Dimples: Learning to love Zooid

Photograph: Frank Stewart

It's a cliché for artists working in pretty much any area, especially a self-consciously experimental one, to talk up their desire for constant reinvention. Henry Threadgill walks that walk more than most, as he's proven throughout a four-decade-plus career; his M.O. has generally been to found a band and along with it a compositional concept, burrow as deep as he can into that particular aesthetic for a number of years and then simply let it go and start all over. Threadgill spoke extensively about this pattern when I interviewed him for The Wire in 2009; at that point, This Brings Us To, Vol. 1, the third album (counting the limited-edition Pop, Start the Tape Stop) by his current group, Zooid, had just come out—or was just about to—and when I made reference to Up Popped the Two Lips, the band's debut—eight years old at that point, to be fair—he set me straight: "I'm talking about the new, this record. That other record, you can't reference that. That has nothing to do with what I'm doing."

As I've spent more time with Zooid, I've come to realize that not only does it not really make sense to compare the band's current output with Up Popped; it might be best to banish the rest of the previous Threadgill catalog from your mind, as well, when dealing with H.T. in the present tense. The most honest I can be when describing this music—documented so far on three Pi Recordings discs: the two This Brings Us To volumes and this year's Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp—is that I have often found it borderline impenetrable. This could easily just be due to a lack of music-theory training on my part. "It's an intervallic language that's kind of like serialism," Threadgill told me of the current Zooid compositional method (employed on the This Brings Us To albums and, I'm assuming—though perhaps unwisely, given H.T.'s rate of evolution—on Tomorrow Sunny and in recent live works, like the brand-new Dimples, a concert-length piece that I heard at Roulette last night). "Serialism is like when you have so many pitches, generally 12 pitches, but you can serialize stuff with 6 pitches, 7 pitches, whatever… Well, the language, the compositional language, the musical language, the harmonic, contrapuntal, melodic language is such that we move from one series of intervals to another series of intervals throughout a piece of music." I only understand what that means in a very surface way; I'd hard-pressed, e.g., to tell you in any any given Zooid piece when the interval series has changed, and for that matter, I'd love to listen to one of these recent H.T. records in the company of someone who truly gets what was going on.

That said, having spent good time with every single other recording Henry Threadgill has made under his own name (including his wonderful LPs with Air), I can tell you that the fundamental sense of uncertainty I've felt when listening to Zooid, that sense that there's something there to listen for that I'm missing, some key that will unlock not just my greater "comprehension" of the music but also my greater joy in it too—the sense of drama and dazzlement and, yes, I'll come right out and say it, fun, that I get from, say, the Sexttet or Very Very Circus—is unique to this band. To put it bluntly, Threadgill seems to have—and I guess it shouldn't have taken me three long years to make an observation like this, but I've wanted to take more Zooid in before attempting to quantify my general impressions of the band—refocused his attention away from the elements of his work that I'd previously found most enjoyable. In the interest of defining those elements, it probably makes the most sense to just play a piece like this:


This is from the 1989 Sextett album, Rag, Bush and All, but I could have just as easily picked something from ’93's Too Much Sugar for a Dime or ’96's Where's Your Cup? (featuring the Very Very Circus and Make a Move bands, respectively), or any number of Air records. I rarely hear Threadgill discussed in the greater "mainstream" jazz lineage, but when I first got to know his work, he made more sense to me there—in the grand tradition of Ellington and Mingus, especially in line with the latter, given Mingus's penchant for epic, sumptuously melodic, composition-forward works (e.g., The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), where conventional instrumentation and form was only a basic blueprint; all of these are descriptors I'd apply to a good deal of vintage Threadgill, esp. the Sextett—than in line with, say, AACM cohorts such as Anthony Braxton or Roscoe Mitchell. He seemed, in short, like an avant-gardist whose work you could truly love, rather than just respect. (Not trying to say, by the way, that I don't love the work of Braxton or Mitchell or, say, Muhal Richard Abrams, as well; it's just that Threadgill at his best is, for me, on a different level. He is one of my favorite composers, period, something that I couldn't honestly say about those others I've mentioned, as much enjoyment as I've derived from their work.)

To oversimplify things, I'll say that with Zooid, the Threadgill lovability factor seemed to me to have decreased greatly. (And as always, I'm speaking only for myself here; not trying to evaluate his work objectively, only to record my personal response to it.) Whereas I've often found, e.g., Air, Sextett, Very Very Circus and Make a Move pieces getting stuck in my head, that has never happened with a piece from the current Zooid phase. Again, that's not a value judgment; it's just an observation. Although I realize full well that there's nothing random about Zooid—in fact, according to my limited understanding, this body of work might be Threadgill's least random and most meticulously plotted—the music can sometimes sound that way to me, either in its more abstract-sounding, chamber-improv-ish mode or its more groove-driven mode, the latter of which often makes me think of a mobile with each component rotating on its own axis, sharing only a mysterious, subliminal relationship with the others.

After hearing last night's concert—which augmented the core Zooid sextet with two extra trumpeters and two extra trombonists—I feel like I'm closer to appreciating Zooid on its own terms. The work, one long episodic piece of about 90 minutes, felt about as slippery to me as previous Zooid pieces had, but hearing that much of the band in an uninterrupted context, and getting to watch Threadgill conduct and marshal his collaborators, I had the sense that I was getting inside the project more, grasping both what it is and isn't. That "conduct and marshal" part is key; Threadgill's participation in Zooid is far less that of a conventional bandleader/performer and more one of an organizer; to put it straightforwardly, he barely played last night. There were a few brief Threadgill solos on two different flutes (a "regular" one and a larger, lower one that I'm pretty sure was bass flute) and some typically searing alto saxophone work near the end of the set—Threadgill's burry urgency on that horn is one of my absolute favorite musical sounds, period, and as with many of the other blatantly pleasure-giving aspects of his prior work, it's only delivered sparingly in Zooid—but Threadgill spent much of last night's set glued to the score, cuing in various players or "sections"—there was a very clear strings vs. brass thing going on, with Threadgill tending to deploy the two sections separately, only bringing in the full ten-piece at select moments—and marking time for drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee.

Speaking of Kavee, he's the clear nerve center of Zooid for me, bringing a badass kind of drive and hypnotic funk to the band that harks back to the best of Very Very Circus. I rarely feel like I'm able to parse out the specific rhythmic cycles—I'm guessing they're as intricately plotted as the intervallic ones—but at the same time, I relish the danceable momentum that comes to the fore whenever his beats kick in. (Threadgill seems to as well; he may not play a lot when onstage with Zooid, but he sure does dance.) These "groove" sections, for lack of a better term, took up about half of last night's set. There were also various other textural episodes: the trumpeters and trombonists playing sans rhythm section, summoning low, Bill Dixon–like tones with just their mouthpieces; guitar, cello and bass reveling in their own tangly feature; fleeting moments of quasi-big-band-ish full-ensemble deployment. It's to Threadgill's credit that as elusive as the music could seem at times, none of the players appeared to be daunted by the Zooid concept; while guitarist Liberty Ellman, a charter member of the group, is clearly the band's chief shredder, the new recruits (esp. trombonist Ben Gerstein and trumpeter Stephanie Richards) got some pretty deadly, unbridled improv in as well at various points.

My favorite moment of the set came right at the end, when Threadgill (on alto) and the strings were playing this kind of airy, unsettled dirge, with a creeping rubato time feel. The trumpets and trombones, all muted, entered for a final few meditative moments, and I felt like was hearing some new organization that I hadn't heard from this band or from any Threadgill project before. Zooid doesn't necessarily leave you with big, splashy, memorable moments that you go home humming, but it does leave you with a desire to look deeper. It keeps you on the outside, operating in its own little bubble, but at the same time, it subtly invites you to look in, observing this strange little mini civilization with its own tough-to-discern but clearly orderly laws and customs.

I'm finding, gradually, that the less I hold on to what I instinctively want from Threadgill, what I've loved about him in the past, the more drawn in I am by Zooid. As I was reminded last night, this current body of Threadgill work is indeed difficult, tough to get a foothold in, but it burrows under your skin if you let it, especially if you see it live, where's Threadgill's hyper-engaged joy in the music, and the committed attunement of his collaborators, is unmistakable. I guess the greatest compliment I can pay to Dimples is that, as it ended, I found myself instantly wishing I could take home a recording of it. (There were mics set up, so let's hope someone's working on that.)

Threadgill's never founded a nation I didn't want to visit and spend good time in; Zooid has sometimes seemed to me like an unfriendly place—a rocky, sparsely settled island country, maybe—but I'm starting to feel more at home there: studying the fossils embedded in the ground and the seabirds flying overhead, relishing the salty sting in the air. I'm not sure I'll ever feel the sheer warmth for this band that I do for, say, the Sextett, but there's an intrigue there, a magnetism that's perfectly in line with past Threadgill feats. I trust him enough that I'm always going to want to know more, to do the legwork. Last night, I could feel that effort slowly, almost imperceptibly paying off.

Update [11/26/12]:
Since Dimples isn't yet available in recorded form—again, I'm really hoping that Threadgill/Pi see fit to issue something by this expanded version of Zooid—I've returned to Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp in the wake of the performance. The more I listen for what's there, and not for the absence of what isn't, the more I find this album blooming before my ears. (I plan to go back to the prior Zooid full-lengths as well, and that includes the oft-overlooked Pop Start the Tape, Stop, a limited edition LP that came out in 2005.) It sounds reductive, but the pleasure I'm finding in Zooid is the pleasure of a band. I mentioned above how Threadgill played only very sparingly at Saturday night's concert. That's not so much the case on Tomorrow Sunny; he pops up as much as any of the other soloists here. But still, his alto and flute work isn't necessarily the focus of the music. It's like what he's trying to do with Zooid is wind up a top and let it go, spinning off either in that hugely infectious avant-funk vein (e.g., "Ambient Pressure Thereby") or a more searching, open-ended one ("Put On Keep / Frontispiece, Spp"). The result is that you focus on the respective contributions of the "sidemen" not just as much as if not more than Threadgill, but as much as if not more than the given "composition."

As I noted above, there are very few examples of what I'd call thematic material in this music. (Again, maybe my ear is deficient, but I'd still be at a loss to sing you any of these pieces, the way I could some of my favorite Sextett or VVC selections.) So what you have is this very spare, uncluttered sonic space (even when the music is at its most heated)—a kind of terrarium you can look into, a forum for the observation of behavior. I'm listening right now to "Put On Keep," which ends with an extended duet between cellist Christopher Hoffman (who makes his recorded Zooid debut on Tomorrow Sunny) and bassist Stomu Takeishi (who, I should note, was not on the Dimples gig; Zachary Lober was on bass). There's nothing guiding your ear beyond the intimacy of the sound; no particular melodic arc, no rhythmic cycle (as far as I can tell). Could this passage and the many others like it in the recent Zooid literature be considered free improv? I'm guessing there's an underlying parameter, but the beauty of it is how unhurried, untaxed, un-goal-oriented it sounds. It's just coexistence and deep listening—a moment-to-moment "Let's see where we get." There are certainly moments of such playing in, say, Air, but there's a serenity and grace to the group interaction in Zooid that feels new—an unpretentious invitation to simply listen to what each musician sounds like, singly and set against the others. Again, I'm still in the midst of my reappraisal (and fortunately, there's no time limit on such things), but right now, that's the aspect of Zooid that's jumping out at me most.


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*Howard Mandel has also written, with refreshing candor, about the slipperiness of Zooid. ("Is the music or are we ourselves at fault?") Mandel was reviewing an earlier Zooid-plus performance, this one featuring the core group plus extra strings; I'm not 100% positive, but I believe this is a video, via Roulette TV, of the concert in question (both the review and the video annotation reference a piece called "All the Way Light Touch").

*Ethan Iverson touches on the stark distinction between Zooid and earlier Threadgill here:
"The last two records on Pi, This Brings Us To Vol. 1 and 2, showcase this latest atonal language, a language that definitely gets a certain sound out of the music.  I admit that I could use the occasional non-language piece to offset the encroaching web!  But, again, Threadgill never looks back, and he's hardly the first great composer to settle into a dauntingly abstract, granitic late music."

Basra lives: RIP Pete La Roca

I'm not an authority on the work of drummer Pete La Roca (born Peter Sims), who, as Ethan Iverson, A Blog Supreme and Sonny Rollins have reported, passed away this past Monday. But I am a fan of his work. I remember some friends turning me on to Basra—La Roca's 1965 debut as a leader, and the only session he led for Blue Note during that period—in college, and it grabbed me hard. I've returned to the record periodically, and it's had the same effect every time. I spun it yesterday when I heard the news, and it seemed stronger than ever—dark, swirling, heady, raw but incredibly tender. The tones of the instruments are so present and unadorned; you feel like you're right there within the mix.

It's because of this kind of record that I get queasy when I see all-time "Best Jazz Albums" lists that stick to the same old narrow canon. Kind of Blue is a great album; I like A Love Supreme very much. But not only are there tons of respective Miles and Coltrane records that I love more, there are so many classics that you'd just never see on a list like this, records that might hit neophytes harder that the so-called staples. Basra is one of these records.



Re-listening yesterday, what struck me about Basra was its droney expanse, the patient way it constructs a mood and just lets it ride. Iverson used the word "folkloric" to describe La Roca's left hand, but I'd apply that term to the entire feel of this album. Listen to the title track, how it sprawls out, like an improvisatory incantation. The rhythm section brings out some of the freest, most speaking-in-tongues playing of Joe Henderson's career, not via commonplace fire (I think here of La Roca's astute critique of free jazz in the interview Iverson links to, e.g., "Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all.") but via hypnotic drift, an authoritative yet almost ghostly pulse, like a James Brown groove slowed way down so that the funk becomes merely implicit. The Henderson figure that starts at 4:43, this overblown, Spanish-sounding thing, just slays me; and then listen how he trails off into this writhing tail of a phrase. What I feel when I hear this saxophone solo is that it is a sort of conjuring on the part of the rhythm section, i.e., that these strange sounds are being drawn out of him by Sims, pianist Steve Kuhn and bassist Steve Swallow. Not to take any credit away from Henderson—just to say that this is a band discovering sound together in real time.

Listen around 5:37 as Sims begins to imply a backbeat feel, faint yet stealthily funky. Then into a kind of bass-drums joint solo, with La Roca limiting himself to hand work: snare rolls that remind me of Tony Williams and the occasional thunderous, Elvin-style tom thwack. But the dynamics and the groove are all his own; he's soloing, yes, but also protecting the pocket, riding the drone. When Henderson reenters at 8:55, the entire band sounds like it's in a stupor, hypnotized by La Roca's faint, earthy churn and Kuhn's eerie high-end textures. I really can't think of any other jazz like this, so engaged with the drone and the sprawl, the way-sublimated funk. And this vibe is no accident, heard on this track alone; it pervades the entire album. La Roca was in search of a mood here, and he nailed it. Blue Note albums, as wondrous as they tend to be, don't often feel fully coherent, holistic in this way, which is why a deliberate concept album like Wayne Shorter's The All-Seeing Eye (recorded just five months after Basra) seems like such an anomaly among the BN discography of that period. I think Basra deserves to be called a concept album as well; its concept is its sustained mood, the one that propels Henderson to an ecstatic trance state, sounding, to me, more unfettered and in-the-moment than on any other of his countless sessions.

La Roca does provide some clues to Basra's otherworldly mood in the aforementioned interview, citing how his two early records as a leader—the other is Turkish Women at the Bath, an interesting LP but not the intoxicating powerhouse that Basra is—were built around "ethnic themes." He cites "Basra" in particular as a Middle Eastern melody (the title comes from a city in Iraq), though it seems to be credited to La Roca himself in the various discographies. Does anyone know if this is a traditional tune of some sort?

The opening track on Basra, "Malagueña" (by Cuban pianist-composer Ernesto Lecuona) uses a very different rhythm than the title track—a classic, Elvin-y 6/8 swing feel—but the vibes of the two pieces are similar, and Henderson reaches that same place of ecstatic incantation. I love "Malagueña," dearly, but during my pass through Basra yesterday, the other track that stood out most prominently was "Lazy Afternoon." I'm not sure that it's possible for a ballad performance to conjure more mystery or more grace than this one does. It feels to me as though the entire quartet is dreaming the same dream, drifting along on the same cloud. Pieces like this, where you stop feeling the genre, the style and start feeling total mood immersion, are the ones that really sold me on jazz in the first place (Andrew Hill's "Black Monday" is another one that hits me this way) and the ones that still fuel my devotion. Listen to how La Roca's brushwork starts pushing ever so slightly harder at about 4:10, like a whisper growing more passionate without getting very much louder. And then by 4:50, back down to that hushed dream state, which sounds like it could last forever. That's how I think of Basra as a whole, as a reverie with no defined beginning or end. It's a sensation you step into, along with the players: a group trance, a collective prayer.

When I hear the record now, in light of the sad news, I imagine it as an ongoing present, where Kuhn and Swallow—both still with us—continue to coexist with the late masters Henderson and La Roca, tapping into that otherworldly flow. La Roca is gone, but Basra lives.

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*I recommend this brief take on Basra, from last August, by the outstanding metal drummer Aesop Dekker (Agalloch, ex-Liturgy), via his fine Cosmic Hearse blog. Dekker cites the "exotic, yet grave" feel of "Malagueña" and has this to say of "Basra": "The title track is an absolutely gorgeous landscape of sound, sultry, sexy, and altogether mysterious."

*Anyone heard this 1997 La Roca/Sims session, SwingTime? The samples sound really nice.

The math and the rock, live

Very excited about tomorrow night's STATS show, at which we'll open for Dysrhythmia and Loincloth. Go here for a TONY preview by Jordan Mamone, also the man behind the classic Pen Rollings interview in Chunklet that first put Loincloth on the map. "To put it bluntly," Jordan wrote then, "Loincloth is the most amazing fucking metal band in existence right now." Can't recall the exact date of that article—’04 or ’05, maybe?—but as Iron Balls of Steel proved earlier this year, the sentiment is still accurate. Amazingly, the ’Cloth's very first live show ever is tonight in New Jersey (also w/ Dysrhythmia), making tomorrow's Brooklyn gig only their second onstage appearance.

A few months ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Loincloth's mad (though, as it turns out, incredibly nice!) drum genius Steve Shelton. You can read the results in the current issue of Modern Drummer, available now in print and via iTunes. Steve wrote an incredibly gracious thank-you note to myself and another journalist on his new blog, the Poundry. I highly recommend checking out all of Shelton's previous entries as well; this man's ideas re: metal and percussive aesthetics are essentially a one-man philosophical school.

Dysrhythmia's new album Test of Submission, is my favorite of theirs to date—I've spun this thing front-to-back about 50 times in the past two weeks. Disciples of the math and the rock, we hope to see you tomorrow night in Brooklyn. Here's a playlist to get you psyched up:

The JCC at 20

I had a great time speaking with Ben Allison, Ted Nash and Frank Kimbrough for this TONY profile. The subject is the Jazz Composers Collective, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and is in residency at Jazz Standard this week. (The mini fest, which actually started last night, runs through Sunday.)

I loved the most recent Ben Allison record, Action-Refraction, but beyond that, I didn't know much about these musicians or their JCC cohorts when I signed on to write about them. I arrived in NYC in ’98, and during the next decade or so, I was largely focused elsewhere; for various reasons, this scene just wasn't really on my radar. Now, this body of work, much of which came out on the Palmetto label, is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for in jazz: challenging, but listenable; eccentric, yet staunchly coherent. I'm talking about records like Allison's Riding the Nuclear Tiger and Buzz, Kimbrough's Lullabluebye, Nash's In the Loop and the Herbie Nichols Project's Strange City. (You can stream each of these LPs in full at its respective link.) Having an excuse to catch up on all this goodness in advance of the interview was a real privilege.

Playing heel: An interview with Billy Corgan

I recently interviewed Billy Corgan for Time Out New York. I was never a big Smashing Pumpkins fan growing up; I loved—and in many cases, love—many bands connected to the alt-rock of yore, but aside from "Cherub Rock," the Pumpkins didn't speak to me. I started hearing good things about the new SP album, Oceania, though, and when I checked it out, I found myself taking to it right away. The record is not a revelation; these SP songs sound pretty much like the ones I remember from the early ’90s. But for some reason, it was easier for me to appreciate Corgan's balance of vulnerability and bombast this time around. I admired that he was still going for an unabashedly big sound, and that he still seemed unafraid to flirt with pretentiousness in order to achieve the effect he desired. Plus, I found (and find) the material catchy as hell—concise and memorable, nearly all the way through.

In conversation, I found the man improbably charming. He's just as, shall we say, inflammatory as you might have read, but what the caricature misses is how good-natured he is about it. He seems to genuinely enjoy repartee, the trading of blows, the dropping of science. As you'll read in the interview, Corgan runs his own wrestling league. One of my favorite parts of the conversation comes when we discuss the parallels between a "bad guy" wrestler and his persona within the world of rock & roll:

"So in wrestling language, I play heel. I like to kick the shins of the Pitchforks of the world because they're pompous, and equally so, they like to point where I'm pompous. So in a way, we're benefiting from the feud."

It seems to me that there's something charmingly old-fashioned about this idea. It's almost like an Oscar Wilde kind of thing. It's just hot air, he seems to be saying of his gratuitous opinion-spouting; it's just entertainment. If we seem to be taking these sorts of pop-cultural dialogues too seriously, it's only because they're more fun that way.

In short, he knows what an interviewer wants from him, in the tabloid sense. He seems to actually relish playing the part that has been foisted on him. He does it with a smile. I recently read somewhere (I really wish I could remember where) a positive reframing of the term "bullshitting," a suggestion that this kind of idle, aimless, sometimes puffed-up talk shouldn't necessarily be considered a bad thing. I'd agree with that. Sometimes we want to tune in and hear someone taking shots. The problem is, it's usually (as on reality TV) cast in a dead-serious light. With Corgan, it's all about mutual amusement. I had a blast talking to him.

Go see the world: David S. Ware and ELEW

The past couple days have brought startling news from the jazz world:

First, last night's announcement of David S. Ware's passing at the relatively young age of 62, circulated by Patricia Parker and reported by various sources, including Peter Hum's blog.

Second, the publication on Wednesday, via Do the Math, of what can only be called a manifesto from the self-dubbed Rockjazz piano star Eric Lewis (who performs as ELEW). It's a remarkable piece of writing. AccuJazz.com dubbed it "really engrossing straight talk"; I'd second that and add that it's also stupendously witty.

It seems odd to link word of a death with any other bit of information; I hope I don't sound crass in that regard. At the same time, I'd be lying if I said that the two figures didn't converge in my mind when I heard about Ware. Let me explain:

When I think about Ware, I think about beautiful music: e.g., an intimate Brooklyn solo concert I had the privilege to attend in March of 2010 (released last year on Aum Fidelity as one half of Organica), or my favorite Ware record, 1979's Birth of a Being, as far as I know the only officially released document of the collective trio known as Apogee, with pianist Gene Ashton (later to be known as Cooper-Moore; read his fascinating reminiscences re: the group—including an account of opening for a band led by Ware's friend Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard—a little more than halfway the page here) and drummer Marc Edwards (still kicking ass in NYC on a regular basis). Respect to Ware's celebrated quartets of the ’90s and aughts, but this early release has captured my imagination more than any other DSW release. To my ears, it's probably the single greatest document of second-wave free jazz. Happily, a blogger has uploaded it to SoundCloud; the pleasures of this music, that heartbreaking, hymnal, post-Ayler lyricism, which gradually splinters apart, like a homey cottage in the path of a tornado, are plain:



But when I think about David S. Ware, I also think about what it means to have a career in jazz. The discussion of how musicians operating in this genre can make a decent living while retaining integrity is a constant one, which seems to flare up about once a year at least. (See also: another recent post by Peter Hum.) While I doubt that Mr. Ware was a particularly wealthy man in the grand scheme of things, certainly it's fair to say that he was one of the more visible jazz musicians of his generation (maybe "peer group" would be more accurate). I don't think I'll ever forget this Gary Giddins assertion, via a July, 2001 installment of his Weather Bird column in the Voice:

"Let's be bold: The David S. Ware Quartet is the best small band in jazz today. I realize that I will almost certainly hear another quartet, or trio or quintet or octet, this week or next, that will make me want to backpedal. But every time I see Ware's group or return to the records, it flushes the competition from memory."

I didn't know enough about the state of jazz in July of 2001 to particularly agree or disagree with Giddins's assertion, but I admired the ballsiness of the statement. (Looking back on the period now, I'd probably give the nod to Tim Berne's then-nascent Hard Cell band, later to be expanded into Science Friction.) But whatever my own feelings about Ware's music, I had an understanding that he was something like the Michael Jordan of this world of Vision Festival–affiliated NYC free jazz that I was just then starting to discover, the member of that crew who had achieved some measure of niche-transcending fame. Around that time, I remember visiting the apartment of a not particularly jazz-fixated friend and spotting a copy of Ware's 1998 Columbia debut, Go See the World, in his CD collection. It was only later that I came to understand how exactly it was that Ware had achieved this name-brandedness, which began to snowball around 1994, thanks in large part to the passionate advocacy of current Aum Fidelity boss Steven Joerg, then working at the Homestead label. (Brad Cohan's 2011 interview with Joerg is a valuable primer on all this: "The idea of signing the Ware Quartet was a bit of a stretch, but I convinced [Homestead]," says Joerg. "The first record we did—Cryptology—ended up being the lead review in Rolling Stone.") I have a memory of Ware's 1999 Columbia record, Surrendered, as being a bit tamer, but listening back to the two now, I realize that both were/are marvelous anomalies, HTGMLPCFJRs! (honest-to-God major-label post-Coltrane free-jazz records, i.e.) I look forward to getting better acquainted with these albums.



I can't speak to the nitty-gritty details of Ware's Columbia signing; it would be fascinating to read an interview with the A&R rep who was responsible for that deal. [Update: Mark Stryker informs me it was none other than Branford Marsalis! I had no idea. Peter Hum points the way to this valuable document: "Branford said don't change a thing," says Ware. Given that Wynton figures into the ELEW saga, it makes me wonder how many jazz success stories of the past 20 years or so don't include the Marsalises in some respect.] But details aside, and whatever the net effect of this episode on the Ware's quality of life then and later on, one has to marvel at and respect the fact that DSW busted through a glass ceiling in a certain respect. Obviously the scale is vastly smaller, and the analogy is iffy due to the fact that unlike Cobain & Co., Ware's signing did not pave the way for a whole wave of like-minded indie artists, but it's hard not to see Go See the World as the Nevermind of American free jazz, a record that mainstreamed, or at least attempted to, an inherently underground aesthetic without masking its essential rawness—and a record that even celebrated that rawness. It seems to me, in other words, that Ware succeeded in the marketplace without compromising in the slightest, that Go See the World is more or less the next record his band would've made for Aum Fidelity had Columbia not stepped in. If you think about it, that's pretty damn cool.

So when I say I linked Ware and Eric Lewis in my mind, what I mean is that, having just read Lewis's disarmingly candid account of how he forged a thriving career in music—proceeding at first through conventional jazz channels and then later fashioning an arena-ready aesthetic built around improv-heavy covers of well-known rock songs—I couldn't help thinking about how these two figures might have regarded one another. Ware's circle was obviously not the same one (i.e., the Wynton Marsalis orbit) that Lewis occupied before rebranding himself—and if you've read the piece, you know that I mean that phrase very literally—as ELEW. But these are obviously two extraordinarily skilled musicians who labored for years over their respective brands of jazz and managed—again, each in their own respective ways—to carve out a place for themselves in the jazz-unfriendly marketplace. (And even Ware, whether consciously or not, was a brand: It's hard to look at the album cover above and argue that there wasn't some image-building going on there.)

I'm not making any value judgment here. I haven't heard enough of ELEW's music (really, just a cover of "Mr. Brightside" at a Jazz Foundation of America event a few years back) to give an informed opinion on it, and my knowledge of Ware's work in the ’90s and 2000s is spotty as well. But it is fascinating to think of these two figures, both "stars" in a certain sense, one of whom won a degree of fame (and even a major-label deal) working in one of the most seemingly "difficult" subgenres in American music, i.e., post-Coltrane free jazz, without altering his core values in the slightest, and the other, who strategically retooled his entire aesthetic, grafting his love for and command of jazz onto a commercially viable "hook" and succeeding beyond just about any contemporary jazz musician's wildest dreams (touring with Josh Groban, etc.). There is no right path. Ware seemed entirely in love with his artistic pursuit, and Lewis, in his own way, seems to be in love with his. Yes, in the latter case, art intermingles more straightforwardly with commerce, but as anyone who has ever tried to make a living at anything creative (writing, ahem) could tell you, it pretty much has to at one point or another, so why not be open about that fact?

Again, I'm not advocating for the ELEW model, nor am I criticizing it. I'm simply stating that it seems to have worked for him, in the sense that he appears to be happy and fulfilled doing what he does, over and above the fact that he's making a good living doing it, and that that is in many ways the definition of success. Ware succeeded too, in that he reached many more listeners than 99 percent of the other free-jazz musicians who have ever lived. Think of the great John Tchicai, who passed away recently at the age of 76. I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of his work (I will say that I adore the early New York Art Quartet works), but I feel comfortable asserting without verifying it first that Tchicai never landed the lead review in Rolling Stone—or, for that matter, toured with Josh Groban. Everyone loves an unsung hero, but sometimes it's worth thinking hard about the players, like Ware and Lewis, who have "made it," and about why and how they did: how much, i.e., was due to their own deliberate efforts, as in the case of Eric Lewis reimagining himself as ELEW; how much was due to tireless advocates, e.g., Steven Joerg in Ware's case; how much was due to the conditions of the marketplace during a given period, etc. As jazz fans, we're bred to be suspicious of success, of visibility, etc., and certainly many of the music's brilliant statements, especially since the ’70s have been made underground, as it were, but we should celebrate the fact that certain artists in the field have managed to climb a little higher, to position themselves a little closer to the popular sphere, to go see the world, as it were. As Lewis suggests, there are lessons to be learned even from Kenny G.

I don't mean to reduce Ware's sad passing to an occasion for soapboxing; all I mean to say is that, with Lewis's fascinating career arc on my mind, I couldn't help but muse a bit on art-and-commerce as it pertains to jazz. May DSW rest in peace, and may ELEW continue to thrive on his own terms.

Propagandhi: CLPPR gods

I'm a little late in reporting as much, but Propagandhi has just finished a two-night NYC run, which I previewed in TONY. The Winnipeg punk band was a key DFSBP presence back in ’09, when their then-new fifth LP, Supporting Caste, topped my year-end list. I saw them live that March, and since then, I've probably listened to Caste more than any other newly released record. To put it another way, it's often that I genuinely admire an album, and say as much in print, only to file it away and forget about it. That is to say, it never earns a real place in my musical pantheon, among the records that I choose to throw on when I'm not accountable to anyone but myself. But Supporting Caste did stick around.

I haven't stopped marveling at the improbability of a band from my past—specifically a political pop-punk band that meant a lot to me during a brief teenage moment in the early ’90s where, in addition to death-metal labels like Roadrunner and Earache, I blindly trusted imprints such as Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords with my not-so-hard-earned cash—resurfacing to completely blow my adult mind. As I discuss in the TONY piece above, Propagandhi has renovated in a serious way since the first—and up till ’09, only—record of theirs I heard, 1993's How to Clean Everything. As I indicated on Twitter last night, having just attended my second Propagandhi show in two nights, the band has become a bastion of what I like to call CLPPR (contemporary lowercase-p progressive rock), i.e., a rock band that's genuinely pushing itself—technically, ideologically, emotionally—rather than merely aping an ethos and aesthetic that broke ground 40 or so years ago (I nod here to gods such as King Crimson, Yes and Rush). Is Propagandhi still a "punk" band? In the sense that their rhythmic home base still overlaps significantly with hardcore, sure. But they belong among an elite group of contemporary rock bands—I'm not even sure whom else I should name in that regard, aside from the mighty Tool—who are forging their own universes.

Propagandhi's music tickles my tech-rock funnybone, yes, but the reason they matter to me is because they employ extreme technicality in the service of extreme emotion: a vehemently liberal political engagement, combined with a sincere soul-search/self-inventory, i.e., "How is it that one can live well and live responsibly?" I don't agree with all the band's views—at Wednesday's show, frontman Chris Hannah asked the crowd, "Did anyone watch the [air-quotes] debate? Who [air-quotes] won the [air-quotes] debate?" indicating an allegiance to the Ralph Nader–esque perspective that there's no real difference between the two parties, a position I have a hard time relating to—but I agree with their depth of feeling. It comes through in the music, and that's because even more so than conveying their radical politics, they're engaged with writing memorable songs. They're so intent on expressing their views that they've been driven to devise ever more complex, ingenious vehicles for those beliefs. The latest result is another deep, fascinating, adult progressive-rock (in the literal sense) opus. If you care about rock that pushes itself and the listener, while at the same time delivering major amounts of oomph, passion and fist-pumping user-friendliness, you need to hear Failed States. (I'd strongly recommend giving it a good, uninterrupted listen while reading along with the lyrics.)



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*Speaking of rock that defines progress purely in its own terms, I recently surveyed the Jesus Lizard discography for Stereogum, as part of a recurring "albums from worst to best" series on the site. I was happy to have the chance to stump for my personal favorite Lizard record, the vastly underrated Down, as well as to revisit the imperfect but still masterful Shot and to really get to know the strange gem that is Blue for the first time—not to mention to revisit the straightforward classics Head, Liar and Goat. For fun, here's a playlist of some of my favorite Jesus Lizard deep cuts:



*Lastly I need to note that one of my favorite living musicians, drummer Steve Shelton, is now blogging at The Poundry. It's been a very Shelton-centric year ’round these parts. You might recall my January rave re: the new album by Loincloth, one of Shelton's two main projects, or my May account of seeing his other band, Confessor, live for the first time at Maryland Deathfest X. I also had the opportunity to interview Steve at length in the spring for an as-yet-unpublished article—I'll link to that as soon as it's available—and I'm extremely pleased to report that on November 17, my band, STATS, will share a bill with Loincloth (playing their first-ever NYC show) at Public Assembly. Anyway, the real point here is that Steve's opinions are as distinctive as his drumming, and he's expressing them with eloquent, passionate regularity via his blog. I especially recommend his comparison of the Ozzy- and Dio-model Sabbaths, his paean to unorthodox cymbal techniques and his eclectic round-up (including both Slint and King Diamond) of the most moving live shows he's ever seen.

Re: How to Dress Well

This past June, I saw two shows by the musical entity known as How to Dress Well and spent some good time with HTDW mastermind Tom Krell in Brooklyn. The result is this FADER feature, one of the longer stories I've published in a good while. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Year-end-listmaking season is coming up fast, but I don't yet feel ready to offer any preliminary word re: my personal 2012 frontrunners. That said, I do think Total Loss, the new How to Dress Well full-length, is very, very good. I'd specifically recommend the tracks "How Many," "Cold Nites" and "Set It Right," in that order, but listen as you will (Spotify stream below). Krell is working in an idiom that seems to be growing more codified with each passing month—i.e., pop (in this case R&B) viewed through an experimental lens—but for me, he stands out, largely because his hooks are so choice. His voice too is divine; NYC-ers, I'd highly recommend seeing him live at Santos Party House on October 8th.

Neil Peart: A 60th-birthday playlist

Last week I wrote about a so-called prog band that doesn't really fit that mold. I held Rush up as a band that does conform to what prog is commonly understood to be, but you can't put them in a box either. I've been listening to and loving Rush for more than half my life, and they're still one of the staples of my musical diet. Say about them what you will, but it's important to understand that the thumbnail version of Rush—screechy vocals, OCD drumming, sidelong songs—is way out-of-date; for the last 30 or so years, since around the time of Moving Pictures, Rush hasn't really been a prog band at all. They've gradually streamlined their sound to the point that what they are is a great rock band, period—a lofty and brainy one, sure, but no more self-indulgent than, say, the Radioheads of the world.

Following this post is a playlist of some of my favorite Rush tracks, all released within the past decade. I offer this as a modest birthday tribute to drummer-lyricist Neil Peart, who turned 60 yesterday. I attempted a close read of a key Peart performance on DFSBP back in ’06; that's not what this sampling is about. My goal is simply to demonstrate the pleasures of late-period Rush. Peart shines here, of course—not just as a drummer but as a lyricist, especially on the harrowing "Ghost Rider," which captures his haunted state of mind in the wake of the deaths of his daughter and common-law wife—but more importantly, these are just good songs. The current/recent Rush output means as much to me as anything they've done. The new Clockwork Angels is scary-good; it's probably my favorite Rush album since 1993's stunning Counterparts.

We'll start with an instrumental off the latter record. Look out for the heavenly delayed crash-cymbal/bass-drum accents that Peart throws in on what I'll call the prechorus starting at :32. Then we move on to "Dog Years," which features Peart playing more or less a punk beat, followed by a quasi-disco one. On "BU2B," listen very closely (headphones will help) after the bombshell kick-in at :50, and you'll hear Peart offering up tasteful commentary with the left foot on the hi-hat; I also love the slashing China-cymbal syncopations that start around 1:15. Re: "Workin' Them Angels," I have little to say other than that I think it's a great, dramatic song. And we end with the darkly majestic "Ghost Rider." Happy birthday, sir, and thank you for your music.

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.