with it throughout a piece. But there are some great examples of him playing in a more suite-like style, where compositions would feature several distinct movements and his drumming would follow suit. "Alice in the Congo," the last track on Mandance, is a good example of this. He starts off with this insistent march pattern—half-time, but again with this almost hyperactive urgency to it, thanks to steadily chomping eighth notes on the hi-hat. These types of beats are a signature of the Decoding Society, and they're what give this band such a buoyant feel; lately I've been struck by the unabashed unhipness of these beats. They're so wonderfully nonvirtuosic, almost leaden, not beholden whatsoever to the tradition of fusiony flash, as exemplified by Billy Cobham or any of the other principal drummers of that movement. Shannon is more about this sort of stubborn folksiness, these beats that lope along with a stick-in-the-mud sluggishness. Again here you hear that weird foreground/background tension, the drums just cruising ahead like a determined bulldozer while the horns do their slurry, languid dance up top. And then at :58 seconds, the band snaps into a bridge-ish section and without worrying about any sort of hip transition, Shannon drops into that wired sixteenth-note hi-hat frenzy, very similar to the "Yugo Boy" beat. Then back to the march beat for a bit, and then around 1:49, when the bass solo begin, he drops way down dynamically and enters this sort of trance-swing, built on fluttering snare-drum ghost notes, tense quarter notes on the hi-hat and these darting, delicate patterns on the ride and crash cymbals. It's a beautiful textural shift.

Shannon frames each little episode in the song with its own distinct beat. When Vernon Reid's guitar solo begins at around 3:05, the leader starts kicking up a little more dust, flirting with a heavy backbeat feel, livened up with splashy fills and digressions. Then after a brief horn fanfare around 4:15, he brings back the initial parade-march beat for a bit, before segueing into this climactic build-up—a gradually accelerating snare roll that starts out (around 5:16) feeling wonderfully draggy, like an anvil tied to the feel of the nimble horn players, and builds into a super-dense buzz. Throughout "Alice in the Congo," you really feel the intertwined-ness of Shannon the composer and Shannon the drummer; he's very keen as a writer on mini set changes and as a drummer on highlighting these shifts. It's not just "Play a head; play some time; play a head"; the best of the Decoding Society pieces from this period ("Harlem Opera," which concludes Barbeque Dog, is another one in this vein that I adore) have a story to tell, and Shannon makes sure that as a drummer, he's upholding the narrative integrity. It's almost like each of these different feels that he favors (the racing sixteenth-note hi-hat stuff, the draggy march beats, the dreamy and diffuse ride-cymbal-heavy sections—a set of approaches that, along with a plodding blues feel, also staked out the rhythmic territory for Last Exit) is its own character: a puppet to be animated, an accent to assume.

With many drummers I love, I think of them as speaking in a unified voice, relating at all times to a single overarching concept, but with Shannon, it's a bit different; I love the way he slips in and out of different dialects, juxtaposes them, shuffles them, constructs a sequence and progression. It's one of the reasons his music, especially from this period, feels like a bright and colorful world that you step into. The marvelous piece titles, the unexpected set changes—it all contributes to this sense that you're sitting at the foot of a master storyteller, one who's not simply executing a style (jazz, rock, fusion, what have you), not just playing music, but bringing a scene to life in sound—decoding it, maybe, leaving its wonderment fully intact.

P.S. You can purchase various CDs and DVDs (though not the ones mentioned above) at Shannon Jackson's website. If only he were MP3-equipped…

P.P.S. I hope it isn't too long before Shannon Jackson performs in NYC. He still plays frequently in Europe; I'm seeing here that he'll be in the Ukraine (!) with a new quartet this coming April.

P.P.P.S. Destination Out has served up some choice Shannon material in the past, e.g., this post, which sparked some lively discussion, as well as a cameo from the man himself.

Iron Balls of Steel: Steve Shelton returns

2012-01-19T05:44:00.015-05:00

Here is my Pitchfork review of the new Loincloth LP. As you'll read in the piece, I never thought I'd type "Loincloth" and "LP" in the same vicinity.

As silly as it might sound given their name, this band means a lot to me. DFSBP readers familiar with the Math? Rock! mixtape might recall a passing mention of Loincloth in the entry for the band Confessor (No. 14). The two bands share a rhythm section—most prominently a drummer, Steve Shelton, whom I believe to be one of the 20 or so most inspired/inspiring drum-set performers of all time, in any genre. In terms of any kind of technical metal (if pressed, I'd label Shelton's microscopic niche "progressive doom"), there's no competition as far as I'm concerned, and one of the reasons this new Loincloth record feels like such a landmark is that prior to its release, you could only hear Shelton on three full-length recordings (a scant number considering that the man has been active in music since at least the late ’80s): two Confessor LPs (1991's Condemned is desert-island material for me, but 2005's Unraveled is also strong) and one very obscure, and not entirely satisfying, album by the spin-off band Fly Machine.

Iron Balls is a stunning addition to this tiny collection. Not only is it downright wizardly from a technical standpoint (and I'm not just talking about the drums here), as I discuss in the review, it packs way more of an emotional punch than I'd ever expected. I strongly urge you to listen to the record in full at Pitchfork and to buy a copy from the Southern Lord store (I couldn't resist the T-shirt plus LP deal).

In the meantime, here are a few choice Steve Shelton performances:

Confessor
"The Stain" (Condemned, 1991)

Confessor
"Alone" (from the highly recommend 2006 DVD Live in Norway)

Confessor
"Hibernation" (Unraveled, 2005)

Instructional segment re: the title track to "Condemned" (bonus feature on Live in Norway)

P.S. Was going to excerpt Loincloth's original four-song demo here, but there are no decent-quality YouTube streams. As far as I know, the release isn't available in any official capacity, but you should have no trouble turning it up online.

P.P.S. Shelton sounds absolutely beastly in this early Confessor clip.

P.P.P.S. Here's a new, very comprehensive interview with the members of Loincloth.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #6: Bill Laswell

2012-01-14T09:35:00.010-05:00

I'm happy to report that Heavy Metal Be-Bop, my jazz/metal interview series, has returned from a little hiatus. The sixth installment, a Q&A with Bill Laswell, is live in abridged form at Invisible Oranges (metal is the focus here, of course) and in a greatly lengthened director's cut at the series's online home, heavymetalbebop.com. (HMB #7 is already in the can, though no promises re: how soon I'll be able to post it.)

As I mention in the intro to the Q&A, which you'll find at the links above, it's hard to discuss the jazz/metal connection without bringing up Bill Laswell; along with John Zorn, he's an elephant in the room. You'll find some Laswell talk—specifically, comments on Last Exit, the polarizing ’80s improv quartet he worked in with Peter Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson—in two prior HMB installments; check out Melvin Gibbs's thoughts here and Craig Taborn's here.

I'm not sure when I first heard of Bill Laswell. I remember that my teenage interest in Mick Harris's idiosyncratic dub-metal project Scorn (I still love the Evanescence LP) led me to the Laswell/Harris collaboration Equations of Eternity, and that a review in the sadly departed metal rag Rip tipped me off to Painkiller, Harris and Laswell's avant-grindcore trio with John Zorn.

As I got more into both jazz and metal though, I developed something of a distaste for Laswell. I remember being immensely excited when I first learned of the existence of 1997's The Last Wave, a trio record with Laswell, Derek Bailey and Tony Williams (!) under the collective name Arcana, and of Last Exit itself. Being a Bailey and Williams nut, as well as a Sharrock obsessive, it seemed that I couldn't go wrong with this material (not to mention Material, a Laswell project that featured guest turns from Sharrock and a bunch of other free-jazz heroes set against a backdrop of off-puttingly synthetic—for me, at least—’80s art-dance). But in the case of The Last Wave, the strange, boomy production, and in the case of Last Exit, a funk-oriented bass presence that struck me as a sore thumb, kept me on the outside. Records like these were classic examples of "On paper, this looks tailor-made for me, but I just can't get with it in the flesh."

Over time, though, I realized that I couldn't stay away. I wasn't going to let my aesthetic quibbles keep me from savoring some of Tony Williams's final recordings (the drummer died during the making of the second Arcana record, Arc of the Testimony), or an extended series of exchanges between musical heroes of mine such as Brötzmann and Sharrock. The more I sat with the Laswell discography (or at least the wings of it that intrigued me most), the more it impressed me. What I realized was that, like John Zorn, another artist whose own work I have mixed feelings about but whose curatorial/community-forging instincts I admire greatly, Laswell's greatest achievement has been his bridge-building, his willingness to forge connections between artists who never would've found each other (note Herbie Hancock and Akira Sakata's names on that Last Exit LP jacket above), or at least probably wouldn't have thought to document their meeting on record: Bailey and Williams, say, or Keiji Haino and Rashied Ali (who appeared with Laswell in a collective called Purple Trap), or Sharrock, Brötzmann and Shannon Jackson, who seem like soulmates after the fact but who, to my knowledge, hadn't played together before Laswell convened them. The Praxis project is another example; I'm not in love with the later material (oriented around Buckethead and Brain), but it warms my heart to read the personnel list for 1993's Sacrifist, which includes Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell alongside the dudes from Blind Idiot God. Laswell's work as an intergenre unifier is less well-documented than Zorn's (in founding Tzadik, Zorn created an invaluable umbrella entity that Laswell never managed to maintain for an extended period), but it's equally undeniable. I'm thrilled that these records exist.

And to branch out briefly into Laswell's work as a producer, the musical world owes him a great debt for helping to resurrect the career of Sonny Sharrock. Guitar and Ask the Ages are among my most treasured records, period, the two best presentations of Sharrock's heartrending magic. (Seize the Rainbow, a Laswell co-production, is an idiosyncratic keeper as well.)

Part of the fun of the Heavy Metal Be-Bop series has been interrogating some of my old aesthetic prejudices. To ignore Laswell outright would a major self-disservice. Just as I don't love all of his records, I don't agree with everything he has to say in the conversation linked above (for one, his estimation of Dave Lombardo's limited musical scope seemed overly dismissive, and even disrespectful), but I'm grateful to have had the chance to sit down with him and discuss this strange musical nexus. Tony Williams, whom Laswell knew well and worked with often, acted as a fulcrum for the conversation, and I think we ventured into a fair amount of underexplored territory re: Williams's ambitions and aesthetic goals as a rock-oriented player.

I hope you enjoy the interview. I'd like to sincerely thank Mr. Laswell for taking the time to meet with me.

Beacons of song: Marsalis/Calderazzo/Connick

2012-01-10T08:21:00.010-05:00

"If you give a soloist an open solo for thirty seconds, he plays like he's coming from the piece that you wrote. Then he says, 'What the hell was that piece I was playing from?' And the next thirty seconds is, 'Oh, I guess I'll play what I learned last night.' And bang! Minute two is whoever he likes. Which is probably Coltrane."—Bob Brookmeyer (RIP), quoted in Ben Ratliff's The Jazz Ear

I think about this quote a lot when I'm hearing jazz live. Often it's because I'm thinking how much Brookmeyer's cautionary anecdote applies to the situation at hand. Last night, thankfully, this was not the case.

The show was Branford Marsalis's "A Duo of Duos" at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Allen Room (TONY preview here), during which he dueted first with Joey Calderazzo—his partner on 2011's Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, over which I've already gushed extensively—and second with Harry Connick Jr., the latter of whom didn't sing. So these were pure saxophone/piano duos, with Marsalis switching between tenor and soprano.

Getting back to the Brookmeyer observation, what impressed me most about these performances was how fully the players were engaging with the material. They weren't "soloing on tunes"; they were getting inside the songs, rooting around, exploring.

The Calderazzo portion came first, four pieces from Songs in quick succession: "Endymion," "The Bard Lachrymose," "Precious" and "Bri's Dance." Right as the pair began "Endymion," you felt like you were being sucked into a vortex. The tempo was a little quicker than on the record, the elegantly dancing melody a little more rushed. Marsalis and Calderazzo seemed eager to crack open the shell of the tune and get to its sweet meat. But again, it wasn't about leaving the song behind. As they played, I got the distinct feeling of overlap, of simultaneity. The men were talking over one another, each jumbling up the melody in his own way, with no consensus tempo. The net result was dense, hectic but also coherent. You felt that each was expounding eloquently, passionately on the same topic, reading out of the same book without agreeing beforehand what page to begin on. Each was so dialed into the material that they could just sing out together, at once.

"Soloist/accompanist" was erased pretty much from the get-go. Yes, there was traditional form at work: The pair would play the melody and dig into it a bit; then Marsalis would drop out, leaving Calderazzo to play alone, and eventually he'd reenter. Marsalis's absences definitely built tension, but they didn't summon that sinking feeling that sometimes comes when a bandleader or dominant musical voice takes a break and you're left with something puny-sounding. Calderazzo was bursting with ideas, and as soon as Marsalis would exit, he would spread out his sound to fill up the space. There was something perpetual about the way he played, as if he couldn't bear to break momentum, but he'd slide all across the spectrum of density and tempo. I kept imagining a punch-card score being run through a player piano as a curious and attentive operator tried out various settings.

And then Marsalis would reenter and suddenly there was room for the two to dance and swoop, to decide in the moment on a consensus pause, to obsess on a tangential phrase. This duo was just about pouring out, a wash of ideas, backed up by a shared familiarity with the material. I've rarely heard a less "[playing] what he learned last night" jazz concept. Marsalis and Calderazzo were interrogating these songs, needling them, pounding out their wrinkles, obsessing over them. The songs were not fodder; they were the focus, the matter at hand.

I remember "The Bard Lachrymose" flowing, almost unthinkably, at an even slower tempo than on the record. What Calderazzo and Marsalis are doing with these somber pieces (the "melancholy" portion of Songs) isn't something I can personally think of any precedent for. To call them "ballads" almost seems silly. They are studies in meditation, in living with an ever-so-gradually unfolding feeling. Last night, "Bard" just oozed out so softly and tenderly, like shadow overtaking light as the day progresses, fueled by Marsalis's perfectly honeyed soprano tone. "Bri's Dance," the most beboppish piece on Songs, concluded the set with an uptempo scamper. The pair didn't fully articulate the melody until the end; they took their time jabbing, hinting, dissecting it. Another reminder that the best jazz isn't just about blasting off indiscriminately; it's about taking flight, yet knowing where your ceiling is—and, crucially, knowing where to land.

The Connick portion of the evening was equally strong. If I have less to say about it, it's only because I knew less going in; having not heard Marsalis and Connick together before—okay, let's be frank: having not heard Connick do much of anything except sing "It Had to Be You" in When Harry Met Sally—I had no idea what I was in for. Remarkably, this duo felt just as deep.

Obviously I had preconceptions. I'll admit that I'd formed a hypothesis that the Calderazzo portion of the evening would feel weightier and that the Connick segment would perhaps be cutesy, more of a lark, more casual. And there was a casual-ness to the way it began, with Marsalis and Connick ribbing each other. (Marsalis made a reference to how Connick was currently "busy being a Broadway star," and how he hadn't "looked at a piano for months.") But this mood did not carry over into the performance. The two began with a piece called "Virgoid," which appears on their 2005 duo disc, Occasion: Connick on Piano 2 (I haven't heard it yet, but you can bet I'll be investigating), and they immediately established a tricky, vexing mood. Given the pair's shared New Orleans roots, I expected a set filled with vintagey, good-time jazz (there was a "St. James Infirmary" encore, during which Connick and Calderazzo shared the piano, but that felt anomalous), yet there was little that felt carefree about the performance. "Virgoid" in particular registered as surprisingly tense, especially from Connick's end, as though he had to keep a tight grip on the material—the arrangement featured these periodic theme statements that seemed to crop up out of nowhere—in order to keep it from spinning out of control.

I don't have the rest of the Marsalis/Connick set list on hand, but I know they played one tune that was only identified as a New Orleans favorite (again, though, it felt more cloudy than buoyant) and "Chanson de Vieux Carré" (also from Occasion) and what I think was a standard. Throughout the set, Connick consistently impressed me. I just could not get ahold of what he was up to, though I remember this pervasive feeling that I described above, this sense of murkiness, perturbedness about his playing. Whereas Calderazzo had seemed to dance tempestuously across the keys, with no filter between his feelings and his movements, Connick seemed more leaden, sluggish, fraught. And I don't mean to suggest that this was a matter of inferior technique; it seemed entirely intentional, as though he were exploring in this instrumental setting all the complex, sometimes awkward or unsightly emotions that he might have to mask when donning his "vintage-style jazz singer" guise.

I can say definitively that there is way more to Connick than I had known. I'm having a hard time remembering an occasion recently when I was so simultaneously intrigued and unsettled by what an improviser was playing. I just could not for the life of me pin down what he was up to. There was a good amount of classic stride in his playing, but very little bebop that I could hear and no real "avant-garde" signifiers. It just felt very other, like a branch that had stemmed off from the main trunk of jazz sometime in the ’30s or ’40s and thickened and evolved and hardened into its own idiom entirely. I'm extremely eager to study up on his work.

The aforementioned "St. James Infirmary" encore, with Connick and Calderazzo sharing the piano bench, was the evening's lightest moment, but again, it wasn't simply a letting-you-off-the-hook moment. There was a silliness to the presentation—at one point Connick was standing behind Calderazzo, more or less embracing him as he played the extreme high and low registers of the keyboard, while Calderazzo sat and handled the middle range—but the performance itself was extremely inquisitive. As with the rest of the evening, there was a sense of the wringing out of potential within a song. It wasn't just "Let's play this tune and toss it aside while we show off and play what we already know over the changes"; it was "Let's steep in this, really marinate in it, explore this confined song space." A lot of improvisers would do well to pay attention to what Marsalis is up to with these duo performances. He seems to want to remind jazz that it is not above its materials, that the songs do in fact matter, that they are the beacon of musicmaking, whether or not you're working in an improvisational setting. Calderazzo and Connick get it too. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that these players are a school unto themselves.

Playing for the people: Sam Rivers and self-regimented freedom

2012-01-04T08:17:00.017-05:00

“When Ornette Coleman emerged, he played thematic material which came out of the blues, and improvised on it. Cecil Taylor… played themes and improvised on them. Dave Holland and I had no thematic material; it was spontaneous creativity, completely improvised, and every night was different. I don’t feel I get credit for my contributions. I would like someone to tell me who was the one who started it if I didn’t.”—Sam Rivers, from a 1999 Downbeat profile by Ted Panken

The question of who "started" free improvisation is a tricky one, and probably unanswerable in the end. (I'd guess that most people's first encounter with an instrument involves free improv of some sort.) But free improvisation as Sam Rivers practiced was indeed its own thing. After spending some time over the past few days with various small-group Rivers records—especially Waves, from August of ’78—I'm starting to understand why this was. As committed as he was to free improvisation, he was just as committed to the performance and/or documentation of this practice. It seems to me that the trajectory of a given from-scratch session meant a lot to him, which is why you can listen to his free-improv records as records, and not just as experimental documents.

I'd be curious to read a detailed account of the changing membership of Rivers's small bands during the ’70s. About the only definitive statement I can make is that a lot of players passed through these ensembles. Yet Rivers was obviously committed to forming bands rather than just ad hoc groups: Dave Holland was a constant presence on bass; Barry Altschul or Thurman Barker often drummed; and tuba player Joe Daley acted as a trusty foil. As a quick scan of the available bootlegs (see the Inconstant Sol trove, e.g.) will tell you, these were working groups. They were touring, gigging, recording frequently, at home and abroad. And so while it's true that you typically won't hear prewritten thematic material in this body of work, you will hear a method being honed.

It seems to me that what Rivers was after was spontaneous set building. He wanted to improvise consistently with the same players over an extended period, so that the band could learn to pace itself, to construct a 45-minute performance, say, that could hold an audience's interest. With these Rivers records and bootlegs, what you're hearing is not, say, the Cecil Taylor mode, where you've got one or two gargantuan pieces making up a set; rather you're hearing skillfully paced episodes—not prewritten, exactly, but in their own way drilled, self-regimented. I think of long-form improv comedy, where a single word or phrase triggers an hour or so of cohesive skits. With these Rivers bands, you don't have the initial prompt, but you do have the same kind of discipline; yes, these groups are creating in the moment, but they're not oblivious to the listener's experience. Rivers was looking for spice, variety, punctuation, transition.

Waves is a great example of this. You can basically look at this album—a quartet with Daley, Holland and Barker—as a studio version of what the band would've been doing live around the same time. As far as I can tell, there is no prewritten material at all on this record. When I first picked up the disc, a few years back, it didn't stick; I was steeped in Rivers's more structured and even meticulous small-group work from the ’60s, records like Dimensions & Extensions, and I wanted to hear his compositional mind at work. But checking out Waves over the past few days, I was able to drop that baggage and appreciate the record for what it is: a snapshot of an improvising ensemble doing what it does. In a sense, there's nothing definitive about Waves, aside from the fact that the sound quality is outstanding; you're just hearing what this band happened to play on this particular occasion. But when you spend time with the album, the structure and the logic of it really start to stand out. Sure, there are no "tunes," but this band knew what it was doing.

As I discussed in my previous Rivers post, multi-instrumentalism is key here. Rotating among tenor and soprano saxes, flute and piano wasn't just a lark for Rivers; over time it became crucial to the way he structured his performances, kept them feeling constantly refreshed. Each instrument swap is a bookend, a chapter marking. For the four shortish tracks that make up the majority of the record (numbers 2 through 5), Rivers plays a different instrument on each one: flute ("Torch"), soprano ("Pulse"), piano ("Flux") and tenor ("Surge"), and on the long opening track, "Shockwave," he starts on piano and then shifts to tenor. Waves being a studio document, these episodes are clearly demarcated here, but the same sort of transitions were taking place onstage as well. Sure, the band may not have plotted out where it was going to begin—only that Rivers was going to start on piano—but once it did begin, there was a logic in place that dictated the subsequent flow.

On "Shockwave," you can really hear how Rivers's multi-instrumentalism guides the band's improvising practice. Rivers starts alone at the piano; Barker enters with small hand cymbals around 2:00, and then Holland comes in with a quasi-vamp at 2:18, giving the piece a real skeleton. The trio accelerates around 4:30, setting the stage for Daley's entrance, and the band explores this quartet formation for a bit. At 6:10, Rivers drops out, changing the texture drastically and leaving Daley to duet with Holland, as Barker offers subtle accents. Even if you haven't heard Waves before, if you're a Sam Rivers aficionado, you probably know what's about to happen: The leader is going to roar in on a different ax. The pause is utilitarian—Rivers needs a moment to switch—but it's also musical; even the pause inherent in the instrument swap becomes compositional, an interlude before the next chapter. Sure enough, Rivers enters on tenor at around 7:10 (he does play an ascending pattern, but to me, it sounds more like a favorite lick rather than a specific prewritten theme), and pretty soon, the band is sprinting along in a happy frenzy. The drama of bringing instruments in and out, of the band coalescing around Rivers, and filling in the space when he's absent, it's all part of way these groups operated. They were not just improvising; they were composing sets from scratch.

Each of the other pieces on Waves has its own clearly demarcated sound space. "Torch" picks up where "Shockwave" leaves off, tempo-wise, but the shift to flute changes the texture completely. "Pulse" slows things down to an abstracted-backbeat grind, with Rivers getting funky on soprano. "Flux" veers into a kind of chamber improv, built around dabs of subtle color from the leader's piano and Holland's singing arco work. And the tenor feature "Surge" flashes back to the high-energy grit of the second half of "Shockwave." The pieces all work together as a suite: 45 minutes of free playing with a purpose.

Even late in his life, as he was busy serving his exacting compositional muse at the helm of the Rivbea Orchestra, Rivers was still practicing this kind of self-regimented free improv in a working-band setting. One album I'd recommend highly is Celebration, from 2004, which features Rivers's trusty Orlando-based working trio with fellow multi-instrumentalists Doug Mathews and Anthony Cole. Even more so than the ’70s bands, this group committed itself to discipline within spontaneity, creating diverse, expertly paced suites in real time. Celebration is probably the best document of the band's shape-shifting dynamism, of the way it could sound like a traditional free-jazz trio one minute (with Rivers on sax, Mathews on bass and Cole on drums) and then a chamber ensemble the next (with Mathews switching to bass-clarinet and Cole to tenor).

To me, this drive for coherence and variety, even in an inherently experimental idiom, ties into Rivers's overall good-naturedness. There's little of the imposing, stone-faced, even audience-defying free-jazz warrior in him. Even when he was playing free, Rivers was playing for the people, and thus he cared about pacing, about the way one piece flowed into the next, about timely endings and transitions, about variety. And he forged his small-group discipline around these ideals. His collaborators internalized them, until they were able to create not just sound, but real music from scratch, and not just discrete episodes, but coherent strings of episodes, lasting the length of a club set. In a sense you could say that Rivers's small-group work tamed free jazz, made it digestible, but the man was such a galvanizing, tempestuous player that staleness was out of the question. As a small-group bandleader, his achievement was to harness "energy music," give it form, spontaneous arrangement—to give even the non-connoisseur a way in. He wanted to improvise, but he cared if you were listening. Even at his most abstract, Sam Rivers wanted to connect.

Goodbye, Sam Rivers

2011-12-28T16:17:00.018-05:00

Much like Paul Motian, Sam Rivers seemed immortal. We can never take the greats for granted.

Nate Chinen penned a thorough, satisfying obit, and Ted Panken has posted some archival material that I can't wait to dig into. And here's a wide-ranging Spotify playlist from Phil Freeman. Some quick thoughts:

1) I feel that The Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers Sessions belongs in every jazz collection. The set is out of print, but three of the four LPs it contains (Fuchsia Swing Song, Contours and Dimensions & Extensions—each stunning in its own way) are currently available as stand-alones. It's a shame that the other Rivers Blue Note, A New Conception—a heartfelt, subtly adventurous set of standards featuring the underdocumented drum genius Steve Ellington, who's also on Dimensions, as well as Rivers's old Boston pal Hal Galper—is in limbo.

2) Rivers was a true multi-instrumentalist. Typically, when a musician, even a great one, doubles, triples, quadruples, etc. on a variety of instruments, I have a clear favorite, and all the others seem like consolation prizes (e.g., I enjoy Wayne Shorter's soprano playing, but I don't love it the way I do his tenor work). I didn't really feel this way with Rivers. The way he switched at will between tenor, soprano, flute and piano was his sound; he dignified a practice that sometimes seems scatterbrained.

3) For someone whose music was often very intense and/or abstract, Rivers always seemed like such a gracious, unbitter man. I fondly recall his enthusiastic, unfailingly patient interview demeanor during WKCR's glorious, weeklong Sam Rivers Festival a few years back. (I'm wishing I could re-live the performance that concluded the fest: a one-time-only reunion of Rivers's ’70s trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul.)

4) Three other Rivers records I love are Vista (2004), a beautifully recorded free trio with Adam Rudolph on hand percussion and Harris Eisenstadt on drum kit; Contrasts (1979), a probing, diverse quartet with an incredible band: George Lewis, Dave Holland, Thurman Barker; and Tony Williams's Life Time (1964), which contains some of the fiercest examples of Williams and Rivers's truly remarkable intergenerational mindmeld, also demonstrated on Fuchsia Swing Song.

Another pair of fascinating anomalies that I need to make some good time for: Tangens (1997), an intimate duo with Alexander von Schlippenbach, excerpted at the top of this post; Steven Bernstein's Diaspora Blues (2002), a set of Jewish themes featuring Rivers and his intrepid late-career triomates, Doug Mathews and Anthony Cole, both of whom also gave multi-instrumentalism a good name. (I remember hearing the Rivers/Mathews/Cole trio at the 2006 Vision Festival and coming away seriously impressed by their versatility and tight-knit dynamic.) I love the up-for-anything openness that Rivers displayed re: these sorts of guest appearances (e.g., Jason Moran's Black Stars, David Manson's Fluid Motion, plus two records with Ben Street and Kresten Osgood) and collaborations (1998's Configuration, with four European players).

5) I'm looking forward to reinvestigating Rivers's large-ensemble works. I must admit I never warmed to the Rivbea Orchestra, but spinning 1999's Inspiration on Spotify as I type, I'm charmed by its near-manic pep. Same goes for Crystals, from ’74.

Thank you for your music, sir, and farewell.

Immolation: a b(r)and I can trust

2011-12-22T11:48:00.015-05:00

Over the past three days, I've run down my favorite new releases of 2011. I've come up with a pretty exhaustive catalog, but it's still incomplete—reason being that I haven't taken into account music that isn't new, but that's new to me.

While I'm at the office, I'm often listening in work mode, i.e., doing background research for a piece or simply rummaging through the mail (or e-mail), sampling the many records I receive each week. But when I'm at home or commuting, I'm usually listening for pure pleasure, and a fair amount of the time, that means schooling myself on older music.

In 2011, especially the latter part of the year, "older music" almost invariably meant death metal, typically by veteran bands who have been around more or less since the genre's late-’80s inception, or at least its early-’90s heyday. I've had a blast reacquainting myself with Obituary, a band I loved in high school but hadn't paid much mind to since. Incantation is another band that's magnetized me this year. I started delving into their catalog after falling under the spell of Disma (see No. 8 here), whose frontman, Craig Pillard, made his name in Incantation in the early-to-mid ’90s. I can't recommend their second full-length, 1994's Mortal Throne of Nazarene, highly enough. It's one of the most enveloping, dread-filled metal releases I know, with beautifully ornate riffage hidden under a layer of pure seething chaos—a true classic. (Check out "Emaciated Holy Figure" for a taste.) But the band that's held my attention longest, and most unwaveringly, is definitely Immolation.

I didn't know much about these guys before 2011. I knew they were from New York (Yonkers, to be exact) and that they'd been around forever (since 1986 or 1988, depending on which source you trust), but I'd always taken them for a capable yet second-rate death-metal band. For a long time, my fanaticism re: Morbid Angel, specifically my fixation on their fascinating idiosyncrasies, blinded me to a lot of what was going on in the trenches, i.e., those bands who were executing death metal in less blatantly progressive or convention-flouting ways. Now, for whatever reason, I'm more attracted by these types of bands, the ones who dig in, mark their territory and just produce and produce and produce. As I discussed in my tribute to Obituary, I'm realizing that evolution isn't always what I want out of music, or out of art in general; sometimes I just want a brand I can trust, and Immolation is exactly that.

After flipping (way late) for the band's 2010 LP, Majesty and Decay, I began a backward chronological trip through their discography. Over the past few weeks, amid various sidetrackings and mini tangents, I've worked my way (so far) through the five prior Immolation full-lengths (from 2007's Shadows in the Light through 1999's Failures for Gods). I've noted subtle differences along the way (the departure of drummer Alex Hernandez, and his replacement by current kit man Steve Shalaty, after 2002's Unholy Cult, brought about a significant shift), but overall, I've been awed by this band's consistent greatness, the way they've established clear parameters for their art—the linchpin elements being (1) Ross Dolan's sub-(or super-?)human growl, (2) chief songwriter Bob Vigna's tirelessly inventive guitar concept, which places equal weight on gnarled, chunky riffs as it does on spidery, floating texture, with constant sudden flashes of pure, out-of-the-blue derangement and (3) a staunchly diverse approach to tempo and rhythmic feel, wherein power-drill blast beats alternate with perversely lurching asymmetrical grooves—and reveled in that tightly defined creative space over so many years. You'll often hear people praise, say, Slayer for their brute single-mindedness, their refusal to stray from what works for them—I remember reading a variation of this in D.X. Ferris's 33 1/3 book on Reign in Blood—but even given my spotty knowledge of Slayer's stranger, more unrepresentative works (1998's Diabolus in Musica, e.g.), I can say that no other metal catalog I could name rivals Immolation's for this quality of head-down, "don't mess with the formula but somehow manage to avoid stagnation" persistence. This band is simply a machine.

Maybe you could say the same for an outfit like Motörhead, but what I'm guessing you couldn't say for Lemmy & Co. is that their current work is arguably their best. I'd argue that Immolation was at their most intense on Unholy Cult; the precision and power of that record is awe-inspiring, bordering on psychotic, owing plenty to the performances but also to a production job that's among the finest I've ever heard in death metal. Unholy Cult's immediate predecessor, 2000's Close to a World Below, is nearly as deadly. After the arrival of Shalaty, a less pummeling, virtuosic drummer than Hernandez—who deserves to be inducted into the Death Metal Hall of Fame (when/if it's built, it's gotta be in Tampa, FL) for his performances on Unholy Cult and Close to a World Below—the band struggled a bit to maintain quite the same intensity level (cases in point: Shadows in the Light and 2005's Harnessing Ruin, both fine records—especially the latter, which contains some of Vigna's most brilliantly demented inventions—but not quite as juggernaut-ish as the Hernandez discs).

Something clicked into place on Majesty and Decay, though. The production job isn't stellar—to me, the drums sound particularly weak, lacking any real bottom or punch—but the songwriting took a quantum leap. This record is absolutely crammed with memorable riffs, compositions that loop incessantly in your brain. At this stage, Immolation's writing is as catchy as it is admirably unrelenting; if I had to choose a favorite album of theirs (and bear in mind, I haven't spent good time with the first two, 1991's Dawn of Possession and 1996's Here in After), I'd have to choose Majesty. Before this record, it would've been hard to imagine Immolation releasing a bona fide single, complete with video, but they did just that this past July ("A Glorious Epoch" is the track in question), and it makes perfect sense. And with the help of that "No one can quite figure out exactly why they're doing it, but what's the use in complaining when the results are this awesome?" car company/metal patron Scion, Dolan, Vigna & Co. have continued to roll forward, recently issuing Providence, a free-on-the-internet EP of brand new material that's as strong as what you hear on Majesty.

Two-plus decades into its existence, Immolation is still adding meaningfully to its rock-solid legacy, and not by tweaking the formula, but, in a way, by becoming more and more itself, drawing ever nearer to its most essential statement yet—without rendering its back catalog obsolete. Each version of Immolation we've heard, over so many albums, has represented its own kind of state-of-the-art; despite the little inconsistencies, there's not really a true transitional album among them. Each one is confident, complete. The highest compliment I could pay each of these records is that it's fit to stand beside all the other ones; it's hard to name an apex, but it's downright impossible to name a nadir. There simply isn't one, and that's why Immolation means so much to me. As much as I've loved getting to know all the new sounds of 2011, I'm not sure another listening experience has meant more to me this year than waking up to this sturdiest, most trustworthy of extreme-metal brands.

/////

Here's half a dozen tracks to get you started. (I'm really starting to loathe the sound quality of YouTube streams, so if you like what you hear, go buy the records in question.)

"A Glorious Epoch" from Majesty and Decay (2010)

"The Rapture of Ghosts" from Majesty and Decay

"Our Savior Sleeps" from Harnessing Ruin (2005)

"Unholy Cult" from Unholy Cult (2002)

"Unpardonable Sin" from Close to a World Below (2000)

"Your Angel Died" from Failures for Gods (1999)

Best of 2011, part III: Honorable mentions

2011-12-21T09:05:00.014-05:00

Today I'll run down some honorable-mention releases, 2011 titles I enjoyed but didn't end up including on either my jazz or all-genres-in-play lists.

/////

Protest the Hero Scurrilous (Vagrant)

Lindsey Buckingham Seeds We Sow (Buckingham)

Aside from the records that did make my TONY top 10, these are the two that came closest to cracking the list. In the end, I just didn't feel that I could recommend either in full, but the highlights on each are magical.

I stumbled across Protest the Hero a few years ago while writing event listings for TONY. I'd heard a few bands fusing prog, metal and emo before, but never with such flair, talent and unabashed bombast. There are some dud tracks on this new one, but wow, the good stuff on here just floors me. Imagine a super-techy, less psychedelic, more overtly metallic Mars Volta circa De-Loused in the Comatorium and you're getting close. The frontman, Rody Walker, is unspeakably good: incredible tone and control combined with pure sardonic attitude. It baffles me a bit that you don't hear more about these guys on the indie-metal buzzfeed, but I think they might be too Warped Tour–ish to win over that crowd. Ignore the subgenre barriers; Protest the Hero is an outstanding band. This video is a little silly, but the over-the-top-ness fits the PTH aesthetic just fine:

Along with my wife, I awakened to Fleetwood Mac in a major way in 2011. The 1975 self-titled album, Rumours and Tusk have been on constant rotation this year (especially the breathtaking "Crystal", which I've started to think of as proto–Will Oldham). I loved Buckingham's fierce live show, and Seeds We Sow, the solo record he supported at that gig, was pretty damn respectable. In the end, there were a few too many weak tracks, but as with PTH, the best ones hit me hard. "Stars Are Crazy" is borderline holy:

And I love the punky chorus on "That's the Way Love Goes":

*****

New York Dolls Dancing Backward in High Heels (429)

Paul Simon So Beautiful or So What (Hear Music)

Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers Teenage and Torture (Knitting Factory)

Gillian Welch The Harrow & the Harvest (Acony)

I guess you could lump these together loosely as singer-songwriter records. Again, I couldn't stand behind the full meals, but certain courses were delicious and memorable. I love the surprisingly wistful mugging of the Dolls track, the low-key aging-hipster vibe of the Simon (the "You've got to fill out a form first / And then you wait in the line" bit of which always summons fond memories of the waiting-room scene in Beetlejuice), the world-weary sneer of the Shilpa and the trouble-in-mind creep of the Gillian. Take a listen:

*****

40 Watt Sun The Inside Room (Cyclone Empire)

Raspberry Bulbs Nature Tries Again (Hospital Productions)

Cannabis Corpse Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (Tankcrimes)

Liturgy Aesthethica (Thrill Jockey)

Exhumed All Guts, No Glory (Relapse)

Five very good metal records. Next year, I may start compiling a metal-only list, but for now, this (along with the three selections on my overall top 10: Anthrax, Deceased and Disma) will have to do. These records deliver top notch takes on, respectively, majestically depressive doom; crusty blackened punk, seething with bad vibes; super-tight, organic (i.e., beautifully recorded and not over–Pro Tools–ed to shit), uncommonly hard-rocking death metal; blissfully enveloping (and reliably argument-starting!) black metal; and riff-choked, cartoonishly gore-fixated thrash-grind. (NOTE: The Liturgy track I chose isn't really representative of the record as a whole, but no matter: It's my favorite.)

Gateways to Inhalation by Cannabis Corpse

Death Knell by Exhumed

*****

Multitudes Twelve Branches (Palanquin)

Freddie T and the People People In (self-released, I believe)

Yukon Yukon (New Firmament)

Three records to which I have either a personal or sentimental connection.

I'm proud to call the good folks of Multitudes and Yukon friends. The former do super-raw and consistently inspired punk fusion (read more here); the latter, state-of-the-art, prog-minded (but not retro in the slightest) art rock, featuring dazzling virtuosity employed in the service of ear-bending yet improbably hooky composition. That's a mouthful, but please, listen.

I don't know Freddie T (a.k.a. Fred Erskine, formerly of Hoover, the Crownhate Ruin, June of 44 and Just a Fire) personally, but I feel like I do; I've loved his music for over half my life. More on People In here. (This one may technically be a 2010 release, but I didn't hear it till ’11.)

Cock by Multitudes

Cut the Lines by Yukon

enemies by freddie t and the people

*****

Death The Sound of Perseverance; Human; Individual Thought Patterns (Relapse)

Extremely classy reissue campaign focused on a band that I've come to realize was one of the very best, most consistently rewarding metal has ever known. I loved the liner-notes essays included with each of these, penned by collaborators of Death leader Chuck Schuldiner: Shannon Hamm on TSOP, Paul Masvidal (also of Cynic) on Human and the hilarious Gene Hoglan on ITP. Clear, punishing sound too. The demos and other bonus tracks don't do much for me, but the full live set bundled with ITP is a real keeper.

Scavenger Of Human Sorrow by Death

Ozzy Osborne Blizzard of Ozz; Diary of a Madman (Sony)

Another essential reissue program. I really didn't know these records at all (aside from "Crazy Train" and maybe another single or two) before I heard the new editions, and they definitely overhauled my perception of Ozzy. I had no idea that he was such a force outside of Sabbath; his stuff from the ’90s and beyond never did much for me, but god, these LPs are special. So much range and—this is what got me—pop know-how; I've heard Ozzy discuss the Beatles in interviews, and you really hear that influence during this period. Amazing bonus video footage included with these as well.

(I should also throw a quick mention at the Paul McCartney reissues. Haven't spend enough good time with ’em yet, but I'm psyched to investigate further.)

*****

Lou Reed and Metallica Lulu (Warner Bros.)

Morbid Angel Illud Divinum Insanus (Season of Mist)

Ah, the year's red-headed musical stepchildren, two sure-fire scorn magnets. I defended both Lulu and Illud on this blog, and I stand by those statements. I definitely gleaned decent enjoyment (and fruitful puzzlement) from both records. All the same, their absence from my proper year-end list is telling. Are these albums out-and-out, never-shoulda-been-made pieces of crap? Definitely not; and even if they were, that kind of bandwagony hater-ism isn't something I can endorse. And yet, will I return to these albums consistently in the future? I'd have trouble answering a firm "Yes" to that.

Again, though, I'm happy these records are in the world. Their respective makers needed to make them, and beyond that, they have no obligation to us. All this business about legacy-sullying, it really doesn't mean very much. In the case of Lulu, everyone who was going to write off Metallica on grounds of poor taste most likely did so around the time of Metallica, if not Load, Re-Load or St. Anger. (Can't really comment on Lulu's place in the Reed canon, as I'm no expert.) And as I argued in the piece linked above, Morbid Angel may be the greatest death-metal band of all time, but their pre-Illud discography is not without its frustrating inconsistencies.

So enough with the dogpiling already (Hitler parodies aside!); let's let these records lie. I, for one, will still flaunt my Metallica and Morbid fandom without an asterisk.

Best of 2011, part II: All genres, director's cut

2011-12-20T13:00:00.003-05:00

Having annotated and expanded upon my year-end jazz list yesterday, I'd like to do the same for the all-genres-in-play top 10 I contributed to Time Out New York. The original list, with a brief blurb for each record I chose, is here. (I plan to discuss runners-up, singles, etc. in a separate post.)

A quick note re: streaming audio: I refuse to embed any player that's going to insert an ad before the track (or one that's going to provide substandard sound), so you're on your own for some of this stuff. I encourage you to search, sample and buy!

/////

1. Frank Ocean, Nostalgia, Ultra (self-released)

I might have slept on this record had it not been for my friend and former colleague Corban Goble, who spied it early on and made sure I gave it a fair shake. Like many, I was first seduced by "Novacane," a seductive jam if there ever was one; I loved its murk and throb, its combination of wit ("I took a seat on the ice-cold lawn / She handed me an ice-blue bong") and vulgarity ("stripper booty and a rack like, 'Wow'"), just the way it built and built and sucked you into its heavy-lidded vortex. (The entrance of that bloblike bass squelch at 1:12 still kills me.) At first, the rest of the record didn't click with me; as is often the case when I grow super-attached to a perfect single, I tend to hold the full album up to that standard, not just of quality, but of mood. I guess I was looking for 40 minutes of "Novacane."

I soon woke up, though, and realized that there was room for more than sordid, hazy, late-night/early-morning rumination in the Frank Ocean aesthetic. The whole album bloomed for me, and I know that this would be The One for This Year (there always is one, it seems). "Songs for Women," with its funky lope and aw-shucks appeal; "Swim Good," that steely, heartsick march to sea; "There Will Be Tears," a portrait of childhood grief intruding on young-adult consciousness; "American Wedding," an offhandedly brilliant riff on "Hotel California"; "Strawberry Swing," which, as solid as the Coldplay source material is, reaches a higher emotional pitch; the yearning neosoul slow jam "We All Try." I wouldn't hesitate to call this record a masterpiece. Listening back to it now, I know that it's etched itself on my heart. I believe this guy. He surprises and challenges me. Moreover, he's an extraordinary singer, reaching deep down for those wrenching peaks (the high note at 2:17 in "We All Try," the little flourish on the word "smile" at 2:08 in "Novacane").

I wasn't too big a fan of Watch the Throne, but Ocean's hook on "No Church in the Wild" slew me; this album is like that cameo writ large. So much feeling, atmosphere, poetry. I just couldn't bring myself to care much about the back story (Ocean's squabble with Def Jam), and truthfully, I didn't love Ocean's live show the way I would've liked (though damn, that new material sounds deep). In the end, the record stood alone: For me, Nostalgia, Ultra was without question the album of year.

2. Anthrax, Worship Music (Megaforce)

I had no particular expectations for this one, only mild curiosity. Anthrax was an MTV staple during my Headbanger's Ball–crazed youth, but I never cared much for them. "Got the Time," say, exuded a goofiness that turned me off; at the time, I wanted my metal stone-faced and scary. But what a joy to experience this band with fresh ears, and to hear them sounding so fired up on this comeback effort. I've since gone back and checked out their earlier material, and to me, Worship Music is stronger. What I love about it is the way the band transcends thrash; yes, that element is there, but the songs are guiding the way. When the band needs to dip into a power-metal bag, it does; same goes for grunge, or blast-beat-driven technicality. I'm just thrilled by how thoroughly this record rocks, how catchy the choruses are, how you can envision an entire arena pumping their fists in unison when you listen. (That didn't quite play out at September's Big 4 show, since the band went on at the ungodly hour of 4pm, but it was still pretty cool to see Anthrax at Yankee Stadium.)

For the most part, I'm on board with the recent art-school-ification of metal; plenty of good has come out of it. But Worship Music helps you remember that at heart, metal is a sweaty, for-the-people music—like turbocharged pop. Clarity and memorability and ROCKING-ness are not passé; those aspects of ’80s metal are still as powerful now as they were, when they're delivered with this much conviction and exuberance. There is so much youth in this record; it's exactly what a comeback album should be. And kudos to Joey Belladonna for an absolutely stellar vocal performance. He sells the hell out of this material. I think that in my youth, before I had caught the Dio bug, I wasn't prepared to appreciate his wailing, dramatic gifts. Now they make perfect sense. Can't wait for the next one from this rejuvenated powerhouse.

3. Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo, Songs of Mirth and Melancholy (Marsalis Music)

See yesterday's jazz round-up.

4. Drake, Take Care (Cash Money/Universal)

I wasn't really ready for a new Drake album. I loved his last one, Thank Me Later, which placed at No. 2 on my 2010 best-of list. But after having been bombarded by his singles for so long, I was ready for a break; 2012 would've been okay with me. But then I heard that album 2 was coming right up, and I knew I'd have to give it a chance. The singles ("Headlines," "Marvin's Room") didn't move me when I heard them in isolation; it seemed to me like he was just going back to feed at the same trough, trying to duplicate the success of Thank Me Later. Then the record came out, and the early reactions were ecstatic. I didn't really get curious till I heard from Corban, who, awesomely, interviewed the man himself and reported that Take Care was his shoo-in album of the year. Time to listen.

All I can say is, "Whoa." It became clear after a first listen that whatever I didn't like about the album (a few corny lines here and there, an inflated sense of self-importance, that annoying faux–voice crack on the "…getting back to my ways" line on "Underground Kings," which I still can't stand), this thing was a real beast. Or, really, feast. So much to savor, so many shrewd guest appearances. Re: the latter, the Weeknd intro on "Crew Love" feels like a laser-beam of tortured (torturous?) emotion (and this from someone who isn't yet a Weekend true believer); and when I heard the Andre 3000 verse in "The Real Her" for the first time, I was straight-up shocked by its charm and effectiveness. A typically badass Rick Ross on "Lord Knows," whoever that is free-associating in a weird robot voice at the beginning of "Buried Alive Interlude" (I'm not sure it's Kendrick Lamar, who guest-raps on the track). And what to say about the fact that that's Stevie effing Wonder playing harmonica on "Doing It Wrong," elevating an already masterful song to an all-time-great level? Drake is helping me to understand something that I'm sure hip-hop devotees have known for years, even decades: that a great album in the genre is like an expertly curated revue, with multiple voices cycling in and out and everyone playing their own niche role.

As I listened repeatedly, the singles fell perfectly into place among the other tracks. Heard in context, "Headlines" and "Marvin's Room," even "Make Me Proud," which not only sounded unimpressive but downright bad to me when I heard it prior to the full record, all became new favorites. (Same goes for the Rihanna-abetted title track, wooden on a first listen but seductive and magical now.) The record is long, but only one song ("Cameras") really seems cuttable to me. I love that Drake is as committed as he is to the LP format, to making full-length sonic movies. The individual highlights of Thank Me Later might top those on Take Care, but in terms of an epic experience, there's no competition: Take Care is a world unto itself, a true journey, well worth taking in full—and repeatedly.

5. Deceased, Surreal Overdose (Patac)

Speaking of epic. Like Anthrax, another band I'd been dimly aware of since teenhood. I'd always taken Deceased for a stalwart but ultimately second-rate death-metal outfit. This album set me right in a major way. In its own way, it's as joyous and triumphant, as diverse and anthemic and rousing as Worship Music.

What drew me into Surreal Overdose is the man at the heart of Deceased: One King Fowley, who handles both drums and vocals in the studio (just vocals live). I strongly urge you to check out Fowley's first-person history of the band at the Deceased site. You'll get a sense there of the sheer delight this man takes in metal; as I discussed in a recent Time Out NY preview, he comes off as a truly kind, friendly guy (an impression I confirmed when I met him in person at the Brooklyn Deceased show back in October), and for all the darkness of the music, you can hear that good-natured-ness in Deceased.

Fowley treats his songs like mini pageants of horror. They're constructed around these gorgeous, theatrical riffs that make you feel like you're in the middle of some kind of thrilling gothic play. And Fowley plays the ghastly ringmaster so well, somehow conveying wonderful narrative flourishes even while growling vomitously. I know very little about the Grand Guignol, but the impression I have of it is similar to the feeling I get from Deceased: It's pure, gory, agonizing horror treated as stylized entertainment. You suspend your disbelief to get into songs like "Cloned (Day of the Robot)" and you actually feel moved by Fowley's borderline-cartoonish narratives.

There's something staunchly adolescent about his viewpoint (killer robot clones), but also something deadly serious: In "Kindred Assembly," "In the Laboratory of Joyous Gloom" and "Dying in Analog," Fowley is discussing topics like senility, depression and death in a very real and disturbing way. On Surreal Overdose, he's talking about emotional horror, not just the kind that involves scary monsters. The music perfectly mirrors these psychodramas; it has a real scope and sweep to it. Surreal Overdose isn't a death metal album at all; there's none of that stone-facedness to it. It's vivid, alive, varied, truly gripping. Even listening back to it now, I'm shocked by its conviction, its intensity and its sheer fun. Surreal Overdose is one of the most honest and ambitious (not to mention entertaining) works of art, musically or otherwise, that I encountered in 2011. Deceased sounds nothing like Anthrax but both take their jobs seriously: They're here to provide (and achieve) escape, pure and simple, not to wallow in inscrutable experimentalism. Long live crowd-pleasing, unabashedly theatrical metal, whatever the scale.

In the Laboratory of Joyous Gloom by Patac Records

6. Gerald Cleaver’s Uncle June, Be It as I See It (Fresh Sound New Talent)

See yesterday's jazz round-up.

7. The Strokes, Angles (RCA)

Ripping on the Strokes has became a sport, and for those who feel like playing, the band makes it pretty easy. They're still given to whining and in-fighting in interviews, in that way that always invites those age-old "Oh, great, the famous rock & rollers are complaining again" sentiments. And there these finger-wagging notions floating around about how the Strokes should have been the ones playing a farewell show this year, not LCD Soundsystem (a band I simply cannot get into). To a degree, I can understand all this: There's something about the Strokes that can feel wimpy, spoiled, tedious.

But the thing is, they are still unbelievably good at what they do, which is creating these three-minute wonders—full of hidden surprises and endlessly scrutinizable, yet completely streamlined. It's like prog ambition mixed with garage-rock cool. In this vein, "Under Cover of Darkness" is one of the most emblematic, and best, songs the band has ever written. Yes, there are bad songs on Angles, a fact I perhaps glossed over in my Time Out review of the record. At this point, I find the languid "You're So Right" nearly unlistenable, and while I respect the curveball nature of it, the drum-less interlude track "Call Me Back" is a real buzzkill, given where it falls in the album.

Just about every other song on Angles, though, I either like very much ("Macchu Picchu," "Metabolism") or straight-up love ("Under Cover of Darkness," "Two Kinds of Happiness," the breakdown of which is like a fireball of rock, "Taken for a Fool," another song that belongs on the Strokes short list, the ridiculously fun and groovy "Gratisfaction" and "Life Is Simple in the Moonlight," one of the best chilled-out songs the band has ever issued, not to mention the source of my favorite guitar solo of 2011). In this material, the band isn't telling us much (anything?) we don't already know about them, but they are reaffirming that they're still around, and however much they claim to not enjoy being a band, their output is still the gold standard for stripped-down, attitude-heavy, pop-friendly NYC rock. I love these guys, and while Angles isn't their best, it's not even remotely a disappointment.

8. Disma, Towards the Megalith (Profound Lore)

Ah, Disma. This isn't the Anthrax/Deceased crowd-pleasing/entertaining sort of metal at all. Nor is it the introspective, inscrutable art-metal thing either. What this is, is the brutal thing, the kind of metal that satisfies your desire to be flattened by a cold, unfeeling sonic steamroller. Towards the Megalith is hands-down the heaviest album I heard all year, the sickest, the grossest. The whole thing just drips with slime and rotting vegetation. The music is pure attack, pure lumbering menace, even when the tempos are fast. And dear God, those vocals. Craig Pillard is perhaps the best low death-metal growler I've ever heard. He very literally sounds like a monster, and not a comical one. (A great side effect of Megalith has been that it's sent me back to Pillard's old band, Incantation, which has since become a serious obsession in its own right.) As conventional as it is, this music is actually scary.

The secret weapon here might actually be the production. Towards the Megalith sounds full and loud and clear. The drums actually sound real. For all the putrid-ness of the music, there's a big, round pleansantness to the way it's rendered on tape. You really sink into this album. There have been weeks this year where I've wanted to listen to nothing else. It invites you even as it repulses you, freaks you out. Re-spinning it now, I'm again totally sucked in by its unholy girth and crunch. You feel the weight of the ages in this; it's primordial and massive and it swings like a motherfucker. In terms of death metal at large, Megalith is not really anything new, but it does feel like something perfected, a revisitation of an old sound, with all fat stripped away and with all intensity heightened. It's like a new model of an old car: The basic design is the same, but all the little quibbles you might've had with the old model don't apply here. In terms of what it's trying to achieve—a sensation of suffocating heaviness and unrelenting brutality—Towards the Megalith is essentially a perfect album.

9. New Zion Trio, Fight Against Babylon (Veal)

See yesterday's jazz round-up.

10. Ben Allison, Action-Refraction (Palmetto)

And once again, see yesterday's jazz round-up.

Best of 2011, part I: Jazz

2011-12-19T13:15:00.001-05:00

Since I didn't annotate the 2011 top 10 I submitted to the Jazz Journalists Association (and Francis Davis's annual Jazz Critics Poll), I thought I'd provide some commentary here. For each entry, I've either linked to a purchase page or embedded a streaming player that allows you to click through and buy MP3s. Thank you to the publicists and musicians who have submitted music to me this year; I've done my best to keep tabs on it all, and as usual, I've had a blast.

1.Branford Marsalis/Joey Calderazzo Songs of Mirth and Melancholy (Marsalis Music)

As you can see from my 2011 jazz halftime report, published back in June, this one grabbed me early on. Now that the year is winding down, I'm happy to report that it didn't let go. There's no embeddable stream of this record, but I implore you to sample it here, especially the tracks "Endymion," "Face on the Barroom Floor" and "La Valse Kendall." When mentioning my interest in this album to friends, I've received a few raised eyebrows, which pains me. As I discuss in a Time Out NY preview of Marsalis January 9, 2012 "A Duo of Duos" gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center (during which he'll perform with both Calderazzo and Harry Connick, Jr., the latter of whom won't be singing), Marsalis's celebrity still overshadows his art. It's a trite point at this stage, but the prejudices persist: He's the saxophone player your mom likes.

And I'm not trying to say that moms wouldn't love Songs of Mirth and Melancholy. But what I am trying to say is that this is an extremely deep record. There's so much grace and poetry to this session. I don't know enough about the connections between jazz and chamber music (or chamber music itself) to know how unprecedented Songs is, but I can't think of another jazz recording I've heard that mixes raw beauty and virtuosic refinement the way this album does. I like Marsalis's quartet with Calderazzo just fine, but in the end, it is an updating of a known quantity (post-Coltrane small-group jazz); this, on the other hand, feels like new terrain to me, or at least extremely underexplored terrain. Again, if you're a Branford skeptic, please spend some time with this album and let me know what you think. I can't imagine you won't be at least a little surprised and impressed with what you hear.

Three quick notes:

A) Strangely, the opening track on here, "One Way," a whimsical, rompy, bluesy type piece, does very little for me; if it weren't for this quibble, Songs might have beat out Anthrax for the No. 2 spot on my TONY all-genres-in-play top 10 list.

B) Purchasing this record digitally from Amazon is a good idea, because you get a meaty 16-plus-minute bonus track, "Eternal."

C) The Marsalis Music YouTube channel is streaming a series of making-of vids.

2. Gerald Cleaver's Uncle June Be It as I See It (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Again, I kept coming back to this record. There's a tenderness and a lushness to Clever's writing that I just adore.—at times, the colors and emotions remind me of Andrew Hill's big-band classic, A Beautiful Day. I've always enjoyed Cleaver's drumming, but after spending time with this record, I'm most excited by him as a bandleader. (As I witnessed a little over a week ago, there's more where this came from!) He's writing rich, painterly music and putting it before improvisational geniuses like Craig Taborn. Don't miss this one. Here's one of my favorite tracks:

Fence & Post: Statues / UmbRa by Gerald Cleaver - Uncle June

I should note here that as with the Marsalis disc, the opening track of Be It as I See It, the noisy, backbeat-driven stomp "To Love," doesn't grab me. I like the contrast between this and the more delicate material that makes up the bulk of the session, but I found myself wanting to skip it on repeated listens (and believe me, there were many).

3. New Zion Trio Fight Against Babylon (Veal)

This one came out of nowhere and knocked me on my ass. The idea—a jazz/reggae hybrid—did not entice, and I'd never quite clicked with the work of bandleader Jamie Saft before. I never imagined that this record could be so patient or mysterious. As I indicated in my TONY top 10, there's a methodical languidness here that could slow your metabolism. Listening to this album, and I recommend playing it in its entirety while driving or cooking or engaging in some other focused activity, is like going swimming in a murky ocean filled with jellyfish, both gorgeously iridescent and subtly menacing. It's such a trip to hear jazz bass pro Larry Grenadier get all trancey on the riffs, and drummer Craig Santiago blows me away with his taste and precision. As for Saft, all I can say is that this record is an absolute piano feast. He isn't playing jazz and he isn't playing reggae; this one is closer to classical music, but really he's just playing wide-open music, flowing in the moment. The track below isn't my favorite from the record, but it's the only one streaming on Bandcamp. Go to the Veal site to order MP3s or a CD.

Jamie Saft's New Zion Trio- Lost Dub 16 by Undead Jazzfest 2011 Sampler

4. Ben Allison Action-Refraction (Palmetto)

I've largely slept on Ben Allison's work in the past; even though this one is a covers record, I can still say that it's converted me into a bona fide fan. Before hearing this, I wasn't familiar with any of the songs (aside from a Monk piece) that Allison and his band interpret here (including works by Donny Hathaway, Samuel Barber and PJ Harvey), but that turned out to matter very little. The band really savors these melodies, delivers them on silver platters, tweaking them a bit but never engaging in any sort of pat "deconstruction" or irreverence.

If there's a twist here, it's in the fascinating make-up of the band, which includes Jason Lindner on both piano and sci-fi synths, the wonderfully fluid guitarist Steve Cardenas (and on two tracks the noise-courting daredevil Brandon Seabrook), the grittily passionate reedist Michael Blake (a player I'd heard of for years without really checking out) and the alternately sensitive and pummeling drummer Rudy Royston (whom I knew from JD Allen's fine trio). The players really draw you into these songs, especially the Hathaway ("Someday We'll All Be Free"), which is like this swelling vortex of melody. Covers records are always in danger of feeling gimmicky, superfluous or just plain boring. This one holds my attention straight through, though, and keeps me coming back. It's a motley assemblage of pieces turned into something cohesive by the magic of meticulous arrangement and smart curation. Plus, the textures (keyboards, guitars, etc.) feel contemporary without giving you that pesky sense of jazz musicians trying too hard to convey that they're down with rock. You can stream (and buy!) the record via this handy embed:

5. Honey Ear Trio Steampunk Serenade (Foxhaven)

Like the New Zion disc, this one hit me pretty much out of nowhere. I'd heard a bit of drummer Allison Miller's work, but saxist Erik Lawrence and bassist Rene Hart were new names to me. This is a really special saxophone trio, brimming with guts and tension, but also with a love for the songfulness of jazz. The level of ambition isn't the same, but part of me wants to compare this to something like Henry Threadgill's Air—a more accessible version, let's say. But there's a similar drive to create a true group sound, to make variety a priority, to mingle the harsh with the pretty. As with the Allison, there's a contemporary sheen to this one, expressed via Hart's electronic effects and Miller's scrap-metal-style percussion, but again, it feels honest and ungimmicky. Overall, this album is just a very strong statement of purpose; Honey Ear Trio clearly wants to be a proper band, not just a steadily gigging saxophone trio. They're taking in rock, reggae, maybe a little electronica, freebop, Aylerish catharsis, Paul Motian Trio openness and producing something diverse but not scattershot. As with the aforementioned JD Allen Trio, there's also a welcome drive to make this music work on record—not just to play, but to edit, to make each track feel like a concise song rather than a meandering jam. I'm excited to hear more from this band. Here's a track:

Matter Of Time by Honey Ear Trio

6. Jeremy Udden's Plainville If the Past Seems So Bright (Sunnyside)

There seems to be a movement brewing of pastoral, song- and melody-driven jazz. Some of the tracks on the Allison get at that vibe, and in a TONY preview on saxist Jeremy Udden's Americana-infused Plainville band, I also cited projects by bassists Eivind Opsvik and Chris Lightcap. (Another group in this vein that intrigues me is Bryan and the Aardvarks.) For me, If the Past Seems So Bright crystallized this whole trend; in its own unassuming way, it seemed like a definitive statement. Some of the rockier, brasher material on here (the very Neil Young–ish "Leland") didn't gel for me, but when this band is speaking in its own voice, such as on the stunning opening track "Sad Eyes," I find it absolutely mesmerizing. As on the Allison record, Plainville is singing songs without words, in which the improvisational accents humbly serve the melody. The dreamy, rootsy prayers on here can really cut into you; again, we're talking about ungimmicky fusion, where the material and not the stylistic conventions are calling the shots. Here's "Sad Eyes" (though I'm having a hard time not embedding "Thomas," which gets me every time):

Sad Eyes by Jeremy Udden's Plainville

7. Bill McHenry Ghosts of the Sun (Sunnyside)

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a tad disappointed by the fact that the first new Bill McHenry–led small-group album in four years (he has put out other records in the interim, including joint ventures with Ben Monder and John McNeil) was a collection of outtakes, pieces recorded during the same sessions that produced 2007's Roses. But after spending good time with this one, I realized that it would be pointless to resist its charms; Roses was such an enchanting record, and this is more of the same. The band is a dream: Monder, bassist Reid Anderson, and yes, the dearly departed Paul Motian. Crazily, the album came out one day before Motian's death. No one record could serve as a Motian epitaph, but there was a mystery and wonder about Ghosts that made it feel like a worthy final statement, a perfect summation of how he'd passed his strange, flickering, mirage-like torch to a younger generation. McHenry clearly got what Motian was about (and vice versa) just about as well as anybody, and this record's curious mixture of haunting beauty ("Ms. Polley") and insidious chaos ("William III") seemed as indicative of the drummer's aesthetic values as of the leader's. The track I haven't been able to get out of my head is "La Fuerza" (since I myself had to look this up, I might as well share that it means "power" or "might"):

La Fuerza by Bill McHenry

8. Craig Taborn Avenging Angel (ECM)

Speaking of mystery… This is most definitely a major statement from a complicated, hard-to-pin-down artist, and that's likely what you're seeing it pop up on so many top 10 lists. (Steve Smith, Nate Chinen, Ben Ratliff and Seth Colter Walls all included it in their all-genres-in-play round-ups, and it topped David Adler's jazz list) I spent a ton of time with this album, both in the immediate wake of my Heavy Metal Bebop interview with Taborn, and beyond. At times, Avenging Angel seemed so daunting—like you would've have to intimately know every significant piano statement of the last several hundred years, and a lot more than that, to truly grasp it—that it exhausted me. And admittedly, there is a ton here to digest, but there's also an almost sacred kind of beauty here—lonely and remote. I'll defer to my TONY preview from June, in which I likened one track ("This Voice Says So") to "stepping out of a spaceship onto an ice planet." You always feel like you're grasping for another metaphor here, because the music is so vast-seeming, almost inhumanly patient and genre-impervious. Virtuosic, sure, but that's almost beside the point; Avenging Angel seems to go beyond mere virtuosity into some kind of alien realm of higher intelligence. It's not a record you'll pull out every day, or even every year, but you can't deny that it's some kind of awesome benchmark. No stream for this one, but you can hear some tracks at the ECM site.

9. Wadada Leo Smith's Organic Heart's Reflections (Cuneiform)

Another mammoth statement, though more in sheer length than in daunting-ness. As I've learned over the past few years, Leo Smith is by far the most accessible of the AACM giants, and maybe the most sheerly pleasurable. I loved the 2008 Golden Quartet disc, Tabligh, but this might be my favorite Wadada album yet, a sprawling set of avant-leaning funk, with an emphasis on the funk. I have never heard drummer Pheeroan akLaff drop such fat, greasy beats as he does here; right from the start of this two-disc behemoth, he's sliding and swaggering. Smith's electric work in this vein will always be indebted to Miles, but the vibrancy and clarity of the textures he conjures in his large-ensemble work are absolutely his own. This record is just swimming in swirls of guitar, keyboard, brass; it's a blissed-out soup of color. And it's got a real flow to it; balancing the backbeat passages are these rubato ruminations, free-floating texture pieces that show off the chamber-style improv know-how of players like keyboardist Angelica Sanchez and bassist John Lindberg. This is definitely one of those "Play it for a friend who's wary of avant-garde jazz" records. There's a lot of adventure here, but little abrasiveness; Wadada has been on a real roll lately (abetted by the stalwart Cuneiform label), and what he seems to be aiming for is the kind of experimentalism where you can shed the facade of stone-faced imposing-ness and just get down to feeling, moving, emoting. Your samples are at Amazon.

10. TIN/BAG Bridges (MabnotesMusic)

Like New Zion and Honey Ear, another very pleasant 2011 jazz surprise. I had heard the two members of TIN/BAG before (trumpeter Kris Tiner in Empty Cage Quartet, and guitarist Mike Baggetta at the head of his own bands), and I may have even sampled a bit of this duo in the past. But it was instantly clear to me that this one was going to make a stronger impression than anything I'd heard previously. As with Honey Ear Trio, TIN/BAG is taking pains to speak in its own language, and the tongue they've honed is a very subtle and distinctive one. You've only got trumpet and guitar here, and there's very little effort made to fill up the empty spaces. This is intimate music, more cozy than lonely—much more modest in scope than, say, the Marsalis/Calderazzo. The two play together beautiful, with Tiner's pillowy lines dancing over Baggetta's plush, chiming notes. Their work is almost unfailingly beautiful, but it's not merely polite; there's a sense of real daring to the project—stripping all distractions away and making the most of what's left. (There are references to yoga in the liner notes, which makes perfect sense when you hear the record.) There are no drums here, of course, but in a way, you could view this band as a descendant of the Frisell/Motian/Lovano trio. There's a similar willingness to step out into the abyss, with only the warm, beating heart of song to guide you. The quietude of Bridges can really pull you in if you let it. Hear for yourself:

Maslow by TIN/BAG

/////

In the interest of concision, and so as not to dilute the list of truly standout releases above, I'll name just four honorable mentions:

Jerome Sabbagh with Ben Monder and Daniel Humair I Will Follow You (Bee Jazz)

Some very focused and engaging freeform trioism. Some prior thoughts in the 2011 halftime report. (Interestingly, Paul Motian subbed for Humair at the NYC release party for this album in April, and subsequently hired Sabbagh and Monder for a week at the Vanguard in September; I'm kicking myself that I didn't make it out to hear them.) Stream it here.

Matana Roberts Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres (Constellation)

A deeply ambitious and at times straight-up harrowing statement. I've been following the Coin Coin project since around 2006, when I profiled Roberts for TONY (sadly, I can't locate the piece in the online archives at the moment), and I'm glad to see it finally starting to get a proper documentation. From Ellington to Roach to Mingus to the Sharrocks—Roberts is taking it all in. Stream it here.

Ellery Eskelin Trio New York (Prime Source)

Harris Eisenstadt September Trio (Clean Feed)

Two featuring the saxist Ellery Eskelin, a perpetual sleeper fave of mine, whom I never feel like I've investigated fully enough. I'm happy with my TONY preview of Trio New York, in which I contrasted this new group—featuring organist Gary Versace and none other than Gerald Cleaver on drums—with Eskelin's previous signature trio, the Andrea Parkins/Jim Black band. Hear some samples here.

Eisenstadt, who topped my 2008 jazz top 10 with Guewel and ranked again in 2010 with Woodblock Prints, made another strong showing with a disc featuring Eskelin and Angelica Sanchez (who might be the MVP of Wadada's aforementioned Heart's Reflections). As usual with Eisenstadt, you're getting something abstracted yet focused, something beauty-forward, settings that confer deep respect for his bandmates. I'm looking forward to spending more time with this one, and I hope the project continues. Hear samples at Amazon.

/////

I listed just two reissues: the landmark Miles Bootleg Series set, which I reviewed for Pitchfork, and the exemplary International Phonograph, Inc., edition of Julius Hemphill's fun, raw, expansive, eclectic opus Dogon A.D.

/////

And finally, here's my chronological list of best 2011 live shows (as with the list of recordings above, only jazz was in play), outfitted with links to coverage.

J.D. Allen's VisionFugitive, conducted by Butch Morris at Le Poisson Rouge
(Winter Jazzfest) - January 7
(feat. Gregg August, Rudy Royston)

Dan Weiss Trio at Cornelia Street Café - January 10
(Thomas Morgan, Jacob Sacks)

Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Town Hall - February 9
(Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci, Brian Blade)

Wynton Marsalis Quintet/Septet at Frederick P. Rose Hall - March 31
(Quintet: Walter Blanding Jr., Dan Nimmer, Carlos Henriquez, Ali Jackson; Septet: Victor Goines, Wessell Anderson, Vincent Gardner, Marcus Roberts, Reginald Veal, Herlin Riley)

The Bad Plus with Joshua Redman at the Blue Note - April 21

Matthew Shipp/Darius Jones at Jazz Standard - April 27

Ari Hoenig Group at Smalls - June 20
(Gilad Hekselman, Shai Maestro, Orlando Le Fleming)

Tarbaby with Oliver Lake at Le Poisson Rouge (Undead Jazzfest) - June 23

Bill McHenry Quartet at Village Vanguard - November 11
(Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Andrew Cyrille)

Gerald Cleaver's Black Host at Cornelia Street Café - December 10
(Darius Jones, Cooper-Moore, Brandon Seabrook, Pascal Niggenkemper)

Perfect 10s

2011-12-15T22:16:00.017-05:00

Via Time Out NY, a list of my top 10 albums of 2011, everything in play.

Via the Jazz Journalists Association, a list of my top 10 jazz albums of 2011.

/////

You'll often hear people who make their living opining about the arts grumbling about the task of year-end list-making. I don't relate. Honestly, I think year-end lists are pretty awesome. Parameters are important: They force you to make those "What would you save from a fire?" (or "…take with you to a desert island?") judgment calls. For me, the process of compiling a year-end list is one of internal debate: "Do you really stand behind this record, Hank? And if so, what makes it more worthy than these ten you're omitting?" I enjoy the end product as an object in and of itself, the way the entries flow and play off one another. I enjoy having the opportunity to say thanks to the artists whose work has enhanced my life over the past 12 months—and to celebrate the fact that people are still bothering to make albums at all.

I also like reading other writers' lists. I love the multiplicity of voices, the hum of conversation. It's all a bit overwhelming, sure, but buried within the din is an important lesson—especially during a year like this, where there's no consensus choice à la My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The lesson is that there's really no such thing as consensus (something Phil Freeman addressed provocatively at the beginning of the year); each writer is a beat unto his- or herself. Anyone who puts together one of these lists and thinks they are making some sort of objective statement is mistaken. On the contrary, the subjectivity of these lists is precisely what makes them great. If you trust the opinions of the writer in question—not necessarily agree with them, but at least respect their integrity and the formidability of the brainpower behind them—you can learn something from their list. You'll hear about a record you missed entirely, find reason to go back to one that didn't grab you on a first listen, or even gain a fresh perspective on a selection from your own list. In short, it's fun to be a part of the conversation.

For me, over the past week or so, that conversation has of course featured my esteemed Time Out colleagues, all of whose year-end lists can be found here. Other lists that have grabbed me: Those by the four Times pop critics, which you can check out here (along with an enjoyable roundtable podcast); Adrien Begrand's epic, still-unfolding, all-genres-in-play list, as well as his metal-only one; another metal list, courtesy of the hilarious and always on-point The Living Doorway blog; Seth Colter Walls's artfully disclaimed list at The Awl; Patrick Jarenwattananon's pithy, poetic list at A Blog Supreme; Brent DiCrescenzo's entirely iTunes-playcount-sourced list at Time Out Chicago; the various lists by my fellow Jazz Journalists Association members; and Nate Chinen's customary year-end critics' summit. Hopefully I'm not forgetting any of the ones I've savored thus far. But at any rate, you see my point: Everyone has a different take on the bygone year in music, and I dig that. No one is right (or wrong), and everyone wins

Living, letting live: Gerald Cleaver's Black Host

2011-12-11T08:06:00.021-05:00

Photo: Juan-Carlos Hernández

This past Saturday night I heard Black Host, a new project led by drummer Gerald Cleaver, at Cornelia Street Café. (The band was concluding a five-night mini tour of NYC, during which it had stopped by three other local venues.) What drew me in was partly my recent interest in Cleaver-led projects (his latest album, Be It As I See It, is a stunner) but the personnel—Darius Jones on alto, Brandon Seabrook on guitar, Pascal Niggenkemper on bass and the mighty Cooper-Moore on piano—was also a major factor.

Throughout the evening's two sets, I kept thinking about the make-up of the band, or more accurately, the fact that in jazz bands are often made, period, custom-built for each gig or recording session. Of course there are exceptions, groups like the Bad Plus that have impressed me precisely because they don't conform to this "leader plus the auxiliary players he or she happens to have convened for the night" model. I kept thinking about the fact that even once players have established themselves, not just as improvisers but as bandleaders and conceptualists, they can still appear in other people's projects, without any sense of it being beneath them. If you happen to be a jazz bandleader—it helps to live in New York and have a decent budget—you can actually assemble your dream group.

It's an obvious fact, one of the first principles of modern jazz, really, that personnel is fluid, but watching Black Host last night, I was re-struck by the special-ness, the vast potential of that idea. Say you're Gerald Cleaver, a great drummer and an experienced bandleader; you can think to yourself, I'd like to put together a project that includes four other established players, bandleaders in their own right: Cooper-Moore (one-time leader of Triptych Myth, multi-instrumental legend), Jones (increasingly prominent leader of a trio and quartet), Seabrook (leader of the punk-jazz force Seabrook Power Plant) and Niggenkemper (I'm not as familiar with his work, but his PNTrio has two CDs out). You can write some engaging music to fuel the enterprise; then, best of all, you can wind the whole thing up and watch it go.

(In rock, the band-building process typically happens once, right at the start. Personnel might shift, of course—guitarist Joe Petrucelli and I founded STATS roughly a decade ago, and we've worked with four different bassists during that time—but really what you're looking for is fixed membership.)

In the case of Black Host, you were hearing what happens when this process pays off, when you draft various players for a project and they get along outstandingly. What I love about this whole phenomenon is how, due to the x-factor of improvisation, a bandleader can't know in advance exactly how his recruits are going to interact. At Cornelia, I was struck specifically by the Cooper-Moore/Seabrook connection. There was one episode, I think it was during the second set, when C-M took a particularly wild solo (one of many that found his fingers, and forearms, scampering across the keyboard, summoning a riot of notes—chaotic and yet fully coherent, tasteful and related to the piece at hand) and lighted upon this violent, trilling figure. Seabrook looked up, clearly transfixed by the pattern, and then began to mimic it, employing the turbo-picking right hand that serves him so well when playing banjo in the Power Plant. The two men, a pianist in his mid-sixties and a guitarist in his mid-thirties were engaged in maniacal game of Hot Potato.

At other points I recall Cooper-Moore watching Seabrook or Niggenkemper solo with obvious glee, clearly fascinated by their ingenuity (throughout the evening, Seabrook was sampling various passages, particularly Jones's saxophone lines, with a small tape recorder and playing them back through his guitar pick-ups; other times he'd toss out razor-toothed ninja stars of notes, like the final flourish in John McLaughlin's epic riff at the end of Miles's "Right Off," from A Tribute to Jack Johnson—one iteration of McLaughlin moment I'm referring to comes right at 18:49 here; and during Niggenkemper's solo intro to one piece, the bassist held some kind of metal bowl, or maybe an aluminum pan?, against the strings to produce a fruitfully abrasive texture). It struck me in these moments that by convening various players, you're not just inviting them to play together, but also to listen to one another, to simply be together for that segment of time. (This fifth straight night of performance seemed like just the right juncture to savor the new relationships within Black Host: The players were comfortable together, but still a bit in awe of one another, still full of wonder.)

Darius Jones contributed his trademark combination of volcanic passion and laserlike focus. As impressive a bandleader as he is, I was struck last night by what a model collaborator he is as well. During the written portions—particularly during the second piece in the first set, a staggeringly gorgeous ballad that I immediately wanted to hear again as soon as it was over—he served Cleaver's vision, articulating the melodies with total clarity and a complex sensation of harsh sweetness—like honey with an underlying pungency—the tenderest notes paradoxically seeming the most effortful. And during the improvised portions, Jones served the hive mind, the collectively settled-upon direction of the music. Sometimes he led, delivering a full-on burry blare; other times, he sat back and reveled in the mayhem, grinning, cheering even, homing in on the Cooper-Moore/Seabrook firestorm, and doling out brief punctuation phrases. Like Cooper-Moore, Jones is a model onstage listener; you feel what others are playing more deeply while watching him respond to it. And that goes back to my point above: As a bandleader, in bringing players together, especially players like these, ones with huge personalities, you're creating this little society, a forum for new relationships to develop. I know Jones has a history with Cooper-Moore, but I'm not sure how much either player has worked with Seabrook, or whether any of the three had previously played with Niggenkemper but there was a very clear sense of camaraderie to Black Host, and one thing that fascinated me was how out of the spotlight Cleaver, the man with the plan, was. In light of what was going on up front, his drumming was a subtle glue.

You did feel his guiding hand in the written material, of course. There was a lot of variety to it. Unlike on Be It As I See It, which features short, chamber-music-like episodes, here the focus was on lengthy pieces that set up an atmosphere and explored it. The opening piece of the first set featured a subtle funk backbeat, with other instruments swirling on top; then came the remarkable ballad I mentioned above, a truly poetic song without words—not unlike "Charles Street Sunrise" from Be It—and a more hectic, uptempo piece. The second set was both harsher and more abstract. I remember some patient, drawn-out melodies and others that were more jagged—weird little sound shapes played in unison by Jones and Seabrook. I remember both hurtling uptempo swing and moments of pure, out-of-time weightlessness. Overall there was just enough shape and contour to hold the enterprise together, but Cleaver had left a lot of room for the spontaneity. I remember that the second set ended with all players partaking of a collective freak-out: Jones barking harshly, Seabrook wringing staticky squeals out of his tape-player/pick-up apparatus, Cooper-Moore leapfrogging his hands across the keyboard. Cleaver stood behind his kit, pressing a stick vertically into the head of his floor tom and threading it up through his fist (a technique I've seen before and experimented with myself but that I know of no proper name for), taking in the whole enterprise stoically yet attentively.

This was the kind of "It's alive!" moment that I've been trying to describe here. As a jazz bandleader in a forum like this, you're composing and preparing, yes; like the host of a dinner party, you're cooking, cleaning, stocking the fridge with beverages, making sure you've got enough place settings, etc. You're probably micromanaging a bit throughout the evening, especially during those first crucial, perhaps tense moments when the guests start to arrive. But at a certain point, you're letting go, allowing your friends to make of the evening what they will. There's a certain joy in seeing the preparations pay off as you expected; someone loves a particular dish that you labored over, say. But what makes you proudest is watching the guests socialize, seeing unexpected new friendships blossom in real time. You've ceded control; now the personalities themselves are in charge.

Again, this is not some shocking revelation; by and large, it's the way jazz works. But it doesn't always work as well as it did in Black Host, where you could see the players reveling in these new relationships. (Clearly, it didn't hurt that they'd been sharing stages for four nights already.) At this point, as an artist, you haven't just assembled a cast to execute your vision; you've founded a little village, a self-sufficient community with a vision of its own. Once it's humming along with its own momentum, you cease to be a leader, per se. At that point, you're just living, and letting live.

Players, not orators: The Fugazi Live Series

2011-12-08T06:40:00.007-05:00

By now you've likely heard about the bounty that is the Fugazi Live Series. If you're just diving in, allow me to recommend the following shows, which I've been savoring over the past few days:

Kansas City, KS - 8/28/93
Several close friends of mine, then and now, were at this show. I was not yet a Fugazi fan; the conversion process occurred a year or so later, and thus I did not see the band till ’95, when some of those same buddies and I took a train trip to St. Louis to catch a gig. The sound quality on this show is good, not great, but the band plays with a fierce energy (befitting the fact that they were touring behind their most aggressive—and, in my opinion, best, though it's a tough call—album, In On The Kill Taker). Plus there's some tense, pervasive crowd interaction: Basically, Ian wants the house lights on, while certain audience members want them off—so badly that they pass around a petition!

Leeds, UK - 10/31/02
An epic set with absolutely extraordinary sound. Seriously, you've got to hear this. The energy level isn't quite as high as in the ’93 show; you can hear that Guy and Ian have mellowed a tad in the intervening nine years. But the set list is just glorious. To many, Fugazi are some kind of symbol, a political statement rather than a band. But as much as I admire their ethics, that wouldn't mean a thing to me if I didn't celebrate their entire catalog. So the later the date of the show, the richer the performance (this one goes the full distance, from 13 Songs through to The Argument); the band's famous no-set-list policy meant that what you got every night was a one-of-a-kind mixtape. If you tune in now and restrain yourself from taking a peek at the song titles in advance, you get the thrill of hearing that unfold in real time.

The Live Series is a wonderful thing. As much as people are obviously going to focus on all the occasionally hilarious banter in these recordings—I swear, sometimes it almost seems to me like Ian planted an asshole or two in each audience so that he could have someone to reprimand—hopefully it will help shore up Fugazi's musical legacy. They are players, not orators, and their range, craft and technique are all breathtaking. Obviously, the DIY infrastructure the band built around itself is impressive, but in the end, it's just a backdrop to an all-time-great body of work: wrenching ("Blueprint"), funky ("Two Beats Off"), catchy ("Public Witness Program"), bitter ("Shut the Door"), triumphant ("Reclamation"), sultry ("Life and Limb"), heartbreaking ("Sweet and Low"), borderline goofy ("Bed for the Scraping") and sometimes, weird as hell ("Cassavetes," anyone?). Long live ’em.

Motian/Haden/Redman/Carroll

2011-12-01T06:55:00.013-05:00

This is an extraordinary performance; I recommend blowing it up to full screen, and watching it front-to-back, followed by part two. Howard Mandel's archival Motian interview tipped me off re: this project—three fourths of Keith Jarrett's American Quartet, but with trumpeter Baikida Carroll subbing for Jarrett, and with Charlie Haden at the helm—and lo and behold, there's a full, pro-quality concert on YouTube. You'll hear a lot of Ornette-ism in this music, but especially in the second piece (which starts at 16:40), this band goes to a freer, more uncharted place. I really wish these four had made a proper record.

(Incidentally, Baikida Carroll plays the Stone in NYC next Wednesday, December 7. He'll co-lead a "Wuartet" with Tim Berne. You might have heard Mr. Carroll on the wonderful new Dogon A.D. reissue.)

/////

P.S. Here is my review of Sunday night's Frank Ocean show at Bowery Ballroom.

P.P.S. Here is my joint preview of two monster metal shows going down in NYC this weekend: Inquisition with Disma (whose Towards the Megalith is one of my favorite metal records of the year) on Friday; and Hull with the mighty Eyehategod on Sunday.

The floating world: Goodbye, Paul Motian

2011-11-23T07:09:00.019-05:00

Paul Motian passed away yesterday at the age of 80. I wrote a brief remembrance for the TONY blog.

In looking back over my writings on Motian—and there were quite a few, especially from the last year or so, during which time I'd grown particularly obsessed with his work, and, fortunately, had the chance to see him live a few times—it occurred to me that verbalizing my feelings about his playing presented a particularly constructive challenge. More so than the work of many (probably most) musicians, what he did defied explanation. Even yesterday, when I heard the news and collected my thoughts, I was thinking, "How do I express what he meant, what he was up to all that time?"

He inspired me to look outside music, for one. Reflecting on the 2005 Frisell/Motian/Lovano record I Have the Room Above Her in 2009, I wrote:

"It's an aqueous record. You will probably not ever find a more convincing display of slippery, nonmetrical jazzmaking. This music floats and is *about* floating. I'm thrilled by the swirly weightlessness… It just hangs there, or drifts there, or flows there, or whatever air or water metaphor you want to apply. It's unmoored music."

Re-reading that, it's almost as though I'm saying you can't describe Motian's work in anything but elemental terms. His great achievement was to restore the wonder to jazz, the mystery. As I mentioned in the TONY write-up, there was a deep historical reverence to what he did—he would constantly repay his debts to Monk, Bird, etc. by performing their work—but there was nothing pat about his approach to repertory. He was always looking for the mystical element, the place where he could pierce convention and let weirdness whoosh in. There was no affect, though, no pretense of struggle; he just seemed to be searching for the most relaxed, human way to play the drums, a state of being where you could work in a given style (jazz) without letting it control you, without letting its calcified methods obscure the warmth and the magic at its core.

Listening to Paul Motian was, for me, remembering that jazz could really be—and not just in an aphoristic way—about constant surprise. Especially as a drummer, I relished the sense of bafflement his playing imparted. The logic behind what he was doing, the "Why?" of it was rarely clear to me (a phenomenon that other writers have eloquently described—see, for example, the end of this recent Ben Ratliff review). All I knew was that Motian never went on autopilot; he responded honestly, directly, instantaneously, at the risk of sounding obtuse, awkward, or, on the other end of things, at the risk of sounding utterly weightless. He was a ghost of a drummer, phantomizing the music. At his best, he seemed to bring everyone (players like Tony Malaby and Ben Monder, who played in a Motian band I caught in 2008) into this mindset, to slow down their metabolism, to resensitize and hypnotize them. Sitting there, inscrutable behind his ever-present sunglasses, he'd swing the watch in front of your eyes and you were entranced, even scared a little by the sensation of anti-gravity. He'd proceed up the route ahead of you, confiscating the road signs, and you were that much more attuned to each little signal.

Again, I've veered off into mystical territory, but Motian had/has that effect. As I reflected in October of 2010, I grew more or less addicted to the flavor of mystery that his music provided. So much so that I found myself unfairly criticizing jazz that didn't provide that, jazz that wasn't even trying to. Re: how another musician or band would even begin to deliberately imitate Motian's style, or the style of his groups, is beyond me. Players like the aforementioned Malaby and Monder—as well as Bill McHenry, who also played with Motian quite a bit—have clearly internalized something of his trance-jazz imperative, lessons about how even when playing, say, a standard, an improviser should never lose sight of the great beyond.

He may be gone, but I don't think his aesthetic values will slip away. He was gracious (and smart) enough to constantly collaborate with younger musicians—read this beautiful homage by Jerome Sabbagh—so there are many possible torchbearers, who have the good sense to honor what he was about without trying to reconstitute it.

Goodbye to a great dreamer of jazz, a conjurer of the sticks, cymbals, drumheads. Thank you for showing us the floating world.

/////

*Hear Motian's music all day (Wednesday, 11/23/11) on WKCR.

*My favorite Paul Motian record is The Story of Maryam, from 1984. It's on Spotify, so why not give it a shot? (Have you ever, in your life, heard anything like "Owl of Cranston"? Jesus…)

*The Motian chapter in Ben Ratliff's The Jazz Ear—readable in original Times incarnation here—is essential: reverent, but also funny. Ratliff clearly relishes the eccentricity of Motian's personality, as well as that of his musicianship. I love this observation dearly:

"I have heard him call a room full of people, at one time, 'man.' (As in 'Hey, thanks for coming, man!')"

*The Inconstant Sol archive contains two fantastic bootlegs of Motian's short-lived ’70s trio with Charles Brackeen and David Izenzon. I recommend this one.

*Ted Panken and Howard Mandel have each posted illuminating archival interviews with Motian.

In praise of Obituary: Forgoing the space race

2011-11-20T07:12:00.011-05:00

"We did the same thing on the new album [as] we normally do. We don't try too hard. We stick to what we are good at. We know that Obituary has a sound and a style, and we want to preserve that, so when the fans buy these albums, they know that they're getting a good Obituary album."—Obituary drummer Donald Tardy, 2010 interview with Art ’N’ Roll WebZine

I've been a fan of the Florida death-metal band Obituary for something like 20 years. A friend passed me 1992's The End Complete at school, and I was immediately sucked into its slow, tortured soundworld. I stuck around for 1994's World Demise—I distinctly remember participating in an Obituary rite of passage around this time: developing my own comical-yet-reverent impression of frontman John Tardy's soul-vomit growl—but I got off the train after that.

As a young listener, I regarded Obituary—along with bands like Deicide and Cannibal Corpse—as part of my death-metal phase: in other words, great at what they did but not really a band you could grow up with. They'd always be there if I needed a little shot of nostalgia, but I didn't think of them the way I regarded, say, Morbid Angel, i.e., as a band I could count on to evolve, to present me with new information over time, and/or to compose material that was so strong and compelling that it transcended the genre entirely.

Over the past few weeks, in advance of last night's Obituary show at Santos Party House, I made a point of catching up on all the Obituary full-lengths I missed, i.e., 1997's Back from the Dead through 2009's Darkest Day, and found that I wasn't necessarily amiss in letting my real-time fandom of the band lapse. It was almost shocking to me how little their sound had progressed. If you'd played me Darkest Day blind, I'd have had a hard time dating it as a post–World Demise release. Still the same mix of excruciating doom-groove passages and bottom-heavy, hardcore-infused thrash (still no blastbeats, a key distinguishing feature of this band); still the same ghastly John Tardy vocals. Obituary was, to borrow the title of their 2005 comeback record (the band was dormant between Back from the Dead and that release), frozen in time. (To be fair, guitarist Ralph Santolla's florid, virtuoso leads, heard on Darkest Day and 2007's Xecutioner's Return, did constitute a modest new wrinkle.)

Before seeing Obituary live last night, I'm not sure that I would've regarded the above quote from Donald Tardy (John's brother) as a particularly admirable one. I'll fully admit that I've often favored artists, musical or otherwise, who placed a premium on evolution, bands where every album provides a new plot wrinkle, where the obligation to the fan is not, as Tardy suggests, to deliver the familiar, but to move forward at the risk of baffling or even losing the listener altogether. I've had the idea of relentless progress on the brain lately in light of the exemplary Death reissues on Relapse. In terms of a death-metal career arc/track record, there really is no greater one than Death's. Once the band really started evolving in earnest, there was no looking back; trying to square the band's 1987 very good, very primitive 1987 debut, Scream Bloody Gore, with, say, 1995's Symbolic—a true progressive-metal masterpiece—is next to impossible. The band was still called Death, but leader Chuck Schuldiner (RIP) wasn't going to let that constrain his ever-heightening interest in dynamics, fluidity, technicality, beauty.

After seeing Obituary live, though, I think I need to reconsider the idea of holding every band to this standard. The fact of the matter is, if a band feels creatively satisfied tending to a small, well-defined garden year after year—and if you watch the video quoted above in full, you'll see that Don Tardy feels just fine about it—and if the audience supports that in full, what's the harm?

Working in the quartet line-up of the Tardy bros, guitarist Trevor Peres and bassist Terry Butler (no Santolla), Obituary put on an outstanding show last night, one of the best extreme-metal shows I've seen. And one of the major reasons for this was that their staunchly untechnical compositions—it's not too much of a stretch, nor is it a dis, to say that for the most part, the songs all sounded the same—made 100 times more sense onstage, to the extent that I had a kind of "Ohhhhhhhh, now I get it!" reaction. What I mean to say is that I can't tell you how many times I've gone to see a more technical extreme-metal band and been disappointed that the mindblowing level of detail I'd grown to love on their records was lost in the deafening blur that is the live metal show. These songs, on the other hand, are designed to be played live in front of a rabid, possibly intoxicated crowd. Obituary's songs are anthems; they are groovefests; they are the death-metal equivalent of great, catchy pop tunes. Whether you know them or not, they move you right on the spot; you dance; you mosh; you headbang; you marvel at how well John's vocal spew complements Peres's caveman riffage and Don's straightforward, borderline funky pummel. At Santos, this music sounded beautifully clear.

That's partly a credit to the club's excellent sound system, but it's also a credit to Obituary: Don Tardy's "We stick to what we're good at" took on a whole new meaning. To him, Obituary is like a really reliable family-owned pizza joint, let's say, that you can confidently patronize year after year. As it should be for just about any metal band, the point is to tour and put on great, fun and, yes, accessible shows. This means crafting material that will work onstage, and super-technical metal often doesn't work onstage. Obituary's material, on the other hand, comes screaming to life at their shows. They are playing for the kids, both in the audience and in their hearts.

This is a band that has never seen fit to compete in death metal's ongoing space race: the largely unspoken, but clearly very real competition to be the fastest, chopsiest, most complex. There's nothing inherently wrong with the progressive impulse, but the trouble is that it only favors the absolute elite, the handful of bands in the genre that can evolve without losing the plot. (Again, Death might be the pinnacle of this practice—the band that has done the most convincing job of upping its technicality while forsaking neither its extreme-metal-ness nor its compositional coherence.) In the end, the long-running band has no responsibility other than to itself, and at the core of that is Don Tardy's idea of knowing what one is good at.

Chuck Schuldiner was good at progressing, at pushing himself and the genre forward, and that's why Death never made the same album twice; Obituary on the other hand is more like any other great genre band: a great hard-rock group, a great bluegrass ensemble or jazz combo. They defined the parameters early on—the key ingredients were all there on the band's first record, 1989's Slowly We Rot—and they've thrived within those parameters ever since. See them live today, 22 years on, and you'll understand that there's no shame in that. Every member of the band was having as great a time as every kid in the pit. (I especially loved watching a clearly psyched John contribute guest floor-tom work on a few passages, as Don handled the rest of the kit—a modest curveball that yielded maximum charm.) These musicians found—some would say founded—death metal in their youth and they've held onto it like an elixir ever since.

The beautiful thing about the underground is that their fans feel the same way, by and large. They don't want Obituary to change. The message from the pit is "You're perfect just the way you are," and Obituary has no complex about that. They're close enough to their life force (i.e., the headbangers who attend their shows and buy their records) to understand that "progress" isn't for everyone. It holds no inherent value, only what you bring to it. If you can make a living as an artist, if you can satisfy yourself and your audience, churning out a uniform, high-quality product, then you are as successful as the artist who makes headlines by turning his/her aesthetic on its head every time out. As Obituary proved to me last night, staying still doesn't necessarily equal stagnation; for some creative entities, it's the smartest thing they could possibly do.

Containing Multitudes

2011-11-14T11:56:00.006-05:00

Last night, my band, STATS, shared a bill with fellow Brooklyn trio Multitudes, our second time doing so this year. The show commemorated a new Multitudes full-length, the digital-only Twelve Branches, which you can stream below or on Bandcamp. At $4, the record is a steal; you should buy it.

Twelve Branches by Multitudes

The band plays a kind of instrumental hardcore, with a progressive edge. Concise themes, tons of movement and sweat but also a math-rocky attention to detail and rhythmic twists that keep you on your toes. The band's greatest achievement is an ability to "jam" while keeping the kinetic energy at skateboard-friendly levels, ensuring that the tension stays taut.

There's enormous swing, rawness, abandon to the Multitudes approach. I definitely hear some mid-'80s SST going on—and a healthy amount of Bad Brains worship—but even more so than, say, the instrumental Black Flag material, Multitudes hits on an honest-to-God full-band looseness. These are vamp structures—two members holding it down while a third goes off—but totally nonrigid. They breathe together, bleeding outside the lines, rejoicing in the blur.

Multitudes' drummer, Alex Lambert, astounds me. He somehow injects an beautifully organic feel into various extreme-rock percussion styles, namely grindcore-ish blastbeats (which he peppers with jazzy ride accents) and classic turbo-punk patterns. Brian House offers a fat, strummy bass presence, and guitarist Pat Foley brings the shimmering fuzz. When the three musicians align (check out "Boar," one of 12 Chinese-zodiac-based compositions on the new record), it's a crunchy, brain-invading blurt, with chaos creeping all around, but not that annoying phenomenon my bandmates and I like to refer to as "thingin'," where there's an in-jokey pretense of "messing up" or "awkwardness." This is simply an expanded-mind version of hardcore, where locking in and deconstructing are two sides of the same strategy.

Twelve Branches is a straight-up representation of the Multitudes vibe. It sounds totally live, totally amped, both gross and gorgeous, just like the band's shows. I feel like for all the punk-jazz and the noise-fusion and whatever other hybrids have come down the pike, this is the true thing I want to hear from a group with an awareness of all these styles, where we're really seeing what it means to follow the thread from, say, Mahavishnu to Black Flag and beyond, and leave all the egghead cleverness out and just make it about pure sweat and exaltation, to borrow a phrase from my Tony Williams Lifetime post.

On Twelve Branches, you're hearing a genre being interrogated, widened, advanced, but you're not hearing any of the tedious weighty Thoughts and Concepts behind that process. You're hearing total rock, with all the doom of Sabbath, the searing catharsis of Sonny Sharrock (I'm hearing both at once on "Ox" right now)—all the right raw gods, fully digested and shooting out like electricity bolts from the fingers of some comic-book hero. I am awed and inspired by the loudness, the obnoxiousness, the aliveness, the inner sensitivity, the joy of this music. Multitudes is the best kind of writhing rock organism, one of the most convincingly unhinged (but NOT abstract or meandering) I've heard in a long while. For those in search of the real punk fusion, it has been achieved with totality on Twelve Branches. Nonthinking, unstinking—amen.

Go see Bill McHenry

2011-11-12T10:45:00.006-05:00

Bill McHenry is playing at the Village Vanguard tonight and tomorrow with Orrin Evans, Eric Revis and Andrew Cyrille. Having caught a set last night, I strongly recommend that you go.

I've been following McHenry for a few years. I think it was 2006 when I first heard him live, playing at the Vanguard with the same band on his ’07 record, Roses: Ben Monder on guitar, Reid Anderson on bass and Paul Motian on drums. (McHenry's new record, Ghosts of the Sun, features the same personnel, and I'm pretty sure it comes from the same sessions as Roses.) In ’09, I caught McHenry in a very different context—a freeform duo with Monder, which you can hear on the album Bloom.

The band he's playing with this week is extraordinary. You've got pianist Evans and bassist Revis—both hailing from Tarbaby, who blew my mind at this year's Undead Jazzfest—and Cyrille, longtime Cecil Taylor collaborator and all-around jazz-drumming badass, behind the kit. I guess what struck me overall is this group's versatility, its refusal to align itself with any particular jazz faction. The band has no "angle," no spin, no gimmick; its M.O. is simply to commit fully to whatever tune McHenry calls, to get deep into it, to execute. The set was beautifully constructed: It opened with a stirring free-time piece, and I also remember a midtempo swinger, a funky soul-jazz stroll, an easygoing ballad. There was no channel-changing vibe at play though; it was just smart pacing.

"La Fuerza," a piece from Ghosts of the Sun, sticks out in particular. McHenry led the band through its floating theme—which for me paints a picture of a proud matador (as the title suggests, it's definitely got that Spanish flavor)—and then stepped aside to give Evans and later Revis some space. Each player built up from a misty cloud to a shuddering, super-physical climax. When those storms died down, Cyrille began an unaccompanied solo, constructed of little taps and clicks. Revis joined in, striking the wood frame of his bass; McHenry, sitting off to the side, started pressing down the keys of his horn, getting a percussive effect, and for a few minutes, the Vanguard stage became a makeshift drum circle.

Here and throughout the set, McHenry seemed delighted by the invention of his bandmates. After his solos, he'd retire to the bench at stage right and sit and listen, looking like a wide-eyed boy. There was a lot to hear. Evans was simply excellent: tasteful, minimal, bluesy at times, but breaking also into seismic, full-keyboard runs, episodes of zoned-out minimalism or full-on classical-styled romance. As he was when I heard him with Peter Brötzmann at this year's Vision Festival, Revis was both tough and songful, using his brief solo spots to advance the music rather than trot out technique. And Cyrille was a model of understated gravity; he swung and propelled with airy funkiness, the pulse sliding and gliding, and you felt no less buoyed by his out-of-meter colorations, which gave off a deep feeling of careful intent.

As so many have written, McHenry has this one-in-a-million tone, gauzy yet robust. It just sounds so classic, well-aged, the sonic equivalent of his tenor's tarnished gold finish. He sings through the horn with no agenda, assured rather than chopsy, no show-offiness. But like Evans, he has these sudden devilish impulses; he might let out a series of brief screeches, or a booming foghorn sound, or get caught up in a tic of fingering, a little OCD figure that he repeats and repeats.

This is that rare brand of jazz that has no name. No one seems to know where it came from. (Is is the Motian-Frisell-Lovano band, maybe?) It's the kind of jazz where the classic and the experimental bleed together and seem as one. Neither aspect feels perfunctory and both are heightened by exposure to the other; you listen harder to the "straight-ahead" swinging, sense more form in the open-ended blowing. It is not a noncommittal middle ground. It is an aesthetic of making calm, mature peace with the full spectrum of available materials. It does not draw attention to its own breadth and range. It is about using each strategy and sitting with it, making it genuine, so that it's not putting on a different hat for every tune, so that it all feels gracious and above board and non-intellectualized, non-"clever." Hear this band and you're not hearing a style of jazz; you're hearing players who take themselves out of the way of the music and just let the songs in, discovering on the spot what they want to sound like.

/////

*NPR graciously streamed Wednesday's 9pm set by this band. Check it out in archived form here.

*As a P.S., here's a 2003 All About Jazz profile I wrote on Andrew Cyrille. I have fond memories of interviewing him; aside from his patience and thoughtfulness, I recall that he was the one who put me in touch with the late, great Walt Dickerson.

*As a P.P.S., I should note that I sent a few live-Tweet dispatches from this show, as well as from a performance by the great Texan black-metal band Absu, which I also caught last night, via the Time Out New York Music Twitter page. I'm still getting the hang of this practice, but I encourage you to follow our channel to check out further on-the-spot concert impressions from me and my esteemed colleagues.

Oceanic

2011-11-04T00:25:00.006-04:00

UPDATE: Everything I wrote below is still true, except for the part about Frank Ocean playing an NYC show tonight (Sunday, 11/6/11). He has cancelled the performance. I'm really bummed about this…

Via Time Out NY, a preview of Frank Ocean's NYC headlining debut, which goes down this Sunday. I'm psyched. As I said in the piece, Ocean's Nostalgia, Ultra is pretty much a lock for my album of the year. If you haven't heard "Novacane," please: I implore you to check it out. (I suggest audio only; the video is too literal for my tastes.)

Halloween edition

2011-10-31T20:56:00.003-04:00

Via the Time Out NY blog, a review of Saturday night's Danzig Legacy event at Hammerstein Ballroom.

And above, a vintage Danzig performance from The Jon Stewart Show. (Hearing J.S. pronounce the title of Danzig's Thrall—Demonsweatlive EP makes my day.)

Into the Void; Buildings on Fire

2011-10-28T06:38:00.010-04:00

I'm happy to share my Pitchfork review of Dischord's new Void rarities compilation, Sessions 1981–83. If you're looking for a quick intro to these guys—at their best, possibly the most off-the-rails hardcore band of them all—try "Think", from the immortal Faith/Void. If you're already a fan, you will eat Sessions up.

/////

I'm loving the new Will Hermes book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire. It's a panorama of NYC music from 1973 through 1977, touching on rock, punk, jazz, salsa, classical, hip-hop, disco and more. In other words, you get to see how, e.g., Bruce Springsteen, Television, Rashied Ali, Eddie Palmieri, Steve Reich, Afrika Bambaataa and Tom Moulton (the latter's name is new to me, and the story of how he originated the modern dance mix is fascinating) played on the same field during the same era. I can't think of too many writers who could juggle all these narratives while keeping the blend brisk and reader-friendly. This book gets you visualizing history and thirsting for the records in question.

Loutallica speaks

2011-10-24T10:07:00.011-04:00

I was fortunate enough to interview Lou Reed and Lars Ulrich for GQ. (Many thanks to Will Welch for the opportunity.) You can read the transcript here. As several have commented, yes, Mr. Reed was intent on giving me the third degree; that's okay—it made for a lively interview. Mr. Ulrich, on the other hand, was a sweetheart—one of the more patient, thoughtful folks I've had the opportunity to speak with on the record.

The occasion is, obviously, Lulu, the new Reed/Metallica collaborative LP. Folks are already lining up to drub this release, and that saddens me a bit. The fact is, it's a significant work that deserves your time and effort. I only got to hear it twice before my interview, and the first time through, I was put off by it; it seemed underorganized, underedited—a failed experiment. On the second spin, though, I felt differently: This big, shaggy thing started to cohere, and I began to admire the ballsiness of the endeavor. Lulu is awkward in spots, and it is in many ways a taxing listen, but it is emphatically not crap. Spend some decent time with it before you write it off.

I think this record is going to be an interesting litmus test: I can see Metallica die-hards hating the Reed aspect, and Reed fans scoffing at Metallica's contribution. Who is it for then? I'm not really sure, but I admire the follow-through all the same. As far as my own perspective, I'm obviously a lifelong Metallica freak, but Lou Reed (both solo and with the Velvet Undeground) has never really clicked with me. I relished the opportunity to try again in preparation for this interview, and I found a few records that really spoke to me, including The Blue Mask and, yes, Metal Machine Music. My opinion of Lulu is still in flux, which is a good thing; the highest compliment I can pay the record is that I'm excited to spend more time with it.

Why not listen for yourself?

CMJ +3

2011-10-19T06:52:00.006-04:00

Looking for lively, polyphonic CMJ coverage? Follow Time Out NY Music on Twitter. A bunch of writers, including myself, will be out, about and Tweeting madly all week.

/////

Also, three blogs I've been enjoying lately:

ugEXPLODE
Anything-goes creator and connoisseur of challenging sounds Weasel Walter (late of the Flying Luttenbachers, currently free-jazz-focused) blogs eloquently, unpretentiously. This close reading of Beefheart's "Hair Pie: Bake 2" blew my mind.

That's How Kids Die
Neck in neck with Invisible Oranges (currently in the midst of an impressive reboot after the departure of site guru Cosmo Lee) for the title of my favorite metal blog. Josh Haun is a passionate, open-minded listener and a clear, forceful writer. His nascent "Top 100 Metal Albums"—unlike so many of its counterparts, a totally freeform affair—looks like an extra-meaty long-term blog-ject. Here's a great entry on Type O Negative's October Rust.

Burning Ambulance
Phil Freeman is all over his beat—jazz, metal, etc.—and I admire that. He writes for a bunch of other publications, but this site (and its accompanying print journal) is his baby, and he makes sure to keep it well fed. He's been especially strong lately on reissues, including those of Death's Human and Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. These are the kinds of pieces that will bring new listeners on board re: such classics.

Review: The Miles Davis Quintet

2011-10-07T08:35:00.003-04:00

Via Pitchfork, a full-length review of that Miles Davis Quintet archival set I was raving about earlier.

First Hand News: Lindsey Buckingham live

2011-10-03T10:16:00.008-04:00

Laal and I have been on a major Fleetwood Mac kick over the past few weeks, so it was a treat for us to be able to check out the Lindsey Buckingham show at Town Hall last Tuesday. Despite some isolated tepid spots, a seriously intense performance. Vocally and guitar-wise, the man still has that old snarl. Here's my review. Can't wait to investigate Lindsey's solo stuff more.

Bill Stevenson on jazz

2011-09-21T23:54:00.014-04:00

I have a Post-It on my wall labeled "dream interviews." There are six names listed, four of which are crossed off: Glenn Danzig, Cecil Taylor, Richard Davis and—the latest—Bill Stevenson, whom I interviewed a few weeks back for Time Out New York. (Trey Azagthoth and Charles Brackeen are left!) Stevenson, the drummer of Descendents and ALL, as well as a former member of Black Flag, was far friendlier and more enthusiastic than two of the other names on the list (I'll let you figure out which). I've been a fan for years, and I wasn't let down in the slightest by our conversation.

Important points:

1) The Descendents play Roseland Ballroom in NYC this Friday, September 23. Info via TONY.

2) Here, via the TONY site, is an edited version of the Bill Stevenson Q&A. Topics-wise, this is much more accessible than what's below; among other things, we discussed Stevenson's recent health problems and his ever-evolving impressions of several classic Descendents songs.

3) Below is an extended outtake from the chat dealing with Stevenson's interest in jazz. We touched on Black Flag's instrumental/improvisational experiments, Stevenson's love for Ornette Coleman and quite a bit more.

/////

HS: With regard to Black Flag, I'm really interested in the instrumental material and some of the more improvisational stuff, like on The Process of Weeding Out and Family Man. Did you feel like there was a current of, for lack of a better term, punk fusion that you wanted to explore further that got cut short?

BS: Yeah, I just wish I was a little further along as a musician when we were trying to do that stuff. 'Cause I was listening to Charlie Parker, listening to Ornette Coleman, listening to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, listening to King Crimson, but I didn’t quite have—even with respect to my meter, my ability to hold time while doing various improvised things—I just wish I had been better when we were trying to do that because I think it could have been more successful. We could have found maybe a whole other bunch of people that might have enjoyed it. I very much appreciate the fact that we were trying to do what we were doing, but I don’t necessarily think the execution was on vinyl as it was in our heads.

HS: It was almost like the first stab at something like that, that had been attempted.

BS: Well, I mean, with guitars, you know, but Ornette Coleman was doing it for 25 years.

HS: Sure, but coming out of a hardcore vocabulary.

BS: Yeah, but we weren't paying attention. It didn’t matter what 7 Seconds or whatever was doing. It just mattered whatever we were interested in at the time.

HS: I was reading an interview from 2003 where you were talking about that rumored ALL instrumental album. You mentioned that you guys were getting into this more improvisational style and had encountered some difficulties in playing that way. Has that current been picked up? Have you been working on that instrumental or improvisational material?

BS: We recorded seven pieces, four of which I think are pretty good, but yeah, it’s just one of those things where, you know, the rent is due, so do we have ten hours a day to apply to this? Functional concerns are obviously the number one enemy of creativity. I don’t know; I don’t have a logical answer.

HS: You were saying how back in '84, you didn't feel like as a player, you were quite up to the challenge of exploring that kind of improvisational stuff with Black Flag. Did you undertake a serious study of jazz or fusion after that?

BS: Oh yeah, you’re damn right I did. I think one of the cooler actual success stories of that would be maybe the song "I Want Out" on Problematic by ALL. It’s not on the improvised side, but on the unfathomably technical side where you can still sing along. And then another one would be the song "Virus" on the Only Crime record To the Nines. There's a middle section in that song where for me it’s interesting because it’s like a drum improvisation over a set pattern—kind of the opposite of bebop. So I’ve had a few things that I would consider to be successes in that area. But I don’t know… Improvising is like… Guitar solos are like farts. They’re okay if they're you're own, but who necessarily wants to listen to them?

HS: Well, what I really like about some of the more experimental Descendents material is that you’re right on the edge. The Process of Weeding Out is freer, like the bass and drums are holding something down while the guitar goes off. But what I like about something like "Uranus" by the Descendents is that it’s a composition. It has a looseness and a little but of space in it, but it’s still a written piece of music.

BS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your perception of this is right on. That's what I mean. I think "Uranus" is a success story in this way and maybe that song "Birds" on ALL's Percolater. There have been a few successes. So I think you might like that song "Virus" on the To the Nines record by Only Crime. That’s in a different way though because it has vocal patterns and everything.

HS: Especially ALL during the period of Allroy Saves, I almost feel like it was this new kind of progressive rock, where all the ideas that would be in a Yes song or something like that would be squeezed into these one-minute songs.

BS: Uh-huh, yeah.

HS: Like that song "Check One," which I've always thought was a mini masterpiece that you wrote. Do you remember anything about how you came up with material like that? Can you give an insight into what you guys were drawing on with a song that complex?

BS: There’s just the obvious kind of five things I suppose, which is Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, King Crimson, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Zappa. You know, they’re kind of ordinary influences, but you know how this stuff works. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it all depends on what it is you’re listening to when when you’re listening to this stuff. Even with Miles Davis, I reckon there’s 50 different ways you could listen to Miles Davis and be getting 50 different things out of it, and that’s certainly true with Ornette.

HS: Do you have a favorite period or couple records of Ornette?

BS: Oh, fuck… He’s my all-time hero of the world, so I don’t even know where to start. I think that most of that material—the chronology escapes me, and this is part of the function of the neurosurgery is some of my memory for minutiae is not all the way reassembled, but I'm gonna say this: All the way up through those releases that they repackaged as Beauty Is a Rare Thing, everything up through that are my eight favorite albums. And then after that, I like the Science Fiction sessions. Oh God, fuck! You what I love? Skies of America! Nobody likes that one, but I love that one.

Ornette to me reached a point where you’d put on the record and it would sound like in high school, in the band room before the teacher got there and everybody was warming up and tuning up—that sound. Sometimes Ornette's records sound that way, and I can’t quite handle that but when it doesn’t sound like that, then it’s my favorite thing in the whole world. And I even like his—I’m gonna call them straighter bebop records, those first two: Something Else!!!! and Tomorrow Is the Question. I love those more than The Shape of Jazz to Come, but then the ones after The Shape of Jazz to Come are some of my favorites.

HS: Like This Is Our Music or Change of the Century?

BS: Yes!

HS: Would you be able to describe specifically how you’ve been influenced by, say, Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins? Or do you think it even works that way?

BS: I reckon drumwise, from that arena, I would see more of an Elvin Jones influence. Or I saw Ornette a few years ago and he had his son on drums. I’ve grown to love Denardo but I don’t know… Then it was a bow bass and a finger bass and Ornette. Man, I couldn’t even breathe I was so… It was amazing! I know this doesn't sound like anything to you, but I live in Fort Collins, CO, so I don't get to see Ornette. That same year, I got to see McCoy Tyner just a couple months later, and I was like, "Yes!"

HS: Was there a period where you were gigging as a jazz drummer? Or was it more like private study?

BS: No, that would be the hugest mistake or oversight, would be to try to put me in that category. I simply don’t have the chops. I more just try to sneak in a little bit of the wonderment or elation of musical discovery that is occurring in real time when jazz musicians are playing. I love that.

HS: I play drums as well, and I sometimes feel like it's almost impossible for a drummer to be truly great at playing both rock and jazz. Do you think you have to pick one of the two and focus on that?

BS: I think so. What I was trying to do was to be both. I reckon Billy Cobham is maybe the closest: He's the everyman's drummer, like he can playing everything better than everyone. And I felt like I was heading that direction—maybe I wanted to be Billy.

But then there's the stick-size issue. I use, like, Sequoia tree trunks in, say, Black Flag, and then if I’m trying to play jazz, which I usually just do by myself, then I’m using really small sticks. So I have this medium-size stick that I use so that I can … I don’t know, it’s like being a jack of all trades, master of none. So now the rock stuff’s not as heavy, but the jazz stuff still isn't fast enough. Those are the things we think that when we sit down at the drums everyday, those are the things we struggle with: Who do I wanna be? How do I wanna define my style? Or do I even wanna define my style? What kind of mood am I in today? Today, I’m gonna play with the 7As. Tomorrow, I'll whip out the DC-17s, and we’re gonna go that route. Or maybe just 5 minutes later we’re going to whip out the DC-17s.

HS: Yeah, I always think about someone like Tony Williams. When he’s playing fusion, it sounds really good but it doesn’t sound like a great rock drummer; it sounds like a great jazz drummer playing that way.

BS: Yeah, I think we all want to be that guy that can just do everything better than everyone, but sometimes it's fun for me to just do my—I have my eight things that I can do better than anyone in the world—just do those. I’ve got my one little, stupid drum roll that I do on every song and my stupid surf beat, and that’s me without thinking, just on instinct and in a way, that’s home.

The Big 4 at Yankee Stadium

2011-09-16T06:25:00.006-04:00

After jumping through many hoops, I scored tickets to the Big 4 at Yankee Stadium. Hassles abounded—absurdly expensive parking, rowdy fans spilling beer on my wife and me, interminable bathroom lines—but this was still a magical show. Here's my review (with slideshow) on the TONY blog.

Addenda:

1) Before the whole Big 4 hype cycle began, I knew next to nothing about Anthrax (just a few vids from late-’80s/early-’90s MTV). Now I'm fascinated by them. Their new album, Worship Music, is addictive—it satisfies my appetites for both chewy thrash and super-melodic Dio-esque wailing. Their back catalog is great too; I love the weird mix of technicality and cartoonishness. As I suggested in the review, it was easy to be psyched for them at Yankee Stadium.

2) Slayer, man. I'm not sure I've ever seen a band perform with such sustained intensity and sheer obnoxiousness. Of course the records are great—at least the old ones; was checking out World Painted Blood yesterday, and the thin-sounding production was bumming me out a little—but I had always taken these guys for granted a bit. Never again. Serious dedication to craft plus blitzkrieg energy.

3) Just about any Metallica set list would feel like a greatest-hits compilation. They can pull out a relative obscurity like the Master of Puppets instrumental "Orion" late in a stadium set and not risk losing anyone's attention. Question: Is Metallica the greatest large-scale rock band currently performing? I can't think of another with a deeper or more varied catalog. I think I'd even put them ahead of Rush, given how well they balance chops and muscle with sheer sing-along-ability. If you have a chance to see them, go—they are currently on devastating form.

4) To me, Megadeth's set was the least engaging of the day, but as with Anthrax, I'm very happy to have reawakened to Mustaine & Co. recently. I was a big fan of Countdown to Extinction growing up, and I saw the band twice in the ’90s (once with—are you ready for this?—Stone Temple Pilots opening!). For whatever reason, though, I never delved into the back catalog. That was lunacy, because Rust in Peace is a total monster. The ruthless tightness and giddy progginess of this record add up to pure smiles for me. It's unsettling, demented, uncompromising music—like a more grotesque, off-the-wall …And Justice for All.

Rudness and rigor: The Miles Davis Quintet, Live Europe 1967

2011-09-12T07:37:00.013-04:00

I'm glad that Nate Chinen took the time to make a methodical, emphatic case for why the forthcoming Miles Davis archival release, Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, stands way out from the Miles-box-set cottage industry. By year's end, I'm guessing we'll all be a little sick of hearing about this one, but let me just say this: It's major, and the hype is and will be justified.

This weekend, I've been hung up on the first version of "Footprints" from disc 2 (11.2.67 in Denmark). The point has been made countless times about how much leeway Miles afforded his sidemen, but this track (and this box set in general) really drives the concept home in a new way. Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock are absolutely romping here. They edge in as much wildness as they can during Miles's solo and then blitz out even more during Wayne Shorter's feature. Williams, who had spent several years playing borderline free jazz with Shorter at Blue Note (I think of Grachan Moncur's Some Other Stuff, from ’64, and Williams's own Spring, from ’65), seems to consider Shorter an ideal partner in crime. On this "Footprints," Williams keeps tossing out splashy explosions during the saxophonist's solo, as if he were throwing Snap-N-Pops at Shorter's feet. Around 3:40, his wildness infects Herbie Hancock, and the three players swirl around in a turbulent incantation. It's so fascinating to hear a band that's so tight and disciplined (throughout all of these concerts, they flip into each new piece in lockstep, without pausing, and on the DVD, you can see the sidemen responding attentively to Miles's hand cues) but that also rages against this authority whenever it gets a free second.

Miles was clearly on to something here, i.e., how amok can we run within a "jazz" format? I.e., this was before the bellbottoms and the scarves and wrap-around shades, before Miles's sets became orgies of pure, psychedelic, funk-driven catharsis. This is about affecting that "cool" pose, that aura of decorum that always clung to Miles—and has become a tedious kind of shorthand for how he's been represented since his death—and that still clings to many who play what I like to think of as jazz-club jazz (more on that concept here), but then inviting the chaos in and letting his co-conspirators raid the mansion, turn a "polite" medium into something warped, impulsive, fucked up. Chinen was right to point out that these men are all wearing tuxedos throughout these performances—putting their audiences in that "America's classical music" frame of mind even as they're assaulting their ears with information overload, some of the most busy and vibrant small-group interplay ever.

On this 11.2.67 "Footprints," the band quiets down a bit during Hancock's solo, but on the out head, Williams is absolutely destroying his kit. Hancock follows suit with these blurred, splatter-paint runs, some definite Cecil Taylor shit. This foreground/background tension/obliteration, when the band is executing a theme as one (or more) members just cuts loose in opposition, is what has drawn me to this quintet ever since I heard Nefertiti (still my favorite Miles album, with this band or otherwise) for the first time about a decade ago. I couldn't believe that a jazz drummer could have the balls to explode so rambunctiously on what was essentially a ballad (I'm speaking of the piece "Nefertiti"), or, moreover, that his employer (a firmly established star by that point) would actually invite that sort of thing. We've all heard the stories about how Miles didn't want his sidemen to practice during their off time: He wanted all that nervous, explosive energy to come out onstage. It's not just an idea or a liner-note cliché, this thing of "giving your sidemen space." It's absolutely demonstrated in the music, and nowhere more vividly than on this new set of 1967 live material.

What I love too, though, is that in addition to the wildness, you also get the control, the pacing. Before his death just a few months prior to these Miles performances, John Coltrane was obviously going way, way out, spilling his guts for hours at a time, he and his sidemen equating length and relentless intensity with transcendence. There was no "jazz" left in it, no "cool," no decorum, no ting-ting-a-ling. Which is totally great and vital. I love Interstellar Space as much as the next guy. That said, there's something marvelous about Miles having been able to open and shut the air lock so to speak, to invite the horror of deep space in and ALSO to block it out when needed.

Take, for example, the way the sets on this 1967 set are constructed. Chinen sharply points out the inclusion of many more original pieces here than on the 1965 Plugged Nickel recordings (which I've enjoyed in the past, but not half as much as this new set), which lean primarily on standards. The effect is that when the standards do arrive—and since there's no stopping between pieces, they arrive pretty abruptly—they feel revelatory. As opposed to looking at your watch ("Oh man, they're playing another jazz-club jazz selection?"), you're grateful for the respite. Check out the "’Round Midnight" that comes right after the "Footprints" described above (11.2.67, disc two). The turbulence and insanity melt away, and it's Miles and Hancock alone in a gorgeous reverie. This duet isn't a rigorous reading of the theme; there's some impressionism to it. But it's so gracious, spacious, the kind of thing that, yes, the average jazz-club patron might expect. Recognizably a ballad. Miles was not about exploding form entirely—he was about letting it expand and contract. Rein them in with something decorous, nakedly beautiful, and then put the screws on. Case in point, this same "’Round Midnight," which quickly becomes an uptempo romp after the kick-in, with Hancock prancing down the keyboard and Shorter summoning steely abandon. (Later in the set, we're back on the gorgeous/turbulent fault line, in the form of Shorter's "Masqualero," which has these remarkable trumpet/piano cutaways, with Williams surging periodically forward to add Latin-style thrust.)

It's not fair or useful to sit here 40 years later and lament the current lack of bands like this, so committed on one hand to rigor (which comes, and this is another cliché that's just straight-up true, from WORKING, from playing gig after gig with the same personnel and a consistent repertoire over a period of years) and to explosive freedom, where the form ("Jazz") is paradoxically strengthened via the relentless inquisitiveness and sometimes, for lack of a better word, rudeness of the performance. No need to compare this to what anyone else is doing or has done. Better simply to say that this is conceptually what we want out of jazz: to set up exquisite sand castles and to augment or knock them down as we see fit, as long as we have a reason for doing so and promise to build them back up again at the end.

Compare this with, say, Coltrane's late music, in which there's really no accountability; you've gone so far out that there's no reference point. And again, I'm not dissing that music, not diminishing the value of that kind of solar catharsis. Rather, I'm celebrating the Miles version of "free jazz," where the construction and the demolition commingled in each piece, where you ask that your sidemen wear tuxedos but simultaneously invite them to go absolutely apeshit on their instruments (I'm listening now to Shorter and Williams kicking up a mighty dust cloud at 6:54 in "No Blues"—total sickness). As Chinen describes, that tension was at its apogee within the Miles Davis Quintet circa 1967, and here you have abundant illustration of it. Buy this box set!

/////

P.S. Disc one is streaming at NPR.

Cosmo Lee on Metallica

2011-09-06T08:47:00.005-04:00

Just a quick post here to say thanks to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges—the site that launched my Heavy Metal Be-Bop interview series—for his outstanding ongoing series "Metallica: The First Four Albums." To bring you up to speed real quick: Cosmo is, in my opinion, hands down the best writer-about-metal on the internet, and for the past few years (five or so?), he's overseen the Invisible Oranges site. He's leaving IO in a few weeks to focus on other projects, and by way of a farewell, he's been running down the first four Metallica records track-by-track (one blog post apiece, i.e.). It's a really impressive project, and as rigorous as it is, it's not formulaic—he's basically taking each track as it comes, offering focused yet unfettered impressions filtered through his identity as a guitarist and through his lengthy Metallica fandom (i.e., how the music sounded to him as a teenager and how it sounds to him now). Here's yesterday's post on the classic instrumental "Orion"; you'll find the rest of the series linked at the bottom.

In particular, this series has reawakened me to the glory of Master of Puppets. My favorite Metallica album is …And Justice for All, but Cosmo has helped me to see that in a way, side two of Puppets is a prelude to Justice. During the "First Four Albums" series, he has written several times about the "anxiety" of Justice. It's not a word I ever thought to use to describe the album, but I know what he means: Justice is incredibly clenched, obsessive, maniacal in its detail, devoid of fun, exhaustive. The band members look joyless and battle-hardened in the inner-sleeve photos, and this makes sense when you hear the music.

This obsessiveness kicks into high gear on side two of Puppets. The track that grabs me the most is "Disposable Heroes"—stream it above—which has long been among my two or three favorite Metallica songs. I was just listening to it this morning and marveling at the enormous amount of CONTENT in the song. Same goes for pretty much all of Justice: You simply can't believe they're stuffing this much INFORMATION into a rock composition, and not useless technical detail. It all makes total, merciless sense. And set against this proggy maximalism is an anthemic-punk sensibility. At the same time as it was scaling new heights of technicality, Metallica was writing its catchiest songs to date.

Dig the prechorus thrash section in "Heroes"—it reoccurs in the song, but you can hear one example at 3:12—which follows a pattern of two bars of four, then two bars of three. The little rhythmic hiccups created by the three-beat bars are pure pleasure for me. This fast, techy build-up gives way to a brief lead-guitar passage and then a turbulent transition sequence before opening up into a total rock-out chorus (the "Back to the front!" part). This is just one of the countless little journeys that Metallica took its listeners on during this classic mid-to-late-’80s period: a perfect juxtaposition of Apollonian and Dionysian musical tendencies.

It's a pleasure to rediscover these albums that I've loved so long in the company of a writer as skilled and insightful as Cosmo. Read the posts and savor the glory of the music, the absolute pinnacle of metal.

On record: Mal Waldron's The Git Go

2011-08-30T08:59:00.007-04:00

I've never been a big fan of what I think of as jazz-club jazz, i.e., straight-ahead jazz as it has been performed in clubs for decades. By this I mean jazz that never questions the head-solos-head format, jazz in which the rhythm section holds it down and the horns take their turns, followed by piano, bass and drums.

Sometimes these performances creep up on you, though. The right players can simply execute and still dazzle. You stop worrying about freshness of overall format, and you focus on the freshness of each moment, the way the music feels rather than the way it appears.

I've praised Mal Waldron's The Seagulls of Kristiansund to the heavens over the past couple of weeks. Right now, I'm fixating on The Git Go, another Waldron album recorded on the same night (9/16/86) by the same band (Rouse, Shaw, Workman, Blackwell) at the same club (The Village Vanguard). This might be the finest jazz-club jazz I've ever heard.

You get two loooooong pieces here, each a 20-plus-minute example of jazz-club jazz. One, "Status Seeking," is fast; the other, the title track, is midtempo. You listen to these performances in the background, and it's easy to cast them an "eh." They just sound, for lack of a better word, normal. The musicians play the head; they each solo in turn; they play the head again.

But if you give in to this music a little, I promise you will find a whole world, a trance incarnation of what is called swing. Ed Blackwell is godlike here. I interviewed Chico Hamilton once (sadly, I can't find the piece online just now), and he stressed that he always likes to play quietly, at a dynamic level he likes to call "the danger zone." Ed Blackwell spends the entirety of "The Git Go" in the danger zone, just sort of loping along. But there's so much activity at the micro level. Waldron makes subtle changes to one basic vamp, and the two play very delicate, very quiet cat and mouse as the soloists trance out on top. Workman gets a bit of wiggle room and dances around the beat—he leaves the timekeeping to Blackwell and Waldron.

This is the kind of jazz that only works if you let it, if you have time and attention to spare. The feeling is priceless, though. You feel buoyed—an unbelievable gentleness, coupled with authority. A beat that's barely there but that's branded on your skin. It just. Keeps. Going. And if you ask for more than it can give, it will not deliver. But as is often said of dance music, you learn to react to the tiny changes. When Blackwell switches to brushes for Waldron's piano solo in "Status Seeking," for example, it feels momentous. You learn to identify with the soloists, feel the sheer pleasure Rouse and Shaw feel as they dance delicately over this elemental CHILLNESS/AUTHORITY summoned by Blackwell and Waldron.

This one took me many listens to get. Seagulls is much more of a clear showstopper, with its convention-defying dirge. Nothing head-solos-head about that one, a clear flouting of jazz-club jazz. But dig how deep and stubborn The Git Go is (especially the title track). It cruises, but not on cruise control. Little macro variation, but in the micro, everyone is fully awake, engaged. Waldron messing with the vamp for a bar; Blackwell messing with the beat for a bar, jumping off into a little mini solo, one of those call-and-response figures he does so well. How can you relax so completely yet still be present? There's a life lesson somewhere in there.

Once you put the microscope to it, this is about as unboring as jazz gets, and it's because these are master players, not playing by rote, but playing by feel. You hear their personalities every second, even when they're "merely" keeping time. There's all this talk of breaking up the time, of deconstruction, etc. But can you play time, let the soloist speak and still sound like yourself? That is the challenge of jazz, at its heart. Listen to Ed Blackwell and Mal Waldron on this record and you will hear that challenge met. This is jazz-club jazz, yes, but it is also a prayer to, for and about jazz, a meditation on what it means to express one's individuality within a tradition.

/////

As I mentioned previously, The Git Go is only $1.78 at the Amazon MP3 store. You know what to do.

On "Do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?"

2011-08-25T08:00:00.007-04:00

Roanna Forman, over at bostonjazzblog.com, recently incited a provocative discussion by posing the simple question "Do jazz critics know how to play jazz?"

This is a fascinating inquiry, and one that gets at the heart of why this profession (I tend to avoid the word "critic" in favor of "thinker-about-music" or similar) is so strange. Basically you have this whole class of people who do not do a thing professionally and yet they are considered to be the utmost authority on that thing, sometimes even more so than the people who do do it for a living. In jazz criticism, the separation between the doers and the commentators—whether literal, i.e., social, or philosophical—is far less pronounced than it is in, say, professional sports, but there's still a divide there. Moreover, anyone in or around a certain art form, whether it's a player or an enthusiast, certainly has the right to ask of any writer who's paid to opine on said art form, "What gives you the right?"

So it's a matter of credentials, and it should be said outright that, in jazz criticism at least, there simply aren't any. I have friends who went to school for three years so that they could pass the bar exam and become lawyers. As far as my career writing about jazz goes (though, as I've stated here before, that's only a part of what I do as a thinker-about-music) I have no such formal training. If someone were to ask me what qualifies me to write about jazz, I would simply have to answer, "I love it."

As far as knowing how to play jazz, I can definitively say that I don't. I have played drums for about 17 years at this point, and I regularly rehearse, perform, record and compose music, mainly for a band called STATS that I'd broadly classify as "metal." I've taken a few lessons here and there, but for all intents and purposes, I'm self-taught as a musician. I have worked hard on my craft, though; there's roughness in my playing, but where it crops up, it's largely intentional.

In terms of my self-instruction, it's almost always been directed toward some sort of rock-based idiom. I have mainly performed rock (and related styles such as metal), so that's what I've studied. My influences as a drummer, those I can often feel myself channeling as I play, are musicians such as John Bonham, Levon Helm, Dale Crover, Neil Peart and Bill Ward. I'm not as good as any of these masters, but on some level, I understand what it is that they're doing; I could break it down for you, whether in technical or plainspoken language, and in some cases duplicate it on the drum set. If I'm a true authority on anything musical, it's the way drums work in a rock context.

As far as jazz drumming, I'm absolutely obsessed with it. Two of my favorite sounds in the world are those of Elvin Jones and Tony Williams interacting with a drum kit. I can definitely say that these musicians have influenced the way that I play—especially Elvin, who is in many ways the John Bonham of jazz, in terms of sheer mass and swing—but in no way could I duplicate what they do, except in some sort of sketchlike fashion. In short, I am not a jazz drummer. I have performed in free-improvisation contexts before, and I can convincingly fake my way through a bebop tune, but my palette is severely limited. When I speak jazz as a musician, I'm doing an impression—it is not my native tongue.

I've been discussing drums here, but the same goes for any of the other main instruments in jazz: Hand me a saxophone or a bass, or sit me at the piano, and I'm not going to be much help to anybody. I have experimented quite a bit with the piano over the years, and even performed on it—again in a free-improv setting—but I'm not a pianist. My knowledge of music theory is rudimentary. I can read rhythm notation, but I would need many hours of concentration in order to make sense of, say, a piano score.

I do write music, though—quite a bit of it. Basically what I do is sing guitar riffs in my head, record them on a dictaphone and then bring them to my bandmates to figure out. Often, these are more rhythmic figures than anything, but I do have melodic movement in mind. It's not a stretch to say that I am in some sense a songwriter; I just do it all mentally/orally rather than on paper. All of the composing that I do has been specific to the specific musical context of STATS (which was formerly known as Stay Fucked). It would not work in a vacuum, in the abstract sense of composition. It works because I have (and have had) friends/bandmates (Joe, Tony, Tom and many others) who are patient enough to sit there and help me realize the ideas that are swirling around in my head. For that I thank them.

Anyway, I've gotten completely off track here. All I really mean to say here is that I am not a jazz musician. If someone wants to take that statement and use it to disqualify my opinions on jazz, that's totally fine. I understand that for some, that might be a dealbreaker. On the other hand, I would have to say that I do feel qualified to comment on jazz. And again, I hesitate to use the word "criticize." When it comes to a given instrument, criticizing someone (whether in the positive or negative sense) ups the ante a bit. That is to say, it would be pretty ballsy of me to peg someone as a crappy saxophone player when I myself could barely summon a single note on a saxophone. Maybe I would have slightly more clout if I were dissing a drummer.

My main point, though, is that it has never been my interest to call anyone out. My entire reason, and perhaps justification, for writing at length about jazz, and researching the music exhaustively through oral history and dedicated listening, is that I am absolutely in love with it.

I view myself as authoritative only in what I am authoritative about. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know ALL of jazz. I'll be the first person to admit that, just as with movies, I have a problem relating to some of the older jazz styles. I'm a huge fan of late-’30s Ellington, for example, but stretch back one decade, to Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, and I have a hard time relating. I can understand what makes this music great, but I don't feel it in my bones.

Where jazz really starts to get interesting for me is the mid-’60s. My true canon of jazz centers around the Blue Note catalog of this era, records like Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Wayne Shorter's The Soothsayer and Jackie McLean's One Step Beyond. (It's no coincidence that all these albums have Tony Williams on them!) My tastes beyond that are vast: I love both the classic Benny Goodman quartets with Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa, and I love Henry Threadgill's Air. I love Kind of Blue and I love Interstellar Space. I love Billy Cobham's Spectrum and Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth.

These are all just off the top of my head, but what I'm really trying to say is that the main thing that qualifies me to write about jazz is that I am devoted to educating myself about it constantly, not because I feel obligated to as a professional, but because I feel compelled to as a fan. Jazz is like food to me. Some weeks, I'm off on rock jags, poring over the Black Sabbath catalog, say, but many weeks, I'm glued the jazz discographies, trying to get a handle on a particular artist or period. I'm giving myself homework basically, homework that is purely pleasure-based. Sure, if I'm preparing for an interview or something, listening can occasionally become a chore, but on a day-to-day basis, it's rarely that. What it is, is pure joy.

I guess if I have a credential, it's that: That I do in fact derive a more or less daily joy out of the phenomenon of jazz. And this is a joy that transcends time, in the sense that I'm often obsessed with current jazz (Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo's Songs of Mirth and Melancholy has brought me great pleasure this year) as well as older jazz that just happened to appear on my radar. This "just happened to appear" part is pretty mysterious to me. (I wrote a bit about it here.) I'm sure many hard-core music fans experience the same thing, but I just get into these extremely intense phases, listening-wise, where I need to hear one particular player, or period, or style, or all three at once, and I will absolutely not stand for one note of anything else to voluntarily enter my ears. As you can probably tell from the last two posts, I'm currently ensnared in a Mal Waldron obsession, set off by searching for Ed Blackwell on Spotify and stumbling across the marvelous Seagulls of Kristiansund.

So just to be clear, I do not know how to play jazz in any true practical sense. I cannot speak objectively as to whether or not that disqualifies me from commenting on it in print with authority. That will be up to my readers to decide. I have definitely struggled with this question myself, and I will admit that yes, sometimes I have felt that I simply lack the terminology or the framework with which to analyze or evaluate or even simply appreciate a given performance. But what I don't lack, though, is a kind of addiction to the music, a desire to embed the sounds of all my favorite players in my head. It's almost a synaesthetic thing. I can conjure Paul Motian, or Andrew Hill, or Tony Williams, or Joe Henderson, or Booker Little, or Jimmy Giuffre, or Fred Anderson in my head, the way I would a taste or a smell. I often think of players as "flavors" in some weird, abstract sense.

I am tirelessly devoted to knowing jazz in this way, just through constant contact with the art form, both through recordings and live shows. And in a way, I think that is the chief responsibility of the "critic": to love an art form so much that learning about it is like breathing. So much that if you weren't being paid to do it, you'd still do it just as fervently. With regard to jazz, this is me, and if I have any real qualification, it is that.

////

P.S. Many prominent critics, including Ben Ratliff and Ted Panken, weighed in on the original post. Right after completing the piece above, I noticed that Patrick Jarenwattananon had weighed in as well. Going to check out the latter as soon as I hit "Publish."

P.P.S. [Updated Monday, 8/29/11] Phil Freeman has contributed a sharp essay on this topic. See here.

On record: Mal Waldron's Crowd Scene

2011-08-24T08:23:00.009-04:00

I'm starting to realize that Mal Waldron was a career-long master of the quintet form. The classic Five Spot sessions from July of 1961—co-led by Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, and featuring Richard Davis on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums—have been some of my favorite jazz records for years. (If you don't know this material, please purchase Volume 1 immediately.) As discussed in the previous post, I've recently become obsessed with a quintet Waldron led 25 years later, a band that also included Ed Blackwell. The Seagulls of Kristiansund and The Git-Go, two albums sourced from the same night of Village Vanguard performance (9/16/86), are both outstanding. Though I haven't yet spent good time with it, I was thrilled to come across this 1984 Waldron bootleg by the same band, with Charlie Rouse, Woody Shaw, Reggie Workman and Blackwell, which includes "Fire Waltz" from the ’61 sessions, as well as a few other Mal favorites.

Over the past couple days, I've turned my attention to a later Waldron quintet release: Crowd Scene, from 1989. This one retains Reggie Workman from the ’86 band, but otherwise brings a whole new cast into the mix. Eddie Moore is on drums (previously, I'd only known him from a great 1987 Waldron/Steve Lacy album called The Super Quartet Live at Sweet Basil), and the frontline consists of Sonny Fortune on alto and Ricky Ford on tenor.

In a way, this is the saxophonists' album. What strikes me about Crowd Scene is how single-minded it is. Unlike the ’86 Vanguard material, which places a premium on diversity and pacing, this later record is all about digging in and vamping so the horn players can blow their brains out. What you have here is two long pieces that cycle over and over through these funky, body-moving rhythmic cells. Fortune and Ford seem entirely game to step into the spotlight. On the first piece, the title track, they're both shrieking to the heavens, getting super raw and soulful. It's awesome to hear the rhythm section churning endlessly as though they're trying to exhaust the saxists. It's a very strange kind of endurance test, where ecstatic freedom arises out of intense stricture.

A lot of commentators have cited a perversity in Waldron's playing, as though the pianist derived some sort of strange thrill out of playing so obsessively and repetitively. Ethan Iverson touched on that a bit in his aforelinked essay, and a blogger at The KingCake Crypt hinted at a similar idea in a post on Crowd Scene:

So here is the deal; don't try to read or study to this - it won't work! Listen to it like you were seeing it live - it should be loud and you should be stoned (whatever that means to YOU).

I heartily agree that this is not an analytical jazz, for players or listeners. You have to turn it up, turn off your brain and feel it. There's no real good answer to the question of why Waldron would want to dig in and just loop these cycles so stubbornly. But the results are special. If the ’86 and even the ’61 Waldron quintet sessions share a certain jazz-club decorum, this one (recorded in the studio, I believe) feels unleashed, obnoxious, relentless, snarling. There's still beauty and form, but it's about seeing how far you can push that form without exploding it. There's a huge amount of tension in this sort of practice that you can't really get at when you're playing entirely free, or when you're moving too rapidly from soloist to soloist. This is the sound of a band straining against a very short leash. Another aspect of the quintet genius of Mal Waldron.

P.S. Both Crowd Scene and its companion volume, Where Are You? (recorded at the same session), are available as absurdly cheap Amazon downloads; the ’Zon seems to have overlooked the fact that jazz records sometimes have very long track lengths and deemed that any two-song album should retail for under $3! Same goes for Seagulls and The Git-Go, not to mention an earlier Soul Note classic recently praised here, the Max Roach Quartet's Scott Free. And if you'd like to try before you buy, all of these records are streamable on Spotify.

P.P.S. In the last post, I mentioned that Ted Panken had covered Waldron recently. After writing, I noticed that Clifford Allen had offered his perspective on the great man as well.

On record: Mal Waldron's The Seagulls of Kristiansund

2011-08-19T09:13:00.010-04:00

As mentioned here previously, one of my favorite things about Spotify is the complete access it grants to the Black Saint/Soul Note catalogs. Browsing the other day, I stumbled upon a Soul Note record I'd heard back in college but never revisited: Mal Waldron's The Seagulls of Kristiansund: Live at the Village Vanguard. Like Max Roach's Scott Free, this is a major work, not just of the ’80s, but of jazz.

The band immediately struck me: Charlie Rouse on sax, Woody Shaw on trumpet, Reggie Workman on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. All hardbop heavy hitters, some—like Waldron—with avant-garde tendencies. You can hear vigorous uptempo swing on the first track, a reading of "Snake Out," Waldron's signature tune. But the one I keep coming back to is the title track, a true jazz dirge.

If there's one thing I love in jazz, it's that—those pieces that move beyond ballad-hood into an almost oppressive sadness. Grachan Moncur's "Love and Hate" (heard on Jackie McLean's Destination Out) comes to mind, as does Booker Little's "Man of Words" (Out Front) and Andrew Hill's "Dedication" (Point of Departure). I just love these works that take their time and trudge along, ideally forcing an emotional engagement on the part of both the soloists and the listener.

This is one of those pieces, crawling along at a near-stillness, Waldron and Workman laying out a spare framework in the background, like a bruise deepening into blue and purple over the course of almost half an hour. I'm not sure I've ever heard Ed Blackwell playing this slowly and sparely before. I think of him as an almost jolly mid- or uptempo player, most at home feelwise when he can really crackle and make the most of his marchy cadences. Here, he's not even playing time, just a pitter-patter of cymbals and other metallic implements. Waldron and Workman are implying a tempo, but it's really more of an ooze, a melting forward of time.

The soloists get down deep with it, wading in the muck. You have these players (Rouse and Shaw) who were known as hardbop workhorses, typically heard burning along in muscular fashion. Here they're forced to engage with the poetry and stillness of Waldron's conception. Shaw's playing really puts his feelings on the line. I always recall in the liner notes of Point of Departure how Kenny Dorham describes hearing "Dedication" and being brought to tears. Again, I think of these really hardass golden-age jazzers being stopped in their tracks by something so SLOW and non-virtuosity-oriented, where you've just got this sprawling canvas and you have to paint a picture with one of those tiny watercolor brushes.

Blackwell and Workman carrying on a dialogue of micro sounds: taps on the rims of the drums, little arco squeaks. And Waldron hanging out in back like the grim reaper. In a brilliant essay on Mal, Ethan Iverson referred to these three players collectively as the Evil Trio. Here, it's more like the Heavy Hearted Trio, but I see what he's getting at.

Once the horns are gone, Waldron wades in, singing so slowly and beautifully through the keys. I just love this idea and vibe so much. Jazz to me is not about the toe-tapping and the finger-snapping and the brassy glitz. It's about this kind of meditation, where you're dropped in an environment and you're forced to get to know all of it, to explore in the dark. Workman knows about this, and his bass solo isn't a "bass solo," where the music stops and the showing off happens. It sounds like a Spanish guitar, thrumming along underneath Waldron's purplish note cloud.

I have listened to this piece on repeat all week. As I stated before, the rest of the record (the marathon "Snake Out" and one short piece) is very good. There's also another Soul Note record, The Git-Go, that was recorded during the same Vanguard set (from September 16, 1986) that yielded Seagulls. It's also on Spotify, though I haven't spent good time with it yet. But "Seagulls of Kristiansund" is one of those performances that removes itself from an album, from a discography, from a genre even. It stands out as a moment of communion. A word like "stunning" doesn't even begin to carry the proper weight.

/////

*Ted Panken posted two archival interviews with the late Waldron earlier this week, in honor of the 86th anniversary of the pianist's birth.

*Iverson's Waldron post, linked above, brought me to this wonderful video of the quintet discussed above. It could very well have been recorded at the same 1986 run that produced Seagulls.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #5: Gentry Densley

2011-08-12T16:16:00.009-04:00

I'm very happy to announce that Heavy Metal Be-Bop #5, an interview with the guitarist-vocalist Gentry Densley, is now live after a long gestation period. Invisible Oranges is hosting an abridged version, by way of directing readers to the new online home of the series: heavymetalbebop.com, where future installments will appear, and where you can read a much-longer cut of the Densley Q&A. Densley's account of hanging out with Branford Marsalis is priceless, so don't miss it.

Gentry Densley has played in a bunch of bands, but he's best known for his work with Iceburn—a progressive-hardcore band that turned into a noise-worshipping free-improv collective—and the coal-black avant-doom duo Eagle Twin. As great as Iceburn was (I'd recommend Firon, Power of the Lion and Hephaestus to newbies, in that order), I think that Eagle Twin's debut full-length, The Unkindness of Crows, might be my favorite Densley release. It's an agonizing yet transcendent record.

As with previous HMB subjects, this is a man who has thought extremely hard about both jazz and metal, and how the tactics and lessons of each idiom can be fruitfully repurposed in service of the other.

Three kinds of love: The Pentagram doc

2011-08-03T17:45:00.009-04:00

Last Days Here, a new documentary about a rock & roll singer named Bobby Liebling, brought me to tears and beyond. Broadly, it is a story about metal, specifically a doomy, post-Sabbath band from the D.C. area called Pentagram. Pentagram, with the wild-eyed Liebling at the mic, brushed up against fame in the ’70s but never attained it. Metal crate-digger types rediscovered the band in the early aughts, and they've since attained some pretty heavy-duty underground cachet.

But as I said, Last Days Here is only broadly about metal. It's really a love story. More specifically, it's a catalog of love's various incarnations: an emotional connection between friends, romantic partners or family members, a spiritual connection between a fan and an artist, a borderline-divine connection between humankind and this thing we call music. The film chronicles the way these noble forces wage war on the self-pitying, self-destructive urges that prey on us daily.

Yes, as the film openly—and, at times, revoltingly—acknowledges, Bobby Liebling is a drug addict. He is a recidivist, a chronic user, someone we might all feel compelled to write off. Someone who has perhaps written himself off. But, the film argues, he is not beyond hope, beyond uplift.

I don't want to spoil the details, but this is a film about a man teetering on the brink, falling down into the chasm and clawing his way back up. Now in the grand scheme of things, a junkie rock singer attempting to resurrect his career might seem like a petty struggle. But there is some of Liebling in all of us, us who get down, who get bleak and dark, but who remember all our blessings, our blessings of family, of partners who look out for us every day of our lives, of friends who would do anything to see a smile on our faces, of sweet, holy art, that takes us outside of ourselves and shows us something loud, overwhelming, glorious. Whether you love metal or not, you will see in this film what it means to love metal, to exalt in its spectacle, its satanic pantomime, its delicious gloom.

The film is about Liebling and his comeback road, yes, but it's also, crucially, about the nonperformers, the behind-the-scenes folks such as Sean "Pellet" Pelletier (that's him with Liebling in the clip above), a Philly-based metal booster who has made it his life's work to ensure that his favorite band (Pentagram, of course) get its due. As you'll see in the film, "above and beyond" doesn't even begin to describe the lengths to which Pellet goes to assist Liebling, but he does it all with a smile: Everything he gives to metal, the music gives back a hundredfold.

This movie will depress you; it will frustrate you and make you want to tear your hair out. It will also make you rejoice in your life's blessings, especially if metal happens to be one of those. The arc of Liebling's story isn't necessarily unpredictable, but it's nevertheless magical to watch it unfold. I wept openly at the end, sympathizing with just about every character onscreen, from the beleaguered Pellet to Liebling's clear-eyed companion Hallie and his perennially doting parents. Last Days Here turns "behind the music" into something truly profound and inspirational. It's a cautionary tale, a love story and a rock doc all in one. You have to see it.

There's a great new Pentagram album on Metal Blade called Last Rites. Check out some samples and pick up a copy here.

/////

On the jazz side of things, I just checked out Solider of the Road, a very well-done documentary on another hardened lifer, Peter Brötzmann. It may not contain the revelations of Last Days Here—to be fair, its subject is far more level-headed and sane—but it's a sharp portrait of an artist I treasure.

I especially enjoyed the insights into Brötzmann's complex relationship with his German-ness, as well as the commentary from his master collaborators such as Han Bennink. The live footage looks and sounds gorgeous, and the interviews are intimate and revealing.

Soldier of the Road is a pretty straightforward—even low-key—work, without much of a narrative arc, but if you're a Brö fan, you should definitely check it out. You can learn more about the film and order a DVD copy here. (Don't be scared off if you're a U.S. consumer—my DVD arrived just days after I placed an order.)

2011 death-metal top 5 (so far)

2011-07-28T09:16:00.012-04:00

A confession: I've spent more time defending Illud Divinum Insanus, the new Morbid Angel album that came out last month and was immediately met with a storm of contempt, than actually listening to it. I was so busy elucidating why I felt it wasn't the piece of crap so many others pegged it to be that I glossed over the fact that it might not be such a durable statement. Is it crap? Absolutely not. Is it a great Morbid Angel album? Let's just say that I'm not sure it will stand the test of time the way Covenant or even Heretic has.

I've read a lot of reviews that take an "ignore Illud and try THIS instead" stance, pointing to some "truer" recent representative of the death-metal ideal (Nader Sadek's In the Flesh, e.g., which features ex-Morbid frontman Steve Tucker). That seems dubious to me. I kind of feel like it's important to deal with the record at hand and not judge it against some broad, nebulous convention.

All the same, it's hard to ignore the fact that 2011 has been an outstanding year for meat-and-potatoes death metal, and as much as I hate to admit it, Illud Divinum Insanus is not one of the main reasons why. With all due respect to Morbid Angel, here are five of my 2011 death-metal favorites, all of which will be in the running come year-end-list time.

Deceased
Surreal Overdose (Patac)

This Virgina band has a long and illustrious history in the metal underground, a history I knew pretty much nothing about. I've heard their name for years, and I've always been sort of tickled by the name of drummer/bandleader KING FOWLEY when I've come across it in metal mags, but before this record, I'd never really investigated Deceased. I think I had an impression of them as one of the countless sub–Cannibal Corpse bands who purvey pummeling yet faceless grunt-and-grind over lengthy careers. I could not have been more wrong in this (essentially baseless) preconception, though: Make no mistake, Deceased is a seriously progressive band, and this record is a bona fide epic.

There's definitely some straight-up blasting death metal on Surreal Overdose—their sixth full-length—but there's just as much rollicking hardcore and, crucially, triumphant thrash. I've been getting down to a lot of …And Justice for All and Rust in Peace lately, and this album thrives on a brand of riff obsession that reminds me of that late-’80s/early-’90s tech-thrash flowering. Combine that sensibility with anthemic, punklike choruses and a serious dystopian sci-fi jones and you've got a very vintage-style album, almost Voivod-ish in its obsessive devotion to epic narrative scope, where the music feels like a constantly deepening STORYLINE.

As raw as the band sounds—Fowley's vocals remind me a bit of Sepultura's Max Cavalera—there's a real progginess to this album that I just love. Sound effects, dialogue samples, constant tempo changes, just tons and tons of INTRIGUE and MEMORABILITY. I actually think of this album as not terribly distant from something like David Comes to Life by Fucked Up (which I also really dig)—taking an "extreme" musical style and polishing it with a sort of epic sheen. The result in each case is a best-of-both-worlds scenario—a fascinating marriage of the primitive and the grand. I seriously doubt I will hear a better metal album (let alone death metal) than this in 2011. Hear/buy it via Bandcamp. Here's a track:

Kindred Assembly by Patac Records

Exhumed
All Guts, No Glory (Relapse)

Like Deceased, Exhumed is another band I'd heard of for years that I'd basically written off as generic. (In both cases, maybe the band names had something to do with it?) But thanks to some very intriguing recent coverage over at Invisible Oranges, including this wildly entertaining essay on Metallica's "Trapped Under Ice" by Exhumed guitarist Matt Harvey," I decided to give their new one a look. And man, this album just smokes.

Like on Surreal Overdose, there's a major thrash/hardcore thing going on here, an almost hysterical riff obsession. Exhumed shares with Deceased a certain over-the-top-ness, but if in Deceased that quality plays out in pulpy, nerdy narrative grandiosity, in Exhumed it comes across as more of a heathen-ish zaniness. There's sinister-minded camp all over this record, from the gruesomely funny cover art (depicting the band members as flesh-eating zombies) to the cornball song titles ("Your Funeral, My Feast") and the "one guy shrieking, the other one barfing" dual-vocal approach. But I assure you, this music is absolutely dead serious. The riffage (not to mention the soloing) simply could not be more righteous. I hear this stuff, and I just want to headbang at warp speed. Guitar nerds, you will be in heaven. This one is also on Bandcamp. Here's the aforementioned "Your Funeral…":

Your Funeral, My Feast by Exhumed

P.S. I was super-intrigued when Invisible Oranges labeled the previous Exhumed effort, Anatomy Is Destiny, "the …And Justice for All of goregrind" (in the intro to this Matt Harvey Q&A). Having sampled Anatomy a bit on Spotify over the last few days, I'm glad to report that this assessment isn't far off.

Disma
Towards the Megalith (Profound Lore)\

Incantation—yet another veteran death-metal band that I'd long assumed was kind of marginal. All the same, I knew that they were revered in the underground, so when I heard that a new Profound Lore band, Disma, featured former Incantation member Craig Pillard on the mic, I was intrigued.

Towards the Megalith does not disappoint in the least. If Surreal Overdose and All Guts are all about being pelted with rapid-fire streams of ideas (riffs, words, what have you), Towards the Megalith lumbers along at a much slower pace. Whether moving at molasses-y doom speed or a bottom-heavy midtempo, this band has enormous girth to it. You think of elephants and tanks and other sluggish yet unstoppable forces. Pillard's got a classic death-metal growl-and-gurgle style. Like a lot about Towards the Megalith, his delivery is familiar yet extremely satisfying. This band just wants to create a sense of slo-mo menace, without getting too ponderous or emo about it. The record's title is apt: You really do start to think of ancient societies and their terrifying moonlight rites when you hear this one. You can check out one track over at Stereogum, and one at Profound Lore, where you can also (of course) buy the record.

Autopsy
Macabre Eternal (Peaceville)

Out of all these bands, Autopsy is the one I'd had the most prior experience with. I wasn't hip to their early classics, such as 1991's Mental Funeral, at the time they came out, but I caught up to them over the past few years and was seriously impressed. The band seemed truly committed to taking Sabbathy evil-ness and riff worship and pushing these concepts into the realm of ugly, gross-out death metal. As on the old records, I'm not in love with the delivery of vocalist of Chris Reifert (who, like King Fowley, doubles in drums), who can sound overly cartoonish to me, like a parody of death-metal vocals. But there's a certain camp to what he does that fits in well with Autopsy's relentless garagey vibe. The playing is proficient as hell, but the band plays with a real rock & roll rawness. Unlike some death metal, which seems utterly disconnected from the blues, Autopsy is all about the sludgy churn, the badass midtempo groove. As with their old stuff, it's quite a treat on Macabre Eternal (their picking-up-right-where-they-left-off "comeback") to hear those core hard-rock values married to pulpy, gore-obsessed lyrical themes. Hear some samples and pick up Macabre Eternal at Peaceville.

Cannabis Corpse
Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (Tankcrimes)

What a fantastically fun record this is. As you might guess from the name, Cannabis Corpse started as something of a joke: I'm not quite clear on whether they were actually covering Cannibal Corpse songs (replacing all the blood-and-guts lyrics with lyrics about weed) or simply riffing on Cannibal's song titles and imagery. To be clear, though: Despite the titles punning on classic death-metal tracks by Decide, Morbid Angel and the like, all the current Cannabis material is original, and with this new record, these guys have taken a major step up in the seriousness-of-craft department.

These guys may just have Cannibal Corpse themselves beat when it comes to playing death metal that ROCKS. The orchestration on this album is absolutely incredible: Every instrument has its place, and all the components groove together so hard. (The beautifully clear production doesn't hurt.) The approach reminds me more of something like Thin Lizzy than it does death metal, a genre in which clarity and instrument separation and naturalness-of-sound don't tend to be high priorities. Despite the growly vocals, these guys actually sound like a more thrash-metal-informed version of the Fucking Champs to me than death metal proper. As with the Champs, these guys play extremely CRAFT-FORWARD metal, metal which has no interest in default rawness. They've written some extremely accomplished and detailed songs here, and they obviously want you be able to hear exactly what's going on.

As with every Cannabis Corpse listener, you've probably got preconceptions that they're a joke band, but this is probably the most pro presentation I've heard on a metal record this year: playing, songwriting, orchestration, production—it all just sounds beautiful and you need to hear it. Get thee to Bandcamp! Here's a track:

Blame it on Bud by Cannabis Corpse

Roundhouse: Reading Harry Crews

2011-07-26T06:23:00.015-04:00

I was sure I had Harry Crews pegged. A friend of a friend mentioned the author at a party a few weeks ago. I can't remember whether the term "hard-boiled" was used, but "Southern" definitely was, and Flannery O'Connor was invoked as a comparison. I said that I had never heard of Crews (when I heard the name spoken, I thought "Cruise"). The friend of a friend, the host of the party in question, surprised me by walking over to his bookshelf, picking out a Crews book—Body, from 1992—and handing it to me. "Here," he said. "Take this. Maybe someday you'll give me a book, or maybe you'll give someone else a book."

I was struck by the gesture. More people should gift books to near-strangers instead of hoarding them. Paradoxically I may have also felt slightly put-upon. Back in 2006, I wrote on DFSBP about the burden of book recommendations, and especially book gifts. My reading time is very limited—usually the combined length of my morning and evening subway commutes—and therefore, I choose my books carefully. Naturally, I trust my own instincts re: what I feel like reading much more than those of others. That's not to say I don't check out books that are recommended to me; I just like to approach them at my own pace. When someone says, "Here, take this," I usually feel a sense of obligation that I could do without.

I was charmed by the gesture, though, and I took the Crews home. It was a slim book, and after a few pages, I felt like I'd apprehended what it was. I'd been reading something heavy (Cormac McCarthy, my default novelist), and I liked that the Crews was brisk and funny: a broadly satirical story about a bodybuilding competition, featuring all kinds of what reviewers like to refer to as "colorful" characters.

I liked also that the author himself seemed to be a character. In his promo photo, Crews wore a tough expression and a mohawk. Googling around, I found that he was the son of a poor sharecropper and that he was given to hardline pronouncements. This YouTube interview with Crews fascinated me on a macho level. "The writer's job is to get naked," says Crews. "To hide nothing. To not look away from anything. To look at it. To not blink. To not be embarrassed by it, or ashamed of it. Strip it down, and let's get down to where the blood is, the bone is, instead of hiding it in clothes and all kinds of other stuff."

I found it funny that when I mentioned Crews in an e-mail to a friend of my mom's who teaches English in a North Carolina high school, she described him thusly: "Harry Crews is one of those Hemingway-esque guys, a little cruder, perhaps, whom other dudes really like." This seemed like a very apt description for the attraction I felt toward Crews. I tend to enjoy authors whom dudes really like—Faulkner, McCarthy—and Crews seemed simply like a more modern and easily caricatured version of the ones I was used to. At first, the prose conformed exactly to my image of the man, and I enjoyed that shallowness, for lack of a better word—the 25-words-or-less-ness of it, the way that I knew exactly what to say if a friend asked me about what I was reading. Not like when you're reading a novel, and you feel like you're racing to catch up with the author's intellect. But when you feel of a book that you "get it" immediately as its begun. It's the kind of smugness one who's accustomed to "literary" novels might (wrongly) feel reading, say, Stephen King. "Oh, I know what this is." It's like saying you want to take a break from thinking too hard.

As I moved through Body, I slowly realized that I got it less and less. Not to say that I had trouble understanding the plot or anything, but it became clear to me that I had vastly underestimated the emotional and intellectual heft of this book. At some point in the narrative, these caricatures had become full-blown characters, and devastating ones at that.

The book focuses on a champion female bodybuilder, Shereel Dupont, who is days away from winning the sport's ultimate title, Ms. Cosmos. Dupont seems like a shoo-in, until her estranged family shows up and breaks her crucial concentration. The book is basically the story of her regaining her composure in the frantic day or so before the competition.

On one level, the book is a cartoonish satire about a culture—bodybuilding—that couldn't be an easier target. Crews really gets off on the grotesqueness of the sport, the way its version of ultimate fitness is so often a thinly veiled version of great mental and physical malady, the way its focus on pumping one's self up often gives way to a rapacious sexual arrogance (see Arnold Schwarzenegger's classic "I'm coming day and night" rant).

But Crews doesn't just sketch his characters and walk away. He lives with them and forces you to do the same, way past the point where you can comfortably dismiss them as caricatures. It's as though one minute you're sitting with a bunch of other nerdy intellectuals, mocking bodybuilders on TV, and the next, you're backstage with them, uncomfortably close to all the sights and smells.

And it's not only the physical sensations. In its darkest moments, this book is coal-black. Crews delivers on his spiel above re: not blinking. His real subject here is the strange duality involved in TRAINING, in disciplining and denying one's self in order to achieve a goal that one has led one's self to believe means everything, and in doing so to a maniacal extreme. He's interested in the cost of that, how that mechanism betters people on one level, even as it chews them up and spits them out on another, turns them into unfeeling husks or crazed sociopaths. As you might guess from the book's title, Crews is also interested in the human body and its endless, impossible hungers. "It seemed a body could never be satisfied in this sorry world," muses one character.

To use the book's own analogy, it's like Crews starts with caricatures and buffs them up until they snap into vivid three-dimensionality. I realized what was going on as I was reading, but the bait-and-switch didn't become fully clear to me till I reached the last page. I won't get into what happens, but I will say that when I closed the book, I felt like I'd been punched in the heart.

"Hard-boiled," "Southern," writer "whom other dudes really like." Crews is all of these things. And I don't resent the shorthand either. We all use it. How else could we talk about things with each other? But what a wonderful thing to realize how completely you've underestimated an artist's power, when you think you've sized up their moves and then out of nowhere, they deliver a blinding roundhouse to your jaw.

More than anything, reading Body reminded me of an elementary lesson re: novels, which is that they ask a lot. You can't just dip your toe in; you have to go swimming, let yourself believe. (Otherwise, you're doomed to a lifetime of "getting it" without ever really feeling it or understanding what "it" is.) In the best cases, long after you're lulled into false security/cockiness, a slow-moving Great White bursts through the school of minnows and gobbles you right up.

Energy music

2011-07-22T09:27:00.006-04:00

Gary Moore - guitar, vocals; Phil Lynott - bass, backing vocals; Scott Gorham - guitar; Don Airey - keyboard; Cozy Powell - drums
1979

Vintage-hard-rock fanaticism has overrun my brain during the past few days, and here is one example of why. When you're able to cram this much musical information into a driving, anthemic performance, you're doing something very right.

On record: Max Roach's Scott Free

2011-07-19T20:00:00.016-04:00

One good reason to try out Spotify if you're on the fence: From what I can tell, the majority of the Black Saint and Soul Note catalogs are accessible via the service. For those unfamiliar with these imprints, a good analogy would be if all the great ’60s jazz labels (Blue Note, Riverside, ESP, Verve, etc.) were combined into two linked entities. In the Black Saint/Soul Note heyday—roughly the mid-’70s through the mid-’90s—everybody who was anybody recorded for label bosses Giacomo Pelliciotti and Giovanni Bonandrini. (I'll just throw out Andrew Hill, Bill Dixon, Sam Rivers, Steve Lacy, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman and Anthony Braxton as a random sampling.) In short, the combined BS/SN holdings are one of greatest jazz troves there is—easily up there with, say, the Blue Note or ECM catalogs. (Now that I think about it, I realize how important a strong visual aesthetic was/is to the success of Blue Note and ECM; BS/SN have many things, but this is not one of them.)

The availability of BS/SN on Spotify was a nice coincidence, given that my first order of listening business after Sunday's Odean Pope show was to study up on the Pope discography. Aside from his substantial work as a leader—I've been digging into the early trios on Moers as well as the wealth of Saxophone Choir material—he made a long string of ’80s Soul Note dates as part of Max Roach's quartet (or at times, with the strings-augmented double quartet).

I sampled a few of these today and enjoyed them all. But one date, 1984's Scott Free, stood way out from the pack. I cannot express to you how killer this album is. If you are a fan of gritty, pianoless freebop in the Ornette—or to cite another BS/SN ensemble, Old and New Dreams—mold, you have to hear it. There is just so much fire and abandon in this album. Pope and Roach make for a seriously punk jazz dream team—they're respectful players and great listeners, but they're always game to get their hands dirty.

One reason I bring up Ornette and his cronies is that Scott Free feels a lot like a Don Cherry Blue Note album. Like those stone-cold classics—especially the glorious Complete Communion—Scott Free is something of a suite: essentially a single 40-minute piece split in half. There's not as much thematic material to chew on as in the Cherries—the very solid motifs that are there were written by the Roach quartet's trumpeter, Cecil Bridgewater—but there are just as many changes of scenery, which is something I'm always looking for in jazz. (Pope's septet delivered a lot of that at Iridium the other night) For example, you hear traditionally outfitted solos throughout the course of the record—horn plus rhythm section—but you also hear a duo, as well as unaccompanied turns by Roach, bassist Tyrone Brown and Pope.

Part one of "Scott Free" (the work bears the same title as the album) starts off with some frenetic head action—very Ornette/Cherry-ish in its simultaneous tightness and barely-contained-ness—and quickly moves into a brief yet hardy avant-funk episode, with Roach working the backbeat and both Pope and Bridgewater wailing away. Then Bridgewater solos over a midtempo swing groove. Right here is when the brainmelting began for me: Bridgewater returns to the theme around the 7:00 mark, and seconds later, Roach explodes into a hurtling tempo. It's Pope's turn to solo and he just wants to get ugly, blowing with maximum brawn and heft and total punk rawness. This is the best of ’80s jazz right here: Unlike in a ’60s recording, the sound is totally dry and unromanticized, like the glare of cheesy stage lights, and the players are just going for it. This is honestly one of the most thrilling improvisational passages I've ever heard. There's no point in describing it—you just need to hear it. Max Roach, bebop king/innovator, squaring off with a total live-wire tenor. I love the Shepp and Taylor duets as much as the next guy, but this is the sound of a working band, of players building off a common language, a repertoire, starting at the top and just blasting off. I love the sound of it.

I won't go play-by-play through the rest of this (though I'm tempted to narrate the unfailingly tough and swinging, not to mention beyond-poetic, Roach solo near the end of part one, and the steely, wounded, blues-drenched, ecstatic, speaking-in-tongues unaccompanied Pope statement near the beginning of part two, the latter of which gives way—in a mindblowing display of good taste—to a Tyrone Brown solo with a laid-back Roach on brushes chugging along underneath). If you seek the grit and the fire and the surging jazz energy, presented with pro studio fidelity, just trust me and check this out. It's pure punk lava and you will not be sorry. Scott Free is what you want to hear in every sense: (1) An old-time master (Roach) at the helm. (2) An honest-to-god working band. (3) Young, hungry sidemen. (4) Great, non-invasive production—where the drums sound so loud and crisp and unglamorous. People tell you jazz languished in the ’80s, you shove Scott Free at them and tell them to shut it.

There's all kinds of other overlooked vintage Roach on Spotify, including several other Soul Note quartet dates (I dug Pictures in a Frame and In the Light), and some considerably weirder stuff, like the absolutely baffling It's Christmas Again (recorded just days/weeks after Scott Free, and featuring the quartet along with guests like Lee Konitz and Tony Scott), on which the band's funky improvisations serve as the backdrop to a polemical poetry reading (vocalized, I'm pretty sure, by Roach, but not, I'm pretty sure, written by him) that has less to do with Santa Claus than with a harsh reminder of racism and its role in America's founding. Then there's the weighty/classy Members, Don't Get Weary, a near-heartbreaking 1968 postbop quintet set with heavy sidefolk Charles Tolliver, Gary Bartz, Stanley Cowell and Jymie Merritt.

If you decide to sign up for Spotify, check all of this out, and if you haven't yet made up your mind, you can always buy a download of Scott Free for—I really can't believe this to be true—a measly $1.78 on Amazon. (They still haven't figured out how to price jazz albums with only a few long tracks.)

Lastly, in the course of writing this post, I've discovered that someone has uploaded video of an entire 1989 Roach quartet show to Dailymotion (a.k.a. second-rate YouTube). If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check that out right this second.

15 favorite music books

2011-07-19T07:56:00.008-04:00

Inspired by Ethan Iverson's list, in turn inspired by Pitchfork's list, here are 15 of my favorite books about music. Like EI's selection, this is simply the result of a quick bookshelf scan, but unlike that list, this one does include memoirs, biographies and the like.

As Serious as Your Life
Valerie Wilmer
I still remember the thrill of discovering this in Labyrinth Books in Morningside Heights. "Holy shit, there's a whole book about free jazz?!?"

Forces in Motion
Graham Lock
I've gushed about this one before. A tender and informative duet between author and subject (that being Anthony Braxton).

Chronicles, Volume One
Bob Dylan
A magical and terrifying tome. People say it's obscure, but it's totally clear. Tells us more than we ever thought we'd hear from the horse's mouth.

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography
Jimmy McDonough
Another one I've praised to the heavens. A constant spray of mindblowing information. The essential guide to one of our most essential artists.

Steve Lacy: Conversations
Jason Weiss ed.
A series of startlingly lucid interviews with one of the great jazz philosophers.

This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band
Levon Helm with Stephen Davis
The straight dope about one of my most beloved bands. You'll never watch The Last Waltz the same way again.

Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis 1967–1991
Paul Tingen
This book has a philosophical patina that can be off-putting, but push through and you'll find a painstakingly detailed, step-by-step study of this crucial period, all tied to the Miles disocgraphy. Great interview material.

Rockers, Jazzbos & Visionaries
Bill Milkowski
One of my favorite interview books. Zorn, Laswell, Fripp, Quine, the Marsalises, Tony Williams, Jimmy Smith and a ton of others.

Spiderland
Scott Tennent [33 1/3 series]
Does exactly what a history book should: Tell you a ton that you don't already know. Some prior thoughts here.

Miles Ornette Cecil
Howard Mandel
An oblique book, incorporating new and previously published material, but it has its own logic. A record of decades spent ruminating on (and interacting with) three masters. Prior thoughts here.

Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal
Jeff Wagner
A no-nonsense encyclopedia of a favorite subgenre. Prior thoughts here.

The Jazz Ear
Ben Ratliff
Probably my favorite jazz book. Sit-downs with the masters that double as definitive portraits. Prior thoughts here.

Precious Metal
Albert Mudrian ed.
Speaking of definitive portraits. 25 classic extreme-metal albums get the Behind the Music treatment. Some of these records you'll know; others you'll be thrilled to discover. Prior thoughts here.

Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews
Arthur Taylor
Intimate, hard-hitting conversations. Taylor, a master jazz drummer, interviewed his peers and they rose to the occasion. I'll never forget, e.g., Hampton Hawes's profane musings.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
Robin D.G. Kelley
Kelley lays it all out in a readable fashion. This is the kind of book that should exist for every major figure in politics, sports, the arts, whatever, i.e., the place you go first. Prior thoughts here.

P.S. I've only just started it, but the new Bob Mould book is really cool.

The unruly engine: Odean Pope at Iridum

2011-07-18T08:05:00.005-04:00

I caught Odean Pope and his septet at Iridium last night, and it was one of the loudest sets of live jazz I've ever heard. This was an incredibly forceful band, one that seemed to punch holes through the air when all players aligned for the ensemble passages. (It didn't hurt that the featured guests were saxist James Carter and drummer Billy Hart.) I had heard Pope's latest record, Odean's List, some months back but I hadn't refreshed before the show and thus didn't really have the sound in mind. It was pretty brutal, a turbocharged postbop display. In recollecting the show, I think of Charles Tolliver's recent big-band music. This outfit of Pope's is a much smaller band, obviously, but like the Tolliver orchestra, it focuses on a dizzyingly exact blare, notes perfectly stacked to yield maximum sheen and volume. It's jazz as attack music, the polar opposite of pensive.

This jazz steamroller was definitely an awesome thing to behold. The set included some deeply old-school jazz machoness, often originating from the two guest stars. This was my first time hearing James Carter live, and though I had a sense from records that he was a bit of a beast, I didn't really get just how beastly he actually was. You can't witness this man play and not think of a bull, or some other snorting, writhing creature—or, for that matter, some elemental force. He basically uses his horn as an implement via which to rend sound; that's the only word that seems to do his approach justice. What his saxophones (tenor and baritone) emit is a stream of aggravated air, as though the molecules were so terrified of his lungpower that they just come sputtering and stampeding out. Some notes ring clear and loud; others are trampled in the crush, and they squeak and yelp as they expire. He may be the closest performer I've ever seen live to someone like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, one of these true world-destroying sax behemoths.

At times Carter simply drowned the band out—it's pretty much impossible to listen to anyone else when he's soloing—but Pope set up some cool cage matches for him, including a lengthy duet with Hart near the end of the set, during which the esteemed drummer took on a kind of schoolyard toughness. It was a friendly square-off, but clearly a take-no-prisoners one: Each player was unmistakably trying to knock the other off his horse. If I had my choice I'd rather hear Hart in a more cooperative context, but this was an exciting alternative.

Carter also dueted with Pope at one point, both players steaming and barreling along simultaneously. It was an impressive fireworks display, but for me, it paled a bit alongside the highlight of the evening. The latter came early in the set. I didn't catch the name of the tune, but the head was to-die-for, a lush, Mingus-y ballad. Interestingly, unlike on the rest of the pieces, all the solos here were totally unaccompanied; the band would play a brief theme statement, and then drop out entirely, leaving the featured player to monologue.

The first few of these breaks were by Pope himself, and they were just glorious. I was not terribly familiar with Pope going into the show. I knew he was a veteran Philly tenor player whose work sort of straddled the avant-garde and the hard-swinging. Maybe in my mind I had aligned him with someone like the late, great Fred Anderson. Anyway, I didn't have a sense of his actual sound, though, and it was a thing of poetry: During these unaccompanied breaks, he combined startling boppy fluidity with wonderful little blemishes—a squeaked note, a spell of noisy overblowing. Neither element took over, so that you never felt like he was pushing beyond what a distinguished player "ought" to do in a jazz-club setting like Iridium, but he was riding that boundary in a very subtly daring way. He tipped his hand slightly, as if to say, "I could get seriously out if I wanted to," but his statements were compact. He also gave generous solo space to pianist George Burton and bassist Lee Smith. He seemed to consider himself just another player in the ensemble.

No disrespect to Carter & Co., but I wouldn't have been too upset if Pope were the only soloist of the night: The gruff, gritty imperfection of his sound brought a crucial sense of struggle to the proceedings, like an unruly engine in a sleek, flawless sedan.

So I'm officially curious about Odean Pope. What are the essential records? I definitely want to dig into his work with Max Roach, as well as his Moers and CIMP sessions. What about the Saxophone Choir or the recent Porter CDs? This stuff is all more or less unfamiliar to me, so I'd welcome any recommendations. Go here (as I'm about to) for a typically informed Bagatellen discussion of the Pope discography.

Sandbags: Waking up to Springsteen

2011-07-13T09:34:00.009-04:00

Bruce Springsteen
"Racing in the Street"

Some of my college friends were obsessed with Bruce Springsteen. I was just discovering "classic rock" at that time—Beatles and Dylan, mostly—and I had not yet awakened to the possibility that the Boss had something to offer beyond the bombastic new-Americana I knew from the radio. As a budding professional thinker-about-music, I had taken an anti-Bruce stance.

Just as every arts writer has his or her own personal pantheon of all-time greats, we each also construct a mirror image set, populated with creators we love to hate. We take stances based upon our own feelings and opinions, but also in reaction to those of others. What would one stand to gain, for example, by expressing a dislike of a figure like Bruce Springsteen if he were not beloved by so many? If he weren't, the opinion would exist in a vacuum. It would score one no points; the act of expressing it would have no object.

Over the years, I have taken great delight in late-blooming passions for the work of this or that artist. It could be a band I never knew existed (the early-’70s British folk outfit Comus blew my mind the other day) or it could be someone like Bruce, against whom I'd formed a somewhat proud prejudice. I have just finished listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town in its entirety for the first time (via the awesome recent box set The Promise), and it was glorious.

I think of a hot-air balloon, and how you have to throw sandbags overboard in order to soar higher. Negative opinions, especially those that have calcified without much practical experience to back them up, are ballast. We hold onto them tightly. The more other people love, the more we want to hate. The world toasts Arcade Fire; we retreat to our rooms to blog crabbily about them, or we blithely dis them in conversation. Criticism is all well and good, but one has to monitor one's own dislikes and make sure they're informed, "accurate," useful, nonrestrictive.

At this point, it's easy for me to see that holding on to some sort of blanket distaste for a great American artist is self-injurious. I see that I had turned my back on a whole vista of music without giving it a chance. And to what end? This petty pride in saying "No" while many others say "Yes."

Consensus can be a terrible, scary thing. I'm not saying go with the flow at all costs. But sometimes the People are simply right. And from what I am starting to discover, I realize they were right about Bruce.

I've been thinking a lot about the idealized space he inhabits, the ’70s. I am so into this idea of art and commerce being unified. Of not having to turn to this pompous, exclusionary "indie" sphere for your intellectually and emotionally nourishing pop music. You could go to the record store, and there the giants would be, lined up on the racks. Your Jonis and Neils and Cats and Bruces. The band America is another recent obsession—lighter, maybe, but still with so much substance. Music everyone can enjoy, that everyone can think and feel about.

Here's to letting more of that "everyone" in, to embracing a time when appreciating music was not a walled-off act, done in a snobbish spirit, buoyed by passion but also weighed down by reactionary baggage. All of that is why I hate this idea of CRITICISM and why I never self-identify with that term. I know that the same demons whisper in my ear, the seductive call of dislike, of anti-, of crossing your arms, of saying "impress me," of "been there, done that." Of judgment, I guess, but more specifically the kind of tuning out that happens when you feel there's something vast and appealing out there that so many others are privy to and that you're maybe in the process of getting left out of.

I think that's a big part of it, this idea that "I could never catch up." Bruce Springsteen, for example, has 30 albums, and these people have spent a decade or more learning about every one, and I don't want to feel behind. We all want to be ahead of the curve. Sometimes it's great to bring up the rear. To just be like, "You know what? You guys were right." And to not worry about timeliness and just wake up anew to the fact that there is SO MUCH SHIT OUT THERE TO LEARN ABOUT.

Darkness on the Edge of Town is an old album, but it is new to me. It is a reason to be happy today. Goodbye to the anti-Bruce sentiment—one less sandbag to weigh me down.

P.S. "Streets of Fire," live 1978:

P.P.S. Branford Marsalis on the late Clarence Clemons, via Do the Math.

Big Pants: a progressive-grunge sampler

2011-07-06T20:25:00.033-04:00

[NOTE: I've augmented some of the entries and tacked on five additional selections at the end.]

I've had the early-to-mid ’90s on the brain lately. This probably has something to do with (a) my Time Out NY preview of Soundgarden's two upcoming area shows (Friday and Saturday), and (b) my recent conversation with former Rollins Band bassist Melvin Gibbs.

Both Soundgarden and Rollins Band fall into a subgenre that I would term progressive grunge. In employing this term, I'm zeroing on a specific sound that crystallized in the post-Nirvana era, one that spanned the under- and overgrounds. When I think progressive grunge, I think of metal crossed with alternative rock and pumped full of fusiony flash and funky swagger. Of tinny, super-crunchy riffage and proudly slappy bass. Of snares tightened up to a bell-like ping. Of guitars hoisted high and pressed tight to the chest. Of brash syncopated accents. Of stylized brooding, illustrated via strobe lights. Of the dead serious mingling with a certain zaniness. Of post–Perry Farrell dreadlocks, and rapping that no self-respecting rap fan would tolerate. All of this adds up to something my friends and I like to call BP, which stands for "big pants," i.e., the kind favored by skaters during the Lollapalooza era.

Yes, when I think of progressive grunge, I think of cheese, but I also think of a bold and thoughtful movement: unafraid of complexity, catchiness, bombast. This is rock music for the pit and for the airwaves, for the show at the VFW hall as well as for the 120 Minutes countdown. I'm fascinated by the way it can seem both fantastically dated and absolutely fresh. This sound still reverberates in bands like the Mars Volta, but really, it dead-ended sometime in the late ’90s. Still, there's a reason that so many of us who grew up in this era hold these bands so dear (Quicksand—pictured above—is one outfit mentioned below who sound as crucial to me today as they did when I first heard them in high school). Though many of us may have moved on to rawer, more extreme sounds (whether along the underground continuum to, say, the DC or Chicago aesthetics, back to the primeval sources like Sabbath and Zeppelin, or straight through to the Metallicas and the Cannibal Corpses), we crave the clarity of this music, its logic and nimbleness, its melodic jolt and body-moving thrust. We crave its accessibility and revel in its non-dumbed-down-ness. It's much cooler to say you were shaped by hardcore or proto-metal, but when I get right down to it, these are the sounds that helped shape my rock aesthetics.

There's not a lot out there now like this, so we have to look backward. (To be fair, bands like Protest the Hero, and even Mastodon from time to time, push some of these same buttons for me.) Progressive grunge is about the uncompromising post-hardcore spirit slamming up against MTV-ish budgets and production values—in many cases a very fruitful collision. Not to mention a distinctly ’90s one. (Living Colour's Vivid, from 1988, is one important precursor. NOTE: I've added a Colour track—see addendum at the bottom of this post.)

Some of these bands are (or were, at the time of these recordings) widely thought of as progressive-grunge bands (Soundgarden, for example, or Tool). Some are often characterized as weird hardcore bands (Iceburn, Into Another, Suicidal Tendencies). Some are just plain metal bands (Anacrusis). But there's a lot of Venn-diagram overlap among them. A quest for sleek, clever loudness, for bright, pure hooks. Ear-bending hit singles. Think of progressive grunge as the populist version of math rock, i.e., another sort of prog-rock outpost. The obstacle course married to the crowd-pleasing impulse.

Anyone else come of age during the progressive-grunge era? If so—or if you're simply an enthusiast of the period—I'd love to hear what your favorites are.

P.S. All credit to my bros/bandmates Tony and Joe, as well as to my friend Nick P., for helping to reawaken my ears to the possibilities of the BP movement.

P.P.S. In the spirit of how I originally consumed this music (MTV), I have included hit singles where appropriate.

P.P.P.S. Some of these tracks I obsessed over at the time (Rollins, Helmet, Quicksand) and some are more recent discoveries (Handsome, Into Another, Kings X), but I feel they are all of a piece somehow.

P.P.P.P.S. It occurs to me after the fact that Shudder to Think's Pony Express Record (1994) is a progressive-grunge landmark. The record stands historically apart from what's below—it's artier than most of my choices and probably more subtle on the whole—but really, it's not terribly different. If Shudder to Think's first few releases hadn't come out on Dischord, it would be fair to lump them in with, say, early Tool or even Soundgarden. [NOTE: I added a Shudder track. See the addendum at the bottom.]

P.P.P.P.P.S. Faith No More and Primus probably belong in this conversation as well. [NOTE: I added a Primus track. Again, see addendum.]

/////

King's X
"Lost in Germany" (1992):

BP at its most joyful. Chops served up with irresistible strut and swagger.

***

Fishbone
"Servitude" (1993):

Prog-core perfection. Jazz-rock fueling the mosh.

***

Soundgarden
"Face Pollution" (1991):

Cornell & Co. at their looniest and most unhinged. A weirdo-punk gem that helps us remember that Soundgarden were once affiliated with SST. In your mind's ear, this band might sound generic, but they were completely off the wall. (NOTE: "Rusty Cage" and "Outshined" represent the prog-grunge ideal—catchy and head-spinning. Do not take it for granted how cool it was/is that these strange, strange songs were in some respect hit singles. "Spoonman" is much cheesier, but similarly bold and unusual.)

***

Tool
"Part of Me" (1992):

Prog comes screaming into early-’90s L.A. Dynamically, Tool still had a long way to go, but the basic ingredients were all there even at this early stage.

***

Into Another
"Poison Fingers" (1994):

Righteously abrasive BP stylings. Too weird for Lollapalooza yet a beautiful exemplar of the progressive-grunge ethos.

***

Life of Agony
"Through and Through" (1993):

Emo-hardcore that goes way out on a limb in the service of the pit and the radio.

***

Quicksand
"Omission" (1993):

Bow down before the prog-grunge masters. Hip-hoppy machismo and pile-driving power.

***

Iceburn
"Irish Jig"/"Fall" (1992):

More off-the-wall abrasion, but still a prime prog-grunge specimen. Hooks within the hecticness.

***

Rage Against the Machine
"Down Rodeo" (1996):

The Cadillac of BP groovecore.

***

Voivod
"Golem" (1991):

Voivod got grungier and poppier than you think around this time, retaining that offbeat edge. Deadly hooks.

***

Stick
"No Groovy" (1993):

Hometown favorites of mine from the Kansas City vicinity. A deep BP skank. By the way, starting a track out in lo-fi and having it kick in at full power after a little while is a progressive-grunge trademark.

***

311
"Come Original" (1999):

Say what you want about these guys, but they snuck badass fusion impulses onto alt-rock radio. The last gasp of BP before nu metal took over?

***

Clockhammer
"Greying Out" (1992):

A glorious WTF, toggling between notey, King's X–y alt-prog and borderline Toad the Wet Sprocket territory. True ’90s art rock.

***

Rollins Band
"Low Self Opinion" (1992):

MTV-ized hardcore, pumped up with prog know-how.

***

Suicidal Tendencies
"Accept My Sacrifice" (1992):

Brilliant outsider funk. No other band sounds like this. "Institutionalized" is cool and all, but The Art of Rebellion is an overlooked classic.

***

Mind Over Four
"Half Way Down"/"Charged" (1993):

More L.A. prog-core. Very early-Tool-ish, pissed off and smarter than you.

***

Bad Brains
"Rise" (1993):

The hardcore heroes, very handsomely MTV-ized.

***

Anacrusis
"Sound the Alarm" (1993):

Often labeled thrash, but this sounds more like prog-grunge to me. Big emphasis on the hooks and the architecture.

***

Helmet
"Milktoast" [a.k.a. "Milquetoast"] (1994):

What can you say about these BP heroes? Body-moving riff fest.

***

Handsome
"Needles" (1997):

Not quite top-notch, but a respectable entry from this Helmet/Quicksand/Iceburn spin-off.

/////

[Added Sunday, 7/10/11]

More BP: Five additional progressive-grunge touchstones

Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Suck My Kiss" (1991):

I really shouldn't have omitted this song from the list above. In the early ’90s, the Chili Peppers proved that the only thing more BP than wearing big pants was wearing no pants. "Suck My Kiss" is the final word in lean, mean party metal, and an honest engagement with the P-Funk universe.

***

Primus
"Too Many Puppies" (1990):

Another zany BP classic. There's something about Primus that is deeply grating (okay, a lot of things), but in the end, there's no sense denying the nerd-mosh thrust on display here. Primus offered a back-door entry into the metal world for those who couldn't deal with all the doom and gloom, and for that, they deserve props. It's interesting too, since both Les Claypool and guitarist Larry "Ler" LaLonde came up playing metal (Claypool famously auditioned for Metallica and LaLonde played in Possession). Revisiting Primus reminds me that I need to reengage with the maniacal free-fusion leads that Ler splattered all over most of the band's catalog.

***

Clutch
"Passive Restraints" (1992):

Most know Clutch as affable stoner-metal road dogs, but they were a much more aggro band in the early days. This is a primo BP jam: more post-hardcore (or even just hardcore) than progressive grunge, but it's got that eccentricity to it (the lyrics are key) that makes you think "alt" and Lollapalooza and all that. About as macho as BP got, but still BP.

***

Shudder to Think
"Gang of $" (1994):

I've often gushed about Shudder to Think's major-label debut, Pony Express Record, on this blog. Please hear it in full if you haven't. Basically Shudder were the Queen of BP: pure pomp and art-rock over-the-top-ness mixed with that polished progginess that is the hallmark of great BP music. Shudder to Think will probably always be remembered more for their indie roots (Dischord) than for their 120 Minutes–ness, but to me, their best material fits in perfectly with the fruitfully commercialized alt-rock movement of the early ’90s. The combination of artiness and big-budget slickness on display here is truly head-spinning.

***

Living Colour
"Leave It Alone" (1993):

Not as essential as 1988's "Cult of Personality," which is pretty much the blueprint for and the pinnacle of the BP sound, "Leave It Alone" is still a pretty badass slice of progressive grunge. Gotta love that nasty fuzz-funk riff.

A marriage

2011-07-04T15:49:00.015-04:00

At around 5:45pm on the evening of July 2, 2011, Joseph E. Petrucelli presided over the wedding of Henry M. Shteamer and Laal F. Shams-Molkara at the Metropolitan Building in Long Island City, Queens. Dinner, drinks and dancing followed, as well as live music performed by the groom, the officiant, the bride and assorted friends.

Thank you to all who helped make this such a beautiful event. I am a very happy man.

/////

Musical scorecard:

Laal walked down the aisle to a loop of David Thomas Broughton's "The Heart You Don't Look Out For," and the celebratory post-ceremony fanfare was "Never Stop" by the Bad Plus. The first-dance soundtrack was a medley of Van Morrison's "Cul de Sac" and Thin Lizzy's "Wild One." The live set included works by Glenn Danzig, Eddie Money, Becker/Fagen and the Strokes. Billy Ocean's "Caribbean Queen" kicked off the DJ portion, and various Takoma releases (Fahey, Kottke) played during cocktail hour and dinner.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #4: Melvin Gibbs

2011-06-25T06:50:00.003-04:00

I'm proud to present the fourth installment of this ongoing series. Thanks as always to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges for his design/layout expertise and for playing host, and thanks, of course, to the subject himself, Melvin Gibbs.

I have to say, I've rarely had more fun preparing for an interview. I knew a bit of Rollins Band back in the early-to-mid '90s, but I definitely wasn't savvy enough as a teenager to hear the outfit as a "combination of Funkadelic and King Crimson," as Gibbs brilliantly describes it. And though I may have been vaguely aware of Gibbs's presence in the group, I didn't have a clue what his history was.

Street Priest by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society (thanks to Steve Smith for digging this out), Seize the Rainbow by Sonny Sharrock, Strange Meeting by Power Tools, I Am a Man by Harriet Tubman, For You - For Us - For All by SociaLybrium. These are just a few of the great records Gibbs has made, and I'm still discovering more (e.g., Ellery Eskelin's Ten, which I can't wait to hear). He is a hero of a movement that doesn't have a name: postfusion, hardcore-informed, noise-embracing, funk-loving.

Currently, Gibbs works with Harriet Tubman—check out their new Sunnyside release, a 2000 live interpretation of Coltrane's Ascension with special guests—which played at Undead Jazzfest just the other night. If anyone caught the set, I'd love to hear about it via the comments. He also just completed a tour of Europe with Encryption, his trio with Vernon Reid and Ronald Shannon Jackson (you can hear an exclusive live track on the interview page at Invisible Oranges). Keep up with Gibbs via Tumblr, Bandcamp (where you can hear two full albums by recent Gibbs-led all-star projects) and Twitter.

P.S. As of this writing, two more Heavy Metal Be-Bop interviews are complete and in the queue. Stay tuned!

Mandance: Tarbaby at Undead Jazzfest

2011-06-23T23:23:00.012-04:00

I spent the first couple hours of Undead Jazzfest 2011 channel-flipping. I took advantage of the staggered set times and jumped between venues to catch about 15 minutes of several different acts. I enjoyed watching Tyshawn Sorey deploy the gravity blast in his sparse, cryptic trio with Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock; hearing the often mercilessly abstract Nate Wooley play a straightforwardly beautiful solo with Harris Eisenstadt's Canada Day quintet; eavesdropping on Marc Ribot's ragged and poignant unaccompanied set. But then Tarbaby started playing and there was no need to think about OPTIONS, the blessing and the curse of the Jazzfest experience (whether Winter or Undead). I put the remote down.

I had heard this collective—pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Eric Revis (who sounded incredible alongside Peter Brötzmann at Vision Festival XVI) and drummer Nasheet Waits (for my money, one of the greatest living jazz drummers), augmented with various guests such as alto hero Oliver Lake, who fronted the group last night—on its 2010 sophomore album, The End of Fear. I'll admit to having initially been baffled by Tarbaby's conceptual/satirical slant (the record features a lot of overdubbed voices, speaking on the topic of jazz convention—and by extension, race— and creating a strange push-and-pull with the music); in short, it's the kind of record with a good deal of fuss and context, which tends to turn me off. As so often happens, I set the album aside intending to give it a second chance, but that chance never came about.

I can see now that no matter how good the record was, it wasn't going to prepare me for the shock (I think that's a fair word) of seeing Tarbaby live. The combined power of these musicians was damn near scary: I felt like I was watching Led Zeppelin, where every player can detonate on their own, but together they were simply volcanic.

The first piece built slowly, with Evans worrying an impish high-register phrase while the rhythm section got its bearings. Lake strode to the mic and began zipping off his trademark turbo-avant-bebop lines, and the music swelled. The band was like a tiny creature drawing air into its lungs and doubling in size with each breath, until—by the middle of this initial number—it was a writhing, hulking beast.

I wish I could put before you the loudness and the weight these four gave off during the course of the set. It's that creeping feeling of "Wow, these players are obviously playing at about 1/10 their full strength right now—if they let it entirely off the leash, we're going to be in some serious trouble." And soon, we were, and it was glorious. This was classic inside-outside jazz, sliding in and out of swing time, always inviting the turbulence while courting the form. And all four players projecting such mightiness, just at the border of macho and yet imbued with so much soul and wit and graciousness. Postbop, I guess I'd call it, though a particularly boisterous and totally un-arty strain of it.

I remember Evans's whirlwind piano flourishes, delivered with classic showman's flair, thundering-herd-of-elephants solos from Waits, Revis's cathartic shout in the middle of what I think was the piece "Brews" (the band quickly fell in line, punctuating the end of every phrase with a collective vocal outburst). Energy-wise, the performance reminded me of any number of free-jazz blowouts I've witnessed, but the crucial difference was that there was a SHAPE and an architecture at play. The quartet worked with relatively brief pieces, a repertoire it knew cold—mostly originals, I believe, in addition to an awesome version of "Awake Nu" from Don Cherry's Where Is Brooklyn?—and as it pushed and pulled and pummeled and caressed these compositions, you felt a guiding logic underneath. A point to it all.

As recently as last week, Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus reiterated that "The future of jazz lies in bands." Tarbaby is definitely, definitely what he meant, and I really hope they get their due soon (someone please book them for a week at a club!) because they are every bit as impressive as TBP, the Bandwagon (of which Waits is also a member) or any of the other more high-profile collectives. That irreverent energy that left me cold on my initial brush with The End of Fear, as though the band were sharing a joke I didn't get, made perfect sense live; it translated as a rare camaraderie. Not the annoying in-jokeyness ("See what I did there?") that sometimes haunts outside-the-box jazz, but a very genuine sense of play—playing with fire really.

It's quite possible that Tarbaby is the most virile jazz band on earth. Again, that flirting with machoness, that cutting-contest mentality, but instead of just stringing solos together, these men were building something, sharing in their own gloves-off kind of way. What a joy to see Oliver Lake, a man who will turn 70 next year, romping around alongside three considerably younger players (their median age is about 40), and there being no sense of tedious reverence for the old guy. Everyone was scrapping together, trading blows. It's enough to make you sad that some older players don't test their mettle against younger generations, and the same goes with younger players who don't get in the ring with older ones. I've definitely written this before (I remember singling out the example of Darius Jones, who was brave enough to tap Cooper-Moore and Bob Moses for his Aum Fidelity debut), but it's such a crucial thing in jazz. It's risky, sure—for the old as much as the young—and not everyone is ready for it. But Oliver Lake is currently playing at an astonishingly high level. Make no mistake, he is a living master, and since he gigs in New York all the time—he'll be back at Undead on Sunday with his Organ Quartet—you are remiss if you don't go check him out. If at all possible, check him out with Tarbaby.

I hope someone makes a live record of this band, or better yet a live DVD. I'm frantically wanting to demonstrate to my friends who weren't at last night's show how great they are. I know I'm going to go back to The End of Fear with fresh ears, but when you get down to it, Tarbaby exists in an undocumentable realm. Regarding it on record is like playing with an action figure of a T-Rex. This is the kind of sweet, jovial thunder that you have to hear in nature.

P.S. Hypocritical as it may seem, here's a Tarbaby + Lake live clip that gives you a little taste of the wildness.

P.P.S. Here's Tarbaby's self-titled 2009 debut (which I haven't heard yet) on CD Baby.

Halftime report: 10 strong 2011 jazz releases

2011-06-22T20:49:00.023-04:00

Last week, several top jazz writers took a minute to survey the year in recorded jazz thus far. (The Undead Jazzfest, which starts tonight—TONY preview here, full schedule here—serves as a handy peg, dividing the calendar more or less in half.) Here's a 25-strong list from Jim Macnie, and 25 plus change from Patrick Jarenwattananon.

To some, these midyear round-ups might seem like overkill; you may even question the value of the ubiquitous year-end polls. But I'm with Jim, who defended the practice in his own wry way ("We all love our horse races and we all love our listicles."). As for me, I'm just really happy that so much jazz is still being recorded and released on albums, and I'm doubly happy that so much of it is being sent to me. As a fan, it's only natural to want to celebrate the bounty and take stock, whether that's yearly, biyearly or daily.

In that spirit, here's an alphabetical list of 10 2011 jazz releases I'm digging. (For reference, here's my 2010 midyear list.) I try to get into a zen frame of mind re: such lists, i.e., not to choose but to be chosen. Great records exude a subtle magnetism and they keep pulling you back. You can't always identify them on the first spin, but they call to you. Playing them, there's a perpetual sense of unfinished business. They are unknowable or at least elusive. That doesn't rule out straightforward appeal, but there has to be something drawing you back. These have all had that effect on me.

Ben Allison Action-Refraction (Palmetto)
This is a record of covers (plus one original). Most of the pieces are new to me (or, like Monk's "Jackie-ing," only vaguely familiar), so I came to them fresh. I just love the sound of the band: funky and sassy and full, and with a rock edge (e.g., on P.J. Harvey's "Missed"), though not trying too hard to mimic rock, which can be a major red flag. My favorite tune is a reading of Samuel Barber's "St. Ita's Vision," which has a psych-happy, retro-synth sheen that—as I suggested in a Time Out NY preview—puts me in a Clockwork Orange frame of mind. You can stream the whole album on Allison's site.

Gerald Cleaver's Uncle June Be It As I See It (Fresh Sound)
If I remember correctly, I received this album right after I finished compiling my best-of-2010 lists. I recall liking it then, but I was worried it would get lost in the shuffle as the year wore on. Fortunately, that hasn't come to pass; this one is a keeper. Don't let the noisy opener, "To Love," throw you: This a sensitive, gently colorful record. The second piece, "Charles Street Sunrise," absolutely knocks me down with its chamberish beauty—like something off Andrew Hill's A Beautiful Day. Some tracks thrive on chaotic vocal overdubs and other programmatic content (alluding to Cleaver's family history), but the sweet ones are the ones that grab me. Like the Allison, the whole disc is streaming online via Cleaver's Bandcamp page. Check out "Fence & Post: Statues/UmbRa," which features a breathtaking Craig Taborn piano solo. (I should also nod respectfully to Out of This World's Distortions, a deep new Aum Fidelity effort from Farmers by Nature, Cleaver and Taborn's trio with William Parker.) I caught a nice live set by this band at Cornelia Street Café a few months back; hope Cleaver takes Uncle June to the stage again soon.

Eric Harland Voyager, Live by Night (Sunnyside)
This one originally came out last year, but apparently Sunnyside is reissuing it in July. The disc showed up in the mail a few days ago and it instantly caught my ear: fiery, chops-forward postbop (in the second-great-Miles-quintet vein) with a great sense of pacing (check out the solo "intermezzos" from pianist Taylor Eigsti). Lots of swagger here and a whiff of hotshot fusion, via Julian Lage's guitarwork. Hadn't heard too much of Harland before (I remember seeing him with Don Byron's Ivey-Divey trio a few years back, subbing for Billy Hart, who in turn subbed for him during the second half of the set), but he's been front and center this year, via this record and the cool James Farm collective. Wish I could've caught that latter group live this past weekend.

Ari Hoenig Lines of Oppression (Naive)
Speaking of hotshot fusion… I saw this band live at Smalls this past Monday and was floored, as I have been by Hoenig & Co. in the past. You should go hear them (Hoenig, bassist Orlando Le Flemming and guitarist Gilad Hekselman, with one of several pianists—the other night it was the marvelous Shai Maestro) in the flesh, but this record gives you a good taste. This band plays tricky, unapologetically flashy daredevil jazz that brims over with the joy of challenge. (I think of my math-rock survey, and the idea of the obstacle course.) Each player always goosing the other. This isn't really about subtlety as much as high-wire interactivity, and I can see it turning some people off, but for me it feels like watching great college basketball or something—a constant rush. Very catchy tunes too, most of them Hoenig originals. Check out some samples at Amazon ("Arrows and Loops" will not leave my brain) and a recent live set via Soundcheck.

Honey Ear Trio Steampunk Serenade (Foxhaven)
Another one that blindsided me. Had heard of drummer Allison Miller before, but had not checked out much of her work. Saxist Erik Lawrence and bassist Rene Hart were totally new to me, though. This cooperative trio plays like a dream, subcategories be damned. Something about the way they operate reminds me of Old and New Dreams, not that there's anything Ornette-ish about the music, but I get a sense of free-jazz-informed players working in a kind of autumnal mode, embracing that tradition as well as meat-and-potatoes swing and soul, all at once. They groove when they want (hinting at reggae, electronica, rock), fray at the seams when they want, always exuding a loose, gracious vibe. I get a strong Dewey Redman sensation from Lawrence (apparently a longtime sideman type dude who works with Levon Helm, among others)—tender yet never too far from a grizzly-bear outburst. I can't imagine a debut record sounding more assured than this. Stream here. (Let me say that it's great to see jazz artists embracing the excellent Bandcamp platform—it's the best way to go.)

Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo Songs of Mirth and Melancholy (Marsalis Music)
Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp released a killer classical-inflected duo disc, Cosmic Lieder, earlier this year, and they sounded even better live. But this sax/piano session, on which the classical element is an even bigger factor, is the one I can't stop playing. I'm not an expert on Branford's music (I will say that I've been digging Crazy People Music majorly of late), but I have some sense that it's the norm for him to be preoccupied with classical repertoire/vibe (see the Branford piece in Ben Ratliff's The Jazz Ear). This CD takes that and runs with it: There is a Brahms piece here, but moreover, the whole thing is dripping with stately elegance, way more reminiscent of chamber music than jazz. The poise and lyricism heard on pieces like "The Bard Lachrymose" and "Endymion" really gets me—it's pretty, yes, but it's something way more than that: almost prayerful. Simply put, I know of no other record that sounds like this. For me, it's one of the biggest surprises of 2011. Some samples here.

Jerome Sabbagh/Ben Monder/Daniel Humair I Will Follow You (Bee Jazz)
As with the Harland, this is another one whose release date is a bit vague. Apparently, it originally came out in 2010, but I definitely didn't receive it last year, and moreover, I remember a CD-release party (with Paul Motian in for Humair) going down only a month or so ago. (Speaking of, did anyone catch that show? I was dying to see it, but couldn't get there.) Anyway, a lot of what's here is free jazz. It isn't Free Jazz, however; it's lunar-landscape free jazz, WTF free jazz, free jazz that isn't afraid to get weird, without getting dense or loud or heated, or signifying "freedom" in any of the obvious ways. Ben Monder is a good person to have in your band if you want to go down this road (see Bloom, with Bill McHenry). So is Humair, a veteran French drummer who I only remember hearing alongside Steve Lacy, not to mention Sabbagh, a beautifully supple tenor player who often works in a boppier mode. If you like your improvisation textural and hear-a-pin-drop sensitive, with no conventions taken for granted—along those lines, the Frisell/Motian/Lovano trio isn't a bad reference point, though this might even venture deeper into innerspace—you will love this CD. Check out samples here.

Wadada Leo Smith's Organic Heart's Reflections (Cuneiform)
Speaking of the unfinished business mentioned above, I can't wait to get back to this one. This release is a monster: two robust CDs' worth of new music for a 14-piece band. Wadada has been on a serious roll in recent years; Tabligh from 2008 was a particular favorite. Heart's Reflections really ups the ante, though, re: its treatment of Wadada's patented current mode of marrying the funky and the meditative. In terms of those respective poles, two supporting players nearly steal the show: Drummer Pheeroan akLaff (sounding downright nasty) and keyboardist Angelica Sanchez (grabbing me even more here than she did on her recent solo album, A Little House). There's definitely some electric Miles here, as is often the case with Wadada, but he's busted into a whole new realm with this wide-spectrum project. Gorgeously recorded and every bit as essential as Tabligh or other great later-period Wadada efforts such as the self-titled Golden Quartet debut and the Jack DeJohnette duo America (both on Tzadik). Destination: Out has a preview; Amazon has samples of each track.

Craig Taborn Avenging Angel (ECM)
It's probably best that I saved this for last, and maybe even that I didn't have access to it before I interviewed Mr. Taborn on the topic of metal a few months back. Simply put, this album is spellbinding and mystifying. Maybe it's that I just don't know the reference points that would unlock it, but I've noticed other reviewers regarding it with a kind of perplexed awe (check out Ratliff's take). By way of an illustration, here's a bit of my TONY preview: "At their best, these performances function like environments: Listening to 'This Voice Says So,' which builds gradually from an ethereal three-note theme, feels like stepping out of a spaceship onto an ice planet—vast and iridescent, but with a lurking malevolence. 'Glossolalia' takes elegant ascending lines and scrambles them into the sonic equivalent of Web-browser error code." What I'm trying to express is that you can't access this record via genre (jazz, classical, whatever); for me, it only made sense when I dropped the frameworks and just listened, when I let the sound pictures happen. I've spun it countless times, and it has retained an unknowable quality, as well as a powerful intrigue—the most I could really ask of a record. You really should hear it. Add Taborn's solo show at the Rubin last week to the list of gigs I was very bummed not to be able to attend. I read a few dropped-jaw accolades (Macnie, Panken), but I'm yearning for a fuller description. Anyone?

/////

Five honorable mentions: Sir Roland Hanna Colors from a Giant's Kit (was planning on including this in the above, but it slipped my mind—you need this record; beyond masterful/gorgeous solo piano, again with a strong classical flavor); Matana Roberts Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens De Couleur Libres (some thoughts via TONY); Shane Endsley and the Music Band Then the Other (playful yet state-of-the-art 21st-century quartet jazz; Taborn also in great form here); Matthew Shipp Art of the Improviser (heavy-duty two-disc set, one trio and one solo); Tin/Bag Bridges (haven't spent good time with this trumpet/guitar duo set, but I love what I've heard; check it out on Bandcamp).

Studio visit: Milford Graves on record

2011-06-14T05:13:00.016-04:00

In a March post, I attempted to make the point that free jazz ought to be documented in the studio from time to time. The only problem was that the Peter Brötzmann albums I chose as examples were actually live recordings. I stand by my argument, however, and it's because of albums like Real Deal and Beyond Quantum, sessions from, respectively, 1991 and 2008 featuring the drummer Milford Graves.

I've been on a Milford Graves kick over the past few days, incited by an interview subject who named Graves's 1976 LP Babi as an all-time favorite. Checking out that record, it was easy to see the appeal: It is as unhinged and raw a free-jazz document as you will find. Like Graves's many ESP-Disk recordings (I happened to catch some great material from 1964's The Giuseppi Logan Quartet on WKCR the other day as part of a Don Pullen profile), it sounds DIY, punk. There's something romantic about that. The legend of free jazz hinges on ideas of subversion and underground-ness. We like to think of these sorts of recordings as having been made hastily and cheaply—or in the case of Babi, a live album, almost incidentally, i.e., the music would have raged on whether or not the tape recorder was rolling. Graves's ESP sessions were mostly (all?) recorded in the studio in NYC, but there's nothing meticulous about them. The resulting documents are more or less the polar opposite of the kinds of gorgeously warm and balanced albums being made for Blue Note nearby at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio.

Despite all the financial shadiness surrounding ESP, fans of this music—myself included—tend to be glad that those mid-’60s records exist. We should also be happy, though, that many of the artists in question, e.g., Mr. Graves, have survived/thrived long enough to take advantage of more sophisticated recording technology. Just like with old, scratchy blues recordings sourced from 78s, we fetishize the thin, sometimes borderline crappy sound on those old ESPs, hold it up as a badge of authenticity, forgetting that no free jazz actually sounded like that in the flesh. You want to hear a Milford Graves album? Get Real Deal, a duet recording with David Murray recorded in the decidedly non–historically sexy year of 1991, or Beyond Quantum, a 2008 trio album with Anthony Braxton and William Parker. (Both are available as Amazon downloads via the links above.)

I can't express to you the sheer beauty of these recordings—not just the performances, but the SOUND. On Real Deal, Milford Graves sounds like the wind and the rain. He sounds like he's worshiping the drum kit, its glorious range of timbres. I'm listening to the first track right now, and it sounds heartbreakingly alive. The recording is wonderfully three-dimensional: You have the ride cymbal over in the left channel, the toms and bass drum closer to the center along with Murray's tenor, the hi-hat slightly to the right of those. I don't think I've ever heard another drummer paint with his kit the way Graves does, coax as much nuance out, and a musician like that deserves to be heard in a warm and resonant document like this, without that obfuscating aspect of rawness—obfuscating not just in the sense that detail is lost, but in the sense that it invites you to impose upon it a kind of punk romanticism. The romanticism is all there in the drums, though—you don't need an invitation to heap on your own baggage.

In short, free jazz deserves the studio treatment just as much as any other music. Sure it's a style built on rawness and spontaneity, but with the truly great musicians like Graves, you're going to get that no matter what. Why not hear him in glorious hi-fi? Here is a sample of Beyond Quantum—skip to around 1:50 for a taste of what I'm talking about:

I love that the ESP records exist (The New York Art Quartet is a particular fave), that Babi survives. But in terms of what I would take to a desert island, it's the pro-shot stuff, so to speak, where the music brings the heat and the recording soaks up the whole range of frequencies. Interstellar Space, anyone? Recorded at the aforementioned Van Gelder facility, not at some no-name Times Square facility or at a gig with a room mic. These Graves records are part of that illustrious tradition. Like many of the recordings in, say, the Aum Fidelity catalog—I've been very impressed recently by the new Planetary Unknown, with David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, the aforementioned William Parker and Muhammad Ali—they're about museum-quality preservation, not DIY mythmaking. Artists of this caliber deserve such treatment. It is, I would venture to say, the real deal.

P.S. ECM is another label that has long understood the value of superior sound quality and studio documentation. You won't hear the full range of a Paul Motian performance on any other label. (See I Have the Room Above Her.) Speaking of which, I wrote about a handsome new studio-recorded Craig Taborn solo disc on ECM in this week's Time Out New York.

Happy Morbid Angel Day

2011-06-07T09:29:00.008-04:00

Morbid Angel, my favorite metal band, breaks an eight-year silence today. Let this post be an official welcome to Illud Divinum Insanus. I bought it on two formats (can't remember the last time I did that with any album); you too should grab a copy via Season of Mist.

You've likely picked up on some of the deafening (and already extremely tedious) backlash that has greeted this release. Here is my preliminary response to that. And here is an eloquent—and dare I say moving?—defense of the record from Earache's Digby Pearson. Thanks to Invisible Oranges for the tip-off.