DFSBP archives: Grachan Moncur III

 

NOTE (July 24, 2021): I've re-upped the links to the Grachan Moncur III WKCR interview below. If you have trouble accessing them, drop me a line at hank [dot] shteamer [at] rollingstone [dot] com, and I'll send them to you directly.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and online audio interviews recently. I highly recommend Jeremiah Cymerman's 5049 Podcast (I've checked out about ten of these so far, and I've loved pretty much every one), Aisha Tyler's Girl on Guy interview with Clutch's Neil Fallon, the Luc Lemay (Gorguts) and Bill Steer (Carcass) episodes of the MetalSucks Podcast, and the Lemay appearance on the Invisible Oranges East Village Radio show (click on September 3 here). While I'm not equipped to put together snazzy-sounding, nicely edited content à la what's linked above, I do have a fairly extensive archive of audio interviews, some recorded live on air. Since most of these radio shows are interspersed with music, they play like readymade podcasts. As time permits, I'll be going back through and digitizing various programs from the vaults, e.g., the 2000 Steve Lacy show I posted back in February.

Next up is an installment of the WKCR Musician's Show, featuring trombonist-composer Grachan Moncur III, that dates from less than a month after the Lacy Q&A. This has to be one of my most treasured interview tapes. As with the late, great Walt Dickerson, Moncur was an artist who existed in a kind of mythical state in my mind before I was lucky enough to be able to meet him. (I made the connection via a wonderful woman named Glo Harris—the widow of the drummer Beaver Harris—my collaborator on a memorial show concerning Beaver, which featured in-studio appearances from Moncur, Rashied Ali and Wade Barnes, and call-ins from Andrew Cyrille and Jack DeJohnette; maybe that'll be my next post from the archives!) I didn't know Moncur's story; I only knew his records, and at that time I was completely obsessed with them, especially the 1963 Blue Note set Evolution, which I still regard as one of the masterpieces of the period, and of jazz in general. Grachan (for the record, it's pronounced "GRAY-shun") and I sat down for three solid hours of talk, music and off-mic reminiscing. It was a really special experience—for one thing, I'll never forget Grachan discussing how his experience of the Kennedy assassination related to the title track of Evolution, one of my favorite pieces of music ever. I was just a kid at the time of this interview—a month shy of my 22nd birthday—but Mr. Moncur treated me like a peer. I hope you enjoy the show. Here it is, in four installments:

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part I

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part II

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part III

WKCR Musician's Show with Grachan Moncur III: 7.19.2000 - Part IV

NOTES:

1) The easiest way to stream these files is by clicking the Streampad link (the blue bar) you see at the bottom of the page. You can also download them as MP3s.

2) The level on the title track to Aco Dei de Madrugada (played at about the 24-minute mark in Part III) was too high, so I cut that piece from the MP3. You can hear it here. The same goes for Echoes of Prayer (featured on Destination: Out back in 2010), announced right at the end of Part III and continuing into the beginning of Part IV; I'm pretty sure we played the majority of the LP, which you can hear in five parts here: I, II, III, IV, V.

P.S. I want to thank my Aa bandmate Mike Colin for reminding me of the existence of this tape. I have a fond memory of he and I going to see Grachan Moncur III play at Iridum in a band that included Moncur's old Blue Note comrades Jackie McLean and Bobby Hutcherson. They played the classic "Love and Hate" that night and Moncur took a solo for the ages. (Judging by this review, this must've been 2004.)

P.P.S. Steve Lehman's 2000 interview with McLean, recently posted at Do the Math, is well worth your time.

Sandbags, part II: On Jarrett, Shipp and getting past Us vs. Them

If Matthew Shipp had posted an Emperor Has No Clothes take on Keith Jarrett in, say, early 2001, my response probably would've been something along the lines of "Amen." At that time, I was still in college—a budding jazz obsessive who thought he knew something about the music, by virtue of the fact that he had spent many hours during the prior couple years learning from master jazz scholars such as Phil Schaap, interviewing master jazz musicians such as Steve Lacy and poring over the vast LP holdings at WKCR. Back then, my core notions about jazz, many still intact, were starting to take shape. Among the truths I recall myself then holding self-evident:

1) Much of the best jazz seems to date from the middle 1960s, when records such as Evolution, One Step Beyond, Point of Departure, Fuchsia Swing Song and Out to Lunch! were being made for Blue Note. (No, it's not a coincidence that Tony Williams is on all of those dates.)

2) I love Booker Little, especially the Out Front album.

3) I love Steve Lacy, especially Trickles (with Roswell Rudd, Kent Carter and Beaver Harris) and School Days (with Rudd, Henry Grimes and Denis Charles).

4) Having sat in what I'm thinking must have been William Parker and Patricia Nicholson's East Village apartment and prepped Vision Festival programs along with awe-inspiring musicians such as Alan Silva, and having attended at least one entire (or nearly so) Vision, I love this festival, and the players—such as Parker, Whit Dickey and, yes, Matthew Shipp—who frequent it.

5) I do not care for the work of, among others, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis and, yes, Keith Jarrett.

It shouldn't be too hard to guess which of the above opinions were derived from actual roll-up-my-sleeves dirty work—i.e., time spent studying/relishing music—and which stemmed from… I'm not sure how to put it other than a blind sort of prejudice. Names like Metheny's, Marsalis's (take your pick), Jarrett's signified the sort of jazz that they liked—they being the world at large. At that time, I'm not sure that I'd ever spent much time in the presence of anyone who actually enjoyed the work of Metheny or Jarrett, but I'd spent plenty of time in the presence of people who were choosy about their jazz, who separated the music into factions that could basically be pegged as Worth yand Unworthy. So, as many green fanatics do, I began to develop a sort of Us vs. Them sensibility regarding the genre. Jazz that I perceived to be popular—I'm not sure how I arrived at this classification; maybe by reading select issues of Downbeat or Jazziz?—was more or less automatically suspect. Anything "free" or "avant-garde" was, just by virtue of its inherent unpopularity, more or less automatically brilliant.

Now, as I implied above, items (1) through (4) in my numbered list above all stemmed from what were essentially joyous sessions of autodidacticism. I'd check out a stack of records from WKCR, hurry home to my dorm room and just study, which really meant blissing out on pure information—not just musical, but also biographical, historical, contextual. I was devouring books like Valerie Wilmer's As Serious as Your Life around this time, cramming for interviews with underrated geniuses such as Grachan Moncur III. In short, I was following my nose, blooming into a lifelong lover of this music.

But in constructing a personal jazz pantheon, I was also, whether intentionally or simply by default, deciding who didn't belong there. At the time, I couldn't have told you exactly why, say, Metheny or Jarrett didn't rank among the Andrew Hills and the Sam Riverses and the Bobby Hutchersons and the Mal Waldrons I worshiped. (I probably would've muttered something about them being "cheesy" and/or inauthentic, whatever that might have meant.) I simply had an intuitive sense that these musicians weren't worth my time. I guess the logic was: "Too many people like them; they must be suspect."

Flash forward to the present. I still love those mid-’60s "inside-outside" Blue Note classics. I still adore Out Front—maybe even more than I did then, if that's possible. I still cherish Steve Lacy's enormous and unwieldy discography. At the same time, I love Now He Sings, How He Sobs; I love Bright Size Life and Song X; I love Songs of Mirth and Melancholy; I love Byablue, Shades, Fort Yawuh, Facing You and the Jarrett/Haden/Motian trio. I also love New Orbit and Shipp's (still-active?) working trio with Michael Bisio and Whit Dickey. I'm not sure what would be an example of jazz that I particularly dislike; even if I could think of one, I'm not sure I'd be inclined to waste virtual space by mentioning it here.

Here's a list of points I'm not trying to make in this post:

1) I'm not trying to say I love Keith Jarrett's work unconditionally. In fact, I'd be suspect of anyone who made that claim, not because I think any of his output is particularly crappy, but because there's just so damn much of it. I only know a very tiny sliver of what's out there. I can say with authority—the authority that comes from actually doing the earwork—that I love the American Quartet. I'll admit that I've never heard The Köln Concert—not because I'm wary of it, but because I simply haven't gotten there yet. (I mean, I've never heard Exile on Main Street front-to-back, either—every one of us has our blind spots.) I'm not wild about what I know of the so-called Standards trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, but I'm no expert. I haven't yet spend any good time with Somewhere, the record Shipp wrote about, but I'm looking forward to doing so.

2) I'm absolutely not trying to say that I think Shipp doesn't know Jarrett's work well enough to comment on it authoritatively. As Ethan Iverson pointed out, Shipp's piece doesn't mention the American Quartet, but that omission is far from an admission of ignorance regarding that period of Jarrett's output. (It would be hard to imagine a player of Shipp's age and disposition not knowing, say, Fort Yawuh inside and out, but again, I'm speculating.)

As for the general sentiment of the piece, I applaud Shipp's nerve, but given his track record for assailing sacred cows, I wonder what all his aggregate rhetoric along those lines has won him over the years, and whether journalists' consistent solicitation of his opinion on famous jazz musicians might not be viewed as opportunistic, or even crass. That is to say: At this point, writers know that Shipp will spout off if given half the chance, but is reducing him, or any other musician, to a caricatured hater really the best thing for jazz journalism, for Matthew Shipp, for the music? Shipp is very clearly a brilliant musician. (As with the Jarrett discography, Shipp's body of work is enormous. I adore some of it—the aforementioned New Orbit, with Wadada Leo Smith, is a particular enduring favorite, and the recent duo project with Darius Jones is remarkable; other records—Equilibrium, for example, and certain other electronic-beat-driven Blue Series titles—leave me cold.) His work speaks for itself; I'm just not sure that knowing he's suspicious—and even disdainful—of Keith Jarrett enhances my enjoyment/understanding of his art in any way. It bums me out that Shipp might go down in the history books—whether through his own persistent soapboxing or through journalists' calculated foregrounding of same—not as "The guy who made all that beautiful, turbulent, haunting music," but as "The guy who persistently dared to dis Shorter, Hancock, Jarrett and other sacred cows in the press."

Here's my best attempt at summing up the point I am trying to make in this post:

The great thing about being a music fan is you don't have to take sides. The other day I had the privilege of speaking to the kids at the School of Rock in Montclair, NJ, about the subgenre known as pop-punk. We listened to Descendents, the Misfits, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones and a few other great, old bands—true forefathers of the style. We also listened to Green Day and Paramore, and during my preparation, I checked out others whose material the students were learning: New Found Glory, Something Corporate, Fall Out Boy. I enjoyed it all: old and new, "authentic" and "commercial," "arty and "populist." I guess what I'm trying to say is, I no longer have any stake in the Us vs. Them game. I love everything that sounds good to me. This week I marveled at both Missing Persons and Gorguts. A lot of times, I tune in to WKCR when I'm driving, but just as often, I'm blasting freestyle on 103.5 or soft rock on 106.7. I'd like to think I don't spend as much time worrying about what I don't like or what isn't worthy, and that I value really doing the listening legwork over spouting blanket opinions. As I've written here before, musical prejudices are like sandbags; there's a great liberation in letting them go, either because you've learned to love an artist you'd previously deemed lame, or because there's simply too much great music to focus on instead, and far too little time in which to do so.

P.S. A totally unrelated Shipp/Jarrett comparison I published in 2011. The more I think on it, the more the two figures seem to be running on parallel tracks—aside from the points I make in the piece, consider each musician's long, super-prolific association with a single label (Thirsty Ear's Blue Series—actually curated by Shipp—and ECM, respectively).

'call it art': The vindication of the NYAQ

The New York Art Quartet isn't a household name. Even among my fellow free-jazz enthusiasts, they're still something of a cult-favorite group. That seems a little odd, because the three principal members, saxophonist John Tchicai (R.I.P.), trombonist Roswell Rudd and drummer Milford Graves, have all made major marks in the roughly 48 years since the NYAQ first disbanded. But the fact remains: In the shorthand history of free jazz, you're talking about Ornette, Trane, Cecil, Ayler, Sun Ra, etc.

I've always thought this was a bit of a shame. I've loved the NYAQ's self-titled ESP debut for a long time; to me it's a core-collection free-jazz document. I haven't spent as much time with the follow-up, Mohawk, but it's sounded great when I've sampled it, and the 35th Reunion album is also surprisingly sturdy.

There have been stirrings in the NYAQ camp over the past couple years. First came the Cuneiform release Old Stuff, an archival set that features Tchicai and Rudd with a different rhythm section (including the great Louis Moholo), and then, more recently, the mothership landed: call it art, a new five-LP box set from Triple Point Records.

Some readers of this blog are likely familiar with Ben Young. I will say up front that he is a friend of mine and also a mentor, dating back to my early college days at WKCR. I will follow that by saying that he is absolutely exemplary scholar and advocate of jazz in general—and of free jazz specifically. You might recall the Albert Ayler box he put together for Revenant, or Dixonia, which set a benchmark for Bill Dixon research. Having only cracked open call it art, his latest project, last night, I feel comfortable saying that it's a new pinnacle in the Ben Young oeuvre, and a cause for celebration for anyone who's ever felt that the NYAQ deserves a lot more recognition than they've gotten.

What we have in this set is a trove of unreleased NYAQ recordings. Some are outtakes from the studio sessions we already know, but others are live tapes, either in a concert or radio setting. I'm only on the second LP so far, but the music is divine (and, for the record, the sound quality is excellent, rivaling that of The New York Art Quartet and Mohawk); I already feel my passion for this group reigniting in a serious way.

Speaking of passion for the NYAQ, the book that comes with the set—and though not book-length, per se, it is a book, meaty and hardbound—is a phenomenal work. I mentioned the term "advocate" above, and what we have in these liner notes is a passionately argued advocacy of the NYAQ's central (i.e., rightful) position in the development of free jazz. It is a setting straight of the record, in a sense, but more importantly, this essay is a tying-together of many different threads, an exegesis of the entire scene surrounding this group. As anyone who knows Tchicai, Rudd and Graves's histories could tell you, the NYAQ did not come together in a vacuum; it grew directly out of, e.g., Rudd's so-called School Days collaboration with Steve Lacy (the famed Monk repertory band); the New York Contemporary Five, which included Tchicai along with Archie Shepp and Don Cherry; and the Bill Dixon–Archie Shepp Quartet, which ended up roping in both Tchicai and Rudd. Young's essay takes us through the entire musical history of each NYAQ member, touching not just on the aforementioned groups but also on activities that will be news to all but the most die-hard enthusiasts of these great men. For example, I knew that Milford Graves came up playing Latin jazz, but I had no idea that he led his own group (the Milford Graves Latin Jazz Quintet) in the early ’60s which (A) included a young Chick Corea and (B) appeared at Town Hall in support of Cal Tjader and Herbie Mann. In this booklet, you'll see not only a photograph of the band, but an advertisement for the concert. The research is that deep.

It isn't just facts that we get. We get a case, as it were, an argument about what exactly it was that made the NYAQ special, revolutionary even. I love this observation: "We would want Ornette Coleman's music of the Eisenhower administration to be Free Jazz's big bang, but finally his new style was still wearing a suit that belonged to an older Jazz pattern." Nothing against Ornette, whatsoever, but this is absolutely true. When you're talking about the freedom of jazz, you're talking about the rhythmic explosion—not necessarily some incendiary meltdown, but the literal freeing up of the time, which was a post-Ornette occurrence. The Cecil Taylor–Jimmy Lyons–Sunny Murray group, captured live in those brilliant 1962 recordings, is a major next step, and as Young points out, so is the Ayler–Gary Peacock–Murray band heard on 1964's Spiritual Unity. But the NYAQ was onto something different, something subtler. This is how Young puts it:

"The NYAQ's perfection of the New Thing impulse depended on omitting Ayler's thrust. Where Ayler played strong lines to lead his band, the NYAQ floated translucent phrases into a bubbling pool that diffused attention."

What Young seems to be getting at here is that there's more than one free-jazz paradigm. We've come to know and love the so-called "energy music" designation, but we've also learned that it's been a double-edged sword in the long term, this notion of free-jazz as some sort of quasi-religious expressionism, some heroic shout to the heavens that inevitably takes at least an hour to exhaust itself. I'm not taking aim at Ayler or Trane here. I'm just taking issue with the idea that free jazz has to be very obviously cathartic to be great.

Enter the NYAQ. I'm not sure I can do better than the "bubbling pool" designation above. Their music has this sort of unsettled but also sublimely unhurried quality. It wiggles; it tests the water; it pauses; it digresses. There truly is no leader. There is a ton of space. The music can be fast or slow. The constant, though, is a sense of deep listening, of non-autopilot improvisation, of working together in a very real kind of freedom, a freedom which, crucially, encompasses the freedom not to conform to a clichéd Free Jazz orthodoxy, which, even back then, was already crystallizing. You hear musicians conversing in this music, searching, exploring what their instruments can do, and how their aesthetic personalities can interact: Graves's fragmented yet remarkably supple flow; Rudd and Tchicai's vocal-like unspoolings, thoughtful and spare. There's an amazing sense of patience and delicacy to this music that is not the same as tentativeness. It's simply a taking of time, even when the music is, so to speak, cooking. (And thanks to Graves, it does very often dance in its own abstractly buoyant way.) I know what Young means when he speaks of the NYAQ "omitting Ayler's thrust." It's thanks to this omission that this music has aged beautifully. Hearing it now, you don't hear any of that ’60s-ness that's so often spoken of, in many cases rightfully so, when, say, Ayler or late Coltrane comes up, the sense of free jazz as the soundtrack to widespread social unrest. The NYAQ weren't screaming; they were probing.

The music I have on right now is from record 1 of the set. It's a recording of Rudd's "Rosmosis," made live on 12.31.64 at Judson Hall on W. 57th St. during the Four Days in December concert series. Any student of free jazz has likely heard of this series, presented by the Jazz Composers' Guild. (The NYAQ played on the last of the four bills, along with Sun Ra; 12/28 featured bands led by Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon; 12/29 paired Paul Bley with the Jazz Composers' Guild Orchestra, led by Carla Bley and Mike Mantler; and 12/30 included the Archie Shepp Quartet and The Free Form Improvisation Ensemble.) But did any of us have any idea that this material had been recorded? It's amazing what a work of scholarship like call it art does; it brings this history—which previously seemed shadowy, mythic, unattainable—right to your door. And it isn't just the sounds; we also get reproductions of Rudd and Tchicai's scores, letters sent between the members of the group, period advertisements, stunning photographs.

I could say more about this set, but as I've indicated, I'm still very much in the process of digesting it. It was important to me to record my initial awe, though. Given the price, call it art is obviously a connoisseur's piece, but if you are one of those connoisseurs, someone for whom either the NYAQ or the early history of free jazz matters, I feel absolutely assured in informing you that you need to get your hands on this set. Ben Young's Albert Ayler box delved deeper into the life and work of a widely recognized genius; call it art, on the other hand, reclaims from relative obscurity a music that was every bit as game-changing, and—now, almost 50 years on from its making—still has the power to arrest, to induce wonder, to make you marvel at its wit, its dexterity, its inquisitiveness, its sense of play and wonder, its living optimism. This is a vindication.

/////

*Learn more about call it art and Triple Point Records here.

*Rudd and Graves will perform together, along with frequent NYAQ affiliate Amiri Baraka (featured prominently on call it art), at The Vision Festival on June 12, 2013.

DFSBP archives: Steve Lacy

I stumbled across the photo above while doing some cleaning the other day. It was taken on June 21, 2000, in the control room at the former location of WKCR, located in Riverside Church. On the left is me, age 21; on the right is Steve Lacy.

In retrospect, the regular DJ gig I held for a couple years during college was a dream. I had regular access to that incredible LP library (and to a listening audience that appreciated it); I got to learn firsthand from master broadcaster/scholar/educators such as Phil Schaap and Ben Young; and best of all, I got to interview various heroes on air, including Rashied Ali and Grachan Moncur III.

I was ecstatic to land the Lacy conversation. I remember seeing him play a few months before this: a concert with Mal Waldron at Lincoln Center's Duets on the Hudson series. I knew that the Lacy/Waldron duo would be coming to Iridium that same June, so I hung around after the show, introduced myself to Steve as a WKCR DJ, and asked if I could set up an interview in conjunction with the run. He said sure. I worked out the details with his manager, and on the appointed day, he walked up to the entrance of Riverside Church, dressed spiffily and looking a little overheated. His friendly smile put me at ease. I recall him asking for a beer, which we procured. We talked and played various Steve Lacy records on air for roughly 1.5 hours; you can listen to the program below. (You should be able to stream via the players or download by clicking on "Part 1" and "Part 2.") Some of the musical selections are included in the broadcast; you'll find a couple of the others in the Spotify playlist that follows. The opening track, which kicked off the broadcast, was "Four in One" from Reflections.

Steve, of course, sounds fantastically wise. I sound green, awkward, sometimes ill-informed. (I'm still kicking myself 12-odd years on for mispronouncing "communiqué," and for not realizing it was an English word!) If I could meet him again, I would thank him for his patience with me on that day. I apologize for the poor volume balance; you might need to adjust your levels during the portions when Steve is speaking. I chose a quieter transfer over one that would distort.

Steve Lacy - WKCR - I
Steve Lacy - WKCR - II

Click the links to download the show in MP3 form, or stream the two sections via the Streampad player at the bottom of the page—they're items 4 and 5 on the playlist. [Update, 5/15/14: Streampad doesn't seem to be acknowledging these tracks at the moment, so simply clicking the links above is probably your best bet for accessing the files.]


(Note: If you enjoy this interview, do let me know via the comments or e-mail. I have a bunch of others that I could transfer and post.)

Spotify:

Myself and Irene

Tonight I had the insanely overdue opportunity to hear Irene Aebi sing live. As detailed here, it was glorious. That's Aebi at right in the pic above (snapped by Laal Shams), with (left to right) Josh Sinton and Kirk Knuffke of the excellent Steve Lacy repertory band Ideal Bread and saxist Jeremy Udden.