Bill Stevenson on jazz

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

Important points:

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

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

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

/////

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

BS: Uh-huh, yeah.



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

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

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

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

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

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

BS: Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big 4 at Yankee Stadium

After jumping through many hoops, I scored tickets to the Big 4 at Yankee Stadium. Hassles abounded—absurdly expensive parking, rowdy fans spilling beer on my wife and me, interminable bathroom lines—but this was still a magical show. Here's my review (with slideshow) on the TONY blog.

Addenda:

1) Before the whole Big 4 hype cycle began, I knew next to nothing about Anthrax (just a few vids from late-’80s/early-’90s MTV). Now I'm fascinated by them. Their new album, Worship Music, is addictive—it satisfies my appetites for both chewy thrash and super-melodic Dio-esque wailing. Their back catalog is great too; I love the weird mix of technicality and cartoonishness. As I suggested in the review, it was easy to be psyched for them at Yankee Stadium.

2) Slayer, man. I'm not sure I've ever seen a band perform with such sustained intensity and sheer obnoxiousness. Of course the records are great—at least the old ones; was checking out World Painted Blood yesterday, and the thin-sounding production was bumming me out a little—but I had always taken these guys for granted a bit. Never again. Serious dedication to craft plus blitzkrieg energy.

3) Just about any Metallica set list would feel like a greatest-hits compilation. They can pull out a relative obscurity like the Master of Puppets instrumental "Orion" late in a stadium set and not risk losing anyone's attention. Question: Is Metallica the greatest large-scale rock band currently performing? I can't think of another with a deeper or more varied catalog. I think I'd even put them ahead of Rush, given how well they balance chops and muscle with sheer sing-along-ability. If you have a chance to see them, go—they are currently on devastating form.

4) To me, Megadeth's set was the least engaging of the day, but as with Anthrax, I'm very happy to have reawakened to Mustaine & Co. recently. I was a big fan of Countdown to Extinction growing up, and I saw the band twice in the ’90s (once with—are you ready for this?—Stone Temple Pilots opening!). For whatever reason, though, I never delved into the back catalog. That was lunacy, because Rust in Peace is a total monster. The ruthless tightness and giddy progginess of this record add up to pure smiles for me. It's unsettling, demented, uncompromising music—like a more grotesque, off-the-wall …And Justice for All.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/////

P.S. Disc one is streaming at NPR.

Cosmo Lee on Metallica

Just a quick post here to say thanks to Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges—the site that launched my Heavy Metal Be-Bop interview series—for his outstanding ongoing series "Metallica: The First Four Albums." To bring you up to speed real quick: Cosmo is, in my opinion, hands down the best writer-about-metal on the internet, and for the past few years (five or so?), he's overseen the Invisible Oranges site. He's leaving IO in a few weeks to focus on other projects, and by way of a farewell, he's been running down the first four Metallica records track-by-track (one blog post apiece, i.e.). It's a really impressive project, and as rigorous as it is, it's not formulaic—he's basically taking each track as it comes, offering focused yet unfettered impressions filtered through his identity as a guitarist and through his lengthy Metallica fandom (i.e., how the music sounded to him as a teenager and how it sounds to him now). Here's yesterday's post on the classic instrumental "Orion"; you'll find the rest of the series linked at the bottom.

In particular, this series has reawakened me to the glory of Master of Puppets. My favorite Metallica album is …And Justice for All, but Cosmo has helped me to see that in a way, side two of Puppets is a prelude to Justice. During the "First Four Albums" series, he has written several times about the "anxiety" of Justice. It's not a word I ever thought to use to describe the album, but I know what he means: Justice is incredibly clenched, obsessive, maniacal in its detail, devoid of fun, exhaustive. The band members look joyless and battle-hardened in the inner-sleeve photos, and this makes sense when you hear the music.

This obsessiveness kicks into high gear on side two of Puppets. The track that grabs me the most is "Disposable Heroes"—stream it above—which has long been among my two or three favorite Metallica songs. I was just listening to it this morning and marveling at the enormous amount of CONTENT in the song. Same goes for pretty much all of Justice: You simply can't believe they're stuffing this much INFORMATION into a rock composition, and not useless technical detail. It all makes total, merciless sense. And set against this proggy maximalism is an anthemic-punk sensibility. At the same time as it was scaling new heights of technicality, Metallica was writing its catchiest songs to date.

Dig the prechorus thrash section in "Heroes"—it reoccurs in the song, but you can hear one example at 3:12—which follows a pattern of two bars of four, then two bars of three. The little rhythmic hiccups created by the three-beat bars are pure pleasure for me. This fast, techy build-up gives way to a brief lead-guitar passage and then a turbulent transition sequence before opening up into a total rock-out chorus (the "Back to the front!" part). This is just one of the countless little journeys that Metallica took its listeners on during this classic mid-to-late-’80s period: a perfect juxtaposition of Apollonian and Dionysian musical tendencies.

It's a pleasure to rediscover these albums that I've loved so long in the company of a writer as skilled and insightful as Cosmo. Read the posts and savor the glory of the music, the absolute pinnacle of metal.

On record: Mal Waldron's The Git Go

I've never been a big fan of what I think of as jazz-club jazz, i.e., straight-ahead jazz as it has been performed in clubs for decades. By this I mean jazz that never questions the head-solos-head format, jazz in which the rhythm section holds it down and the horns take their turns, followed by piano, bass and drums.

Sometimes these performances creep up on you, though. The right players can simply execute and still dazzle. You stop worrying about freshness of overall format, and you focus on the freshness of each moment, the way the music feels rather than the way it appears.

I've praised Mal Waldron's The Seagulls of Kristiansund to the heavens over the past couple of weeks. Right now, I'm fixating on The Git Go, another Waldron album recorded on the same night (9/16/86) by the same band (Rouse, Shaw, Workman, Blackwell) at the same club (The Village Vanguard). This might be the finest jazz-club jazz I've ever heard.

You get two loooooong pieces here, each a 20-plus-minute example of jazz-club jazz. One, "Status Seeking," is fast; the other, the title track, is midtempo. You listen to these performances in the background, and it's easy to cast them an "eh." They just sound, for lack of a better word, normal. The musicians play the head; they each solo in turn; they play the head again.

But if you give in to this music a little, I promise you will find a whole world, a trance incarnation of what is called swing. Ed Blackwell is godlike here. I interviewed Chico Hamilton once (sadly, I can't find the piece online just now), and he stressed that he always likes to play quietly, at a dynamic level he likes to call "the danger zone." Ed Blackwell spends the entirety of "The Git Go" in the danger zone, just sort of loping along. But there's so much activity at the micro level. Waldron makes subtle changes to one basic vamp, and the two play very delicate, very quiet cat and mouse as the soloists trance out on top. Workman gets a bit of wiggle room and dances around the beat—he leaves the timekeeping to Blackwell and Waldron.

This is the kind of jazz that only works if you let it, if you have time and attention to spare. The feeling is priceless, though. You feel buoyed—an unbelievable gentleness, coupled with authority. A beat that's barely there but that's branded on your skin. It just. Keeps. Going. And if you ask for more than it can give, it will not deliver. But as is often said of dance music, you learn to react to the tiny changes. When Blackwell switches to brushes for Waldron's piano solo in "Status Seeking," for example, it feels momentous. You learn to identify with the soloists, feel the sheer pleasure Rouse and Shaw feel as they dance delicately over this elemental CHILLNESS/AUTHORITY summoned by Blackwell and Waldron.

This one took me many listens to get. Seagulls is much more of a clear showstopper, with its convention-defying dirge. Nothing head-solos-head about that one, a clear flouting of jazz-club jazz. But dig how deep and stubborn The Git Go is (especially the title track). It cruises, but not on cruise control. Little macro variation, but in the micro, everyone is fully awake, engaged. Waldron messing with the vamp for a bar; Blackwell messing with the beat for a bar, jumping off into a little mini solo, one of those call-and-response figures he does so well. How can you relax so completely yet still be present? There's a life lesson somewhere in there.

Once you put the microscope to it, this is about as unboring as jazz gets, and it's because these are master players, not playing by rote, but playing by feel. You hear their personalities every second, even when they're "merely" keeping time. There's all this talk of breaking up the time, of deconstruction, etc. But can you play time, let the soloist speak and still sound like yourself? That is the challenge of jazz, at its heart. Listen to Ed Blackwell and Mal Waldron on this record and you will hear that challenge met. This is jazz-club jazz, yes, but it is also a prayer to, for and about jazz, a meditation on what it means to express one's individuality within a tradition.

/////

As I mentioned previously, The Git Go is only $1.78 at the Amazon MP3 store. You know what to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

////

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

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

On record: Mal Waldron's The Seagulls of Kristiansund

As mentioned here previously, one of my favorite things about Spotify is the complete access it grants to the Black Saint/Soul Note catalogs. Browsing the other day, I stumbled upon a Soul Note record I'd heard back in college but never revisited: Mal Waldron's The Seagulls of Kristiansund: Live at the Village Vanguard. Like Max Roach's Scott Free, this is a major work, not just of the ’80s, but of jazz.

The band immediately struck me: Charlie Rouse on sax, Woody Shaw on trumpet, Reggie Workman on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums. All hardbop heavy hitters, some—like Waldron—with avant-garde tendencies. You can hear vigorous uptempo swing on the first track, a reading of "Snake Out," Waldron's signature tune. But the one I keep coming back to is the title track, a true jazz dirge.

If there's one thing I love in jazz, it's that—those pieces that move beyond ballad-hood into an almost oppressive sadness. Grachan Moncur's "Love and Hate" (heard on Jackie McLean's Destination Out) comes to mind, as does Booker Little's "Man of Words" (Out Front) and Andrew Hill's "Dedication" (Point of Departure). I just love these works that take their time and trudge along, ideally forcing an emotional engagement on the part of both the soloists and the listener.

This is one of those pieces, crawling along at a near-stillness, Waldron and Workman laying out a spare framework in the background, like a bruise deepening into blue and purple over the course of almost half an hour. I'm not sure I've ever heard Ed Blackwell playing this slowly and sparely before. I think of him as an almost jolly mid- or uptempo player, most at home feelwise when he can really crackle and make the most of his marchy cadences. Here, he's not even playing time, just a pitter-patter of cymbals and other metallic implements. Waldron and Workman are implying a tempo, but it's really more of an ooze, a melting forward of time.

The soloists get down deep with it, wading in the muck. You have these players (Rouse and Shaw) who were known as hardbop workhorses, typically heard burning along in muscular fashion. Here they're forced to engage with the poetry and stillness of Waldron's conception. Shaw's playing really puts his feelings on the line. I always recall in the liner notes of Point of Departure how Kenny Dorham describes hearing "Dedication" and being brought to tears. Again, I think of these really hardass golden-age jazzers being stopped in their tracks by something so SLOW and non-virtuosity-oriented, where you've just got this sprawling canvas and you have to paint a picture with one of those tiny watercolor brushes.

Blackwell and Workman carrying on a dialogue of micro sounds: taps on the rims of the drums, little arco squeaks. And Waldron hanging out in back like the grim reaper. In a brilliant essay on Mal, Ethan Iverson referred to these three players collectively as the Evil Trio. Here, it's more like the Heavy Hearted Trio, but I see what he's getting at.

Once the horns are gone, Waldron wades in, singing so slowly and beautifully through the keys. I just love this idea and vibe so much. Jazz to me is not about the toe-tapping and the finger-snapping and the brassy glitz. It's about this kind of meditation, where you're dropped in an environment and you're forced to get to know all of it, to explore in the dark. Workman knows about this, and his bass solo isn't a "bass solo," where the music stops and the showing off happens. It sounds like a Spanish guitar, thrumming along underneath Waldron's purplish note cloud.

I have listened to this piece on repeat all week. As I stated before, the rest of the record (the marathon "Snake Out" and one short piece) is very good. There's also another Soul Note record, The Git-Go, that was recorded during the same Vanguard set (from September 16, 1986) that yielded Seagulls. It's also on Spotify, though I haven't spent good time with it yet. But "Seagulls of Kristiansund" is one of those performances that removes itself from an album, from a discography, from a genre even. It stands out as a moment of communion. A word like "stunning" doesn't even begin to carry the proper weight.

/////

*Ted Panken posted two archival interviews with the late Waldron earlier this week, in honor of the 86th anniversary of the pianist's birth.

*Iverson's Waldron post, linked above, brought me to this wonderful video of the quintet discussed above. It could very well have been recorded at the same 1986 run that produced Seagulls.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #5: Gentry Densley

I'm very happy to announce that Heavy Metal Be-Bop #5, an interview with the guitarist-vocalist Gentry Densley, is now live after a long gestation period. Invisible Oranges is hosting an abridged version, by way of directing readers to the new online home of the series: heavymetalbebop.com, where future installments will appear, and where you can read a much-longer cut of the Densley Q&A. Densley's account of hanging out with Branford Marsalis is priceless, so don't miss it.

Gentry Densley has played in a bunch of bands, but he's best known for his work with Iceburn—a progressive-hardcore band that turned into a noise-worshipping free-improv collective—and the coal-black avant-doom duo Eagle Twin. As great as Iceburn was (I'd recommend Firon, Power of the Lion and Hephaestus to newbies, in that order), I think that Eagle Twin's debut full-length, The Unkindness of Crows, might be my favorite Densley release. It's an agonizing yet transcendent record.

As with previous HMB subjects, this is a man who has thought extremely hard about both jazz and metal, and how the tactics and lessons of each idiom can be fruitfully repurposed in service of the other.

Three kinds of love: The Pentagram doc

Last Days Here, a new documentary about a rock & roll singer named Bobby Liebling, brought me to tears and beyond. Broadly, it is a story about metal, specifically a doomy, post-Sabbath band from the D.C. area called Pentagram. Pentagram, with the wild-eyed Liebling at the mic, brushed up against fame in the ’70s but never attained it. Metal crate-digger types rediscovered the band in the early aughts, and they've since attained some pretty heavy-duty underground cachet.

But as I said, Last Days Here is only broadly about metal. It's really a love story. More specifically, it's a catalog of love's various incarnations: an emotional connection between friends, romantic partners or family members, a spiritual connection between a fan and an artist, a borderline-divine connection between humankind and this thing we call music. The film chronicles the way these noble forces wage war on the self-pitying, self-destructive urges that prey on us daily.

Yes, as the film openly—and, at times, revoltingly—acknowledges, Bobby Liebling is a drug addict. He is a recidivist, a chronic user, someone we might all feel compelled to write off. Someone who has perhaps written himself off. But, the film argues, he is not beyond hope, beyond uplift.

I don't want to spoil the details, but this is a film about a man teetering on the brink, falling down into the chasm and clawing his way back up. Now in the grand scheme of things, a junkie rock singer attempting to resurrect his career might seem like a petty struggle. But there is some of Liebling in all of us, us who get down, who get bleak and dark, but who remember all our blessings, our blessings of family, of partners who look out for us every day of our lives, of friends who would do anything to see a smile on our faces, of sweet, holy art, that takes us outside of ourselves and shows us something loud, overwhelming, glorious. Whether you love metal or not, you will see in this film what it means to love metal, to exalt in its spectacle, its satanic pantomime, its delicious gloom.

The film is about Liebling and his comeback road, yes, but it's also, crucially, about the nonperformers, the behind-the-scenes folks such as Sean "Pellet" Pelletier (that's him with Liebling in the clip above), a Philly-based metal booster who has made it his life's work to ensure that his favorite band (Pentagram, of course) get its due. As you'll see in the film, "above and beyond" doesn't even begin to describe the lengths to which Pellet goes to assist Liebling, but he does it all with a smile: Everything he gives to metal, the music gives back a hundredfold.

This movie will depress you; it will frustrate you and make you want to tear your hair out. It will also make you rejoice in your life's blessings, especially if metal happens to be one of those. The arc of Liebling's story isn't necessarily unpredictable, but it's nevertheless magical to watch it unfold. I wept openly at the end, sympathizing with just about every character onscreen, from the beleaguered Pellet to Liebling's clear-eyed companion Hallie and his perennially doting parents. Last Days Here turns "behind the music" into something truly profound and inspirational. It's a cautionary tale, a love story and a rock doc all in one. You have to see it.

There's a great new Pentagram album on Metal Blade called Last Rites. Check out some samples and pick up a copy here.

/////

On the jazz side of things, I just checked out Solider of the Road, a very well-done documentary on another hardened lifer, Peter Brötzmann. It may not contain the revelations of Last Days Here—to be fair, its subject is far more level-headed and sane—but it's a sharp portrait of an artist I treasure.

I especially enjoyed the insights into Brötzmann's complex relationship with his German-ness, as well as the commentary from his master collaborators such as Han Bennink. The live footage looks and sounds gorgeous, and the interviews are intimate and revealing.

Soldier of the Road is a pretty straightforward—even low-key—work, without much of a narrative arc, but if you're a Brö fan, you should definitely check it out. You can learn more about the film and order a DVD copy here. (Don't be scared off if you're a U.S. consumer—my DVD arrived just days after I placed an order.)

2011 death-metal top 5 (so far)

A confession: I've spent more time defending Illud Divinum Insanus, the new Morbid Angel album that came out last month and was immediately met with a storm of contempt, than actually listening to it. I was so busy elucidating why I felt it wasn't the piece of crap so many others pegged it to be that I glossed over the fact that it might not be such a durable statement. Is it crap? Absolutely not. Is it a great Morbid Angel album? Let's just say that I'm not sure it will stand the test of time the way Covenant or even Heretic has.

I've read a lot of reviews that take an "ignore Illud and try THIS instead" stance, pointing to some "truer" recent representative of the death-metal ideal (Nader Sadek's In the Flesh, e.g., which features ex-Morbid frontman Steve Tucker). That seems dubious to me. I kind of feel like it's important to deal with the record at hand and not judge it against some broad, nebulous convention.

All the same, it's hard to ignore the fact that 2011 has been an outstanding year for meat-and-potatoes death metal, and as much as I hate to admit it, Illud Divinum Insanus is not one of the main reasons why. With all due respect to Morbid Angel, here are five of my 2011 death-metal favorites, all of which will be in the running come year-end-list time.

Deceased
Surreal Overdose (Patac)

This Virgina band has a long and illustrious history in the metal underground, a history I knew pretty much nothing about. I've heard their name for years, and I've always been sort of tickled by the name of drummer/bandleader KING FOWLEY when I've come across it in metal mags, but before this record, I'd never really investigated Deceased. I think I had an impression of them as one of the countless sub–Cannibal Corpse bands who purvey pummeling yet faceless grunt-and-grind over lengthy careers. I could not have been more wrong in this (essentially baseless) preconception, though: Make no mistake, Deceased is a seriously progressive band, and this record is a bona fide epic.

There's definitely some straight-up blasting death metal on Surreal Overdose—their sixth full-length—but there's just as much rollicking hardcore and, crucially, triumphant thrash. I've been getting down to a lot of …And Justice for All and Rust in Peace lately, and this album thrives on a brand of riff obsession that reminds me of that late-’80s/early-’90s tech-thrash flowering. Combine that sensibility with anthemic, punklike choruses and a serious dystopian sci-fi jones and you've got a very vintage-style album, almost Voivod-ish in its obsessive devotion to epic narrative scope, where the music feels like a constantly deepening STORYLINE.

As raw as the band sounds—Fowley's vocals remind me a bit of Sepultura's Max Cavalera—there's a real progginess to this album that I just love. Sound effects, dialogue samples, constant tempo changes, just tons and tons of INTRIGUE and MEMORABILITY. I actually think of this album as not terribly distant from something like David Comes to Life by Fucked Up (which I also really dig)—taking an "extreme" musical style and polishing it with a sort of epic sheen. The result in each case is a best-of-both-worlds scenario—a fascinating marriage of the primitive and the grand. I seriously doubt I will hear a better metal album (let alone death metal) than this in 2011. Hear/buy it via Bandcamp. Here's a track:



Exhumed
All Guts, No Glory (Relapse)

Like Deceased, Exhumed is another band I'd heard of for years that I'd basically written off as generic. (In both cases, maybe the band names had something to do with it?) But thanks to some very intriguing recent coverage over at Invisible Oranges, including this wildly entertaining essay on Metallica's "Trapped Under Ice" by Exhumed guitarist Matt Harvey," I decided to give their new one a look. And man, this album just smokes.

Like on Surreal Overdose, there's a major thrash/hardcore thing going on here, an almost hysterical riff obsession. Exhumed shares with Deceased a certain over-the-top-ness, but if in Deceased that quality plays out in pulpy, nerdy narrative grandiosity, in Exhumed it comes across as more of a heathen-ish zaniness. There's sinister-minded camp all over this record, from the gruesomely funny cover art (depicting the band members as flesh-eating zombies) to the cornball song titles ("Your Funeral, My Feast") and the "one guy shrieking, the other one barfing" dual-vocal approach. But I assure you, this music is absolutely dead serious. The riffage (not to mention the soloing) simply could not be more righteous. I hear this stuff, and I just want to headbang at warp speed. Guitar nerds, you will be in heaven. This one is also on Bandcamp. Here's the aforementioned "Your Funeral…":



P.S. I was super-intrigued when Invisible Oranges labeled the previous Exhumed effort, Anatomy Is Destiny, "the …And Justice for All of goregrind" (in the intro to this Matt Harvey Q&A). Having sampled Anatomy a bit on Spotify over the last few days, I'm glad to report that this assessment isn't far off.

Disma
Towards the Megalith (Profound Lore)\

Incantation—yet another veteran death-metal band that I'd long assumed was kind of marginal. All the same, I knew that they were revered in the underground, so when I heard that a new Profound Lore band, Disma, featured former Incantation member Craig Pillard on the mic, I was intrigued.

Towards the Megalith does not disappoint in the least. If Surreal Overdose and All Guts are all about being pelted with rapid-fire streams of ideas (riffs, words, what have you), Towards the Megalith lumbers along at a much slower pace. Whether moving at molasses-y doom speed or a bottom-heavy midtempo, this band has enormous girth to it. You think of elephants and tanks and other sluggish yet unstoppable forces. Pillard's got a classic death-metal growl-and-gurgle style. Like a lot about Towards the Megalith, his delivery is familiar yet extremely satisfying. This band just wants to create a sense of slo-mo menace, without getting too ponderous or emo about it. The record's title is apt: You really do start to think of ancient societies and their terrifying moonlight rites when you hear this one. You can check out one track over at Stereogum, and one at Profound Lore, where you can also (of course) buy the record.

Autopsy
Macabre Eternal (Peaceville)

Out of all these bands, Autopsy is the one I'd had the most prior experience with. I wasn't hip to their early classics, such as 1991's Mental Funeral, at the time they came out, but I caught up to them over the past few years and was seriously impressed. The band seemed truly committed to taking Sabbathy evil-ness and riff worship and pushing these concepts into the realm of ugly, gross-out death metal. As on the old records, I'm not in love with the delivery of vocalist of Chris Reifert (who, like King Fowley, doubles in drums), who can sound overly cartoonish to me, like a parody of death-metal vocals. But there's a certain camp to what he does that fits in well with Autopsy's relentless garagey vibe. The playing is proficient as hell, but the band plays with a real rock & roll rawness. Unlike some death metal, which seems utterly disconnected from the blues, Autopsy is all about the sludgy churn, the badass midtempo groove. As with their old stuff, it's quite a treat on Macabre Eternal (their picking-up-right-where-they-left-off "comeback") to hear those core hard-rock values married to pulpy, gore-obsessed lyrical themes. Hear some samples and pick up Macabre Eternal at Peaceville.


Cannabis Corpse
Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (Tankcrimes)

What a fantastically fun record this is. As you might guess from the name, Cannabis Corpse started as something of a joke: I'm not quite clear on whether they were actually covering Cannibal Corpse songs (replacing all the blood-and-guts lyrics with lyrics about weed) or simply riffing on Cannibal's song titles and imagery. To be clear, though: Despite the titles punning on classic death-metal tracks by Decide, Morbid Angel and the like, all the current Cannabis material is original, and with this new record, these guys have taken a major step up in the seriousness-of-craft department.

These guys may just have Cannibal Corpse themselves beat when it comes to playing death metal that ROCKS. The orchestration on this album is absolutely incredible: Every instrument has its place, and all the components groove together so hard. (The beautifully clear production doesn't hurt.) The approach reminds me more of something like Thin Lizzy than it does death metal, a genre in which clarity and instrument separation and naturalness-of-sound don't tend to be high priorities. Despite the growly vocals, these guys actually sound like a more thrash-metal-informed version of the Fucking Champs to me than death metal proper. As with the Champs, these guys play extremely CRAFT-FORWARD metal, metal which has no interest in default rawness. They've written some extremely accomplished and detailed songs here, and they obviously want you be able to hear exactly what's going on.

As with every Cannabis Corpse listener, you've probably got preconceptions that they're a joke band, but this is probably the most pro presentation I've heard on a metal record this year: playing, songwriting, orchestration, production—it all just sounds beautiful and you need to hear it. Get thee to Bandcamp! Here's a track: