The Selected Ballads

Slava + The Raj

2012-02-07T18:52:00.000-08:00

I recommend watching the entirety of this BBC documentary on the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, but if you need to be convinced, the two minutes or so starting at approximately 42:30 contain some of the best live performance footage I've seen of any musician.

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I finally finished the book I've been reading since late last year, Raj by Lawrence James, an appropriately lengthy but mostly fascinating history of the British in India. One of the things that kept me going was the succession of amazing names, mostly British. A sample:

The Marquess of Tweeddale
Sir Montstuart Elphinstone
Ba Maw
Maud Diver
Sir Bampfylde Fuller
Sir Hugh Gough
Lord Minto
Tanti Topi
Sgt. John Ramsbottom
Major Henry Broadfoot
Lieutenant Hooke Pearson
L. Marsland Gander
The Faqir of Ipi
Francis & George Younghusband
Field Marshal Viscount "Weevil" Wavell
Lord Pethick Lawrence (referred to in the book as "the Etonian vegetarian")
Field Marshal Sir Claude "The Auk" Auchinleck

Recent Record Finds

2012-01-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

Rounding up some of the better items I've found in recent record digs, stretching back to that annual colossus of record shows, the WFMU Record Fair, and including more recent trips to the pride of St. Louis record stores, Euclid Records (sorry Vintage Vinyl, I like you too), and a worthy new discovery, Greenpoint's Co-op 87. There are also one or two finds from Gimme Gimme in the East Village and Permanent Records in Greenpoint here too, plus a couple items on the soon-to-be-obsolete compact disc format.

Grant Green - Goin' West
Grant Green's Goin' West is a somewhat lesser-known link in a tradition stretching from Louis Armstrong's collaborations with Jimmie Rodgers to Sonny Rollins to Bryan & the Haggards. (I also tend to enjoy when the jazz-to-country crossover goes the other way - Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, Jethro Burns, even Merle Haggard have ventured to varying extents into jazz territory with good results.) Though it was released in the late '60s, the early '60s recording date and inclusion of "I Can't Stop Loving You" certainly suggest the influence of Ray Charles' surprise success with Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music in the choice of this concept. Whatever the impetus, this group makes it work, turning some of the potentially hokiest material into music that sounds like golden age Blue Note, which in fact it is. I think a lot of the credit has to go to Billy Higgins, who finds creative solutions for making these tunes swing. Check out Higgins on "On Top of Old Smokey" (feels weird even typing that) - great drummers are often praised for making complex music sound natural and spontaneous, but here you have a great drummer making something fairly sophisticated out of very basic musical materials. A young Herbie Hancock also sounds quite comfortable in this territory, and as for Grant Green, all I can say is that hearing that tone coming out of my speakers is one of life's great pleasures. Oh, and the bass player is Reggie Workman!

Goin' West makes an interesting point of comparison with Bill Frisell's treatment of country and folk material. Frisell revels in the beauty and simplicity of the melodies (check out Frisell's versions of "Red River Valley" with Gary Peacock, a tune that also appears here), whereas Green & co. are more about adding layers of complexity. I could imagine both approaches ending in disaster, but these musicians are too good, too tasteful for that to happen.

Pat Matheny (w/ Charlie Haden & Billy Higgins) - Rejoicing
Although I normally much prefer Bill Frisell to Pat Matheny, I've been enjoying this record more than the Power Tools record (Strange Meeting w/ Frisell, Melvin Gibbs, and Ronald Shannon Jackson) I picked up at the same time. Rejoicing is an ideal companion piece to Song X - quieter, heavy on Ornette tunes but w/out Ornette himself. If you can manage to make a bad album with Haden and Higgins on board, shame on you, but that's certainly not the case here. Everybody sounds good, although I prefer the first side, with mostly Ornette tunes, to the second side, which gets into Pat originals and some guitar synth textures.

Julius Hemphill - Blue Boye
It's probably an unfounded bias, but I tend to steer clear of solo saxophone albums, or really most solo instrumental albums that don't feature piano or guitar. I knew Julius Hemphill would do something worthwhile with the format, though. In any case, Blue Boye is really better described as a "saxophone Conversations with Myself" or a "one-man WSQ" than a solo recital, with most tracks featuring Hemphill overdubbed on multiple instruments. I love the liner note description of Hemphill, one of the masters of writing and arranging for multiple horns, confidently building up the multiple tracks in a series of single takes while still wearing his overcoat in some half-assed, freezing basement studio.

It's often been noted that there was always a strong blues feeling in everything Hemphill did (and though I may be on shaky ground, I would argue that this stronger blues strain is one of the things that distinguished the music and musicians that came out of the St. Louis BAG scene from the closely related Chicago AACM scene), and it is certainly in evidence here, as the album title would suggest. I've been particularly enjoying the bluesy, boppish and truly solo "Kansas City Line" and the funky flute and hand clap driven "Homeboy Tootin' at the Dog/Star", which brings to mind the deep roots of Otha Turner's Mississippi fife & drum pre-blues.

Charles 'Bobo' Shaw & The Human Arts Ensemble (feat. Joseph Bowie) - P'nkJ'zz
This is a NYC loft scene edition (recorded at Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea) of the Human Arts Ensemble, which had originated with a very different lineup in St. Louis as a racially integrated adjunct to the Black Artists Group. BAG-related figures Joe Bowie (whose punk-jazz fusion project Defunkt would've been operating at this time), Julius Hemphill and Abdul Wadud are on this record, and most of the music resembles the Hemphill-Wadud collaborations (with their blend of free, blues, and African gestures) more than it really touches on punk. The exception is the first track, the wild (and gloriously titled) "Steam Away Kool 1500". While it may be a stretch to call it "punk", it's certainly in your face, gesturing toward rock with a heavy electric bass groove that reminds me a little, but only a little, of Keith Jarrett's "Mortgage On My Soul". It's a bit of a disappointment when the album doesn't continue in this vein, although I also enjoy the Latin or Afro-Latin acoustic guitar-driven vamps of the next two tunes, and the last and shortest track, "Be Bo Bo Be", gives Wadud the chance to go off a bit with a bowed solo.

Especially since reading Point From Which Creation Begins, Benjamin Looker's history of BAG, I've been picking up records here and there from what might be called the post-BAG discography. I haven't yet found another Dogon A.D.-style lost masterpiece, but Hemphill certainly went on to make many strong records in the '70s and '80s (and not just with the WSQ - see above), and I've also enjoyed some of the records where Lester Bowie got together with his old St. Louis associates, such as Fast Last! with Hemphill, brother Joe, Philip Wilson and John Hicks. One I'm on the lookout for is Shaw's Streets of St. Louis, also recorded under the HAE moniker and featuring a monster lineup, including Hemphill and Wadud, both Bowies, and Hamiet Bluiett.

Sonny Rollins - There Will Never Be Another You
This has to be one of the greatest two-drummer albums, with Mickey Roker (who talks a bit about it in his DTM interview) and Billy Higgins (who participated in some notable two drummer recordings with Ornette and Ed Blackwell) burning live in the MOMA Sculpture Garden in 1965. There's some great Tommy Flanagan, and the 16-minute title track is a particular must-hear, with Sonny wandering off mike around the courtyard near the end.

Laura Nyro - Gonna Take a Miracle
The legendary Philly team of Gamble & Huff brought a restrained but meticulous production approach to this record, only unleashing the strings a couple times and putting all the focus on the vocals of Nyro and Labelle (just a few years before they hit big with "Lady Marmalade"). The result, especially on the more sparsely instrumented tracks, is something like street corner harmony in a gloomy cathedral. It's a very precise but hard to describe atmosphere I don't think I've heard on any other record. In retrospect, it was a smart move to do an album of remembered songs, songs that had nostalgic value to Nyro, in what was up-to-date style in 1971. She didn't go to Motown and try to replicate the sound of the original records, instead going with producers and singers who were still on their way up and would go on to help define the sound of '70s R'n'B. Another unexpected but effective move was sequencing what is in my opinion the strongest track last. That song, the title cut, is a tour-de-force heartbreaker, originally a minor 1965 hit for the Royalettes (check out this great video), and a great expression of the breakup-as-Armageddon trope that Jens Lekman was gently mocking/paying tribute to with "The End of the World (Is Bigger Than Love)".

It must be a mark of how much I like Robert Christgau's writing that I can get pissed off about a forty year-old review, but his dismissive B-minus write-up of this record, where the best he can say about Labelle is that they "don't screech once", is pretty galling. I imagine his anti-Nyroism was at least in part a contrarian reaction to her critical darling status amid the earnest atmosphere of the early-'70s singer-songwriter scare, but at least he was able to recognize the greatness of the "Monkey Time/Dancing in the Street" medley. When Labelle start repeating the line "don't forget the Motor City", I get chills.

Roger Woodward - Shostakovich - 24 Preludes & Fugues
This was a WFMU Record Fair find, one of a few 20th Century classical records I picked up, still under the sway of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise. This is the only version I've heard of this music, and the only thing I've heard from Woodward, who came out of Australia and is apparently still active, having recorded this in his early 30s in 1974. So, I'm thoroughly unqualified to write in depth about this, but I can see where this is in some way a 20th-century response to Bach as well as a chance for the composer to try out a bunch of ideas in short pieces. Though listening to the whole thing in one sitting is a bit taxing for someone of my attention span, there is a variety that sustains interest through the set of 24, with some pieces sounding like Baroque music with a few 20th-century harmonic touches and others more like full-blown Shostakovich squeezed into the prelude-and-fugue form. There's also a Keith Jarrett recording of the Preludes & Fugues on ECM which I'm somewhat curious about. I'm not crazy about his Goldbergs on harpsichord but I'm willing to give Klassical Keith another shot.

Mstislav Rostropovich - Britten - Cello Suites
Another one from the Record Fair. I first discovered Rostropovich through his recording of Shostakovich's first cello concerto, and after hearing this record of the first two of Britten's beautiful and technically dazzling suites for solo cello, I'm on the lookout for more recordings by the great Azerbaijani cellist. There's a record of Britten (on piano) and Rostropovich together that I'd like to hear, and there's also BBC documentary that I think is available streaming online if you do a little digging. I'd also really like to hear the 3rd Britten suite, which was written for but not recorded by Rostropovich. Another win for vinyl: this record has a really cool cover which seems not to have been retained by any of the CD releases of this music.

...and last and also least:

Having Fun with Elvis on Stage
One of music history's most notorious novelty/bizarro items, this is 37 or so minutes of Elvis' stage banter from the Adderol-addled early '70s brought to the public courtesy of Col. Parker's cynical avarice. Judging by this record, Elvis spent much of his time on stage during these years dealing with requests for his sweaty scarves from female fans of all ages.

Best Live Music Seen in 2011

2012-01-16T10:50:00.000-08:00

Once again, The Selected Ballads strives to be the last blog to submit a yearly Best Of list. The format this year is my top ten (or eleven, depending on how you count them) live shows of 2011 followed by six honorable mentions and two music-related events worthy of note. The list is in no particular order, except for the first entry, since there was no question that I had to give pride of place to the great, recently departed Paul Motian.

Paul Motian MJQ Tribute Quartet - Village Vanguard
Even if he hadn’t passed away this year, Paul Motian would’ve been my Artist of the Year. I don’t think there was any artist I saw live more times this year than Motian, and as I continued picking up his records, I may also have listened to more of his music than any other artist. The fact that his last year was such an active and creatively fertile one is both inspiring and adds to the sense of loss (what might he have done in 2012?). I think I saw all but one of the groups he brought into the Vanguard in 2011, including two different ones with Masabumi Kikuchi. It’s a tough call, but the MJQ tribute quartet (with a lineup matching the Modern Jazz Quartet’s vibes-piano-bass-drums format) was my favorite. I loved what Steve Nelson on vibes brought to the music, and this group seemed to provoke Motian to some particularly fine displays of beautifully unorthodox swing. If any of the six nights they did play were recorded in some unofficial or official form, I hope the music comes to light.

Ethan Iverson Trio (feat. Buster Williams & Ben Riley) - Smalls
and
The Bad Plus w/ Joshua Redman - Blue Note
I saw almost as much of Ethan Iverson this year as I did Paul Motian, including their trio with Larry Grenadier at the Vanguard and Billy Hart’s quartet featuring Iverson, Mark Turner and Ben Street. I chose to highlight this Smalls appearance, a trio with two masters in Buster Williams and Ben Riley (who I’ve been enjoying on Hank Jones’ Bop Redux, a Bird-and-Monk-only trio record that I picked up over the holidays), simply because it was the most fun, producing moments of surprise and beauty and swing out of some of the most familiar tunes in the canon.

This year, the Bad Plus were coming off arguably their strongest album, and I can’t imagine any instrumentalist stepping in and contributing more to their already strong material than Joshua Redman did. The fact that I was wedged into a remote corner of the Blue Note's bar area for the Bad Plus set (due to my own lack of planning) meant that seeing the trio at Smalls was a bit more enjoyable, but musically, both groups succeeded in achieving their very different ends (or was it that they achieved the same end - making good music - by different means?). They don’t need me to tell them this, but Bad Plus fans with an open ear shouldn’t sleep on Iverson’s other gigs (or Dave King’s newish duo with Matt Mitchell, either).
[Update: just noticed after posting this that DTM linked here the other day. Quite a spike in traffic around these parts. Thanks Ethan!]

Bill McHenry Quartet - Village Vanguard
I saw McHenry numerous times this year, including a fine set at Smalls, but the group he assembled for the run at the Vanguard helped make this the best. Along with two members of Tarbaby (who I regret missing when they played NYC this year), Eric Revis and Orrin Evans (who I also enjoyed this year with his Big Band and sitting in with Ari Hoenig at the drummer’s Monday night residency), Paul Motian was to have been the drummer in this group before his final illness led him to cancel all his gigs. As it turned out, McHenry made an excellent choice in calling Andrew Cyrille, and the group came together beautifully, taking McHenry’s music to places I’d never heard it go. I hope they reconvene soon.

John Hebert’s Sounds of Love - The Stone
This was a one-time, all-star band that totally delivered on its promise, making some of the best music I heard all year with an all-Mingus set. Like an unorthodox general manager assembling a great team out of seemingly incongruous parts, Hebert brought together associates from the different corners of the jazz world he inhabits, resulting in some unexpected but exciting interactions (I’d be surprised if Taylor Ho Bynum and Fred Hersch had ever shared a stage before, for example - the group also included frequent collaborators Tim Berne and Ches Smith). The set was heavy on material from Mingus’ later-period Changes albums (some of my favorite Mingus), and Hersch’s playing managed to be completely right for the material while sounding nothing like Don Pullen, whose piano was such an important element of the original albums. As with Bill McHenry, I saw Tim Berne several times this year with various groups, including Michael Formanek’s (whose latest album with Berne I've just started listening to) and a couple of groups of his own. I’ve also been enjoying the reissue of Julius Hemphill’s multi-instrument solo album Blue Boye on Berne’s Screwgun label.

Bill Frisell Quartet - Village Vanguard
Bill seems to make it into my Best Of somewhere every year, but good is good, and this set was extra-special for me as it fell on my birthday. As a baseball fan, I like to think this quartet’s (Frisell’s usual trio supplemented by cornetist Ron Miles) rendition of the “St. Louis Blues” was a harbinger of the Cardinals’ success (not to mention the resurgence of the hockey team that shares a name with the immortal W.C. Handy tune). The set also included an encore, something rarely seen at the Vanguard, with Frisell and bassist Tony Scherr pulling out acoustic guitars for a loose-but-sublime medley of “Moon River” and “Misterioso”.

Mary Halvorson Quintet - Barbes
By March, Halvorson’s group, now on their second album, had become a more powerful force since I first saw them a year or so before, when the compositions that ended up on Saturn Sings were new and horns had only recently been added to her original trio. On this night, they sounded to me like one of the best working groups around. I don’t know what the future of this lineup is, but If she can keep these players together for another album, there’s no reason to think they won’t continue on their upward trajectory.

Jeff Mangum - Loew’s Theater, Jersey City
I went into this one with some skepticism and cynicism. I’d seen Neutral Milk Hotel a couple of times back in the ‘90s and been strongly affected by them, but I had some doubts about Mangum’s “comeback tour”, playing the same music, with no new material, 10+ years later. Mangum’s still-powerful voice and the thoroughly undiminished power of his songs cut right through my defences, though. The cavernous, slightly spooky Loew’s Jersey Theater was an appropriate venue for Mangum and his ghost-haunted songs. Tantalizingly, he mentioned that he’d like to come back with “the band” and have Julian Koster play the theater’s organ. He mentioned it casually, contributing to the sense that he was just picking up from where he left off in 1999 or so, with no self-consciousness about or need to explain the long gap in his performing and recording career.

Swamp Dogg - Metrotech (Downtown Brooklyn)
Playing to an outdoor lunchtime crowd within the sterile confines of Metrotech - not the ideal conditions for deep soul music to thrive, but Swamp Dogg proved that old school showmanship and professionalism can overcome almost any obstacle if the audience is willing and the songs are strong. I’d thought of Swamp Dogg as primarily a great songwriter who also happened to be a good singer, but had no idea what a dynamic performer he is.

Sean Nelson Sings Nilsson - Rock Shop
Though he sometimes sings Nilsson with orchestral accompaniment, on this night, backed by members of Kay Kay & His Weathered Underground, Sean Nelson brought Harry into the rock club, notably on the set closing ”Jump Into The Fire”, but no less successfully on gentler tunes like “Daddy’s Song”, made famous by the Monkees, and Point favorites “Me and My Arrow” and “Think About Your Troubles”. Nelson is a hell of a singer, which you have to be to creditably sing Nilsson, and hearing songs I’ve loved for so long on record done beautifully live was a moving experience.

Marshall Crenshaw w/ The Bottle Rockets - Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago
I was excited about this pairing as soon as I heard about it, and though I wouldn’t have thought to match them up myself, I went in with high expectations and had them exceeded. I’ve seen Crenshaw a couple of times solo and heard some of his live albums, but I’ve never heard his songs sound as good as they did with this lineup. Crenshaw and Brian Henneman’s contrasting styles of guitar mastery added a good kind of tension and gave extra juice to just about every song, making these electric guitar-based songs somehow more electric. Bassist Keith Voegele ably contributed the harmonies that are so important in Crenshaw’s music, and Mark Ortmann proved to be the perfect drummer for MC’s style, reminding me a bit of Pete Thomas, a comparison that had never occurred to me while listening to Ortmann with the Bottle Rockets.

The Bottle Rockets opening acoustic set (coming off their live acoustic release Not So Loud) was also superb, taking advantage of the well-tuned sound of the Old Town’s hall. Just as the Bottle Rockets helped make Crenshaw’s old songs sound new, some gems from their own back catalog showed hidden facets as banjos were added and tempos were changed, in some cases returning to the form the songs had when first written.

Honorable Mentions

Jeremy Denk - Zankel Hall
A severe workout of a recital, pairing Ligeti’s Etudes with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, from a pianist I enjoyed on record and in writing in 2011 and hope to see and hear more from in 2012.

Logan Richardson (w/ Greg Osby, Nasheet Waits, Sam Harris, Burniss Travis) - Smalls
Tremendous group led by the impressive and still rising saxophonist, with Greg Osby (billed as “Egg Cosby”, in the tradition of “Charlie Chan” and “Buckshot LeFonque”), and the mighty Nasheet Waits on drums (I wasn’t able to catch Waits as much this year as last, but his drum duo with Dave King at the Bad Plus-Bandwagon Prospect Park show was one of the year’s great moments).

SIM Big Band - Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
A who’s who of the Brooklyn scene playing compositions by several of the members. Andrew D’Angelo’s passionate solo on Kris Davis’ composition (the title of which I don’t recall) and the drumming of Tyshawn Sorey throughout were the highlights for me.

Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio - Jazz Standard
Don Byron, whether on clarinet or sax, plays with a combination of wit and soul that seems to be a genuine expression of his personality. This new edition of his Ivey-Divey Trio project, focusing on Lester Young-derived standards and Byron originals, had Geri Allen and Charli Persip (author of How Not To Play Drums and almost the drummer on Sketches of Spain) in one of the city's classiest and most comfortable venues.

Eugene Chadbourne - The Stone
Chadbourne is someone I’d wanted to see for years, and this solo show reinforced for me what a great songwriter the good doctor is, above and beyond his impressively wacked-out instrumental prowess.

Jason Moran/Mark Helias/Tom Rainey - The Stone
A novel opportunity to see Jason Moran in a piano trio that wasn’t The Bandwagon. The greatness of Moran w/ Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits is well-known, but this was more than a novelty, as these three entered into a high-level dialogue on their first time out.

Two Music-Related Highlights of 2011

Shadows - Collapsible Hole
The Hoi Polloi company, under the direction of Alec Duffy, very creatively exploited the potential of an unusual, garage-like theater space in Williamsburg, to bring John Cassavetes’ 1959 "Beat movie" to the stage. Also a fine study in maximizing available resources, Rick Burkhardt’s music used limited instrumentation to great and varied effect, creating an appropriately hip, improvisational feel without restoring to pastiche or mere "jazziness". Shadows was somehow both irreverent toward and respectful of its source material, managing to generate real emotion and atmosphere.

Nick Tosches - Jefferson Market Library
A theatrical, borderline demonic reading by the dark bard of American music’s underbelly, with an appropriately gloomy, Gothic setting in the Jefferson Market Library and an audience that included major rock’n’roll figures like Little Steven Van Zandt and Lenny Kaye, as well as one of the original Jaynettes (who Tosches writes about in Save the Last Dance for Satan, the book he was promoting at this reading) in attendance.

Recent Live Music - Run Up to Year's End

2011-12-21T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping to put together a year-end list of the best live music I saw in 2011, but in the meantime, here are a few notes on the most recent shows I've seen:

Jason Moran/Mark Helias/Tom Rainey at the Stone
As far as I know, this was the first outing for this trio, although Helias and Rainey have played together with Tony Malaby and others. Before they started, Moran said something about looking forward to the "conversation" that was about to take place, and it turned out to be a profound one. The trio's version of Paul Motian's "Once Around The Park" was nothing like any Motian version I've heard and proved once again how rich with possibility his compositions are for contemporary improvisers. The set ended with that most joyous of blues, the "St. Louis Blues" (the 2nd time I've heard it played this year - Bill Frisell's trio back in April was the first), a perfect showcase for Moran's thorough, Jaki Byard-influenced, recombinatory command of decades of jazz piano idiom.

Kermit Driscoll/Bill Frisell/Kris Davis/John Hollenbeck at Cornelia St. Cafe
Without a doubt, the highlight of this set for me was a rhythmically reworked version of Frisell's "Lookout For Hope" that started with Davis emulating on piano the effect Frisell sometimes gets by placing a music box mechanism up to his guitar pickup and ended with Frisell playing a straight-outta-Revolver backwards guitar solo via one of his effects pedals. In between, Hollenbeck and Driscoll chopped up the rhythm, turning one of Frisell's older and more familiar tunes into a new (but still recognizable) entity.

I've been meaning to check out more of Davis' music since seeing her with the SIM (School for Improvised Music) Big Band earlier this year. That band (packed with notable downtown/Brooklyn figures) played impressive compositions by several of its members, but I thought Davis' was far and away the best.

Billy Hart/Mark Turner/Ethan Iverson/Ben Street at Dizzy's (JALC)
I'd only seen Billy Hart previously with The Cookers, but knowing some of his records and his reputation, I was excited to see him with his main quartet of recent years, which includes some of the best mid-career musicians (veterans but not yet elders) in New York (or anywhere). Hart seems to be a very interactive drummer, listening and responding, seemingly concerned with supporting each of the other members of the group while also keeping the music fresh and in-the-moment. I particularly enjoyed his interactions with Iverson during the piano solos, which made for some of the most on-the-edge exciting moments of the set. I really need to get some of the recordings this quartet has done.

Though I'd been to the Rose Theater, this was my first time at Dizzy's (I feel silly typing the rest of the name, "Club Coca-Cola"), the club-sized venue at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It's clear that they took advantage of the opportunity to design a jazz club from scratch, resulting in a comfortable, rational layout with elbow room and good sightlines, basic elements that are often lacking in older clubs that came into being more "organically".

Paul Motian

2011-11-23T07:11:00.000-08:00

I haven't tried to tally it up, but I may have written more about Paul Motian's music on this blog than any other subject. Before I moved to New York City, I'd heard him on records but it wasn't until I saw him live a couple times that I really got hooked on his music. Writing about it was a way of trying to understand what made me keep coming back (I tried to see at least one set whenever Motian played a week at the Vanguard). While I'm very sad I won't be able to see him play anymore, I plan to continue picking up his records and others that he played on (his latest, Windmills of My Mind, and Bill McHenry's Ghosts of the Sun will probably be the next ones I get), and I'll keep trying to get to the bottom of why his music has such a hold on me.

Here are links to my Motian-related posts. Looking back, a lot of the writing is not so hot (and my thoughts on Motian are sometimes followed by reviews of bakeries?!), and I don't think I really got to the bottom of what appeals to me so much about the sound world Motian was able to create each time he stepped onstage (or into a recording studio), but these pieces are interesting to me at least as a scrapbook of the man whose music enriched my life over the past few years:

Trio 3 in 1 (w/ Jason Moran and Chris Potter) from the week they recorded Lost in a Dream
A quote I really love from an interview with Motian
Motian-Lovano-Frisell in 2009
Octet+1
Motian plays in the Fred Hersch Trio - a meeting of two of my absolute favorites
An Amazon.com anomaly for one of Motian's records
A Motian-related dream
Motian-Moran-Osby
On Motian's many great collaborations w/ Charlie Haden on piano trio records
Jakob Bro and Tim Berne records w/ Motian on drums
the fabulous Motian Soul Note box set
my Best Live Music of 2010 features a couple of Motian gigs
Quintet w/ Bill McHenry
a spectacular three-week run at the Vanguard w/ three different groups
Motian's New Trio w/ Jerome Sabbagh and Ben Monder

I didn't get around to writing about the last time I saw Motian play, with Greg Osby and Masabumi Kikuchi, during what turned out to be the last of his many, many weeklong engagements at the Village Vanguard. The combo of Motian and Kikuchi was strong stuff, and Osby could mix it up with them on the same high plane. At the end of the set, which must've been profoundly disorienting for anyone in the audience who only knew Motian from his early work with Bill Evans, I remember Motian smiling, looking really pleased, as the last note was struck and he took the mic to introduce his fellow musicians. I don't know if he knew his time as a performer was coming to an end, but there was no doubt that he was having fun.

Check out some far better writing on Motian from Ethan Iverson, Jerome Sabbagh and a beautiful remembrance from photographer John Rogers. I'm sure many more tributes will continue rolling in.

The Trip

2011-10-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

Steve Coogan plays "Steve Coogan" in a film (largely) about Steve Coogan. The relationship of Coogan and Rob Bryden, previously explored to great effect in Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy (Winterbottom also directed The Trip), makes this a bit like the British Old Joy, a road trip buddy movie about friendship and the tug of war between freedom vs. responsibility, substituting the English Lake District for the Pacific Northwest. As scenic as Old Joy, The Trip is, on a more modest scale, nearly as layered and digressive as Shandy. Though clearly a fiction, the film draws heavily on the public personas of the two men and leaves us wondering how accurate a glimpse of their inner lives we've actually been given.

I liked how the emotional threads emerge as the characters try to repress their anxieties (about aging, career, etc.) or hide them beneath a veneer of humor (even when the humor is precisely about those anxieties). Coogan is by turns critical and dismissive of Bryden's (rather masterful) celebrity impressions when they're together (the premise is that Coogan has brought Bryden along on a sort of journalistic food tour of the North of England), but then we see him practicing them alone in front of the bathroom mirror, a picture of insecurity. The interplay of the ridiculous (the constant dueling impressions) and the more "serious" content was handled with relative subtletly and naturalness, capturing something very true about the way men talk about pop culture as a way of avoiding more personal or serious subjects. I only felt the balance tip too far in one direction at the end, when the contrast between Brydon returning to his family and Coogan to his cold, empty luxury apartment was scored with music a little too "on the nose", as if the point wasn't already obvious from the images.

All said, though, this is one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen all year and certainly one of the funniest. I wonder if it would work as well for someone who hadn't seen Tristram Shandy or wasn't familiar with Coogan's early work (especially Alan Partridge). Even without that background, I think it would be obvious that Coogan and Bryden are operating here at a very high level, turning the mundane, the trivial, and the repetitive into hugely effective comedy (they're helped by editing which displays timing almost as sharp as that of the actors, letting bits run on just long enough and cutting on just the right beats). Before watching the film, I didn't realize that it had been edited down to feature length from a longer TV series. Netflix doesn't seem to have the TV version, but a great deal of the cut material seems to be on the U.S. DVD as deleted scenes, including a sequence of multiple takes of a driving scene where Coogan and Brydon explore the idea of a historical drama where a lord (to be played by Coogan) instructs his men that they leave for battle at "10ish" in the morning. Watching the two actors try out seemingly endless variations on this simple idea (Coogan must say "Gentlemen, to bed" about 150 times) was hypnotic and absolutely fascinating, putting me into some sort of weird comedy trance.

[I enjoyed this list of commercial voice-overs the versatile, prolific and apparently ubiquitous-in-the-UK Bryden has done, according to his Wikipedia page: Renault, Tango, The Times, Tesco, Abbey National, Sainsburys, McDonald's, Toilet Duck, Cahoot, Mint Card, Pot Noodle, Domino's Pizza, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, The Observer, Fairy Liquid]

Bob Cassilly

2011-09-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

A few words about the great St. Louis sculptor/builder/doer/civic hero Bob Cassilly, who died this week in an accident while working on his long-anticipated Cementland project:

Bob Cassilly's work appeals to a huge range of people - it could never be called "elitist" - and works on many levels. It doesn't allow you to engage with it on a purely intellectual basis - it appeals to the physical, to memory, to things in the brainstem - but if you do choose to think about it, there are precedents to be found in the history of art and architecture - the monsters of Villa Orsini, obsessive "outsider"/folk art sculptors like Simon Rodia of the Watts Towers, and, above all in my mind, Antoni Gaudi. When I visited the Guell Park, I thought of Bob's work and was amazed that I'd never made the connection before. The mosaic work, the torquing cave-like arcades, the creatures - all have their echoes in Cassilly's work. But while Gaudi served wealthy patrons and the Church, Cassilly was truly a people's artist, making the best kind of public art, accessible but never condescending. He was like a DIY Gaudi, working with reclaimed materials (Gaudi's mosaics were made from discarded dinne plates and the like, but Cassilly took recycling and architectural salvage to a whole new level in the City Museum). And like Gaudi, his work was heavily craft-dependent - he needed a team of skilled craftsmen to realize his visions, but Cassilly was himself a great craftsmen, hands-on literally to the end.

In creating the City Museum, Cassilly and his collaborators (sometimes referred to as the "cowboys" or as their Twitter feed has it, Cassilly's "personal build monkeys") took an old shoe factory and turned it into, among other things, a repository of dreams...and nightmares. As the upper and outer parts of the museum allow you to climb into open space, high and free above the city, the lower regions of the museum, often aided by clever lighting, and especially after the addition of the Enchanted Caves, seemed to be an outlet for Cassilly's darker imaginings, or a portal into them. Primordial creatures lurk, concrete seems to melt, ooze, and mate with twisted metal. The logic of the museum's circulation is dream logic - slides and spiral staircases skip over several stories of the building, tunnels with the mouths of beasts spit you out in unexpected places. Perhaps only in Bob Cassilly's hands could the friendly burger-wielding Bob's Big Boy take on an eerie, portentous quality, as he does in the carnivalesque Beatnik Bob's section of the museum (of course, I may be the only person who took it that way!).

Terms like "interactive art" and "adventure play" become meaningless when applied to Cassilly's work because it goes so far beyond the type of work usually described by those terms. I'm pretty sure Bob never felt the need to study the "psychology of play" or the developmental needs of children in creating the City Museum or Turtle Park (which he famously vandalized in protest after his concrete sculptures were covered in an epoxy coating - a far greater vandalism, in his estimation). He didn't have to, because he'd somehow never lost the ability to see things from a kid's point of view. "Inner child" was a term that cropped up in almost any piece of writing about Cassilly, and to say he was "in touch" with it is probably a significant understatement. There were stories of him challenging members of his crew to race him up ladders (with a $100 bill as the prize). In an early story about the Cementland project (which, I noticed upon rereading, also includes a Gaudi comparison that wouldn't have meant much to me at the time it was written, before I'd seen Gaudi's work in person), he was quoted on the pent-up desire he was sure people had to throw rocks off of the site's tall smokestacks, a desire he fully intended to satisfy (he rejected his earliest idea for the site, which was to fill it with sand and bring in camels). It was the combination of a child-like imagination with business acumen and the ability to make stuff happen which really made Cassilly a rarity, and an absolutely irreplaceable figure. If his final project is completed with even half of his conception intact, it will surely be a helluva thing to experience.

I thought that grabbing links to the best photos I could find on Flickr would be a suitable tribute since Cassilly's work begs to be photographed and is difficult to photograph badly - intensely three-dimensional, his work looks interesting from any angle, and as the photos of the City Museum show, it can be experienced from any angle, often from inside and out. I went a little nuts once I started browsing Flickr - I've got 65 links so far and that's only the City Museum. I might do some organizing and add photos of more projects, but these should give you a taste if you've never made it to St. Louis to see Cassilly's work for yourself (and I of course recommend you do):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
60 61 62 63 64 65

Bonus Links
Two accounts (with a video) of Cassilly's 2003 boxing match at the City Museum, by notable St. Louis scribes Thomas Crone and Randall Roberts.

Three Un-recent Movies Seen Recently

2011-09-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices
I don't remember exactly when or where I first heard about this one, but I did some have curiosity about the (to me) mysterious world of polyphonic vocal music - motets, madrigals, etc - and, at this point, I would watch a Werner Herzog documentary on just about any subject. Herzog's rather free (to put it mildly) approach to documentary filmmaking surely reaches one of its highest points of invention in Death for Five Voices, as he packs numerous staged scenes and outright fabrications into a 60-minute running time (it was originally made for German TV). Though anyone with an ounce of natural skepticism or previous acquaintance with Herzog's documentaries will be doubting at least half of what they see on-screen, it's all somehow appropriate in telling the story of a man, Prince Carlo Gesualdo, who inspired plenty of wild legends and rumors in his own time and for centuries after. Why shouldn't Herzog get to invent some of his own?

Though some of the stories Herzog tells about the mad, murderous composer are fictional or exaggerated, the music, performed for the film by a couple of different ensembles, is very much for real and quite striking. Though I didn't know enough about the style or have a good enough ear to immediately distinguish the elements that made Gesualdo's music so strange in its own time but attractive to much later composers like Stravinsky, Herzog includes enough explanation from musicians/musicologists to give the viewer things to listen for without getting into levels of detail that might have bogged down a 60-minute film. Herzog rarely gets bogged down, especially in his documentaries, which with their abundance of fascinating people, places, and events have represented his stronger work in recent years. The Herzog filmography contains many lesser-known gems like Death in Five Voices, The White Diamond being only the first that comes to mind.

The Loved One
Check out the list of names associated with this movie, from 1965: Tony Richardson (fresh off his Oscars for Tom Jones) as director; Jonathan Winters, John Gielgud, Liberace, Milton Berle, James Coburn, Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Rod Steiger, and Paul Williams among the cast; Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood as screenwriters, adapting Evelyn Waugh; Haskell Wexler as DP and producer and Hal Ashby as editor. It's not uncommon for movies that are overstuffed with big names to be big flops, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It's dark, a bit strange, and has strong performances from all the leads, including Mad Men's Robert Morse as the at-first befuddled but ultimately resourceful protagonist, an English poet living by his wits in LA. There are so many off-the-wall characters (none more so than Steiger's Mr. Joyboy, though he has stiff competition) and bizarre/surreal set pieces that it almost doesn't matter whether it all adds up, but for the most part I think it does.

The Loved One is one of the many, many films in which Hollywood turns the camera on itself, though here the the funeral industry (along with the pet cemetery business, anticipating Errol Morris' Gates of Heaven) plays an even bigger role than the film industry in making up the strange sea in which Morse's fish-out-of-water finds himself. The idea of a lone sane man and/or outsider trying to survive in the insanity of Southern California is something of a film subgenre, of which Sunset Boulevard and The Long Goodbye are two of the finest examples (though here, as in Sunset Boulevard, the hero is not exactly a white knight, but a man with ambitions whose eye for opportunities is sharper than his moral code).

I don't know how faithful the adaptation is to Waugh's novel, but Terry Southern's influence seems evident in the tone of the movie - anti-authoritarian, satirical, horny, and a bit perverse. The Loved One looks forward to the similarly-themed but more anarchic (and to me, less effective) movies that Southern was involved in later in the '60, Easy Rider and The Magic Christian. While not a restrained piece of work by any means, The Loved One shows more craft and discipline than those later films, which for me typify the period after the decline of "studio system" craft but before the "new Hollywood" had really found its footing. Simultaneously experimental (or perhaps just aping experiments done years before in Europe) and nakedly/desperately appealing to the "youth market", some of these movies (like the Monkees' Head) are still great fun to watch, but they tend to give the impression that most of the cast and crew were high and/or assuming the audience would be.

One last, rather trivial note: I took the shots of rotating statues in the Whispering Glades "memorial gardens" to be an obvious nod to Godard's Contempt (try 1:25 in this excerpt), but in the making-of doc on the DVD, Wexler makes no mention of Godard, even though he singles out those shots and discusses how he set them up. As Contempt opened in the US less than a year before The Loved One was released, I suppose it's possible that Wexler and Richardson wouldn't have seen it in time, but if not, it's a pretty striking coincidence.

Jubilee
Derek Jarman's Jubilee has an all-star cast of a different sort, featuring generally lesser known actors but some big names from the music world, including a very young Adam Ant, punk/glam pioneer Wayne/Jayne County, Siouxie and the Banshees, and soundtrack contributions by Brian Eno. Jarman seemed to have a great ability to find a style for each of his films suitable to the subject (the compositions, lighting, and use of color in Caravaggio, for instance), and the anarchic, violently eclectic look and flow of Jubilee (apparently inspired in part by early punk 'zines) is no exception, though it's not entirely clear how much of this was planned and how much resulted from necessity, disorganization, or lack of funds. As with The Loved One, the succession of wild characters and strange happenings keeps things interesting, with Jarman stuffing a surplus of ideas (mostly good ones) into the cinematic blender.

Among the strange case of characters, Toyah Willcox's performance as Mad, the genuinely frightening butch pyromaniac, is of particular note. Though she was a serious, trained actor in a cast made up largely of non-actors, friends of Jarman, and genuine punks, her performance came across to me as more "real" and believable than some of those who may have been playing characters much closer to their off-camera selves. Apparently Willcox later became something of a pop star, but I hadn't heard of her, and until I saw the making-of documentary, I assumed she was someone Jarman found trawling around London punk shows.

Though very much inspired by and steeped in the punk aesthetic, Jubilee is by no means a celebration of punk. Jarman was an outsider, fascinated by the aesthetics but able to retain a critical distance from the scene he was immersing himself in. His skepticism about punk as a cultural revolutionary movement is part of the reason Jubilee is still watchable as something more than a period piece and helps explain why many scenesters were apparently upset and disappointed with the film when it opened (most notoriously, Vivienne Westwood, who responded with her "Open Letter to Derek Jarman" t-shirt, a reading of which reveals that Jarman's film certainly hit a nerve). This reaction from the true believers is understandable in light of the film's (cynical but, in retrospect, rather uncontroversial) suggestion that punk was just another style ripe for co-option and exploitation by the star-making machinery. Even some of Jarman's friends and associates took the film as a politcally conservative piece of nostalgia for the Golden Age of Elizabeth I, and there is certainly enough material in the film to make that a defensible interpretation, though not the only one.

Jubilee fits well with some of the work that Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg, among British directors, were doing in the '70s, as well as having some apparent nods to Kenneth Anger and, perhaps inevitably, to some of Godard's late-'60s films. Jarman was clearly well-read, but the book that Jubilee put me in mind of was written many years later. The idyllic seaside ending (with Elizabeth and her astrologer/advisor/magus John Dee walking off along some very scenic cliffs) reminded me a bit of Iain Sinclair's novel Downriver, which, like Jubilee, shows contemporary Britain (Downriver came out just after the Thatcher era; Jubilee just before) through a dark, twisted mirror (Sinclair also shares Jarman's fascination with Dee, though I don't recall that he figures in Downriver). In both works, the ending feels like a relief, resigned if not necessarily hopeful, after the violence and grotesquerie that went before. In an unexpected but effective touch, Jarman lets the seagull sounds from the last scene continue for a minute or so over a black screen, like the blank pages at the back of a book, inviting the audience to sit for a bit longer and reflect.

Gedney at Duke

2011-09-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

I've just started reading Geoff Dyer's newish essay/review collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and Dyer has already led me to an amazing find - the online William Gedney archive at Duke University. Dyer co-edited a book of Gedney's photographs and writings (most of which apparently went unpublished during his lifetime), and the photos of India seem to have been a major influence on Dyer's excellent Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. The book, What Was True, seems to be out of print and selling for four to five times its original $35 list price online, but the Duke website will do nicely until I can get my hands on a copy. Besides the Benares/Varanasi photos and the photos of Kentucky, Haight-Ashbury, and Brooklyn (Gedney was a longtime resident and chronicler of Myrtle Ave - his notebooks on the subject are like the Brooklyn Arcades Project) that Dyer mentions in his essay, my favorite find so far in the archive is a mockup of a planned book on contemporary composers, with great photos of just about all the big names of Gedney's time - Partch, Feldman, Wolpe, and the big Bs and Cs: Babbitt, Barber and Bernstein, Cage, Carter and Copland.

Four Items - A Boot, A Beard, A New Trio, A New Bakery

2011-08-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'm willing to confess that I've tended to enjoy bands influenced by the Velvet Underground more than the VU themselves, which may explain why I enjoyed this (probably old news to VU fanatics but new to me) live bootleg recording - purportedly recorded from a mic placed inside Lou's amp - better than almost any VU I've heard. Wherever the mic really was, the mix is very heavy on guitars, with drums and organ audible and vocals faint to non-existent (I believe this is the Reed-Morrison-Yule-Tucker lineup). If it hasn't already been done, somebody should start a band doing instrumental versions of VU songs. But make sure the guitars are plenty loud.

Two other guitar-centric items:

Having taken a pass on most of Bob Pollard's many, many post-GBV releases, I'd been meaning to check out more of his Boston Spaceships project and was finally pushed to shell out for one of the albums by Tom Scharpling's endorsement of Let It Beard on the Best Show. (It's the latest from the Spaceships, but I'm going to assume that Pollard has released something else in the four weeks or so the record has been out.) Beard's got only two fewer tracks than Alien Lanes (26 vs. 28) but close to double the run time. I wouldn't mind some of the songs being tightened up a bit, or even radically truncated early-GBV style, but the BS's generally make good use of the extra length and the hit-to-dud ratio is pretty high here. Choice cuts include "Chevy Marigold", "Earmarked for Collison", "I Took on the London Guys", "Red Bodies", "The Vicelords"(!) and "German Field of Shadows". Unfortunately, after those last two, "Speed Bumps" is a speed bump in the album sequence, a missed opportunity (Pollard's lyrics, about driving-while-texting or something, don't live up to the great bouncy backing track) that interrupts the record's cruise to the finish line.

I saw the first set of Paul Motian's new trio (billed, straightforwardly enough, as Paul Motian's New Trio, probably a reference to the fact that it has the same sax-guitar-drums lineup as Motian's longest-running trio with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell) at the Village Vanguard last night and I think the drummer has another winner on his hands. Ben Monder, who's played with Motian in several different configurations, is a guitar monster who deserves wider recognition. His guitar sound ranged from atmospheric to menacing evil in the course of the hour-long set. The new element was Parisian native Jerome Sabbagh on tenor. Not having heard him before, I sampled some tracks on his website (many featuring Monder) and immediately got the impression that this was a guy who was already operating in Paul Motian's general sound neighborhood, an impression borne out by his performance with the trio. Sabbagh might have negotiated the standards a bit better than the Motian tunes (which seems natural for a first time out), but he was compelling throughout, and I'm tempted to check in again later in the week to see how this group develops.

On a last, non-musical note, the place I've been touting as the best bakery in NYC to anyone who would listen, Almondine (in Red Hook and Park Slope), has some competition from a new Cobble Hill spot, Bien Cuit on Smith St. I need to try more of their breads, but the baguette is more than solid and I'd put the pastries up against any in the city. Based on the evidence so far, this is the real artisan bakery deal, of the kind that seems to be more often seen on the West Coast (where artisan bakeries were an actual thing before the word "artisan" got degraded to a laugh line through rampant overuse) and only aspired to here. Going in the afternoon after Irene, when they were just reopening, was like a non-early-rising bakery lover's dream. It was mid-afternoon but everything was fresh out of the ovens.

Jim Dickinson on Big Star's Third

2011-08-15T17:57:00.000-07:00

This post is over a year old, but I just discovered it. Jim Dickinson interviewed about the recording of Big Star's Third (aka Sister Lovers, aka Beale Street Green). If you're a Big Star/Alex Chilton fan, this is THE SHIT.

Recent Listening - Jones and More

2011-08-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

Hank Jones - The Oracle (with Dave Holland and Billy Higgins)
From 1989 - if you heard this record in a blindfold test and weren't familiar with Hank Jones, I don't think you'd ever guess that it featured a 70 year-old pianist who was born several years before Bud Powell and within a year of Monk. Of course, this is one of the standard lines on Hank Jones - though he could play authoritatively in older styles, he stayed contemporary over an incredible number of decades - but it's absolutely true and particularly striking on this session. The first track, Jones' "Interface", starts things off like a blast of fresh, cool air on a hot, muggy day. Holland and Higgins are tremendous in this trio, as you'd expect, though I wish there was a touch more Higgins in the mix (Holland is particularly well-recorded). Though Jones recorded with so many of the great musicians and assembled some amazing trios, and I have a long way to go in catching up with, for example, Ethan Iverson's deep knowledge of the Jones discography, I can't imagine he ever had a trio much better than this one. So why is this record apparently out-of-print?

I've also been listening to Jones' entry in the Live at Maybeck Hall solo piano series. His full, two-handed approach was great for solo playing. Some of my favorites so far from this concert are "Blue Monk", on which Jones makes creative use of Monk's harmonic and melodic material without entering the realm of deconstruction or abstraction, and "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'", the famous Rogers & Hammerstein tune he also recorded with Joe Lovano but which, to my knowledge, hasn't been done by too many other jazz musicians. You can feel the sun coming up when Hank Jones plays that tune. I also find Jones' version of Joe Bushkin's "Oh, Look at Me Now" (also recorded with Lovano on the excellent Kids) irresistible. From reading some interviews, it seems like Jones had an excellent dry wit, which would explain the introduction (given a separate track on the CD) where he refers to Bushkin (who composed "Oh, Look at Me Now" in 1941) as "one of the newer writers on the scene".

On the subject of remarkable pianists, I just watched a Marc-Andre Hamelin DVD I got from Netflix. Recorded a few years ago in Germany, it has a documentary piece combining interview and concert footage plus the full length interview and recital that the documentary draws on. All parts are well done, very professionally edited and shot, with good sound, but you could almost skip the documentary and go straight to the full length interview and concert tracks. I guess not everyone wants to watch an hour-long interview about classical concert piano conducted by a soft-spoken, almost taciturn (or perhaps just respectful) German interviewer, but I find Hamelin a fascinating character and enjoy watching his mind work. He's hugely intelligent and articulate and has a slightly odd but charmingly Canadian sense of humor. The recital features a fairly conservative program - Haydn, Chopin, Debussy, and some Gershwin in the encores - for Hamelin, who is known for playing works by lesser known composers along with his own compositions, but he's capable of making anything new - not by updating or modernizing anything but simply by playing the pieces so well. Or, you might say, so thoroughly - there seems to be no idea, nuance, detail that the composers put into these pieces that Hamelin does not extract and present clearly to the listener.

The new Okkervil River, I Am Very Far, is turning out to be a textbook "grower" for me. It didn't make much of an impression on first listen, but lots of nice musical and, especially, lyrical details keep revealing themselves (as mentioned in the previous post).

I recent purchased the Gillian Welch version of John Hartford's "In Tall Buildings" from this tribute album. Gillian's introduction pretty much nails it - this song will make you want to quit your job if your job involves a subway commute and an elevator ride, and maybe even if it doesn't. If "In Tall Buildings" isn't being included in anthologies of the great American folk songs, it should be.

I learned about Felt via the Clientele and Alasdair MacLean's expressed admiration for them and their leader Lawrence, but I didn't know about Lawrence's next band, Denim, until reading some tributes to him on his 50th birthday. This is a great example of his work, reminiscent of, and perhaps deliberately nodding to, some of Ronnie Lane's songs with the Faces.

Bitter, Sour, Sweet, & Misheard - Items Re: Food & Drink

2011-08-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

Ramazzotti Amaro
This Italian bitter liqueur (whose producer apparently spent a bit of money on their website) is less bitter and less brightly colored than Campari. I'm not a big fan of it on the rocks or straight, but I have discovered a great use of it for dessert - a splash of Ramazzotti with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I also enjoyed it as a sub for sweet vermouth in what I called an Imperfect Manhattan:
1.5 oz rye whiskey
0.5 oz Ramazzotti
0.25 oz Dolin dry vermouth
a splash or two Angoustura bitters
stirred with ice and strained into a chilled glass

There is (or was - it appears to have been a limited thing) a Ramazzotti Ritter Sport Bar, which I would love to try if they're still available anywhere.

----------

Speaking of Ritter Sport chocolate bars, is the Olympia flavor (yogurt, honey and hazelnut) a great Ritter Sport flavor or the greatest Ritter Sport flavor? I've only seen it at places that carry large numbers of Ritter flavors (probably 10 or more), but it is worth seeking out. It has a sour-sweet thing that I've certainly never encountered in a candy bar.

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Okkervil River's "The Valley" from their latest, I Am Very Far
For the first couple of listens, I heard the phrase "in the valley of the rock'n'roll dead" as "in the valley of the rock'n'roll deli" (would've been a nice internal rhyme) and assumed Will Sheff was referencing this place, on 6th Ave just south of Central Park.

Martin Amis' Joystick (Not a Metaphor or Euphemism)

2011-08-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

Though today's Slate article on Martin Amis' arrival in Brooklyn was thoroughly unnecessary, covering ground that had already been trampled by herds of Brooklyn blogs in the past several months, I am thankful to Troy Patterson for one piece of information in the story. I had no idea, and still can't quite believe, that Amis published a book on video game tactics. As in, how to get high scores on Asteroids and Space Invaders. Check it out - seeing the recognizable Amis style applied to the minutiae of old skool arcade gameplay is mind-bending.

Recent Listening - Focus on 1977-1980

2011-07-27T18:36:00.000-07:00

I noticed that four of the albums I've been listening to lately and wanted to write something about were all released between 1977 and 1980. Though an essay could probably be written on the way McCartney and Lowe responded to the musical trends of the time with the albums mentioned below, I'll leave it to the reader to draw any larger conclusions about the period from this basically arbitrary quartet.

Andrew Hill - Strange Serenade
I bought this 1980 trio record after seeing it mentioned by both Russ Lossing and Hill's last bassist, John Hebert, in a piece honoring what would've been Hill's 80th birthday. If it seemed odd for this relative obscurity (with a pretty lame cover) in Hill's catalog to be mentioned by two of the five musicians asked to name favorite tracks, it made a lot more sense after one listen. The first thing that really struck me about this album is how much this trio reminds me of Jason Moran & the Bandwagon, especially on the long first track, "Mist Flower". There are some obvious connections: Hill was apparently something of a mentor to Moran and the drummer on Strange Serenade is Freddie Waits, father of Bandwagon drummer Nasheet Waits, who also played and recorded with Hill. I haven't heard a ton of Freddie Waits, but he sounds great on this record, seeming to push Hill and stretch the framework of the music just the way Nasheet does at times with Moran. Avant bassist extraordinaire Alan Silva is stylistically different from the Bandwagon's Tarus Mateen, but he shares what seems like a natural aversion to playing the conventional thing, and both combine with the drummer to create the impression of something unleashed and untamed.

Woody Shaw - The Iron Men
Shaw's 1977 album, actually billed as "Woody Shaw with Anthony Braxton", also features Arthur Blythe, Muhal Richard Abrams, Cecil McBee, and Joe Chambers and the previously unknown-to-me Victor Lewis (looks like I should have known about him, as he has an impressive resume and is apparently still playing and teaching) alternating on drums. The album seems to be a dedication to Eric Dolphy, the title a reference to the album and song "Iron Man", both of which Shaw appeared on. "Iron Man" also appears as the first track here. There's also an Andrew Hill composition, "Symmetry", and the overall style of The Iron Men fits into the same fertile zone between hard bop and free jazz that much of Dolphy and Hill's work inhabited.

Muhal Richard Abrams sounds particularly good to me in this context - there's something beautifully clear, almost illuminated, about both his sound and the ideas he's playing on this record, including some really nice comping. Iron Men is also a good place to hear why bassist Cecil McBee (still very active today at age 76) was on so many records with so many major and stylistically diverse figures in the commercially dark (though artistically strong) period for acoustic jazz that was the late '60s through the early '80s.

The rendition of Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz" makes an interesting point of comparison with the way AACM-affiliated musicians like Abrams and Henry Threadgill approached early jazz and pre-bop material, though the template for Shaw's version was clearly the recording of it he made with waltz master Eric Dolphy (with Dolphy on flute). The tune seems to have had continuing appeal, as Greg Osby recorded it with Andrew Hill late in Hill's career on The Invisible Hand. As fine as the nods to Dolphy, Waller, and Hill are, the album reaches a climax on Shaw's own "Song of Songs", which includes sections of pretty hot interplay between Shaw and Abrams, then Braxton and Blythe, an Abrams solo containing moments where he sounds like two pianists playing simultaneously, and an all-in blow-out before a fade-out at 12:45.

McCartney II
Is the fact that I really enjoy this (in some ways, obviously flawed) album a sign of some terrible decadence in my taste, an incurable soft spot for Paul, or has contemporary music reached a place where McCartney's 16-track home recordings, released in 1980 and by turns dubby, new-wavey, disco-y, and dopey (both meanings), sound fresh, invigorating, and maybe even relevant? While catching up with some Best Show on WFMU episodes via podcast - I tend to be about 3 weeks behind - I heard prominent and passionate McCartney fan Tom Scharpling mention McCartney II a couple of times, including recommending notoriously WTF? outtake "All You Horse Riders", included on the bonus disc of the reissue, for anyone who thinks John Lennon was the weirder, more "experimental" Beatle. While I find "Horse Riders" more of an amusing (and truly strange) curiosity than something that bears repeated listening, I can't get enough of "Check My Machine". A B-side which also appears on Disc Two of the reissue, it's certainly odd but also masterful, full of cool little hooks and sonic details. It almost makes me regret not getting the super-deluxe reissue which includes the much longer, unedited version.

Speaking of odd but masterful, I've had Nick Lowe's "Nutted By Reality" stuck in my head since the two-LP reissue of 1978's Jesus of Cool arrived at my place a few days ago. What kind of mad genius could devise a song that starts off with a funky Jackson 5 intro, followed by the opening lines "Well I heard they castrated Castro / I heard they cut off everything he had", then shifts midway into an almost unrelated strummy/bouncy part with lush, harmonized vocals to describe the titular "nutting"? The same kind that could write catchy dachshund-eats-silent-movie-star song "Marie Provost" (included in my previous Lowe Top Ten). This is certainly one reissue I'm glad to have bought on vinyl, because Yep Roc did an excellent job with the packaging, including both the original cover and the American, Pure Pop for Now People version in what looks like a reversible gatefold (I haven't actually tried reversing it). Also, why is colored vinyl cool? I don't know, but it is. I should also take this opportunity to declare my preference for "Shake and Pop" over "They Called it Rock". While basically the same song, I like the former's dirtier, more lowdown, almost glammy groove a bit better than the latter's more straightforward Rockpile/Dave Edmunds/rockabilly bounce. Lowe's upcoming opening slots for Wilco should be interesting - will they do "I Love My Label" together?

One last item, departing from the '77-'80 theme:
I just listened to the entire first side of The World of Harry Partch (from 1969), comprising the single track "Daphne of the Dunes", before I realized that I was playing it at 45 instead of 33-1/3 RPM. Since Partch and his musicians were playing his own custom-designed instruments tuned to microtonal scales of his own devising, there's really no reference point outside of Partch's own music to tell if the intruments don't sound "right", but part way through the piece I did start to wonder just how the marimba players in particular were able to negotiate the mixed- and irregular meters at such breakneck tempo. It's still impressive at the correct speed, but if you happen to have some Partch on vinyl, check it out at 45 (I guess you could also speed up an MP3, but where's the fun in that?).

Vern Gosdin's version of Donovan's "Catch the Wind". If lovin' it is wrong, I don't wanna be right. Great as his original recording was, Donovan sounds like a little boy compared to grown-ass man Vern Gosdin.

Gosdin's other big foray into mid-'60s pop territory, The Association's "Never My Love", doesn't work quite as well for me despite a strong vocal.

Recent (and Less Recent) Live Music, Part Four - Master Drummers

2011-07-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

Here are some more reports on music I’ve seen in the last month or so. All three of the shows in this installment have at least one thing in common - they all featured master drummers: Charli Persip with Don Byron and Geri Allen (playing under the banner of Byron’s Ivey-Divey Trio, earlier versions of which have featured Jason Moran and Jack DeJohnette, among others), Ben Riley with Ethan Iverson and Buster Williams, and Andrew Cyrille with Ben Street and David Virelles. I'm always aware that I don't really possess the knowledge or language to adequately describe what musicians of this level are doing, but reading Robin Kelley's Monk biography has reminded me that there is value in documenting the day-to-day life of this music - who played with who, what they played, how it sounded - for future reference, even if the documentation is inadequate or incomplete. Some of the reviews Kelley quotes sound ill-informed, ignorant, or just plain laughable to us today, but even if they give a distorted picture, it may be the only picture we have of a particular moment in time.

Don Byron/Geri Allen/Charli Persip at Jazz Standard

I think of Persip mostly as the drummer on Mal Waldron’s amazing The Quest with Eric Dolphy, but his discography ranges far and wide (I love that he put out an album called No Dummies Allowed, though I haven’t heard it) in a career almost (but not quite) reaching back to the era that inspired Byron’s original Ivey-Divey album, a tribute of sorts to the famous Lester Young-Nat Cole-Buddy Rich session of the mid-’40s. Though playing as the Ivey-Divey Trio, the set went beyond the music of Byron’s original album to include Mel Torme’s ballad “Born to Be Blue”, featuring some tasty ballad tenor from Byron and impeccably swinging brushwork from Persip; “Joe Btfsplk”, a Byron original featuring a twisty clarinet melody which was not nearly as melancholic as might be expected for a tune named for a Li'l Abner character with a perpetual rain cloud over his head ("an allegory for clinical depression", according to Byron); and even some Monk (“Four in One”, I think), on which Allen, surely one of the better living Monk interpreters, did some particularly fine work.

Ethan Iverson/Buster Williams/Ben Riley at Smalls

Ben Riley is probably best known as a Monk alum, appearing on many of Monk’s major live and studio recordings of the ‘60s. Like Persip, though, he has a huge and wide-ranging discography, from Sonny Rollins’ The Bridge to his role in Sphere and other projects with Kenny Barron and Buster Williams. I listened to a Kenny Barron live trio album with Riley and Williams several times before seeing them with Iverson at Smalls. Iverson himself told the audience that he’d been listening to Riley and Williams with Jimmy Rowles and Mary Lou Williams as preparation for the gig. Although I wouldn’t have picked up on these influences, whatever preparation he did certainly paid off.

I’d seen Iverson playing the jazz canon at Smalls before, with Tootie Heath, and like that gig, this meeting with the masters was a lot of fun. The trio seemed to be feeling each other out a bit with the first set opening “Now’s the Time”, but things quickly took off from there. “These Foolish Things” was an early highlight as Iverson dug into the tune with some passionate and deeply melodic improvisation that should have erased any doubts about whether he belonged on the stand with Williams and Riley. Maybe it’s just because I’d recently read Iverson’s epic piece on Lester Young and listened to a couple of the classic Prez renditions, but I thought I detected some of that influence in the way Iverson approached the tune. The many, many sets Williams and Riley must have played together in their long careers showed to very good effect as they were absolutely cooking on a “Confirmation” that went into “Caravan” as Riley gave the rhythmic signal at the end of a solo, Iverson picked it up, and the trio took off to the desert. If there was anyone in the room not having a good time at that point, they have my sympathy. Though I was a bit doubtful about Williams' pickup-enhanced bass sound at first, he thoroughly won me over with his remarkable technique - employing double stops and slides to great effect - and the energy with which he propelled the music forward in conjunction with Riley.

Unfortunately I had to leave after the first set, but I wonder if they got to any Monk in the second. I also wonder what Stanley Crouch, who I believe I spotted at the bar (and who was the subject of a memorable interview conducted by Iverson), thought of the music (I guess if I had any guts, I could've asked him myself).

As a curious side note, I came across a couple of reposts (here and here) of the New York Times weekly jazz listings that included Nate Chinen’s blurb for this gig. Strangely, they appeared to have been rewritten as if translated into some other language and back into English. Iverson’s band is referred to as “The Terrible Plus” and Williams and Riley become a “stroke organisation” instead of a “rhythm team”!

David Virelles/Ben Street/Andrew Cyrille at University of the Streets

I’d seen David Virelles, a twentysomething Cuban-born pianist, play with Mark Turner, Ben Street and Paul Motian. It was clear in the context of Turner’s group that he was a substantial player with his own, non-derivative sound, but leading his own Continuum trio with Street and Andrew Cyrille he opened the doors wide, giving the audience a more complete view of the (quite advanced) stage he's reached in his musical development. Though there were compositions (Virelles’ I assume), the music often felt very free and the trio explored a wide dynamic range, unafraid to allow the music to approach silence at times. Though it encompassed everything from cool, stately extended chords to percussive clusters, there was a thoughtful/intellectual quality to Virelles’ playing that sustained a serious mood that was relieved by the more playful spirit of Cyrille’s relentlessly inventive percussion. As much music as Virelles and bassist Ben Street (one of those musicians who is ubiquitous, but for very good reason - he seems to be able to adapt to, engage with and enhance any musical situation he's in - he also always looks like he's listening really intensely, which probably has a lot to do with his success) were playing, I still found myself watching the drummer for much of the set. I suppose it’s no stretch to call Andrew Cyrille the archetype/patron saint of avant/free jazz drummers. He has a thousand sounds at his disposal, using every part of the kit and many things beyond the kit (he even took a “mouth solo” - Cyrille would’ve made a fine beatboxer), but every one is musical and he deploys them with taste and purpose (and he can swing plenty, too).

Recent (and Less Recent) Live Music, Part Three

2011-06-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

James Carter Organ Trio w/ Nicholas Payton & James 'Blood' Ulmer
Having recently picked up Carter's live organ trio record (with Ulmer guesting), I had to check out this group live, especially with the addition of Nicholas Payton. I'd only seen Carter as part of the WSQ, and while his mastery was very much on display even as the junior member of that group, he has more of an opportunity to show his personality when leading his own group. In his interactions with the crowd, choice of material, even his sharp suit, Carter made it clear that, at least with the Organ Trio, he’s proudly working in the tradition of band leader as showman, though I hear no pandering in his playing. I imagine Carter takes on familiar material - the first, trio-only part of the set featured "Out of Nowhere", "Killer Joe", and "Come Sunday" (with vocals from drummer Leonard King) - knowing full well that he can transcend familiarity through virtuosity and straight-up musicality. (I thought there was another Sunday-themed tune, as the set was on Sunday night, but I can't remember it now. It definitely wasn't "Gloomy Sunday" or "Sunday Kind of Love". “Sunday in Savannah”? Maybe, but I don’t think so...) Payton and Ulmer came out toward the end of the set and were featured on the last few tunes, including Ulmer's blues guitar-and-vocal showcase "Little Red Rooster" (also featured on the live record). I would've liked a bit more of the guest stars, but that's not to say there was anything lacking when it was just the trio.

I also recently picked up a copy of Carter’s US recording debut as a leader, The Real Quietstorm, featuring an intriguing band that includes Dave Holland on several tracks as well as a young Craig Taborn on piano. It’s a serious record with an strikingly wide range of material (including pieces by Monk, Ellington, Sun Ra, Don Byas, Jackie McLean, and even Bill “Honky Tonk” Doggett) and Carter helps keep it interesting by playing six different instruments in nine tunes (it's not a gimmick if you can play them all as well as James Carter). As with the Organ Trio, Carter took on a potentially trite concept and made real, substantial music out of it.

Neil Young w/ Bert Jansch at Lincoln Center
I only recently bought my first collection of Jansch's music, having previously been more aware of his reputation than his actual music. Though his Scots-accented vocals got a bit lost at times on their way to the upper balcony, his mastery of the open-tuned acoustic guitar was absolutely clear and undeniable.

I've seen Neil several times (six? seven? eight?) now, and I would probably rank this solo appearance somewhere in the middle of those shows. There was nothing as transcendent as seeing him play "Like a Hurricane" with Crazy Horse in the middle of a raging thunderstorm or as surprising and satisfying as his rarities-filled solo acoustic set at the United Palace, but neither was there anything quite as awkward as seeing the full choreographed version of Greendale performed in front of a summer shed crowd or the debut of a long block of electric car-themed songs at Madison Square Garden before they'd been refined (I think that’s almost a pun in this context) into the form in which they'd appear on Fork in the Road. On a guitar geek note, the Gretsch White Falcon (familiar from the early CSNY days) threatened to upstage Old Black (yes, it has its own Wikipedia entry), as Neil played some surprisingly effective solo electric numbers on both guitars (something I've never seen him do). The best comparison I can come up with is this: if Old Black would kill you by liquifying your internal organs, the White Falcon would come to life, slice through your flesh and snap your bones with its beak. The Falcon had some serious bite.

Along with several newer songs (a mixed bag), After The Gold Rush figured prominently in the set, including what might've been the night's high point, an "I Believe In You" so pure and perfect that it seemed to dissolve time, making the 40+ years (!) since it first appeared temporarily irrelevant.

Gowanus Jazz Fest at Douglass St Music Collective - Michael Formanek Quartet, Frank Carlberg's Tivoli Trio
In the Formanek Quartet, the bassist-leader (the only member of the group I hadn't seen before) seemed to form a solid center with his playing, and his compositions were a fine launching pad for his hugely talented bandmates. Even among musicians as good as these, it's hard for Tim Berne not to be the center of attention when he's playing, but he also found opportunities to lay out, setting up some nice trio moments with Formanek, pianist Jacob Sacks and drummer Gerald Cleaver. I need to get this group's album (with Craig Taborn rather than Sacks on piano) as there seemed to be a lot of meat to the compositions that would reward repeated listening.

Cleaver was back the next week at Douglass St. with the Finnish pianist Frank Carlberg. Carlberg's Tivoli Trio compositions (inspired by childhood memories of a circus/variety show trio) made for a fun, varied set, but it was bassist John Hebert who stole the show for me. I've seen Hebert several times with a wide variety of musicians, but I don't know if I've ever seen a group that gave him a better showcase. Hebert left no doubt why he, along with Cleaver, is one of the most in-demand musicians working. It was one of those performances that makes you think, at least on that given night, there can't possibly be anyone anywhere playing that instrument better. Hebert was somehow both inside Carlberg's tunes, in deep communication with Cleaver, and threatening to burst out of them with a surplus of furious invention.

Most recently, I saw Tim Berne/Ches Smith/David Torn/Trevor Dunn tour the stations of the free improvisational cross at Barbes (playing what Berne called “the Unpaid Jazz Fest”), moving together through moods ranging from outer spacey to droning to ferocious to funky. I hadn’t seen guitarist David Torn before, but I’m guessing that the phrase “mad scientist” gets used a lot in writing about him. He’s got a lot of gear and knows how to use it to get sounds that are both (to employ two cliches) ear-catching and mind-bending. He threw some crazy curveballs and often added contrasts to what the other musicians were doing without overwhelming them (though, to be sure, he could have with the tools at his disposal). It was also my first time seeing Trevor Dunn (though I knew about him going all the way back to Mr. Bungle), and I was impressed by how he maintained a very high level of focused, creative intensity, a continuous stream of ideas executed with conviction, for the entirety of an almost continuous hour-plus set of improvised music.

As at Douglass St, I noticed how good Berne seems to be at listening, his sense of when to contribute what to the mix, including knowing when to lay out. He seems to be all about the total sound rather than taking a star turn as a soloist, though when he decides it's time to throw down, he can chop some heads. As for Smith, he gave a clinic in [whatever you want to call the style of music this group was playing] drumming, going beyond the kit to play various toys and spare parts and then coming back to build a sick beat. Leaving aside all the extended techniques, I've never seen anyone play drums anything like Ches Smith does. He's certainly developed his own style, particularly in the unorthodox way he approaches the cymbals. I think it has something to do with the combination of long arms and a small kit.

Recent (and Less Recent) Live Music, Part Two - All-Vanguard Edition

2011-06-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

Paul Motian Trio, Trio 2000+2, and MJQ Tribute at the Village Vanguard
After seeing the quintet with Bill McHenry that I wrote about here, I completed my plan to catch a set from each week of Paul Motian's three-week Vanguard stand back in February and March, but I'm only now catching up with the recaps. Week two's trio with Ethan Iverson and Larry Grenadier focused mostly on standards (with one or two Iverson compositions - unexpectedly, I don't think I heard any of Motian's), at least in the set I saw. While any Motian-led group takes on his musical personality to a certain (usually large) extent, this trio seemed to have plenty of room for each player's personality to emerge and shape the overall sound. Grenadier in particular shone on Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", really digging in and bringing the blues to the fore. Iverson's deconstructive (for lack of a better word - that doesn't quite describe it) approach to "All The Things You Are" made the trio's version fresh and engrossing (they also played one of the other tunes in competition for the title of ultimate jazz warhorse, "Body and Soul"). The trio's fine version of Michel Legrand's "The Windmills of Your Mind" (famously recorded by Dusty Springfield on Dusty in Memphis and also the title track of Motian's forthcoming album with Petra Haden and Bill Frisell) brought out the Spanish feel lurking in that tune to good effect (making it easy to imagine that the windmills in question were Quixote's).

The final week was a two-bass lineup of Motian's Trio 2000+2 (I think most of the previous 2000+2 iterations have featured two saxes instead, but Motian has used two basses before). I was particularly looking forward to seeing pianist Masabumi Kikuchi in person after admiring his work with Motian on record. He did not disappoint. Kikuchi blows the ugly/pretty dichotomy apart like few pianists outside of Monk, whether moaning through a particularly beautiful piece of ballad melody or weaving intricate but dissonant lines with interlaced hands. I don't find Kikuchi's vocalizations particularly distracting (I prefer them, if that's the right word, to Keith Jarrett's), but there did seem to be an uncomfortable vibe in the audience. One idiot actually shouted "thank God!" when the set ended, atypical behavior for a club where respectful (even worshipful) audiences are the norm. The combo of Kikuchi and Motian, two idiosyncratic but complimentary masters, was a potent mix producing at-times "difficult" music. The fact that the weird stuff - the dissonances and counterintuitive rhythmic accents - was not taking place at the high volumes and fast tempos associated with stereotypical in-your-face free jazz may have actually made this music more unsettling and expectation-confounding. As Iverson recently wrote (quoting a letter in response to criticism of a Motian appearance at Jazz at Lincoln Center some years ago), “Motian can sit back and relax, knowing that his deeply swinging yet modernist style can still upset squares, even though he has been playing exactly the same way for at least 40 years!” The set included Motian tunes "Standard Time", "Olivia's Dream", and a meatier-than-usual, set closing "Drum Music" with some solo space for saxophonist Loren Stillman. The highlight for me was a gorgeous rendition of Lionel Hampton's "Midnight Sun" that showcased (and here I risk sounding like a beer commercial) the mountain stream-like clarity Kikuchi is able to bring to a ballad. "Midnight Sun" is also one of the highlights of Vol.5 of Motian's On Broadway series (check out the heavy duty Johnny Mercer lyrics, rendered here by Ella Fitzgerald).

More recently, Motian was back at the Vanguard with his tribute to the Modern Jazz Quartet, featuring a group with the MJQ lineup of vibes-piano-bass-drums. I'll admit to not knowing the MJQ's music very well beyond a few of their most famous tunes, and I haven't listened to much vibes outside of some things with Bobby Hutcherson, but I found this group totally compelling. I can't believe I wasn't previously familiar with Steve Nelson (on vibes), because he's thrillingly good. He's got something of a Monk-ish approach, clearly "in the tradition", rooted in the blues, but also very much in the moment, engaged, alert, open and willing to explore all possibilities. The freshness and freedom in Nelson's playing fit nicely with Motian, whose playing at certain points in the set could've served as a litmus test for potential fans. If you didn't like what he was doing at those moments (one of which, if memory serves, was on "Bags Groove") - respectful of the tune, swinging, and yet totally individual and cliche-free - you'd never get into him. The set mixed MJQ material with some of Motian's tunes, including a really nice "Abacus". I'm always happy to hear that one, and I particularly liked pianist Craig Taborn's approach to it. Being in almost the opposite corner of the room from Taborn, I couldn't see or hear him quite as well as I would've liked, though he had at least a couple head-turning solos and seemed to find interesting things to do in both the relatively traditional structures of the MJQ stuff and the more open spaces of the Motian tunes. I don't know how much Taborn and Motian have played together before this week, but I'd like to hear more. Bassist Thomas Morgan is something of a Motian veteran at this point, playing in many recent groups (including the aforementioned Trio 2000+2, along with Ben Street), and he seems totally at ease with what I imagine must be the unique requirements of playing bass alongside Paul Motian.

Check out a couple of excellent posts from Ted Panken on Nelson and Motian.

Bill Frisell Quartet at the Village Vanguard
I only caught one set of Frisell's two-week Vanguard run, during the second week with his frequent collaborators Kenny Wollesen, Tony Scherr, and Ron Miles. I wish I had made some notes at the time, as I've probably forgotten or may be misremembering some of the tunes (my excuse: it was my birthday), but I do recall that it was a fun, loose set that found Frisell seemingly in the mood to play the blues, including the "St. Louis Blues" and "Lovesick Blues" (I think there may have been a blues-based original in the set, too). For me, Wollesen revealed the affinities between the Handy and Williams tunes as he played the type of beat on the "I'm in love, I'm in love..." part of "Lovesick Blues" that I associate with the "St. Louis woman..." part of "St. Louis Blues" (all of which would make more sense if I knew what to call that particular beat). Frisell honored a shouted request for acoustic guitar with an encore of "Moon River" into "Misterioso". Scherr also switched to acoustic guitar and played some slide after jokingly turning the guitar upside down during Frisell's intricately improvised intro as if to say "what do you expect me to do with that?". Of all of Frisell's groups, this may be the one he seems most comfortable and casual with, and probably the one he's able to take in the most different directions (and I think he's said as much himself in interviews). So many of the avenues and aspects of music that I love are embodied in Bill Frisell - I never get tired of him.

I'm slowly catching up with these live music reports. Part Three coming soon...

Dream Journal #7

2011-05-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

Had a strange dream last night involving husband-and-wife evangelists/cult leaders who may have been based on a similar husband-and-wife team from Season 2 of True Blood, a show I haven't watched for several months. They were really into fishing ("fishers of men"?) for some reason, and at some point I think I swallowed a small, live fish whole. They were also control freaks, in true cult leader fashion, at one point inserting a small metal button or peg in the floor so that I couldn't close the door to my bedroom. I was living in some sort of communal house with them and some other people who'd fallen under their spell. I seemed to be the only person who knew that the situation was bad news, but no one would believe me. My favorite detail of the dream was that the cult leaders had some sort of Christian rock band who played in the style of the early Sir Douglas Quintet, and they'd had great success recruiting wannabe Sir Dougs from Sweden, where there was apparently a large group of young SDQ fans ripe for cult indoctrination.

The Selected Ballads Selects...Coffee and Baked Goods

2011-05-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Stumptown is my go-to supplier for coffee beans, as they have a great selection, they get consistently good beans, and they seem to know how to roast to just the right level. Just about everything I try from them makes a great cup of coffee, though I tend to like the Guatemalan and Ethiopian coffees the best. Hopefully this was an anomaly, but on my last trip to the Ace Hotel location, I had a hard time finding any beans roasted most recently than a week before. I feel a little silly even mentioning this, but Stumptown has spoiled me with their usually dependable freshness (often selling beans roasted the previous day), and after all, the beans only have to make it from Red Hook to the Flatiron. When I see Stumptown for sale in Brooklyn stores like Union Market and Blue Apron, it's much more common to see that they've been sitting around for a week or two.

After running out of my last bag of Stumptown beans, I decided to give Gorilla Coffee another try. I'd written their coffee off as overroasted, with the consistently heavy hand on the roaster eliminating flavor differences between single-source beans from different parts of the world, but based on the Guatemalan beans I just bought from them, they seem to have eased up, much to the coffee's benefit. After only one cup, I can't judge the new-and-improved Gorilla yet, but if I was going to name some honorable mentions behind Stumptown, the first two that come to mind are La Colombe, the Philly roaster that now has cafes in Manhattan, and Blue Bottle, the San Fran "microroaster" with a Williamsburg location. Blue Bottle is probably Stumptown's nearest competitor in quality and attention to detail in their cafe - they've been getting serious with their baked goods lately and they serve NYC's best (and possibly most expensive) iced coffee. La Colombe takes a different (Italian-influenced) approach, focusing on blending rather than single-source coffee, and roasting darker across the board. Though I tend to like lighter roasts than the typical La Colombe coffee, they seem to really know what they're doing, and if I'm in the mood to switch things up with a darker roast, I'll go with one of their blends. Intelligentsia beans (from Chicago), some of the best in the country, are available at a couple places in NYC, but haven't been fresh when I've looked at them as I don't think they're being roasted locally. I'll pick up a bag next time I'm in Chicago.

[Update: good piece on Stumptown here - "the Jesus Christ of caffeinated beverages"]
---------------

For me, the undisputed king of NYC bakeries is still Almondine - their bread is the best (they wisely stick to a few basic French styles that they've mastered, rather than trying to be everything to everybody) and they can contend with anyone in the pastry and cake department (I was very fortunate to receive some of Almondine's superb macarons as a gift recently). Grandaisy is not far behind, though, and may be the best bakery in Manhattan, also very strong in both bread and sweet stuff (my observations are based on the W 72nd St location). In Brooklyn, Marlow & Sons, though only having a small pastry case at the front of the restaurant, produces consistently excellent scones, biscuits, and the like. I also tried Peels on the Bowery for the first time recently, and the two items I got (a biscuit and a banana donut) were enough to convince me of its potential elite baked goods status.

Venturing into still sweeter realms, I was in Yorkville for the first time in some time over the weekend and stopped in at Two Little Red Hens. I was glad to be reassured that it's still the place to go for unpretentious and unashamedly sweet and rich desserts - cookies, lemon (or lime-coconut) bars, cakes/cupcakes, and though they didn't have it when I stopped in, the best cake/loaf-style gingerbread I know of. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for my health), I didn't make it to neighborhood landmark and old-school butter-bomb cookie and pastry provider Glaser's. I need to get back there for what may be the world's greatest prune danish before they go on their annual extended summer break.

On the doughnut front, I've been hearing great things about Dough, the new place in Clinton Hill. While a still-warm dulce de leche from Doughnut Plant has put doubt into my mind at least once and Pies 'n' Thighs puts out a fine product (though they don't taste quite as good as they look - P'n'T might have, to my eye, the most visually appealing donuts in town), I still haven't found any place that seriously challenges Greenpoint's Peter Pan for NYC donut supremacy. I do tend to favor the purity of an unadorned or lightly glazed cake donut over the yeast-raised, heavily-iced-in-exotic-flavors style Dough seems to be working in, but I look forward to trying their offerings with an open mind. I've somehow not mentioned pie in this post, but Four & Twenty Blackbirds in the Gowanus is also high on my list of places to try.

As a final note, I'm pretty sure I got fatter just by typing the second half of this post.

Recent (and Less Recent) Live Music, Part One

2011-05-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

Although it's already been said better, I feel I should add one more voice to the chorus of enthusiasm for the meeting of contemporary titans that was The Bad Plus w/ Joshua Redman at the Blue Note. To say that Redman was able to find a place within TBP's often tightly arranged tunes would be a huge understatement. If I was to employ a deliberately terrible mixed metaphor, I would say that like master jewelers, the trio gave Redman a setting in which to shine and he knocked that s**t out of the park. For every mood and mode that The Bad Plus explored (and they get to lots of different places in a single set), Redman was right there with something profound (and often jaw-dropping) to add to the mix.

I do regret not planning ahead and getting stuck in the SRO bar area with a terrible sightline, but even at that remove it was impossible to miss the strong musical message that was being delivered - TBP's inimitable compositions taken to the next level live. "People Like You" and "Layin' a Strip for the Higher-Self State Line" are the first titles that come to mind as highlights, but there were many, many great moments spread through the set I saw (which also included, if memory serves, "Who's He?" and "Dirty Blonde" - I didn't make any notes).

I can't fault the Blue Note on its bookings - they bring in some of the best - but the decor does tend to give one the unsettling feeling (as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out) of having walked into the highest tier "gentleman's club" in a medium-to-large size Midwestern city, so that seeing someone with, for example, the elegance and stature of Ron Carter on stage there can seem almost distractingly incongruous. I suppose the defiantly unremodeled yet far-from-classic interior could serve as a sobering commentary on the economic viability of presenting jazz seven nights a week in the current economic and cultural climate. Mirrors and neon or not, they keep pulling me back in by booking musicians that are just undeniable, such as James Carter with 'Blood' Ulmer and Nicholas Payton (more about that in the forthcoming Part Two of this post).

I was at The Stone twice recently, finally seeing Dr. Eugene Chadbourne after listening to his music on and off for many years, and seeing the mighty Ken Vandermark in a duo with Joe Morris on guitar. Though he originally made his reputation as a downtown/avant guitar weirduoso, the Doc's recent solo set left no doubt that he's also a heckuva songwriter (highlights in that department included "God Made Country Music" and "Old Piano") and a great (though still plenty weird) banjo player. Come to think of it, I'd love to see a guitar-banjo duo with Morris and Chadbourne (looks like they have recorded together). If Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore hadn't already used the album title Blowin' In From Chicago, it would suit Ken Vandermark perfectly. His technique is highly advanced, but at the same time, he makes it very clear that playing the saxophone essentially involves blowing into a tube. There was no shortage of brains or guts in the Vandermark-Morris duo.

I saw the Mary Halvorson Quintet at Barbes for a second time (the first time, I think they were playing a mixture of material from the trio album Dragon's Head and some then-new compositions that would end up on Saturn Sings, but I may be combining it in my memory with an earlier trio gig). In any case, with the newer material firmly under their belts, the growth of the group sound and of Halvorson's compositions was very much in evidence. This group, already acclaimed well beyond the Brooklyn scene centered on venues like Barbes and Korzo, just keeps getting better.

For the March installment of Tower of Song, a monthly songwriter's-circle-type deal at Rock Shop, host/organizer Jennifer O'Connor outdid herself, assembling a very heavy lineup: Tim Bracy, formerly of Mendoza Line; the undisputed Queen of Country Music in Brooklyn and personal favorite of John Peel, Laura Cantrell; and a man who must be one of the most underappreciated songwriting talents of our time, 33-1/3 author and sometime John Darnielle collaborator Franklin Bruno. The performers made the most of being onstage together as a group, covering each others songs and contributing harmonies and extra guitar and keyboard parts. The highlight of the show may have been Bruno's song inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Perfect Lovers). I don't know if he's recorded it, and I'm not even sure of the title, but I'd really like to hear it again.

I guess these YouTube clips (scroll down on the right-hand column) of the '80s-era public access jazz chat show The John Lewis Show (not the famous pianist or the civil rights leader and politician, but the less famous drummer) have been circulating for a while, but I just discovered them via A Blog Supreme and they are my new favorite thing. Ron Jefferson, the Ed McMahon to Lewis' Carson, must have been one of the hippest people alive at the time (not to mention "dynamic", "prolific", and "beautiful"). The show provides a valuable historical window into '80s jazz fashions, though I assume that Jefferson's bow tie in this segment was purely his own thing and not representative of any current trend. And fans of The Fighter might enjoy the interview Lewis and Jefferson conducted with boxer Saoul Mamby (who, at a critical turning point of that movie, pulls out of a fight with Micky Ward at the last minute). Lewis has DVDs of the full-length shows available here.

Next time in Part Two: Bill Frisell! Paul Motian! Neil Young! James Carter! and more?

And a final word from Schroeder:
More true than I'd like to admit.

All Souls

2011-04-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

While reading Javier Marías' three-part Your Face Tomorrow, I didn't realize that the main character/narrator had appeared in some of the author's earlier works. When I came across that piece of information, reading some of the YFT discussions at Conversational Reading, I went out, bought and read All Souls, where (as far as I know) Marías originated his Oxonian Madrileño character, Jacques/Jaime/Jacobo Deza. Even though the action of All Souls takes place some years before the plot of Your Face Tomorrow begins, reading the first novel second enhanced my appreciation of both books and my understanding of Marías' style and thematic preoccupations. There are many parallels and resonances between the books - both have key scenes involving the main character following/observing someone in a museum, and both build up to the story of a suicide. Besides these parallel features, there are also many "callbacks" from All Souls in YFT - characters, stories, quotations, ideas - a theory of horror illustrated by a gypsy flower seller and a three-legged dog, to name one of the most memorable.

It doesn't seem as if Marías planned for All Souls to be the first in any kind of series of books featuring the character Deza (in fact, he isn't even named in All Souls, perhaps deliberately tempting the reader - despite a warning at the front of the book - to identify him with the author). In YFT, it seems that Marías had to find a way of bringing a character that he killed off in All Souls back to life because he wanted to write more about him. The solution, inventing a surviving brother with very similar life experiences, may seem contrived but it's hard to imagine how YFT could have existed without Marías solving this problem in some way, so central is this character (Rylands/Wheeler, revealed at the end of YFT to have been based on a real Oxford mentor figure of the author's) to the story. Apparently, there are other Marías novels with shared characters, including the follow-up/sequel to All Souls, Dark Back of Time, which I plan to read soon. Brief, brilliant, and surely one of the greatest "campus novels" (though it transcends that genre) outside of Lucky Jim, I can recommend All Souls without reservation to be read as an introduction to Marías or as a warm-up for or follow-up to Your Face Tomorrow.

A Job I Am Glad I Do Not Have

2011-04-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

Much as I enjoy baseball and, in particular, Cardinals baseball, I really really would not want to be a baseball beat reporter. Here's one reason why. If, like me, you find it too painful to sit through the entirety of this video, just skip to about the last thirty seconds. The look on the guy's face at the very end is priceless.

And on a related note:
"...what LaRussa has on other pantheon managers is that he's the only one whose car keys Buzz Bissinger has tried to take after a scotch-y night at a Macaroni Grill in suburban Houston."

Also, for the record, I respect LaRussa's accomplishments, generally approve of his managerial style, and admire the good work he does for animals. Don't want to be lumped in with the LaRussa haters, of which there are plenty.

Noise & Silence

2011-04-12T07:03:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, I took a free tour of Columbia's Computer Music Center (formerly the Princeton-Columbia Electronic Music Center), the highlight of which was getting to see this beast, the historic and currently non-functioning RCA Mark II synthesizer. In looking up that last link, I noticed that this bit of (presumably) fake trivia has been inserted into the RCA's Wikipedia page: "Igor Stravinsky was rumored to have suffered a heart attack upon hearing Babbitt's glowing description of the synthesizer's capabilities".

The tour (part of the Unsound Festival) having whetted my appetite for synth/computer music, I went down to Littlefield in the Gowanus this weekend to check out Marcus Schmickler's set. I mentioned in this post that I was enjoying some of Schmickler's recent computer-generated sounds. His set was considerably more punishing than I expected from hearing his arpeggio-crazy album Palace of Marvels (the description of which cites, among many other things, Leibniz, Foucault, and the Panopticon!), but then again, the title of the showcase was "Oceans of Noise". I was thinking up titles for sections of Schmickler's set as it was going on, but only got as far as these first two, "Chorale for Jet Engines" and "Colecovision Nightmare".

Schmickler deployed an impressive variety of sounds in his multi-pronged digital noise attack, all of which gave me a new context in which to appreciate the wholly analog, truly assaultive, and I would guess unsynthesizable noise that the boiler pump in my basement started making later than same night. If I'd had a sampler handy, I certainly would've captured the sound for future use.

As an antidote to all this noise, I listened to what must be very close to the opposite pole of music, and very near to silence in comparison, John Cage's music for prepared piano. The Cage, two discs on Naxos featuring the pianist Boris Berman, was part of a big The Rest Is Noise-inspired purchase I made at J&R Music World, a surprisingly good source for bargain-priced jazz and classical CDs (they even carry this rather amazing item), and one of the few remaining venues (after the demise of the NYC Virgin Megastores and Tower Records) where one can have the experience of browsing thousands of discs on multiple floors under harsh fluorescent lighting. There's a nicely melancholy tribute to departed record stores and the joy of the browse here.

And speaking of the browse, there were some unusually worthy finds in the "dollar room" at the Brooklyn Record Riot this weekend. In particular, there was one box of mostly '80s stuff from which I extracted seemingly good condition (haven't played them yet) records by Squeeze, the Del-Lords, Ian Hunter, Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe! (I also paid more than a dollar for records by Andrew Hill and the Young Fresh Fellows.)

Five Music-Related Items

2011-03-29T19:35:00.000-07:00

1
Ives playing Ives - a decidedly lo-fi recording, but Ives brings a certain I-don't-know-what to his own composition ("The Alcotts" section of the Concord Sonata) that isn't present in any other version I've heard.

2
Speaking of 20th-century composers, if I ever become a full-time aesthete, haunting avant-garde salons and whatnot, I plan to adopt this look. Hearing this Boulez recording of Ionisation recently made me wonder if Brian Wilson was listening to Varèse around the time of Pet Sounds and the original Smile sessions. To me, there are some clear similarities - the layering of different percussion instruments and, of course, the use of fire sirens and (though not in Ionisation) theremins. I think there's something about the reverby room sound on the Boulez version that makes me think of the sounds Wilson was getting at Gold Star and Western Recorders. In other versions of Ionisation, I don't hear the connection as much. The Varèse-Zappa connection has been well documented (and the Varèse-Bird connection!), but, perhaps unsurprisingly, I've never heard Varèse mentioned in the same sentence as the Beach Boys.

3
Any list of the greatest guitar riffs of all time that does not include some version of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates' "Shakin' All Over" is not to be taken seriously. Check out Jimmy Page trying to remember it here.

4
Last week, I saw a screening of Glenn Ligon's film The Death of Tom at the Whitney, attracted by the prospect of hearing the score performed (actually spontaneously re-composed) by Jason Moran. The film and Moran's performance were worth walking through a hail storm for, and I got a lot out of the discussion after the screening. The topics included Ligon and Moran's mutual love of Monk; Ligon's artistic decision to let his original conception of the film go and yield to the opportunities afforded by an epic camera/film stock fail and Moran's music, ending up with a very different film than he'd envisioned; and Moran and the Bandwagon's ongoing process of wrestling with Bert Williams' massive-for-its-time hit "Nobody" (a hidden track on Ten and a main motif in Moran's Death of Tom music), with renditions often breaking into violent deconstruction and stopping just short of total destruction. There's a good interview of Ligon, conducted by Moran and covering some of the same topics as the Whitney discussion, here.

5
I recently found a great anecdote from the history of architecture that says something about the 20th-century tendency toward refinement (in the sense of removing impurities, extraneous elements) in design (although both of the architects in question were often less restrained in practice than the anecdote may suggest). To tangentially relate this last item to music, I'll note that it comes via the website of Ken Vandermark, the great Chicago saxophonist who I saw recently with Joe Morris and a couple years ago with Jason Moran.

Chelsea USA

2011-03-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Google Maps has been acting up lately, at least for me. One result was this map, improbably superimposing Chelsea over the entire United States, creating a fun alternate reality in which the Hotel Gansevoort is located on the outskirts of Guadalajara:

Your Face Tomorrow

2011-03-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

I finished the final volume of Javier Marías' Your Face Tomorrow over the weekend. I'm definitely not done thinking about it, but I might venture a few tentative thoughts.

The structure of this three-volume,1200+ page work is one of the most intriguing things about it. I'd like to see somebody chart the plot of YFT, to show how frequently the action jumps backward in time only to return to the main story, the whole of which is being related after the fact by the narrator/protagonist. [The chart probably wouldn't need to be as complicated and this or this. Maybe it would look something like this.] This narrator, Jacques Deza, comments several times on how a few of the main characters, himself included, share the ability to never "lose the thread", no matter how many tangents they follow or parentheses they insert into a conversation. And this is exactly what Marías does. Although the timeline of the main story may only advance by a matter of minutes in hundreds of pages, as happens in the second volume, Marías/Deza never lets go of the thread, always finding his way back from the innumerable digressions, asides, speculations, backfills, and recollections within recollections. In retrospect, it becomes clear that the digressions are really just as much part of the story, just as important, as the main thread. Though the material is much different, the way that stories lead to other stories, or memories to other memories, in YFT is not unlike the book-within-a-book in Michal Ajvaz's The Golden Age (which I discussed here), with the key difference that Ajvaz's narrator does lose the thread as he's pulled deeper and deeper into "the Book".

The pace of YFT's main story seems to pick up a bit in the third (and longest) volume, as Marías starts to pay off on a lot of things he'd set up much earlier - hints, allusions, questions, obsessively repeated words or quotations of initially unclear import. Still, the bare facts of the plot could have been related in conventional novelistic fashion in a matter of a few hundred pages, even taken at a leisurely pace, pausing frequently to describe rooms and sunsets. So what does Marías need three volumes for? I wouldn't call YFT an experimental novel. Structurally, Marías is not doing anything more radical than Proust (and certainly less radical than Sterne). He does, however, find a way of representing his narrator's consciousness, his internal monologue, that may not be new but certainly is distinctive and effective. The voice and storytelling method Marías has fashioned is even, to indulge in a book jacket blurb cliche, compulsively readable despite the sheer length that results from this approach. If you can get on Marías' wavelength in the first book, you'll be with him for the long haul, all the way to the end of his epic London-Madrid sort-of-spy story.

With YFT, Marías makes a case for the novel's continued relevance as a form uniquely suited to shed light on the mysteries of human consciousness and human behavior. I'm pretty sure he's also given us some deep insights on the perennial (and interrelated) subjects of history, memory, war, and violence, but these (especially the last two) are the aspects of the book that I feel I'm still unpacking, and writing about them would probably merit a whole separate (and much longer) post.

[After finishing this post, I've started working my way through the series on YFT at Conversational Reading, which I'd specifically avoided - along with almost all reviews - until I finished the book.]

Soul In The Night & Other Finds

2011-03-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most interesting find on my most recent visit to the Jazz Record Center was a mid-sixties Sonny Stitt-Bunky Green session called Soul In The Night (with future Earth, Wind & Fire leader Maurice White on drums!). While this album is squarely in the soul jazz/organ jazz tradition, from an era when presumably these tunes might've shown up on Chicago jukeboxes, Bunky Green's eventually quite influential (on Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, and Rudresh Manhanthappa, among others) approach on alto is very much in evidence, and the pleasing contrast with Stitt brings it into sharp relief. While some of the tunes seem a bit dated in their Swinging Sixties-ness (at certain points, you can almost picture Austin Powers doing The Frug), there's some real meat here, as on the Stitt-composed simple blues blowing vehicle "Home Stretch", where the two altos stake out their respective aesthetic positions with some nice trading.

Green was still playing "inside" by almost any definition, but with a slight kink or skew away from the mainstream and the alto tradition represented at that time by Stitt, the great Bird torch carrier.
It might be a stretch to call Soul In The Night a template for the Green-Manhanthappa dual alto disc Apex, but I think it would certainly make for an interesting back-to-back listen, and there is a nice bookend quality, with Green having been the young up-and-comer on Soul In The Night and the respected elder on Apex. [When I started writing this, I had no idea that this fantastic Manhanthappa on Green post was going up at Destination: Out.]

In the Record Center's "bargain bin", where surprising treasures lurk, I found the legendary-in-certain-circles Furry Lewis Fourth & Beale, recorded by the also legendary-in-certain-circles Memphis producer Terry Manning with the artist sitting in bed with his wooden leg off. There's a newer version out there with more tracks than this disc has, but for $5 I can't complain - I'd probably pay five bucks for a blank disc if it had Stanley Booth liner notes. I also picked up an album of Kurt Weill songs by Tethered Moon, the trio of Masabumi Kikuchi, Paul Motian and Gary Peacock, the first two of which will be at the Village Vanguard this week.

Thoughts on Some Recent Shows (+ Amazon Knucklehead Dilution Project)

2011-03-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

In the last couple weeks, I've had the opportunity to see three of the most exciting contemporary drummers on the New York scene: Tom Rainey (with guitarist Nir Felder), Ches Smith (with his These Arches group), and the man who has fit that description for over 50 years, Paul Motian (with a quintet). Rainey was the only one of the three that I hadn't seen before and he was extremely impressive, employing a full range of techniques (including playing with his bare hands) with a concentrated focus - you can see Rainey listening and the results, whether subtle accents or controlled explosions, consistently elevate the music being played (Rainey is truly onto some "next level sh*t"). I would think Felder's music must sound very different when he plays with any other drummer.

I'd seen Ches Smith before (with Mary Halvorson and in Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog), but I don't think I'm ever quite prepared for him. One of the most fascinating drummers to watch, there is something very visual about his style, simultaneously free/out/avant and rock-oriented. He seems to have a special mind meld with Mary Halvorson, finding just the right weird thing to perfectly accompany whatever weird thing she's playing at a given time (and to be clear, weird is to be taken as an endorsement of this music). This was my first time hearing a set of Smith's compositions, and though I probably can't describe them adequately (they were pretty diverse), I definitely want to hear more.

I've written plenty about Paul Motian, but there was one moment toward the end of the recent set I saw at the Village Vanguard when the sound coming from his corner of the stage was just amazing. He really had the whole kit simmering with an utterly distinctive combination of (among other sounds) "pish"ing cymbal, clattering sticks, and a sound that reminded me of kicking the side of a file cabinet. As I said about Fred Hersch's piano sound at the Vanguard, I don't think any recording I've heard of Motian has quite captured what he sounds like in that room.

After seeing Motian's quintet last weekend (he's at the Vanguard for two more weeks with two different groups), I think I can feel a major Bill McHenry phase coming on. McHenry's use of space with Motian was one of the more striking features of the group's sound. He built up solos gradually, deliberately, from short phrases separated by pauses that seemed almost uncomfortable (like pauses in a conversation that last just a little too long) to longer, more sustained runs, whether languid or fleet - it was edge-of-the-seat dramatic and wholly successful.

The entire quintet impressed me with how fluent they were in Motian's language, with McHenry and pianist Russ Lossing perhaps most outstanding in this regard. Distinctively Motian-esque phrases kept cropping up in the midst of improvisation (certainly on Motian's own tunes - the set I saw seemed to follow a strict pattern of alternating Motian compositions with standards). Some of this was just a matter of improvising on the melodies, but at other times, it really felt like these players were really thinking like Motian, they'd absorbed his compositional language and now sounded like natural, native speakers.

And while I'm on the subject of great contemporary New York-based improvising musicians, I should point out an injustice of sorts that's recently come to my attention. I noticed yesterday that Jason Moran's pretty much universally praised Ten, consensus best jazz album of 2010, currently has a three-star (out of five) rating on Amazon. This matters because it could potentially keep people away from discovering this album. People who may not be familiar with Moran's work or only know his earlier stuff might actually give credence to the two (in my opinion) wildly misguided two-star reviews and miss out on some great music. Surely Ten had more than four total reviews at one time, but now it seems that it's being sold through an Amazon affiliate and Amazon has wiped all the previous reviews and started from scratch, so that these two bad reviews really stand out and have undue weight. So, what I'm proposing is that any fans of Ten reading this follow this link and review it. Let's right an aesthetic wrong here. (And maybe somebody with a blog readership exceeding mine can pick this up and make it a mini-campaign.)

Bonus Links
I found a great Bill McHenry audio interview (along with two streaming live sets) here.

And a sweet YouTube find: McHenry Sings Carmichael! (in Spain, while looking a lot like Mad Men's Paul Kinsey)

Three Brief Music Items (w/ many links)

2011-02-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

1.
So, the Vivian Girls came up right after the Detroit Cobras on my iPod recently. It was just a single track by each of them, and I realize these bands are pursuing two very different aesthetic agendas, but the back-to-back comparison was not flattering for the poor Vivians. (I haven't hear their latest stuff, but apparently it shows some development in their sound.) On a positive note, it was good to be reminded that The Cobras' Rachel Nagy is one of the flat-out greatest rock'n'roll singers of our time (right up there, I'd say, with Lisa Kekaula of the Bellrays).

2.
All signs have been pointing me to Mal Waldron this week. Well, two signs: the Oliver Lake Organ Quartet's version of his "Fire Waltz" at Roulette over the weekend (here is Lake playing it with a different group), and rereading Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" with its image of Billie Holiday whispering "a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron" at the Five Spot. So, I listened to Waldron's The Quest, which turns 50 years old this year. The whole thing is highly recommended, but I'd like to direct your attention to the track that really grabbed me on these most recent listens, "Warm Canto", featuring the sublime combination of Eric Dolphy on clarinet and Ron Carter on cello. Also, if you're at all interested in Waldron and haven't read Ethan Iverson on the subject, you should do so immediately.

3.
Check out this video, featuring the great Marc Ribot playing some Sabbath-y but thoroughly Ribot-ized doom blues with the whimsically-named but not whimsical-sounding trio Whoopie Pie. Help, what's the incredibly familiar theme Bill McHenry is playing in this clip??? It's on the tip of my tongue... [Update 3/16/11: Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" is what I was thinking of.]

4.
Bonus Update Item (2/25/11)
This little addendum is my way of comforting myself for my utter failure to score tickets for the NYC and Jersey City Jeff Mangum shows that went on sale today. Instead of getting into a predictable rant about shows that go on sale nine months in advance and sell out in (literally) seconds, I'll simply remind myself how lucky I was to have been in the right place at the right time to see Neutral Milk Hotel at their peak, when none of us at the 40 Watt Club could've suspected that we were witnessing something that was about to go away for the better part of a decade. On stage, Mangum burned with a riveting, even frightening intensity in those days. Living in Athens then, I had a few chances to say something to him, tell him how much I was enjoying the then-new Aeroplane, but after seeing him play I was frankly too intimidated, even though he cut an unassuming figure around town.

I don't know the answer to the mystery of Mangum's post-Aeroplane semi-silence. Maybe he was close to the edge of some kind of precipice and was smart and self-aware enough to pull back from it. Maybe he'd used up his allotment of inspiration and knew it. In any case, I'm glad he's decided to play some shows this year, and I hope he can give those in attendance a little taste of what I saw on those nights at the 40 Watt. [Update to the update: Ignore the nostalgia-tinged self-pity above. By means of precision timing, I managed to get tickets on the second day of the Jersey City sale (versus the first day "pre-sale"). PATH train, here we come...]

Scattered Thoughts on the Grammys

2011-02-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

Or at least the parts of the Grammys I saw:

I know she sings and has her own records and played at the White House, etc, but jazz fans, try to wrap your head around the fact that the person who was playing bass with Joe Lovano at the Village Vanguard a couple months ago beat Justin Bieber for Best New Artist. And would it have been too much to ask to see a Grammy-style over-the-top spectacle in tribute to Lifetime Achievement honoree Roy Haynes? Maybe a Boredoms-style thing with 85 jazz drummers (one for each year Haynes has been alive) playing simultaneously.

Gwyneth Paltrow + Cee-Lo + a "muppet" band = much better than I could've imagined. I have no doubts about Cee-Lo's talent, but Gwyneth brought some game, showing herself to have a considerably better sense of pitch than some past Grammy winners I could name (*cough*Taylor Swift*cough*). GOOP on, soul sister!

Dylan striking some poses during "Maggie's Farm"! I love this guy. And I loved the reaction shot of Neil Young simultaneously cheering and sort of waving to Dylan. Cool to see Neil in the position of a genuinely excited fan.

Did I really see a Target commercial for wigs? I had the TV on mute at the time, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was. How long has Target been in the (non-Halloween) fake hair business?

The Most Fascinating Cultural Figure of Our Time

2011-02-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

Isn't James Franco amazing? He's in something like four different degree programs and he's hosting the Oscars and he played Allen Ginsburg (pretty well, actually) and he does weird art videos, etc, etc, etc.

Well, you know who's more amazing? BILL M****RF***IN' MURRAY, that's who.

So Franco's way into poetry. Well, so is Murray.

Franco was on a soap opera. Bill Murray signed on to be the voice of goddamn Garfield because he thought the script was by Joel Coen! (Turns out it was Joel Cohen.)

And let me ask you this:
When was the last time you heard about James Franco winning a major professional golf tournament, LIKE BILL MURRAY JUST DID?!?!?!?

Three Sides: One Too Many?

2011-02-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

I haven't watched all that much soccer in my life, but the other night's Arsenal-Newcastle United match was one of the wildest, most improbably entertaining I've ever seen. 3-0 Arsenal after ten minutes, 4-0 at the half, and it ends in a draw?!?! The shots of Newcastle fan reactions at the high and low points (including some early, thoroughly disgusted walkouts) were priceless.

As great as that match was, my main reason for posting about "the beautiful game" is my discovery of something called "3-sided football". According to the Wikipedia entry, this three-team, three-goal variant is associated with situationists and psychogeographers and, while theoretically interesting, is perhaps a bit less than beautiful in actual practice. You can read a very fine account of a match here, including a description of an "orgy of free-scoring libertarian collectivism".

Put This Baby in a Super Bowl Commercial

2011-02-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

This is approximately 10,000 times more enjoyable than the adult-talking baby in those online stock trading commercials. Also slightly NSFW.

Somebody at Slate Thinks Green Bay is in Florida

2011-02-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

...and doesn't know how to spell Pittsburgh. From this morning's Slatest newsletter roundup of the day's top stories:

Green Bay Packers Triumph at Super Bowl
The Florida team took down the Pittsburg Steelers 31-25.

Both errors have since been corrected on the site, but fortunately the newsletter made it to my inbox in its original, much more amusing form. To be fair, I'm sure this is someone working very early in the morning for very little money. Still funny, though.

bits/bytes/birds/bags

2011-02-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

I don't know much about the electronic musics, but I'm enjoying this guy's crazy sounds (scroll down for player).

One of the most amazing things I've learned recently:
Many of the nests for bird's nest soup are "produced" in "factories".

One of the other most amazing things I've learned recently:
David Allan Coe cut a record with Dimebag Darrell?!?!?

The Selected Ballads Selects A Ballad

2011-01-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

My song of the moment is, without question or qualification, Prefab Sprout's "Angel of Love" (available as a free download here). What at first sounds like an unbearably cheesy, goopy love ballad reveals unsettling details, dark corners and depth with subsequent listens. This sh*t has layers!

What could be more hackneyed than repeatedly invoking Romeo and Juliet in a love song? But then lines like "Poison or dagger?/Read the last line" and "Death waits to claim us/and frame us in pine"(!!!) peek out to remind you of how that play ends. Angel metaphors are equally played out, but there's a realization waiting here too if you keep in mind the traditional blues meaning of pleading with an "angel" to spread her "wings". I'm not saying the lyrics are particularly profound in isolation, but I do think they're smashingly successful in the context of the song, married to a melody that is a well turned thing of beauty.

"Angel" was apparently recorded as a demo for an album that was never made, the would-have-been follow-up to Sprout's UK hit album Jordan: The Comeback. The remastered demos were finally released a couple years ago as Let's Change the World with Music. For a demo, this recording has plenty of sonic details to reward close listening and an enveloping synth-heavy atmosphere that walks the line between a warm blanket and a smothering, faintly miasmatic mist. I bought a couple of older Sprout albums a few years ago but never gave them many spins. The time has definitely come to spend some more time with them. "Angel of Love" has certainly taught me not to judge any of Paddy McAloon's songs without giving them at least a few listens.

[Update: I first heard "Angel of Love" on a free Tompkins Square sampler which also featured a late-career live take on "Hickory Wind" by Charlie Louvin, who died today. Nashville music writer Bill Friskics-Warren has a fine obit in the NYT.]

Vive Quebec

2011-01-25T18:27:00.000-08:00

Nice to see The Awl taking note of the great Ike Quebec (and specifically, Phil Freeman's concise and usefully opinionated rundown of Quebec's Blue Note "comeback" period). I made brief mention of Quebec's work with Sonny Clark and Grant Green in this post, but Freeman's piece has given me some ideas for what to listen to next.

Jay Farrar & Ice Cube: The Hidden Connection

2011-01-21T18:11:00.000-08:00

The Adios Lounge makes the link.

Memo to Andre 3000 and Big Boi

2011-01-21T07:08:00.000-08:00

Why is there not an Outkast-sanctioned Chonkyfire^TM brand hot sauce? I would carry it around in one of these and put it on everything.

Best Of 2010 - Best Live Music

2011-01-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

Well, it's mid-January and I'm finally posting my best live music of 2010. My "long list" became a "short list", at which point I remembered a few shows I'd forgotten about and had to rethink. In the end, I gave up on having a neat, even number of shows on the list, and the order is very loose. The best of the best is generally at the top, but don't take the order too seriously - I didn't. At least from my perspective as a fan and listener, it was a great year for live music, and I think this list conveys that.

1. Solo shows
As far as list making conventions go, this is a total cop-out, a blatant attempt to squeeze in extra entries, and an arbitrary conglomeration, but I'm putting this group of shows at the top to point out what a great year it was for solo performances. I mentioned a few in my previous list, but here are six more (in alphabetical order) that helped make 2010 a year of brilliant loners and rugged individualists:

Marc-Andre Hamelin at Le Poisson Rouge
The only classical show here, Hamelin's LPR appearance had more in common with the other shows on this list than you might think: it was a club gig, a CD release "party", and unlike most classical piano recitals, Hamelin was performing his own compositions. Hamelin left me wanting to hear more of him and resolving to hear more classical piano in general in 2011.

Brian Henneman Christmas Show at Iron Barley
Brian Henneman (of the Bottle Rockets) carried on his St. Louis holiday tradition with a set of songs (familiar favorites and rarities, new, old, and half-remembered) and stories, both of which he has in abundance. The tagline of The Best Show on WFMU doubles as a good description of this night: Three Hours of Mirth, Music, and Mayhem. There were no Christmas songs, but Henneman did give some gifts, ranging from vinyl rarities to cheap sunglasses, for some of those with the opportunity, good sense and taste to make the journey to deep South St. Louis on Christmas night.

Fred Hersch at the Village Vanguard

Matthew Shipp at the Blue Note
A straight-through, seemingly free-associative recital very much of a piece with his latest solo record, 4D, part of the Blue Note's credit-due Monday night "stuff we might not book on other nights" series. Nobody gives the left side of the keyboard a workout quite like Shipp. A brilliant mind thinking out loud through the piano.

Jeff Tweedy at Bowery Ballroom
The solo format gives Jeff Tweedy an opportunity to show how he's built and sustained such a large and devoted fanbase with Wilco - by writing lots of great songs and performing them well. A simple formula that is not so simple to execute. Tweedy has become a masterful solo performer, keeping the crowd in the palm of his hand and successfully taking songs familiar in their often densely arranged Wilco versions back to the way they were presumably written, by one man with an acoustic guitar. Tweedy's use of effects was sparing, but effective, as when he used some combination of reverb and volume pedals to substitute for the sweeping pedal steel in "Wait Up" (from Uncle Tupelo's March 16-20, 1992).

David S. Ware in Park Slope

2. Reid Anderson/Ethan Iverson/Mark Turner/Nasheet Waits at Smalls
and
Tarbaby (Orrin Evans/Eric Revis/Logan Richardson/Nasheet Waits) at Jazz Gallery
Nasheet Waits was hands down the drummer of the year in my book. I didn't hear all the records he played on this year, and certainly didn't catch all of his gigs (he's a busy man), but these two shows plus the universally praised Ten, Tarbaby's The End of Fear, and Waits' 2009 release Equality: Alive at MPI (which I only discovered in 2010) left me increasingly more impressed with his playing. His deep connection with bassist Tarus Mateen is well-known, but he sounds great with Reid Anderson and Eric Revis, too. Same goes for his playing with William Parker in Tony Malaby's Tamarindo, though I didn't hear them together until 2011.

3. Apex at Jazz Standard
The musicians in Apex are talented enough that they could sound good playing just about anything - standards, free improv, loosely sketched out "blowing tunes" - but that's not what they do. Instead, they're working with a set of strong, distinctive compositions, many of them instantly memorable. It was this combination of tremendous musicians fully engaged with strong material and each other that made this show a no-brainer Best Of.

4. Syl Johnson at Southpaw
An unforgettable performer. Records are great. I love records. But records last, while people go away. When you have the opportunity to get in the same room as a legend, grab that opportunity while you can.

5. World Saxophone Quartet & M'Boom at Birdland
My comments under Syl Johnson pretty much apply here too. The opening "Hattie Wall" from this show was certainly a contender for my favorite single musical moment of the year. The feeling it gave me is something you can't get from a recording.

6. The Dutchess & The Duke at Mercury Lounge
Little did I know it would be my last chance to see this duo, as they've apparently broken up (something I learned only after putting this show on the list) If this really was their last NYC show, they left us with a beautiful memory.

7. Jens Lekman at the Green Building on Union
I'm not sure if the new songs he played are quite up to the high standard set by Night Falls On Kortedala and internet single "The End of the World", but it's possible he'll have a whole new batch by the time he records his next album. Lekman hinted at multiple releases in 2011 and we can only hope he follows through. After his previous tour featuring a large, all-female band clad in matching white outfits, Lekman went with a much simpler setup at the Green Building, using the acoustic guitar w/ a stand-up drummer format associated with Jonathan Richman, whose one true heir I believe Lekman to be. Some of the tunes from Kortedala were supplemented with prerecorded backing tracks, with some even bringing a dance-y element to the show, and a saxophonist joined in for a couple songs near the end. Despite these additions, the generally bare bones arrangements helped Lekman show off his chill-inducing vocal abilities. The occasional goofiness puts you enough off guard to be cold-cocked by the power of his voice when he really cuts loose. He also engineered some effective transitions between songs - best of all might've been the perfectly conceived, euphoric segue from "At The Department of Forgotten Songs" to "Black Cab" (both from You're So Silent, Jens, as good an introduction to Lekman as the similar early singles compilation Suburban Light is to the Clientele).

8. Paul Motian/Bill Frisell/Tony Malaby/Mark Turner at the Village Vanguard
and
Bill Frisell's Disfarmer Project at the New York Society for Ethical Culture
Paul Motian likes to mix it up, constantly trying different combinations of musicians, many of which are able to create magic under his leadership. The two-for-one substitution of Tony Malaby and Mark Turner for Joe Lovano during the first week of the Motian/Frisell/Lovano trio's annual Vanguard run was done for scheduling reasons rather than just to shuffle the deck (the trio is Motian's longest running group), but something new and exciting was created just the same.

Bill Frisell likes to mix it up, too, working with a gradually expanding universe of top-notch and, like Frisell, cross-boundary players. For the Disfarmer Project, a set of music to accompany the work of Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer, Frisell turned to musicians who have appeared with him on some of his more country/folk/roots-oriented projects (the Disfarmer group even played a little rockabilly). Though I've seen Jenny Scheinman play several times (with Frisell and others), this was my first opportunity to see the modestly brilliant multi-instrumental steel-and-slide specialist Greg Leisz and stoic, consummate-pro-making-it-look-easy bassist Viktor Krauss in person. Though these were the same musicians as on the fine Disfarmer record, the music, arranged as a sort of loose song cycle, came alive in person and in the company of the projected images in ways that it didn't in the studio versions.

9. Henry Threadgill's ZOOID at Roulette & Jazz Gallery
If not for the Bridge On The River Kwai-style "hot box" that was The Stone for Bill Frisell's August workshop, Roulette (at least on the November night I saw Threadgill) would've taken the prize for Hottest Venue of 2010. The excessive radiant heat was making me groggy, but the music kept snapping me back to attention, so that I experienced much of the show in a sort of half-consciousness, which is actually not a bad way to hear music that resists rational analysis (though there is clearly a system at work). It's often said that no other music sounds like this, and as far as I can tell that's absolutely true. I think an interesting comparison could be made with some of Ornette Coleman's more recent music, especially in the rhythms and the use of multiple bass instruments, but the total effect is still quite different. I was more conscious for ZOOID at Jazz Gallery, but you might not know it from reading my rather odd post about the experience. And check out this video of Threadgill in '88 - it ends in the middle of a solo, but Wow!

10. Belle & Sebastian w/ Teenage Fanclub on the Williamsburg waterfront

11. Bloodshot Records Showcase (Bottle Rockets, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, Cordero, Graham Parker) at Bell House
The Bottle Rockets are long time favorites that always deliver, and it was fun to finally get to see Graham Parker, but Scotland Yard Gospel Choir was the surprise of the night for me - I'd heard none of their music prior to this show but came away a fan. Although it was released in 2009, SYGC's "Tear Down The Opera House" was one of the songs of 2010 for me.

12. Oliver Lake Organ Quartet at Jazz Gallery

13. War Paint w/ Family Band at Music Hall of Williamsburg
I would call Family Band's sound "dark pastoral psych-folk" or "music to listen to while cultivating an urban farm in Bushwick or foraging in a slightly sinister patch of woods". I'd love to see a bill with them and Arbouretum. Headliners War Paint are serious up-and-comers, tight, with chops and songs. A not quite place-able mix of cool influences and some no-joke bottom end from a fun-to-watch, no-joke rhythm section.

Hiding in Plain Sight - Three Recent Discoveries

2011-01-10T18:33:00.000-08:00

Lahore Deli
I've walked by this tiny, almost hidden Pakistani spot on Crosby St. (just south of Houston) many times on the way to Housing Works Bookstore, but only tried it for the first time a few days ago. Located across the street from a gas station, it's the quintessential cabbie pit stop. I only grabbed a couple of snacks, a samosa and a round, flat chicken kebab (slightly spicy, very tasty), but the quality was impressive enough than I'm definitely returning for more soon.

Pastrami Hash at Carnegie Deli
Tipped by a recent article in the NYT and finding myself in the neighborhood at an hour when the tourist-frequented deli was half empty, I decided to stop in for some hash. I'd never considered ordering hash at the Carnegie before reading that article, but it is truly a classic hiding in plain sight on the menu. As you might expect from a place with sandwiches that look like this, the hash is generously portioned and dominated by pastrami, with small chunks of potato, even smaller chunks of green pepper, and nearly invisible (but definitely present) onions. There's also a corned beef version which I haven't yet tried. $16 for a plate of hash might seem ridiculous, but I got three solid meals out of one order, and I've got a pretty healthy appetite. (It looks like this person got through a bit more of their hash at the restaurant than I did. The potatoes and peppers also look a bit chunkier than they were on my plate.) I didn't take the fried egg option at the deli, but did add an egg when reheating the second portion of leftovers at home, and it was mighty fine.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
Another of those classic albums that I've somehow avoided hearing for years, I picked up a used copy of the Ryko reissue of Bowie's Scary Monsters after Christmas, and have been digging it in the new year. I knew how great "Ashes To Ashes" is, but then Bowie follows it with "Fashion" and "Teenage Wildlife" - POW! POW! I guess I was pretty predisposed to like this album, being a big fan of Station to Station (which features many of the same musicians, notably Carlos Alomar and Roy Bittan), but it really delivers.

Note: I'm still tinkering with my list of the best live music I saw in 2010, perhaps subconsciously trying to be the last blogger to submit a Best Of list for the year. I think I'm already past the point where anyone could possibly care, but I hope to post something in the next couple days.

Late To The Party - Organ Damage/Wild Things/Bird Notes

2011-01-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

End of the year roundups are a great way to find out what you've missed from the previous year. To cite just one example of something I'm sure I wouldn't have found any other way, my favorite discovery from the year-end conversation at Nate Chinen's The Gig is the (get ready for it) badass Norwegian organ trio Elephant9. I realize that the phrase "badass Norwegian organ trio" sounds like it contains multiple oxymorons, but check 'em out and see for yourself.

----------

I don't remember where I found the link to this Awl piece from 2009, but I just came across it this weekend. The Awl was one of my most-read sites of 2010, but I guess I wasn't checking it regularly before that. In any case, Tom Scocca articulates the problem I had with the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are with much more clarity and force than I'm capable of. Reading it was cathartic.

----------

Another thing from 2009 that I only recently got around to reading was Steve Coleman's Charlie Parker "Dozens" at Jazz.com, an epic piece worthy of its subject. As the writings on his M-Base website demonstrate, Coleman is almost frighteningly knowledgeable and insightful on just about every aspect of the art of spontaneous composition (his preferred term), and this Charlie Parker piece is like 12 excerpts from the best textbook on the subject never published. There's the basis of an education here, an implied course of study. It takes some close listening to grasp some of Coleman's points, but if you follow his example and really dig into this music, he will teach you some things. And lest you think he's just blowing conceptual smoke, he provides plenty of transcriptions to illustrate his points. With one complete reading, I feel like I've only started with this piece, but Coleman has already made me listen more closely to the music he discusses, which is perhaps his most important lesson. As Phil Schaap's long-running radio show has amply proven, this is inexhaustible music which just sounds better as you pick up on more of its nuances (most of which are guaranteed to elude on a first or even third or fourth listen).

Coleman is particularly strong in trying to understand (without pretending to be certain) how Parker and his associates thought about the music they were playing from a technical standpoint (which may have been quite different from the way the music has been analyzed after the fact). Though it may sound like a ridiculously esoteric piece of musicology, Coleman's elaboration (supported by quotes from Parker and Gillespie) of the distinction between minor sixth (with a sixth in the bass) and half-diminished chords is a valuable bit of analysis insofar as it illuminates something about the thinking behind the improvisation. Coleman isn't just describing what Parker played, but how he (along with Gillespie, Monk and others) might have developed the approach that led him to play it.

Reading David Foster Wallace's "The Empty Plenum", a review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, just after reading some posts on Coleman's blog, I noticed that the concept of time and its relationship to language comes up in both places. Language is particularly important to Coleman's understanding of Charlie Parker's music. He conceives of Bird's solos as hip, streetwise conversations, with the natural but extremely intricate rhythms of speech (Coleman takes the idea of musical "phrases" quite literally). Jason Moran did some experiments in this area, "transcribing" recorded conversations into music ("Ringing My Phone" was one recorded result). Coleman suggests listening to a Parker solo and focusing only on the rhythms while ignoring the pitches. Both Moran's transcriptions and Coleman's listening exercise serve to reveal underlying structures that may be obscured by "content" (words or pitches). [Update: some interesting speculations about the connection between language and improvised music in this video.]

One last note re: Steve Coleman and his appreciation of the masters - his 1991 album Rhythm In Mind, which I recently downloaded from his website, is a beaut. It's an all-star lineup, including Von Freeman, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland and Ed Blackwell, but to me, Tommy Flanagan shines brightest of all. Flanagan is one of those widely-acknowledged piano greats that I've never taken the time to really get to know, but his work on this album has made me resolve to dig into the Flanagan discography in the new year.

Best of 2010 - Ten+ Musical Moments

2010-12-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

I'm still in the process of paring down a very long "long list" of the best shows I saw in 2010, so as a sort of preview and in lieu of an "honorable mentions" section, I've compiled this list (in no particular order) of great individual moments or aspects of live shows that aren't going to make my final Best Of list:

Watching Bill Frisell play Monk and Stephen Foster from about 10 feet away on a summer night inside the sweltering, nearly swoon-inducing Stone. (Two other memorable solo guitar performances come to mind: Robert Fripp's "Soundscapes" performance at the Winter Garden - finally, someone found a way to work with the cavernous acoustics of the space rather than being swallowed up by it - and Mary Halvorson on Christian Marclay's Wind-Up Guitar at the Whitney - wish I'd seen frequent music box user Frisell playing it. Anthony Coleman's bemused expression while reading the "score" of Marclay's Pret-a-Porter off of models' thrift-store wear was another image that stuck with me from the past year).

Vijay Iyer playing "Human Nature" with his great trio in Tompkins Square Park (it's on YouTube!)

Greg Osby pushing an end of the envelope that's rarely pushed, by taking a very, very quiet solo with Paul Motian and Jason Moran at the Village Vanguard, bringing an already attentive Village Vanguard crowd to an absolute hush. Focus, control, mastery, taste.

Moran w/ Mary Halvorson and Ron Miles romping and stomping through David Bowie's "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" during a boldly varied, adventurous set at Jazz Standard.

William Parker augmenting his Little Huey's Sextet with a percussion ensemble of face-painted neighborhood kids at Campos Plaza in the East Village on the first day of the Vision Fest.

Ethan Iverson, Corcoran Holt, and Tootie Heath taking a joyride through the jazz canon at Smalls. One of the most purely fun shows I saw this year, I'd intended to catch just one set but couldn't leave until the last note had been played.

Dirty Projectors' opening set and Phoenix's "unplugged" encore set (including a beautiful Francoise Hardy cover, sung in French to the annoyance of some meatheads seated near me) at Madison Square Garden, both better than the oversized, over-polished chrome machine Phoenix has become live (though Daft Punk was a nice surprise!).

Marty Ehrlich's beautiful, detailed, and sometimes even delicate compositions for his 4 Altos group at The Stone - one listen was certainly not enough to grasp all the nuances in this deep music.

?'s eternal rock'n'roll fire and old-school showmanship (including singing a duet with Ronnie Spector while lying on his back!) and Frank Rodriguez's junky '60s organ tone (achieved on a decidedly non-'60s synthesizer) providing the key element of the Mysterians sound at Damrosch Plaza.

In another case of a keyboard player driving a rock band, Dave Amels' beyond-tasty organ work with the Jay-Vons at the Rock Shop. The greatest compliment I can pay these guys is to say that they're the only group to really remind me of the Get Happy-era Attractions, the gold standard for guitar-organ-bass-drums lineups in a rock'n'soul context.

Friday Must-Read - Sartre/Kafka Hell Train

2010-12-17T12:14:00.000-08:00

One newsman's journey into darkness and despair on board a Philadelphia-bound Amtrak train (via The Awl).

Here's a representative sample:
Oh god, lights went out. Train totally dead. No one is telling us anything! Sitting in dark shivering. "Sartre"

I recommend this as a soundtrack for reading these tweets.

2B LVD + SYL PWR

2010-12-13T18:14:00.000-08:00

I may have mentioned this before, and I may mention it again, but here is one of the greatest, most soulful vocal performances of all time, for your listening pleasure. I remember where I was when I first heard it - a stretch of Interstate 55/70 in Illinois - and I'm just glad I didn't have to engage in any defensive driving maneuvers while it was playing or I might not be typing this right now.

Speaking of soul, I just received the massive doorstop of a boxed set that is Syl Johnson: Complete Mythology, and this weekend, I took my first dip (let's try another metaphor) in the Numero Group's bubbling, six LP/four CD cauldron of soul/blues/r'n'b stew. I was fortunate enough to catch Johnson live at his recent, wall-to-wall packed show at Southpaw in Brooklyn. He was thrillingly good: a harp-wailing, Strat-slinging, proto-rapping, unpredictable fireball of impish energy and pure entertainment.

Calling out (and getting) twenty-one hits from the band. Doing a "Take Me to the River" to make you forget (if just for a night) all about Al Green and Talking Heads. Johnson's performance made it absolutely clear that there's no substitute for the real thing, the original article. You can be as meticulously retro as you want in putting together a band sound or making a recording, but you can't duplicate what someone like Syl Johnson has - his thing is too idiosyncratic, with way too much experience behind it. R'n'b has moved on, producing new, equally inimitable masters - R.Kelly comes to mind - but when Johnson and his peers are gone, those extra elements that you can't get from a record will exist only in memory, as unrecoverable as the stage presence of Bessie Smith or the cornet tone of Buddy Bolden.

The Golden Age

2010-12-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a good, short summing up of an excellent book I read recently. My own attempt to write a good, short summing up of The Golden Age ended in failure, so I recommend you read this one and, more importantly, read the book.

Although I abandoned the original post I was working on, I'll throw in a few scattered points here:

The Golden Age is very much connected in my mind with Borges. Although JLB is constantly being cited as an influence, it does seem particularly clear in this case. That's not to say the book is derivative, but to me, it reads a bit like a Borges story (successfully) expanded to novel length. Calvino and his Invisible Cities is another obvious reference point that I've seen mentioned, but I see Borges as the ultimate source. Calvino isn't necessary to explain Michal Ajvaz's invention in the same way I think Borges is. I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Ajvaz had written a book on Borges.

One thing to watch for in The Golden Age is a particular, complex form that keeps recurring, leading the reader to believe that it may be some kind of key to the island civilization being described. Perhaps the most concrete presentation of this form is in the description of the river that forms the geography of the island's upper town. It comes together from divergent sources, flows for a while as a sort of braided stream, with small islands of rock where the houses of the town have been built, and then splits apart into a delta. This coming together, flowing for a while as a more-or-less unified force, and then breaking apart again also serves as an approximation of the process by which the island's sole Book changes as it passes through the hands of the islanders, who are simultaneously its readers and editor-writers.

Dalkey Archive Press, Ajvaz's US publisher, is surely up there with the very best small-to-medium size presses, along with maybe New Directions and I don't know who else. I had a hard time choosing between The Golden Age and The Other City when taking advantage of a sale Dalkey was running. Now I'm thinking I should've bought both.

For Sale: Rembrandt Drawing, Signed by Basquiat

2010-12-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

So, I recently signed up for Phil Schaap's jazz e-newsletter, which so far has turned out to be mostly lists of things he has for sale. Before going further, I want to say that I'm a fan of Schaap's long-running Charlie Parker show. He is an incredible living resource and important force in promoting and furthering appreciation of the music. I noticed a strange thing about the items Schaap has for sale, though. Many of them are ostensibly rare records signed by, but not featuring, Wynton Marsalis. Now, what I said above about Schaap also applies to Marsalis. I have nothing against him and have enjoyed his music - he's clearly an important figure. But why would anyone want (to cite just one example of an actual item for sale) a 78 of Fats Waller playing "Carolina Shout" signed by Wynton? Or (to cite another example) a 1927 Bix Beiderbecke 78 signed by Wynton? At least in that case, it's one horn player signing another's record, which maybe sorta kinda makes some kind of sense - or not? Does Marsalis' signature on somebody else's rare record make it more or less valuable to collectors? If you were trying to sell a rare Mickey Mantle baseball card, would you get A-Rod to sign it? I'm honestly confused.

Update:
Here's something I have no confusion or reservations about - hours and hours of archived Phil Schaap broadcasts, available for streaming. Gold mine. Treasure trove. Cornucopia.

Dorothy in Concord

2010-12-03T12:50:00.000-08:00

You know that thing where you turn off the sound on The Wizard of Oz and play Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack? And if you start it at the right place, it matches up in all kinds of cool ways and makes the movie like totally more psychedelic than it already is? Well, it doesn't work so well with Charles Ives' Concord Sonata. I noticed that The Wizard was on one night last weekend, but I also felt like listening to Marc-André Hamelin's Charles Ives/Samuel Barber disc, so I thought, let's try this and see what happens. And what happened was, my focus alternated between the music and the movie without the former ever becoming anything like a "soundtrack" to the latter. Not that I really expected it to work, but I thought maybe something cool would happen. Maybe it would work better with this version.

In any case, I can certainly recommend Hamelin doing Ives when listened to on its own. My appreciation of both of them is still in its early stages, and I know there are hours and hours of music I've yet to hear, but one particular area of Ives' work that I want to explore further is his large collection of songs, many based on pre-existing texts by others (poems, lyrics to other songs). I've heard only a small selection so far, initially drawn in when I found out that there was an Ives-ized version of "Abide With Me". Setting these words to new music is perhaps not a terribly radical idea, but it's one that struck me as bold and even inspiring, having grown up with the hymn as an immutable fact of life (in comparison to the Ives version, Thelonious Monk's wonderful and slightly skewed arrangement of the original tune sounds quite traditional). The titles of Ives' songs alone (including one called "Slugging a Vampire"!!!) make me want to hear more.

One last, rather remarkable, thing I just learned from Wikipedia re: the Concord Sonata:

In 1986, Bruce Hornsby borrowed the opening phrase of "The Alcotts" movement as the introduction to his hit "Every Little Kiss" (as heard on the album The Way It Is).

Don't Sully My Aeroplane

2010-12-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I (on rare occasions) hear something from In The Aeroplane Over The Sea on the radio, one part of me enjoys the music while another part of me feels like something is being violated. Like this music is too sacred or important or personal or something to be out there in the ionosphere mingling with lesser sounds. Like it's being diminished or disrespected or indecently exposed.

Aeroplane is one of those albums I can only listen to if I'm in the right mood, prepared to listen to the whole thing and submit to what I know it's going to do to me. For whatever reason, I haven't listened to it in a long time. When I was 14 or 15, I used to ration out "Hey Jude" to myself. I didn't allow myself to listen to it too often, not wanting to diminish the power it had for me at that time. I guess I've never really outgrown that way of thinking.

Two Drummer-Led Albums (And A Piano Footnote)

2010-12-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

Nasheet Waits' Equality: Alive at MPI is a fine album from last year that seems to have flown pretty far under the radar, especially considering who's on it. I couldn't find much online about it other than a positive mini-review in one of Tom Hull's valuable, Christgau-style Jazz Consumer Guides and a combined review (like this one, I guess) on All About Jazz. It may say something about the continued importance of record labels and their promotional capabilities that Jason Moran's recent Blue Note release, Ten, got a lot of well-deserved attention (for a jazz record) from NPR and other major outlets, but Equality (with the same personnel as Ten, plus saxophonist Logan Richardson), released on the tasteful but tiny Barcelona-based Fresh Sound, was mostly ignored. If you're a fan of Ten, as I am, I would be surprised if you didn't dig Equality (it's definitely more of a RIYL thing than an Armond White-style "better than" thing). After Waits pretty much blew my mind at a couple of recent performances, I wanted to find out what other recent albums he appeared on, and eventually came across Equality. It's a great example of the discoveries to be made by digging into the discographies of players you admire.

As I've mentioned before, there's something I really like about Moran when he's playing with saxophonists (his recent work with Apex comes to mind, as well as the ultimate Bandwagon+sax album, Black Stars), and he has plenty of great moments here. Equality also showcases the talents of bassist Tarus Mateen particularly well - his "King Hassan", one of the album's highlights, features a funky, propulsive Moran-Mateen-Waits groove set against the longer tones and mysterious/exotic mode of Richardson's melody statement and solos. Both Ten and Equality feature Jaki Byard tunes, and it's also interesting to compare the different approaches to Byard's "Mrs. Parker of K.C." on Equality and Fred Hersch's Whirl (Moran and Hersch* were both Byard students, although the influence is probably more evident in Moran's case). The head is played just about the same on both records, but the approaches diverge pretty starkly from there.

Another drummer-led album I've been listening to lately is Billy Hart's Enhance from 1977 (I was tipped off by reading Ethan Iverson's revised 1973-1990 list, a great starting point if you're looking to expand your knowledge and record collection). It's a tough one for me to pin down or briefly summarize. There's a lot going on and several styles and sounds packed into seven tracks (perhaps because six different members of the ensemble contribute compositions - Oliver Lake has two). Lake's presence may explain why I'm hearing a bit of the "St. Louis sound" (I'm thinking here of BAG, WSQ, and the later Julius Hemphill circle of associates and proteges) in the freewheeling group dynamic and the way bluesy harmonized passages comfortably share album space with "out"/free sections, particularly on "Hymn for the Old Year" (which also appeared a few years later on the WSQ masterpiece Revue).

I think I hear a bit of late Mingus, too, perhaps mostly in the playing of Don Pullen (who I really like on Mingus' Changes records) - Pullen fans should definitely check out this album. Enhance documents a group of world-class musicians choosing intelligently from the all the sounds available to them, not preemptively rejecting any possibilities or following any stylistic dictates or dogma, which is to say that there's a lot of music here, enough to last for many, many listens. The next Billy Hart I really want to get is Oshumare - it's Hart in the '80s, with Branford Marsalis and Steve Coleman instead of Enhance's Dewey Redman and Oliver Lake, Kenny Kirkland instead of Don Pullen, plus Bill Frisell!

*I've probably written about Fred Hersch enough on this blog, but I have to briefly mention that I saw the first set of his solo run at the Vanguard on Tuesday night. Highlights of a set in which everything was up to his usual high standard included a new composition dedicated to Billy Strayhorn, "Hot House Flower", which seemed to evoke the longing and beautiful melancholy that are important components of both Hersch and Strayhorn's music, and a version of Monk's "I Mean You" with Hersch conducting a deep exploration of the tune that made the long-delayed direct statement of the head at the end sound like a triumph. The set was being recorded (hopefully for a future release), but, unfortunately, somebody close to the mics knocked over a bottle in the middle of "I Mean You". Knowing Hersch, though, he'll probably play an even better one by the end of the run.

A Brief Note on the Late Leslie Nielsen

2010-11-29T06:41:00.001-08:00

This may sound like a snob/connoisseur thing to say, but the original Police Squad! TV series, which lasted all of six episodes, was funnier and better than the Naked Gun movies in just about every way. I watched these things over and over again on VHS in the late-'80s/early-'90s and certain gags still pop into my head from time to time. Come to think of it, the complete series on DVD would make an excellent Christmas gift.

Leslie Nielsen certainly made some sub-par movies later in his career, but with the six episodes of Police Squad! and the other Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker exclamation-point-enhanced masterwork, Airplane!, he earned his lifetime pass. Some of the funniest sh*t I've ever seen.

The Holiday Season Is Box Set Season

2010-11-16T08:07:00.000-08:00

I
Six discs of Orange Juice?!? Bring it on. OJ had a concept, a sound, that shouldn't have worked: awkward, white Scottish guys trying to play funky, dance-y, r'n'b-flavored pop/love songs in a DIY/post-punk milieu, fronted by a singer with a voice that, on first listen, seems completely, almost laughably wrong for this kind of music. The first time you hear them, you have to readjust your ears and your expectations. And then, if you're lucky, at some point it clicks and you get it. Off-kilter white "funk", a guy that can't sing doing a sensitive, vulnerable thing - these are elements that became somewhat common in the '80s underground/indie scene (and have been revived and recycled ever since), but even if you're familiar with the context, there's still something jarring and, ultimately, fresh about the way Orange Juice deployed/combined them to create their sound. The Housemartins were on to something similar, but they had a better, if still unconventional, singer in Paul Heaton and their aesthetic seems a bit easier to parse (Northern soul, gospel, Marxism, delivered with a bright tempo and mood). Orange Juice's influences, the components of their sound, don't come through so cleanly, perhaps (especially on their early Postcard material, documented on The Glasgow School) because of a simple lack of competence, a classic case of ambition outpacing ability to spectacular effect.

I don't know how long the link will be active, but the Guardian has a bunch of streaming preview tracks here.

II
Also on my Christmas list is this super-deluxe-looking Syl Johnson box from The Numero Group. I only know a handful of Johnson's records, mostly his top shelf (and sometimes uncannily Al Green-like) Hi Records work and the phenomenal "Is It Because I'm Black", so I'm very much looking forward to digging into this treasure trove. I'm also hoping to catch the man live at Southpaw in December, having missed him last time he was in town. Syl Johnson is right up there with O.V. Wright in the category of Undeniable Soul Masters who deserve to be more widely known.

III
Speaking of treasure troves and six-disc boxes, I recently got the Paul Motian Black Saint/Soul Note set, which consists of six complete albums Motian made for the Italian label(s). Black Saint and Soul Note played a crucial role in picking up the slack left by American labels in documenting the most creative jazz that was happening from the late '70s into the '90s. The box includes One Time Out, an early (but not the first) Motian-Lovano-Frisell trio album, which contains some of that group's wildest excursions and one of Bill Frisell's freakiest guitar tones on record. There are also piano-drums duos with Paul Bley and Enrico Pieranunzi. The Pieranunzi (Flux and Change - attention Crap Jazz Covers, if you haven't seen this one, you need to check it out), a live record arranged into a series of suites or medleys combining improvised sections with standards, gave me a fuller appreciation of the Italian pianist's range. I'd previously thought of him as a fairly conventional, if brilliantly fluid, classically-inflected player in the Bill Evans line, but this album demonstrates his imagination and his ability to move between free playing and changes while keeping up a dynamic, exciting interaction with Motian. It's a fun listen and shows why this duo has continued to collaborate over the years (this looks like it could be a worthy sequel).

Three of the discs document the predecessor to Motian's long-running trio, the Paul Motian Quintet, with bassist Ed Schuller and saxophonist Jim Pepper along with Lovano and Frisell. I hadn't heard anything from this group before buying this box (although I had heard the earlier version of the Quintet with Billy Drewes instead of Pepper), but can now say definitively that these albums are prime Motian. If you're a fan and you don't have The Story of Maryam, Jack of Clubs, and Misterioso, you've got a serious gap in your collection and some good listening ahead of you. These albums include many Motian compositions that he would record again later, but the versions here are almost uniformly excellent, if not necessarily definitive. Motian the composer was fully formed by this point (the mid-'80s); these discs are full of characteristically beautiful and mysterious tunes like "Cathedral Song", "Trieste", "Byablue" (a gorgeous solo performance by Frisell), and the Motian tune par excellence, "Abacus". While some of his compositions, like "Circle Dance", can resemble bright, major-key folk songs, many of them achieve beauty while defying listener's expectations on a note-by-note level. The melodies don't progress or resolve in ways that we're accustomed to hearing; they strenuously avoid cliche. The next note is always a surprise, and so the tunes remain fresh and elusive. Monk's compositions (some of which appear in this box) often feature aggressively or humorously "off", "wrong", or discordant notes. Motian's compositions thrive on the unexpected note, the one that doesn't so much sound "wrong" as surprising or counterintuitive.

(Strangely enough, this is not my first post that mentions both Syl Johnson and Paul Motian)

Leitch At The Movies, Part Two

2010-11-15T17:17:00.000-08:00

This is awesome news:
Will Leitch, who, as I've noted before, I've been reading since approximately 1994, finally has a full-time gig writing about movies, his true calling.

Lincoln Goes All In

2010-11-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

I see that others have already picked up on this, but I was reading a news item about the coming flood of investigations the new Republican-controlled House intends to unleash when I noticed something very interesting in the background of the photo of Rep. Darrell Issa of California. It's a painting executed in a very niche style: Republican Art. It depicts a bunch of Republican presidents playing poker and busting a gut at a joke presumably told by Abe Lincoln, who appears with his back to the viewer. Here's a closer look at what may be the cheesiest sh*t I've seen this side of a Thomas Kinkade.

While the obvious analogy is to "Dogs Playing Poker", I think this painting perhaps has more in common with the popular dorm room poster, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, as both works replace the nameless figures in a familiar artwork with representations of historical figures in order to make some comment on those figures. In the case of the reworking of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, the viewer is supposed to gather than Elvis, Bogart, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe were, despite (or because of) their fame, just as lonely and isolated as Hopper's diner crowd. In the painting I'll call Republican Presidents Playing Poker, the message appears to be that were these leaders of various eras to be gathered around a card table, they would surely find themselves to be kindred spirits, as unified in their Republicanism as the poker-playing dogs are by their dog-ness. As for the joke Lincoln is telling in the painting, I'd be willing to bet Bush 41's pile of chips that it involves Nancy Pelosi.

Three Food Tips

2010-11-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

I.
I'd heard some internet murmurings that Soup Burg, a nondescript diner on the Upper East Side that I had walked by many times without taking notice, justified the second half of its name by serving a mighty fine burger. I have confirmed that these rumblings are true. The patty is big, loosely packed, and if you order it on the rare side, there's a nice contrast between the crisp char on the surface and the super-juicy pink center. If that last sentence sounded at all sexual, I apologize.

II.
If you're looking for a way to liven up a bland Chinese takeout meal, might I suggest stirring in a small spoonful of Indian pickle (say, a nice mango chili). Transformative.

III.
Pickled turkey gizzards, straight out of the jar, may not sound appetizing, but you might be surprised. I was. They're a highlight of the excellent "bar snacks" menu (consisting mostly of pickled things in jars) at The Old Fashioned in Madison, WI. This place packs 'em in, and with good reason. If you find yourself in Madison, go and drop a buck on a gizzard. You won't be sorry, and even if you are, you've only blown a dollar on the experiment, and you can tell people you ate a pickled turkey gizzard. Worth it for the anecdote alone. Also, this place lets you add braunschweiger to any sandwich for $1.25 - as a Midwestern German-American, this almost brings tears to my eyes. As much I as like this place, I still have to say that the namesake drink, a Wisconsin tradition, is an abomination, a warped bastardization of one of the foundational classic cocktails. They should just call the drink a Badger, and I'd be OK with it.

Albums of the Moment

2010-10-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

I've purchased a lot of music lately, both online and on my trip to Chicago (Reckless Records!). I haven't even listened to all of it yet, but here are some quick notes on the stuff I've been playing most in the last week or two:

Jakob Bro - Balladeering
This Danish guitarist's album is like the perfect blend of a Bill Frisell album and a Paul Motian album, both of whom, not coincidentally, appear on it along with Lee Konitz and bassist Ben Street. There's some great footage on YouTube from a making-of documentary that was included in a deluxe edition of the album. This 2009 record is kind of hard to find in physical form, but it is on iTunes. Konitz is one of those major figures I haven't paid enough attention to, but he has some absolutely sublime moments here. He doesn't play on the album's first track, but his entrance on the gentle, almost children's-song-like "Evening Song" is one of the finest, most memorable moments of music I've heard all year.

Tim Berne Sextet - The Ancestors
An Amazon MP3 Store find for under $3, this is a live album with just 3 long tracks (two of which are Parts 1 & 2 of the same tune, presumably split when the album came out on vinyl). There's some great Paul Motian on this album, including what may be one of his best (and longest?) solos on record. I was walking the other night on Houston St., from the quieter western reaches heading east. The Jakob Bro album ended just as I reached Broadway and the opening track of this ("Sirius B") was the ideal soundtrack for the nighttime bustle of Manhattan.

The Bad Plus - Never Stop
I listened to this walking around Chicago and it seemed to be giving me energy, like a musical battery (I would recommend a loop of the title track to marathoners-in-training). Never Stop, more than just about anything else, made me thankful for my new headphones (Koss PortaPros) and their nice bass response (an exponential improvement over my old earbuds). I'm sure Ethan Iverson and Dave King would sound good as a duo, but if you can't properly hear what Reid Anderson is playing on this album, you're not really listening to it.

Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque
When I first got this album, it didn't quite click with me for some reason. I really liked "Metal Baby" and was lukewarm on the rest. Now, after seeing them live and relistening to this for the first time in years, I get it. How could "The Concept" have eluded me (I didn't intend that as a pun)? It still pales in comparison to the Fanclub's obvious inspiration, Big Star, but it gets a lot of things right and not much wrong. I hear TF's music as taking "The Ballad of El Goodo" as its starting point - the power ballad side of Big Star. They don't have the funkier, Memphis soul-derived aspects, or the sense of half-willfully teetering on the edge of madness and collapse that was part of both Chilton and Bell's natures.

Marc-Andre Hamelin - Etudes
After seeing Hamelin for the first time recently at Le Poisson Rouge, where he played a program of pieces from this, his latest record (the bulk of which is devoted to Hamelin's set of 12 etudes in each of the minor keys), there was no question that I had to have this music. As a person who still struggles to read music, a quick look through the scores for the etudes (which was for sale at LPR) made me feel like a third-grader trying to make sense of Infinite Jest, but this is far from mere virtuoso show-off material. Hamelin's music is melodically and harmonically rich and as finely and intricately layered as a piece of Louis Sullivan ornament (see my previous post). Hamelin's ability to render all of these layers and strands so that they can be heard individually as well as part of the total composition may be a more impressive, and, for the listener, probably more valuable, skill than the sheer, incredible volume of notes he's able to produce in a given measure. The etude that first grabbed me was No.7 (for the left hand alone), a gorgeous piece of music and, for obvious reasons, a feat of technique, but 8 (a musical setting of a Goethe poem) and 11 (a minuet) have also become early favorites (I expect that many, many more listens will be required to get to the bottom of this music).

One album I'm looking forward to is Volume II of Henry Threadgill's This Brings Us To, which I mention because I was just checking out Studs Terkel's 2005 book And They All Sang, which features a chapter on Threadgill. In 2005, Terkel was 93. A 93 year old man, who was 16 when his favorite jazz record, Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues", came out, was into Henry Threadgill. Can you get any hipper than that? [A day or so after writing the above, but before posting, I thought I spotted Threadgill outside Jazz Standard. Presumably, he was there, as I was, to check out Apex. For some reason, I feel compelled to use profanity to describe just how good this group sounded, so I'll at least keep it brief. Two word review: sh*t hot. And to expand on that: really f*cking good.]

Chicago Notes, Part One: Midwestern Mystics

2010-10-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

The Selected Ballads has been away for a while, partly due to a trip to Chicago. Some notes from the Great Metropolis on the Prairie:

For the first time in several years, I revisited Millennium Park and the adjacent Art Institute. Last time I was there, the Cloud Gate was being buffed to remove the seams between the individual mirror squares that make up the surface of the "bean". Now, there's not a seam in sight, and one could almost believe the whole thing had been poured into a mold. Looking again at Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion, I was thinking what a thrill it would be to stand in front of a big audience and unleash a highly amplified open E chord into that space. Has anyone ever asked Jeff Tweedy or Steve Malkmus about that?

If it does nothing else, Renzo Piano's addition to the Art Institute, the Modern Wing, provides a much-needed connection between the museum and Millennium Park, both at ground level and via a bridge that rises from park level to the 2nd floor of the new wing. Fortunately, it's also a pretty nice piece of architecture - well-detailed, restrained in its use of a limited palette of colors and materials, and in harmony with both the park to the north and the main Institute building to the south (apparently, there are some problems, though). A lot of care was taken to make the new wing energy-efficient, including the admittance of quite a bit of natural light, which actually made me realize that I prefer to feel a little less connected to the outdoors when looking at art in a museum. Maybe it was the beautiful day I visited on, but the natural light entering (from the less art-damaging northern direction, as per Piano's design) the Modern Wing started to make me wish I was back outside, a feeling that disappeared once I was back in the main body of the Institute.

On the other side of the Institute, Dan Kiley's '60s-era South Garden may now be overshadowed by all the design action to the north, but it has aged well and remains a high point of Modernist landscape architecture. Kiley's design sets up a simple grid, gets the grades, materials, and proportions right, and basically gets out of the way to let a by-now-mature grove of cockspur hawthorns create an environment quite apart from the nearby Loop.

Visiting the exhibit, Looking After Louis Sullivan, was a bit like going to church for me, as I consider myself an initiate in the great master's dualistic-mystic cult of organic-geometric architecture. The show featured the work of four photographers, including the heroic martyr to architectural preservation, Richard Nickel, as well as some of Sullivan's own drawings. Among these drawings, I spent a long time studying the incredibly intricate, pencil-drawn plates from A System of Architectural Ornament, According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers, a commissioned work completed near the end of Sullivan's life. A diagram (titled "Manipulation of the Organic") showing how a relatively simple natural form like a leaf or a seed pod could, by following nature's example, be elaborated and abstracted into a complex piece of ornament, reminded me of some of the ideas of Sullivan's approximate contemporary Gaudi (an adjacent drawing, showing a similar process of elaboration with geometric forms, also had some resonance with Gaudi's work). Just because both men took inspiration from the forms of plants and obsessively elaborated geometric forms doesn't mean they were aware of, or in any way influenced by, one another's work, but it's an intriguing possibility.

I also visited the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the masterworks of another of my heroes, Sullivan's fellow Midwestern mystic, landscape architect Jens Jensen. The conservatory, and specifically its fern room, were recommended to me as a must-see masterpiece, but I had a hard time believing than an interior landscape could be in the same class as Jensen's great parks and gardens. It is, though. The fern room is a complete landscape, a complete work of art even, as meticulously thought out and calibrated for various effects as a traditional Japanese garden, but with more of a concern for hiding the hand of man. The fern room is both an immersive, mist-shrouded prehistoric fantasy and a landscape composition that would reward close study. This story, which is also summarized on a plaque in the fern room, gives a sense of Jensen and the perhaps more genteel times in which he practiced (whether or not the story is 100% factual hardly matters).

Learn English The Malkmus Way

2010-10-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

I never really got into Pavement, so I've been pretty immune to the excitement generated by their reunion, but it does give me an excuse to share my one and only Pavement-related anecdote, which takes place in Beijing a few years ago. My Chinese friend, who was driving me to the airport, had the radio tuned to a station that played English language lessons. The lesson that was playing as I arrived at the terminal, and that made me wish I didn't have to get out of the car, was using as its text the lyrics to Pavement's "Cut Your Hair". So, Pavement fans can take pride in the fact that potentially millions of people in China have been learning English via Steve Malkmus lyrics.

On Belle & Sebastian & "Second Singers"

2010-10-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

So, I saw Belle & Sebastian the other night for the first time since (get ready for it) 1998. Their transformation as a live act in that time is a well-known story, so I won't belabor the point, but it would be fun to go back in time and try to convince people who were at the 40 Watt Club that night 12 years ago that someday Stuart Murdoch would be throwing out autographed (American) footballs to kids in the crowd and inviting fans up on stage to clap and dance with him. In that time travel scenario, I'd also try to convince people that in a few years B&S would have a popular song about a Mets-Giants series and that, a few years after that, we'd have a black president.

There are many things that could be said about Thursday night's fine, rain-defying performance (and Teenage Fanclub was good too - midtempo jangles, hey-thatsa-nice-distortion-pedal solos and Chiltonesque harmonies beautifully intact after all these years), but I want to focus on a tangential topic that I found myself thinking about after the show: a category of musician that I'll call, for lack of a better term, the "second singer". Usually a key instrumentalist in the band, the second singer maybe sings a song or two per album and is clearly inferior, vocally, to the lead singer. Sometimes though, as in the case of Belle & Sebastian's lead guitarist Stevie Jackson, the second singer may be a fan favorite, their songs often highlights of an album or show. There's something about Jackson's slightly wobbly vocals on songs like "Seymour Stein" and "Jonathan David" (love those "name" songs) that slices right through my defenses, although it may just be a case (and I forget who's written about this phenomenon) of less polished vocals being perceived as more direct, honest, or sincere. In the case of a pop song, though, I suppose the listener's perception is the only "reality" that matters. I'm not sure I know what that last sentence means, but I do know that Jody Stephens' vocal on Big Star's "Way Out West" has a similar unaffected, yearning thing going on.

Other good, canonical examples of "second singers" are Dave Davies ("Death of a Clown", "Strangers") and Keith Richards ("You Got The Silver", "Happy"). There must be some other good ones that I'm forgetting about. Mick Jones of The Clash almost works, but I think he's too strong a singer, maybe not quite "secondary" enough to qualify. Same goes for Pete Townsend. Moving away from rock, Bob Wills is an interesting case. Even though he was the bandleader and the name attraction of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, he only occasionally sang lead, mostly sticking to fiddle and his trademark interjections and band member shout-outs. He had a great, truly one-of-a-kind singing style, though, that was perfectly of a piece with the band's "clean hat, dirty boots", urbane-yet-downhome approach to the blues.

Tarbaby at Jazz Gallery

2010-09-26T16:26:00.000-07:00

After being shut out of some recent shows around town, I made sure to show up early at Jazz Gallery to check out Tarbaby. It's a relatively small space and the group consisted of four of the heaviest hitters on the contemporary scene - Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Nasheet Waits and Logan Richardson. So, I was surprised to see empty seats, especially as I've seen the place packed for groups featuring some of the same personnel. Maybe there was something else going on that night that I didn't know about, but the people that did have the taste and good sense to show seemed to be into the music. One of the best spontaneous reactions someone can have to music is to laugh - not because they find the music funny, but because they're thrilled and astonished by what they've just heard. It's a joyful thing, and not every musician can make it happen, but Tarbaby certainly can and does (they also get a lot of "WHOA!"s).

It's challenging for me to adequately describe this music, but looking at a couple of the musician/composers whose tunes they played (most of the set seemed to be originals), Don Cherry ("Awake Nu" from Where is Brooklyn? - it also appears on Tarbaby's first album) and Sam Rivers ("Unity"), both musicians who masterfully navigated (or perhaps, erased or ignored) the divides between in vs. out, free vs. composed/arranged, may at least give a sense of the spirit of this group. Tarbaby excels at giving a free, on-the-edge feeling to a seemingly arranged piece, pulling a piece apart to the point of chaos before snapping it back together with awesome precision. This is something that Jason Moran's Bandwagon (also - and probably not coincidentally - featuring Nasheet Waits, quite possibly the best drummer in New York City right now) specializes in, something which could perhaps even be considered one of the hallmarks of the best jazz being made today, a tenuous common thread in an era in which stylistic strands have diverged in innumerable directions.

Maybe someone has done this, but I would love to read a good article (even a book) covering the major approaches to composition that have developed in, say, the last twenty or thirty years, techniques that have evolved within common practice as well as totally individual systems (Henry Threadgill's, for instance). Because this is where my knowledge and my ear often run up against their limits. On some of Tarbaby's original tunes, there was obviously a head and the musicians were looking at some kind of a lead sheet, but it was hard for me to tell how much else was written out - was there a set number of bars before returning to the head? was there an arranged ending? Not that this affected my enjoyment of the music - this was music to be felt in the moment and thought about later - but the impulse to understand more about the things we enjoy is a healthy one, I think.

Hey There, Mr. Woodsy Pants

2010-09-21T12:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure, but I think this Wall Street Journal article on jeans care is some kind of classic in the field of newspaper "lifestyle" reporting. I won't give away all the good stuff, but you'll surely be interested to learn that a proper denim care regimen involves Dr. Bronner's soap, a "woodsy" potpourri sachet, and a little bit of good ol' fashioned sunshine.

The Spirit of Al-Andalus, Between Two Slices of Bread

2010-09-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World, about the rise and fall of Al-Andalus. Though it leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about its relevance to the modern world (with the book nearly ready for publication on Sept. 11, 2001, Menocal resisted the urge to make any changes to her text), the book clearly celebrates the cultural richness of medieval Spain as a product of religious tolerance and laments the fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim) that brought this luminous era to a close. Despite the fact that it was published eight years ago and deals mostly with Spain in the 10th to 14th centuries, it is literally difficult to think of a more topical read.

Sure, Al-Andalus had its Arabic-speaking Jewish warrior poets, its Muslim Aristotelians, its immortal works of architecture, but I'm proud to live in a city where one of the best places to get a Jewish deli sandwich is a Muslim-owned restaurant (that closes for Friday prayers) in a neighborhood synonymous with hip-hop culture. If I was hungry enough, I might even say that this compares pretty favorably with the Alhambra as a work of art.

Some Thoughts On The Nilsson Doc

2010-09-15T19:10:00.000-07:00

I finally got to see the long-time-in-the-making Harry Nilsson documentary, Who Is Harry Nilsson?, the other night. Some lightly sifted thoughts:

This movie may be unmatched as an endless parade of bad teeth and embarrassing hair styles. Some of the fashions on display betray the length of time it took to finish the movie - clearly, much of the interview footage had to wait several years before making it to the screen. I'm sure some of the participants are as mortified by the way they look in this movie as I am by my high school yearbook photos. Yes, Van Dyke, those jeans do make your butt look big.

Though not made with the skill of an Errol Morris, a D.A. Pennebaker, or even a Burns brother, I would've been happy to sit through this movie if it had run to the length (239 min) of Peter Bogdanovich's admirably workmanlike Tom Petty doc. There's probably a sharper, more stylish movie to be made with this material, but as a Nilsson fan, I'll take what I can get and like it.

I was disappointed that one of my favorite Nilsson albums (and a great example of the Late Work As Neglected Gem genre, a genre I think I made up*), Knnillssonn, wasn't mentioned (although one or two songs from it made the soundtrack). The story of its "comeback album" potential being squelched by the ill-timed death of Elvis (Harry's RCA labelmate) seems like it would've been an irresistible story for the filmmakers, but instead, the late RCA albums were glossed over as if they were all of a self-indulgent yet half-assed piece.

Speaking of underrated albums, I wanted to shout at the screen when Richard Perry started dissing Son of Schmilsson. I love both of the Perry-produced Nilsson albums, but I've always preferred the rough edges of SoS over the more polished (but undeniably masterful) Nilsson Schmilsson. Perry's interview footage is very revealing. After "Without You" became a worldwide hit, he saw a wide open road of nothing but good times and platinum records ahead, but Harry grabbed the wheel and, like Neil Young at around the same time, steered into the ditch. The footage of Harry with the pensioners' choir recording "I'd Rather Be Dead" undercuts Perry beautifully (the old folks get it, Richard!), though he would probably see it as indicative of Nilsson's growing self-indulgence. In any case, it makes me wish the SoS making-of documentary had been finished and released (it's not too late, of course).

Some of the best moments in the movie occurred, as one might expect, on the soundtrack. Although Cinema Village must have some of the smallest screening rooms (calling them theaters seems a bit too grand) in New York, and the sound is nothing special, it was still a thrill to hear Harry's voice writ at least semi-large. Due credit was given to his amazing self-harmonizing and overdubbing abilities and to the phrasing that he was forced to lean on after blowing out his voice during the Pussy Cats sessions. I'd love to see something like the "Layla" mixing board scene from the Tom Dowd documentary done for one of the great, many-layered Nilsson vocal performances (though for calling attention to the artifice/magic of singing with yourself via studio technology, it would be hard to top his "three Harrys" BBC performance).

In summary: I'm not sure if this documentary is greater than the sum of its parts, in that I'd probably rather see a two-DVD set of Did Somebody Drop His Mouse? and The Music of Nilsson (if such a thing existed), but, for someone who's already a fan, there's more than enough good stuff here to justify the enterprise.

*Though, of course, the idea of artists having a distinct "late style" is a well-known one and can be useful as a lens/key to view/interpret difficult or neglected works in a new way.

This Is Weird

2010-09-13T12:27:00.000-07:00

So, this morning I was eating a caffeinated candy bar from the Czech Republic that I received as a gift, and it reminded me of the Pixies' "Debaser". The bar was called Shock, and I've always misheard the chorus to that song as "Shock! Andalusia!", a mishearing that has persisted even after I learned what the actual lyrics are. Then, not more than a half hour after finishing the bar, "Debaser" comes on the radio, probably the first time I've heard it in a year or more.

Compared To What?

2010-09-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

The next person who refers to Newt Gingrich as an "intellectual" should get smacked in the mouth with a Susan Sontag book.

Newt Gingrich is an intellectual like Justin Bieber is a headliner at the Gathering of the Juggalos.

Has a person ever become so willfully stupid that their PhD was voided? I'm imagining a guy from Tulane showing up at Gingrich's office, removing the sheepskin from its frame, stamping a giant black VOID across it, and handing it back to him.

END OF RANT

Recent Listening - Somewhat Lesser-Known Names From The Jazz Canon

2010-09-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

A quick rundown of some albums I've been enjoying lately from the classic, "hard bop" era of the late '50s to early '60s (the exception, Hank Jones' I Remember You, was recorded in 1977 but is stylistically not too far removed from the earlier era):

Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin', Sonny Clark Trio, Sonny's Crib, and especially Leapin' & Lopin' (musicians on these four albums include Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, Billy Higgins, Art Taylor, and Philly Joe Jones)

Hank Jones - I Remember You (recorded in France w/ George Duvivier and Oliver Jackson) and Relaxin' at Camarillo (w/ Belgian flautist Bobby Jaspar, Paul Chambers and Kenny Clarke)

Phineas Newborn, Jr. - We Three (w/ Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes - probably should be considered a leaderless or co-led session, but sometimes listed as a Roy Haynes album as his name is first on the cover)

Ike Quebec - Blue & Sentimental (w/ Grant Green, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones) and his exquisite (and apparently career reviving) solo on "Deep in a Dream" from Leapin' & Lopin'

If there's something like a common denominator here, other than the fact that all of the above artists are less well known than they deserve to be (though there was a small surge of interest in Hank Jones upon his death at age 91 and Sonny Clark has apparently always been big in Japan), it's Paul Chambers, who plays bass on six of the eight albums mentioned, in three instances with Philly Joe Jones (a pretty much unbeatable combination) and with three other all-time-great drummers (Art Taylor, Kenny Clarke, and Roy Haynes) on the other records. Chambers is well-known for his work with Miles Davis and for playing on a million other classic sessions in a short but brilliant life (I love Charlie Haden's comments on him at the end of this interview), but George Duvivier's superb playing with Hank Jones caught me off guard because I wasn't as familiar with him. I'd heard him on a few things, including records with Bud Powell and Eric Dolphy (along w/ Ron Carter on cello!), but hadn't paid him much mind until hearing I Remember You. I guess there's never been a major surplus of world-class bassists, so it shouldn't be surprising that, like Hank Jones, Duvivier played with a wide range of musicians over a long career - still, it's a fun list, including Cab Calloway, Moondog, Janis Ian, Barry Manilow, and Tom Waits.

Re: my Sonny Clark binge, the undeniable-but-not-fully-explicable greatness of Leapin' & Lopin' is an interesting case. When he recorded it, Clark was coming off a period of reduced musical activity (apparently due to his drug problem), and the band for the date consisted mostly of musicians who, while top-notch professionals, were a tier down from the big names on many of his previous albums. Great as they may have been, Charlie Rouse and Butch Warren were not John Coltrane and Paul Chambers. On paper, L&L seems like it would be a solid effort by an artist in premature decline, good but not up to previous standards. In fact, it's probably one of the best records of its era, an era when classic records were being recorded on a weekly basis. One of those records where, by some mysterious (chemical? alchemical?) process, everything came together.

Part of the record's success, obviously, has to do with the way that this group of musicians fit together (having Billy Higgins on drums is always a good start), but Clark's strong compositions, making up half the album, are also a big factor, especially the instantly memorable "Melody for C". The aforementioned "Deep in a Dream" (why hasn't this standard been recorded more often?) is one of the archetypal romantic ballad performances. Set slightly apart from the rest of the album, in its own smoky ether, by the substitution of Ike Quebec for Tommy Turrentine and Charlie Rouse, this track is the thing that puts this album in a special category for me. Quebec's own Blue & Sentimental, one of the only albums from his post-Leapin' & Lopin' comeback era not to feature organ, is a very successful pairing of old skool tenor (hearkening back to the pre-bop, Hawkins/Young/Webster era while looking forward to the soul jazz trend) with some then state-of-the-art talent in Grant Green and Chambers/Jones. It's a moody, enveloping listen and leaves me wanting to hear more Grant Green (I've got my eye on this in particular).

Werk It, Etc

2010-09-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

Found this great proto-Neu! Kraftwerk track (don't be scared off by the crazy "intro" - the pounding, stomping badassness starts to kick in a little after 1:30) while checking out this actual Neu! track from this list (one man's impressive attempt to construct a sort of personal Billboard chart).

The list also reminded me of something of which it is very salutary to be reminded: Glenn Danzig's delivery of the word "bitch" (or syllable, if you prefer to think of "sonuvabitch" as one word) in "Where Eagles Dare". To properly represent how he sings it would require phonetic markings that I don't know how to do in HTML and don't understand anyway, but it's what makes the song for me, somehow encapsulating an entire attitude/point-of-view/way-of-being in the delivery of one word.

And how was I not previously aware of The Embarassment? (Don't miss the beer-chucking live version! I love everything about this video, including the MC Escher wallpaper.)

Ride A White Swan (Update)

2010-09-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I linked, not without skepticism, to a report that one of The Selected Ballads' favorite writers, the great, underappreciated-in-America Iain Sinclair, was collaborating on a project that somehow involved the 2012 Olympic site and a river journey by pedal-driven swan boat. Not being familiar with his collaborator, filmmaker/artist Andrew Kötting, it seemed too strange to be true. Now, it turns out there's online documentation [via] that it really happened, though the photo of Sinclair and Kötting in their swan boat being lowered into the water by helicopter is almost enough to make me start doubting the whole thing all over again. More documentation, some of it via pinhole camera, on the impressively pseudonymed Anonymous Bosch's Flickr (his non-swan-related photos of London and Londoners are also well worth a look).

As fanciful as the project still seems, it makes more sense to me after finishing Sinclair's latest book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, in which the swan is something of a motif, a recurring and shifting symbol or totem. There's swan graffiti, a gory swan massacre, and even the mysterious Dr. Swan (aka Swanny), a seedy character who Sinclair tracks through a Hackney underworld (one of many underworlds Sinclair explores, including the Hackney Mole Man's literal one) of day-drinkers, self-medicating doctors, and disgraced morgue attendants haunting abandoned hospitals.

When The Right Singer Finds The Right Song...

2010-08-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

...there's no doubt. Jeff Tweedy, who played on one of the finest CCR covers ever recorded, is now part of another one. [via]

Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, [insert pianist here]

2010-08-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

My recent acquisition of the Geri Allen-Charlie Haden-Paul Motian album In the Year of the Dragon got me wondering, how many Haden-Motian piano trio sessions are out there? With the help of some online discographies, I've come up with the following (I put an asterisk* by the ones I've heard):

w/ Keith Jarrett:
Life Between the Exit Signs
Somewhere Before
Mourning of a Star

w/ Geri Allen:
Etudes*
In the Year of the Dragon*
Segments
The Montreal Tapes
Live at the Village Vanguard

w/ Gonzalo Rubalcaba:
The Montreal Tapes*
Discovery: Live at Montreux

w/ Enrico Pieranunzi:
Special Encounter*

w/ Paul Bley:
Memoirs*
The Montreal Tapes

If anybody reading this knows of any I've missed, please let me know in the comments section, because the ones I've heard so far have me wanting to "collect the set".

Haden and Motian established themselves as one of the great one-two bass-drum punches as members of Keith Jarrett's "American Quartet" (presumably continuing the work they began on the Jarrett trio dates, which I haven't yet heard), but with the Bley and Allen collaborations, they made a strong case for themselves as the go-to partners for pianists with strong, slightly off-kilter musical personalities. In the Year of the Dragon is an ideal piano trio record: beautifully equilateral, with all three musicians contributing compositions and continually pushing the others out onto the improvisational edge, where these players thrive. Sounds, tunes, ideas jump off the record. Lesser piano trios can slip into an undifferentiated, though polished, beige haze. Geri Allen is allergic to beige, and Haden and Motian are at their best working with bolder colors. The only other Allen-Haden-Motian trio record I've heard, Etudes, is at least the equal of Dragon and gets to some different places stylistically (including a very memorable take on Herbie Nichols' "Shuffle Montgomery").

After a few listens, I haven't quite been able to get a bead on the Pieranunzi (Special Encounter). It's safe to say that he's operating on a high level in the flowing/European classical-influenced/Bill Evans line. There's beauty here, but I haven't dug deep enough yet to see what else is going on. I can unhesitatingly recommend another Haden-Pieranunzi session, Silence, with Billy Higgins and Chet Baker* (the only time they appeared together on record?) sounding surprisingly great together.

Since writing the above, I've picked up the Montreal Tapes with Gonzalo Rubalcaba. The Cuban pianist must have been in his mid-twenties at the time of this live recording, and he plays with exuberance and a kind of personal, idiosyncratic virtuosity. The track list on this live set (part of a series of Haden discs, all recorded in 1989, that I'd like to get more of) has no real low points, but finishes particularly strong with three familiar but extremely welcome selections: "Silence", one of Haden's most beautiful compositions and one he's returned to often; Ornette's early gem "The Blessing", a great fit for this trio and a tune Haden had played on 30 years prior at the Hillcrest with Paul Bley; and "Solar", the Miles tune that's been recorded by several great pianists, starting (as far as I know) with Bill Evans at the Vanguard. If I was going to make any criticism of this excellent album, it would be that it doesn't quite achieve the superb three-way balance of the trio with Allen. I don't know if this holds true of this trio's other records, but Rubalcaba and Haden seem to be in the fore, slightly overshadowing Motian, though he gets his licks in and is more than solid throughout.

One trio I'd like to hear is Haden and Motian with Ethan Iverson, who has often expressed his love for, and debt to, the Jarrett American Quartet. As far as I know, they haven't recorded and I missed their run at the Vanguard in '08 (though I have seen Iverson and Haden as a duo). In fact, it was Iverson's recent, exhaustive piece on Ron Carter-Tony Williams trio sessions that inspired me to finally finish this piece that I've had sitting around in draft form for months. Iverson refers to Carter-Williams as "the Rolls Royce", which begs the question of what to call the high-performance machine that was Reid Anderson and Nasheet Waits at Small's earlier this month with Iverson and Mark Turner.

*The idea I had of late-period Chet Baker, previously informed almost exclusively by the Let's Get Lost soundtrack, had to be recalibrated after hearing Silence. Baker here doesn't sound anything like the mythical burnt-out junkie, slouching through Europe toward an increasingly inevitable death. He's swinging, floating along, sounding like he's glad to be in such good company. Even though Haden is the nominal leader, it's Higgins that sets the tone, his joyful playing ruling out the possibility of any musical moping.

Four Things Found On The Internet

2010-08-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

1
This photo book, from Thurston Moore's new publishing concern and featuring the work of former Village Voice photographer James Hamilton, looks like it could be some kind of milestone in the photos-of-musicians genre. That Johnny Rotten photo! He looks downright huggable, almost angelic. [via]

2
The limited exposure I've had to Tao Lin's work (like the majority of the small minority of people who've heard of him, I have a greater familiarity with his self-promotional stunts and shenanigans than his writing) has left me intrigued but a bit doubtful of the success (in literary terms) of his admittedly distinctive project. I didn't really "enjoy" but was at least semi-engrossed by his recent account of being arrested for "trespassing" at NYU, but this piece in Canteen is a pretty impressive literary performance, bordering on heroic feat of sustained concentration (actually, I think "heroic feat of sustained concentration" might more accurately describe the act of reading the piece). I hate to go here, but it did remind me a little bit of a DFW footnote (like, say, some of the longer ones in Brief Interviews) in its "how long can he keep this up?"-ness.

3
I'm glad somebody (Ben Ratliff, though there are probably others by now) has written about the "new" (1940) Savory recording of "Body and Soul", a sample of which was posted by the Times yesterday. I don't really have enough knowledge of the state of jazz saxophone circa 1940 to know just how far ahead of its time Hawkins' playing is in this sample, but it seems like he's making some pretty strikingly radical choices here. The playing is so much more modern-sounding than the recording that it produces an exciting friction (frisson?) - there must be a good analogy, but I can't come up with it. It's not like he's into Dolphy territory exactly, but it's hard to believe anybody else was playing like this 70 years ago. It's also hard to believe that I'm posting about a 47-second sample of something. Obviously, I'm eager to hear the whole thing.

4
And last but far from least, rare foulmouth Elvis blues (with commentary by Nick Tosches!). The Hound should be declared King of the Internet, at least for today, for posting this. Go listen before somebody makes him take it down.

Chew On This

2010-08-17T12:58:00.001-07:00

Am I crazy, or is this new group Woodworms trying to pass off a boiled-down pastiche of Konono No. 1, Andrew Hill's Compulsion, and Darin Gray's St. Louis Shuffle as an original concept? So derivative.
[via]

Look Into The Gorilla's Eyes

2010-08-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

Recently came across Spanish photographer Amparo Garrido's website and was especially taken with her photos of dogs and gorillas, putting me in mind of Werner Herzog's quote (which I can't find or remember precisely - was it from Grizzly Man or Burden of Dreams?) about how your beloved family pet would be quite willing to kill you for food if it came to that. In trying unsuccessfully to find the Herzog quote, I discovered that at least two people on Flickr have cats named for the great director. Unsurprisingly, both cats appear to be Brooklyn residents.

Stranger Than Fiction

2010-08-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

The John Lurie piece in the new New Yorker is really something. One of those (less than weekly) occasions when I'm glad the Selected Ballads household has a New Yorker subscription.

I may have been primed for the which-one-is-crazier story of Lurie and his friend/stalker by having just finished John Gilmore's Hollywood memoir Laid Bare, in which fame and its frequent companion self-destruction are major themes. I might do a post of some of my favorite quotes from Laid Bare, which will certainly include the description of Dennis Hopper as "a goat in Miss Tweedle-dum's parlor".

If you haven't already seen it, you've probably at least had someone recommend it to you, but I can't let a post mentioning John Lurie and Dennis Hopper end without urging you to rent, buy, or YouTube Lurie's Fishing With John. Or, at a minimum, the legendary Tom Waits "fish in his pants" episode.

"Wes Anderson Sucks, Spike Jonze Sucks..."

2010-08-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

Could this Vincent Gallo interview be the inspiration for the instant classic Scharpling-Wurster "Sucks" bit from the Best Show on WMFU? Check out Part 1 of the Gallo interview starting at around 14:08 and decide for yourself. [Gallo interview via].

The Best Show episode in question (from 7/6/10) is archived here. Even funnier to me than the ten-minute-long list of "sucks" novelty records was the list of Newbridge-area power pop bands recorded by Wurster's strangely principled audio engineer:

Lovely Boys
The Bill Bixbys
The Craigs
Sherbet Falls
The Album
Sleestacks
[a name I couldn't make out - Wurster almost loses it as this point]
I Love You The Ghost of Andrew Davis
Bam Bam
The Resistance (a "white power pop" band that sounded like "the Rubinoos fronted by Goebbels")

I really want to start a band called The Craigs.

New Wave Jet Age

2010-08-03T07:14:00.000-07:00

It looks like this appeared a few years ago, but I've just discovered a very cool thing: old issues of St. Louis new wave/punk/pop/rock'n'roll 'zine Jet Lag available online with commentary by co-founder (and longtime community radio DJ) Steve Pick. Highlights are too numerous to mention - just starting browsing anywhere - but I was particularly intrigued by Beatle Bob interviewing Chuck Berry (and giving him a sort of "blindfold test") in issue #7. Check out Pick's commentary on this issue in the blog - apparently, there's been some speculation about the authenticity of the interview, given B-Bob's occasional willingness to sacrifice truth on the altar of rock'n'roll. (If I haven't done so before, I'd like to state that, on the divisive issue of Beatle Bob, I am firmly in the pro-Bob camp. As a general rule, it's good to be in the same camp as Robert Pollard.)

? & The Mysterians @ Damrosch Park, 7/31/10

2010-08-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

F**k yoga, I wanna get on whatever health and fitness regime ? (of ? & The Mysterians) is on. Unless it's yoga, in which case I will start doing yoga.

"96 Tears" came out 44 years ago, and these guys are still killin' it. Of course, maybe in Martian years, ? is still the young man that his on-stage energy (the man can dance!) makes him seem to be. Rock'n'roll.

Bonus Links
Check out this Flickr set of the Lincoln Center gig (w/ Ronnie Spector joining in on "96 Tears"!!!)
What the photos don't capture is the blinding light that was coming off ?'s sequined outfit

And don't miss the Hound's ? post, including a good comments section

Links of the Day

2010-07-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

1.
I used to live a couple blocks from this place. Walked by a million times. Never went in. This makes me realize that my decision-making was sound.

2.
Gangstaaaaaaaaaaaa.

[Both via The Awl]

A Marginal Note Re: Missed Opportunities

2010-07-26T18:21:00.000-07:00

Good Lord. I was in the Strand last week, having a grand old time browsing, thinking a bit about the recently departed Strand habitue David Markson, and I had no idea that big, annotated chunks of Markson's personal library were for sale all around me. David Markson's copy of Tristram Shandy, $5. Sh*t. It's not so much that I regret missing out on buying these books. Though it would be a cool thing to own a book from the library of a writer I admire very much, it might feel a bit ghoulish to go bargain hunting for a dead man's possessions. What I regret is missing out on the thrill/chill I would have experienced in pulling a book off the shelf at the Strand, looking inside, and realizing it had belonged to David Markson.

[Update: HTMLGiant, as expected, is all over this thing. And in the comments to that second post, I noticed that there's a Facebook group for people who've acquired Markson's books, a virtual reassemblage of his library.]

Of Film Diaries & Biopics, Philosophers, Aliens, and Prog Keyboardists

2010-07-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Good interview with London writer and Selected Ballads favorite Iain Sinclair here [via]. The video, a sort-of guided tour of Hackney with Sinclair, is the real highlight, and a must-see if you're a fan, as it includes bits of his 8mm film diary from the '60s and '70s. I really want to see more of this footage. Maybe someone could collaborate with Sinclair on editing a couple hours of highlights from the diary, fly him over, and screen it at Anthology Film Archives (with live narration?).

Speaking of Anthology, their Anti-Biopic series (in its final week) was a brilliant idea well executed. I've seen only two of the films so far, Ken Russell's over-the-top-of-the-top Lisztomania and Derek Jarman's cerebral, irreverent, and altogether engrossing Wittgenstein, but the impressive range of the series and the film knowledge that went into putting it together is clear from just reading through the program. With Roger Daltrey (as Liszt), Ringo (as the Pope), and Rick Wakeman (as an Aryan FrankenThor - you just have to see it - and the man responsible for the soundtrack), Lisztomania makes Tommy seem restrained, as if Pete Townsend's conception was holding Russell back from really letting his freak flag fly. Lisztomania is as quintessential a '70s movie as any of the gritty, realistic Dog Day Afternoons that are now so associated with that decade. [Update: I just saw that Lincoln Center is about to kick off a Russell retrospective, including appearances from the master himself.]

Wittgenstein, the biography of a notoriously difficult-to-understand (and yet highly quotable) philosopher filmed against a black backdrop, could have easily been as dry as Lisztomania is juicy. Though it runs at a decidedly cooler temperature, Jarman's film has its fair share of sex and eccentricity, integrated with, rather than providing relief from, the philosophy at the core of the story. The most memorable example of this integration is the glockenspiel-playing "little green man" from outer space who engages the young Wittgenstein in a philosophical dialogue. Had this dialogue been set in a Greek temple with phallus-shaped columns and scored with some wicked prog synth, it would've been worthy of Ken Russell.

Roundup of Recent Live Music, Part Two

2010-07-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Marty Ehrlich (4 Altos) at The Stone

I'd been wanting to catch Marty Ehrlich live for some time, especially after reading about him in Point From Which Creation Begins, the history of St. Louis' Black Artists Group, the crucible/wellspring for so much of the most vital creative music of the '70s and '80s. BAG has often been overlooked in the shadow of Chicago's AACM, with which it was allied, but if you start tracing its influence and look at all that its members went on to do, its historical importance becomes clear.

Ehrlich was a friend and protege of Julius Hemphill, having become involved in the BAG scene as a - clearly very hip - teenager. Besides the remaining founders of the still-mighty World Saxophone Quartet, Ehrlich must be considered the primary torch carrier and further-er of Hemphill's work composing for multi-saxophone ensembles - it sounds like a weird niche, but Hemphill, and now Ehrlich, have made it into a legitimate and strong branch of jazz practice. I'm no composer or scholar of classical music, but I imagine this kind of writing must have similarities to writing for string quartet. There is a chamber quality to the 4 Altos music (and for those unfamiliar with the group, their name accurately describes their lineup, four alto saxophones and nothing else), something intimate and cerebral but still powerful on an emotional/visceral level. At The Stone, the group debuted some new Ehrlich compositions, and not having been familiar with any of this group's music, I thought the new compositions might've been the best of the set - one called "Starlets" was a particular standout.

Jason Moran, Mary Halvorson, Ron Miles at Jazz Standard

There's a Willa Wonka boat trip quality to the experience of seeing this trio - a wild ride ("there's no earthy way of knowing/ which direction we are going") in congenial company. Listing some of the composers that made up their program - Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Conlon Nancarrow, David Bowie - only gives a hint of this group's range. I was thinking before the set that I've heard Moran, either live or on record, play just about everything, from James P. Johnson to Schumann to Afrika Bambaataa (actually, that's all just one album), but I hadn't ever heard him touch on rock (though I suppose "Planet Rock" does have a rock, or at least Krautrock, foundation). I wasn't surprised to hear him take an excursion in this direction, but wouldn't have expected him to choose as his vehicle the last track on Diamond Dogs. "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family", as it turns out, has a groove well-suited for this group to inhabit and expand, adding dimensions surely never anticipated even by its forward-looking composer, and affording Halvorson the opportunity to engage in what could be described, if one was so inclined, as righteous riffage and shredding.

I was pleased to see the continued proliferation of Paul Motian compositions outside of the drummer's own gigs. The music seems to be spreading in a hand-to-hand way, as younger musicians who have played with Motian (a large and constantly expanding group) add his tunes to the repertoires of their own groups. The Frisell tune (might've been from Richter 858?), besides being a lovely set closer, was an invitation to think about the distinct places Halvorson and Frisell have carved out for themselves in the realm of contemporary improvised guitar. Halvorson did play some Frisell-ish reverb-y chords before moving into her more characteristic single-note-dominated attack. And like Frisell, Halvorson is a skillful and creative user of electronics in her playing, but she uses different effects to different effect, often to warp the notes of her already unlikely lines. Halvorson's tone can at first sound almost like an anti-tone to ears accustomed to amp-, pedal-, and tube-obsessed, tone-chasing rock guitarists. It sounds deceptively "natural", just the sound of a big Guild plugged into a clean Fender amp, but the sound is surely tweaked and deliberately crafted for the effect it achieves, which is to make you listen, and to make each note distinct (except when she chooses to digitally twist or smear them).

I feel a little guilty about wrapping this up without even touching on Ron Miles' fine playing (on G trumpet, I believe), but I'll just say that this is another rarely-convening group that I would love to see record, live or in studio.

Tweet 'n' 'Shine - Two Brief Items

2010-07-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

1.
Two of my favorite recent @jonwurster tweets (and I realize that "retweeting" via a blog is like transcribing a TV show with a telegraph):

I feel my English skills are @ a level where I'm ready to help others. Please contact me if you or someone you no is in need of tootering.

If I could know the answer to 1 question it would be: Has there ever been a guy so into rockabilly he refused modern medical help and died?

2.
Kudos to Dave Bry at the Awl for correctly identifying (and embedding - scroll to the bottom) the best version of "Moonshiner".

Just realized that these are not, as I'd first thought, totally unrelated items, as Wurster has recorded and toured with Jay Farrar.

Discovering Prine

2010-07-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

After reading about the strange-but-true Roger Ebert-Sex Pistols connection, I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that Ebert is responsible for another footnote in music history: he wrote the first review John Prine ever received. Though his beat was movies, Ebert broke the story on the emergence of one of the Great American Songwriters. His post about it is several months old, but I just came across it a few days ago. It contains the original review, which came so early in Prine's career that he seemed not to have settled on final titles for some of what would become his most famous songs ("Sam Stone", for example, was apparently called "The Great Society Conflict Veteran's Blues"!).

I've had the pleasure of being bowled over by some brilliant performances that I was in no way prepared for, but I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to walk into a club with no expectations and hear "Sam Stone" for the first time. And then "Angel From Montgomery".

Bonus Links
Swamp Dogg's cover of "Sam Stone" (if it's possible for a knife to the gut to be transcendent, then that's what this is)
Susan Cowsill and Brian Henneman doing "Angel From Montgomery"

Bonus Commentary
Armond White's recent comments about Ebert ("I think he does not have the training. I've got the training" "I'm a pedigreed film critic") remind me of the old, intermittently funny syndicated public radio character, Dr. Science, whose catchphrase was "I have a Masters Degree...in science!" I've never thought about this before, but I wonder if Dr. Science was an inspiration for noted public radio fan John Hodgman's "expert" persona.

I'm Assuming There Are No Wooden Puppets In Inception

2010-07-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

All this talk about Inception and the way dreams are portrayed or used as plot devices in movies reminds me of the most dream-like movie I've ever seen, Jan Svankmajer's Faust. It's not about dreams, and there are no "dream sequences", but it feels the way a dream feels. The logic, the rhythm, the repetitions of certain actions, all seem more akin to a dream than to a mainstream movie, as if Svankmajer replaced conventional film grammar with dream grammar. There's something about the way stairs are used in Faust that is key to its convincing dream-ness, but I don't think I could explain that without seeing it again, if even then. Thinking about how images, scenes and, most of all, the feeling of the thing have persisted in my mind, coming to the surface with surprising frequency, it's hard for me to believe that I've seen it only once, in or around 1998. I like the form it has, the place it inhabits, in my memory, and I'm a little afraid of the way a second viewing might alter that.

As a side note, another thing I remember about that screening (here comes some name-dropping) is that Jeff Mangum and a bunch of the Elephant 6/Orange Twin gang were there. They all showed up together in a van. Which, now that I'm typing it, kind of sounds like a dream I would've had. But that, kids (here comes some nostalgia), was Athens, Georgia in the late '90s.

A Useful Tip From Ted Leo

2010-07-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

The phrase "leaving it all onstage" was coined for performers like Ted Leo. I was in the audience the night in 2003 when, unfortunately, his voice was one of the things he left onstage, partway through a set in Urbana, IL, the resulting strained vocal cords forcing him to cancel several tour dates. He did his damndest, though, to give us our money's worth, and I think everyone came away from the show admiring the effort he made. He's always a very high energy, "on" performer, and thanks to the food diary he just wrote for New York Magazine, his secret is out:

"It's a really good, quick pick-me-up: mix, say, two fingers of Jameson, a packet of Emergen-C, and a dash of hot sauce. You're best off doing the orange or tangerine flavors; anything else doesn't work so well. It's not the tastiest thing in the world, but it gets the job done."

Drummers, Trios

2010-07-13T18:41:00.000-07:00

I'm probably way behind on this, but I recently found out that there's a trio featuring drummers Eric McPherson and Nasheet Waits (the other member is Abraham Burton on tenor). As it happens, these are also the drummers on two new piano trio albums that I've been listening to a lot lately, Fred Hersch's Whirl (McPherson) and Jason Moran's Ten (Waits). Whirl and Ten really showcase Hersch and Moran's strengths, with major, distinctive, and highly collaborative contributions from McPherson and Waits. Both of these albums would be excellent "start here" recommendations for new listeners, which is saying something considering that both Hersch and Moran have extensive catalogs (especially Hersch, who, as far as I can tell, has put out close to 30 discs as a leader). If you hadn't heard a note of their music, these new albums would give you a pretty clear idea of what these guys are about.

Bonus Links
Waits gives an insightful tour through the Max Roach discography, along with some personal reminiscences, here. Unless you are some kind of world-class percussion master or scholar, you will learn some things about drums reading this. After I read it, I was inspired to pick up a couple of Max Roach albums from a vendor at the Brooklyn Flea on Saturday, The Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker and The Many Sides of Max Roach. They were from a cheap, not attractively packaged, reissue series, but they sound OK and the music is definitely more than OK. Many Sides is perhaps the more interesting recording. There's no way for Max Roach Plays Charlie Parker to improve on Max Roach playing with Charlie Parker (even with Kenny Dorham on the session); Many Sides has Booker Little on trumpet and a nicely eclectic group of compositions, including tunes by Bill (father of Spike, bassist on Bringing It All Back Home) Lee, a young Muhal Richard Abrams (so young that he's referred to as just Richard Abrams on the sleeve), and Consuela (aunt of Spike) Lee Morehead.

Yesterday Was Thoreau's Birthday

2010-07-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

[Note: I did not realize it was Thoreau's birthday at the time the following incident occurred.]

Last night, I saw a small fly on my closet door. I picked up the nearest book to swat it. Then I realized that the book I was holding, the book I was about to kill the fly with, was Walden. This doesn't feel right, I thought. So, I put the book down, picked up a copy of the Brooklyn Rail that was lying nearby, and killed the fly with that.

Roundup of Recent Live Music, Part One

2010-07-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

Oliver Lake Organ Quartet at Jazz Gallery

I hate to use such a hacky analogy, but hearing Oliver Lake's version of "organ jazz" was like eating an updated version of a classic dish by a master chef. Maybe a dish that was popular in the '60s and '70s and has since fallen out of fashion (Steak Diane?). The brilliance in the reinterpretation is that it still has the taste of the original, but there are different elements, and just more of something, but it's all so well-integrated that you find yourself savoring the overall effect, the pleasure of it, instead of trying to identify all the ingredients. I don't think it would be inaccurate to use the terms groove, blues, funk, or hard bop to describe aspects of the quartet's music, but there is still the vital avant-garde streak that one would expect from an Oliver Lake group, mainly apparent in the leader's own alto playing. Rather than try to put a label on this group and its music, I'll just defer to this fine, concise description (of their new album, Plan) from Lake's website, "Oliver with three young cats exploring a whole new language together".

As a sidenote, I recently discovered that there is an Oliver Lake, as in a body of water, in Indiana. Sounds like a great setting for a jazz festival. I was also excited to discover that Oliver Lake has a Twitter.

The New Pornographers w/ the Dodos and the Dutchess & the Duke at Terminal 5

I've seen the New Pornographers several times, and they always impress. One thing I've only noticed recently, though, and especially at this show, is how Dan Bejar's songs, which often start out sounding like the odd men out, the square pegs, on a new NPs album, have gradually become my favorites. And, judging by the crowd at Terminal 5, I'm not alone. Every time DB took the stage (a few times to the strains of Darth Vader's "Imperial March", to his almost totally imperceptible, and perhaps non-existent, amusement) and stepped to the microphone, it meant it was time for a show highlight. Of course "Myriad Harbor" was going to be a crowd pleaser - New Yorkers' love of self-celebration is well-known - but I'd forgotten what a MF'er "Jackie Dressed in Cobras" is.

The Dodos must surely be the only acoustic guitar/vibes/drums (and sometimes acoustic guitar/drums/drums) trio ever, and their sound is even more rhythm-dominated than you'd except from that lineup. Meric Long is a very percussive guitar player, though he can and does get more single-note "picky" and melodic in certain songs, and the vibes function more as a tuned rhythm instrument (they are technically percussion, after all) than as a melody/solo voice. Also, Long yelps a lot as punctuation, another percussive element. I appreciate what this band is doing on a conceptual/intellectual level, but haven't really warmed to them.

By my estimation, the Dutchess and the Duke's music is about 50% based on their ragged-but-right, unique-but-familiar vocal blend, 35% on their folky, vaguely roots/Southern/country-filtered-through-the-British-invasion sense of melody, and 15% on their rudimentary-but-evocative electric guitar playing, so that it wasn't a big deal that they had to bring along a substitute guitarist due to a hand injury. D&D have created a wonderful sound world, and I'd love to see them as headliners in a small club (they played Union Hall in Brooklyn earlier this year, but I missed it). Also, I finally caught up with their second (and latest) album, Sunrise/Sunset, after seeing them live, and I expect I'll be returning to it more often than their (very strong) debut. The first was bare bones basic; this one adds a bit of orchestration/arrangement/production, but still feels winningly modest and homemade.

Beeswax

2010-07-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to seeing Beeswax. I liked both of Andrew Bujalski's previous films and will continue to see whatever he puts out until such time as he starts making end-of-days thrillers with Nic Cage (actually not sure I wouldn't see a Bujalski-Cage joint). I don't know if Beeswax is my favorite Bujalski (I'd have to rewatch the others to be sure), but it does clearly represent another step forward in his development as a director.

Beeswax made me think about Bujalski's approach to comedy, so low-key as to be almost unrecognizable as such. I found myself thinking "that was really funny" a lot, but only laughing (or, really, half-chuckling) a couple of times. And even then, there wasn't a clear sense that the scenes or lines or moments I found funny were intended to be funny. I suspected that most of them were, but there was no way to be sure, and certainly no "laugh here" cues. That's the kind of sub-sub-level Bujalski is working on, but even so, I think Beeswax is, in essence, a successful comedy.

Although the primary pleasure I found in Beeswax was simply watching the two (real life and movie) sisters, Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, especially their reactions and facial expressions, there was a satisfying, and perhaps surprising, wholeness (artistic unity?) to the film that suggests that Bujalski has matured into something of a young master. His ambitions may seem small, bafflingly so to some viewers, but he seems to have reached the point of being in complete command of his art. You may not know where he's going, or why, in Beeswax, but if you pay attention, you can tell that he's guiding the action with a sure, confident hand.

Who(se building) You Callin' Ugly?!?

2010-07-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Wow, the AIA just got smacked down really hard for calling the New York Times building NYC's ugliest. Meanwhile, I enjoyed reading the results of Vanity Fair's architecture survey, which includes some praise for the Times building. Knowing what everyone knows about architects and their egos, I shouldn't have been surprised by how many of the architects polled voted for their own buildings, but I was still a little surprised by how many of the architects polled voted for their own buildings. Self-promotion is part of the job, though, especially ITE*.

*in this economy

Up In The Old Hotel, Fighting Zombies With A Chainsaw

2010-06-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

I don't play video games and haven't for a long time, but perhaps that's only because I didn't know there was a video game featuring Joseph Mitchell as a character. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like he gets to do anything cool, like battle his way out of a post-apocalyptic version of the New Yorker offices where all the editors have been turned into zombies, or take on the King of the Gypsies in a cherrystone clam-eating contest at McSorley's.

More info here. [via]

A One-Block Journey Into The (Retro-) Future

2010-06-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

For a brief, but awe-inspiring, sample of what the City of the Future was supposed to look like, walk down East 24th St. in Manhattan between Park and Madison in the direction of Madison Square Park (actually, at certain times of day, it's even better to start a block further east). You'll walk between, and be dwarfed by, the Met Life Tower and the Met Life North building. Although the buildings were designed and constructed decades apart, the effect is one of immersion in a single architectural vision. You have to look up for the effect to be complete, since, for me, the sky bridge spanning 24th St. is the key element of the composition.

I don't think I've ever photographed this block, but in any case, it has to be experienced in person. Google Street View will give you a taste, though.

Bonus Links
The Met Life North building was begun in 1928, one year after Metropolis (coincidence???), and topped out about 70 stories short of its originally intended 100-story height. Here's a rendering of the original, uncompleted design.

APB

2010-06-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Any NYC jazz internet types out there know what happened to the Mandatory Attendance blog? It went on a vacation hiatus and never came back. I hope Mr. or Mrs. Mandatory is just taking an extended summer break, because the blog was a great resource, often picking up on stuff that the also-valuable-but-less-focused WBGO calendar missed.

The Children Are The Future

2010-06-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

Some great writers have passed on recently, but thanks to the younger generation, the future of literature is bright. No, I'm not talking about this crowd. These kids are the ones to watch.

Speaking of scouting out up-and-coming talent, I'm reminded of this.