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.

/////

*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.

On fire: Craig Taborn at the Vanguard

Growing up in Kansas City, I played a lot of video games. During one phase, my friend Drew and I became obsessed with a cartoonish basketball title called NBA Jam. A key feature of this game was the possibility of one of your players achieving "on fire" status, awarded after they had scored three consecutive baskets.

After a two-basket streak, the game's announcer would say, "He's heating up…," and then, if you were able to land that crucial third basket, he would yell out, "He's on fire!" At this point, pandemonium would ensue: Your player suddenly became superhuman, gaining the ability to sprint turbo-speed and to take off from half-court for monster anti-gravity dunks. There was a wild ecstasy to these moments, your player turning into some kind of supernova. All you had to do was press a few buttons and rack up the points.

It seems silly to say so, but I couldn't help thinking of "He's on fire!" last night as I watched Craig Taborn perform at the Village Vanguard. I cannot remember the last time I witnessed a performer so utterly ablaze on a stage: pulling off so many dazzling technical achievements while exercising such a purely musical imagination. The show demonstrated that virtuoso skill doesn't have to get in the way of ideas; the two can coexist in a feverish frenzy, the hands doing the bidding of the sparking neurons and the overflowing heart.

Last year, Craig Taborn released a very good solo piano album, Avenging Angel. Around the time that I interviewed Taborn for my Heavy Metal Be-Bop series, I listened to the record obsessively. I found it beautiful but, in the end, somehow impenetrable, one reason I left if off my all-genres-in-play year-end top 10 list for Time Out NY (it did rank on my jazz-only list); I had to come clean and admit that I respected it more than I loved it. On my CD shelf, it's a hushed museum piece, to be savored in rare moments of undivided attention rather than to be really lived with in a practical sense.

For me, the performance I witnessed last night, a trio set with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver, was like the fulfillment of every hope I'd had for Avenging Angel. The album enthralled me with its strange, austere logic (in Time Out NY, I wrote of one piece that it "[felt] like stepping out of a spaceship onto an ice planet—vast and iridescent, but with a lurking malevolence…") but in the end, I was yearning for some kind of warm blood pumping through the chilly atmospheres.

That passion, that human pulse flooded the room last night. If Avenging Angel feels like a classic shut-in record, the sound of a man burrowing deep inside himself, this trio set was all about communication. Taborn, well known for his self-effacing personality, was clearly loving being in front of an appreciative crowd (there were whoops and hollers during several climactic moments) and communing with his bandmates, both of whom achieved their own kind of "On fire!" status.

Taborn mentioned at the outset that he wasn't one to do much "mic work," and that we shouldn't take his lack of announcement as an indication that he wasn't thrilled by our presence. I'm paraphrasing here, but he went on to say something to the effect that, rather than taking breaks to speak and catch his breath, he preferred to dive into the deep end and remain submerged for the duration, the better to focus on (I believe this was the phrase he used) simply "creating music."

And thus it was so, especially during the first piece in the set. I have no idea how long it lasted; my guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 minutes. (No titles were given, so I can't help you there.) The piece felt to me like an expanse, a onflowing river that the players waded into and then ever so gradually began to attune to, growing more and more powerful, joyous, daring, until they evolved into some kind of collective superhuman aqua-being, capable of harnessing the water's enormous energy and using it to his own creative ends.

Okay, that's an out-there metaphor, but I'm struggling to convey the sensation of this piece. It had a feel that I'd liken to midtempo electronica, a steady, almost breakbeat-ish drive, but without the clichéd sped-up James Brown groove; there was no sense of typical jazz swing, just a subtle, airy funk laid down by Morgan and Cleaver. Sometimes Taborn would hammer on the rhythm, constructing these ingenious hypnotic vamps that sometimes sounded to me like sped up Tim Berne themes. Other times, he would let the left hand handle the vamp and unleash the right in a fit of wild expressionism, smearing it across the keys or leaping between distant notes. If the moment grabbed him, he'd let both hands free and let fly with a downward-stabbing, knitting-needle-like frenzy.

You couldn't not think of Cecil Taylor watching these outbursts, but I'm hesitant to invoke the Maestro, simply because the effect was so different. With Taylor, there's often this sense of private ecstasy, a feeling that he'd be playing exactly the same way if he were at home alone; with Taborn on the other hand, I felt a real exuberance, a "Come along with me" feeling. Juxtaposing these daredevil flights with infectious rhythmic drive had a "Eureka!" affect: Taborn's playing had all the extroverted thrust of McCoy Tyner comping behind John Coltrane—but employed in the service of a much more contemporary-sounding groove—combined with the unbounded imagination of Taylor. For me, it was a whole new kind of chocolate and peanut butter: two great tastes I'd never thought I'd get the chance to taste together.

I can tell that my description is doing a disservice to the pervasive collectivity of this performance. In a sense, yes, Taborn was the leader and the star. But in another sense, he was more a servant to a vibe than its master. The piece (I'm still talking about this marathon opening selection, which moved through several transitions and likely included two or three distinct compositions) was the real focus and all three players were giving themselves over to it. Taborn was going off, as it were, but it rarely felt like he was soloing in the traditional sense. At all times, the three players were building something, participating in something collective. There were no clear cues to orient you in terms of foreground/background: "Now he's soloing; now he is," etc. Taborn eased back just as often as he surged forward, and you felt the music playing itself.

Cleaver was absolutely unflappable throughout this piece, keeping up an airy future-funk texture—I hesitate to even call it a groove; it was more of a sensation; you felt that you were moving forward, even though it was hard to tell at what speed or for what duration. What he and Morgan (who like Cleaver, gave himself over to this strange, enveloping onrush) were providing was a kind of endlessness. When I was describing above how the music felt like the players were wading into a river, what I was trying to get at was the idea that this imaginary river had already been flowing for eons before the musicians waded in; they were participating, communing with, thriving on the strength of some kind of preexisting current. In that sense, the music did feel a whole lot more like great electronica than like jazz. It was an unmarked superhighway, and however turbulent Taborn's embellishment got, you still felt like you were just cruising. That's a testament to Morgan and Cleaver's marvelous attunement to Taborn's strange, ambitious, very un-jazz-like concept. (The cohesion makes sense b/c this trio has been touring Europe regularly for several years; you can download two 2009 concerts here, though, respectfully, as good as these bootlegs are, they pale in comparison to what I heard last night.)

The piece finally did stop, but there was no break. Taborn played alone for a little while, entering into what sounded like traditional jazz-ballad territory, but extremely slow and tender. It was a startling juxtaposition. Again, back to my earlier point that yes, Taborn often reminds me of various piano giants, but he seems much more willing than, say, Taylor to employ relatively conventional devices. I don't mean to say that he's somehow reliant on clichés; I mean that he seems totally okay with dipping into traditional modes for moments at a time if it suits his overall purpose. When you hear Cecil Taylor, you're hearing Cecil Taylor; and that's it. There's a wall there. Taborn has a very different kind of humanity to his playing; he wants to blow your mind—and, maybe, his own—but he wants to welcome you through the door. I guess what I'm saying is that this particular solo ballad section was straightforwardly gorgeous, and juxtaposed with the magic-carpet ride of the previous long piece, it felt like a revelation. You're exploring the ice planet, this vast, alien landscape, and all of a sudden you come across an inviting little cabin, with smoke coming out of the chimney.

The band worked back up to another Berne-ish prog-groove peak in the final piece. Morgan took a poetic bass solo somewhere in there; Taborn and Cleaver both laid out for several minutes, and then Cleaver reentered not with a sound produced from the kit, but by rubbing his palms together. Somehow, you could hear it perfectly. There was a real sense of meditation in that club, of everyone knowing they were experiencing something rare and magical. When the band finished, stopping together on a dime, there was a glow in the room, not to mention wild applause.

In case it isn't clear from the above, I'm feeling evangelical about this performance. If you live in New York and you've ever had any interest in Taborn's music, you must see this trio play tonight or tomorrow (sets at 9 and 11pm; check the Vanguard site or Time Out NY for details). With respect to his existing body of work, this was, idiomatically, some whole other shit. I always know that a show is going really, really well when I shoot astonished glances at my wife and she mirrors them, rather than simply humoring me. We were both floored by this show, and I'd have a hard time imagining that any attentive, open-minded listener (no "jazz-fan" credential needed) wouldn't be. I cannot wait to hear where this trio goes in the coming years; right at this very moment, they are my favorite band on the planet.

P.S. Before the Taborn show, we caught Billy Hart's magnificent quartet, discussed in the previous post. I don't mean to short-shrift that set here; it's just that they're a known quantity to me, about whom I've already written at length, whereas I was encountering this Taborn band more or less fresh. I will say that Hart himself was on the warpath last night; I can't remember the last time I heard a drummer of any kind thwack a floor tom or bash a cymbal with such conviction. You can still catch the Hart band too; they're closing out their Birdland run tonight.

P.P.S. There's been some good Taborn-trio buzz building throughout the week. I've deliberately held off reading Ben Ratliff's review or checking out too much of the archived set (plus very cool A Blog Supreme interview) that's up at NPR b/c I knew I wanted to attend myself and approach the music without too many preconceptions. Now that I've seen the show and weighed in myself, I'm looking forward to catching up on the conversation.

Perfect 10s

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

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

/////

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

////

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

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

RIP Rashied Ali

What an absolutely outstanding musician.

And he sounded as good in recent years as he did on all those classic records. I feel fortunate that I was able to catch him live several times (but still, it wasn't enough). I'll never forget when I interviewed him in 2003 at his studio in Soho. He spoke of trying to "turn time into nothing." When I asked him what he meant, he proceeded to sit down at his kit and demonstrate. "Okay, here's time," he said, easing into one of his patented subtly roiling drumscapes. "And now I'm going to turn time into nothing." To be perfectly honest, I perceived no change in what he was playing, but either way it was completely magical to hear him in such an intimate setting. Here, via All About Jazz, is the complete transcript of said interview, which contains a wealth of great info on Interstellar Space and Ali's career as a whole. Check The Volume for a modest obituary and some nice links.

This sad news begs the question: Does anyone know the whereabouts of Rashied's younger brother Muhammad? I absolutely love his vintage work with Frank Wright and several others, but I have heard very little news of his recent activities. Some enticing tidbits here.

UPDATE: A Blog Supreme reports (as do several other sources) that Muhammad actually subbed for Rashied at the Newport Jazz Festival this past weekend. Anyone attend? I'm dying to know how he sounded. Thanks to RVAJazz and Steve Smith for the heads-ups.