Since I don't have a regular radio outlet anymore—:(—thank God for Destination:Out. The site's principals have been unusually generous re: letting me muscle in on their territory when I have a blogging idea that suits their multimedia format. Last year, I surveyed Bobby Few's oeuvre, and now I've got another mixtape up on the site, bearing my somewhat corny—but IMHO justified— title of The Right Prescription (you'll have to read the intro to find out where that title comes from). This one's dedicated to Alvin Fielder (tearing it up behind the kit and looking like a ’70s ?uestlove in the pic above), a man who's always been one of my favorite drummers, yet whose recordings have always seemed really elusive outside of his famous debut on Roscoe Mitchell's Sound. I decided to use the sad recent news of his illness as an excuse to comb through his discography and pick out some choice tracks. Please take some time to sample this music; it's inspiring stuff.
All best wishes to Mr. Fielder! Here's hoping he makes it back to New York for a gig someday.
Tonight I had the insanely overdue opportunity to hear Irene Aebi sing live. As detailed here, it was glorious. That's Aebi at right in the pic above (snapped by Laal Shams), with (left to right) Josh Sinton and Kirk Knuffke of the excellent Steve Lacy repertory band Ideal Bread and saxist Jeremy Udden.
Friday's Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten duo show was a serious trip, as I attempted to relate here.
The pair's recent record, Elise (all info plus a full stream here) is a winner. Telepathic meditative poignancy, first-rate free soul, etc. Scandinavian jazz is no joke whatsoever. It is really the frontier as far as I'm concerned.
Speaking of which...
One-item playlist (besides the aforementioned Elise):
Futterman-Jordan Quintet - Nickelsdorf Konfrontation (Silkheart, 1995) This strange and wonderful disc teams Mats Gustafsson, the reigning sax titan of the aforementioned musical community, with (get ready for this) Barry Guy, "Kidd" Jordan, Alvin Fielder and Joel Futterman. The latter three have often performed as a powerful trio, but the addition of the Euro free masters makes this a real find.
And in STATS news, I'm proud to say that "Yo King," the first track from our brand-new demo/EP, Marooned, is now streaming over on MySpace. It would behoove you to play this loud. If anyone is interested in getting ahold of the full three-song recording, please drop a line to statsbrooklyn@gmail.com. (Bonus points if you can figure out where the song title came from.)
Also, really fun show the other night (flyer above, though I don't know why I didn't think to upload it *before* the gig) with Scurvy and Zevious. Heavily high-tech prog-jazz from both ensembles. Thanks to Johnny for setting that up.
*And then Laal, Joe and I took in Roy Haynes at the Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival on Saturday, preceded by a gorging session at the impressive Smoke Joint. Sadly we missed the opening set by Amiri Baraka, but luckily the esteemed poet came back out at the end to drop some impish witticisms. He and Haynes were together onstage long enough for me to snap the blurry but (at least IMHO) evocative pic above.
Note: Yes, more and more posts on DFSBP are now linking to The Volume. Am doing my best to keep both beachballs in the air, but it's tough; sometimes there's just going to be overlap, which I'm cool with and hope you are too. Thanks for bearing with me in this transitional time.
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Recent listening:
I've never really offered straightforward playlists on here before, but why not start? I've been doing some spring cleaning both at home and at work and have unearthed a fair amount of jazz and experimental music discs from recent years that I've been really digging. Since most of them are old now they conform to the DFSBP corporate motto: "Apropos of Nothing!"
Dennis González's Spirit Meridian Idle Wild (Clean Feed, 2005)
Does the Portugese avant-jazz label Clean Feed release too much music? Of course, there's no such thing as too much, but in one crucial sense, I'd have to answer yes. As you can tell by the vintages above, I'm nowhere near caught up on all this label's boatload of records from the past few years. I'm sure there's a ton more awesome ones that have fallen through the cracks. Both Sfumato and Idle Wild feature unbelievable supporting casts, and interestingly both records include the awesome Ken Filiano on bass. Oliver Lake steals the show on the González--the latter *always* recruits the sickest sideman; just check some of his Silkheart discs from the '80s--and on the Golia, I'm blown away by the leader's frenetic multireed facility. I really don't know Golia's other work at all. These are both out-jazz sessions with a just-right balance of structural integrity and free blowing.
Ambitious and beguiling, as with pretty much all of Welch's work that I've heard. Love the solo bagpipes piece, "Traversing Mad-Hatten," and the large-ensemble stuff ain't too shabby either. Cool that the last track features future stars such as Charlie Looker (Extra Life) and Tyondai Braxton (Battles, etc.).
What a strange, strange musician Kelley is. This is an enigmatic set, a sort of tape-collage thingie constructed out of live recordings. Don't know that I prefer this to, say, Nmperign, but at its best, it features the same obsessively textural quality that makes that duo so awesome.
William Parker & the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra Raincoat in the River (Eremite, 2002)
Exuberant and well-constructed; loose yet efficient. Have never truly loved a Little Huey record, but this one comes closest to what I'd like to hear from the band.
Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Elise (Compunctio, 2008)
A dazzlingly romantic and gritty release. Are Scandinavians making the best jazz in the world right now? Could be. You can hear the whole record here.
There are not too many jazz records as flawlessly exquisite as the original Birth of the Cool. Fleet and breezy yet insanely ornate; lovely, catchy, PERFECT (especially the to-die-for "Moon Dreams," a woozy ballad that becomes a modernist fever dream). It's a kaleidoscope of beautiful writing and as for the soloists, Lee Konitz, in particular, sounds utterly like mercury here. Really wish I'd caught him at the Vanguard this past week.
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Lastly, trolling about the Clean Feed site, I just discovered the unfortunate news that drummer Alvin Fielder is very ill. All well-wishes to this excellent and underrated musician, who played on Roscoe Mitchell's 1966 landmark Sound as well as a ton of great sessions in more recent years with "Kidd" Jordan et al.
Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu on his stuffed-animal collection:
"My favorite is a baby watermelon in the shape of a cube with arms, legs and a happy face. It has been adopted by two other smaller, German, gay watermelons—one with glasses and one with a moustache and a seed-shaped tear."
Go to The Volume to read the rest of a pictorially enhanced e-mail Q&A I recently conducted with Stewart, who plays Brooklyn (Monkey Town, to be exact) a week from today, April 6.
Xiu Xiu is one of the few bands I know that's truly deserving of the description "harrowing." If you haven't heard them, 2006's The Air Force is an emotional gut-punch of the highest order.
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Just devoured Michelle Mercer's new Joni Mitchell tome, Will You Take Me as I Am. It's an intriguing hybrid--part biography, part criticism, part (for lack of a better word) meditation on Joni's so-called "Blue Period." I admired the freeformness of the book, its commitment to detours and tangents. There are some fun gossipy details here, as well as excellent supplemental interviews with the likes of Graham Nash. Best of all though are the first-person accounts of Mercer's extensive personal encounters with Mitchell, such as the time the singer dressed the author down--or tried to--during an intimate dinner party. Well worth it for the Joni fan and made me realize I really need to check out Mercer's Wayne Shorter bio.
Happy 80th birthday, Cecil Taylor! (There is some dispute over his actual DOB, but I trust the authorities.)
The commemorative gig--seemingly billed as a poetry/piano set--occurs on Saturday. And I'm almost certain I heard on air that WKCR will play CT from noon to 9pm today.
I've got little to add right now other than to say that attending a wide array of CT shows has been one of the real highlights of my time in NYC over the last decade. I find his music inexhaustible and endlessly fascinating, something I can't say about very many artists in any medium. I've written about him extensively on this blog and elsewhere; here are a few of those pieces:
*Review of Taylor at Village Vanguard with Tony Oxley, July '08 (Links to earlier CT coverage on DFSBP can also be found in this post.)
*An attempt to unpack CT's signature piano moves, including "The Lick," February '08
*A review of CT's most recent NYC solo concert, a show that may provide the blueprint for what goes down on Saturday, August '08
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Also, Crack the Skye officially dropped yesterday. As predicted, my initial obsession with this one has dampened a little since I first heard it, but I'm still mightily impressed. Check out my Mastodon piece in last week's Time Out NY--in which bassist vocalist Troy Sanders unpacks the album's elaborate narrative underpinnings--as well as a separate mini-feature, where Sanders reveals (!) his five favorite concept albums of all time.
STATS performs its first show since January this very evening (Monday, 3/23) as part of the awesome, longstanding Precious Metal series. Would love to see you there! Here's all pertinent info:
Mon, March 23 @ Lit @ Lit, 93 Second Ave (between E 5th and 6th Sts), NYC $6
It's been a severely strange showgoing week. Via The Volume, here are my accounts of Monday night's Mötley Crüe show at Madison Square Garden and Tuesday's David Thomas Broughton gig at the Living Room. The former was what pretty much what you'd expect, though perhaps even a little more bombastic/excessive than whatever mental picture you're currently conjuring. The latter straight-up floored me. Laal had turned me on to DTB's recordings, which I'd found to be respectably eerie and hypnotic. But this show was something else entirely, namely borderline terrifying. Don't sleep on this guy (pictured above).
A few items of (outstandingly esoteric) interest, reported via the new-ish Time Out NY music blog, The Volume:
1) Hella is now a two-piece again. We'll have to wait and see, but this could be an excellent thing. I tried valiantly to get into the band's various nonduo records--issued after its early-aughts golden age--but at times I felt as though I was fooling myself. Hold Your Horse Is and The Devil Isn't Red, though, remain classic. I wouldn't expect any sort of retread, but let's just hope they focus and cut down on the jamming and general shenanigans.
2) Two thirds of Dysrhythmia joins Gorguts. For the tiny sliver of the population that knows who both of these bands are, this is pretty astounding news. Whatever comes out of this, it will not be even remotely boring. See my Gorguts post from last year for a few thoughts (though I doubt that MP3 link will still work).
3) Propagandhi slayed at MHOW on Friday night. One of the most interesting things about covering music for a living is keeping up with all the bands I loved in high school. Never thought I'd be writing about Propagandhi in 2009, but go figure. A summer-camp friend turned my buddy Drew and I on to them when we were like 14, and they became a mild obsession among my KC friend crew during our few years of pop-punk enthusiasm. Crazily the band has persevered and evolved into something you can actually take seriously. As with the mighty ALL, Propagandhi's current output is truly deserving of the moniker prog-punk, and lyrically, it achieves truly rare levels of both idiosyncrasy and sincerity. Consider my favorite song of 2009 so far, "Dear Coach's Corner":
I highly recommend checking out the lyrics here. The song is a rant against a regionally famous show called Hockey Night in Canada, which features a segment called "Coach's Corner," where cohost Don Cherry (no, not that Don Cherry) often espouses pro-Iraq War views. Ron MacLean, named in the song, is Cherry's fellow anchor. Apologies for that convoluted explanation, but there's a lot of background info at play.
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*Laal and I have been making our way through a few Woody Allen flicks lately, and last night we watched Broadway Danny Rose, which I found to be both hilarious and formidably poignant. Going in, I felt like I knew the shtick so well--old-time Jewish showbiz humor, yadda yadda--that I didn't even need to watch the movie, but as with the best Woody material, the film manages to bury some very incisive commentary on life, love and art within a seemingly frivolous, cutesy package. Excellent stuff.
*We also caught Phil "Dr. Wu" Woods at J@LC on Friday night. The man seemed a little frail and he definitely held back a little, not soloing at length or very often, but when he did blow, it flirted with glory. He's got one of the most beautifully liquid alto tones I've heard live. Woods definitely let his band do most of the work and--when he wasn't cracking corny-fun "stimulus package" jokes--made a point of touting the longevity of his current quintet, featuring trumpeter Brian Lynch (a member since '92), as well as bassist Steve Gilmore and drummer Bill Goodwin (both of whom have been with Woods since '74). Those are pretty amazing statistics for any era of jazz, let alone 2009. Aside from Gilmore, who took a number of excellent, subtle solos, I can't say that the band struck me as much more than extremely competent and professional (i.e., for me, none of the players aside from Woods, advanced a very strong musical personality), but maybe that's the point: If you're a working band, you've got to simply be able to pull off the gig in as smooth a manner as possible--it isn't about wowing people necessarily. It's the kind of art that's easy to overlook, but it's a respectable one nonetheless and it made for a highly enjoyable evening's jazz.
A few disparate musical topics to blab about this balmy Sunday evening...
STATS (above, photo by Peter Kleeman) is up and running again after a month-or-so hiatus. Very happy to be rocking in this manner once more. In two weeks' time, on March 23, we will perform as part of the hallowed Precious Metal series at Lit Lounge. Come one and all. More spring shows are in the works and new recordings are coming soon.
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I have heard the new Mastodon album, Crack the Skye, which officially appears 3/24. (It's already up for grabs in the file-sharing netherverse, but--strangely--sans the tour de force 13:00 album closer, "The Last Baron.") In fact, I've heard it like ten times. I'm utterly addicted to it. Though my reaction is extremely positive, I'm just a tad hesitant re: raving about it at this early stage simply because I remember having the exact same "Holy shit!" initial opinion of 2006's Blood Mountain. But after a few weeks, I remember feeling like I'd exhausted that album and that its appeal was distinctly ephemeral. Amid all the Crack the Skye buzz, though, I've been coming back to Blood Mountain (and Leviathan as well) and feeling pretty well-sated.
Anyway, re: Crack the Skye, a lot of the early press has cried, "Prog!" and I'm not going to disagree there. The album is one huge, epic mood piece, inviting all the usual BIG adjectives like "sprawling" and such. There's a wide array of dynamics, a smattering of Moog-ish keyboards and a continuation of Blood Mountain's heavy reliance on *sung*--i.e., as opposed to shrieked, bellowed or roared, as on Remission--vocals. The hooks on this record are simply monstrous. Nearly every song has at least one moment of grand-slam catchiness (behold "Divinations" and its solid-gold chorus here) and the singing sounds a good deal more natural this time around. It's very much a record of unabashed beauty, yet when the heaviness comes, it's massive and furious.
It's pretty safe to say at this point that Mastodon is a band for the ages. They may not be Yes and they may not be vintage Metallica, but at their best, they do provide some magical combination of the pleasures of both prog and epic technical metal. (Crack the Skye probably leans more toward the former pole.) They are pretty much the cream of Big (i.e., major-label) Rock these days, and I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't be extremely excited to hear a new Mastodon disc. I just hope I feel as psyched about Crack the Skye at the end of the year as I do now. That's all I'll say for now, but watch this space for more Mastodon coverage soon.
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Before and between my Crack the Skye intake, I have been listening exclusively to Last Exit. Throughout my listening life, there are always a ton of bands, albums, artists, periods, genres, etc. that I know at some point I'll have to check out but that I just haven't quite gotten around to. I tend to mentally refer to such a scenario as having a date with an artist.
I've had a date with Last Exit for many years. It's not that I've never heard them before. Far from it; I've had plenty exposure to them ever since a co-worker handed me a cassette dub of Headfirst into the Flames one summer during college. But I've never before really wholeheartedly embraced them like I have over the past few weeks. In many ways, I'd always considered Last Exit a dream band, boasting as it did the twin towers of guitarist Sonny Sharrock and saxist Peter Brötzmann (the latter of whom I touched on a few weeks back). But it also boasted a player who for me has long been a stumbling block, namely bassist Bill Laswell.
I could write volumes on my wariness re: a fair amount of what is often termed downtown music and especially re: two of its signature artists, John Zorn and Laswell, but I'm not in the mood to rant (nor, to be fair, have I really put in the extensive listening that would be necessary to back up my lukewarm appraisal of each man's work). I will say, though, Laswell's funk- and dub-infused improv work--not to mention his production aesthetics, e.g., on this quizzical recording--has often struck me as heavily cheesy and dated.
But after my recent Brötzmann binge, I knew that I had to reckon with Last Exit in a serious way. This recent spate of listening--which included samplings from the self-titled release, the aforementioned Headfirst, The Noise of Trouble (with a very yet awesome Herbie Hancock cameo) and the hit-and-miss yet nevertheless fascinating studio disc, Iron Path--was the first time I really felt like I was able to appreciate the band as a totality, to hear it without wishing I was hearing Sharrock and Brötzmann with a more genuinely brutal--and less hokey--rhythm section.
And whatever anyone wants to say, however violent an ensemble Last Exit was, it could also be an extremely hokey one. Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson often defaulted to these sproingy, two-beat, almost rockabilly-like rhythms that sounded more goofy than menacing, all but negating the savageness of what was going on up front. But again, this time around, I was trying to hear more openly, less judgmentally, and I found myself embracing these more lighthearted--and even, at times, silly--aspects of the band. Sure there's part of me that wishes they were just balls-out all the time, but there's a really special sort of quirkiness to what Laswell and Shannon do in the band that adds a satisfying variety to the improvisations.
I guess if I could sum up what I'm saying it's that I stopped viewing Last Exit as a flawed dream band and started hearing them for what they were, which is very much a product of their time. Along with the transcendent rawness of their music, there's also a kind of '80s cheese thrown into the mix, a flashy, synthetic glitz that seems to creep into almost anything Laswell touches. But just as I've come to terms with the soupy overproduction of Laswell-helmed Sharrock discs like Highlife, I'm starting to dig and accept how that aesthetic plays into Last Exit as well. Don't get me wrong: L.E. never came anywhere near the bombastic lushness of Highlife, but there's definitely an element of grandstanding, fun-loving cheese about what they do, not to mention an element of perverse playfulness, evidenced--to name two aspects--in the band's cartoonishly macho song titles ("My Balls/Your Chin," anyone?) and Shannon's cryptic avant-blues vocal outbursts.
Nowhere is *all* of this more apparent than the band's killer Frankfurt gig from '86, which is viewable in several forms on YouTube (though, sadly, no longer in the brief version so aptly tagged by Weasel Walter with the phrase "mountains of cocaine"). Note the insanely kinetic, Bon Jovi-esque camera work, which only enhances the over-the-top-ness of the music:
[Note: These two vids depict the same gig, though I believe there's little or no overlap between them. Don't hold me to that, but either way, they're in no way identical and both well worth a peep.]
The whole gamut of the band is here in these clips. First one leads off with that inimitable free-time skronk they patented, with Laswell thrumming away and Shannon skittering behind him, both expressing nervous momentum rather than any metric structure, and Sharrock and Brötzmann just teeing off on top. Then comes a horrifically brilliant Brötz solo feature, where he sounds more like a fuming dragon than a sax player. And then comes Shannon caterwauling away on some free-soul scat madness. Second clip starts off with the "mountains of cocaine" cataclysm itself, then finds its way into a wacky ride-'em cowboy stomp before kicking into some of the most disgusting death-blues imaginable. The close-ups of Sonny around 4:00 are simply priceless, and when he pulls out the slide around 4:50, what was already a puke-inducing display of badass electric rawness turns into something molten. It's thrilling and monumental. From there things descend into horseplay--Laswell's manhandling of the bass seems stilted to me--but the spell never breaks. And that's what's so special about Last Exit: The quartet's project was all about mingling the sublime with the wanky, the profound with the vulgar. They weren't what I had originally idealized them as being--namely the most uniformly fearsome band of all time--but they were brash and awesome and hilarious and staunchly unboring. Hail Last Exit (even Bill Laswell!) and damn, does all this make me wish I'd gotten a chance to see Sonny Sharrock live before he died.
PS: In my YouTube trawlings, I turned up several more excellent related vids, including two (1, 2) bootleg recordings from a 1988 L.E. gig, the first of which begins with a jaw-dropping unaccompanied stand by Sharrock. And for the truly brave, here's Carlos Santana covering Sharrock's classic "Dick Dogs" (WTF, I know). And lastly, for the die-hard Sharrock heads, behold the man gigging with his unlikeliest collaborator, flutist Herbie Mann. This one is just a glorious enigma if there ever was one: A happy, sprightly groove-jazz vibe and then Sharrock comes and just capsizes the whole thing with his frenetic panther runs. I'd heard this juxtaposition on record, e.g. Live at the Whiskey A Go Go, but viewing it is even more disconcerting.
PPS: And finally, an appropriately irreverent Last Exit interview.
