Milford and Chick

Last week, just days apart, we lost a pair of masters, who, as many pointed out, worked together early in their career, before they became leaders in their respective areas of the jazz world.

Here is a new piece I wrote for Rolling Stone in tribute to Milford Graves. And here are a few writings on him from over the years: a live review of Graves with John Zorn and Steve Coleman at the Vanguard; a dual account of seeing him play the night before catching J. Read, one of my favorite metal drummers; and a reflection on an online Graves master class. And here is an interview I conducted with Milford at his home in 2015. I'm so grateful to have shared time and space with him on multiple occasions.

I haven't gone quite as deep with Chick Corea but I'm nevertheless a huge fan, from the Miles records, to Now He Sings (and the later ECM albums by that trio) to Return to Forever, the Herbie duo and beyond. Here is an obituary for Rolling Stone, as well as a new interview with Herbie Hancock on Chick's genius and benevolent spirit.

'Interstellar Space' at 50

New at Rolling Stone, my 50th-birthday tribute (measured from date of recording, not release) to one of my favorite albums, Interstellar Space. Features fresh input from Ravi Coltrane, Jack DeJohnette, Peter Brötzmann, Nels Cline, Ingrid Laubrock and others, as well as archival thoughts from the late, great Rashied Ali — a big thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with me.

Please check out this DFSBP bonus track, the complete transcript of my interview with Louie Belogenis, who has a couple of choice quotes in the piece but who shared so much more wisdom and insight regarding Coltrane's artistry in general and Interstellar Space in particular.

Few quick addenda:

*Here's the original Rolling Stone review of Interstellar Space, by Stephen "Hammer of the Gods" Davis, for anyone who's interested.

*I wanted to delve a bit further into the shadowy pre-Interstellar history of sax/drums duets in jazz but didn't want to veer too far off course. In addition to Ali's mention of undocumented duos with Archie Shepp (cited in my 2003 Rashied interview for All About Jazz, a Q and A I quote frequently in the new piece), there's this tantalizing passage in the book that comes with Revenant's Holy Ghost Albert Ayler box. The speaker is Mr. Milford Graves, discussing Ayler's visits to his apartment in East New York, Brooklyn. The time frame isn't specified, but my educated guess is that the below would have taken place around 1965, when the two were working together most frequently:

"We played a lot of duets at my house — just the two of us. The things that we did when he came over to my house aren't on any records; people hear the records and they don't hear the real Albert Ayler — the Albert Ayler who's relaxed when he's not around a major audience for which he's going to have to play something that people will dig, or play a tune he has recorded so he can sell some records." 

*Along similar lines, we also have, of course, the brief Coltrane / Art Taylor duet that commences about 30 seconds into "Countdown," as well as this epic Trane / Roy Haynes showdown from Newport '63 (thanks to Ben Ratliff and his essential Coltrane: Story of a Sound for the tip-off on the latter, which is sort of hiding in plain sight; there's more great Ratliff-on-Trane in this 2001 Times piece):



Not to mention the Interstellar-style duet that erupts between Trane and Ali around 3:20 into "Offering," recorded just a week before Interstellar itself:



*Here's a short list of other sax/drums recordings I love — either old favorites or albums I've discovered while working on the RS piece. There's a nice, long list up on the Free Jazz Blog (though now out of date, since new ones are surfacing all the time, e.g., Rich and Carson Halley's brand-new The Wild — thanks to Derek Taylor and Dusted for the tip-off — which I can't wait to check out in full):

Sunny Murray / Arthur Doyle, Dawn of a New Vibration
Sunny Murray / Sabir Mateen, We Are Not at the Opera 
Essential 2000s-era Sunny Murray, shaggy, swinging and sublime, on these two. Doyle and Mateen — both of whom double on flute — know what's up and of course hold their own next to the gentle giant.

Fred Anderson / Robert Barry, Duets 2001
Fred Anderson / Steve McCall, Vintage Duets
The former is maybe my single favorite sax/drums album next to Interstellar itself — a sort of freebop infinity, relaxed but never casual. The McCall set, recorded back in 1980, is a deep Chicago document.

Milford Graves / David Murray, Real Deal
David Murray / Jack DeJohnette, In Our Style (Fred Hopkins appears on some tracks)
Milford Graves / John Zorn, 50th Birthday Celebration, Vol. 2
Two of the best representations of Milford Graves on record, with two very different, very well-matched partners, as well as a fun, gutsy Murray/DeJohnette dust-up.

Denis Charles / Jemeel Moondoc, We Don't
Pure infectious exuberance as a Caribbean-born '60s survivor meets a loft-era alto wizard circa '81. Charles's roughly contemporary duos with clarinetist Peter Kuhn, featured on disc 2 here, are also excellent.


Peter Brötzmann / Paal Nilssen-Love, Wood Cuts
Paal Nilssen-Love / Joe McPhee, Tomorrow Came Today (McPhee plays pocket trumpet on some tracks; reissued as part of the Candy box set)
Peter Brötzmann / Shoji Hano, Funny Rat/s series
Pick your poison, really, when it comes to Brötz drum duets — I must have them all! — but I've gotten good mileage out of Wood Cuts and the third Funny Rat/s disc with the incredible Hano. Nilssen-Love and pretty much anyone, doing pretty much anything, is going to be worth your close attention, and the McPhee here is no exception.

Willem Breuker / Han Bennink, New Acoustic Swing Duo (Breuker also plays clarinets)
Kaoru Abe / Hiroshi Yamazaki, Jazz Bed
Two of the earliest, not to mention most wildest, entries in the sax/drums canon, with the Bennink/Breuker being recorded all the way back in late '67 (thanks to Ben Young for the tip-off). The Abe/Yamazaki, recorded in '71, is just so goddamn raw/real.

Paul Flaherty / Chris Corsano, The Beloved Music
Paul Flaherty / Randall Colbourne, Bridge Out!
Speaking of raw/real, here be Flaherty and Corsano, the standard bearers of the punk offshoot of the sax/drums monolith. Flaherty/Colbourne is a subtler yet just as compelling combo.

Jimmy Lyons / Andrew Cyrille, Burnt Offering
Jimmy Lyons / Andrew Cyrille, Something in Return
Cecil Taylor Unit blood brothers getting down to serious business.

Dewey Redman / Ed Blackwell, Red and Black in Willisau
Ornette blood brothers doing same.

Kid Millions / Jim Sauter, Fountain
Keeping the tradition moving. Molten noisejazz lava with surprising sensitivity. See also: Sauter's duet with Weasel Walter on this 2014 WW improv sampler, on which he also goes toe-to-toe with Marshall Allen and Marco Eneidi.

Jon Irabagon / Mike Pride, I Don't Hear Nothin' but the Blues
Another contemporary spin. Obsessive, insular and just downright perverse at times.

What are your favorites?

2015 in review

This year, I often felt like I was sneaking new music in. I started a new job, put out a record and saw a two-decade obsession finally bear fruit. Honestly, there wasn't all that much room for anything else. But as I look back through the year's releases, I see quite a few that made an impression.

Genre pretty much went out the window, which is the way it ought to be. Last night, my wonderful girlfriend, Alex, and I spent some time sharing our current pop obsessions, which seem to be everyone's current pop obsessions. I love all the songs making the rounds: "Hotline Bling," "The Hills," "Here" (the latter is probably the single of the year for me). Bieber's "Sorry" is another in-the-air favorite that will not leave my brain. I did file jazz, metal and general-purpose year-end lists for various polls, but looking back, none of them feel definitive to me. That orderly, fenced-off approach doesn't reflect how music fits into my life. The other night, some friends and I sat around spinning vinyl ranging from the latest Sheer Mag 7" (my album of the year, even though it isn't an album) to the new Fleetwood Mac Tusk reissue, the stellar Laddio Bolocko box set and, just because, Bob Dylan's Infidels. It's all sitting by my turntable, along with a ton of other records that captivated me at one point or another recently: Sonny Rollins's The Bridge, the Eagles' One of These Nights, Keelhaul's Triumphant Return to Obscurity, Pat Metheny's 80/81, Blue Öyster Cult's Tyranny and Mutation, Roky Erickson's The Evil One, Joni Mitchell's Hejira, the Stooges' Fun House, etc. (I'm proud to say that the craw set and STATS LP are there too.) Music.

It's all in play at all times. It has to be a free space. In that spirit, here are some of the records that I enjoyed this year, that happened to come out this year, in no particular order—10 of them will eventually make up my Pazz and Jop ballot. Links to Bandcamp only, because that's where online music really lives

Krallice Ygg Huur (self-released)
This record to me is pure astonishment. It's my favorite thing Krallice has ever done—and that's saying a lot because I love much of their prior work, especially the self-titled debut and 2011's Diotima—and one of my favorite things that either Mick Barr and Colin Marston have ever done, which is saying even more. (Close call with Annwn and Skullgrid, respectively.) The amount of musical information here is staggering, as is the confidence and majestic flair with which it is rendered. This is art music, plain and simple, the vanguard of contemporary composition, that happens to be transmitted in a format we might refer to in shorthand as metal.

Sheer Mag II (Wilsuns/Katorga)
Probably the release I really and truly felt the most of any that came out in 2015. It's a four-song EP, but as an aesthetic statement of purpose, it's as weighty as any album I heard this year. The soul, the smarts, the wounded swagger. This is just pure rough rock-and-soul attitude filtered through an at times dauntingly complex sophisto-pop aesthetic. And vocals to melt your heart and cut through whatever distraction might be unfairly monopolizing your spirit on a given day. This just kicks so, so, so much ass.

Henry Threadgill Zooid In for a Penny, in for a Pound (Pi)
Zooid just keep pushing. One of the most insular bands on earth, and one of the most fascinating to stand outside of and cast one's listening gaze upon. I heard this music at Roulette a year ago, and it seemed like a new high bar for the group. The album completely does the set justice. So much beautiful detail, either when the band is cooking in its trademark oblique-chamber-funk mode or stripping back for mini sonic dioramas of curious detail and staunch refinement. Oddities and wonders abound, and they're only amplified by heightened attention. When you put on a Zooid record, you listen, and you listen to the members of Zooid listening, each playing their part in Threadgill's imaginative wonderland.

Mayday Parade Black Lines (Fearless)
Not a new band, but a new one to me. Mainstays of the Warped Tour scene and exponents of an emo offshoot that's near and dear to my heart and probably best exemplified by Say Anything's 2004 masterwork, …Is a Real Boy. Hugely passionate and anthemic pop-oriented rock music with a belt-to-the-rafters theatrical bent and an undercurrent of showy self-laceration. This album is totally, knowingly over-the-top and, if you're as into this sound as I am, eminently replayable.

Milford Graves and Bill Laswell Space / Time • Redemption (TUM)
I saw these two play duets at the Stone last year, and the chemistry was lacking. They find a groove on this album simply by coexisting. This is basically an ambient release, elevated above the mundane by the primeval thump of one of the mightiest and most mysterious percussionists on earth, and Laswell's melodic and textural know-how, which can blur into wallpaper-ism but here seems subtle and right and soothing and benevolent. To me, this is a logical sequel to Sonny Sharrock's Guitar (one of my very favorite records of all time), and not just because a) there's a track named for Sonny here and b) Laswell produced Guitar. Mystical, swirling, churning tone baths. 

Jeff Lynne's ELO Alone in the Universe (Columbia)
I'm not an ELO completist, but I aspire to be one someday. Jeff Lynne's lifelong project, i.e., crafting Beatlesque pop music of limitless accessibility that doesn't apologize for its sly surreality and lyrical eccentricity, is a worthy one, and judging by this album, and by the outstanding live show I saw at Irving Plaza last month, he's still operating at a very high level. There are a handful of songs here ("When I Was a Boy," "One Step at a Time") that feel like future greatest hits, which, given the depth the ELO greatest-hit pool, is really saying something.

Stanley Cowell Juneteenth (Vision Fugitive)
I spent a fair amount of time with this one but it didn't feel like anywhere near enough. I hear Juneteenth as a cousin of Dave Burrell's breathtaking 1979 solo-piano version of Windward Passages, one of those albums where a pianist translates the vast orchestral universe inside their head to the keys. This feels like a magnum opus for Cowell and an important reminder that this giant continues to do great, vital work. Further thoughts here.

Voice Coils Heaven's Sense (Shatter Your Leaves)
Another EP that delineates an entire sonic world. This, like the Krallice record, seems to me to be a state-of-the-art example of not exactly where music is at this moment, because nothing else really sounds like Heaven's Sense, but of a sort of speculative future of music, where pop could end up if diligence and wisdom and higher instincts prevailed. Demanding, yes, but so sensuous and pleasurable and coherent at the same time. There are hooks in "An Atrium" that have run through my head for days. If you consider yourself a fan of so-called progressive music of any kind, or of pop that aims at a kind of ethereal complexity and sweeping and refined emotional heft—I'll throw out Kate Bush and Yes as two inadequate touchstones—you must, must, must hear this. The descriptor "haunting" has been drained of most of its meaning, but it applies here.

Mary Halvorson Meltframe (Firehouse 12)
Another release with a kind of fierce beauty and interiority to it, but while the Voice Coils EP is all about high-wire ensemble dazzlement, this is stripped back and close to the bone. A simple description of what Meltframe is—meditation on and deconstruction of melody—feels way too clinical. This is an album that sings with emotion. A personal language on a common instrument, spoken plainly—sort of the rule for how all jazz ought to feel but rarely does. All the approaches to the gorgeous and carefully selected source material work equally well: harsh, subdued, dense/effects-heavy, sparse/unadorned or one melting gradually into the other.

Tau Cross Tau Cross (Relapse)
A debut album that sets forth a strikingly well-formed band concept. Shades of Killing Joke, Motörhead, recent Prong and, yes, mid-to-late-period Voivod (that band's Michel "Away" Langevin is Tau Cross's drummer). Gloom-painted postpunk–meets-thrash-meets–hard rock with outstanding hooks and tons of variety; surprisingly, the folky tracks work as well as the ragers. Rob "The Baron" Miller's impassioned delivery brings real grizzled pathos. Further thoughts here.

Black Star Riders The Killer Instinct (Nuclear Blast)
The group that began life as the Band Once Again Known as Thin Lizzy but Without Phil Lynott is now, thankfully, rolling up their sleeves and doing it the hard way: forging ahead and making new music. This album sounds like it could have been made anywhere from about 1983 through 1989, but no one for whom music like this—hook-forward, arena-scaled, cheese-oblivious hard rock—holds any appeal is going to care about its "relevance." This album completely, wholeheartedly rocks. The Riders pay homage to Lizzy, yes, but really they're just honoring the tough-guy songwriting tradition in general; there's just as much Bon Jovi in here, and that's fine by me. Fantastic songs—well, on the first half of the album, at least—and a frontman, Ricky Warwick, who's easy to believe and root for.

Title Fight Hyperview (ANTI-)
There's apparently some sort of subgenre-oriented skin-shedding going on with this record—hardcore-gone-shoegaze, I believe—but since I'm not familiar with Title Fight's past work, I'm taking this at face value. Hyperview is simply a lush and enveloping melodic indie-rock album, undergirded with post-hardcore muscle and glistening with a melancholy emotional mist. The color field of guitars and the raw-throated cries that burst out from beneath them lead to a kind of mood-drunkenness that's a pleasure to get lost in. It helps that the songs themselves are as strong as the atmosphere.

Jack DeJohnette Made in Chicago (ECM)
As I indicated here, the quintet heard on this album has evolved considerably since they recorded this album at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2013, but Made in Chicago still holds up as a supergroup effort that capitalizes on every bit of its enormous potential. The stars here, and I think Mr. DeJohnette would agree, are Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, and the presence of a master drummer-leader who also happens to be one of the best listeners in jazz only makes their contributions—both as composers and improvisers—sound that much sweeter (or nastier or more otherworldly, depending on the moment). Not just great artists sharing the stage, but the sound of a group aesthetic crystallizing, and the stage being set for future wonders.

Laddio Bolocko Live and Unreleased 1997–2000 (No Quarter)
Post-hardcore colliding with funk, free jazz, sound collage and psychedelia in a totally organic way. The prog impulse channeled into fiercely danceable body music, fueled by one of the greatest drummers of our time, Blake Fleming, who I first came to know through the illustrious and incredible Dazzling Killmen. I'd always felt that I hadn't quite gotten the complete picture regarding this band from its earlier No Quarter compilation, The Life and Times of…, and this release confirms it. A heady barrage of archival material, some quizzical and fragmented, some gorgeously dialed in and fleshed out. (I adore the groove-science "Afrostructure" series, which falls somewhere in between these two poles.) The final stretch of this sprawling set, with the studio version of the two-part cosmic-groove-prog opus "How About This For My Hair?" and a live set from Slovenia that's so intense it feels like it could leave scars (but is also wonderfully subdued and sensitive in spots), is the reason why archival releases like this are essential to the musical ecosystem: to bring to light bygone marvels you never knew existed.

Sonny Rollins Quartet With Don Cherry Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962 (Solar)
Speaking of bygone marvels. We maybe had a clue with this one in the form of Our Man in Jazz, but did we really know the enormity of what went down until now? 

Blind Idiot God Before Ever After (Indivisible)
BIG share Laddio Bolocko's NYC-via–St. Louis trajectory, as well as their wide-open conception of what rock-based post-hardcore music can sound and feel like. Another Laswell production, and a balletic, rumbling behemoth of a comeback album. Everything about Before Ever After sounds to me like an improvement on the already-intriguing formula that BIG advanced on their late-’80s/early-’90s work. Can't wait to see where they go from here.

Revenge Behold.Total.Rejection (Season of Mist)
J. Read is like a gigantic mutant rat that leaps out of the darkness, chomps on your leg and refuses to unclench its jaws as you flail about in agony. The man is a driven psychopath behind the drums and one of metal's truest, most original underground voices. On days when I lose faith in the idea of metal, grow weary with its self-straitjacketing conventions, I can still reach for a Revenge album—and specifically this, which is easily the band's most compelling record to date—and feel something. Pure, seething soul and fire, and the deft commingling of chaos and precision. Just when you think this album is a total blastbeat blur, it snaps back into focus with a skull-rattling rawk breakdown or cave-prog precision attack. If you want to know my "metal album of the year," it's a tie between this and Ygg Huur—despite what my ballot says below; again, feelings change and evolve, which is why polls are just arbitrary snapshots in time—albums that represent two very different extremes of "extreme metal" that actually feel, you know, extreme. Further thoughts here.

The Bad Plus and Joshua Redman The Bad Plus Joshua Redman (Nonesuch)
This album didn't top my 2015 jazz ballot, but if I were casting said vote right now instead of a few weeks back, it probably would. The Bad Plus Joshua Redman is a near-perfect record, an exemplary illustration of everything we already know the Bad Plus does well—at this point, their sonic fingerprint is as instantly recognizable as that of, say, the Who—given a smart tweak/kick-in-the-ass via the presence of a contemporary tenor-saxophone master. This quartet was already great four years ago, but here, there's a sense of shared purpose that feels hard-earned through hours and hours spent together onstage. Instantly memorable compositions, performances that move with convincing emotional purpose and with utmost concern for the musical material at hand, whether it's crisp, refined and determinedly melodic or sprawling, choppy and, well, determinedly melodic. Jazz always needs more song-focus, more band-focus, and the Bad Plus keep showing us how handsomely those philosophies can pay off. Here, they have some very able assistance. Not really measuring by length here, but this is the 2015 "epic" for me.

Interlude:
So yes, maybe I'm getting in a small dig at Kamasi Washington's The Epic there (and also, more explicitly, in the Stanley Cowell blurb linked above). The Epic certainly wasn't an album I disliked, but nor was it was one I connected with on any deep level. I heard glossy, tastefully updated retro bombast with strong melodies, some truly ass-kicking post-Coltrane/turbo-bop moments and long stretches of not-much-happening. I'd hold up any of the jazz albums listed above as far better examples of "where jazz is at" than The Epic any day. But then again…

Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope)
The Kamasi-wave wasn't really about Kamasi. It was about Washington's role in this thorny masterpiece, which topped every poll both because of its sociopolitical urgency in a year where the topics Lamar dealt with on To Pimp… were not only impossible to ignore but impossible not to despair over, and because, well, it was an enthralling LP, period, a searing self-interrogation that balanced every menacing boast with a choked-up sniffle. Everyone seemed to want to tell me that the album I just described was actually D'Angelo's Black Messiah. I didn't quite connect with that one, either, but I believed every last second of this.

Iron Maiden The Book of Souls (Parlophone/Sanctuary)
Same goes for this. I like Iron Maiden, which seems weird to say, since they're a band beloved by their fan base in an uniquely rabid way and ignored by pretty much everyone else. Honestly, I just don't know the catalog that well, but The Book of Souls was an instant "yes, please" for me. I love the way the visceral, bottom-heavy production sound combines with Bruce Dickinson's heroic yet endearingly strained-sounding vocals, and I love how itself this band remains, how committed they sound to this thing called metal that is really, for them, simply Iron Maiden Music. Like the Black Star Riders album, The Book of Souls rocks in a timeless way. I didn't once make it through the entire LP in a single sitting, but whenever I checked in with it—from archetypal single "Speed of Light" to that hammy yet genuinely touching 18-minute finale, "Empire of the Clouds"—I felt uplifted and inspired.

Weather Report The Legendary Tapes 1978–1981 (Legacy)
This hits me in a similar way: a supremely confident band, doing its thing. As a group, Weather Report had a strange magic—virtuosic daredevilry, yes, but also festive melody and childlike wonder and a certain kind of zany party-prog verve. None of the truly great acts that we label as "fusion" (ahem…) really sounded anything alike, and this release helps us see Weather Report for the style-transcendent anomaly that they were, and adds to the welcome hoopla surrounding the Jaco documentary release (and my own private hoopla surrounding a recent deep immersion in the Jaco–Joni Mitchell collaboration).

Morgoth Ungod (Century Media)
Deactivate brain. Rage. Repeat. (For those who related to this, as well as my Obituary and Asphyx gushing over the years, you need to hear Ungod.)

Kirk Knuffke Arms and Hands (Royal Potato Family)
This cornet specialist continues to record in all kinds of interesting contexts, bringing fresh ideas to each situation. I agree with the core mission statement of Arms and Hands—that bringing together Bill Goodwin and Mark Helias was a fantastic idea. (Lamplighter, another 2015 Knuffke session featuring Goodwin, is also well worth your time, and from what I've read and the samples, this sounds awesome.) Another example of jazz-as-personal-sonic-signature, in personnel, mood, repertoire.


Update, 12/28/15:
David S. Ware / Apogee Birth of a Being (Aum Fidelity)
Heart-burstingly passionate trio music—perhaps the single most convincing document of post-Ayler free jazz I've heard—from 1977, reissued here with extra material. Apogee, a working band with Cooper-Moore (then Gene Ashton) on piano and Marc Edwards on drums, is, to me, every bit as compelling as Ware's later, better-known quartet with Matthew Shipp, William Parker, etc. Massive.

Update, 12/29/15
Killing Joke Pylon (Spinefarm)
The only reason this one wasn't on here before is that I hadn't yet had a chance to spend good time with it. As with ELO, I'm not a Killing Joke completist, but I aspire to be one. I adored KJ's 2010 album, Absolute Dissent, but sort of slept on 2012's MMXII. I need to go back and remedy that, because this new one is another monster. Menace, beauty, relentless momentum, enthralling texture. Few bands can conjure such a pervasive, well-shaded sensation of gloom.

Update, 12/30/15
Elder Lore (Armageddon Shop)
Whoo boy, does this thing kick ass. A few people (one being my friend and former colleague Steve Smith) had tipped me off to Lore during the course of the year, but I didn't really dig in till just now. I'll reprise a line I just tweeted, because it sums up my thoughts well: This is like recent Mastodon gone full prog, with vastly better production. I'm still digesting this, but it seems to me that the quality of the songwriting on Lore matches the enormous ambition on display here, which is sort of insane given how high these guys are clearly aiming.

Jaco 
A documentary that aims for and achieves definitive status via its smart balance of the personal and the musical. Watching this, you feel like you're seeing Jaco from all sides. Moving and insightful testimony from collaborators (Peter Erskine, Joni Mitchell, Wayne Shorter, et al.) and confidants (Bill Milkowski's contribution is particularly valuable). Breathtaking footage. A complicated life, dealt with sensitively yet unflinchingly.

Update, 12/31/15
Napalm Death Apex Predator — Easy Meat (Century Media)
Namechecked below but deserves a special shout-out. What I love about newer Napalm Death is, paradoxically, how clean it sounds. The current incarnation of this band is miles away from state-of-the-art extremity; by comparison, the Revenge album above makes 2015 Napalm (at least the recorded version) sound like Chuck Berry. But I'm fascinated by the way they've refined their craft for maximum accessibility and coherence, while remaining committed to speed and abrasiveness, and a genuine sense of purgative rage, embodied by Barney Greenway. You can hear everything that's going on in this music, and there's great care taken in the composition, pacing, mood. Extremity isn't really the issue: Napalm Death is, at this point simply, a great, adventurous rock band.

P.S. Phil Freeman's guide to the ND discography is essential for those of us who know bits and pieces of the band's long, complicated history but not the whole thing.

*****

The nitty-gritty

2015 Jazz Ballot (with regard to this poll)
1. Milford Graves and Bill Laswell Space/Time • Redemption (TUM)
2. Jack DeJohnette Made in Chicago (ECM)
3. Henry Threadgill Zooid In for a Penny, in for a Pound (Pi)
4. Mary Halvorson Meltframe (Firehouse 12)
5. The Bad Plus and Joshua Redman The Bad Plus Joshua Redman (Nonesuch)
6. Stanley Cowell Juneteenth (Vision Fugitive)
7. Wadada Leo Smith and John Lindberg Celestial Weather (TUM)
8. Kirk Knuffke Arms and Hands (Royal Potato Family)
9. Jon Irabagon Behind the Sky (Irabbagast)
10. John Zorn Inferno (Tzadik)

2015 Metal Ballot (with regard to this list)
1. Revenge Behold.Total.Rejection (Season of Mist)
2. Black Star Riders The Killer Instinct (Nuclear Blast)
3. Iron Maiden The Book of Souls (Parlophone/Sanctuary)
4. Tau Cross Tau Cross (Relapse)
5. Blind Idiot God Before Ever After (Indivisible)
6. Krallice Ygg Huur (self-released)
7. Morgoth Ungod (Century Media)
8. Royal Thunder Crooked Doors (Relapse)
9. Napalm Death Apex Predator — Easy Meat (Century Media)
10. Embodied Torment Liturgy of Ritual Execution (New Standard Elite)

10 Best Shows I Saw in 2015
1/13 - Celebrating Charlie Haden (The Town Hall)
2/13 - John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Milford Graves + Marc Ribot, Trevor Dunn, Tyshawn Sorey (Village Vanguard)
2/26 - Xylouris White (Bowery Ballroom)
3/15 - Charles Lloyd Quartet (Village Vanguard)
5/10 - Morpheus Descends (Saint Vitus)
6/11 - Feast of the Epiphany + Travis Laplante (IBeam)
6/20 - Dead Moon + Borbetomagus (Pioneer Works)
6/29 - Rush (MSG)
8/21 - Krallice (The Stone)
10/5 - Jack DeJohnette’s Made in Chicago (Cornell University)

With a special honorable mention for Ayahuasca, Godstopper, Couch Slut and Pyrryon at BRIEFCASEFEST 2015.

SONGS/2015

Recently

Few news bits to share:

1) I'm thrilled to report that the second Craw Kickstarter campaign, complete as of June 2, has met and exceeded its funding goal. The good people at Northern Spy and Aqualamb, the members of Craw, and myself are already hard at work on the vinyl box set, which will be out later this year. (Above is a subject-to-change rendering of the 100-page, Aqualamb-designed book of photos and lyrics that will accompany the set.) A big thanks to any DFSBP readers who pledged, helped to spread the word or simply gave the campaign a look. Stay tuned!

2) On May 1, I spent more than three hours talking with Milford Graves, a longtime musical hero of mine, at his home in Jamiaca, Queens. A big thanks to Red Bull Music Academy—and my editor there, Todd Burns—for posting an extra-lengthy Q&A drawn from this conversation.

3) I've spent much of this past week on the road with Psalm Zero. Thanks to all bookers, bands (especially the unrelenting Massachusetts noise-rock quartet Livver) and friendly folks who helped to make this trip fun and fruitful. I enjoyed all the shows, but I'd like to single out BRIEFCASEFEST in Toronto on Friday as particularly great experience. Was absolutely floored by the local bands Godstopper and Ayahuasca, each of whom specializes in a unique strain of proggy, melodic post-hardcore that really struck a chord with me, as well as our NYC comrades Couch Slut (a stunningly intense and unsettling band; I'm still reeling) and Pyrrhon (a band that pushes technical death metal into a zone of pure info-overload mania).

Thus concludes my stint working with PZ. I'd like to thank the band's co-leaders, my friends Charlie Looker and Andrew Hock, for a challenging, rewarding experience. They're both extremely creative, prolific and uncompromising musicians, and I can't wait to see what they do next, both together and separately. For the curious, here's a video of a show I played with Psalm Zero in April. If you're not familiar with the band, I firmly believe that their 2014 debut, The Drain (which I wasn't involved in, to be clear), is a new classic of dark, heavy, forward-thinking rock.

Hey, 'Nineteen': Garth W. Caylor's instant classic

There didn't seem to be much risk involved in plunking down $21 for a copy of Nineteen +. A couple weeks back, my friend Stephen Buono tipped me off to this Wire news item concerning a book of interviews with jazz musicians that had recently been self-published by its author, Garth W. Caylor Jr., 50 years after its completion. (Caylor completed the manuscript in ’65 but shelved it after he was unable to find a publisher.) I took one look at the time frame, 1964–65, and the list of artists involved—Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Milford Graves and Steve Lacy are five of the 19 names—and knew that I needed to have this. With those artists on board, Caylor's book had to be at least interesting.

I'm about halfway through Nineteen +, and I'm comfortable labeling it as an essential jazz book. Off the top of my head, my personal short list in that regard would look something like:

Valerie Wilmer
As Serious as Your Life

Ben Ratliff
The Jazz Ear

A.B. Spellman
Four Lives in the Bebop Business

Arthur Taylor
Notes and Tones

Graham Lock
Forces in Motion

Lock's classic Anthony Braxton tome is the odd volume out there, in that it focuses on one artist. The rest of these books are compilations of sorts, where each chapter concerns a different artist or set of artists. Nineteen + is of the latter type. Among those listed above, Caylor's book probably most closely resembles Taylor's classic collection of artist interviews: Unlike with the Ratliff and Spellman books, the chapters here are short (about eight pages on average, and the book itself is small: a paperback just larger than pocket-sized), and unlike with Wilmer's, the author doesn't seem to have much of an agenda in mind. I say "much of" because he does seem to be attempting to get to the bottom of the "inside"/"outside" binary that was a hot-button issue in jazz at the time and which is still a source of occasional debate/commentary; the chapters on Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (they're heard from together here, as they often are on record) and Bill Evans contain some fascinating insights in that regard, e.g., Sims and Cohn's complicated stances on Coltrane (they admire his technique but seem to find his aesthetics abrasive).

Caylor is more or less reporting what he experienced and recorded, aiming not exactly for a portrait of each artist he visits (he interviews the majority—all?—of the musicians in their own respective homes) but for a sketch of their personality and philosophy, aesthetic and otherwise. He uses the Q&A format occasionally and quotes large, sometimes pages-long, blocks of the artists' words verbatim. But these aren't mere transcriptions. Caylor frames the conversations with his own prose, and the effort is beautifully unobtrusive, like an expert lighting job. (In the introduction, Caylor describes how, at the time he was compiling these interviews, he was working as an architect, and the elegant yet unassuming way he structures his chapters seems directly related to that career.) He offers just the right scene-setting details—starting his Jaki Byard profile, for instance, by describing an interaction between the pianist and his young son, or his Steve Swallow chapter thusly:

Steve Swallow lives among tables and chairs of wood, shelves of paperbooks, and shelves of spools of colored yarn above that, all the way to the ceiling because his wife weaves things. They serve coffee with chicory, I think, from cups and saucers of baked earth. There is a bass fiddle, a piano, a loom and some cats in the tall room.

Or even transcribing bits of phone conversations he overhears: serendipitously, Mingus happens to ring Byard during Caylor's interview of the latter, and Miles happens to call up Herbie Hancock while the author is visiting. ("Miles said, 'So you're gonna take what all the musicians say and put it in a book and get all the money for it'—is that right?")

The pieces are far shorter and less commentary-heavy than Calvin Tomkins's wonderful New Yorker artist profiles, but there's a similar kind of sensitive mind at work here. The writing is musical but not gaudy. Caylor also includes complementary quotes from various texts by authors that either come up directly in the conversations or whose work is relevant to the topics discussed in the interviews. Interestingly, he often lets these authors have the final word in a given piece. Art Farmer mentions Ravel, for example, so Caylor closes that chapter with several apropos 1930s quotes from the composer; Caylor and Swallow discuss Zen Buddhism, so the author appends an excerpt from D.T. Suzuki.

What strikes me is how freely Caylor gets these musicians to speak. The insights pour out. After reading each piece, I really do feel like I've spent an hour in the company of the artist in question. I've already dog-eared this book to death. A few excerpts:

[Playing with Paul Bley] was an overwhelming experience—I got physically sick afterwards—I stayed in bed for three or four days and thought and thought… Playing with Paul Bley was the first wholly musical experience I'd had—it wasn't recreational and it wasn't social. It had an awesome effect on me.
—Steve Swallow

So really Charles Mingus's band is about the only group I can think of that I could play for and be able to play every thing I know on piano.
—Jaki Byard

The kind of group I want is say a quintet where each piece is a composition by all five players. I want to get an interaction of sound caused by an interaction of minds. I want everybody to be playing together, not necessarily all the time, but maybe so. Maybe two guys will solo at once. Maybe more.
—Herbie Hancock

…[Going] to a museum clears my head—I get a lot of inspiration looking at pictures, and I don't make literal associations. I don't compare it to what I'm doing—it makes me feel much "braver" about my own playing and writing.
—Jim Hall

So you see what I mean. Caylor gets these artists talking about what matters, which is the music. If you, like me, have an endless thirst for this kind of primary-source interview material (the phrase "Musicians on music," which John Zorn employs in the subtitle of his Arcana volumes, seems apropos, although in Caylor's book, the musicians are just as often talking about literature or visual art), you're going to gulp this concise book down.

I should point out that the Milford Graves conversation is especially valuable. We're lucky to have a thorough documentation of Graves's current viewpoint, but I don't think I've ever read an interview with him from the mid-’60s, when he was making so many indelible contributions to jazz, drumming and music in general. The Graves interview is a torrent of ideas, free-flowing but absolutely coherent. Caylor sees a handwoven basket (presumably Native American, since he includes a picture of a Washoe basket in the text, one of many tastefully incorporated visual aids in Nineteen +) on the floor in Graves's home and asks about it. Graves replies:

It's sort of an environmental thing for me, first of all it makes me think of a snake, you know; it keeps my coordination together when I think about it. An object that I can look at for a while sort of helps me inside, edifies me, builds my mind and makes me comfortable.

Funny, because Graves drumming does all those things for me. At another point, Graves provides an eerily apt description of his musical asethetic:

…[My] thing is not to capture sound, you know. My feeling is just to move along with it, just to get into the sound, to make myself a part of it and just move along without making any stops.

I'm reading this book and I'm underlining incessantly—consuming these marvelous first-person insights in a state of joyous disbelief. For jazz people, the publication of Nineteen + is a major event. I'm confident that if it had come out 50 years ago, it would be held up as an all-time classic in the field. As far as I'm concerned, the book attains that status instantly. It's an invaluable work of artists-on-art scholarship—as WKCR taught me, the hierarchy goes 1) the music itself, 2) the words of the people who made it (i.e., the majority of Nineteen +) and 3) everything else—and my only wish is that there were several more volumes of Caylor's conversations to follow. Purchase immediately.

P.S. In terms of musicians-on-music, I've also become an avid fan of Joe Wong's drumcentric podcast, The Trap Set. Try the Drumbo, Dale Crover, Ndugu Chancler interviews.

New York, instrument: John Zorn at the Village Vanguard

John Zorn is at the Village Vanguard through Sunday. Last night I caught a pair of sets I've been looking forward to since the series was announced: the duo of Zorn and Milford Graves, augmented by special guest Steve Coleman, and the trio of Marc Ribot, Trevor Dunn and Tyshawn Sorey, playing material from the Asmodeus and Valentine's Day albums, with Zorn on live conduction.

Check out the samples from Asmodeus above, and you'll have an excellent idea of what the latter set sounded like. (G. Calvin Weston plays on that album, while Sorey is on Valentine's Day, but interestingly, the most compelling pieces from last night's set—such as the Sharrock-via-Hendrix stomper "Mufgar"—were from the former.) I have relatively little to say about this set, honestly, mainly because it was so much goddamn fun. The entire club—me and two of my best friends, those at all the tables visible around us and, crucially, the musicians onstage and especially Zorn—were beaming en masse, reveling in the vaguely transgressive thrill we were sharing. Ribot, Dunn and Sorey, who are, when they want to be, three of the straight-up nastiest musicians on the planet, simply, gloriously just kicking out the jams in a sort of acid-rock-meets-prog-punk-meets-screaming-cathartic-blues mode, and on the stage of the Village freakin' Vanguard, no less. Zorn offered plenty of on-the-fly instruction, orchestrating impromptu drop-outs and unison accents, stoking the flames of each musician in turn, but mainly what he offered was a platform for something this awesome to go down.

Zorn's core principle, as I understand it, can be reduced to some variant on "Music is community" or "Music is people." His greatest gift, in my eyes, is the way he locates the best musicians on the planet (which usually means in New York)—not just the chopsiest virtuosos, but the ones who shred with passion, fire and abandon, slams them together in dream-team assemblages, provides them with just enough compositional fuel that they can attain lift-off and simply gets out of the way. Yes, he was stageside last night, calling pieces and conducting, but mostly, he was sitting there grinning his ass off and rocking the fuck out, just like everyone else in the club. The thrills of primal, bashing jazz-rock, occasionally coming off the rails and zooming along in freeform tumult. It was such a basic concept, but the depth of heart and musical resources of the three musicians involved made it profound. Yes, Ribot, Dunn and Sorey were, in a certain sense, just jamming on some skeletal themes, but they poured so much love and aggression into the endeavor, returning the gift Zorn had given them by assembling them in the first place and giving them this material to work with. This was a high-order act of brain-frying. Someone should book this trio at a big rock club—would love to hear them that much louder.

There was noise and riot in the first set, as well, but that performance vibrated on a whole different wavelength, and I think that had a lot to do with the presence of Steve Coleman. Zorn and Graves have been working together as a duo for a long time, and they have a pretty well-established sound as a band of two. (Compare their first documented meeting, from 2003, with their 2013 Metropolitan Museum performance -- a trio with Jackson Pollock, in a sense.) Meditation, yes, but mixed in with plenty of catharsis in the classic free-jazz sense, with Graves providing the weather-event rumble and Zorn the jagged stabs of aural lightning. To my ears, the meditative element won out during last night's set. Zorn played his share of his patented aggro sandpaper, but he doled it out thoughtfully. For me, this set was about a special kind of unity, the two horns meshing in a snaking, interlocking dervish display, as Graves conjured rhythm, his patented primal shimmy, out of the earth.

The set had a nice arc to it. As I remember, the pieces went like this: full trio, Zorn/Graves duo, Coleman/Graves duo, brief Zorn/Coleman duo, full trio. Hearing the Coleman/Graves duo really drove home the contrast between the two horn players. Whereas Zorn's home base in these sorts of settings is an eruptive mode, Coleman seemed to hear in Graves's pulsations an invitation to control rather than release, an encouragement to find ecstasy in discipline, to craft and sustain a coherent soloistic line. When the three played together, the latter impulse often won out. Zorn and Coleman were two horns looking for one voice, darting, overlapping and at certain moments fusing, so that it was hard to tell their alto sounds apart. Both working admirably hard to, in some profound way, agree on the current they were following—striving for utmost harmony in every sense. To my ears, Graves was, this time around, homing in on the dance. It's always an element of his performance, but here, it seemed like the root of the whole endeavor. (Maybe it had something to do with the fact that before the show, he got stuck in traffic driving his drums from Jamaica, Queens to the Village—"You want to talk about avant-garde?" he said to the audience, playfully. "That was avant-garde"—and needed to counteract vehicular frustration with pure body-moving joy.)

At times, as during the Coleman duo, Graves would assume a more upright posture, with his back against the metal folding chair that he always uses as a drum throne, and fixate on simple right-hand motions that aimed for what my friend Will (an extraordinary drummer whose playing effortlessly connects the dots between Ed Blackwell and Clyde Stubblefield) referred to as the sweet spot of the floor tom, that zone that every drummer knows, where you strike and draw sound out of the three core elements of the instrument all at once: skin (the head), metal (the rim) and, through the percussive act, wood (the body). Milford Graves is the absolute unparalleled master of locating these sweet spots on his kit and using them to make the rhythm sing like a three-dimensional choir, pouring forth impossibly funky pulsations, not quite "in time" but always related to a certain groove imperative.

It made you want to dance and sing, and so the altos did. You heard the core strains of what these three players do—the Jewish music in Zorn's blood, the bebop in Coleman's, the Afro-Cuban root of the Graves endeavor—all swirled together in a kind of blurry oneness, a single stream, not barreling forth, but sort of riding a current. And while Graves was clearly the one directing that current—not just with the single-hand free funk described above, but with his full-kit massage/barrage, including moments where he held two sticks in the right hand so as to grab both the floor tom and a bongo nearby—no one was in charge here. At its best moments, this was a set that felt like a group submission, a burying of ego in the service of flow. You can talk it about it other ways, but to me, it sounded nakedly spiritual—a beautiful contrast to the heat and bombast of set two.

So music is community, music is people. And I'd add that music is event, the simple act of willing things to happen. I've had my reservations about John Zorn's work in the past, some published on this blog, but I've felt them melting away in recent years, from the 2013 Met takeover on. The bottom line is that, as the Met event demonstrated, and as the two sets I saw last night reaffirmed, this guy is an expert at making impossibly cool stuff happen. Free jazz and contemporary classical music at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Dirty punk fusion at the Village Vanguard? Yes, please. In a very real sense, John Zorn's instrument at this point in his career is New York City itself—its musical geniuses, its hallowed institutions. He's assembling world-class artists in any number of styles and presenting them in the way they ought to be presented: as cultural treasures, via events where you celebrate the artists, the spaces, the inimitable New York–iness of it all. These Zorn gatherings are, increasingly, real events, not just shows. He's changing the fabric of how we engage with art in NYC, and he has been for a long time, and that's a serious feat. (And not just through events he's directly involved in; his LES venue, The Stone, presents live music six nights a week.) And on a more immediate level, he's facilitating a very specific kind of fun—quintessentially abrasive perhaps, but also so inclusive. Anyone, not just a "free-jazz fan" or a "Zorn fan" could've checked out those sets last night and understood that something joyous and special was going on. Community, communication, communion—basic acts of bringing artists together and inviting audiences to join in. It's a profound cultural project, and based on last night's magic, boy, is it ever working.

"You don't get it in front of a blackboard, man": A Milford Graves master class

Never enough Milford Graves, okay? His drumming, its presence, the sonic and physical space it inhabits, is one of my musical food groups. As I wrote last week, I'm currently on the lookout for nourishment, hungry for truth and wisdom in music. At that point, I was finding what I needed in Paul Motian (I was remiss not to link to this incredible 1986 Motian/Frisell/Lovano vid, btw), another one of my listening staples. Then I stumbled across the clip above (part one of a three-part Milford Graves master class, filmed last year at the New School, and graciously documented in full by bassist Nicolas Letman-Burtinovic) and my attention shifted. For the past few days, I've been all about this series of videos. I have some thoughts to share on this document, but the most important observation I can offer is that it's precious and essential. I urge you to watch the whole thing.



If you've ever attended a Milford Graves concert, you know that he loves to rap with the audience at different points. He always drops bits of heavy knowledge during those mini sermons, and the above is like a two-hour version. Concentrated, conversational insight. Mystery and majesty. Not capital-T Truth; just the distilled experience of one lifetime. The testimony of a fully realized artist, scientist, healer, scholar.

This master class does have an element of rant to it. Graves is, to cite one of his central principles, which he discusses at length here, anti-metronome and pro-biorhythm. He's anti-machine, pro-man; anti-rigidity, pro-fluidity. Clichéd notions, perhaps, when taken in the abstract, but when coupled with the great sweep of Graves's knowledge, his hard-won authority, seven-plus decades in the making, and with the way he plays—and, it should be said, he barely plays at all during this master class, though there is an intense musicality to the delivery; even when speaking, he's all about rhythmic soundmaking, teaching through song and dance as much as word—his insights take on great profundity. He's anti- bottom heads on drums, anti- overly fussy charts written by non-drumming bandleaders, anti- equal temperament. Anything that impedes flow is suspect.

And there's invaluable history here, both personal history and that of a time and place. Milford Graves (and many Graves devotees will know this, either from call it art, another invaluable Graves-related document, or elsewhere) is, at base, a Latin-jazz musician, a player of the timbales who focused on that instrument and its surrounding idiom to the point that, as he relates here, trap-set masters such as Art Blakey and Elvin Jones meant relatively little to him during his formative years in the early ’60s. His idols were percussionists such as Willie Bobo and Graves's friend and contemporary Bill Fitch, his bandleading models artists such as Cal Tjader. Graves led a Latin-jazz group featuring a young Chick Corea, apparently a fearsome player even at that time. He didn't touch a set of trap drums till ’63, the year before he began working with the New York Art Quartet in the idiom he's best known for, so-called free jazz.

You watch this, and you realize that a musician like this—an artist like this, a person like this—is truly beyond category. "Free jazz" seems so small compared to the worldview expressed here. Graves tells of foraging for herbs, absorbing nature, studying and practicing acupuncture, learning martial arts, playing in Africa and Japan. He's a gatherer and an aggregator, a mystic and a skeptic, a teacher and a student, pouring out notions for you to take or leave. What does it mean to really study music? How far can academia take you? (Bear in mind that Graves taught at Bennington for close to four decades, so he clearly believes in higher education, but he approaches it from a personalized, humane, experience-driven standpoint.) What is an artist's responsibility to an audience? Should you prepare a show, or take the temperature of the room and build a performance based on the environment you find yourself in? Why, fundamentally, do you do what you do?

We speak of personalities and presences as animated. If you've ever seen Milford Graves perform, you know he is that, both when playing and when speaking. But just as importantly, he is animating. You leave his presence (even virtual presence) with wider eyes, a broader gaze, a renewed awareness for all that there is out there—the scope not just of music, but of knowledge, betterment, fulfillment, understanding. There's no boundary on this kind of inspiration—it seeps into every corner of your life.

I'm currently immersed in the autodidactic study of double-kick drumming. I've recently signed on as the live drummer for a metal-oriented band I really love called Psalm Zero. I've spent 20 years as a single-kick drummer, and proudly so, but idiomatically, this music demands double kick, and so I've set out on that path. It's tough going, but rewarding—and, more importantly, fun.

And learning should be, if you have the right teacher. Milford Graves is a—not the, because there could never be just one—right teacher. In his view, you learn out of love, not out of careerism or competition or any other base reason. You make a life out of it. You cultivate confidence and humility in turn. You form strong opinions and you make them known, but you make it clear that you only speak for yourself; you never wield dogma like a billy club.

Most importantly, you share. There's a bit near the end of the third part of the talk where Graves speaks about pedagogy, and about how he made a point to actually play with every one of his students. He even goes so far as to say that a teacher who doesn't do the thing they teach alongside their students is quite literally not teaching. Teaching is giving. It's spending time. It's encouraging and helping and inspiring—literally breathing into those one instructs. It's coming to terms with the fact that while books, systems and schools of thought are great, people are greater.

No wonder you leave a Graves performance feeling so renewed, so uplifted. It's because every one is a deliberate act of inspiration. "You don't get it in front of a blackboard, man," he says at around 25:00 in part two, repeating the line several times for emphasis. Nor do you get it—nourishment, knowledge, experience, aural or otherwise—with earbuds squashed in your ears, or when mashing buttons on your iPhone, or sitting at a desk staring at a screen. You get it by being there, either by paying physical witness (I treasure my collection of Milford Graves recordings, but they're nothing compared to the thrill of seeing him live; that's true in the case of almost every great artist, but with him it's, like, mega-true; you have to feel those soundwaves on your skin) or, if you want to do the thing yourself, by putting your body somewhere, temporarily shutting out the world and getting to know it—it being your own private, physical reality and the skill/art you want to make manifest. It doesn't have to be drumming; it could be anything. But is has to be real, not virtual—experienced, not read about. Not in front of a blackboard, indeed.

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More Milford Graves on YouTube:

*Steve Coleman interviews Milford Graves at the School for Improvisational Music (2013)

*"Milford Graves and the Japanese"—concert film and documentary, from a Japanese festival organized by dancer Min Tanaka (1987)

*Milford Graves and William Parker, live at Jazzores (2010) [Graves discusses this performance during the master class]

*Milford Graves Quartet (1973) [Some sharp commentary on this vid, and Graves's work in general, via Weasel Walter]

*Milford Graves at the Vision Festival Lifetime Achievement event, via Don Mount (2013)
-NY HeArt Ensemble
-Transition Trio
-Afro-Cuban Roots

*"Speaking in Tongues"—Milford Graves documentary featuring David Murray, Stanley Crouch and others (1982)

*"A Tribute to Milford Graves"—highlights from event held at Bennington College (2012)

*Milford Graves and Japanese percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori—performance and interview (1993)

Soundchasing: Sunny Murray

In various writings on Milford Graves, I've mentioned the idea of chasing a sound. I'm not sure what it is about this certain species of drummer—Graves, Paul Motian, Sunny Murray, Elvin Jones—but sometimes I get it into my head that I just can't listen to anything else other than the sound of one of these players. It's like a craving for a certain kind of food that overcomes me, sticks around and then gradually departs. And I'm finding that it's cyclical. My pantheon is taking concrete shape, in other words. I'm open to new information, but I think the names mentioned above will always be a part of the rotation; these strong desires to hear them, and only them, will come back around.

Lately, the sound I'm chasing is Sunny Murray's. As with Milford Graves's, Murray's sound can be a hard one to really locate. It's been ages since I've seen the man perform, and that was not a positive experience. So I've been been busy sifting through what's there to sift through on record. Again, as with Milford Graves, I defy the museum-ification of artists like this, the holding up of their
"legendary" early recordings—often the ones on ESP or BYG, or the ones with some similar kind of first-wave cachet—as the best place (other than live) to hear them. Recent examples aren't as numerous as I'd like them to be, but both Graves and Murray have been extremely well-served by state-of-the-art modern recording technology.

Right now, I'm listening to Tiresias, a 2011 release under Louie Belogenis's name. As Clifford Allen—a serious Murray scholar—points out in the liner notes, we should treasure this opportunity to hear Murray in such gorgeous studio fidelity. (Beyond Quantum, a 2008 Tzadik set featuring William Parker and Anthony Braxton, is probably the closest equivalent in the Milford Graves discography.) So I've got this record on, and I just want to dive deep down in it. The crisp rattle of the snare, the lavish boom of the toms and bass drums—a sublimated thunder, as though Murray could shake the walls if he wanted to, but is content to flutter around wraithlike. And then gradually swelling the cymbals, rustling and conjuring, behind Belogenis. It's such a loving curtain of sound that Murray drapes over this session. He was obviously onto something similiar as early as Spiritual Unity, but I think he's a better listener, a better drummer, a better musician now.

The sound quality on I Stepped Onto a Bee, recorded in 2010 with Murray's current working-triomates Tony Bevan and John Edwards, isn't quite as stellar as what you hear on Tiresias—there's a certain brittleness to the sound, kind to the high end, but less so to the Elvin-y low end that's so crucial to Murray's overall delivery—but this one's also essential for the devoted Sunny Murray soundchaser.

There's a prevailing sense that Murray's approach to drumming is a sort of a default: He couldn't swing back in the day, so he had to resort to this. There aren't enough good vintage examples of Murray trying to "swing" for us to really make that call. I think Murray's dangerously easy to underestimate, though. Certainly, unlike Milford Graves—at least in my experience of seeing him play, Graves has never seemed anything less than scarily poised—there are times (such as the 2003 Tonic gig I caught) where Murray has appeared on the bandstand in a less-than-ideal headspace. You listen to these recent records, though, and you hear Murray's voice as clearly as if he were speaking; he's not doing this thing because he can't do that thing. He's doing this thing because it's the thing he's chosen and perfected.

This signature Murray style isn't the only style he's capable of delivering, by any means. There are plenty of obscure recent sessions—such as this very strange and not quite satisfying Archie Shepp record with Richard Davis, and an astounding bootleg I grabbed off Soulseek years ago of a 1998 Sonny Simmons / Sonny Murray duo gig in Cambridge—where you can hear Sunny Murray capably swinging in a relatively traditional vein, and sounding utterly like himself at the same time. But at his best, such as on I Stepped Onto a Bee, the idea of whether or not he's technically swinging is irrelevant. The point is that he controls the pace and the sensation of the music completely, decides whether it will be a ghostly dirge-blues, or this sort of surging free shout. And while the Murray sound is enveloping, especially that patented irregular cymbal swell, which carries you along like a mist at your back, what's most impressive is the blend, the way he occupies certain frequencies, fills up all the sound around his collaborators, so that he's buffeting them rather than drowning him out. (It would seem from this great Paris Transatlantic interview with Murray that there's more science to this—i.e., that very special way in which Murray inhabits and sort of plasticizes musical space—than many have thought. "I wanted to get more from the beat than just the beat," as he puts it.)

On Dawn of a New Vibration, Murray's tough-to-find 2000 duo session with the late Arthur Doyle (see also: Burning Ambulance), the drummer gets so much more from the beat than just the beat. One of the tracks here is titled "Elephant Dreams," and that's exactly how I think of Murray's sound on this record. The shaggy, loping weight of the sound coming off his kit here is just extraordinary. More and more, this is what I look for in a drum sound. It's Bonham; it's Elvin; it's Milford; it's Motian; it's prime Sunny Murray. It's that sense of dragging sound and rhythm, hauling it around like a sack of potatoes. It's not mutually exclusive with a certain kind of nimbleness, but the principal imperative is the earth-ness of the sound, the way that it rumbles through the ground and the air. Dawn of a new vibration, indeed.

During times like these, I need nothing more than that thwack, that thump and shimmer, that unmistakable sonic signature. It's not something you can capture. You need to be in the room with it, really. But recent, top-quality studio recordings can get you about halfway there, which is saying a lot. Right now, I'm breathing it in like oxygen.

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In terms of sheer distinctiveness of voice, I've also been deep into both Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace and Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning. Such a pleasure to hear these men speaking, as Sunny Murray does, with such authority and idiosyncrasy—being themselves at such a simultaneously refined and unapologetically raw level, in other words. That is what we mean by author, artist.

And since hearing this wonderful news, I've also been chasing the sound of Slint drummer Britt Walford, another player who's got a secure spot in my aforementioned percussive pantheon. When it comes to boomy, wide-open girth of sound, and a gorgeously loose feel, he is one of our contemporary masters. Such a shame that his discography is so tiny—really just three Slint releases and one relatively unrepresentative LP apiece by the Breeders and Evergreen, as well as various odds and ends, including this crucial pre-Slint rarity by Maurice. Even Graves's and Murray's relatively scant recorded works dwarf Walford's. I did find this enticing tidbit from last year, though. By the way, all fans of Britt Walford specifically and Slint in general need to read Scott Tennent's 33 1/3 book on Spiderland. The coming Lance Bangs doc ought to be a revelation, but until then, Scott's volume represents the deepest knowledge base we have on this insular band/scene.

Milford Graves and J. Read: blacksmiths of now

Sometimes appreciation takes the form of disbelief. You know a musical phenomenon from recordings, and you seek it out in person, assuming that you'll be able to better process it. But somehow, it makes even less sense live, and you come away loving and appreciating it—and the musician behind it—all the more.

Over the past two nights, I've seen shows featuring, respectively, two of my favorite living drummers. Friday: Milford Graves, in duo with Joe Lovano at the Stone; Saturday: James "J." Read, with the Alberta metal band Revenge at Saint Vitus. In each case, I felt like I was witnessing the end point of a certain methodology of percussion, the ultimate expression of what a human being interacting with the instrument can accomplish—not just physically, but spiritually. Both performances employed what Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth has referred to as "engulfingness," the fact of overwhelming the listener in an attempt to project/engender a feeling in an unusually deep way, almost as if the musician casting spells on the listener.














Friday's show was my third Milford Graves performance this year, and my second in the intimate confines of the Stone. Each of these gigs has been a duo show with a saxophonist: Evan Parker, John Zorn (part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art takeover) and Lovano. This last one was by far the best, in terms of rapport and, I guess I'd say, sheer amount of ground covered. Graves and Lovano dug deep almost immediately; as soon as the performance began, you sensed that each one was delighted by the other, wanted to give his partner all his heart and might, and to help him along to a place he hadn't yet been. To be fair, this sense of spiritual conveyance was stronger in one of the two directions, namely from Graves to Lovano, and I think Lovano would've fully admitted that. At the end of one of what I believe was the first piece, the saxophonist said, to the audience but just as much to himself, "Milford Graves, the greatest musician alive." (It may have been "…the greatest musician on the planet," but it was something with that kind of certainty to it.) I think everyone in the Stone would've agreed with him. I've rarely witnessed such obvious gratitude and reverence—manifested as gleeful ecstasy—as what was radiating from Joe Lovano on Friday night.


After seeing the Evan Parker duo a couple months back, I compared the phenomenon of Milford Graves performing in a small room to a weather event. His technique has the effect of changing the climate of the room, conjuring otherworldly states with sound and vibration. I'm frustrated with my language here, with the way I'm falling back on lofty, abstract description to convey a very tangible sensation. But in a way, that shortcoming on my part is the best tribute I could pay this musician and his art—an admittance that you can't know it any other way than to make a pilgrimage to it, to be in its presence. When watching Graves on Friday, when taking in that worship of wood and metal and hide—I don't want to misquote Professor Graves, but after one piece, he made reference to the negative effect the weather was having on his drum heads ("animal skin" was the phrase he used, I believe)—I found myself thinking of the enormous gulf between knowing a musician's signature sound from recordings and knowing it live, what a chasm there is between those two understandings. I thought about how the divine rumbles of, say, John Bonham and Elvin Jones would only ever be, for me, shadows of their real selves. (I saw Jones live one time, but I wasn't prepared then to really absorb what I was witnessing.) But I know the Milford Graves sound—or at least I can say that I have known it during those moments when I've been in its presence. I don't think it's possible to take an experience like that with you.

You watch the movements—the strange inverted grip Graves favors with his left hand; the way he rests the butt of the stick that strikes the ride cymbal on the floor tom; the way he mutes that cymbal with the shaft of the stick, creating these weird phasing effects—and it doesn't really bring you any closer to assimilating the benevolent barrage you're hearing and, just as importantly, feeling. When Graves plays, you're being, in a sense, battered by sound, but it's a restorative battering—like a particularly forceful, bracing massage. You feel like you're being swooped up in a cyclone, almost discerning its cycles, its near-regularity, but never grasping it—you're chasing after a meter, but as my friend Ben Young likes to put it, you can never quite pinpoint where "1" is. You knew Lovano was right in this place with the audience; the moments when he was playing seemed almost secondary to the moments during which he was silent, simply dancing, almost convulsing along with Graves's torrent. He was caught in that Milford Graves tractor beam, held in that grip of that enormous, polyvalent sound and vibration, soaking up its energy. We know that Graves is really a healer by trade, and when you hear him live, that fact is unimistakable. It's drumming as a gesture of spiritual restoration. We also know of Graves's fondness for hoisting fellow musicians on his back; this is what he does, figuratively, for the audience each time he plays: "I've got this. Let me carry you. Let me take you somewhere."



James Read wants to take you somewhere as well. With Graves, it's waves of love radiating from the kit; with Read it's beams of pure hate. Like pretty much all the projects he's been involved with, his current main outlet, Revenge, revolves around that idea that metal ought to be, first and foremost, an expression of filth, violence, seething rage. All of Revenge's songs sound exactly the same. You listen to them on record, and it's a malicious blurt. I've loved Read in that setting—specifically Revenge's Victory.Intolerance.Mastery LP, and various releases by Axis of Advance and Blood Revolt—but as with Graves, what he projects on the kit isn't something you can really take with you.

At Saint Vitus, Read played a beat-up old double-bass kit, borrowed for the night from the great Jim Roe (a veteran death-metal drummer best known for his work on the classic early Incantation LPs and performing last night with Mausoleum). From the first quick blast of his soundcheck, I knew that I was right to be in the front row. There was something extraordinary emanating from the kit and I wanted to soak it up fully.

Extreme-metal drumming often seems like an entirely different discipline than rock drumming—in a weird way, it can be a much less powerful, less full-body-engagement activity, especially where constant blastbeats are in play. (The classic phenomenon is that you'll see players barely tapping the snare drum in an attempt to reach absurd b.p.m. levels.) This is not the case with Read. You can't see him play and not think of a beast or a whirlwind, some superhuman exertion/expression. You hear his signature style on record—a glorious slopfest marked by supremely hectic blasts; thudding, caveman-style midtempo breakdowns; and these absurdly blurred, audacious tom rolls, which sound like a drum-machine malfunctioning—and you wonder if its bestial power is the result of some trick of production. You don't understand how any human could play that way, could interact with a drum kit to produce such disorientation, such savagery.

But Read is 100% the real thing. At Saint Vitus, between songs, I heard one guy in the front row go, "Fuck Neil Peart; he's the guy," or somesuch, pointing at Read. A comment like that is obviously a pointless apples vs. oranges non-comparison, but I knew exactly what the dude meant. Seeing Read is, like seeing Graves, an experience of disbelief. And as with Graves, Read is most definitely playing lead drums; in Revenge, there are two other musicians onstage—players stage-named Vermin on guitar-vocals and Haasiophis on bass-vocals—and what they do is impressive. (Vermin's rabidly trilling solos are a frequent perverse delight.) But you're at a Revenge show to see and feel the fury of James Read. Few players ride the line of chaos and control like this guy. Sometimes, his barrage, the insane jumble of toms and double-kicks, sounds completely arrhythmic—not to make too tidy a comparison, but at the speeds and density levels Read favors, what he does can sound strangely similar to what we think of as the free-jazz percussion tradition that Graves epitomizes.

Whereas Graves wants to buoy his audience, though, Read wants to flatten them. His projects all have this heavy militaristic bent; the man performs wearing camo pants, after all. The intent could not be any more obvious, but as anyone who's ever sat behind a kit can tell you, sheer aggression isn't going to get you very far. J. Read likes to frame what he does as anti-technique—see this amazing interview: "Ive [sic] been attacking the drum kit for over 10 years because drums are the most crushing instrument," etc.—but like Graves, this musician has obviously figured out a way to break through some sort of physical and sonic barrier when it comes to playing the instrument. The feeling I get from his playing is similar to the one that Zach Hill's drumming on the early Hella recordings gives me, that of a player who's almost angry at the idea that four-limb percussion has a threshold, this sense of "Why can't I just make more sound come out of this thing we call a drum set," and willing that more-ness to be so.

Revenge frames itself as anti-fun, anti-exhilaration, anti-uplift, and that's all good and well, but to me, great drumming is always a celebratory event. I'm sure J. Read would hate to hear me say this, but I find what he does just as inspiring as Graves's healing barrage. There is such ghoulish theater to Read's performance style—the way he headbangs violently as he plays, or fixes his eerie, unblinking stare on the audience during the slow parts—but he is, in the end, a part of the great tradition of percussive artists who take us elsewhere when they play, who heal us through extreme devotion and will to this primal art. Like Graves's, Read's technique is absolutely his own—I was struck, for one, by how close by he positions the ride cymbal, so that his entire arm is basically covering its surface and he's striking the outer edge. I would absolutely love to sit behind him as he plays, to really see what's going on with those vomitous rolls of his. But I sense that, even if I could closely monitor everything that was going on visually, I'd still come away baffled.

With players like this, the quantifiable fact of their performances is only ever a small portion of the story. You've been in the presence of this elemental phenomenon, the fact of these musicians interacting with their instrument, and for that time, maybe, you understood, you felt the totality of their expression and made some tenuous connection between what they were doing and how it made you feel. But you can't bottle that sensation. You come away with this sort of dumbfounded reverence, almost as if you were leaving a magic show. But unlike with magic, where you know there's some fundamental illusion at play, there's something comforting about the fact that yes, that drumming was in fact real—those performers are using the same humble materials you have access to.

I'm tempted to call these experiences in the presences of masters like Graves and Read transportive, but really, while they are happening, they do not take you elsewhere. Rather they make you feel more there, right in that place where you are, than you ever have. It's not a sensation of escaping one's immediate circumstance; it's a sensation of knowing it completely, and being blissfully happy that you're in the presence of an artist who could help you achieve that knowingness. I envy those that got to hear my late drumming heroes live—the Bonhams, the Jones and Williamses—but on the flip side, I'm so grateful for these audiences with the ones who still walk the earth. These poets of the go-for-broke now moment. These madmen who, like a blacksmith heating metal, supercharge the present so that they can make it malleable, bend it to their will. Whatever the emotional objective—be it love in Graves's case or hate in Read's—the point is the drive behind it. Take the now; make it yours.