Recently: my year in death metal + Black Flag

Two pieces to share, along with brief postscripts:

*Via Noisey, a round-up of the death metal I loved most in 2013, all of which took the form of new music by old bands. In prior DFSBP writings—including four posts anthologized in the recently released seventh issue of Burning Ambulance, at the kind request of editor Phil Freeman—I've made no secret of my bias toward the genre's veteran acts. As I tried to make clear in the Noisey piece, I'm not suggesting that newer groups aren't currently making great death metal; I'm simply drawing attention to the fact that a weirdly large number of bands from the movement's early-’90s heyday (not coincidentally, the moment I came on board as a fan) are still at it, and have issued top-quality product this year. Some of my favorite albums of 2013, regardless of genre, are on this list.

*Via Pitchfork, a review of the new Black Flag record. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that I found the album disappointing. I'm a huge Greg Ginn fan—his guitar sound/concept sums up what I love about music about as well as any other instrumental voice I could name. At the same time, as I indicate in the piece, I think that when it comes to releases, he tends to opt for quantity over quality. The man still issues a ton of music, just as he has for decades, and it bums me out to think that—in the context of this spotty yet significant trove—What The… might be the first and last Ginn-related record many listeners will hear outside of the original Black Flag discography. Considering this new LP in light of the full spectrum of Ginn's work over the last quarter century might not result in a more pleasurable listening experience, but I think it does soften the blow a little bit. I assure you: This will not be the last we hear from the man.

If you haven't yet seen Ben Greenberg's Talkhouse write-up of What The…, I highly recommend it.

Recently, again

*Black Sabbath review at Pitchfork. It's been a bumpy ride, but the new Sabbath album is finally here. I'm thankful that I had the space to muse on it at length. I'll echo Stereogum's Michael Nelson, who graciously shouted out my piece in his write-up of the new "God Is Dead?" video, and point out that the discourse surrounding this record has been especially lively. I disagree with Ben Ratliff and Adrien Begrand's evaluations, but they both make solid, compelling points—Ratliff re:, e.g., the oft-overlooked "insane party" aspect of Sabbath 1.0; Begrand re:, e.g., the tough-to-beat sturdiness of Iommi and Butler's last go-round with Ronnie James Dio under the Heaven and Hell moniker.

For a true expert opinion, I highly recommend Steve Smith's NYT Popcast discussion with Ratliff. I doubt there are many commentators covering 13 who have a more detailed working knowledge of Sabbath's entire history than Steve; I'd like to offer a special note of thanks to Steve for abetting my own last-minute crash course re: Sabbath's shadowy non-Ozzy, non-Dio years. I'm still immersed in those seven LPs, trying to make sense of the weird, divergent sprawl. For starters, I'm beginning to feel like Born Again and Headless Cross are both real keepers.

P.S. Phil Freeman's review went live after I published the round-up above, but that's well worth a look too. Again, I'm not on board with every one of his points—e.g., while I do hear Brad Wilk deliberately playing it safe, I (thankfully) don't think there's oppressive ProTools looping/"gridding" going on here; you can hear the patterns/fills fluctuating throughout the songs, in ways that you wouldn't if all the drum tracks on 13 were subject to a ruthless, industry-standard cut-and-paste job—but this is a very sharp evaluation with a provocative conclusion.

*Milford Graves preview at Time Out New York. I've had Milford on the brain lately, largely due to call it art. The lineup for Wednesday's Lifetime Achievement showcase—opening night of Vision Festival 18—is insane; I can't wait.

*Black Flag preview at Time Out New York. As Ben Ratliff has eloquently noted, in another thinkpiece/Popcast combo, the current bifurcated reunion is insane. When I interviewed Greg Ginn last July, he was playing to near-empty rooms with his Royal We project, which I caught twice (once at Iridium, of all places) over the course of a week. The situation is somewhat different now. I look forward to seeing how it all goes down.

List-o-mania: 1996–2011

Over the past week or so, Pitchfork has been polling readers, staffers and contributors re: their favorite albums from the years 1996 through 2011, i.e., the 15-years-and-counting lifespan of the site, via a project called the People's List. My friend and former TONY staffer Colin St. John tipped me off to the project—check out his own list and commentary—and after a little procrastination, I began frantically compiling my top 100 in time for yesterday's deadline. You can view my list here, and those of other Pitchfork writers here.

Lists of this nature are strange; that fact is well established. They are strange because when it comes to such a vast and vastly diverse art form as music or movies or books, consensus is pretty damn near impossible. Phil Freeman wrote passionately and persuasively on this topic last January, with regard to his feelings of alienation from the Kanye-obsessed hordes of fellow Pazz and Jop voters. In one sense, I do not share Phil's feelings; I really enjoyed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the consensus critical pick for best album of 2010), and I included it on both my year-end top 10 list, and this most recent 15-year-spanning list. On the other hand, when I view friends' and colleagues' contributions to the People's List—here's a typically well-rounded one from another FAFTS ("friend and former TONY staffer"), Corban Goble—I can't help but feel a little apart from the Conversation at Large.

Again, this not out of hostility or reactionary-ness re: what I'll call the Indie-Rock Canon that has cohered during this Pitchfork lifespan (and which has in recent years expanded to included hip-hop/R&B—both mainstream and underground—as well as certain strains of metal, electronica, experimental music, etc.). I included quite a few records in that zone, including three Strokes albums, a bunch of Will Oldham selections, LPs by Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Dinosaur Jr., Battles, Dr. Octagon, Deerhoof and Sia, and a few more. And I like a lot of the other consensus faves, albums by Radiohead (I haven't listened to OK Computer in a good while, but I got really into it in college), Joanna Newsom (Ys is a beautiful, epic album), Built to Spill (ditto re: Keep It Like a Secret), Modest Mouse (the first song on The Lonesome Crowded West destroys me, but on the whole, I like This Is a Long Drive… better; didn't realize that was from ’96—probably should've included it!), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, Japandroids, Fucked Up, Wavves, the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and on and on. But it would've been disingenuous for me to include any of those latter albums on my top 100, because none of them has captured my heart and mind the way that, say, Colossamite's Economy of Motion (to pick one great yet largely off-the-radar album from my list) has. So my list is simply what it is, all that it really could be, i.e., a totally subjective catalog of normalcies, idiosyncrasies and, in some cases, by virtue of what is not included, blind spots, one very major one being hip-hop.

Over the past couple years, I've definitely tuned in to hip-hop more than I had in the previous decade. But I'm still no expert, and that's much of the reason why even in the case of a lot of rap I know I like (Ghostface, Outkast, Eminem), I didn't include those records; I simply haven't put in the time that in and of itself is an indication of love for an artwork. That is to say, when compiling my year-end best-of lists each December, I try not to overthink them, i.e., I simply reflect back on what I spent the most time voluntary listening to throughout that time period. In other words, you don't pick your favorites; they pick you. Last year, the Frank Ocean was a no-brainer, as was the Francis and the Lights the year before that, and the Propagandhi the year before that (speaking of Supporting Caste, which came in at No. 5 on my People's List ballot, I've started to think of this as an all-time-great album, certainly the best new record I've heard since I started to work as a full-time writer-about-music). These are simply the newly released albums that demanded my sustained attention, obsession, care, zeal, etc. during this time period. And that is all I have tried to do with this 1996–2011 list: catalog, in hasty digest form, that sustained attention over these past 15 years. I speak for no one other than myself, which is why I prefer to consider lists of this sort as lists of "favorites" rather than reflections of some monolithic "best"-ness. Taken as honest reflections of a single person's tastes, they become a whole lot less threatening and a whole lot more fun. Coming upon a list like Colin's and Corban's, where in the case of about half the selections, I know them only by title or maybe a lone track, is a chance to know more. Conversely, if even one person who checked out my picks was inspired to take a first listen to John Fahey's Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites (in TONY, I said: "During five lengthy ruminations, in which original and public-domain material mingles with Ellington, Artie Shaw and Bola Sete, you hear the haunted, heartbreaking sweep of American music as filtered through a single encyclopedic mind"), Tim Berne's The Shell Game, or anything by craw [sic], Keelhaul or Cheer-Accident, that would make me extraordinarily happy.

And that possibility, of turning someone on to something new, or inspiring them to reconsider something they thought they knew fully, is really the only reason I can see for this whole writing-about-art thing to exist in the first place. These albums speak for themselves, but for some reason, the babble of history drowns them out and we have to dig them up and praise them and let them reiterate what it is they have to teach us. Which brings me to Colin's final point, i.e., what are the sleeper 1996–2011 picks, the great albums, in any style, yet uncovered by any of the participants in this hive-mind People's List exercise? I'd be grateful for any readers' comments.

P.S. I'm already kicking myself over the purely accidental omission of Boys Life's Departures and Landfalls. I did include a record by the related Farewell Bend (Brandon Butler and John Rejba were in both bands), but Departures is a true all-time fave ’round these parts. And all of the following were records I intended to include but had to cut to get myself down to a nice, round 100:

William Parker Clarinet Trio Bob's Pink Cadillac
The Octagon Nothing But Change
Cannibal Corpse Evisceration Plague
June of 44 Tropics and Meridians
Behold… the Arctopus Skullgrid
Yukon Mortar
Territory Band–2 [Ken Vandermark] Atlas
Dan Weiss Trio Timshel 
Obituary Darkest Day 
Charred Walls of the Damned Charred Walls of the Damned
Ornette Coleman Sound Grammar 
Axis of Advance Obey

Also a shout-out to Nicki Minaj's mixtape Beam Me Up, Scotty, a shrewd selection by Corban that I totally forgot about.

P.P.S. The 1996 cut-off point was interesting for me, as it comes just a few years after the release dates of some of my favorite records of all time, albums that surely would've ended up near the top of the list had the initial year parameter been, say, 1993: two more masterpieces by craw (craw and Lost Nation Road), Morbid Angel's Covenant, Face of Collapse by Dazzling Killmen, Slip by Quicksand, Helmet's Betty, Death's Symbolic and many more.

P.P.P.S. There isn't a whole lot of jazz or improvised music on this list. I'd attribute that to a couple of factors: I didn't start listening to jazz seriously till about 1999, and much of my jazz attention up through about 2005 was devoted to playing catch-up, i.e., schooling myself on the music's vast recorded history, a project that still persists: I'd estimate that older, non-contemporary jazz still accounts for about two thirds of my current jazz intake. Also, I'd say that on the whole, album-oriented lists favor song-based, i.e., largely non-improvisatory, music. It's a silly generalization to make, I know—I'm already second-guessing it—but it's the best way I can think of to account for the fact that there's nothing by, say, Joe McPhee, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Henry Threadgill, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton on my list. All of these artists have meant a lot to me over the past 15 years, but my high estimations of their work have formed from a composite impression of live performances I've seen, records I've heard new and old, interviews I've conducted  and just a general kind of "living with" the work and attendant philosophies of figures such as these. But on the other hand, the jazz records I did include—albums by Andrew Hill, Tim Berne, the Bad Plus and others—are all albums I've savored in much the same way as the mostly rock-oriented selections on my People's List ballot: via repeated, sustained, voluntary attention. I'd like to hear folks' thoughts re: great 1996–2011 jazz records I might have overlooked; I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, especially from the period before ’05, when keeping up with current jazz releases wasn't yet part of my job.

P.P.P.P.S A running list of other worthy records from this time period, listed as I think of them:

Henry Threadgill Where's Your Cup? 
Anthrax Worship Music 
The Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers 
Weezer Pinkerton 
One Day as a Lion One Day as a Lion 
Björk Medúlla 
Xiu Xiu The Air Force
Coptic Light EP and LP

P.P.P.P.P.S Here's a great, jazz-heavy list by Destination: Out's Jeff Golick. Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is one of many shrewd selections here.

Goodbye, Sam Rivers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your music, sir, and farewell.

Perfect 10s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #1: Dan Weiss

I'm pleased to announce the debut of Heavy Metal Be-Bop, a new interview series dealing with the intersections of jazz and metal. Cosmo Lee, the editor of Invisible Oranges—my favorite place to read about metal on the internet—has kindly agreed to play host.

The mission statement of the series could be expressed colloquially as, What's the deal with jazz and metal? As any reader of this blog knows, the two styles form the main pillars of my music consumption. I'm far from alone here: In addition to Ben Ratliff and NPR's Lars Gotrich—both of whose jazz/metal examinations I cite in the intro to HMB #1—Phil Freeman and various others have written extensively and intelligently about both genres and the ways in which they reflect one another. In terms of this series, though, my intent is to focus on musicians—more specifically (at least for starters) jazz-loving metal musicians, and still more specifically, jazz-loving metal musicians whose work might not reflect an obvious metal influence. ("Moving beyond Naked City" might be a good subheading for the endeavor as I see it.)

The brilliant drummer Dan Weiss—who made my favorite jazz album of 2010 and who used to play in doom-metal outfit Bloody Panda—is my first guest. As you'll read, we talked jazz and metal for a while and then listened to some music together (his choices): Gorguts, Metallica, Meshuggah. Dig, especially, Weiss's attunement to the emotional trajectory of the riff. The next installment of HMB (which will post as soon as the transcribing gods will allow) is a chat with jazz pianist and scarily knowledgeable metalhead Craig Taborn. I'm psyched to have HMB out there—do let me know what you think.

P.S. I can only view it as auspicious that the Times has just published a Brad Mehldau playlist that cites Cancer Bats.

P.P.S. A few of Dan Weiss's listening selections got edited out for space, and I wanted to list them here for the record:

1) Cardiacs - various songs, including the phenomenal "Dirty Boy". Insane British "pronk" (prog-punk) band—had never heard them before. It's like King Crimson gone Rocky Horror! Weiss: "For me, this is their anthem. I think I listened to this 10 or 15 times in a row one night. It just keeps going the whole way. And the harmony is almost like Renaissance, Medieval music, the way the harmony moves. Very strange. Beautiful stuff. So weird, fuckin’ weird melody. They just lay on this; they hang on it. I love the way they lay on that."

2) Ustad Rais Khan - "Raga Marwa." Weiss drew several parallels between the complex beat cycles in Indian classical music and extreme metal. Weiss: "Classical Indian music: Could it be equated to blast-beat metal? It’s just all groove to me."

3) Miles Davis - "Directions" (live at Antibes, 1969). Weiss: "Just the way [Jack DeJohnette] opens this shit up. He’s playing as hard as he can. Hear those crashes… He’s bashin’. That kills me."

Re: Re: Pazz and Jop

Pazz and Jop 2010 is live. Here is my ballot: The album list is the same as the one I filed for Time Out, but the singles list is new.

Phil Freeman has written an interesting response to/critique of the whole enterprise. I attempted to post a comment, but Blogger rejected it on account of its length. I decided I'd go ahead and post it here. Check out Phil's post via the link above and read my response below.

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Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Phil. A few observations:

Re: "Pick a niche and grind it out," I think the point you're trying to make is that nobody can be an expert on everything, no matter how hard they try, so in a sense the niche picks you: Whatever you spend the most time listening to and researching is your beat by default.

I attempted to grapple with some of these issues in a recent blog post, I Am Not a Jazz Journalist. In a way, my core argument was the opposite of yours—i.e., "Let's not build walls around ourselves"—but one of my conclusions was similar: Each person can only really specialize in at most two or three areas.

I guess for me—today, at least!—I'm okay with being thought of as a writer who favors jazz and various types of heavy/weird rock. But I don't see any need to set myself up in opposition to the critical mainstream. I'm not a pop expert, but I find myself keeping up with that world more and more (largely through listening to the radio while driving), and the fact of the matter is—just like when I was a kid listening to Kasey Kasem—I derive huge amounts of pleasure from the Hits, per se. This year, I loved Drake, Nicki Minaj and yes, a good deal of the Kanye album.

What I'm saying is that while each of us does in fact have to pick a niche simply due to time (and as you point out, money) constraints, I don't see why we have to build up walls to keep anything out, or draw attention to those walls if they happen to exist. If I'm predominantly a jazz and rock writer who occasionally ventures into the pop, hip-hop and indie worlds and likes what he hears, so be it. My year-end top ten is nothing more or less than a distillation of what *I* checked in a given year—no apologies, explanations, concessions or disclaimers needed.

If we're committed to this profession, we listen to as much music as we can, simply because we love to do so. I admire your critiques of the music-critic establishment, and I often feel a similar alienation, but I don't want to miss out on a great record simply because everyone else happens to be listening to or talking about it. Megapopularity or buzz is never a guarantee of quality, but it's also never a guarantee of a lack thereof.

Best,
HS

I am not a jazz journalist

[UPDATE: This post has elicited a number of insightful responses, some of which you'll find in the comments below. Howard Mandel has shared his thoughts on his own blog.]

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I'm just returning from a Jazz Journalists Association town hall meeting—"What is the state of jazz journalism now and what are its future prospects?"—held to coincide with APAP and NEA goings-on about town, as well as with Winter Jazzfest, which I attended last night and which I'm enthusiastically headed back to in a few hours. For a number of reason, mainly my own over-politeness, I failed to get a word in at the gathering, and I left feeling frustrated by that fact. I had a few things to say, and so I'll say them here.

The question at hand in this meeting was, as I gathered it, "How do we survive as jazz journalists?" The laments being aired were familiar ones: Print outlets are drying up, and even as online outlets are proliferating, online outlets that pay well are scarce. In one sense, I felt a bit distant from this conversation due to the fact that I have a staff job writing about music at Time Out New York. For this, I am infinitely thankful—it affords me a highly visible platform, as well as a good deal of freedom to express myself elsewhere as I see fit.

But I also felt distant from this conversation in another, more important sense. When I interviewed Anthony Braxton a few years back, he said to me emphatically: "I am not a jazz musician, and please put that in your article." Though I have a great deal of respect for my colleagues in the JJA—such as Howard Mandel, David Adler, and Laurence Donohue-Greene and Andrey Henkin of All About Jazz—and I'm proud to be a card-carrying member, I feel like I need to make a similar stipulation in terms of my own work as a writer, and more broadly, as a lover of music: I am not a jazz journalist.

It's absolutely true that I love jazz and—as any reader of this blog, or for that matter my fiancée, will tell you—and spend an inordinate amount of time listening to it, analyzing it, hearing it live and just generally obsessing about it. BUT all this activity does not occur in a vacuum. As I took great pains to stress in this 2006 post, one of the very first things I ever wrote on this blog, I experience music in a countless ways: listening to the radio while driving, singing karaoke, dancing at the weddings of friends and families, writing and performing with my band STATS, listening to promo downloads at the office or to my iPod on the train. By the same token, my tastes are wide open. In other words, I love jazz, but I am in no way wedded to it as a listener or as a writer, and though I realize that my position is unique and privileged, I'd state with caution that anyone who is wedded to Jazz Journalism—i.e., rather than, say, Music Journalism (or even Cultural Criticism or even something way broader)—per se as a profession may have a difficult road ahead.

David Adler acknowledged this in the meeting by indicating that he was probably less familiar with mainstream pop than he ought to be. The mention of Justin Bieber elicited quite a few snide smiles. But the plain fact of the matter is, a fact that ought to be acknowledged by anyone who's being paid to think about music, there's a lot of REALLY GREAT STUFF going on in mainstream pop these days. I don't need to bore anyone with some paean to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but I think it needs to be stated that we writers-about-music who love jazz shouldn't make it our beeswax to learn about pop because it might make us more marketable, we should do so because if we don't, we're cutting ourselves off from some really wonderful and fascinating music.

This is a lesson I've learned gradually. I've been a music snob my whole life, prattling on and on about esoterica, and when it comes down to it, some of my favorite music ever made is music that very few people have ever heard of. But over time, I began to realize that obscurity was not in any way a sign of quality. I came at music backwards, learning about DIY rock and metal first and then catching up re: all the classics. It was only a few years ago that I finally realized what every drive-time commuter has understood for decades: that Led Zeppelin is considered one of the greatest bands of all time because they FUCKING RULE, not because they play to some bullshit lowest common denominator. I'm not saying that all pop is great, but I am saying that to willfully insulate yourself from popular music, or from ANY music is to cut off a crucial air supply, not just regarding your career but regarding your enrichment as a lover of art.

When I first got to Time Out New York, I came carting a portfolio of pieces on jazz artists, pieces on experimental artists, all kinds of super esoteric stuff. I held these up as a badge of honor: "Look at how exclusive and rarefied my knowledge is," etc. And I'm still very proud of those pieces, as well as all the pieces I've written for Time Out on little-known artists ranging from avant-jazz pianist Burton Greene to death-metal visionary Steeve Hurdle. But you know what? I'm just as proud of my pieces on Francis and the Lights, and Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj. Having the opportunity to sit down with the latter for an interview was one of the most enjoyable and stimulating things I did in all of 2010. Taking on that assignment wasn't some sort of concession or compromise: What it was, was straight-up enlightening.

And our best writers-about-music show us this on a weekly basis. Think of Ben Ratliff, who can inspire you take a second look at either the doom-metal band Salome or soul-jazz great Dr. Lonnie Smith; or Nate Chinen, who can do the same for Josh Groban, Marnie Stern or the Tristano-ite Ted Brown. Or my TONY colleague Steve Smith, who could school you on Nas, King Crimson, Henry Threadgill, Edgard Varèse or a million others as the situation demands. Or Phil Freeman, who can—and frequently does—start provocative discussions on anything from Borbetomagus to Iron Maiden to Miles.

And that latter name (Miles) is an important one. Now it's fashionable to turn up our noses at the out-of-it critics who dissed Miles's electric experiments. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that he had just outgrown the tidy genre tag of "jazz" and needed to grow, right? But by emphasizing our jazz-journalists-ness over our lover-of-music-ness, maybe we're just echoing those critics' narrow-minded approach. If we expect broad-mindedness, resolute outside-the-boxness from our greatest and most widely influential artists (our Miles-es and our Beefhearts and our Kanyes), we need to expect the same of ourselves as thinkers-about-music.

BUT let me say, that I'm not advocating for some nebulous nonspecialization, some completely level playing field wherein we insist of ourselves that we GIVE EVERYTHING A CHANCE, do or die. No, that would lead to a world of spread-way-too-thin dilettantes. What I'm saying is that we need to foster a non-monogamous approach to the idea of specialty. Every writer-about-music worth anything has certain areas of affinity, a handful (finite yes, but always expandable) of styles or areas that make their heart flutter with excitement. And by the same token, every one of those writers, has massive blind spots—stuff that they don't know a damn thing about. What I'm saying is, let's celebrate the multiplicity of the former, let them play off of and inform one another. (In my personal pantheon, jazz mingles with metal, with classic rock, with punk, with pop, with hip-hop and more.) And let's also say, in certain cases, "You know what? I really don't know anything about MUSICAL STYLE X, and at least for today, I'm okay with that." Let's follow our innate tastes and distastes, in other words, without walling ourselves off.

Again, I'm not saying, "Don't specialize." I'm just saying, "Let a little air in." Our best outlets for music coverage are the ones that allow you to glimpse the world beyond their particular area of focus. A Blog Supreme, which alludes frequently to the indie-rock sphere; Destination Out, which makes a constant effort to portray avant-garde jazz as vital and inviting rather than some pallid curio. And stretching further out, Burning Ambulance and Signal to Noise, which celebrate the esoteric spirit while still maintaining their authoratativeness, and Invisible Oranges, which cheerleads for the metal underground while at the same time calling B.S. on the scene's inherent hypocrisies.

All I'm really saying here is: Let's not pigeonhole ourselves right out of the gate. Let's bond over our shared love of this music without building a fence to keep non-jazz-obsessives out, and to blind us to the possibilities of the pop world and beyond. The best jazz I heard in 2010—records by the Bad Plus, Chris Lightcap, Dan Weiss and others—didn't need some sort of rubber-stamp Seal of Jazz Approval to convey its message. It just sounded beautiful, in a way that didn't need to be explained. As I noted in my Bad Plus post, my fiancée, Laal, often helps me to open my mind re: how I think about the jazz I take in: The operative question isn't "Was that a great jazz show?," it's "Was that a great show?" Full stop.

All of the real movers on today's jazz scene know this well. Adam Schatz, say, or Darcy James Argue, or Ethan Iverson, all of whom have demonstrated their engagement with the world outside the jazz bubble in a number of shrewd ways. Aside from all the great music I heard at last night's Winter Jazzfest, one of the coolest encounters I had was with the saxist Darius Jones, a scary-good musician and an extremely nice guy whom I've known for a few years now. I shook his hand, congratulating him on what a fine set he'd played with Mike Pride's From Bacteria to Boys, but all he wanted to do was grill me about what it was like to interview the great Nicki Minaj. So again, all this great music exists on one plate for the artists—let it also be so for those of us who cover it.