Space and grace: The return of Blind Idiot God

Jordan N. Mamone, an excellent writer-about-music and a longtime Time Out New York contributor, wrote an exemplary preview of this past Saturday's record-release show by the veteran instrumental band Blind Idiot God, which you can read here. (Spoiler alert re: the concert: I was there, and it was fucking great.) Jordan notes that for the past 20 years or so, "…in-the-know doom and math-rock fans [have whispered Blind Idiot God's] name in reverent tones." I know what he means. For ages, I've heard tons of folks who, like me, gravitate toward these general musical zones, speak/write reverently Blind Idiot God. In the past, I'd checked out their ’80s and ’90s material, and enjoyed bits and pieces of what I'd heard, but for whatever reason, BIG never quite clicked with me. Upon first exposure, their music just didn't lodge in my brain and viscera the way that, say, the instrumental Black Flag material or the Don Caballero catalog did (to cite, respectively, one contemporary and one logical descendant of BIG).

To be fair, I suspect that the hushed-tones phenomenon cited above has been helped along by a few key extramusical factors: 1) Blind Idiot God had the SST / Greg Ginn stamp of approval during a time when that stamp of approval really meant something—a factor like this is always crucial in upping an underground band's cachet. 2) They also had the NYC downtown-scene stamp of approval, via associations with John Zorn and Bill Laswell, which meant that the rogue jazzheads who may not have given bands like Black Flag or Don Cab the time of day seemed to look at BIG as some sort of exception to the rule when it came to progressive, aggressive underground rock. I deeply respect Brian Olewnick's work (his beautifully written blog is only the tip of the iceberg), but I bristle at this phrase in his AllMusic review of BIG's third album, Cyclotron: "While still head and shoulders over most thrash-influenced 'math rock…' " I could of course be sorely mistaken, but this seems like a textbook case of a writer dismissing an entire (sub-)genre without actually having explored the depth and variety of said (sub-)genre. This whole metal/math-rock-for-smart-people concept—i.e., "I'll listen to a Zorn/Laswell-affiliated 'math rock' band like Blind Idiot God, but I won't get to know, say, the Touch and Go or Skin Graft catalogs"—seems deeply suspect to me. (Two qualifications/clarifications: A) in the mid-’80s, when BIG first emerged, their field, so to speak, was far less crowded, so maybe they did seem all that much more special to those who were paying attention, and B) I just want to emphasize that I'm taking issue here with perceived critical snobbishness, not BIG's actual music or aesthetic values.) And 3) Blind Idiot God picked an amazing name. It sounds so wonderfully, perfectly antisocial to proclaim one's self a fan of a band that goes by that Lovecraft-indebted moniker.

Despite my prior ambivalence, I was still mighty intrigued by the news, arriving in late 2014, that BIG would be releasing a comeback album in 2015. The band's current drummer, Tim Wyskida—formerly of the blood-curdlingly intense Khanate—works in my office building, and he and I have become friendly. I knew that BIG had been working on a new record for a while—Bill Laswell, who co-produced the album, mentioned it to me when I interviewed him in 2012—but last I'd heard, the project was in limbo. When I'd ask Tim about a release date, he'd typically laugh and cite the widely reported perfectionism of guitarist-bandleader (and, as of now, sole original member) Andy Hawkins. But here it was: concrete info on an upcoming release.

I'll cut to the chase: The album in question—Before Ever After, available from Hawkins's own Indivisible Music imprint; that's cover you see above—is outstanding, easily one of my favorite records of the young year, and almost certainly the best heavy-, metal- or "extreme music"–related release of the 2015 crop (right now, it's neck-and-neck with Napalm Death's stunning Apex Predator—Easy Meat). Suddenly, all at once, I get Blind Idiot God. I'm officially a member of the hushed-tones club.

Blind Idiot God is still an instrumental band, but as in the old days, there's a certain verbal concept coming through in the song titles: "Earthmover," "Under the Weight," "Wheels of Progress," "Barrage." (The vintage Cyclotron review above touches on the heavy-machinery metaphor too: "The listener feels buffeted about, as if inside a roaring engine at 30,000 feet.") The strange thing about
these associations is how inadequately they capture what, to me, makes Blind Idiot God's music, specifically the music they're making now, great. What I love about Before Ever After is precisely that it doesn't feels monolithic or mechanized, or really heavy in any traditional, metal-oriented sense. Jordan's preview homed in on the aspect(s) of the record I respond to most: "…the LP emphasizes lumbering repetition that infuses the music with increased space and grace. The noisy stuff breathes deeper [i.e., deeper than it did in during BIG's first phase of operation]…" That "breathes" concept is key.

"Wheels of Progress," which you can hear here, is a masterpiece in this regard. The song's snarling intro riff lunges forward in a kind of stumbling rubato time, as though the music were hurling itself against a wall, exhausting itself, panting and then starting over again. The second riff, starting around :30, has a similar kind of organic feel—crunching, grinding to a halt and then sort of melting away into a luminous goo of sound. The guitar and bass intertwine and crane to the sky, Hawkins's notes bending and singing. The track kicks into a more rigorous, propulsive groove, but the respiratory feel of the music remains intact. The middle of the song features a gorgeous ambient interlude, with Hawkins playing a series of delicate and hypnotic melodies, conjuring blissful delirium. The second theme (the one that starts at :30) returns, but it sounds even more spent this time around, less rigorous, almost as if it had warped from exposure to its own heat. If metal is, to take the genre's name at face value, the sound of strength and rigor, Blind Idiot God is the sound of pulsation and flow. The music isn't, to my ears, mechanized; it sounds biological. This record truly does breathe.

A lot of this has to do with Wyskida. The music he's playing with BIG, these avant-heavy dreamscapes, couldn't be more different than what he played with Khanate, which specialized in creeping, crawling gloom. But the two bands do share an especially organic approach. Khanate and BIG differ from 99% of all other rock-/metal-related music in their loose relationship to the idea of metric time. The music's pulse expands and contracts as needed. (In Khanate, that idea was obviously pushed to the absolute extreme.) And Wyskida is one of the rare heavy drummers I've heard, and especially one of the rare double-bass drummers I've heard, who can pummel while also caressing the time, coaxing out its little microdetails. On "Twenty Four Hour Dawn"—the album opener, and also the opener of Saturday's show—Wyskida accompanies Hawkins's harsh, glinting first riff with a sort of dancing, undulating march pattern, a beat that reminds me of Ronald Shannon Jackson in its insistence on a very personal, almost folksy kind of groove contour. At the show, Wyskida played a sizable double-bass kit (interestingly, the left kick drum was slightly smaller than the right), and he hit hard, but he wasn't brutalizing the music like, say, the insanely crushing Eric Neuser, drummer of opening band Gnaw, which features Wyskida's former Khanate bandmate Alan Dubin on vocals. Wyskida's roll-heavy approach brought out the music's impressionistic quality as much as its ferocious aspect. You can hear an example of this at around the 3:30 mark in the recorded version of "Twenty Four Hour Dawn." In one of many thrilling, unexpected changes-of-musical-scenery that occur on Before Ever After, the band breaks into a kind of skipping uptempo groove. And though they keep ramping up the intensity, with Wyskida hammering on the double kicks, the music retains a lightness—to borrow another phrase of Jordan's, a feeling of space and grace. ("Under the Weight" is another great place to hear this odd, intoxicating juxtaposition of buoyancy and aggression.) This record is heavy, yes, but it's also remarkably balletic.

Hawkins's guitarwork is of course another essential component of the BIG sound. Like Wyskida, he's a player who's fully able to bring the pain in a relatively traditional manner—check out "Earthmover," which features a lead riff that's heavily reminiscent of the Melvins' doom-rock classic "Night Goat"—but who's just as concerned with the texture of the sound as with its weight. His best riffs, like the opening theme of "Twenty Four Hour Dawn" or the central pattern in "Barrage," seem to be made of light as much as sound. They glint and burst, flash and dissolve. Occasionally, Hawkins takes a proper solo—there's a glorious, Sonny Sharrock–ian lead outburst around 1:45 into "Twenty Four Hour Dawn"—but he's a player more given to outbursts of texture. There's a gorgeous ambient interlude in "Twenty Four Hour Dawn" (yes, I know I'm citing this track frequently, but it's long and eventful and amazing!), around the 5:00 mark, where the groove drops out, and Hawkins plays these alternately trilling and roaring figures that diffuse and sparkle in the air like handfuls of colored powder. Another track on Before Ever After, "Voice of the Structure," is an abstract solo guitar piece that moves palindromically from near-silence to a buzzing, singing electro-wail and back again. ("Voice of the Structure" harks back to Halo, a solo record that Hawkins issued in 1994 under the name Azonic.) Seeing Hawkins play live was fascinating. The amplification was extreme, as is BIG's wont—see this recent definitive Hawkins interview by another Time Out contributor, Brad Cohan, for more on that—with mountains of guitar and bass cabinets heaped at the back of the stage. And Hawkins employed an insanely large rig and several different, unusually (for underground avant-rock, that is) fancy-looking guitars. No beat-up SGs or Les Pauls here—these were boldly colored, oddly shaped beauties that looked like they might be custom jobs. But like Wyskida, he wasn't out to brutalize. He employed a personal vocabulary of gestures (scraping the pick on the strings above the fretboard, for instance) and chords to conjure a sound that was, yes, huge, but just as importantly, rich, immersive and sensuous. Hearing Hawkins live, I felt more bathed in sound than assaulted with it. And though he's an intimidating-looking guy—stocky, with closed-cropped white hair—his stage presence isn't aggro. He's a painter with sound, seemingly more intent on sculpting the medium for its own sake than infusing it with any kind of extramusical violence. (He speaks to that idea in the Cohan interview: "For me, using music to express emotion is like using a howitzer to kill a fly: It ought not to be necessary, and it's a poor use of the resource.")

The space, the grace, the sense of breathing, they all bring me to the elephant in the room, which is Blind Idiot God's dub proclivity. (If you're not familiar with the group, they've always interspersed their heavy, prog-punk-ish "core" material with humid, sensuous, funky dub.) I admit I'm somewhat wary of this aspect of the BIG aesthetic. What I love about their rock-oriented side, especially on Before Ever After, is how idiosyncratic, how open and unbounded it feels. BIG's dub, to me, feels less personal, oddly conventional for a band so determined to will a fresh sound into being. After many listens through Before Ever After, I'm starting to enjoy the dub material—specifically, tracks like "High and Mighty" and "Night Driver"—in a palate-cleansing sort of way. These tracks do help to pace the record, to make it feel like a journey. (The live show, on the other hand, followed the template of the first, self-titled Blind Idiot God record and sequenced all the dub tracks together at the end—something of a momentum-killer for me.) And the album's excellent sound—this is probably the best-sounding Laswell-related record I've heard—its rich, buttery, spacious massiveness really flatters the tranced-out throb of these tracks. Also, "Strung," the second-to-last track on Before Ever After, which contains elements of both BIG's rock and dub tendencies, hints at the intriguing idea that in the future, these two components of the band's sound might be less segregated.

My personal feelings on the dub element aside, Before Ever After is a fascinating record, one that the current version of the band, rounded out by bassist Will Dahl, brings to roaring, pulsating life onstage. BIG circa 2015 is a band fully at ease with its eccentricity, and maybe more attuned to it than ever. The album indeed fuses avant-rock with a rare kind of space and grace, makes it breathe and throb and pulsate. To me, Before Ever After secures BIG's primacy in the canon of bands that have successfully integrated post-hardcore rock expression with an uncannily organic pulse, a sense that the music is more animal than machine. (Coptic Light and Multitudes both come to mind in this regard; for all I know, both have drawn inspiration from BIG's past work.) Hear the strange way this music moves—not like heavy machinery, but like some oozing, wriggling giant slug—and feel the way it moves you.

Once a seed: Keith Jarrett solo, now

Last night, I saw Keith Jarrett play solo at Carnegie Hall for the second time. The first such show I saw, in January of 2011, had been, in my view, disastrous. (In short, I actually witnessed the Coughing Wars in the flesh, and they were not pretty.) I chose not to write about that concert at the time, mainly because I knew I would take no pleasure in reliving or recounting it. It's pretty clear that Jon Pareles felt the same, though in his case, he was obligated to file a review.

I'm happy to report that last night's show was far better, both musically and in terms of artist/crowd rapport. Jarrett did display some faintly curmudgeonly behavior, but it was self-aware, mild. He seemingly can't not comment on coughs overheard from the audience, but last night he framed these "incidents" (Jarrett didn't use that term; I use quotes only to indicate where I stand on the matter) as minor improprieties, interruptions to be tsk-tsked but ultimately tolerated with a wry smile. Even when he informed the audience that one coughing outburst had ended a piece prematurely, he portrayed this as serendipity, i.e, just the way things go, an attitude you'd expect him to have embodied all along given his insistence on the purity of improvisation.

I'm ambivalent about foregrounding these extramusical details, but they matter. And that's true because, these days, a Keith Jarrett solo concert is a performance on many levels, not just musical. As with all Keith Jarrett solo concerts, last night's was technically improvised, but I couldn't help feeling as though Jarrett was, on some level, working from a script. Not from a score, but from some innate sense of what these concerts are, to him, at this point in his staggeringly accomplished career. The pieces he played didn't have names, of course, but at times, I felt like I was witnessing a performance of an evening-length work called A Keith Jarret Solo Concert.

Though the mood of the show was mercifully very different from the one I saw in 2011, the rhythm, the procedure of it was quite similar. The lights dim. Jarrett, a relatively tiny figure, strides out from those almost comically large doors at stage left. He walks over to the piano with a sort of self-conscious casualness, hands in pockets. "Oh, you want me to play?" his gestures say. "Well, I suppose I could do that." He chats a bit with the crowd. Last night, Jarrett's banter often touched on his drive to NYC that day, which had apparently been long and arduous.

Then he begins playing. The pieces are on the short side, averaging about four to five minutes. They fall into roughly three categories: the bluesy, earthy, muscular vamp-driven pieces; the searching, and often inconclusive and impenetrable, exploratory pieces, which tend to sound more "modern classical" than "free jazz"; and what I'll call, for lack of a better term, the Pretty Pieces. (Thanks to my friend and colleague Sophie, also in attendance, for helping me to establish this taxonomy.) He plays; he stops; he takes his hands off the keys. And then he stands up and bows, deeply, letting his torso go fully slack, as the audience applauds. This gesture plays up the sort of humblebrag quality that A Keith Jarrett Solo Concert has. "I have scaled Improv Mountain on your behalf, audience; I brought back a mere trifle, but I hope it was to your liking." The implication of heroism, of the artist alone up there on that huge, grand stage, with only his wits and his hands to guide him, is an inescapable part of these shows, and though this unspoken but very present element can be oppressive at times, it does seem more or less accurate—i.e., there is, at base, something heroic about what Jarrett does during these performances.

The great mystery and rapture of A Keith Jarrett Solo Concert comes, in my opinion, chiefly during the Pretty Pieces I cited above. Anyone who has seen one of these performances will know the pieces I mean. There were two that stood out for me last night, the second piece of the evening and roughly the sixth—two or three before intermission. Essentially, these pieces are songs. Improvised, yes, but so exquisite in their design, in the rightness of their melodic and harmonic arc, their adornments, the economy of their motifs (the second of the two pieces I cited above started with a little twinkle of a figure in the highest register of the keyboard and, lovingly, utilized that theme throughout) that it's as if Jarrett were plucking them from a tree like pieces of perfectly ripened fruit. Sometimes he sings along, wordlessly, in that famous and, to some, infamously distracting, vocalization of his—for the record, this habit of Jarrett's doesn't really bother me at all—and the mouth sound seems to reinforce the sense that though what he's playing is in some sense brand-new, it's also a song that both he and the audience already know by heart. The Pretty Pieces tend to have the flavor of ballads—wholesome tearjerkers. Melodramatic, in a sense, but also completely disarming and true. Last night, during these pieces, I kept thinking of the Branford Marsalis composition "Hope," specifically the version that appears on Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, the saxophonist's excellent 2011 duo album with pianist Joey Calderazzo. "Hope" is an almost comically gorgeous piece—one of the most elemental and stirring melodies I've ever heard. Several of the pieces Jarrett played last night felt equally inevitable, equally transporting. Pure magic, from the second he set his hands on the keys to the second he lifted them off. I don't know about heroic, but wizardly seems apt. The idea that a musician could, seemingly at will, distill a piece this right-feeling out of the air is almost scary. What would that feel like, to be able to sit down at the instrument and just, like, do that?

A Keith Jarrett Concert gives the impression that the Muse doesn't answer every time the maestro knocks. Some of last night's pieces were more sketchlike—open-ended, even downright stunted. The gulf between these and the Ones That Work can be frustrating. Couldn't Jarrett conceivably just play a concert of all Pretty Pieces? Hard to say. I'm sure his contention would be that it's out of his hands, pun intended, whether a given piece takes flight, but the rightness of the Pretty Pieces, from note one, is tough to ignore. Yes, he does in fact make it look easy, as though the art of composing a perfect song from scratch were as simple as solving a Rubik's Cube for the thousandth time.

Near the end of the show, in a genuinely affecting moment, Jarrett walked over to the mic in between pieces and said, "Thank you for following my work." He then addressed the elephant in the room, the notion—perfectly conceivable for anyone in attendance in January of 2011—that he "hates the audience." He assured us that none of what we were hearing would've been possible without us present. "You think I play like this in my studio?" This speech too seemed like a preordained part of A Keith Jarrett Concert—a necessary display of contrition and appreciation. But it also felt sincere. It was both welcome and classy, and, for me at least, it served to clear the air. (There had, for the record, been another solo Jarrett show at Carnegie Hall between the ill-fated 2011 one and last night's concert; according to Sophie, Jarrett's demeanor and performance had been exemplary that night in 2012.)

Does A Keith Jarrett Concert grab me the way Jarrett's ’67–’76 material does (see here and here)? No. There's a wild, organic beauty to that work that moves me, revs me up to no end. These days, Jarrett doesn't seem to be walking so close to the ledge, aesthetically. He's flying blind, yes, but I do get the sense that he can, so to speak, play these concerts in his sleep, simply reaching into his endless storehouse of Keith Jarrett Pieces. I realize that it might sound like I'm selling his achievements short, but that's not my intention. I'm just saying that there's something about the "not a hair out of place" quality of his present-day improvisations that both dazzles and stonewalls me. Whereas the ’70s work—and I'm generalizing rampantly here—felt like a man meticulously constructing a stairway to the stars, via compositions that felt so infectiously personal and natural, the current work can feel like a man ascending the very same stairway, i.e., one he's already built and ascended countless other times. There's an inevitability to A Keith Jarrett Solo Concert that, to me, feels the slightest bit canned.

The Pretty Pieces, though. Those exquisite sensations. Recalling them now is like recalling a bath in a hot springs. You really can't get that feeling anywhere else. At his best, Keith Jarrett has always been a genre of one, and that singularity was on display last night. He's a complicated figure—at times, a tedious one. But his achievement, the Idea of Piano that he's brought into the world, is undeniable, and still strong. It exists, persists, and you can go see it. Admire the perfection and sturdiness of it, almost as though it were a thing growing out of the ground. It's hard not to see the full, flowering splendor every time you look, but it's worth remembering that A Keith Jarrett Solo Concert was once a seed. It came about gradually. All the years of apprenticeship. Charles Lloyd, Miles, the American and European Quartets, the Standards Trio. The decades of solo performances. (Interesting to note that the 40th anniversary of the famed Köln Concert was this past January 24.) It all fed into this, and it's all there, if you look and listen closely. A Keith Jarrett Solo Concert is not inevitable, preordained, even if it can seem that way. It happens now because Jarrett has willed it to happen, year by year, moment by moment, right up to the present.

Spellcasting: Jim White drums with Xylouris White

The drums. You think you know the instrument, all of how it feels to play, to watch and listen, to experience. And then something comes along and reminds you that, well, no you don't. You know what you know, and what you don't know is vast, as well as inspiring. (In this regard, I highly recommend picking up Arcana VII, the latest volume of John Zorn–edited musician writings, and checking out the essays by Ches Smith, on his experiences learning Haitian Vodou drumming and incorporating it into his own aesthetic, and Tim Keiper, on his travels and musical experiences in Mali, Brazil and beyond.)

I've written before about the irreducibility of great drummers in performance, the way that if you're not in the room with them, picking up every sensation related to what they do—sound is just the beginning—you're not even coming close to experiencing their art.

Last night, I saw another drummer whose work I'd classify this way: Jim White, probably still best known as one third of the Australia's foremost violin-fronted instrumental-dirge-punk trio Dirty Three. He's also a sort of drummer to the indie singer-songwriter stars, most notably Will Oldham—before Thursday, the only time I'd seen White live in recent years was with Oldham, in 2009— and Cat Power, but also Nina Nastasia.

I remember being riveted by White's performance at that Oldham show and making a mental note that I needed to hear and see more of him. I'd listened to quite a bit of Dirty Three growing up, appreciated what White did in that group and seen them live once, but I never saw his percussive voice as something vital and elemental until these last couple show experiences, where White's weird, almost ritualistic vocabulary of gestures, his conjurer's approach to his art, really hit home for me. (Looking back, the fact that I hadn't yet delved into jazz when I caught that first Dirty Three show, probably around 1998, might explain why his playing didn't strike a chord with me at that time.)

Last night, White's current focal project, Xylouris White—a duo with the Cretan lute player George Xylouris—opened for Swans at Bowery Ballroom. (This New Yorker piece, into which Fugazi's Guy Picciotto figures prominently, serves as an excellent introduction to the band.) White was set up at center stage; this is clearly an equally matched pairing. What Xylouris does is gorgeous and absolutely essential to the project. Given that I know essentially nothing about the Cretan lute tradition, I humbly point you to the article linked above. Xylouris's contributions sounded at times Arabic, at times Jewish, at times even Indian. Hearing Xylouris blind, "Greek" would not have been my first thought. His lute playing suggested ragas as much as folk dances. There was a trance element, and an element of deep, stirring passion, as filtered through forceful virtuosity.

If there was a solemnity to Xylouris's playing—and given that he's coming out of a very strict tradition of lute performance, into which he was indoctrinated by his family, this makes perfect sense—White's presence embodied a certain kind of earthy flow, a sensuality with a hint of mirth. It seems impossible, or perhaps merely inadvisable, to attempt to describe his drumming without describing his appearance. A stocky man with a sort of mad-scientist Afro, White has a bearing of unflappable cool. His face bears a strange resemblance to that of longtime Altman actor Henry Gibson, but his dress (billowy shirt, unbuttoned about halfway), aura and presence suggest, to me, the Most Interesting Man in the World character you see in those beer ads. He looks, basically, as though he's seen just about everything there is to see, and that the years have engendered in him not jadedness but soul-deep contendedness and a sort of easy amusement with his surroundings.

White approaches the drum set as an object of fascination, as a site of mystery and delight. His movements are breathtakingly fluid. There is a dance that occurs, a pantomime, a flow, when he's behind the kit. He has strange tendencies—moving his arms in big, slow, exaggerated arcs, from over his head down to the drum, sometimes glancing up at his stick or mallet as it's poised over his head, as though marveling at the percussive act itself, the coil before the strike as much as the strike itself. There's a kind of inquiry and interrogation of the process, in the midst of that process. His torso dances. His shoulders shimmy. Sometimes he sort of clutches his left leg up and inward toward his body. He plays weird games with his unusually long sticks, not just tossing them in the air for a quick flip, but sometimes dropping one on the snare, letting it roll across the drum and picking it up with the other hand, and then doing the same with the other stick; back and forth, back and forth, as though in the midst of drumming, he were also juggling.

All this strange business brings about a kind of enchanted state, a feeling that's exactly analogous to what White does sonically and rhythmically. He has a way of sort of flowing around the kit, draping his sticks on the heads almost lovingly, that can disguise the power he commands. One minute he's consummately unobtrusive, offering up a quick subtle mallet roll across the toms or a tap on the tambourine he sometimes attaches to his hi-hat, and the next he's slamming out a fervent, rapid pulse on the kick drum, or playing some sort of bastardized backbeat with conventional sticks or those bundles known as Hot Rods. In these latter moments, his playing gives off the sense of limitless power deployed almost casually, like he could go full-on Bonham if he wanted to but prefers to keep the beat aerated, stumbling, fragmented, open-ended. There are miniature controlled detonations that, to me, at least, recall the more painterly realm of free jazz, but in general, I hear very little reference to any familiar tradition in White's playing. His pulse is insistent, yet blurred, hazy, always in service to the dance his body makes, rather than the other way around. His presence in the music is all about a personal experience of rhythm, a fluid exchange between a drummer's textural and timekeeping roles.

White surveys the audience as he plays, neither glaring nor smirking, but with a look that can touch on each of those. Last night, he flashed grins at Xylouris. There's much more of a sense of effort, of bearing down, in Xylouris's playing than in White's, and the drummer's glances at the lute player seem to say something like, "I'm right there with you, mate; I just don't have to try so hard."

Seeing White play, the overall effect was of having an experience you can't get anywhere else. In my mind, this aligns him with great jazz-oriented originals such as Ronald Shannon Jackson, Paul Motian and Milford Graves and with avant-rock masters ranging from Bill Bruford to contemporary giants such as Brian Chippendale, Zach Hill and Greg Saunier. As with those players, when Jim White is on a gig, you're hearing a concert of Jim White Music, as much as you're taking in whatever else in going on. That's not to say that he's a domineering force; sometimes, his sonic presence is downright self-effacing. Only to say that he is one of those elemental drummers. He walks onstage and there is a certain thing happening, between him, the kit and the air around it, that can't happen except in his presence.

Jim White's background is a bit hazy to me. I know the Dirty Three output fairly well, and I want to revisit it. I'm intrigued by Venom P. Stinger, the punk band he worked in with future D3 bandmate Mick Turner during the ’80s, which reunited and played New York in recent years. You can hear punk in his playing, and you can feel jazz in there too, in the overall looseness and his favoring of traditional grip. But there's a sense in which no genre you could invoke entirely accounts for his approach and aesthetic. He's created a whole world of behavior around his drumming. He walks onstage, sits down and begins not just a performance, but a relationship with the kit, the sticks, the room, and this attunement gives him unusual control over the flow and sensation of the music. When Jim White is drumming, I can't help but feel that he's casting a spell—slyly, without visible effort. It a spell that only breaks when he says so. I look forward to the next enchantment.

/////

*A brilliantly conceived Xylouris White video. (Check out White regarding the dog around the 1:00 mark.) The Xylouris White homepage and their 2014 debut album, Goats. A Ben Ratliff review of a 2014 Xylouris White gig.

*Here's a Ratliff review of a 2010 Venom P. Stinger reunion gig, as well as video of a 1988 VPS performance.

*A beautiful White/Nastasia duet.

*My friend and former Time Out New York colleague Jay Ruttenberg wrote a remarkable profile of White back in 2007. Like most Ruttenberg pieces, it's funny, sharp and, in my view, definitive. Please excuse the horrendous web formatting and enjoy the article. (Here's the Conan performance Will Oldham references.)

New York, instrument: John Zorn at the Village Vanguard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panorama: The joys of the Fugazi Live Series

In a recent post about the Paul Motian Trio, I wrote about spirit music, sound that feeds, and maybe even heals. My current obsession is Fugazi—kicked off by an excellent interview with drummer Brendan Canty, via The Trap Set, a new podcast hosted by Joe Wong, who happens to be my West Coast counterpart in the band Aa—and though the sound is very different, the effect, the aftermath of listening, feels similarly restorative.

It's common to speak of the uprightness of this band, whether in terms of how they resisted the evils of the business of music (or the often-barbaric practices that attend its live performance: moshing, crowd-surfing, etc.), or how they helped raise awareness re: the evils of government and commerce. And it's also, perhaps, in a sort of reverse-cliché way, common to speak about how their real contribution was a musical one, or how they were one of the most transformative live bands of their (or all) time.

What I don't hear a lot of, in terms of general Fugazi-ology, except among my closest friends, is appreciation for the meat and substance of the Fugazi experience, which is the songs. It's easy to forget, since the hoopla has died down—see this NPR piece and this New York Times article, both from 2011—that the Fugazi Live Series is still online and accessible to all. If you're not familiar with the endeavor, it's very likely the most extensive authorized single-band concert-download archive in the world. (Short of maybe the Dead, although I'm not even sure if they make their shows available direct to fans in such an accessible, no-b.s. format.) You don't have to mess with iTunes or any kind of tedious sign-up process; you just go in and browse the shows—all helpfully rated in terms of sound quality and equipped with a free sample track—and grab whichever ones you like for a suggested price of $5.

I'm nowhere near an authority on this archive—it would take years of dedicated listening and browsing to really get familiar—but I have zeroed in on particular favorite periods. The 2002 shows hold a special fascination for me. For starters, I can highly recommend the Boston gigs from April 19 (mislabeled in the URL and iTunes tags as May 19) and 20 of that year—also available as YouTube videos, here and here. I love the shows from this era simply because by this point, the band's final year of performance to date, Fugazi were drawing on their entire recorded output, all seven albums (well, six plus a pair of EPs that I came to know jointly as 13 Songs). What strikes me as I listen to these sets and others from 1995 (the year that one of my favorite Fugazi albums, Red Medicine, came out, and the year that I saw them live for the first time, at this St. Louis show; have just downloaded that, and it sounds incredible—I picture myself back in that room; and my friend/bandmate Joe told me he had a similar experience looking over this set list, from the first Fugazi show he attended, earlier in the same year; this Philly show is also a must) is that one of Fugazi's main contributions, and maybe the one that means the most to me, is their egalitarian approach to their own catalog. We all know that Fugazi didn't release proper singles (a couple scattered 7-inches, yes, but no actual singles, in the classic "airplay"-oriented sense) or videos, but beyond that, the degree to which they really stood by—as in performed live, consistently, and with passion and conviction—just about every song they ever put out is really striking.

Most bands of any longevity gradually whittle down their catalog, encapsulating entire periods with just a few songs sprinkled into their live sets. Fugazi refused to let their songs die. The main Fugazi Live Series search actually has a song selector, so you can track individual songs as they appeared in live sets throughout the band's career. Just for fun, I typed in "Burning Too," a track from 13 Songs (or from the Margin Walker EP, if you want to get technical), and, if I'm being honest, one of my least favorite Fugazi songs and not one I've heard fellow fans shout out as a particular favorite. Sure enough, there are eight pages of results, stretching from 1988 to 2001. My point is that Fugazi put their entire weight behind everything they released. Yes, of course, the band had what you might call hits—"fan favorites" is probably more accurate—songs like "Waiting Room," "Bad Mouth," "Suggestion" and "Merchandise," songs that every Fugazi fan, however casual, knows by heart, but in terms of how they operated, especially near the end of their performing lifespan so far, they treated their entire catalog with equal care, did away with the oppressive hierarchy of "greatest hits" and "deep cuts" that ends up polluting the catalogs of so many great bands (Zeppelin, for one; how wonderful it would be to revise "classic rock" history and do away with the idea that this monster band's masterful, meaty output ought to be reduced to 10 or so radio staples). So at the best of these Fugazi performances, you get the early material colliding off the late, as though the band had placed their entire catalog on shuffle. But of course this is live and real and organic. We've all heard about how the band didn't use set lists and how they all had to be prepared to unleash pretty much any one of their songs at any time, which is a pretty staggering notion once you really think about it, especially if you've ever had the experience of being in a band and dusting off material you haven't played in years; the recall / muscle memory is often pretty appalling.

I love how, in the second Boston show mentioned above, the band uses 1993's In On the Kill Taker (another album I adore, not that there's a Fugazi album I don't feel that way about) as a center of gravity, starting off the show with two of that album's most rousing songs, the Ian MacKaye–sung rager "Facet Squared" and the Guy Picciotto–sung partially a cappella masterpiece "Rend It," and sprinkling the set with various other IOTKT gems, like "Public Witness Program" and "Last Chance for a Slow Dance" (maybe my single favorite Fugazi song), while also making room for plenty of material from the then-new Argument album, as well as two brilliant Joe Lally–sung songs in a row ("Recap Modotti" and "By You"), a couple 13 Songs oldies (notice how "Waiting Room" is sort of thrown unassumingly in the middle there; no "Let's encore with our best-known song!" hoopla here) and Steady Diet of Nothing closer "KYEO" to end the set.

If you know all these albums by heart, the effect—the thrill of "What song are they going to play next?" and "How will it play off the one before and the one after?"—is a profound one. You start to see Fugazi's whole catalog as this glorious 360-degree panorama. The fast songs, the slow songs, the Guy songs, the Ian songs, the Joe songs, the instrumentals (dig "Number 5," from the "Furniture" single, which opens the 4/20/02 Boston show). It's all material—to be used, to be played, to be savored. No song privileged over any other. No staples—songs that have to be played at every show or the audience will go home unhappy. You create, you amass and then you just play, from the heart, whatever song wants to come out at that time, in that city, under that set of conditions. Yes, the $5 door price and the outspoken political stance were radical, but to me, this attitude toward one's catalog is even more so. You aren't writing a bunch of songs just so you can hit the jackpot with one or two, sell a million copies of those and then populate your albums with all the filler. You're standing by everything you create, letting none of it go to waste. And you're keeping your legacy pure, because every single one of those albums stands up, all the way through. As do the shows themselves. Each one has its own logic, its own arc, its own emotional and intellectual journey, its own story. I have a feeling I'll be playing in the Fugazi Live Series sandbox for years to come.

"…as long as there's an Earth": Celebrating Charlie Haden at the Town Hall

At some point during last night's Charlie Haden tribute at the Town Hall, I realized that the expectations and considerations I'd walked in with were meaningless. As I attempted to convey last year, upon Haden's passing, I adore this man's music and felt compelled to show up to this public event to pay respects. I also, I'll admit, felt a bit of what they call FOMO—fear of missing out. Denardo Coleman was listed among the participants, and as I had learned over the summer, that meant that Ornette himself might show up. And who could say for sure, I thought, that Keith Jarrett, whose Haden collaborations have been a recent obsession of mine, wouldn't surprise us all and make an appearance?

So when was it that I chucked this admittedly narrow-minded checklist mentality? It could've been when, during a duet by Lee Konitz and Brad Mehldau, I realized that I was witnessing one of the most relaxed and conversational musical events I've ever seen take place on a stage. "Performance" seems almost too pretentious a word for such a casually majestic and—to use a word that Joshua Redman, after his own too-brief turn with Kenny Barron, Scott Colley and Jack DeJohnette, attributed to Haden's own musicality and humanity—empathic duet, which found Mehldau gently buoying that exquisitely sweet, breathy Konitz alto sound, as well as the saxophonist's impromptu scat-style vocalizing. Or during a piece commemorating Haden's love for and collaboration with Alice Coltrane, which featured staggeringly gorgeous harp ripples from Brandee Younger, saxophone work of stunning poise from Ravi Coltrane and Geri Allen's warm, subtle piano magic. (Yes, I'm running out of terms of breathless praise here, a feeling that anyone who was in the audience last night can probably relate to.) Or maybe it was when Dr. Maurice Jackson, an author, Georgetown professor and Civil Rights Movement veteran, spoke movingly about his longtime friendship with Haden, singling out the bassist as one of "too few good white men" and aligning him with Anthony Benezet, an 18th-century French Quaker whom Jackson, in a 2010 biography, labeled the "Father of Atlantic Abolitionism."

What I'm trying to get across is that during last night's proceedings, a certain kind of alchemy occurred, through music and through speech and through the projection of emotion, that made the late subject feel palpably present, as though, at the event's conclusion, Haden's name would be called and the audience would all turn to face him, standing in the crowd or onstage, and honor him with an ovation. Having not attended many political rallies in my lifetime, I can't remember being present at any other gathering where I felt such a strong sense of consensus, shared by audience members and those onstage alike. And the collective conviction was, simply, that Charlie Haden was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary musician, and that these two qualities were inseparable.

Haden's wife, Ruth Cameron, a wonderfully dignified, gracious host throughout the three-hour event, spoke candidly about her husband's struggles with addiction, about how he had always told her that he was "in trouble" as soon as he put down his bass and had to navigate life as it existed apart from music. True as that may have been, Haden must have sorted out his issues to some degree, because nearly every associate who stepped on the Town Hall stage last night spoke about how knowing Charlie Haden and playing with him had enriched their lives. From Cameron herself, who spoke of Haden's sense that it was his mission to bring beauty into the world. To Mehldau, who, speaking after his performance with Konitz, alluded to his own history with substance abuse and how Haden's example had helped him cope. To Pat Metheny, who played a beautiful acoustic medley of Haden pieces and then reflected on his countless collaborations with the bassist, and on how he had shared things in conversations with Haden that he had never shared with anyone else. To Denardo Coleman, who spoke, self-deprecatingly but with great dignity, on his father's behalf, and discussed how Haden had always—from their first session together, when Denardo was only 10—helped him feel happy and at ease, as well as personally and musically validated. To Joshua Redman, who, remarkably, spoke of listening to Haden's many collaborations with his father—Dewey Redman, who had been mostly absent during his upbringing—and how the intimacy he felt radiating from that music actually helped him learn to love a dad he hadn't really even known.

Everyone spoke of Haden's zeal for beauty and positivity, each in their own way: Putter Smith, a fellow bassist (in the extraordinary Mintz Quartet, for one) who had known Haden in L.A. in the ’50s, asserting that Haden's contribution to the language of the bass was a certain kind of profound intimacy, the handling of the instrument as though it were a baby to be cradled. Ernie Watts, saxophonist in Quartet West, which played a marvelous two-song mini set near the end of the show, with Colley on bass, talking matter-of-factly about how Haden's musical language was nothing less than the manifestation of God speaking through him. Haden's friend and lawyer Fred Ansis and friend and record-industry associate (seemingly there was no figure in Haden's life that did not also earn the distinction of friend, along with whatever other role they might play) Jean Philippe Allard recalling with good-natured exasperation their years of fielding Haden's ever-urgent phone calls about session budgets or packaging design, all of which would begin with, "Hey man…" (Haden's religious use of that phrase became an in-jokey refrain throughout the evening), and how despite the day-to-day difficulties, they were always happy to help Haden realize his unwavering commitment to excellence. And the comedian Richard Lewis, who in a video statement spoke of how much he valued Haden's friendship and inspiration and, like Ravi Coltrane, Maurice Jackson and several others, alluded to the bassist's deeply corny sense of humor. ("Charlie—in heaven, if there is a heaven, play bass; do not tell jokes.")

And those who didn't honor Haden's quest for beauty verbally did so through music. As epitomized in the Konitz/Mehldau performance, there was a deep humanity and soul coursing through all of last night's musical events, one that like Haden himself, transcended genre, transcended the notion of a "tribute concert" and felt like nothing less than a collective embrace, an affirmation, with each player summoning an almost superhuman, and quintessentially Haden-esque generosity. Trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxophonist Tony Malaby, trumpeter Seneca Black and others taking, in turn, stupendously emotive solos during the Liberation Music Orchestra's rendition of "Amazing Grace" during their show-concluding mini set, presided over by the magisterial, impossibly cool Carla Bley; Ernie Watts displaying, in his tenor work with Quartet West, otherworldly degrees of virtuosity and passion; Henry Butler and Gonzalo Rubalcaba offering solo piano performances (the former also singing) that blended staggering command with wrenching tenderness; Petra, Tanya and Rachel Haden (a.k.a., the Haden Triplets) and their brother, Josh Haden, accompanied by Bill Frisell and bassist Mark Fain, displaying their magical vocal harmony on the gospel song "Voice From On High," an echo of the honoree's own upbringing singing country and folk with his family's band. (We got a taste of that via one of several clips from Reto Caduff's wondrous Haden documentary, Rambling Boy, still sadly unavailable as a DVD or download due to music-rights issues. Can anyone help remedy this?)

There was no intermission, no lull. The unfamiliar faces were as riveting as the stars, the speeches as profound as the music. The event, and here I have to credit Ruth Cameron again, had a real narrative arc; it told a story of a musical life, and gave you a sense of the life in and around that music. There was so much giving, verbally and sonically. What wasn't there—Ornette, Keith or, and this last part was strangely welcome, any sort of imitation, invocation or even recorded representation of Haden's own bass sound; nor did the program feature what to me is the bassist's signature composition, "Song for Che," which had to be a calculated decision—was ultimately irrelevant, because of the bountiful richness of what was.

Any Charlie Haden fan feels, through the countless recordings, through the immense humanity and courage of his sound on the bass, a certain kind of, to borrow the title of one of my favorite Haden albums, closeness with this folk hero of modern music. Last night's event affirmed that feeling, the sense that anyone who knew this man in life, worked with him in music, felt his presence in any way, came away uplifted. As I suggested above, I have a sense that a lot of what I've written here might, to those who weren't in attendance at the Town Hall, read like hyperbole. But just as Haden's various friends and associates related, I felt nothing but beauty, joy and profundity from this event; in short, it was like a megadose of what I feel every time I listen to Charlie Haden—with Ornette, with Keith, with Old and New Dreams, with the Liberation Music Orchestra, on his many treasured duet albums. I thank Ruth Cameron and all the other participants for affirming everything I already knew I felt for this giant of music, for encouraging me to explore all the Haden I don't know (I need to get familiar with the Quartet West catalog, pronto) and for generally illustrating in such a poetic, human way how music and emotion are the same thing, how true artistic generosity, the kind that Charlie Haden achieved, can only be achieved by living a truly empathic life. The story we heard last night is a story that bears infinite retelling. Fortunately, as Richard Lewis put it, with funny yet sincere hyperbole, it's a story—the Charlie Haden story—we'll be telling as long as there's an Earth.

Delivering the death metal: A new Cannibal Corpse LP

The death-metal band Cannibal Corpse released a new album this past September: A Skeletal Domain, their 13th LP. As with the prior two Corpse records, 2012's Torture and 2009's Evisceration Plague, it took me a second to come around to ASD. What typically happens is that I register the fact of the album release without really registering its considerable significance to me, a serious Corpse fan. I spin the record once, half-listening and thinking, "Yep, another Cannibal Corpse album" (you'll often read this sort of dismissive phraseology applied to the Corpse; Brooklyn Vegan recently wrote that ASD was "notable simply for being Another Cannibal Corpse Record"), and then I move on. Some weeks or months later, I think to myself, "Wait a minute, a new Cannibal Corpse album?!" Then I load the record onto my iPod, and the serious engagement begins. This time around, it took a couple tries. Even after I started listening closely, I wasn't crazy about ASD. But within the past week or so, something has clicked: I've been spinning ASD obsessively, and I'm now thinking it might be the best Corpse disc of them all.

As I've discussed here before, Cannibal Corpse turned a corner with 2006's Kill. In my opinion, that's when the latter-day incarnation of the band—fronted by George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher, who replaced founding vocalist Chris Barnes back in 1995—really got their shit together and began cranking out truly elite product worthy of their elder-statesmen status within the death-metal realm. I believe that, taken together, Kill, Evisceration Plague, Torture and A Skeletal Domain are the best that contemporary death metal has to offer. Not necessarily the most challenging or the most innovative, or the most extreme or harsh or thought-provoking or unsettling or what have you, but simply the best. This is death metal that perfectly balances technicality and brutality, chaos and catchiness. These are albums you can play all the way through, again and again, full of songs that sound great on record or onstage. Like most great music, the recent Cannibal Corpse output is music you can use.

A veteran band besting themselves with each album. Not just upholding a standard but pushing. This is not a common phenomenon. As evidenced by the Brooklyn Vegan quote above, it's not the sort of career arc that's going to gain you much respect outside your own die-hard fan base. But death metal is, at its core, an insular art form. I recently stumbled across a making-of documentary dealing with The Wretched Spawn, the Corpse album that preceded Kill. There are many beautiful moments here, many of them dealing with the idea of the fan/band symbiosis, and the members' gratitude at being able to do what they love for a living. At 32:45, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz says, "That's our job: delivering the death metal." Fisher follows him up: "This music is everything to me. It's given me so much, and the fans have given me, and all of us, more than we could ever give back. But we try to give back."

I'm still somewhat iffy on mid-period Corpse, the years between when Fisher joined the band and Kill. But when I've heard each of the prior three Corpse records, I've heard exactly what Mazurkiewicz and Fisher describe above. A band giving back, delivering the death metal. Professionals doing their job. ASD upholds this standard. There is so much craft and care and love, and so little bullshit, on this record. Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse had a certain seedy grime to it. (Yesterday, I stumbled across this incredible 1994 soundboard boot, which captures that lineup in its prime.) Corpsegrinder-era Corpse, on the other hand, is all about the fury, the relentlessness, the onrushing mincing machine that is the band's riff factory / nervous system: guitarists Rob Barrett and Pat O'Brien, and bassist Alex Webster, the Corpse's three principal songwriters.


Like the last couple Corpse discs, ASD actually improves as it goes on, growing steadily more demented and adventurous. The first three tracks are total anthems—clear future live staples. The title track and "Headlong Into Carnage" up the speed and intensity and breakneck Corpsegrinder word-munching to near-absurd levels. "Icepick Lobotomy," probably my current favorite track on the record, shows off two of late Corpse's signature moves: the agonizing doom breakdown (:33) and the thrilling uptempo 6/8 rock-out (2:00). "Vector of Cruelty" is one of the grooviest songs in the band's discography, orbiting around this sort of cruising midtempo feel, while "Asphyxiate to Rescuscitate" is one of the most manic and mathy, frantically juggling five- and seven-beat clusters. The last track, "Hollowed Bodies," starts off with a needling blast-beat riff that harks back to the Barnes-era heyday of 1994's The Bleeding, and goes on to effortlessly juggle tempos and feels—there's no last-track curveball here; just more Corpse-y excellence.

Basically, you finish the album and you want to play it again. There's no drop-off. ASD is just the latest example of Cannibal Corpse giving back, delivering the death metal. There's no ceremony about it. The next chapter is built in. You know the next LP will arrive in two or three years and you know it will be humbly outstanding. You know the casual spectators will take it for granted. You know the fans will show up to the concerts. You can count on this reliable cycle, and though you might grow temporarily numb to it, you know that when you hear what the Corpse does next, you will remember why they are at the forefront of their genre, 26-plus years after they started. It's a simple matter of releasing quality product. Of evolving without losing the thread. Of balancing immediacy and cleverness. Of doing their work lovingly and with full commitment. Art and craft, craft and art. Job, done; death metal, delivered. Fans, like this one, happy as hell.

In praise of the big: Antemasque's stellar debut

Here, via Wondering Sound, are my thoughts on the new self-titled debut by Antemasque, one of my favorite records of 2014.

As a child of the ’90s, I grew up in a time of big, weird, bombastic, accessible rock music. Metal, alternative, rap-rock, what have you. The subgenre wasn't as important as the high level of quality and the unabashed polish of the presentation. I grew up loving records like Clutch's self-titled 1995 LP, Quicksand's Slip, Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire, Jawbox's For Your Own Special Sweetheart, Pantera's Far Beyond Driven, Helmet's Betty. Big, splashy, major-label records made by innovative bands with (for the most part) what was then thought of as indie cred. To me, there was nothing more exciting than the mingling of idiosyncrasy and massiveness. These records sounded and felt huge. I cherished my Dischord and Touch and Go albums, too, of course, but I found the replayability of the albums above, and others like them, to be unusually high. I wanted them on all the time.

When I first heard the Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium, it struck me as the early-aughts version of the kind of record I'm talking about above. It was a huge record, with crystal-clear production and heart-punching hooks. But it was clearly also the product of a weird, personal, insular vision. I didn't know At the Drive-In's work well at the time, but in hindsight, De-Loused was very much aligned in spirit with a record like Slip or Betty—the work of kids with one foot in punk/hardcore and one foot in, for lack of a better term, Big Rock. Like Walter Schreifels or Page Hamilton or J. Robbins or the Clutch dudes, the Mars Volta's Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala wanted to retain their identity while expanding their scope and reach. It's a tricky balancing act, but when a band really pulls it off, the results can be magical and timeless. On De-Loused, the Mars Volta pulled it off. That record is a classic. Like several of the others listed above, it still sounds absolutely explosive and fresh to me today.

The Mars Volta's subsequent output didn't click with me in the same way. When I heard Frances the Mute, the follow-up to De-Loused, I was disappointed to find a more diffuse and, to my ears, pretentious presentation. The rock, the hugeness, the fun was more elusive; the tedious neoprog sprawl seemed to dominate. (I'm absolutely not disparaging prog or neoprog here; I'm just saying that I preferred the obviously proggish but much more immediate Mars Volta of De-Loused to the more self-consciously arty one of Frances.) I gradually lost track of a band that had once seemed to me like a great hope of smart, eccentric mainstream rock. I heard bits and pieces of the later Mars Volta records, but nothing that really drew me in.

Flash forward to this summer. Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala had reconciled after the Mars Volta's messy split, and they were teasing a new project. A few singles emerged, and they sounded good to me. I kept an eye out for the full album, and got ahold of it after the band posted it to Bandcamp momentarily. Antemasque hooked me instantly. I felt that rush of immediacy that I'd been looking for since De-Loused, since all those ’90s records I mentioned above. I knew very quickly that this was one of those huge records, a definitive statement by dudes with arty impulses but the good sense to streamline their output, to craft a record that you can just crank up and feel, really live with. Antemasque simply flows, and explodes, and kicks major amounts of ass. Like De-Loused—although Antemasque is a very different, more straightforwardly rock-oriented band than Mars Volta—this album is a blast.

While preparing for my write-up, I caught up on all the Mars Volta and At the Drive-In I didn't know. I found great tracks nestled everywhere in the discography, from the earliest ATDI ("Star Slight" and "Initiation," from their first LP, Acrobatic Tenement, blew my mind with their scrappy, passionate emo-ness) to the latest MV (I found myself gravitating to their final album, Noctourniquet—maybe the most un-rocking, un–De-Loused-like of their records).

I think Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala are geniuses (especially when working together), and have been pretty much since they began collaborating. But making a truly great record is about more than genius. It's about crafting something that truly engages all the way through. Concision is one method. It's the one these artists have chosen on Antemasque, and it works beautifully. I saw Antemasque live the other night, and the show was everything I hoped it would be—fun, concise (Rodríguez-López's spellbinding guitar-heroics and Bixler-Zavala's magnetic stage presence—these two really are our generation's Page/Plant—saved a couple fairly lengthy jams from tedium), energetic as hell. It was about the songs, and this band has a lot of great ones.

I'm not going to refer objectively to a return to form, because that implies that mid-to-late period Mars Volta was somehow a mistake. Clearly the band didn't think it was, so in a sense, it wasn't. But to this listener, Antemasque does represent the point at which I jump back on the bandwagon. I'm all in with these guys again, and it feels wonderful. I hope they keep making more massive, molten masterpieces like Antemasque. Let's hear it for the big.

Blood so real: Samhain live / Danzig devotion

For me, Samhain was always the weird, shadowy middle chapter of the Glenn Danzig saga. There's an immediacy to basically the entire Misfits discography, and to the cream of the Danzig one (essentially albums one through four, plus odds and ends afterward), that seemed to skip over Samhain. I've often come across passionate Misfits and/or Danzig fans who haven't heard a note of, say, the classic November-Coming-Fire.

So to me, it was a strange and intriguing decision for Glenn to bring Samhain back out on the road this year, for an appearance at Riot Fest and a subsequent mini tour, which I saw at Best Buy Theater last night. A few years back, I attended a show billed as Danzig Legacy, in which Glenn and assorted sidemen played three short sets focusing on each of his bands in turn. In some ways, the Samhain portion was the most intriguing—both because the songs are less iconic than the Misfits and Danzig classics, and because the lineup (unlike that of the Danzig segment, which featured no vintage-era members, or the Misfits one, which featured only guitarist Doyle) included two actual old-school Samhain-ers, Steve Zing and London May, trading off on bass and drums.

Last night's set was a chance to focus exclusively on Samhain, and I have to hand it to Glenn for keeping the parameters tight. The band played only three Misfits songs, and two of those ("Horror Business," a.k.a. "Horror Biz," and "All Hell Breaks Loose," a.k.a. "All Hell") showed up in their subtly but effectively rearranged Samhain versions; the third, "Halloween II," always sounded like a Samhain song to begin with, so it fit right in. Having not met a whole lot of die-hard Samhain fans in my peer group, I was surprised to see how passionate the crowd response was. People were singing along to every word of even the obscure Initium songs, like "Macabre" and "The Shift," and the pit was raging more or less the whole show.

The experience of seeing Glenn Danzig live in 2014 is complicated. I've seen him several times in recent years, so I knew what to expect, but last night, his age, and his bitter, out-of-touch demeanor hit home even more. To put it mildly, his onstage persona, which I gather is not too different from his offstage one, is not a pleasant one. He's developed an obsessive loathing for fans filming his shows on their phones, and he has a habit of aggressively calling out specific members of the crowd. There were several distracting instances of same last night, as well as an utterly absurd episode where a roadie apparently handed Danzig an out-of-tune guitar (Danzig played some sparse rhythm guitar on the strangely uplifting Initium closer "Archangel") and Danzig proceeded to make a laughingstock of the poor guy in front of the whole crowd. (I don't recall the entire rant, but he definitely employed the term "Einstein" in the classic sarcastic-’80s-jock way, and said something like "What is this, Ethiopia?" when the same roadie forgot to set up a mic stand for him.) There was also this classic rhetorical question posed to the audience: "Does anyone else out there fucking hate hipsters?" I could go on, but you get the point.

The odd thing is that another bit of banter was one of the most endearing moments of the set. You always hear artists give these "Thanks for your support—it means a lot" speeches near the ends of shows, but the one Danzig gave last night was one of the most sincere-seeming I've ever heard. In so many words, he thanked the audience for supporting him all these years (keep in mind that Glenn Danzig is 59, and has been performing since the late ’70s), and made the point that fan loyalty is the driving force behind underground art forms like punk and metal. Again, we've heard all this before, but Glenn Danzig is someone who has lived this dream basically his entire life, willing three bands into worldwide icon-hood (and inspiring countless others) through the force of his own vision, conviction and, it must be said, talent. You can't do that without a passionate and devoted fan base.

I'm proud to call myself a member of same. At this point, I've been obsessed with Danzig's body of work for more than two decades. For a few years during my adolescence, I plastered one entire wall of my bedroom with Danzig/Misfits/Samhain memorabilia. (Another friend and I competed to see who could construct the grandest Danzig Wall, as we called it.) The music of these projects has never lost its resonance for me, and to me, it's some of the best-made—and most soulful, intense, dark, tough, sensual, smart, atmospheric, idiosyncratic and sheerly enjoyable—rock I've ever heard. In recent years, I've seen my teenage idol turned into a caricature—with the Henry and Glenn comic, the infamous backstage punch-out, the kitty-litter pic, the admittedly hysterical bricks anecdote—and I'll admit that I'm a little defensive about it. But when you see the man onstage, willingly giving detractors all the ammo they need to ridicule him, you realize that defending Glenn Danzig as a guy is a losing battle.

What I will do, though, is defend Glenn Danzig as an artist and, just as importantly, entertainer. The Misfits songbook is straight-up Beatles-worthy in its density of brilliance per capita. We're talking about buckets' worth of perfect songs—true anthems. The first four Danzig records are almost as good in terms of sheer swagger and baddassery and vibe cultivation. And the Samhain catalog is a creepy, esoteric wonder unto itself. You see Glenn Danzig perform these songs—not talk between songs, or otherwise make an ass of himself, but actually perform them—and you feel how much he wants you, the audience member, to feel, to embrace the liberating power of dark, punishing, violent and—paradoxically, but maybe not at all—fun music.

"All Murder, All Guts, All Fun," one of the most rousing songs Samhain played last night, says it all. Yes, Danzig's all about the tough-guy posturing—the snarls, the air-punching. But what he really is, is an entertainer in a classic escapist-minded mode. He dreamed up a character, that of "Glenn Danzig," and has spent his life embodying it to the fullest. When he's in the midst of that embodiment, performing a brilliant punk song like the urgent "Let the Day Begin" (last night's set closer) or the gothy "Black Dream," or a stirring proto-Danzig (i.e., the band) dirge like "To Walk the Night," he is 100% believable. You go along with him on this possibly cartoonish, but ultimately transporting and empowering journey. In short, you believe. Or at least I do.

The spell might break as soon as a song ends, but for those several minutes, you're in that alternate world that he's created—one that's not just sonic but also visual. The band took the stage splattered in fake blood à la the Initium cover, and at one point Danzig made a comment to the effect of "How many other bands would come out here and put on all this blood for you?" This is the man who told his audience way back when, "I want your skulls." (I saw a band cover "Skulls" on Halloween, and it united the entire audience in Danzig worship; like I said, classic songs.) And the sentiment feels reciprocal: I want your skulls, essentially your loyalty, and I'll give you back total commitment in my performance. At certain moments during the show, I saw Danzig wipe fake blood out of his eyes and lapse momentarily into an "I'm too old for this shit" slouch. But then he'd snap right back into the sneering, the headbanging, the giving of himself unto the fans, the keeping of the faith, the embodiment of his own shock-rock anti-hero-hood. (And I should say that the rest of the band—Zing, May and Baroness guitarist Peter Adams—all abetted the Danzig vision with total commitment. I believe that they believe.)

Glenn Danzig appears to me to be, despite all his bitter lashings-out, a man in love with what he does, what he's created, and what he brings out in those who share that love for what he does. I wouldn't want to be him, but I respect the sacrifice he's made—essentially, apparently, trading his own, like, development as a decent human being for the blessing/curse of metamorphosing into the ultimate fantasy character. Like a pro wrestler, or something? Perhaps, but pro wrestlers don't write transporting, immortal, impossible-not-to-sing-along-to songs like "Unholy Passion." And they don't put on shows as galvanizing and true and passionate as the one I saw last night.

Yes, I came away from the show, as any sensible thinking person would, recounting Danzig's various between- or intersong absurdities with my friend. But in my heart, I knew that I still believed. It takes a little effort, but really not that much at all, to separate the myth from the man—to set your feelings about the latter aside out of respect for your love for the former. That's what art, and just as importantly, entertainment, are all about. Glenn Danzig is a master entertainer, in part because he is a master artist. He has made so many things that resonate so widely: songs, yes, but also an entire worldview, a collection of imagery, a persona, a unified space where the emotions he has worshiped all his life—basically evil, violence, passion, anguish, lust, what have you—can rise to the surface and boil over in this kind of communal exorcism. It's the same principle behind a great horror movie, but in the case of the Danzig brand, and specifically a concert over which he presides, it's a real group ceremony. Superficially, I don't feel like I have much in common with the average Danzig fan, but the goosebumps I frequently found myself getting during last night's show let me know that I'm going to be a member of this brother-/sisterhood for the rest of my life.

"And that blood's so real," Glenn Danzig sings in "Bloodfeast," one of my favorite Misfits songs, "Because I just can't fake it." I know exactly what he means, and I take him at his word.

The price of right: 'Whiplash,' a jazzless jazz movie

When a more or less mainstream movie comes out about a topic you specialize in, you take notice. You almost feel compelled to form an immediate opinion, because you know someone will ask: "Have you seen this new film about a jazz drummer? What did you think?!"

The movie I'm talking about is, of course, Whiplash, which deals with a sadistic—or is he enlightened?—jazz-band director at a Juilliard-like NYC music school and his super-driven student, possibly also on his way to a life of cold inhumanity and artistic immortality.

I should say up front that I found Whiplash really compelling as a straightforward human story. The acting was solid all-around, and the transformation of the main character, Andrew (Miles Teller), into a kind of Art Monster felt believable and suitably complex, i.e., you weren't sure whether to admire him or pity him as he drove himself ever harder, past blisters and bleeding and beration at the hands of his teacher, Fletcher (J.K. Simmons, a.k.a. that dude who's in everything but whom you probably don't know by name).

This question of how far you need to go—or maybe, how inhuman you need to become—in order to be great is one worth asking, and Whiplash thrusts it in your face for pretty much its entire running time. But what I found almost more interesting were the questions it didn't ask. Whiplash ostensibly concerns itself with jazz, with drumming, with music in general, but to me, it felt strangely divorced from any of those things. What I mean is that Andrew's entire quest is presented as no different from that of, say, a marathon runner or mountain climber. The drumming in the film is entirely tense, joyless, athletic, extreme, punishing. We hear music being played in Whiplash, but mostly we see and hear practice, and practice that looks and feels very much like self-flagellation.

Director Damien Chazelle apparently played in high-school jazz band, so I guess I should assume that in addition to posing his core inquiry of "At what price art?," he's also asking questions about the sort of militaristic regimentation of jazz during the past few decades. But this seemed sort of like an undercurrent rather than anything the movie came right out and addressed. I couldn't help noticing that there were really only two actual musical fixations in the film, two hallowed icons held up as examples of the greatness that Andrew is trying to achieve and Fletcher is trying to inspire: Buddy Rich and Charlie Parker. I could be mistaken, but I don't think a single other drummer was named in the film besides Rich. That makes perfect sense, in a way, because to me—respectfully, Buddy Rich has no place in my personal drum pantheon, jazz or otherwise, but to be fair, I haven't dug very deep into his work—Buddy Rich is the icon of jazz as sport, jazz as "My band is going to wipe the floor with your band," jazz as a chops war, jazz (or music in general) as a thing not to be studied, enjoyed, savored, but as a battle with clear winners and losers. Is this why Chazelle chose Rich—i.e., as a sly critique of those who would model themselves after the wrong kinds of artistic heroes—or was it simply that he, as a young jazz hopeful, worshiped at Rich's altar? Or that Rich is simply the go-to shorthand idol of "every aspiring jazz drummer"? (Another thing: Like Rich, almost everyone shown playing jazz in Whiplash is white. Again, I wonder: critique, commentary or coincidence?)

In terms of Parker, there's not a single mention of the fact that he was, like, a brilliant alto saxophonist and improviser. All we hear about is that he was an inferior player who became an immortal one after—in the famous story, recounted ad nauseum in the film and elsewhere—drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him during a jam session. (I've heard this anecdote so many times that I can't even remember where the supposedly definitive version comes from—does anyone else happen to recall?) In any case, I thought it was very telling that there's not a single mention of, or even allusion to, the idea of improvisation in the film. Andrew's entire quest revolves around mastery: mastering rudiments, mastering certain tempos and feels (all the while being verbally and physically assaulted, both by Fletcher himself and by his own ever-developing inner Fletcher), mastering charts, mastering a sort of samurai-like ascetic discipline. The idea of inspiration, of expression, of putting one's personal stamp on the music never comes up. Jazz as it's portrayed in Whiplash is about rigor and bombast, mostly in an ensemble context, and that's it. And it was hard for me to tell if Chazelle intended his movie as a critique of this ghoulish perversion of jazz in the academy, or if that version of jazz—the one where jazz looks very much like, say, wrestling or football or rugby—was the only one he knew, and was therefore the only one his film dealt with. I'm splitting hairs here, but I came away from Whiplash wondering all this.

Chazelle leaves it up to the audience to decide whether Andrew's quest, the one that will very likely result in him become a famous drummer with no personal relationships whatsoever, is worthwhile, or even fated for someone of his constitution. But I couldn't tell if were also meant to be asking whether "succeeding" at this version of art—i.e., not the version where you change the world through the depth and specificity of your vision, i.e., the Miles, Mingus, Ellington and, yes, Parker version, but the one where you basically become a charts-obliterating robot—was even a worthwhile goal to begin with. Is Whiplash simply a film, in other words, about the price of getting jazz right, or is it also a film about how profoundly the jazz-education system—teachers, students, everybody who embraces this apparatus for the learning/inculcation of jazz—has gotten jazz wrong? Because, yes, relentless practice is what turned Charlie Parker into Bird, but it wasn't the relentless practice of, like, the saxophonic equivalent of rudiments and snazzy ’70s-style big-band charts. It was mechanical study combined with the drive to make a personal statement, with actual passion and curiosity, a concept that is not even remotely touched on in Whiplash (again, a calculated omission? Hard to say…). Passion not just to "improve" but to discover.

So Whiplash definitely made me think—just maybe not along the exact lines it seemed to be trying to make me think. But as a visual, visceral and emotional document, I thought it was extremely successful. Jazz, music and drumming aside, it's basically about the idea of a young man pushing past his breaking point and going into a kind of transcendent/purgatorial free fall, a portrait of what the obliteration of "normalcy" in the name of excellence looks and feels like. (My friend and Time Out colleague Josh Rothkopf nailed all this in his Whiplash review.) Chazelle really rubs your nose in the madness of it all—the rehearsal scenes in particular, with Fletcher halting performances time and time and time again with a bulging bicep and clenched fist, are suitably excruciating. And the film's dark pull really centers on how much you find yourself agreeing with Fletcher's worldview at times. This idea of "Is the desire for greatness unreasonably extreme, or is the rest of the humanity too content to settle?" is a profound one, whatever your chosen field or life path.

Yes, the "jazz" in the film looked and sounded nothing like the jazz I love, but then again, I've never studied jazz at a conservatory. (I'd be really curious to hear how someone from that environment would respond to Whiplash.) Bottom line: a good, thought-provoking night out at the movies, and a rare chance to see a feature film that touches on some of my chief obsessions.

P.S. Forrest Wickman goes deeper into the cymbal-throwing incident (myth?) and its relationship to Whiplash here.