'Emergency!'

Proud to present an in-depth look at Emergency! by the Tony Williams Lifetime, via Pitchfork's Sunday Review. This record means a lot to me. Lifetime looms large in my ongoing Heavy Metal Bebop research — it's come up again and again in the various conversations I've had on the topic of the jazz/metal intersection. In some ways, it represents the birth of that concept: There was no jazz-rock, and then suddenly, with Emergency!, there it was*. 

Beyond its historical significance, the record also just completely kicks ass. I think a lot about the whole "musical time machine" question, i.e., what bygone act would you go back and witness if you had your pick. For me, lately, the original Lifetime — maybe at the October 1969 Ungano's run recalled by Herbie Hancock in the review — tops that list.

For a bit more on Lifetime, check out this John McLaughlin interview from a few years back.

*This phrasing is a bit hyperbolic. There were of course plenty of precursors. One I need to delve into more is Gary Burton — I found an interview where Tony specifically cited him as a genre-blending pioneer, and I've often heard Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell do the same. I don't know this body of work well, but I intend to remedy that!

John McLaughlin talks Mahavishnu and more

This one, a Rolling Stone interview with John McLaughlin about his upcoming (final) U.S. tour and the history of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, was definitely a cross-it-off-the-bucket-list type of deal. Would've loved to have had more time with him on the phone — not to mention a better connection on the line — but he was so generous and forthcoming during our chat. I got chills listening to John describe gigging with Lifetime, a group that's probably in the top 10, if not five, of bands I'd choose to go back in time and see live if given the chance.

I'm still making my way through Bathed in Lightning, Colin Harper's exhaustive but extremely readable history of McLaughlin's early career, but this book is invaluable. If you're a fan — or if you've ever found yourself wondering, as I do often, how the fuck music as advanced and inspired as Mahavishnu's could come to exist on this planet of ours — you need it immediately. I'm also a fan of Walter Kolosky's Mahavishu biography Power, Passion and Beauty, an unconventional and informal book that nevertheless has a ton of great original research. The testimonials from many prominent artists who saw Mahavishnu (and Lifetime) live are priceless.

I leave you with this clip of what has become my favorite Mahavishnu piece, "Hope," an easy-to-overlook interlude on Birds of Fire that the band turned into a heavy-metal cataclysm onstage:


I also can't recommend the bonus disc of the classic '73 Mahavishnu live set Between Nothingness and Eternity highly enough. That entire concert is just utterly transcendent and staggering. I'm more in awe of this band than ever, and that's saying something, considering how much they've meant to me over the years.

I also enjoyed getting to know the later Mahavishnu records, such as Apocalypse and Visions of the Emerald Beyond, which I'd mostly overlooked before. They lack the otherworldly drive and focus of the early stuff but are still very much worth checking out. And there's so much more to McLaughlin's vast discography: the mix-and-match post-Mahavishnu all-star date Electric Guitarist and After the Rain, a 1994 trio album with Elvin Jones and Joey DeFrancesco, are a couple I've found myself going back to. And of course the phenomenal Extrapolation. Long live Johnny Mac…

Where the mystery lies: Goodbye, Bobby Hutcherson

One of my favorite sound series in recorded music occurs during a five-second span here, from 6:11 to 6:16:



Bobby Hutcherson: Clang!
Tony Williams: Thud-thud

Bobby Hutcherson: Clang!
Tony Williams: Thud-thud

Bobby Hutcherson: Clang!
Tony Williams: Thud-thud

That passage, to me, epitomizes Blue Note's glorious mid-'60s flowering, of which Hutcherson was such a vital part: this quality of poised, wired, almost perverse exploration that, on records like Out to Lunch!, contrasted with breathtaking cohesion and musicality. (The title track of Dialogue and "The Omen" from Happenings — recorded, respectively, roughly a year and two years after OTL!, and featuring Hutcherson on marimba as well as vibes — embody a similarly adventurous spirit while pursuing a spookier mood — free jazz that had nothing to do with Fire Music, per se; this was genuine collective, spontaneous, open-ended, genre-transcendent soundmaking.) These are the records that made me a Jazz Person, all honorary Bobby Hutcherson Dates whether or not he was the nominal leader: Evolution, One Step Beyond, Judgment, Andrew!!!, Dialogue, Components, Happenings, Destination Out and others that I'd discover later on, like Time for Tyner, Oblique and Patterns.

Hutcherson also had a knack for a very unguarded sort of tenderness — hear his own joyful waltz "Little B's Poem" — as well as an almost psychedelic command of texture. Hear Andrew Hill's "Alfred," on which he doesn't solo but nevertheless brings to the theme statements a magical quality of otherworldly singing — that sense of shimmering space, a quintessential expression of the vibraphone's potential. (Walt Dickerson was another vibes player who loved to build up waves upon waves of a kind of sonic gel, inviting the listener to come and float and surrender.)

Listen, for example, to what happens around 3:20 here:



Bobby Hutcherson goes texture-mad, exploding his solo into a ringing, singing soundmist.

And at the other end of the spectrum, you have his somewhat more conventional contributions to an album like Destination Out, where he plays a pianist's role in the ensemble but still revels in his instrument's idiosyncrasy.



Hutcherson was integral to the Jackie McLean / Grachan Moncur III concept, explored here as well as on One Step Beyond and Evolution; his odd, bulbous protrusions, metallic yet also pillowy, helped to sharpen the bracing whiff of eccentricity these records give off. Like Out to Lunch!, these are piquant albums, subtle in their way but insistent in the way they stand apart from hardbop convention. Almost like a synth player or electric guitarist might function in a jazz group several years later, Hutcherson helped to give this music an almost sci-fi quality. He sounded like the future.

Many of the albums discussed above are compiled into this Spotify playlist.


I'm no expert on Hutcherson's later work, such as the celebrated band with Harold Land, in which he seemed to lay back a bit more, elevating the jazz mainstream with his ever-classy approach rather than exploring the margins. This would be the kind of track that my younger self would have been likely to gloss over or even dismiss, but now I just hear it as a consummately well-rounded musician exploring another side of his talent:



For more of Bobby in the '70s, check out this great archived WFIU radio show hosted by David Brent Johnson. Hutcherson's discography starts to get a bit unwieldy in this later Blue Note period and beyond. I'd be grateful for any recommendations re: his essential albums that fall outside the "classic" mid-to-late-'60s phase discussed above.

Thank you, Bobby Hutcherson, who helped to draw me in closer to what, for me, is the very center of jazz, where the mystery lies.

/////

*Nate Chinen's very eloquent NYT obit, which hits on some excellent descriptions of Hutcherson's textural command: "luminescent and coolly fluid"; "resonating overtones and chiming decay"; "coloristic range of sound."

*Peter Hum's remembrance, featuring a collection of musician tributes, is a great read.

*A fascinating Hutcherson anecdote concerning the rehearsals for Out to Lunch!

 

Moment's Greatest Hits

A while ago on Twitter I used to roll out what I called Weekly Greatest Hits—a round-up of anything new or old that was currently hitting me hard. In that spirit, here are a few current faves. (This may or may not become a regular DFSBP feature.)

James Brandon Lewis  
Days of FreeMan



As I indicated in my 2015 round-up, I slept on a lot of music last year. Here's a late-breaking head-slapper. Days of FreeMan would've been an obvious, high-ranking inclusion on my jazz top 10, at the very least, if I'd heard it in time. (Seems like this flew under a lot of folks' radars; Phil Freeman and Seth Colter Walls were among those looking alive.) Little needs to be said—the appeal is immediate. Lean funk- and hip-hop-informed jams with tons of swagger and soul. I'm not sure I've heard backbeat-oriented jazz done this well before. Missed JBL at Winter Jazzfest last night, but I plan to remedy that soon.

David Bowie 
Live 1973 (from D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars)



Speaking of swagger. The level of charm, charisma and peacock-ish sass oozing off this man in this performance is basically terrifying. I'm not a Bowie completist, but I am a fan, and I've been filling in knowledge gaps during the past sad, intense week. My Rolling Stone colleague Andy Greene is a real Bowie authority, and I learned a lot from this list, which tipped me off to the above.

P.S. Blackstar is a trip as well.

Iggy Pop
"Some Weird Sin" (from Lust for Life)



This Bowie-co-produced track is just staggering. (Note: It also sounds exactly like the Strokes at their thickest and most sensual.) I'm not crazy about what I've heard from the Idiot album, but Lust for Life lives up to its audacious title. Nasty, glammy brilliance; rough, sneering conviction. Listening to this, you can hear Bowie reckoning with Iggy's genius and framing it in just the right context where it can shine in a new, post-Stooges way. It's feral but theatrical too.

Tony Williams
New York Live (1989)

 

More on the idea of swagger... Tony Williams is one of my very favorite drummers, but I know less than I should about his later years. I've read a lot about his brash attitude and confidence (in Bill Milkowski's essential interview compilation Rockers, Jazzbos and Visionaries, the author describes Williams at a mixing session for the 1992 Story of Neptune album: "Pacing around the control room with a fat cigar jutting out the side of his mouth, Tony Williams is a portrait of swaggering intensity"), and those traits are on full display in this outstanding video. The effect is very different to hearing him during his '60s heyday. There was a brashness at play during that period, too, obviously, but here it has ripened into a sort of bullish, cocky, unabashed, Muhammad Ali–like badassery. This is hardbop as take-no-prisoners combat, the embodiment of what Damión Reid calls the "[showing] up to crush" mentality.

P.S. It's downright pathetic that much of the recorded output of the band in the video above is out of print. I've been scouring the 'net for days looking for Neptune and its predecessor, Native Heart.

P.P.S. Vinnie Sperrazza is all over this period of Tony's output.

Mark Turner Quartet
Live at Winter Jazzfest 2016

I'm currently under the weather so I'm sparing myself the full-on marathon WJF experience, but I have to call out the outstanding set I saw by this band at the ECM showcase last night. Lathe of Heaven, from 2014, is a great record, but this group has apparently been gigging a lot since then because the set I saw last night made that album sound tame and undercooked. If there's another current working small group that can rival this band for attunement among the members, high-wire interactivity, and overall poise and alertness and excitement, I'd really like someone to tell me about it. They just sounded so dialed-in. And Marcus Gilmore, dear God... It's been no surprise for years, since he works with so many great bands, but this guy is simply operating on an elevated plane.

Bonus tracks:

Chris Dave with Robert Glasper





Thanks to the aforementioned James Brandon Lewis for reminding me that I need more Chris Dave in my life. What starts to happen—percussively, and with the entire band, really—around the 6:00 mark here is simply obscene.

There's all kinds of hoopla re: the jazz/hip-hop crossover thing. Robert Glasper is obviously a key conduit and has been for some time. I'd love to see him get the kind of attention Kamasi Washington has gotten, but for his trio work like this (and this), which speaks to me way more than his Black Radio output. The message I get from a performance like this is that you don't have to "cross over," in blatant genre-splicing ways, to engage meaningfully across traditions.

P.S. Contrary to the title, this video was not filmed at the Village Vanguard.

Krallice 

This band is still getting tons of plays around these parts. Not just the amazing Ygg Huur (discussed here) but also its predecessor and brand-new follow-up (which was actually, confusingly, recorded before Ygg Huur). You need to be paying attention to Krallice if you care about what is called the "progressive" spirit in music.

Joe Maneri Quartet

This group—the late Joe Maneri on various reeds, piano and the occasional vocal, with his son Mat on violin and viola, Randy Peterson on drums, and a revolving cast of bassists—had such an unmistakable sonic fingerprint. Jazz smeared into near-oblivion, unfolding in a slo-mo Butoh dance that can feel both tortured and whimsical. My favorite album is the hard-to-find Get Ready to Receive Yourself, but was digging In Full Cry recently.

P.S. Hearing Randy Peterson live last week with Tony Malaby's Apparitions band is what got me thinking along these lines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shapeshifter: In praise of Bruford/Wetton/Fripp King Crimson

Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time self-educating re: rock from the ’70s. We always hear about the ’60s, specifically the end of the ’60s, as a rock heyday, but the next decade seems to me to be the One, when all the warning shots had been fired and the premier bands were all just, to use a term coined by Damión Reid, showing up to crush. As usual, I speak only for myself, oriented according to my inescapable biases, biases that go by names like Black Sabbath (who started out strong but attained some kind of exalted state of fried-mind excess around the time of 1975's Sabotage), Thin Lizzy (who issued their own fireball of a record that same year, just one of at least five all-time-great LPs they'd release throughout the decade) and Led Zeppelin (let's stick with the ’75 theme, and take a moment to reflect on two of the sickest grooves ever recorded: exhibits A and B).

I will love all of these bands/records for as long as I am on Earth, but at this point, they are like comfort food to me: known quantities with a predictable, though not commonplace effect, i.e., they yield ecstasy the way great coffee yields a buzz. But much of my RLT (recreational listening time) over the past week has been spent chasing down a different kind of feeling, furnished by a band that thrived contemporaneously to the woolly rock mammoths enumerated above, but was on, as they say, a whole different trip.

I'm speaking about King Crimson, specifically the version of King Crimson that existed—with more or less stable personnel, give or take percussionist Jamie Muir and violinist David Cross—from (I think I've got this right) the summer of 1972 through the fall of ’74. Aside from perennial KC mastermind Robert Fripp, this lineup was all about bassist-vocalist John Wetton and—I feel like I need to cross myself while typing this, so large does this musician currently loom in my personal pantheon—drummer Bill Bruford, who reported for Crimson duty as soon as he had finished laying down tracks for this prog monster.

If this specific version of King Crimson occupies a different galaxy than the Rock Gods I mentioned above, the Sabbaths, Zeppelins and Lizzys, it also has surprisingly little to do with what I think of as capital-p Prog. I love much of the output of the aforelinked Yes, as well as that of Rush, who really came into full flower later in the ’70s on albums like Hemispheres (some will point to 2112 as the Rush landmark from that period, but that was just the icebreaker), but at this point, those bands too are known quantities, both to me and the World of Rock. They really do exemplify most of the traits they're said to exemplify: long-ass songs, foregrounded virtuosity, helium-voiced vox, etc. (Those descriptions aren't loaded in any way; they're simply neutral catalogs of what those bands sounded like at that time.)

But BWFC (Bruford, Wetton, Fripp Crimson) is, again, something other, and I've spent the last week or so trying to get to the bottom of exactly what that is, or at least observe the full range of its behaviors. I'm finding those tasks extremely daunting but at the same time, I'm enjoying myself immensely. This is not a band you comprehend right away, and that is primarily because BWFC is a shapeshifter. You cannot get your head and heart around it via conventional means, i.e., albums; you have to experience it, live with it, in the wild—that is to say onstage. For several years now, I have really enjoyed the BWFC studio output, namely Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and Red. (I included the first chapter of the two-part Larks' title track in a math-rock mix I compiled a couple years back.) But to be honest, at this point, I'm considering this trilogy as little more than a digest version of BWFC. I feel like I never knew the band until very recently, when I started digging into the band's own immaculately maintained live archives, known as DGM—i.e., Discipline Global Mobile—Live. (Search 1973 and 1974 here to get a sense of what a treasure trove this is.)

So far, I've picked up three shows: 10/23/73 in Glasgow; 3/30/74 in Mainz, Germany; and 6/28/74 in Asbury Park—the latter of which is heard, in edited/meddled-with form, on the USA live album. (It's funny to think about how in June of ’74, Asbury Park's most famous musical export, Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a. prog's antithesis, was in the process of becoming a star.) My knowledge of these official bootlegs is no means encyclopedic—Steve Smith, the most avid/learned Crimsophile I know, is your man—but I can vouch for every one of these shows, and more specifically, for the way they complement each other. Yes, there are song overlaps—I'm starting to sound like a Deadhead here, and though I'm no die-hard there either, I do love me some cherry-picked live Dead—but these are three completely different concerts: different energies, different trajectories, different purposes. I was hoping I'd purchase three of these boots and feel like that was enough, but sadly (for my bank account, i.e.), I think I'm just getting started.

So what is it about BWFC? What's the big deal? I really wanted to link the Glasgow version of "Easy Money," one of BWFC's signature jams, here, so the music could do the talking, but it isn't on YouTube. I just put on a snippet of said track, to get the scent back in my nose. What is it? It's ear-bleeding art-funk, primed for maximum timbral abrasion, gritted-teeth extremity, with harsh and peculiar textures protruding from every strata of the sonic spectrum. That latter point is key for me. One of the chief joys I derive from BWFC is how strange and utterly distinct each sound you hear is. The timbres of the various instruments don't comfortably jell, as is the case in, say, Sabbath or Zeppelin; they war and clash. You've got the flopping, distorted, ungainly beast that is Wetton's bass tone in the low register—like the grotesquely exposed metal skeleton of a sci-fi cyborg—then you have Fripp's merciless high-end fuzz, scratching at your right ear like steel wool; and then there's Bruford's multifaceted soundmaker—I hesitate to call it something so mundane as a drum kit: the ugly wash of the hi-hat; those way-tight toms, which sound like crude timbales; and that piercing snare, softening often into a Tony Williams–y press-roll caress.

The band does kick and slam as one but what makes BWFC special is the way they elude and toy with the groove—each player off on his own orbit like a planet in a solar system—as though no one member wants to be caught playing it straight. Bruford in particular seems to love the delicious tension that comes from hinting at a metallic stomp; he could easily Bonham (to coin a verb) his way through the grooves—"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One" comes to mind—but so often chooses to keep the beach ball in the air, so to speak, giving the band the low-end kick it needs but satisfying his own improvisational drive with destabilizing fills and other purposeful inconsistencies. He is not exactly a busy drummer; it's more that he's a restless one. The lumbering doomgroove in the middle of the Red track "Starless"—the definition of a musical slow burn—is a great place to hear what I'm talking about. During the Mainz show, the band draws out the off-kilter riff for more than two ominous minutes, with Bruford limiting himself to minute cymbal taps, before kicking in. But even when Fripp and Wetton near their crescendo, the drummer is still strutting and stuttering along, totally unperturbed; he increases his volume and power, but rarely goes two measures without throwing in some sort of ungainly fill or daring syncopation. In this section, Bruford makes me think of a train-jumper who toys with a slow-moving freighter for miles, flamboyantly hopping on and off as he pleases, never content to simply pick a car and ride. (You get a sense of what I mean around 6:30 in this 1974 TV clip, though the out-of-sync-ness of the audio and video bums me out sufficiently that I held off on an embed. You can view the full four-song performance in excellent fidelity on the 2009 CD/DVD reissue of Red.)

All the band members' performances during this period—my apologies for short-shrifting the often-breathtaking David Cross, whose keening violin is a key feature of these gigs I've been checking out—tend toward the same controlled-chaos brilliance, to the extent that it's easy to forget just how special the material itself is. The variety is simply awesome. Yesterday I marveled at the four-song run at the end of the Mainz show: After "Starless," you've got the relatively concise "Lament," maybe the single strangest piece in BWFC's repertoire. It starts off exemplifying one of the band's key song types, i.e., the brief, ballad-like, almost stagy ditty (I wish I could think of a more dignified word), in which Wetton—whom I've begun to regard as quite possibly the most compelling singer in so-called progressive rock, and one of the most underrated in rock, period—plays the husky yet tender straight man to lyricist Richard Palmer-James's wry satirist. Then, much like in "Starless" itself, the scene changes completely: after a brief instrumental interlude, the band explodes in a deranged art-funk riff fest, with Wetton sounding like he's coming completely unglued. Next up is "Improv Trio," one of the many impromptu interludes that marks this period of Crimson; these pieces take all different shapes (there are four very different ones in the Mainz show alone), but this one is like a pastoral bit of drumless soundtrack music, on which I believe Fripp and Cross are both playing sparkly Mellotron while Wetton lays down a chilled-out bass skeleton. The piece leads into the grandaddy of BWFC's many balls-out jams, the aforementioned "Easy Money," rendered here as stumbling, seething, drunken death funk, with Wetton's signature scat episode at the beginning coming off as a burlesque of airheaded rock & roll. "Easy Money" is always a set highlight, but this version is particularly dire and ragged—a noisy morass. And this very punk element of BWFC is part of what sets them apart from any other contemporary band that you might be tempted to label prog: BWFC understands the value of pure amplified slop, and how effective it can be when juxtaposed with a very British kind of proper-ness and refinement (I think of other brief, chill tracks of the "ditty" variety," such as "The Night Watch"). And there are so many other elements and imperatives at play in the BWFC repertoire: quirky, riffy, Woodstocky blues-rock (see "Cat Food," a track from the pre-BWFC Crimson album In the Wake of Poseidon, which closes the Glasgow show) sits next to obsessive-compulsive epics like "Fracture" and "Larks' Tongues… Part Two." Anyone with even a passing interest in math rock needs get familiar with the former (the Glasgow version is tremendous); the juxtaposition in moods—from notey geekery to flailing violence—is something later exponents of the style have rarely been able to capture in such an organic way. And I'm still getting my brain around the many improvisations that dot these set lists.

There's something very unusual going on in these performances—a marriage of prog's grandeur and virtuosic flash with an almost proto–mid-’80s–Black Flag live-wire scrappiness—that I'm not sure you hear in any other band of the period. Mahavishnu does skew "punk" on their first two records, but they never let themselves sound as frenetic, as hungry, as wild (or on the other hand, as unmoored or abstract) as BWFC do in these performances. This version of Crimson seems to embody the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—each one pushed to the limit—in a single uncanny unit. I've yet to really get to know Crimson before or after this period, but from what little I do know, BWFC was a unique episode in the history of the band, and maybe of music, period, at least the Western styles I know and love best (rock and jazz).

BWFC was a meteor shower, smashing the airlocks that separated the proto-metal space station from the fusion one and the postbop ones and setting all those impulses free. Pretty much everything I love about music from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s is here somehow: the mercurial looseness of the Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, the bombed-out bash of early Sabbath, the D&D-presaging sweep of Yes, the white-hot shred of Mahavishnu and even an undercurrent of especially grimy funk. It didn't last, of course, but for that glorious moment, BWFC had it all, and we are extremely fortunate that the fossil record is so complete. If you need me, I'll be in the DGM archives…

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P.S. Speaking of archives, a mammoth new Larks' Tongues in Aspic box set—bulging with extra live audio and video—is coming 10/15. Scroll down a bit here for details.

"There Comes a Time," over time

I didn't know what to make of Tony Williams's "There Comes a Time" when I first heard it, on a used copy of the 1971 Ego LP that I picked up in college. The raw, gnashing instrumentals on Emergency! were much closer to what I was seeking from Williams's Lifetime band, and the presence of vocals on that record and on Ego baffled and even bugged me. I don't feel that way anymore. When I reexamined Emergency! last year, Williams's dreamy recitation on the track "Where" ("Wheeeeere are you going? Wheeeeere do you come frooooom?") really struck me. A psychedelia time capsule, sure, but also an effective interlude on a loud, brash album. (I'll admit that I still have trouble sitting through the monologue on "Beyond Games.")

The key Williams vocal performance, though, is "There Comes a Time." What a strange, strange song… It's built around this swelling, snowballing odd-time swing vamp (I think it's technically 5/4, but I find it easier to count as ten beats). On the original Ego version, the organ of Larry Young (billed as Khalid Yasin) adds a glimmering haze to the steady, ominous march of Ron Carter's bass line, while Ted Dunbar layers juicy guitar twang on top. Williams works up to a bashing cymbal froth, and around the 3:00 mark, the vocals finally emerge:

There comes a time when you want to be older
There comes a time when you want to be bolder
I love you more when it's over

It's a cryptic, vaguely unsettling sentiment, which takes on added menace in the next verse:

There comes a time when you're helpful
There comes a time when you're doubtful
I love you more when you're spiteful

That "spiteful" gets me every time. One word that encapsulates this entire weird, creeping shadow of a song.

The critical consensus seems to be that Williams's vocals are a nuisance. (Think of Ornette's equally maligned work on violin and trumpet.) "Unfortunately, both of those tracks ['There Comes a Time' and another Ego song 'Lonesome Wells (Gwendy Trio)'] are bogged down by vocals (by Williams and Jack Bruce, respectively) singing Williams' own earnest and not terribly inspired verse," Stewart Mason asserts at AllMusic.

I would side with the ever-broad-minded Gil Evans (recall his Hendrix tributes), who elevated the song to something like standard status on his 1976 album There Comes a Time, and then later performed it with Sting. It's something of a shock to hear the Police-man state, "This is a song by Tony Williams" in the clip below (almost as though he were shouting out Cole Porter or some other well-known Great American Songbooker), but he does a great job with the piece.

Here's the original "There Comes a Time," from Ego:



Here's the Ego incarnation of Lifetime performing the track live in ’71:



Here's the Gil Evans Orchestra's 1976 interpretation [Billy Harper on gut-busting tenor]:



Here's a take by a later Lifetime lineup (’79, I think) ["There Comes a Time" starts at 20:53]:



Here's a version, strangely retitled "Lawra," from Williams's elusive 1980 trio album, Play or Die [Tony's voice still sounds great]:



And here's Sting's "There Comes a Time," with the Evans Orchestra (’87) [I believe that's George Adams on backing vox and tenor]:



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Anyone know of any additional versions of this underrated Williams classic? You'd think that Sting's performance would've inspired other singers to give it a shot.

Brute/skittering: Tony Williams in the ’70s

Sometimes I get hung up on the details. Right now, it's the intro to "Fred," from the Tony Williams Lifetime's Believe It (1975). Six staggered bass-drum/crash-cymbal thumps, then a switch to the open hi-hat for one last washy punctuation mark. So sparse and so complete.

And Tony's performance on the piece itself: The pinnacle of "fusion" drumming, to my ears. That airy, syncopated groove on the opening theme, then the tension-building shift to the ride cymbal at 1:08 and the whitewater full-band accents / solo spots starting at 1:14. I love the muscle and the drive of this passage, the way Tony is just bashing, owning these breaks, knowing how badass he is. But I also love how he comes right back down to earth afterward: He resumes the opening groove (1:28), yet quickly thinks better of it, opting instead for a brisk, thrilling little cymbal swell.

Tony Williams in the ’60s (with Miles, and on Blue Note, with Sam Rivers, Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur, Andrew Hill and others) was one of the sounds that initially sold me on jazz. I checked out his early work with Lifetime in college and then had a real moment with it last year. For whatever reason, though, I hadn't followed the thread further until pretty recently. Believe It is my latest Williams obsession, and I feel as strongly about it as I do re: any of his work. If there is such a thing as jazz-rock drumming (something I've been pondering in my Heavy Metal Bebop series, i.e., is it possible for one player to excel at both of these styles, either independently or simultaneously, given their disparate demands?), this is as good as it gets. You have true brute punch on one hand, and on the other, Williams's patented elasticity, a skittering nimbleness, like the aural equivalent of one of those basilisks sprinting over the surface of the water.

I've also been exploring Williams's sideman work from around this time. The performance below, with Stan Getz, Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke (the same band on Captain Marvel) kills me. The dress, the sound, the attitude. I love how Williams sort of cocks his head to the side before he starts, like, "Are we ready to melt some faces? Okay then." Dig the extended close-up at 4:10.



And then this one, with Clarke again, and Jean-Luc Ponty on violin. (I think both of these clips are from ’72.) Check out the virtuosic pugilism around 3:10, and the way Tony eases the feel down to light swing at 3:30. It's one of those patented on-a-dime Williams transitions; he never seemed to require any significant amount of runway in order to smoothly land the 747.



For any Williams buffs reading this, what are your favorite Tony performances from the ’70s and beyond? Million Dollar Legs, the follow-up to Believe It, has a terrible reputation, but I'm looking forward to an in-depth firsthand study. Other records that intrigue me: Didier Lockwood's New World (recorded 1979), Michael Mantler's Movies (’77) and the super-rare 1980 Williams session Play or Die. I'm not well-versed in the later, more postboppish Blue Note period either. Would greatly appreciate any recommendations.

P.S. [After the fact] Another record that merits mention is Hal Galper's Now Hear This (recorded 1977). Williams goes tornado at the end of the title track.

P.P.S. There is also, of course, the Man Jazz meltdown that is Trio of Doom.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #6: Bill Laswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bill Stevenson on jazz

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

Important points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

BS: Uh-huh, yeah.



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

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

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

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

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

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

BS: Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/////

P.S. Disc one is streaming at NPR.

Come and live with us: Magma live

"Definitely you can come and live with us
…
All you gotta do is help out with the chores…"
—Dirty Projectors, "Temecula Sunrise"

I thought of the line above while watching Magma at Highline Ballroom last night. The impression I kept getting, over and over, from this most idiosyncratic of old-guard progressive-rock bands (check the eye-popping facts if you haven't heard of them: French, around since ’69, built around an invented mythology and language, etc.) was of a commune: a self-sustaining civilization based on a shared commitment to beauty and, just as important, industriousness. "Definitely you can come and live with us," the furiously intricate yet highly supple jazz-rock epics (ranging in mood from the eerie to the imperious to the flat-out goofy) churned out by bandleader Christian Vander & Co. seemed to say, "but please understand that we're going to put you to work." You know those often absurd-seeming, state-sanctioned images of Communist life from China or the former Soviet Union, where everyone's happy and busy and also pretty much anonymous? That was how this incarnation of Magma—Vander (at left in the pic above) on drums and his wife, Stella (to his right), on vocals, along with a vibraphonist, a keyboardist, a guitarist, a bassist and two more singers (one male and one female)—felt to me.

But the X-factor, the thing that made it joyous and wonderful instead of creepy, was the passion of the playing. Prior to seeing this show, Magma had always seemed merely like the coolest idea to me. Anyone who spends any time digging for information about progressive rock, as I have for a good while now, eventually runs up against Magma, like some weird, impenetrable bedrock. Those lean, proggy riffs and vaguely musty fusion-isms always sounded like an appealing throwback, but the Kobaïan chant and the fact that Magma never seemed to rock in as balls-out a manner as, say, Yes, always ended up leaving me a little numb.

Live, though, you get volume, and also, crucially, you get Vander. A hulking, sweaty and frequently smiling man, he is an utter thrill to watch. Cymbals positioned high and at precarious angles, their faces nearly perpendicular to the stage. I wrote a little while back about the Vaz drummer Jeff Mooridian, and how his native position on the kit was playing snare, bass and some furious 16th-note pattern on the high hat. Vander's native territory is that perpetual staple of prog drumming, the steely, syncopated groove smashed out on the China cymbal and bass drum simultaneously, with the snare filling in the space. You really hear, in this man, the grand lineage of jazz-rock: Despite Vander's constant professions of love for Elvin Jones, what I heard was a lot of Bruford, a lot of Cobham and on the quieter passages, a lot of Tony Williams. (I've often opined that the same drummer can't really play both rock and jazz convincingly, but Vander comes about as close as anyone I've ever heard, bringing the requisite bombast for the former and a very genuine sense of touch and buoyancy, as demanded by the latter.) But, one wonders, given Magma's 1969 vintage, who was it that influenced whom?

The band played for about two hours, and yes, it was exhausting at times and hammy at others. But I was consoled by the notion of witnessing something absolutely singular. To nod to the great Rick Astley ("You wouldn't get this from any other guy"), you wouldn't get this from any other band, namely such a deep, committed demonstration of what PROG means, entirely unobscured by pop and for that matter, "classic rock." Sure you could go see the latter-day Yes (I've never had the pleasure—I'm sure it's amazing), but this is something much more grassroots, much more cult, something closer to the sublime, Zenned-out nerddom at the core of prog. It's nothing less than motivational speech in musical form: an overwhelming pageant of human achievement, i.e., "You too can accomplish such brilliance if you eat your Wheaties and practice every day." Definitely you can come and live with us, say the Vanders and their cohorts, busy erecting their otherworldly architecture—it won't be easy, but the sacrifices just might be worth it.

/////

Some background: a great 2002 interview with Christian Vander.

Melvins/Blue Notes/Parker/Taylor/MORE

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

MELVINS/BLUE NOTES

the new lineup of the Melvins proved itself a smashing success w/ the recently dropped "(A) Senile Animal," but they sealed the deal big time at Warsaw tonight. the show simply kicked total ass.

openers were weak to piss poor. i'm a huge fan of Joe Lally's bass playing in Fugazi, but his solo stuff doesn't do much for me--basically very chill songs built around bass vamps and Lally's speak-singing. the songs he sang on the last three Fugazi records were awesome, but these just feel half-baked. it was interesting to hear him backed by Dale Crover and Coady Willis of the 'Vins and (of all folks) Melvin Gibbs on "lead" bass, but the set was pretty much a snooze.

Ghostigital (i think one of the dudes from the Sugarcubes) just totally blew. boring arty dance music w/ rambling poetry over top.

then was Big Business who played a really solid set of mostly new stuff. this was the first time i heard them live where the mix was just right. their music is straightforward and relentless and, it must be said, very Melvins-like, but they've got a really strong identity, owing to what awesome players Jared and Coady both are. the notsosecret weapon is Jared's voice, a hugely powerful and melodic instrument. Dale joined in on guitar on a few tracks including "Easter Romantic" from "Head for the Shallow" ("White Pizzazz" was also played, after Dale exited), which i thought was probably the best heavy record of '05.

set segued right into the 'Vins set. the two drummers started up this intricate marchy-type vamp, which led into (i think i'm remembering this right) "The Talking Horse," the first track from the new record (which weirdly was the last track on the promo disc i got; entire record was reversed from actual track order and i'm not sure if that was a mistake or just the Melvins messing around). a good deal of "Animal" was played and the stuff simply sounded flawless (didn't hurt that Warsaw is an excellent room with near-perfect sound). usually the drummers would sort of jam out at the end of the songs and launch right into the next one. pacing and setlist were amazing; i heard songs i never expected to hear live, such as "Revolve," "Sky Pup," "Set Me Straight" and..."Oven," which is perhaps the heaviest song ever written and was like a moment of communion for me and my Stay Fucked bros--we opted to attend this show together instead of practicing--b/c we cover that song live. then there were the staples, such as "Let It All Be," "The Bloated Pope" (totally badass track from the very spotty "Pigs of the Roman Empire" record), "The Bit" (which sounded completely massive and benefited from a creepy drawn-out intro), "The Lovely Butterfly" and "Hooch."

it's true that there are certain songs that are in every Melvins set (no "Night Goat" tonight, though), but they play all the material with absolute conviction; they simply do not phone shit in. you might be wondering why i hadn't mentioned how the new lineup (Jared and Coady from Big Business are now in the band if that wasn't already clear) affects the sound and i think the reason is that the new guys fit in so seamlessly. the new songs already sound like classics and the old ones sound pretty much the same but with the added punch of an extra drummer. i really think this new record is one of the best of the band's career and this live show was a whole lot better than the other two i've seen. special props again to Jared's voice: check his performance on "A History of Bad Men" on the record and you'll see what i mean. like Buzz, he can be ferocious and melodic at the same time.

don't miss this band if they come back! hail Melvins! can't believe how long they've been around and how they keep kicking ass completely outside of the spotlight. who else even comes close to this kind of longevity and consistency let alone constant renewal. damn, these guys are just...

***

so i wanted to sort of revisit something from the last post. was trying to home in a certain period of jazz and i cast too wide a net. what i'm really talking about are the more avant-garde-leaning records on Blue Note from the early to mid '60s. i think this music is unparalleled in jazz--total virtuosity and control but with an experimental streak. but CONTROLLED, formal, TOGETHER. not free jazz. free jazz lives but it doesn't have the depth of this music. i'm talking about (partial list):

Andrew Hill - Point of Departure (3.21.64)

Andrew Hill - Andrew!!! (6.25.64)

Grachan Moncur III - Evolution (11.21.63--> day before Kennedy assassination! i
interviewed Grachan and he said he got chills listening to the funeral broadcast the next day because the horns playing taps reminded him of the dirgey title track of "Evolution" recorded one day prior.)

Jackie McLean - One Step Beyond (3.1.63)

Sam Rivers - Fuschia Swing Song (12.11.64--> one day prior to Tony Williams's 19th birthday)

Don Cherry - Complete Communion (12.24.65)

Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch (2.25.64)

you'll notice that Tony Williams appears on many of these. i feel that he is the best jazz percussionist who ever lived, and one of the finest musicians period that i've ever been exposed to. he played music, not drums. utter finesse and conviction in every note. few things feel more sublime to me than the above-mentioned music and especially Tony's part in making it. this was such a special time.

uniformly strong WRITING on these discs. every piece hummable--never just heads. structural fascinations--Cherry's suite formats, Hill's episodic "Spectrum"--solos to melt your heart and brain (think of Jackie McLean on title track of "Evolution"). real improvisation and composition perfectly balanced. it's dumb that Blue Note lets these things waver in and out of print--as much as i love Coltrane and Miles and Duke and a ton of more well known things, these--and a bunch of related sessions from around the same time and with a lot of the same players--are really the essential records for me, my gold standard for jazz.

[a HUGE thanks needs to be given here to Andrew, Joe and Russell, dudes who first helped me cultivate my love of the aforementioned jazz regions and to Schaumann and Jeff, who understand exactly what i'm talking about when i gush about this vital realm of art.]

*****

Monday, October 16, 2006

COMPLETE COMMUNION / STEVE SMITH

Don Cherry's "Where Is Brooklyn?" (recorded 11.11.66) is a breathtaking small-group inside-out jazz session. but what Blue Note record from this period and general category isn't? these sessions are just too much for me sometimes: how is it that every one of these players--here it's Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Henry Grimes and Ed Blackwell--have such a strong identity and concept, that it's Cherry's session, but everyone contributes such a unique sound. this is living jazz. Grimes gets a lot of solo space and he sounds amazing--really extreme dexterity and outness of concept. my favorite piece i think is "The Thing," which is this awesome bluesy piece--supercatchy, like so many of Cherry's pieces. Pharoah digs into this one so hard. he does a lot of screaming/overblowing, what have you on this disc, but on this one, he just grooves. Ed Blackwell is a true great--his blinding speed and just sense of hurtling along is basically unparalleled. when you wanted the music to just move/cook/etc., you called this guy.

i'm so stuck on this period of music. basically all of my favorite jazz albums date to around this time: all the great Andrew Hill's, the Sam Rivers's, "Out to Lunch," the early Miles quintets, "Interstellar Space." Booker Little's "Out Front" and the Five Spot sessions w/ Dolphy are a few years earlier, but it's really like '59-67 or something. shit was just ridiculous during this time.

*****

hey, a quick thanks to my friend and colleague Steve Smith for linking here from his blog, Night After Night, which is a really cool and diverse resource for opinions on all kinds of music. link is way up there to the right where the links begin ("Steve Smith's blog")-->

kinda nervous to be connected from there b/c that blog and many of the other ones that Steve links to are pretty serious, pro-type endeavours. not really sure what this one is. been very irregular about posting and also, everyone should know that this is really in theory the news page for my band, Stay Fucked [ED: this post was originally on the Stay FKD page, but actually, you're now reading this on the Hank alone blog.] though a lot of the posts end up being about shows i've seen or records i'm listening to. basically it's just about me as someone who makes and listens to music a lot. ok--again, thanks Steve.

strange record to think about: Van Morrison - "Veedon Fleece"

*****

Sunday, October 15, 2006

EVAN PARKER

had the good fortune of seeing Evan Parker play solo saxophone for the second time in my life tonight. this was at the tiny Stone. this was, not surprisingly, completely awesome. some quick thoughts:

a) i think about Parker's sound as consisting of a main sound and a residual sound, the latter coming across to me like sonic exhaust, like it sort of shoots out the back as he's playing the main line.

2) his tenor sound has an amazing bite to it, just very gruff and scratchy. in such a small room as the Stone, it had a huge impact.

d) four pieces were played, plus a tiny encore of "Played Twice" by Monk, which i took as a nod to the recently deceased Steve Lacy, who performed that tune on his 1960 (is that right?) LP, The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy. Lacy obviously being a fellow soprano master--the two played together on that Chirps disc which i honestly haven't heard but need to.

H) Parker showed an awesome sense of pacing. the pieces were long, but they ended when they needed to. an interesting contrast with the Cecil show earlier in the week was that Parker seemed to end pieces in a very deliberate manner, like bringing them down dynamically, whereas Cecil would stop very abruptly. both players give the sense though of dipping into this infinite stream, like it's just a constant flow that you're hearing part of--nothing really begins or ends. both can sound repetitive and constantly fresh at the same time--bringing to mind that idea that i heard quoted once that "Cecil Taylor has been playing the same piece of music since the '70s." it's at once dead on and totally false. Parker's the same way--the music is unmistakable and the basic materials are the same but each piece has it's own logic and the really great ones seem totally unique. for example, one of the tenor pieces tonight had this really key melodic element; Parker jumped between registers and created a nice contrast, something almost hummable. strange b/c i don't think of Parker as being about melodies, but about like liquid pitch changes. the sound is like mercury, constantly burbling or gurgling or flowing in this slippery quicksilver way.

1) listening to the sort of "exhaust" pitches described above is a really cool experience. at times, i detected these very regular rhythms happening "behind" the main note flow, like pulses of 5 or 6 beats. it makes me wonder if there's a limit to how much of each level of sound he can control when doing multiphonics, like if it's the sort of thing where when one layer is shifting, the other must remain constant. sorta like a Heisenberg type of thing.

there is endless mystery in these sounds. time spent communing with Evan Parker is like brain floss, totally bracing and wondrous.

thinking about a lineage about such obsessive musicians, who pursue this one ultraspecific sound--though as stated above, with marvelous microcosmic variation--over an entire career. saw two of these types, Evan and Cecil this week. i believe that Mick Barr of Orthrelm, etc. is this type of player as well. you always know it's him and even though his works are very diverse (especially the Ocrilim record), it's still all pointing toward this basic vibe--laser focus. who else? ... are there artists in other mediums? like Rothko or Mondrian or something? something to think about...

*****

Friday, October 13, 2006

CECIL TAYLOR / XIU XIU

got to see...

Cecil Taylor

last night.

solo.

at Merkin Hall.

i guess you could say this was one of those check-that-off-the-list-of-things-to-do-in-this-lifetime kind of shows. the best thing about it, for me, was the chance just to do my best to home in and listen really really hard to him for over an hour. obviously i have like 100s of hours of his music on CD, but when you're at a concert, that's all you're doing. sounds obvious, but i was thinking about how that's the best thing about live music, not that it's live, but that it gets your undivided attention--insofar as anything ever does. maybe i just have ADD, but it's just special to me to be able to focus so much.

anyway, he played i think four pieces, interrupted by very brief breaks, during which he turned the pages of what i guess was some sort of score resting on the piano, though it could have been poetry. he recited a short poem before playing which was really awesome, one of the more coherent texts i've heard from him. it was printed inside the program notes and contained stuff about "coefficient of viscosity" and "coriolis" and stuff like that. sounds absurd, but it started w/ (get this) the names of five drummers: Chick Webb, Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, Max Roach and Tony Oxley. so to me, the whole poem was about rhythm. really fascinating.

anyway, the music. i'm avoiding trying to describe this b/c it's so hard. ok, Cecil's music is instantly recognizable b/c you have these sort of musings in really short units where the fingers of his right and left hands will mirror each other. those are the connective tissue of his recent solo music. and then there are obviously the percussive parts, where he'll use either the side of his hand, his fists, or his fingers in kind of a rapid-fire downward stabbing motion. and there's also the really dramatic, usually low-end chords that he often slams on in between the aforementioned spasms.

last night was generally in keeping w/ the Cecil solo i know. in the first piece, he seemed to take a bit to build momentum and toggle somewhat predictably between the modes described above. the second piece was fascinating though b/c at one point, he was clearly playing a written figure--he stared at the "sheet music" and repeated this flowery subtle melody three or four times. there were these strange moments throughout the show where he dropped just the slightest hint of a beautiful, consonant melody and then pulled back. at one point, he paused and i actually felt him hesitate: his fingers were shaking above the keys before he plunged back in. also, he was wheezing audibly throughout--a reminder that he is in fact 77 (!!!!) years old.

dammit, i lost my train of thought, but i was going to comment on some interesting features of the fourth piece. i think some similar stuff was going on in terms of these isolated moments of more conventional beauty than i'm used to hearing from him. this is not to say that i'm one of those people who characterizes him as some basher and is surprised to hear something beautiful from him--far from it. but there was some really delicate, quiet playing in this set. during those parts you could really admire how athletic his hands are. he seems to put as much bodily thrust into his quiet attack as to his loud one. the fingers really dance.

this is the way to experience Cecil. just a beautiful thing to be able to witness. can't imagine ever not being completely awed by this man's music.

*****

ran down to the Mercury Lounge to catch Xiu Xiu afterward. this is the band responsible for what is, i think, definitely one of the best albums released in '06, that being The Air Force. the live show was really, really intense, though i'm not sure i prefer it to the records--really it was a totally different thing. on the album, the music envelops Jamie Stewart's voice, but never overwhelms it; the timbre and lyrics are always right up front. live, unless you know how the vocals go already, you might have a hard time making out just what he's up to b/c this was LOUD stuff with the instrumental interplay taking center stage. and awesomely rhythmic i might add. lineup was: Stewart on vocals, percussion, lap steel, etc.; Caralee McElroy on vox, melodica, samples and probably a whole lot of other stuff; and Ches Smith on drums, percussion and vibes. they played over backing tracks, but got into some really heavy syncopations and rhythmic workouts that reminded me (duh!) of Aa a little bit. Ches did a great job of working with the drum machine and playing what sounded like really powerful, fucked up versions of those crazy 32nd-note dance beats you hear in Destiny's Child and shit like that. Stewart is pretty awesome to watch; he's obviously digging pretty deep and he shuts his eyes tight the whole time. a great show, definitely. it's cool that they're sort of interpreting the album rather than reproducing it.

like i was saying, "The Air Force" is definitely something to hear.

*****

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

CANNIBAL CORPSE/JIMMY LYONS/BROTZ and BENNINK/JOHN FEINSTEIN/THE DEPARTED/
CHEER-ACCIDENT/COSMOS

in the All Music Guide's review of the new Cannibal Corpse disc, "Kill," the writer refers to them as a black metal band. ouch.

that album is pretty savage, though it gets totally old after three songs. all the players have gotten a lot better than the last time i really checked them out, which was in like eighth grade, around the time of "The Bleeding" (as you can see, they've really got this album titling thing down to a science). i remember my mom said she would buy me an album if i went on a Sunday school retreat and the one i wanted was fucking Cannibal Corpse. thanks, mom!

also in the middle of this alto thing. been enjoying disc 1 of the Jimmy Lyons box set (thanks Scofield for the burn) immensely. it features this drummer Sydney Smart who may be one of the most cooking freetime pulse players i've ever heard--just complete frenzy, but at a simmering temperature. he sounds like he must have been a pretty crazy dude. or maybe really well-adjusted and he just had this crazy side to him. anyway, where are you Sydney Smart? the first track is a boiled-down burner of ridiculously fast and potent freeness, sort of a la Ornette, but sometimes i like listening to Jimmy even more. Raphe Malik is killing too. Lyons's control is scary, obviously translating those superfast liquidy runs a la Bird to the free thing. but that's really the truth. he is that good. also digging Burnt Offering, recommended to me by my free jazz source Russ Baker. [ed: intended to add that i'm now moving on to "Porto Novo," which pairs one of my other alto heroes, Marion Brown, with Han Bennink, mentioned below.]

who, like me, attended one of the Brotzmann/Bennink sets the other night at Clemente Soto Velez. they really cooked. "track" lengths were a little skimpy, but Bennink's chops made me wanna barf. Brotzmann's tarogato was like an annoying little kid wailing. i love the burr of his tone. made me go back and check out "Reserve," this great FMP disc w/ Barre Phillips and Gunter Sommer. basically i feel that Brotzmann is just a texture--you can turn him on or off and he will go and sound really awesome. not so interactive though. don't know how much that matters when all is said and done. though there are some nice quiet bass clarinet passages on "Reserve" that kind of debunk all that. it's not an absolute thing.

"The Departed" was great. i like Matt Damon's Boston accent and boyish macho thing so much. look out for the scene where he picks up the lady shrink in the elevator. he says something like he'd get stabbed in the heart with an icepick if he could go out w/ her. and then the actual date scene is amazing, with both him and her commenting on this weird architectural dessert. most will comment on Nicholson, but it's the painful scenes between Damon and the girl that got me. plot is SO confusing, like "Miller's Crossing" but worse. very brash and audacious, if at times predictably so. whatever, you'll love it.

reading John Feinstein. i love his books about sports. i could give a shit about the Baltimore Ravens, but he writes characters so goddamn well. i love the narratives. proves my point about nonfiction: any documentary work is interesting if it's well told. the subject is totally irrelevant.

Cheer-Accident is coming to town. hail this band. listen to "Learning How to Fly" from "The Why Album" or "Find" or "Smile" from "Introducing Lemon." their drummer/pianist/vocalist/trumpeter Thymme Jones is an utter progpop genius. he plays these sick funky oddtime beats and sings in this beautiful sort of neutered whine. that's not a good description. it's just a pretty high croon sans drama. melodies are something like Beatles meets Yes. hail hail hail this fucking band.

enjoyed Cosmos at ErstQuake. tiny sounds. people laughed at me when i described it. Ami Yoshida is a poet of the throat and a very sad performer to watch--sad as in full of pathos. amazingly austere yet fragile. don't wanna get into stupid cliches re: her gender and ethnicity. listen to Cosmos.

looking forward to: Peter Luger, Cecil Taylor, Xiu Xiu (AMAZING new album), playing the new Stay Fucked song live--it's called "Naked from the Waist Up" and we've had some of the riffs kicking around for several years.

other things of note:

Ocrilim - Anoint
Point Break on DVD - Ultimate Adrenaline Edition
Steely Dan - Making of Aja DVD
The Band - Making of "The Band" DVD
some people that i have encountered recently, both for good and for bad...