Go see the world: David S. Ware and ELEW

The past couple days have brought startling news from the jazz world:

First, last night's announcement of David S. Ware's passing at the relatively young age of 62, circulated by Patricia Parker and reported by various sources, including Peter Hum's blog.

Second, the publication on Wednesday, via Do the Math, of what can only be called a manifesto from the self-dubbed Rockjazz piano star Eric Lewis (who performs as ELEW). It's a remarkable piece of writing. AccuJazz.com dubbed it "really engrossing straight talk"; I'd second that and add that it's also stupendously witty.

It seems odd to link word of a death with any other bit of information; I hope I don't sound crass in that regard. At the same time, I'd be lying if I said that the two figures didn't converge in my mind when I heard about Ware. Let me explain:

When I think about Ware, I think about beautiful music: e.g., an intimate Brooklyn solo concert I had the privilege to attend in March of 2010 (released last year on Aum Fidelity as one half of Organica), or my favorite Ware record, 1979's Birth of a Being, as far as I know the only officially released document of the collective trio known as Apogee, with pianist Gene Ashton (later to be known as Cooper-Moore; read his fascinating reminiscences re: the group—including an account of opening for a band led by Ware's friend Sonny Rollins at the Vanguard—a little more than halfway the page here) and drummer Marc Edwards (still kicking ass in NYC on a regular basis). Respect to Ware's celebrated quartets of the ’90s and aughts, but this early release has captured my imagination more than any other DSW release. To my ears, it's probably the single greatest document of second-wave free jazz. Happily, a blogger has uploaded it to SoundCloud; the pleasures of this music, that heartbreaking, hymnal, post-Ayler lyricism, which gradually splinters apart, like a homey cottage in the path of a tornado, are plain:



But when I think about David S. Ware, I also think about what it means to have a career in jazz. The discussion of how musicians operating in this genre can make a decent living while retaining integrity is a constant one, which seems to flare up about once a year at least. (See also: another recent post by Peter Hum.) While I doubt that Mr. Ware was a particularly wealthy man in the grand scheme of things, certainly it's fair to say that he was one of the more visible jazz musicians of his generation (maybe "peer group" would be more accurate). I don't think I'll ever forget this Gary Giddins assertion, via a July, 2001 installment of his Weather Bird column in the Voice:

"Let's be bold: The David S. Ware Quartet is the best small band in jazz today. I realize that I will almost certainly hear another quartet, or trio or quintet or octet, this week or next, that will make me want to backpedal. But every time I see Ware's group or return to the records, it flushes the competition from memory."

I didn't know enough about the state of jazz in July of 2001 to particularly agree or disagree with Giddins's assertion, but I admired the ballsiness of the statement. (Looking back on the period now, I'd probably give the nod to Tim Berne's then-nascent Hard Cell band, later to be expanded into Science Friction.) But whatever my own feelings about Ware's music, I had an understanding that he was something like the Michael Jordan of this world of Vision Festival–affiliated NYC free jazz that I was just then starting to discover, the member of that crew who had achieved some measure of niche-transcending fame. Around that time, I remember visiting the apartment of a not particularly jazz-fixated friend and spotting a copy of Ware's 1998 Columbia debut, Go See the World, in his CD collection. It was only later that I came to understand how exactly it was that Ware had achieved this name-brandedness, which began to snowball around 1994, thanks in large part to the passionate advocacy of current Aum Fidelity boss Steven Joerg, then working at the Homestead label. (Brad Cohan's 2011 interview with Joerg is a valuable primer on all this: "The idea of signing the Ware Quartet was a bit of a stretch, but I convinced [Homestead]," says Joerg. "The first record we did—Cryptology—ended up being the lead review in Rolling Stone.") I have a memory of Ware's 1999 Columbia record, Surrendered, as being a bit tamer, but listening back to the two now, I realize that both were/are marvelous anomalies, HTGMLPCFJRs! (honest-to-God major-label post-Coltrane free-jazz records, i.e.) I look forward to getting better acquainted with these albums.



I can't speak to the nitty-gritty details of Ware's Columbia signing; it would be fascinating to read an interview with the A&R rep who was responsible for that deal. [Update: Mark Stryker informs me it was none other than Branford Marsalis! I had no idea. Peter Hum points the way to this valuable document: "Branford said don't change a thing," says Ware. Given that Wynton figures into the ELEW saga, it makes me wonder how many jazz success stories of the past 20 years or so don't include the Marsalises in some respect.] But details aside, and whatever the net effect of this episode on the Ware's quality of life then and later on, one has to marvel at and respect the fact that DSW busted through a glass ceiling in a certain respect. Obviously the scale is vastly smaller, and the analogy is iffy due to the fact that unlike Cobain & Co., Ware's signing did not pave the way for a whole wave of like-minded indie artists, but it's hard not to see Go See the World as the Nevermind of American free jazz, a record that mainstreamed, or at least attempted to, an inherently underground aesthetic without masking its essential rawness—and a record that even celebrated that rawness. It seems to me, in other words, that Ware succeeded in the marketplace without compromising in the slightest, that Go See the World is more or less the next record his band would've made for Aum Fidelity had Columbia not stepped in. If you think about it, that's pretty damn cool.

So when I say I linked Ware and Eric Lewis in my mind, what I mean is that, having just read Lewis's disarmingly candid account of how he forged a thriving career in music—proceeding at first through conventional jazz channels and then later fashioning an arena-ready aesthetic built around improv-heavy covers of well-known rock songs—I couldn't help thinking about how these two figures might have regarded one another. Ware's circle was obviously not the same one (i.e., the Wynton Marsalis orbit) that Lewis occupied before rebranding himself—and if you've read the piece, you know that I mean that phrase very literally—as ELEW. But these are obviously two extraordinarily skilled musicians who labored for years over their respective brands of jazz and managed—again, each in their own respective ways—to carve out a place for themselves in the jazz-unfriendly marketplace. (And even Ware, whether consciously or not, was a brand: It's hard to look at the album cover above and argue that there wasn't some image-building going on there.)

I'm not making any value judgment here. I haven't heard enough of ELEW's music (really, just a cover of "Mr. Brightside" at a Jazz Foundation of America event a few years back) to give an informed opinion on it, and my knowledge of Ware's work in the ’90s and 2000s is spotty as well. But it is fascinating to think of these two figures, both "stars" in a certain sense, one of whom won a degree of fame (and even a major-label deal) working in one of the most seemingly "difficult" subgenres in American music, i.e., post-Coltrane free jazz, without altering his core values in the slightest, and the other, who strategically retooled his entire aesthetic, grafting his love for and command of jazz onto a commercially viable "hook" and succeeding beyond just about any contemporary jazz musician's wildest dreams (touring with Josh Groban, etc.). There is no right path. Ware seemed entirely in love with his artistic pursuit, and Lewis, in his own way, seems to be in love with his. Yes, in the latter case, art intermingles more straightforwardly with commerce, but as anyone who has ever tried to make a living at anything creative (writing, ahem) could tell you, it pretty much has to at one point or another, so why not be open about that fact?

Again, I'm not advocating for the ELEW model, nor am I criticizing it. I'm simply stating that it seems to have worked for him, in the sense that he appears to be happy and fulfilled doing what he does, over and above the fact that he's making a good living doing it, and that that is in many ways the definition of success. Ware succeeded too, in that he reached many more listeners than 99 percent of the other free-jazz musicians who have ever lived. Think of the great John Tchicai, who passed away recently at the age of 76. I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of his work (I will say that I adore the early New York Art Quartet works), but I feel comfortable asserting without verifying it first that Tchicai never landed the lead review in Rolling Stone—or, for that matter, toured with Josh Groban. Everyone loves an unsung hero, but sometimes it's worth thinking hard about the players, like Ware and Lewis, who have "made it," and about why and how they did: how much, i.e., was due to their own deliberate efforts, as in the case of Eric Lewis reimagining himself as ELEW; how much was due to tireless advocates, e.g., Steven Joerg in Ware's case; how much was due to the conditions of the marketplace during a given period, etc. As jazz fans, we're bred to be suspicious of success, of visibility, etc., and certainly many of the music's brilliant statements, especially since the ’70s have been made underground, as it were, but we should celebrate the fact that certain artists in the field have managed to climb a little higher, to position themselves a little closer to the popular sphere, to go see the world, as it were. As Lewis suggests, there are lessons to be learned even from Kenny G.

I don't mean to reduce Ware's sad passing to an occasion for soapboxing; all I mean to say is that, with Lewis's fascinating career arc on my mind, I couldn't help but muse a bit on art-and-commerce as it pertains to jazz. May DSW rest in peace, and may ELEW continue to thrive on his own terms.

Propagandhi: CLPPR gods

I'm a little late in reporting as much, but Propagandhi has just finished a two-night NYC run, which I previewed in TONY. The Winnipeg punk band was a key DFSBP presence back in ’09, when their then-new fifth LP, Supporting Caste, topped my year-end list. I saw them live that March, and since then, I've probably listened to Caste more than any other newly released record. To put it another way, it's often that I genuinely admire an album, and say as much in print, only to file it away and forget about it. That is to say, it never earns a real place in my musical pantheon, among the records that I choose to throw on when I'm not accountable to anyone but myself. But Supporting Caste did stick around.

I haven't stopped marveling at the improbability of a band from my past—specifically a political pop-punk band that meant a lot to me during a brief teenage moment in the early ’90s where, in addition to death-metal labels like Roadrunner and Earache, I blindly trusted imprints such as Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords with my not-so-hard-earned cash—resurfacing to completely blow my adult mind. As I discuss in the TONY piece above, Propagandhi has renovated in a serious way since the first—and up till ’09, only—record of theirs I heard, 1993's How to Clean Everything. As I indicated on Twitter last night, having just attended my second Propagandhi show in two nights, the band has become a bastion of what I like to call CLPPR (contemporary lowercase-p progressive rock), i.e., a rock band that's genuinely pushing itself—technically, ideologically, emotionally—rather than merely aping an ethos and aesthetic that broke ground 40 or so years ago (I nod here to gods such as King Crimson, Yes and Rush). Is Propagandhi still a "punk" band? In the sense that their rhythmic home base still overlaps significantly with hardcore, sure. But they belong among an elite group of contemporary rock bands—I'm not even sure whom else I should name in that regard, aside from the mighty Tool—who are forging their own universes.

Propagandhi's music tickles my tech-rock funnybone, yes, but the reason they matter to me is because they employ extreme technicality in the service of extreme emotion: a vehemently liberal political engagement, combined with a sincere soul-search/self-inventory, i.e., "How is it that one can live well and live responsibly?" I don't agree with all the band's views—at Wednesday's show, frontman Chris Hannah asked the crowd, "Did anyone watch the [air-quotes] debate? Who [air-quotes] won the [air-quotes] debate?" indicating an allegiance to the Ralph Nader–esque perspective that there's no real difference between the two parties, a position I have a hard time relating to—but I agree with their depth of feeling. It comes through in the music, and that's because even more so than conveying their radical politics, they're engaged with writing memorable songs. They're so intent on expressing their views that they've been driven to devise ever more complex, ingenious vehicles for those beliefs. The latest result is another deep, fascinating, adult progressive-rock (in the literal sense) opus. If you care about rock that pushes itself and the listener, while at the same time delivering major amounts of oomph, passion and fist-pumping user-friendliness, you need to hear Failed States. (I'd strongly recommend giving it a good, uninterrupted listen while reading along with the lyrics.)



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*Speaking of rock that defines progress purely in its own terms, I recently surveyed the Jesus Lizard discography for Stereogum, as part of a recurring "albums from worst to best" series on the site. I was happy to have the chance to stump for my personal favorite Lizard record, the vastly underrated Down, as well as to revisit the imperfect but still masterful Shot and to really get to know the strange gem that is Blue for the first time—not to mention to revisit the straightforward classics Head, Liar and Goat. For fun, here's a playlist of some of my favorite Jesus Lizard deep cuts:



*Lastly I need to note that one of my favorite living musicians, drummer Steve Shelton, is now blogging at The Poundry. It's been a very Shelton-centric year ’round these parts. You might recall my January rave re: the new album by Loincloth, one of Shelton's two main projects, or my May account of seeing his other band, Confessor, live for the first time at Maryland Deathfest X. I also had the opportunity to interview Steve at length in the spring for an as-yet-unpublished article—I'll link to that as soon as it's available—and I'm extremely pleased to report that on November 17, my band, STATS, will share a bill with Loincloth (playing their first-ever NYC show) at Public Assembly. Anyway, the real point here is that Steve's opinions are as distinctive as his drumming, and he's expressing them with eloquent, passionate regularity via his blog. I especially recommend his comparison of the Ozzy- and Dio-model Sabbaths, his paean to unorthodox cymbal techniques and his eclectic round-up (including both Slint and King Diamond) of the most moving live shows he's ever seen.

Re: How to Dress Well

This past June, I saw two shows by the musical entity known as How to Dress Well and spent some good time with HTDW mastermind Tom Krell in Brooklyn. The result is this FADER feature, one of the longer stories I've published in a good while. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Year-end-listmaking season is coming up fast, but I don't yet feel ready to offer any preliminary word re: my personal 2012 frontrunners. That said, I do think Total Loss, the new How to Dress Well full-length, is very, very good. I'd specifically recommend the tracks "How Many," "Cold Nites" and "Set It Right," in that order, but listen as you will (Spotify stream below). Krell is working in an idiom that seems to be growing more codified with each passing month—i.e., pop (in this case R&B) viewed through an experimental lens—but for me, he stands out, largely because his hooks are so choice. His voice too is divine; NYC-ers, I'd highly recommend seeing him live at Santos Party House on October 8th.

Neil Peart: A 60th-birthday playlist

Last week I wrote about a so-called prog band that doesn't really fit that mold. I held Rush up as a band that does conform to what prog is commonly understood to be, but you can't put them in a box either. I've been listening to and loving Rush for more than half my life, and they're still one of the staples of my musical diet. Say about them what you will, but it's important to understand that the thumbnail version of Rush—screechy vocals, OCD drumming, sidelong songs—is way out-of-date; for the last 30 or so years, since around the time of Moving Pictures, Rush hasn't really been a prog band at all. They've gradually streamlined their sound to the point that what they are is a great rock band, period—a lofty and brainy one, sure, but no more self-indulgent than, say, the Radioheads of the world.

Following this post is a playlist of some of my favorite Rush tracks, all released within the past decade. I offer this as a modest birthday tribute to drummer-lyricist Neil Peart, who turned 60 yesterday. I attempted a close read of a key Peart performance on DFSBP back in ’06; that's not what this sampling is about. My goal is simply to demonstrate the pleasures of late-period Rush. Peart shines here, of course—not just as a drummer but as a lyricist, especially on the harrowing "Ghost Rider," which captures his haunted state of mind in the wake of the deaths of his daughter and common-law wife—but more importantly, these are just good songs. The current/recent Rush output means as much to me as anything they've done. The new Clockwork Angels is scary-good; it's probably my favorite Rush album since 1993's stunning Counterparts.

We'll start with an instrumental off the latter record. Look out for the heavenly delayed crash-cymbal/bass-drum accents that Peart throws in on what I'll call the prechorus starting at :32. Then we move on to "Dog Years," which features Peart playing more or less a punk beat, followed by a quasi-disco one. On "BU2B," listen very closely (headphones will help) after the bombshell kick-in at :50, and you'll hear Peart offering up tasteful commentary with the left foot on the hi-hat; I also love the slashing China-cymbal syncopations that start around 1:15. Re: "Workin' Them Angels," I have little to say other than that I think it's a great, dramatic song. And we end with the darkly majestic "Ghost Rider." Happy birthday, sir, and thank you for your music.

Shapeshifter: In praise of Bruford/Wetton/Fripp King Crimson

Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time self-educating re: rock from the ’70s. We always hear about the ’60s, specifically the end of the ’60s, as a rock heyday, but the next decade seems to me to be the One, when all the warning shots had been fired and the premier bands were all just, to use a term coined by Damión Reid, showing up to crush. As usual, I speak only for myself, oriented according to my inescapable biases, biases that go by names like Black Sabbath (who started out strong but attained some kind of exalted state of fried-mind excess around the time of 1975's Sabotage), Thin Lizzy (who issued their own fireball of a record that same year, just one of at least five all-time-great LPs they'd release throughout the decade) and Led Zeppelin (let's stick with the ’75 theme, and take a moment to reflect on two of the sickest grooves ever recorded: exhibits A and B).

I will love all of these bands/records for as long as I am on Earth, but at this point, they are like comfort food to me: known quantities with a predictable, though not commonplace effect, i.e., they yield ecstasy the way great coffee yields a buzz. But much of my RLT (recreational listening time) over the past week has been spent chasing down a different kind of feeling, furnished by a band that thrived contemporaneously to the woolly rock mammoths enumerated above, but was on, as they say, a whole different trip.

I'm speaking about King Crimson, specifically the version of King Crimson that existed—with more or less stable personnel, give or take percussionist Jamie Muir and violinist David Cross—from (I think I've got this right) the summer of 1972 through the fall of ’74. Aside from perennial KC mastermind Robert Fripp, this lineup was all about bassist-vocalist John Wetton and—I feel like I need to cross myself while typing this, so large does this musician currently loom in my personal pantheon—drummer Bill Bruford, who reported for Crimson duty as soon as he had finished laying down tracks for this prog monster.

If this specific version of King Crimson occupies a different galaxy than the Rock Gods I mentioned above, the Sabbaths, Zeppelins and Lizzys, it also has surprisingly little to do with what I think of as capital-p Prog. I love much of the output of the aforelinked Yes, as well as that of Rush, who really came into full flower later in the ’70s on albums like Hemispheres (some will point to 2112 as the Rush landmark from that period, but that was just the icebreaker), but at this point, those bands too are known quantities, both to me and the World of Rock. They really do exemplify most of the traits they're said to exemplify: long-ass songs, foregrounded virtuosity, helium-voiced vox, etc. (Those descriptions aren't loaded in any way; they're simply neutral catalogs of what those bands sounded like at that time.)

But BWFC (Bruford, Wetton, Fripp Crimson) is, again, something other, and I've spent the last week or so trying to get to the bottom of exactly what that is, or at least observe the full range of its behaviors. I'm finding those tasks extremely daunting but at the same time, I'm enjoying myself immensely. This is not a band you comprehend right away, and that is primarily because BWFC is a shapeshifter. You cannot get your head and heart around it via conventional means, i.e., albums; you have to experience it, live with it, in the wild—that is to say onstage. For several years now, I have really enjoyed the BWFC studio output, namely Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and Red. (I included the first chapter of the two-part Larks' title track in a math-rock mix I compiled a couple years back.) But to be honest, at this point, I'm considering this trilogy as little more than a digest version of BWFC. I feel like I never knew the band until very recently, when I started digging into the band's own immaculately maintained live archives, known as DGM—i.e., Discipline Global Mobile—Live. (Search 1973 and 1974 here to get a sense of what a treasure trove this is.)

So far, I've picked up three shows: 10/23/73 in Glasgow; 3/30/74 in Mainz, Germany; and 6/28/74 in Asbury Park—the latter of which is heard, in edited/meddled-with form, on the USA live album. (It's funny to think about how in June of ’74, Asbury Park's most famous musical export, Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a. prog's antithesis, was in the process of becoming a star.) My knowledge of these official bootlegs is no means encyclopedic—Steve Smith, the most avid/learned Crimsophile I know, is your man—but I can vouch for every one of these shows, and more specifically, for the way they complement each other. Yes, there are song overlaps—I'm starting to sound like a Deadhead here, and though I'm no die-hard there either, I do love me some cherry-picked live Dead—but these are three completely different concerts: different energies, different trajectories, different purposes. I was hoping I'd purchase three of these boots and feel like that was enough, but sadly (for my bank account, i.e.), I think I'm just getting started.

So what is it about BWFC? What's the big deal? I really wanted to link the Glasgow version of "Easy Money," one of BWFC's signature jams, here, so the music could do the talking, but it isn't on YouTube. I just put on a snippet of said track, to get the scent back in my nose. What is it? It's ear-bleeding art-funk, primed for maximum timbral abrasion, gritted-teeth extremity, with harsh and peculiar textures protruding from every strata of the sonic spectrum. That latter point is key for me. One of the chief joys I derive from BWFC is how strange and utterly distinct each sound you hear is. The timbres of the various instruments don't comfortably jell, as is the case in, say, Sabbath or Zeppelin; they war and clash. You've got the flopping, distorted, ungainly beast that is Wetton's bass tone in the low register—like the grotesquely exposed metal skeleton of a sci-fi cyborg—then you have Fripp's merciless high-end fuzz, scratching at your right ear like steel wool; and then there's Bruford's multifaceted soundmaker—I hesitate to call it something so mundane as a drum kit: the ugly wash of the hi-hat; those way-tight toms, which sound like crude timbales; and that piercing snare, softening often into a Tony Williams–y press-roll caress.

The band does kick and slam as one but what makes BWFC special is the way they elude and toy with the groove—each player off on his own orbit like a planet in a solar system—as though no one member wants to be caught playing it straight. Bruford in particular seems to love the delicious tension that comes from hinting at a metallic stomp; he could easily Bonham (to coin a verb) his way through the grooves—"Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One" comes to mind—but so often chooses to keep the beach ball in the air, so to speak, giving the band the low-end kick it needs but satisfying his own improvisational drive with destabilizing fills and other purposeful inconsistencies. He is not exactly a busy drummer; it's more that he's a restless one. The lumbering doomgroove in the middle of the Red track "Starless"—the definition of a musical slow burn—is a great place to hear what I'm talking about. During the Mainz show, the band draws out the off-kilter riff for more than two ominous minutes, with Bruford limiting himself to minute cymbal taps, before kicking in. But even when Fripp and Wetton near their crescendo, the drummer is still strutting and stuttering along, totally unperturbed; he increases his volume and power, but rarely goes two measures without throwing in some sort of ungainly fill or daring syncopation. In this section, Bruford makes me think of a train-jumper who toys with a slow-moving freighter for miles, flamboyantly hopping on and off as he pleases, never content to simply pick a car and ride. (You get a sense of what I mean around 6:30 in this 1974 TV clip, though the out-of-sync-ness of the audio and video bums me out sufficiently that I held off on an embed. You can view the full four-song performance in excellent fidelity on the 2009 CD/DVD reissue of Red.)

All the band members' performances during this period—my apologies for short-shrifting the often-breathtaking David Cross, whose keening violin is a key feature of these gigs I've been checking out—tend toward the same controlled-chaos brilliance, to the extent that it's easy to forget just how special the material itself is. The variety is simply awesome. Yesterday I marveled at the four-song run at the end of the Mainz show: After "Starless," you've got the relatively concise "Lament," maybe the single strangest piece in BWFC's repertoire. It starts off exemplifying one of the band's key song types, i.e., the brief, ballad-like, almost stagy ditty (I wish I could think of a more dignified word), in which Wetton—whom I've begun to regard as quite possibly the most compelling singer in so-called progressive rock, and one of the most underrated in rock, period—plays the husky yet tender straight man to lyricist Richard Palmer-James's wry satirist. Then, much like in "Starless" itself, the scene changes completely: after a brief instrumental interlude, the band explodes in a deranged art-funk riff fest, with Wetton sounding like he's coming completely unglued. Next up is "Improv Trio," one of the many impromptu interludes that marks this period of Crimson; these pieces take all different shapes (there are four very different ones in the Mainz show alone), but this one is like a pastoral bit of drumless soundtrack music, on which I believe Fripp and Cross are both playing sparkly Mellotron while Wetton lays down a chilled-out bass skeleton. The piece leads into the grandaddy of BWFC's many balls-out jams, the aforementioned "Easy Money," rendered here as stumbling, seething, drunken death funk, with Wetton's signature scat episode at the beginning coming off as a burlesque of airheaded rock & roll. "Easy Money" is always a set highlight, but this version is particularly dire and ragged—a noisy morass. And this very punk element of BWFC is part of what sets them apart from any other contemporary band that you might be tempted to label prog: BWFC understands the value of pure amplified slop, and how effective it can be when juxtaposed with a very British kind of proper-ness and refinement (I think of other brief, chill tracks of the "ditty" variety," such as "The Night Watch"). And there are so many other elements and imperatives at play in the BWFC repertoire: quirky, riffy, Woodstocky blues-rock (see "Cat Food," a track from the pre-BWFC Crimson album In the Wake of Poseidon, which closes the Glasgow show) sits next to obsessive-compulsive epics like "Fracture" and "Larks' Tongues… Part Two." Anyone with even a passing interest in math rock needs get familiar with the former (the Glasgow version is tremendous); the juxtaposition in moods—from notey geekery to flailing violence—is something later exponents of the style have rarely been able to capture in such an organic way. And I'm still getting my brain around the many improvisations that dot these set lists.

There's something very unusual going on in these performances—a marriage of prog's grandeur and virtuosic flash with an almost proto–mid-’80s–Black Flag live-wire scrappiness—that I'm not sure you hear in any other band of the period. Mahavishnu does skew "punk" on their first two records, but they never let themselves sound as frenetic, as hungry, as wild (or on the other hand, as unmoored or abstract) as BWFC do in these performances. This version of Crimson seems to embody the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses—each one pushed to the limit—in a single uncanny unit. I've yet to really get to know Crimson before or after this period, but from what little I do know, BWFC was a unique episode in the history of the band, and maybe of music, period, at least the Western styles I know and love best (rock and jazz).

BWFC was a meteor shower, smashing the airlocks that separated the proto-metal space station from the fusion one and the postbop ones and setting all those impulses free. Pretty much everything I love about music from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s is here somehow: the mercurial looseness of the Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet, the bombed-out bash of early Sabbath, the D&D-presaging sweep of Yes, the white-hot shred of Mahavishnu and even an undercurrent of especially grimy funk. It didn't last, of course, but for that glorious moment, BWFC had it all, and we are extremely fortunate that the fossil record is so complete. If you need me, I'll be in the DGM archives…

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P.S. Speaking of archives, a mammoth new Larks' Tongues in Aspic box set—bulging with extra live audio and video—is coming 10/15. Scroll down a bit here for details.

The drummer, given some: Albert "Tootie" Heath with Ethan Iverson at the Vanguard

What do we mean when we say "Give the drummer some"? The trio of Ethan Iverson, Ben Street and Albert "Tootie" Heath—which I heard at the Village Vanguard last night—is one answer. The band grows out of Iverson's "Seek out your heroes and play with them" initiative, also the engine behind the pianist's ongoing Billy Hart collaboration. The idea isn't simply that you give the drummer a lot of solo space; it's more that you simply play really great jazz in the company of the musician in question, while drawing the listeners' attention, both verbally and through sympathetic arrangements, to their brilliance.

I knew Tootie's name before attending last night's show, but I didn't know his work and his sound the way I know, say, Roy Haynes's. I may have even seen him play one other time—as part of the Heath Brothers, I believe, at a Jazz Foundation of America event—but he wasn't really on my radar in the way he ought to have been. And this is sort of the point re: the aforementioned "Seek out your heroes" initiative: The gig—in this case, a run at the Vanguard‚is no longer just a gig; it's a work of advocacy. What it says, is, "This masterful musician walks among us; he's playing better than ever; come pay your respects."(One of Iverson's many Heath intros last night went like this: "As we live and breathe, 'Tootie' Heath on drums!")

I heard such wonders coming from the drum kit last night that I felt embarrassed by my prior ignorance of Mr. Heath's work, by the fact that I'd never deliberately set aside a night, or ten, to go hear him play. There was the wicked bouncing march he laid down on "The Charleston," a quasi-backbeat—I think I remember a 16th-note feel, played with the left hand on the hi-hat—that reminded me of the Purdie Shuffle (see around 3:30 here) on Sonny Rollins's "No Moe" and some of the most exquisitely swinging brushwork I've ever heard on the head of "Shiny Stockings." (The way Heath's wire brushes grabbed the snare and lifted out the sound on the latter piece made me feel like I understood for the first time what was really meant by the term "trap set.")

But it was the mallet playing that really floored me. In his recap of Tuesday night's sets, Iverson mentioned Heath's "African mallet patterns" on Paul Motian's "It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago." I wouldn't have been knowledgeable enough to identify the beat in question—played with one mallet on the untightened snare, the other on the rack tom—as African, but that description makes perfect sense; relistening to the pattern in my head now, I'm pretty sure there was some three-against-four going on. Technicalities aside, though, the important thing about the beat was how it fit into the arrangement. Much of the rest of the set had to do with swinging in the conventional sense, pieces in which Iverson and Street reveled in Heath's spacious, gracious pocket, in which the trio grooved as one entity. But "It Should've Happened…" was something different. The performance was about coexistence rather than straightforward agreement. Iverson's melody floated over Heath's mallet pattern, the two seeming totally independent of one another but totally attuned. It's the kind of arrangement that, it seems to me, has to just sort of happen. It's like, "I'll play this, you play that, and I'll see you at the end of the tune." The parts jelled beautifully, even though their actual relationship was a mystery. And thus, as a Motian tribute, it made perfect sense. If that mallet episode played to me like a little mind puzzle, the one on "How Insensitive" was an exercise in simplicity. I'm not sure I've ever seen a drummer make more poetic use of minimal materials than Heath did on this piece. He held the mallet in his right hand, using it to lightly strike the floor tom while he rustled the fingers of his left hand over the head of the same drum. There were variations in the pattern, but mostly it was just pure pulse, with ever-so-slight embellishment. You heard the piano and the bass, but what you felt was the drum, a plush murmur in time. If I had to guess, I'd say that the piece lasted two minutes, maybe two and a half (all the pieces were brief, which made for excellent variety), but it felt so generous in its lulling hush. As with the brushwork, what I really felt here was a new understanding of the materials of jazz drumming: why you use brushes here, sticks there, mallets in this other context. The kit can speak in so many different tongues, and Albert Heath is fluent in them all.

Heath's witty banter was a show unto itself. The bowtied drummer was obviously in high spirits last night—though I'd venture to say that he probably is every night he's onstage—cracking constant jokes in between and even during the pieces. He'd turn constantly to the young man seated immediately to his left and offer commentary on the music as it was happening. One of my favorite of these moments was when Iverson was playing an eerie uncaccompanied intro to the ballad "Memories of You"; Heath leaned toward the audience member in question and stage-whispered "Frankenstein!" Then he pantomimed a scary monster, curling his hands into claws and baring his teeth. He was obviously poking fun at Iverson's love of the esoteric flourish, but in a loving, old-school way, the way one seasoned comedian might roast another. And after Iverson announced "Shiny Stockings," Heath turned to the young man and asked, "You know 'Thong Song'?" He explained that "Shiny Stockings" was pretty much analogous to that Sisqo favorite, before singing a little snippet of the immortal chorus ("Thong-th-thong-thong-thong") for the benefit of the entire crowd. Then, after Iverson spoke about Heath's association with Mal Waldron—the trio had either just played or was about to play Waldron's "Fire Waltz," the killer opener to the classic Dolphy/Little/Waldron/Davis/Blackwell Five Spot recordings, with Heath unleashing a merciless series of triplets on the snare—and recommended the Waldron record Impressions as a good example of that partnership, Heath said, "I think that record went rust instead of gold… or maybe it went mold."

As if it wasn't clear whose show it really was, Iverson and Street both sported "Tootie" buttons, with Street even wearing a Heath-style bowtie. This dynamic, i.e., generations mixing onstage, with the younger element (namely Iverson) making it very plain how thrilled they are to be onstage with the elder, has the potential to be corny or cloying. But the reason it's not in this case is that however worshipful Iverson's intros of Heath are, once the music begins, he's performing as an equal. Often, you'll see younger sidemen to distinguished older musicians playing a sort of "Yes man" role. Here, it's almost the opposite; Iverson's job in this trio seems to be to keep Heath surprised and energized. You can tell it's working because Heath plays in a constant state of delight, smiling and letting out appreciative whoops. Sure the style and the repertoire—familiar standards like "Now's the Time" and "All the Things You Are" alongside eccentric choices like the aforementioned "Fire Waltz" and the Motian—are designed to flatter, but in the end, the point is not simply to cater to the drummer but to stimulate him and thus to give the listener a sense of his breadth, to cultivate in the audience the kind of appreciation for this great man that Iverson himself harbors. And in all those senses, this project is entirely successful.

When you see this ingenerational link done right—i.e., when there's mutual respect, but also a real head-on engagement between equals—it's one of most inspiring, satisfying phenomena in jazz. I think about Jon Irabagon and Barry Altschul, or Darius Jones and Cooper-Moore, or Anthony Braxton and any one of his current much-younger collaborators. The Iverson/Heath hook-up (and I mean no disrespect to Ben Street; his role is vital—not to mention clearly impressive to Heath, who listened to the bassist's solos with rapt attention last night—and my discussion here is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the complex dynamic of this particular trio) is one of the most successful examples of this that I've seen, a partnership that makes "old" jazz feel entirely new. I'm not sure I can remember enjoying a set of so-called straight-ahead jazz more than this one, and it's because the setting encouraged me to focus on the nuts and bolts, to not take for granted the decades' worth of class and experience and good humor and skill seated behind the drums. In short, the set made me a Tootie fan for life. Mission accomplished.

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*If anyone can think of other great intergenerational collaborations, either current (like the ones mentioned above) or past (Miles Davis and Tony Williams, say), I'd love to hear about ’em in the comments.

*It's interesting to think about how the Iverson/Heath partnership differs from the Iverson/Hart one. Hart is just five years older than Heath (the men were born in 1940 and 1935, respectively), but that gap is important. The current Billy Hart Quartet is playing a much more, for lack of a better word, modern strain of jazz than this Iverson/Street/Heath group, focused on long, exploratory performances and mostly original repertoire. The bands sound nothing alike, and they complement each other beautifully.

*Here is Steve Smith's sharp appreciation of the Iverson/Street/Heath trio, which he caught this past Thursday. I'd like to thank Steve for the tip, which spurred me to attend last night.

 *As is customary with the Iverson collaborations, there's an extended interview on file.

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UPDATE: Thanks, Mark Stryker, for his informative intergenerational-collabo overview, which you'll find in the comments. I know a few of those examples well (Shorter, Haynes, etc., and the Cookers absolutely rule!), but some are new to me. Psyched to look into the Louis Hayes group in particular.

List-o-mania: 1996–2011

Over the past week or so, Pitchfork has been polling readers, staffers and contributors re: their favorite albums from the years 1996 through 2011, i.e., the 15-years-and-counting lifespan of the site, via a project called the People's List. My friend and former TONY staffer Colin St. John tipped me off to the project—check out his own list and commentary—and after a little procrastination, I began frantically compiling my top 100 in time for yesterday's deadline. You can view my list here, and those of other Pitchfork writers here.

Lists of this nature are strange; that fact is well established. They are strange because when it comes to such a vast and vastly diverse art form as music or movies or books, consensus is pretty damn near impossible. Phil Freeman wrote passionately and persuasively on this topic last January, with regard to his feelings of alienation from the Kanye-obsessed hordes of fellow Pazz and Jop voters. In one sense, I do not share Phil's feelings; I really enjoyed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the consensus critical pick for best album of 2010), and I included it on both my year-end top 10 list, and this most recent 15-year-spanning list. On the other hand, when I view friends' and colleagues' contributions to the People's List—here's a typically well-rounded one from another FAFTS ("friend and former TONY staffer"), Corban Goble—I can't help but feel a little apart from the Conversation at Large.

Again, this not out of hostility or reactionary-ness re: what I'll call the Indie-Rock Canon that has cohered during this Pitchfork lifespan (and which has in recent years expanded to included hip-hop/R&B—both mainstream and underground—as well as certain strains of metal, electronica, experimental music, etc.). I included quite a few records in that zone, including three Strokes albums, a bunch of Will Oldham selections, LPs by Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Dinosaur Jr., Battles, Dr. Octagon, Deerhoof and Sia, and a few more. And I like a lot of the other consensus faves, albums by Radiohead (I haven't listened to OK Computer in a good while, but I got really into it in college), Joanna Newsom (Ys is a beautiful, epic album), Built to Spill (ditto re: Keep It Like a Secret), Modest Mouse (the first song on The Lonesome Crowded West destroys me, but on the whole, I like This Is a Long Drive… better; didn't realize that was from ’96—probably should've included it!), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, Japandroids, Fucked Up, Wavves, the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and on and on. But it would've been disingenuous for me to include any of those latter albums on my top 100, because none of them has captured my heart and mind the way that, say, Colossamite's Economy of Motion (to pick one great yet largely off-the-radar album from my list) has. So my list is simply what it is, all that it really could be, i.e., a totally subjective catalog of normalcies, idiosyncrasies and, in some cases, by virtue of what is not included, blind spots, one very major one being hip-hop.

Over the past couple years, I've definitely tuned in to hip-hop more than I had in the previous decade. But I'm still no expert, and that's much of the reason why even in the case of a lot of rap I know I like (Ghostface, Outkast, Eminem), I didn't include those records; I simply haven't put in the time that in and of itself is an indication of love for an artwork. That is to say, when compiling my year-end best-of lists each December, I try not to overthink them, i.e., I simply reflect back on what I spent the most time voluntary listening to throughout that time period. In other words, you don't pick your favorites; they pick you. Last year, the Frank Ocean was a no-brainer, as was the Francis and the Lights the year before that, and the Propagandhi the year before that (speaking of Supporting Caste, which came in at No. 5 on my People's List ballot, I've started to think of this as an all-time-great album, certainly the best new record I've heard since I started to work as a full-time writer-about-music). These are simply the newly released albums that demanded my sustained attention, obsession, care, zeal, etc. during this time period. And that is all I have tried to do with this 1996–2011 list: catalog, in hasty digest form, that sustained attention over these past 15 years. I speak for no one other than myself, which is why I prefer to consider lists of this sort as lists of "favorites" rather than reflections of some monolithic "best"-ness. Taken as honest reflections of a single person's tastes, they become a whole lot less threatening and a whole lot more fun. Coming upon a list like Colin's and Corban's, where in the case of about half the selections, I know them only by title or maybe a lone track, is a chance to know more. Conversely, if even one person who checked out my picks was inspired to take a first listen to John Fahey's Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites (in TONY, I said: "During five lengthy ruminations, in which original and public-domain material mingles with Ellington, Artie Shaw and Bola Sete, you hear the haunted, heartbreaking sweep of American music as filtered through a single encyclopedic mind"), Tim Berne's The Shell Game, or anything by craw [sic], Keelhaul or Cheer-Accident, that would make me extraordinarily happy.

And that possibility, of turning someone on to something new, or inspiring them to reconsider something they thought they knew fully, is really the only reason I can see for this whole writing-about-art thing to exist in the first place. These albums speak for themselves, but for some reason, the babble of history drowns them out and we have to dig them up and praise them and let them reiterate what it is they have to teach us. Which brings me to Colin's final point, i.e., what are the sleeper 1996–2011 picks, the great albums, in any style, yet uncovered by any of the participants in this hive-mind People's List exercise? I'd be grateful for any readers' comments.

P.S. I'm already kicking myself over the purely accidental omission of Boys Life's Departures and Landfalls. I did include a record by the related Farewell Bend (Brandon Butler and John Rejba were in both bands), but Departures is a true all-time fave ’round these parts. And all of the following were records I intended to include but had to cut to get myself down to a nice, round 100:

William Parker Clarinet Trio Bob's Pink Cadillac
The Octagon Nothing But Change
Cannibal Corpse Evisceration Plague
June of 44 Tropics and Meridians
Behold… the Arctopus Skullgrid
Yukon Mortar
Territory Band–2 [Ken Vandermark] Atlas
Dan Weiss Trio Timshel 
Obituary Darkest Day 
Charred Walls of the Damned Charred Walls of the Damned
Ornette Coleman Sound Grammar 
Axis of Advance Obey

Also a shout-out to Nicki Minaj's mixtape Beam Me Up, Scotty, a shrewd selection by Corban that I totally forgot about.

P.P.S. The 1996 cut-off point was interesting for me, as it comes just a few years after the release dates of some of my favorite records of all time, albums that surely would've ended up near the top of the list had the initial year parameter been, say, 1993: two more masterpieces by craw (craw and Lost Nation Road), Morbid Angel's Covenant, Face of Collapse by Dazzling Killmen, Slip by Quicksand, Helmet's Betty, Death's Symbolic and many more.

P.P.P.S. There isn't a whole lot of jazz or improvised music on this list. I'd attribute that to a couple of factors: I didn't start listening to jazz seriously till about 1999, and much of my jazz attention up through about 2005 was devoted to playing catch-up, i.e., schooling myself on the music's vast recorded history, a project that still persists: I'd estimate that older, non-contemporary jazz still accounts for about two thirds of my current jazz intake. Also, I'd say that on the whole, album-oriented lists favor song-based, i.e., largely non-improvisatory, music. It's a silly generalization to make, I know—I'm already second-guessing it—but it's the best way I can think of to account for the fact that there's nothing by, say, Joe McPhee, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Henry Threadgill, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton on my list. All of these artists have meant a lot to me over the past 15 years, but my high estimations of their work have formed from a composite impression of live performances I've seen, records I've heard new and old, interviews I've conducted  and just a general kind of "living with" the work and attendant philosophies of figures such as these. But on the other hand, the jazz records I did include—albums by Andrew Hill, Tim Berne, the Bad Plus and others—are all albums I've savored in much the same way as the mostly rock-oriented selections on my People's List ballot: via repeated, sustained, voluntary attention. I'd like to hear folks' thoughts re: great 1996–2011 jazz records I might have overlooked; I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, especially from the period before ’05, when keeping up with current jazz releases wasn't yet part of my job.

P.P.P.P.S A running list of other worthy records from this time period, listed as I think of them:

Henry Threadgill Where's Your Cup? 
Anthrax Worship Music 
The Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers 
Weezer Pinkerton 
One Day as a Lion One Day as a Lion 
Björk Medúlla 
Xiu Xiu The Air Force
Coptic Light EP and LP

P.P.P.P.P.S Here's a great, jazz-heavy list by Destination: Out's Jeff Golick. Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is one of many shrewd selections here.

Heavy Metal Be-Bop #8: Damión Reid

The eighth installment of my jazz/metal interview series is now live in both extended and abridged versions. I've loved Damión Reid's drumming ever since I first heard him with Robert Glasper (it was either 2005's Canvas or 2007's In My Element), and more recently, his work with Steve Lehman and Greg Ward has been blowing my mind. But I had no idea he was a metal fan until Matt Merewitz, who had been keeping up with Heavy Metal Be-Bop, suggested that I talk to him for the series. So a big thank you to Matt for the tip, and to Damión for being so generous with his time. I had an awesome time working on this one.

The pleasures of post-purism: Joe Henderson in the ’70s

 My latest listening jag concerns the saxophonist Joe Henderson. For the past five days or so, pretty much all my recreational music intake has centered around him. The phase is a follow-up investigation to a flea-market LP purchase I made a couple months ago: Henderson's Black Narcissus, from 1976.

The fact that I picked up that record—an highly unusual and indisputably of-its-time session, slathered in a thick vintage-synth glaze—and my intense enjoyment of it speaks to a change in my jazz tastes over the last few years. To put it concisely, I've thrown what I now identify as my former snobby purism out the window. When I was first getting into jazz, in college, I developed a series of parameters about what periods and aesthetics interested me. Maybe this walling-off was merely practical then; getting my head around the genre was such a vast undertaking that I had to set some limits. Anyway, guided by my own innate taste and also likely by the general critical bias—shared by some of my then-colleagues at WKCR—against fusion or what I'd call posthippie jazz of any kind, I homed in on the mid-’60s Blue Note aesthetic, exemplified by Andrew Hill, Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur III, Sam Rivers, Bobby Hutcherson, Larry Young, Wayne Shorter and others, as my personal gold standard. For many reasons, records from that pool have aged incredibly well: They sound amazing, thanks to Rudy Van Gelder; they embody the most appealing characteristics of so-called "in" and "out" jazz aesthetics; the leaders and the sidemen are all virtuosos, who came up in the trenches, so to speak, and who took improvisational originality seriously; and they were made before rock, funk and pop influences whooshed into jazz, muddying the gene pool. (Rudy Van Gelder aside, the same could of course be said for the Miles quintet records of the same period.)

Simply put, I learned then a kind of prejudice against the ’70s and ’80s. What you wanted, it seemed to me, were those beautifully designed Blue Notes of the Lion/Wolff period, not the garish—visually and sonically—jazz records of the ’70s, with their super-dated graphic design and equally outmoded fashion statements in the artist photos, with subpar production values, either too clunky or too thin, to match. To bring my main point back around, I'm pretty sure I would've picked up a record like Black Narcissus out of the used bin a decade ago, noted its vintage and instrumentation (synths! congas!), and thrown it right back, confident that I wouldn't be missing out on any of what I loved about Joe Henderson's work on Pete La Roca's Basra, Andrew Hill's Point of Departure or Larry Young's Unity. (For whatever reason, I've only studied up on Henderson's great leader records for Blue Note more recently; I spent time with In ’n Out this past weekend and adored it.) I'll admit that I'm still wary of this whole "Deep Jazz"/"Rare Groove" aesthetic, as popularized by outlets like Soul Jazz Records (any longtime Wire reader will recognize their back-cover advertisements), but somewhere along the way, I realized that to wall myself from what I'll call, for my own purposes, the post–Blue Note years in jazz—i.e., post-1967, say, the year when Alfred Lion retired from Blue Note, John Coltrane died and Miles was in the process of bidding farewell to acoustic jazz—was a mistake. Sure, many musicians, maybe even Henderson himself, were swept up by the current in the ensuing decade or so; sure, the rigorous quality control that prevailed at Blue Note wasn't necessarily in evidence during Henderson's stint at Milestone (1967–1976); sure, records like Black Narcissus, and some other Milestone Hendersons I've been loving over the past few days—Black Is the Color, Canyon Lady, In Pursuit of Blackness, Power to the People—don't seem as uncannily undated as the mid-’60s Blue Note catalog does. But what I'm realizing is that purism-for-its-own-sake just isn't as interesting to me anymore; or rather, maybe it is, but I'm just as excited about jazz that is of its time, jazz where you sense a strange kind of friction between artist integrity and label bottom line; jazz where producers were setting soloists against all kinds of faddish backdrops to see what might sell; jazz, like Black Narcissus, where the confluence of free-jazzy experimentation and DJ-friendly grooving-ness makes your head spin. The title track (a piece that also appears on Power to the People, in a much more conventionally "tasteful" version) is one of the less audacious pieces on the record, but it still gives you an idea of the album's general bent, the way in which it reflects the jazz-industry climate that spawned it:



That "tasteful" I wrote above is important; in many ways, it strikes at the core of the point I'm trying to make. Is this a dated recording? Sure. It's unlikely you'd hear synths applied so liberally on a 2012 jazz album, and if you did, there would probably be some very deliberate kitsch-ification going on. Does this record have the unadorned elegance of a classic Blue Note recording? Certainly not. But then comes the trump card: Does Joe Henderson slay on this record? Absolutely. Listen as he heats up from about 2:50 on (I love that tranced-out tic around 3:10). Sure the synths are swarming around him, threatening to drown him out, but he's pushing back mightily, asserting his trademark grit and agility with as much potency as ever. In short, despite the eyebrow-raising sonic wallpaper, there's no mistaking this for anything other than a Joe Henderson record, and given what a tough-and-tender monster Joe Henderson was (RIP), a true force from the ’60s through the ’90s, for a fan of Henderson, and more broadly, of jazz to wall him/herself off from the man's output during the ’70s due to some straitjacketed notions of "good taste" seems like an aesthetic crime. Does everything on these records work? Of course not. (Some of the meandering cosmic-free-jazz abstraction on Black Is the Color springs to mind as an example thereof.) But is there some absolutely dynamite Henderson, some of the best playing I've ever heard from him, playing that's far more intense and unhinged than what you'll hear on his Blue Note recordings, on these records? Indeed. In short, any serious jazz fan needs to eventually learn to toss their superficial aesthetic hang-ups out the window if they're going to really wade neck-deep in this glorious music. Everyone loves the ’60s (and, for that matter, the ’50s); they're an easy sell—pure class, no funny stuff. But the ’70s offer a very different kind of pleasure; in the case of Henderson records like Black Narcissus, they're excessive, scattershot, confounding and also bubbling over with joy and invention. As you can see from the back-cover portrait, Henderson isn't sweating the sea change in the music:

 He's going with the flow, yes, but he's also standing his ground. Many of the great ones did the same during the ’70s and ’80s. I think of Sonny Sharrock, whose Highlife I once disdained for its aggressively poppy, borderline smooth-jazz sound palette. But there comes a time when you realize that you'll follow certain artists anywhere and that you usually won't be disappointed when you do. Is Highlife on the same level as Ask the Ages? (With Sharrock, the Henderson timeline above is reversed; Ask the Ages, his last album, is the most "Blue Note," that is to say "pure," recording he ever made and certainly one of his best.) Perhaps not, but you're depriving yourself of some highly enjoyable Sonny if you skip it. And more importantly, in walling yourself off from where your ’60s heroes went in the ’70s and ’80s, you're over-idealizing them, making believe that they didn't have to struggle to find their way during those uncertain times for jazz, that they didn't have to reckon with the industry at large and the public's changing tastes. In the case of artists as raw yet adaptable as Henderson and Sharrock (recall that the latter played in Herbie Mann's band for years), that kind of negotiation was a central fact in their career and a principal reason why their respective discographies can seem so unwieldy. But we should embrace that unwieldiness, embrace the fact that the Henderson fossil record includes exquisite specimens such as In ’n Out up as well as more transitional, rougher-hewn ones such as Black Narcissus or Canyon Lady (a lush, soundtracky, Latin-centric session, released the year before Narcissus). As I suggested above, it's all Joe Henderson, and thus it's all great. As with Sharrock, it didn't really matter what was going on around him; when he played, he spoke the truth.

A couple caveats/clarifications:

1) Granted, we're talking about very high-caliber players here; I wouldn't adopt this "I'd follow you anywhere logic" with respect to just anyone.

2) Though it touches on the same period championed in the great Behearer revolution of 2006—that is, the overdue glorification of the best jazz of the ’73–’90 period—the point I'm making above isn't the same one being made during that hive-mind blogathon. Personally, my main takeaway from the Behearer episode was an appreciation for masters such as Henry Threadgill and Keith Jarrett, artists who made their first essential statements as composers/improvisers/bandleaders during this period (give or take a couple years). In other words, neither of these artists had, like Henderson, established himself during the era of Blue Note purism. (With Sharrock, it was more an Impulse/ESP purism, e.g., as established on Pharoah Sanders's Tauhid and Marzette Watts's & Company; he does appear on a Blue Note record, Wayne Shorter's Super Nova from ’69, but there's nothing conventionally pure about that wild, esoteric-yet-rewarding LP.) "The ’70s in jazz" wasn't something that Threadgill and Jarrett had to reckon with, react to, assimilate in particular; it was simply their breeding ground. Whereas Henderson, an artist who made his name in that golden era of jazz purism, was exactly the kind of jazz musician who is often thought to have "lost his way" in the ’70s, to have bowed to the aesthetics of the time rather than helped shape them. And while it may be true that Joe Henderson was no Miles Davis, in terms of forging ahead with a clear idea of what he wanted out of his post-purist jazz, what I'm saying is that that matters less to me now than it once did. As long as I'm hearing Joe Henderson play tenor, I'm happy, whether that's in a classically styled quintet in 1964 with Kenny Dorham, McCoy Tyner, Richard Davis and Elvin Jones (damn, that lineup…) or at the center of a synth-drenched post-fusion maelstrom in 1976. I understand now that each is enriched by the other.

3) I don't mean to suggest that all of Joe Henderson's Milestone records are as aggressively non-purist as Black Narcissus or Black Is the Color. There are plenty of more-or-less straight-ahead, or inside-outside, if you will, LPs among them, In Pursuit of Blackness and Tetragon being two that stand out among my recent listening. Power to the People (1969) is another one that, while certainly funk-oriented, nicely encapsulates the more conservative (i.e., hard-/postbop-informed) brand of electric jazz that flourished at the time.

I'd love to hear about readers' similar experiences re: "How I learned to stop worrying and love the ’70s/’80s output of Jazz Musician X." I'm very curious about, e.g., the CTI catalog. Which of those records are, as they are rumored to be, poppy and slight, and which of them are rewarding in the same way that Henderson's Milestone releases are?

P.S. This clip doesn't relate to Joe Henderson in the ’70s, but I can't resist linking to the man's appearance on Charlie Rose in 1997.

The spirit of radio: WKCR's blessing

Last evening I drove to Westchester with my wife to celebrate a happy family event. On the way, we listened to WKCR, catching the tail end of Afternoon New Music (featuring side A of Distinction Without Difference, an intense 1979 Billy Bang solo set I'd never heard before) and the first chunk of Jazz Alternatives.

The show began with Chico Hamilton's Man from Two Worlds, a 1963 record that was also new to me. The title track started with a shifting bed of uptempo rhythm from Hamilton (sounding more Elvin Jones–like than I've ever heard him) and bassist Albert Stinson—a carpet of almost Indian-esque drone. Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabo drifted in with tranced-out tenor and guitar, engaging in a brief improv tangle before launching into the sing-songy, unmistakably Ornette-ish head (written by Lloyd, I'm now finding out). It was classic inside-outside jazz: steady and propulsive underneath and ear-bending up top. Unlike the Bang, it made sense as drive-time music, but the calories weren't empty. The same went for the next selection: side B of Jimmy Smith's Got My Mojo Workin'. I wasn't in love with the title track (a showcase for Smith's gruff vocals), but the Ellington (Strayhorn?) pieces that followed, "Johnny Come Lately" and "C Jam Blues," killed me with their combination of sass and class; the rhythm section alone—Kenny Burrell, George Duvivier and Grady Tate—had me doing internal cartwheels.

I didn't get to listen beyond that, but what a pleasure: to tune in at random and hear this wonderful—and in the case of the Hamilton, fairly obscure—vintage jazz, not being played to celebrate an anniversary or a new reissue, or to commemorate a passing, but spun just because. A set of music that challenged but didn't alienate, that, in the end, served the function you'd hope radio would serve around 6 p.m. on a weeknight.

For maybe a year and a half in college, I hosted a show on WKCR, the 5–8:20 a.m. Daybreak Express program, which segued right into Phil Schaap's Bird Flight (thus giving me ample opportunity to learn firsthand from the sensei). These days, I'm more a WKCR appreciator than a participant; I still host the occasional show, but whenever I tune in to the station and hear something great, I can't help but wish I still spun there regularly. I spent so many hours in that incredible library, scanning the LPs from A to Z, writing down the names of hundreds of titles that interested me (I did the same at Jazz Record Mart in Chicago around the same time), and checking out five or so at a time for dorm-room research.

Some of my happiest times at WKCR were when listeners would call in to say, "I dig what you're playing," or some variation thereof. (Plenty of times, you'd get the opposite: "This isn't jazz!" etc.) One instance in particular stands out: It must have been about 7 a.m., and I was playing "Who Does She Hope to Be?"—that gorgeous and perfectly accessible ballad from Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages. A man called the studio and said, with genuine rapture in his voice, "I love this song." It was a brief exchange—I'm pretty sure I thanked him sincerely for listening and that was pretty much it—but it planted a vivid picture in my mind. I heard background noise that suggested a car, and I imagined him cruising across one of the NYC bridges, convertible top down, just drinking in the Sonny and the sunlight and smiling contentedly. Sure, I spun plenty of "out" records during my time at WKCR, but it was at moments like this when I felt most deeply connected to the DJ's trade and to the glory of jazz radio. I felt like I was both meeting my own needs, i.e., those of a discerning curator, and the customer's, as it were, i.e., giving this kind man something beautiful to listen to on his a.m. drive. It's like Neil Peart said in "The Spirit of Radio":

Begin the day with a friendly voice,
A companion unobtrusive
Plays that song that's so elusive
And the magic music makes your morning mood

We are all our own DJs, scouring the internet, cramming our hard drives full of obscurities. But sometimes you want to surrender to a trusted source, tap into something communal, let the current carry you. Do not take WKCR for granted. To be able to turn on the radio at random on a weeknight and hear Billy Bang, Chico Hamilton and Jimmy Smith consecutively, from original LP sources and without commercial interruption? That is what is called a blessing.