Ten strong 2010 jazz releases

I can't tell if it's an unusually great year for jazz albums, or if I'm just making more of an effort to survey what's out there. Either way, I've heard some killer recorded jazz in 2010. Here are a few full-lengths I'm really feeling. Obviously we've got a few months to go before year-end-poll time, so just consider this as an informal "Don't sleep on these" list, in no particular order apart from the fact that No. 1 is a clear favorite. (One or two of these—the honorable-mentioned Sam Newsome, e.g.—may be late-2009 releases that didn't make their way to me till after the new year.)

Anything crucial that I'm missing?

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1. The Cookers Warriors (Jazz Legacy Productions)

2. Weasel Walter Invasion (ugEXPLODE)

3. Harris Eisenstadt Woodblock Prints (NoBusiness)

4. Jason Moran Ten (Blue Note)

5. Geri Allen Flying Toward the Sound (Motéma Music)

6. The Bad Plus Never Stop (E1 Music)

7. Mike Pride's From Bacteria to Boys Betweenwhile (Aum Fidelity)

8. Jon Irabagon Foxy (Hot Cup)

9. John Escreet Don't Fight the Inevitable (Mythology)

10. Mario Pavone Arc Suite T/Pi T/Po (Playscape)

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Honorable mention:

Jeff Davis We Sleep Outside (Loyal Label)

David Weiss and Point of Departure Snuck In (Sunnyside)

Vijay Iyer Solo (ACT Music)

Louis Sclavis–Craig Taborn–Tom Rainey Eldorado Trio (Clean Feed)

Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green Apex (Pi)

Paul Motian Trio with Jason Moran and Chris Potter Lost in a Dream (ECM)

Newman Taylor Baker Drum-Suite-Life (Innova)

Sam Newsome Blue Soliloquy (self-released)

James Moody 4B (IPO)

Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth Deluxe (Clean Feed)

Amir ElSaffar–Hafez Modirzadeh Radif Suite (Pi)

Rova and Nels Cline Singers The Celestial Septet (New World)

Stéphane Furic Leibovici with Chris Cheek and Lee Konitz Jugendstil II (ESP-Disk)

Mike Mainieri Crescent (NYC)

Kurt Rosenwinkel and OJM Our Secret World (Word of Mouth)

The chase: craw live at the Grog Shop

[Flyer by John G.]

Every serious music lover has that one show they spend their whole life chasing, the concert they've built up in their mind as the greatest thing they ever saw. For me it was about 15 years ago. It was either ’95 or ’96 and I saw a Cleveland band called craw [sic] play in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. Their records were my chief obsession at that time, and the show confirmed what I'd hypothesized: that this was the best band I'd ever heard. As a devout teenage metalhead, I had grown weary of the genre's macho, dumbed-down attitudes (these were the days before "indie metal," before intellectual cred was pretty much a given within the style). In craw I found the darkness and ruthless complexity I craved, along with vocals/lyrics that seemed like the ravings of a mad scientist. Live, everything was amplified, right there in front of my impressionable face: It was like being attacked by geniuses.

So I chased craw for the remainder of their touring existence, catching something like six more shows over the next couple of years. I moved to New York and craw stopped touring. Eventually Joe McTighe, the lead singer who had so impressed me, left Cleveland, and the band quietly went extinct. By this point, the early 2000s, craw's prog-punk ethos, grafting the former style's technicality onto the latter's brutality, had become a "thing" in earnest, a genre unto itself. I couldn't relate to bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, but after a few years, when my friend Joe and I started a band called Stay Fucked, I realized that the prog-punk ethos was percolating in my backyard. So both as a musician and as a fan, I continued to chase the idea of craw.

Things got interesting around 2005. Stay Fucked was progressing and we met folks from all these other bands who had a stake in the prog-punk thing: Mick Barr, Zs, Behold… the Arctopus, Friendly Bears, Time of Orchids. We'd already known the members of Timber, Birthday Boyz and Snack Truck from college, and then we came upon others of our tribe: Archaeopteryx, Yukon, Animal, Maw, Clan of the Cave Bear, Dysrhythmia. (In 2006, I helped organize a Philadelphia festival—which bore the same name as this blog—to showcase some of this talent.) Within this community, I was a tireless evangelist, handing out burned copies of craw records like bibles. Some listened and caught the fever, but by this point, there was no craw to see live, no way to really ground the myth in fact.

Suddenly, though, there was a craw to see live. A month or so ago, I got word that the band would reunite for a one-off Cleveland show, a benefit for a friend (photographer and longtime scene booster Karen Novak). As I'd expected, Joe McTighe was not coming back to town, so the other three members of craw's final lineup (guitarist Rockie Brockway, bassist Zak Dieringer and drummer Will Scharf, the latter also of Keelhaul) would play as a trio, with Brockway doubling on vocals. I was skeptical on the latter front: McTighe's strategy had been to lay slippery, chaotic patterns over the musicians' rigorous tech-rock grid, and the idea of trying to play and sing craw at the same time seemed impossible.

Doubts or no, I knew this was something I needed to see. So this past Monday, a decade and a half after that initial Kansas City experience, here I was again chasing craw. Friends, family and fiancée all thought I was a little nuts—flying to Cleveland overnight for a show—but on the other hand, they all knew me well enough to understand that when it came to craw, I wasn't going to compromise.

I got into town at about 5:30 p.m. My kind host was my friend John, a keeper of the prog-punk flame who plays in the aforementioned Clan of the Cave Bear. He's one of the only other people I know who seems perfectly content to talk about craw (or any other extreme band you might fancy) ad infinitum. We chilled out at his place for a few minutes, grabbed a bite and then headed over to the Grog Shop, a modest-sized bar/venue (NYC people: think of Mercury Lounge) where the show was going down.

The crowd was sparse. As a pilgrim, I wanted to pay my respects to the band. Will knew I had planned on coming, but he still seemed a bit surprised that I had actually gone through with it. Rockie and Zak were shocked as well, but happy to see me—it had been something like eight years since I'd seen or talked to either one. It's always a little weird playing the role of the obsessive fan, but in my experience, if you're in a situation where you can actually converse freely with your idols, you should. And no matter how embarrassing it seems, you should tell them how much their work means to you—as I've been doing with these guys since I was a teenager. With all that out of the way, we got some good catching up in before the show. I gave Rockie and Zak some STATS CDs.

After the opening band finished, I grabbed a spot right at the front of the stage (not that there was much competition). I had planned on taking some Flipcam video, but I concluded that I didn't want to worry about documentation while watching the band. John's girlfriend, Leia, kindly offered to tape a few songs for me, but then we realized that like eight other people were filming the whole show. (I'll be sure to post some links as soon as the videos appear—I'm guessing you'll see a few on this YouTube channel.) Will had rattled off the song selection to me when Keelhaul played NYC earlier this month, but when John and I spied the set list, we were psyched to see "STRONGEST," signifying "Strongest Human Bond," one of the best songs from my favorite craw album, Lost Nation Road, and a clear favorite among my various friends who love the band.

Suddenly the sticks were clicking and it was on. I think I half-expected some kind of heavenly trumpet fanfare, but nope, this was a rock band playing to a thin crowd in a suburban-ish bar on a weeknight, a scenario that was no doubt playing out concurrently at thousands of other venues across the country. It took a bit for the magic to warm up: Opening track "Caught My Tell" (drawn, like most of the set, from craw's final album, Bodies for Strontium 90) sounded a little wobbly, and Rockie clearly had his hands full with the guitar-vocal doubling. (Overall, though, Rockie handled the challenge well: He didn't attempt to mimic Joe's delivery; instead, his hoarse, shouted style was a respectable placeholder.) "Strongest Human Bond" came next and things started to gel. The old chills brewed up inside during the midsong breakdown ("20 years later my twin is passed out on the couch"). By the third song, "Space Is the Place," I was right where I wanted to be. There were only a few of us up near the stage, including John, but were all zeroing in on the same phenomenon: that euphoric rush of volume and crazed inventiveness that only craw delivers. These songs are so ingrained in my head and heart that for all their complexity, they sound absolutely logical, absolutely fluid. I danced and screamed along.

However easy it is to dis the nostalgic impulse in general, it's ridiculous to resist it on a personal level. Specific things light us up when we're young and nothing else but those specific things can truly complete our circuits when we're older. We stay open-minded, we stay grounded, we stay rational and sane, and new stimuli flood in, but there's a unique joy that comes when we're in the presence of the old stimuli, when we chase our aesthetic ideal and there it is, intact, waiting for us.

The second half of the set is a blur to me—I was so out there and in the moment and happy. I distinctly remember the stunning skeletal-funk bass-drums breakdown in "Unsolicited, Unsavory" and how it grooved harder than it does on the record. I remember the glorious turbulence of "Divinity of Laughter" and the sleek, serrated cadences of "Is It Safe?" I remember when a fellow craw lifer—I only caught his first name, R.J.—came up onstage to help Rockie sing the classic "405" (a creepy rant about a woman who falls victim to a stalker then survives a plane crash), and how Will (who had not played on the recorded version of the song) spiced up the ominous ending with a backbeat. And I remember that I didn't want it to end.

Afterward I got to catch up some more with Zak. We went through a little craw history, talked about our mutual loves of Rush and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and filled each other in on our extramusical lives. I have no idea when I'll see him again, or if I'll ever see craw play again, but this particular chase had been worth it. The 32-year-old me shook hands with the 16-year-old me and said, "You were right."

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The full set list from Monday's craw show at the Grog Shop in Cleveland:

Caught My Tell

Strongest Human Bond

Space Is the Place

Sex

Unsolicited, Unsavory (a.k.a. "Dubby")

Chop Shop

Divinity of Laughter

Flunky

Is It Safe?

Weedy Species

405

Cars

Drummer to drummer: Vaz's Jeff Mooridian, Jr.

"They've Won" by Vaz, from Dying to Meet You (Gold Standard Laboratories, 2005)



As you may have gleaned from my last post, I've been listening to a lot of Vaz lately. (For the uninitiated, Vaz is an extremely ominous Brooklyn noise-pop band, spun off from the revered and semi-defunct ’90s outfit Hammerhead.) Another recent trend is that I haven't been drumming as much as I'd like. My band is on an involuntary hiatus due to some chronic wrist soreness that's currently afflicting our bassist—not sure if it's technically tendonitis, but it's that general sort of thing—and I've had a hard time getting motivated to go play on my own. Over the past few days, though, all the Vaz intake has had a galvanizing effect: I knew I had to go in to the practice room and try to play some of this stuff.

To say that executing Vaz beats is outside my comfort zone as a drummer is a vast understatement. Slow and mid- tempos are pretty much where I excel. Even when I'm playing complex music, I like to get behind the beat and really relax in the manner of Levon Helm, Black Sabbath's Bill Ward and Jean-Paul Gaster from Clutch, and it's just not that easy to do this when you're playing at a breakneck tempo. I've always been in awe of punk players (i.e., a drummer named Alex Mooney, who played for my friends' high-school band, The Crackbabies) who can impart a sense of groove to those scampering rhythms.

When you're talking about the marriage of groove and velocity, the drummer you really need to examine is Vaz's Jeff Mooridian, Jr. (a.k.a. Deft Garlands and Bruce Museum). I've seen Mooridian play many times over the past six years or so, having shared bills with Vaz a number of times as part of both STATS and Aa. And I've gone through various periods of obsession with the Vaz discography. I don't think it's an exaggeration to call him one of the most intense drummers in the contemporary rock underground. I'm fully behind the worship of Brian Chippendale and Zach Hill, but Jeff Mooridian does something that's every bit as special.

Like Chippendale and Hill, Mooridian plays way more notes than he needs to, but I wouldn't really call him a hyperbusy player like those two. You know how Papa Jo Jones is always held up as the king of the hi-hat in jazz? There are players like that in rock too, and I always pay them special mind because the hi-hat is my favorite part of the drum kit. It might sound weird, but one drummer whose hi-hat work I really admire is Fab Moretti from the Strokes. Listen to Is This It and you will hear one man's ascetic devotion to the hi-hat—he rarely strays from it during the whole record. Anyway, Mooridian is an absolute poet of the hi-hat: He uses it to fill up as much space as possible, imparting a sense of breathless, whooshing speed.

Listen to the track above, if you haven't already. (It's from the second Vaz album, a damn-near flawless document.) It's a great summary of what Mooridian does routinely with the hi-hat, namely fixate on a two-handed 16th-note feel. You'll often hear rock drummers go for this vibe during a climactic moment, but Mooridian goes there pretty much ALL THE TIME. The two-handed 16th-note feel is the bread and butter of his drumming, and the result is that Vaz songs impart a truly unique sense of velocity.

During the verse of "They've Won" (beginning after the brutal tom-heavy intro), Mooridian goes into this absolutely ridiculous hi-hat pattern that sets the tone for the whole song. I could be wrong, but having seen him play live many times, I'm pretty sure he's not traditionally schooled in any way, and thus does not avail himself of any of the insider economy-of-motion tricks that a highly trained player might employ. I'm the same way—mostly self-taught, and thus I often probably expend twice the amount of energy that I should. All I can say is that trying to play the "They've Won" verse beat last night at the proper tempo, I almost passed out after a few bars. What really kills me about the groove, though, is not just those furious hi-hats; it's the deep-pocket RELAXATION of the bass-and-snare pattern. As hurried and frantic as the hi-hat stuff is, the bass and snare sound like they're jogging in leisurely fashion. As I learned from Alex Mooney long ago, it's not enough to be able to execute a pattern; what really connotes mastery is to be able to RELAX WITHIN a pattern.

The stuttering "chorus" pattern on "They've Won" is awesome as well: a juxtaposition of two bars of the breakneck 16th-note hi-hat stuff with two bars of an 8th-note feel. I love this kind of call-and-response drum-beat architecture—something Ed Blackwell did a lot.

Anyway, the music speaks loud and clear, so I'll leave you with that now. Jeff Mooridian, Jr. will probably never appear in a drum magazine, but he deserves to be recognized for what he does: His hi-hat poetics make him unlike any other drummer on earth. In playing twice as many notes as he needs to, he creates beats that feel not just fast but sublimely urgent. I'm going to keep trying to learn to play this stuff, and even if I can't quite get to where he is, I'm sure I'll learn something.

On the discussion front, can you think of any other poets of the hi-hat, or masters of velocity/groove?

Top five of the moment

1. Vaz Dying to Meet You (Gold Standard Labs, 2005)

2. The Flying Luttenbachers Incarceration by Abstraction (ugEXPLODE, 2007)

3. Melvins Hostile Ambient Takeover (Ipecac, 2002)

4. Coptic Light EP (Dotlinecircle Communications, 2006)

5. Spontaneous Music Ensemble So, What Do You Think? (Tangent, 1971)

Listen to this: Francis and the Lights

I'm very psyched about Francis and the Lights right now. Go here to read my TONY profile of the band's leader, Francis Farewell Starlite, and go here to read a marathon transcript of the entire interview, in which we discussed his recent tours with Drake and MGMT, his admiration for Anthony Braxton (with whom he studied at Wesleyan), the fine art of saying no and much more. Also, I highly recommend that you (a) listen to the new Francis and the Lights album, It'll Be Better; (b) watch the new Francis and the Lights video; and (c) go see the band live either tonight (Thursday, August 12) at S.O.B.'s or next Tuesday (August 17) at Radio City Music Hall with MGMT.

If I were you...

...and in NYC, I would check out the following:

1) William Brittelle at (Le) Poisson Rouge tonight (Tuesday, August 3). I reviewed Brittelle's new album in TONY, where I deemed it a 21st-century soft-rock opus. This record had my number in a major way, blatantly referencing Steely Dan, as well as all sorts of classic prog, fusion and AM Gold. (And check out that beautiful cover above.) Whether that's your vibe or not, this one is really worth a look. Check out some background on Brittelle via Steve Smith's Times feature.

2) Keelhaul and Unsane at Santos Party House on Thursday (August 5). I previewed this one in TONY. Need I blab more about my love for Keelhaul? Enter the temple of ACTION MUSIC.

3) Cynic at Bowery Ballroom on Friday (August 6). Zenned-out fusion-metal gods. They're playing their 1993 debut, Focus, in its entirety, but I'm more excited for tracks from the even-better 2008 comeback, Traced in Air. The mighty Dysrhythmia opens.

Crazy for you: Takayanagi's Mass-terpiece

Mass Hysterism: In Another Situation, a 1983 record by the late Japanese noise-guitar hellion Masayuki Takayanagi (1932–1991) is one of those albums that always going to be lurking in my attic, so to speak. I can put it away for a while, but it never goes to sleep—it's always calling me. Even if it takes a few years, I'll be back. (As an illustration of this, I obsessed over Takayanagi in a February 2007 post as well.)

It's a bashing, clanging exorcism: two electric guitars (the other played by Ikira Iijima—anyone know his other stuff?) and drum set (played by Hiroshi Yamazaki—how ’bout him?). Been checking out a lot of the earlier Takayanagi stuff from the '70s—specifically, the Archive 1 box set—and I really enjoy it, but it doesn't take me where this does. The presence of flute or sax, or Takayanagi's sparse, Derek Bailey–ish stylings, grounds the '70s music in something I already know: it's "improvised music" or it's "hyperactive free jazz." Mass Hysterism, on the other hand is an explosion. It seems almost quintessentially extreme, like the kind of thing you'd play for someone just to shock them, or to prove how masochistic your tastes really were.

But the ears adjust quickly, and you warm up to the feedback dance like a pet near the radiator. Abuse of machinery. Squalling, elevating shapes. Engines priming. Zapped technology. Screaming light. Completely undifferentiated and yet mega-eventful from moment to moment. This is a musical exercise so easily described—a FREAKOUT in the classic sense, befitting the record title—but what makes it special is the sustained nature of the performance, the diversity of the soundspace, and the frenized love the players display. Throwing themselves violently at the muse and the music, over and over and over, for something like 40 minutes. So much so that when you listen, you don't see the men, can't possibly picture them existing and deciding to do this and then, doing this. Can you imagine what it would've been like to see this live?

There's definitely a historical perspective at work, i.e., this was extreme for its time. These days, you could go to No Fun Fest, or countless similar events in basements and art spaces all over the world, and see bands like Hair Police worshipping the same ugly vibes. Also, it helps the overall mystique that info on Takayanagi is so tough to come by for the non–Japanese speaker.

What scraps of info do come through are tantalizing—see, for example, this survey of recordings by both him and sometime partner-in-crime Kaoru Abe. For one, Takayanagi seems to have been almost insufferably outspoken, intent on alienating any musician not devoted to his ultra-extreme aesthetic agenda. NPR's Lars Gotrich gives some helpful background on Mass Hysterism here, and the temporarily out-of-commission-due-to-malware-attack Destination Out has also featured compelling Takayanagi posts. I can't find any video of Takayanagi working in Mass Hysterism attack mode. There are no readily available interviews online, or step-by-step journalistic accounts of his career. (Though on the latter tip, it's important to note that as with Derek Bailey, Takayanagi did come up playing straight-ahead jazz. For whatever reason this always lends a greater gravity to free music—think of Coltrane—even if that might be dubious logic, i.e., do you really have to prove your bona fides before going off the deep end?) Just a bunch of dauntingly expensive reissues—Mimaroglu seems to have just about every one—scattershot blog posts, etc.

But for starters, all you need is Mass Hysterism: only $8 from iTunes if you're the stand-up sort, or pretty easily locatable elsewhere online if you're not picky. There are so many RIYL clichés I could—and sometimes feel compelled to—trot out when listening to this record. ("If you worship Lightning Bolt...," etc.) But does that really help anyone? Better to say: go for it.

I spun about three fourths of Mass Hysterism yesterday, and while writing this, I checked out the rest. And now I am back to the beginning. Yamazaki has unfurled his jackhammer magic carpet, and Takayanagi and Iijima are singing their apocalypse hymn. I'm not surprised at all by any of this anymore, having heard it a bunch. I'm just pleased by it. You don't have to pretend that "experimental" music is a struggle every time out, that you're some kind of freak who goes back again and again even though it hurts. Try Mass Hysterism—I think you'll like it. May it lurk in your attic for years to come.

A man needs a "Shakey": Neil Young's bio

I need to say something very simple here: Thanks to Jimmy McDonough for writing Shakey. I'm not quite through yet, but I'm reading this book—a 2002 biography of Neil Young—with such awe. It's exactly the kind of work that one wishes existed re: every artist one loves.

It's unauthorized in the strict sense, yet with full access. McDonough interviewed Young himself exhaustively, but maybe more importantly, he interviewed just about everyone who ever worked with Young and brought their opinions to NY for consideration. It's a true 360-degree portrait. (More than 300 interviews—MORE THAN 300!) And all the personality study is in service of the music. There's not a single song or album or bootleg discussed here that you don't want to run out and hear. And McDonough tells it to you straight: what's worth checking out and what's not.

Some of the reviews quoted on the book jacket have been really bothering me. Two of them use the word "maddening." One of them says "unmanageable" and "overzealous." Overzealous? Would we prefer our biographies of monumental artists to be merely zelaous, or underzealous? And what exactly is maddening about leaving no stone unturned? About doing impeccable research and synthesizing it into something lengthy (but not unreasonably so, given that we're dealing with a four-decade career here) and eminently readable? As for unmanageable, how exactly? Maybe if you'd rather read a capsule review or a blog post.

It's so wonderful to check this book out and so sad to think about how alien it seems from most writing on the internet, i.e., most writing that people read. There's no need for a curmudgeonly rant here, but there's something so pre-internet about this book. McDonough flew out to all corners of the country to visit with the major players in Neil Young's life. He worked this thing out over something like a decade, even wrangling with Young's own mixed signals, which nearly sunk the project. This is not a deadline-driven thing. It was obviously open-ended in the best sense.

It might sound "overzealous" but I think this is a heroic act: to try to make sense of a life, specifically one that is not one's own. Not a life that's worth more than other lives, but simply one that is public, that has touched a lot of people as a result of what it has yielded.

What I'm saying is that every great, public artist—every great, public human, really—deserves a Shakey, a passionate and more importantly READABLE primary-sourced guide to the person and the work and the complex solar system of friends, associates, lovers, nemeses and whatnot that made it all possible. A work that's grounded in the facts but that doesn't burden you with them. A scrapbook compiled by a true fan with the wherewithal to speak objectively.

And now, back to the 1991 NY & Crazy Horse triumph, Weld...

Earthbound: Goodbye, Fred Anderson

Photo: Fred Anderson, right, with Robert Barry—by Nathan Mandell

I realized last night that I did not say a proper goodbye to Fred Anderson. I wrote a brief, hasty obituary for the Volume, but there's more to say.

Like Bill Dixon, a contemporary whose death preceded Anderson's by just eight days, Anderson was an artist whose work I returned to obsessively. And as in the case of Dixon, what I kept searching out over and over was a sound. In Anderson's case, a very ripe, robust, steely thing that reminded me of liquid metal.

I also admired the no-nonsense-ness of Anderson's approach. He was a saxophonist who favored freeform improvisation but who was always careful to plot his own architecture as he went. When I listen to Anderson, I don't hear the quasi-religious questing evident in Coltrane and many of his acolytes. I simply hear a man working through some lines on his horn—spiraling off from metric time but always rooted in hard, hard swing and soul. It was as though he were saying to his capital-F, capital-J Free Jazz contemporaries and billmates (frequent partner Kidd Jordan among them): "I respect what you're doing up there in the stratosphere, but I have plenty of material to hash out right here on Earth."

That notion fits almost too conveniently with Anderson's status as a kind of blue-collar stalwart of the scene—staying rooted in Chicago, installing carpet or tending bar to keep his family going while his cohorts in the AACM (with whom, again, he shared very little in terms of style) brought their music to the world. But I think you can hear the humility in the playing. Anderson never doubled on another horn, never experimented much with bandbuilding or compositional form or extended techniques. He was content to write a few stark lines ("Dark Day," "Within," etc.), let those be the guideposts of his career, and just play and play.

My favorite Anderson context is the sax-drum duet. No disrespect to Interstellar Space, which I adore, but since that album has given way to so many carbon copies, it's amazing to hear an artist who approached the form in an entirely different way. And no disrespect to the Anderson's constant collaborator, Hamid Drake, but I feel that Anderson was at his best alongside two other percussionists: Steve McCall and Robert Barry. Vintage Duets, a 1980 duo session with McCall that came out 14 years later on Okka Disk, is a fine release, though the document that really gets me is an unreleased recording of the pair playing at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 1986, passed to me by a friend, who got it from a friend. The music is tougher, bolder than the earlier date, yet still with this deep sense of calm. The opening 25-minute version of "Within" might be the finest single Anderson performance I've heard. I love how Anderson doesn't feel the need to ratchet up in intensity as he plays. In other words, there's no sense of that hackneyed free-jazz climax, which inevitably comes too soon and leaves the performance with nowhere to go. McCall cruises, Anderson cooks, and those are the simple revelations of the gig.

(Re: the recording mentioned above, I could easily share it online, but I'm wary of the ethics involved, especially so soon after Anderson's passing. Anyone have any thoughts on that?)

The other towering Anderson masterwork, for me, is Duets 2001, a Thrill Jockey disc featuring Robert Barry. I have pretty much zero awareness of Barry before or after this session. (I know he's worked with Ken Vandermark, but I haven't heard those records; here's a 2008 interview, which I'm going to check out as soon as I'm done with this post.) I can't even tell you how much I used to play this album. Haven't heard it for several years, but it's on now as I type. To me, this is the Truth. A center of calm. Barry heats it up at times, but the greatest moments are the sublimely laid-back tracks, like the opening "bouncing." This is go-where-it-may music, unfolding infinitely. Could stop now, could go on forever. Always swinging. It gives a feeling of air, of buoyancy—quiet, unassuming creativity that is its own reward.

Now I think I'm the one listing toward post-Coltrane-y mumbo jumbo, so I'll stop. If you haven't heard Duets 2001, though, please obtain it. It is jazz of *no school* whatsoever and yet it is most assuredly jazz. That was Anderson's gift to his musical sphere, to exist outside of stream and current and trend and yet not to deprive you of what you loved about bebop and free jazz alike. Taking the lessons he learned from Charlie Parker (seemingly his No. 1 muse), freeing them up and meditating on the results. For a long, long time.

P.S. If you like Duets 2001: Another underrated record that partakes of a similar buoyant, unhurried vibe is William Parker's Bob's Pink Cadillac, also recorded in 2001, and featuring clarinetist Perry Robinson and drummer Walter Perkins. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Work song: Keelhaul, household chores and the unthinking

"...with rock & roll, the more you think, the more you stink."—David Briggs, quoted in Shakey

I'm currently ensconced in the marvelous Neil Young biography cited above. In one of my favorite passages, Briggs, Young's longtime producer, rants about the pitfalls of modern recording practices ("People realized they could do their part... later. Play their part and fix it later"). Maybe there's cliché at the heart of this sentiment ("Turn off the brain" and whatnot), but is it not so true that rock comes from another place than the mind?

I have all this on the brain today—see? the brain again—at the outset of what promises to be a great holiday weekend. Watched Woody Allen's Alice this morning with my new fiancée (great movie), and then we launched into one of our epic cleaning fits. I always self-assign to doing-the-dishes duty and I actually love it. The reason is that it affords me the perfect opportunity to Rock Out to whatever music I choose for an extended, uninterrupted period.

Re: "the more you think, the more you stink," something I've noticed is that certain music can rule more the less you specifically concentrate on it—like, say, if you're doing the dishes or running on the treadmill while you're listening. Case in point: Keelhaul, a band whom I've often written about before (like here and here) and whom I've become re-obsessed with over the last few days after learning that they're playing Santos Party House in NYC on August 5 (with Unsane, can't wait). Today I blasted their latest album, 2009's Keelhaul's Triumphant Return to Obscurity, as I soaped and scrubbed all the bowls, forks, knives, cutting boards, whatever. And though it was such a mundane domestic task, there was something beautiful about my ACTIVITY paralleling that of the music.

You listen to Keelhaul, in other words, and you want to work. Because what this band does best is work. They are riffsmiths, endlessly churning through labyrinthine math-metallic constructions—a practice that somehow transcends a conventional task like songwriting. Some Keelhaul songs are a minute long; some are seven minutes long. Some have vocals; some don't. Some are unrelentingly brutal; some are downright chill. But what unites all of their music is a sense of drivenness, of single-minded, less-you-think-less-you-stink MOTION.

Enslaving yourself to a riff. Is there any point to it? Well, the point is that it gets you out of your head. I've often found this at STATS rehearsals, as we cycle through repetition after repetition after repetition of a riff. It's not something you'd ever perform (unless you're Cheer-Accident doing "Filet of Nod"!), but you do it for the release, the pleasure of activity and motion and forwardness and non-static-icity and sculpting something out of sound.

That is so often the pleasure of making and listening to music for me—just being on a moving train, or somesuch. Exorcising the demons via vigorous movement. And if you're not playing music, DOING SOMETHING while listening is often the next best thing. So I wish you all activity—unthinking and nonstinking—as well as a great ROCK soundtrack this Independence Day weekend, and in that spirit, here are Keelhaul themselves, destroying the silence and the inactivity with pure WORK music in their hometown of Cleveland just a few weeks ago: