Masabumi Kikuchi / Ornette Coleman

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Masabumi Kikuchi this week. Seeing him on piano at the Village Vanguard with Paul Motian truly expanded my conception of music and beauty. I put down some impressions of one such appearance here. After Motian's passing, I saw Masabumi play twice more, including a solo performance at the Motian memorial concert. It was a high point in a concert full of wonderful moments, an elegy as only Masabumi could conceive it, like a man groping his way through a dark forest, in search of his lost friend, their lost sound.

---------------

In my negligence in updating this blog, I let the passing of Ornette Coleman go unmentioned here. Here are some earlier pieces touching on the now-departed master/magus/maverick - an early effort on the occasion of his Jazz at Lincoln Center appearance and a brief review (near the end of this post) of Shirley Clarke's wonderful documentary. The two albums I put on after hearing of his death - Soapsuds, Soapsuds, an album of duos with Charlie Haden, and Of Human Feelings with Prime Time - reminded me of the incredible range of expression his career encompassed, although they were released only two years apart in the late '70s.

Owls, Etc

I've been checking out drummer Jeff Cosgrove's new trio record of improvised pieces and standards, Conversations With Owls. The most striking piece on the record is a sort of reverie on "My Favorite Things", a wholly successful approach to the familiar tune that's miles away from both Julie Andrews and John Coltrane. Cosgrove and bassist Martin Wind lay a perfect foundation for pianist Frank Kimbrough as he allows the melody to slowly emerge, as if rising up out of a dream. The set's other standard, "I Loves You Porgy", has a similar dreamy quality and is beautifully played by all, though it represents a more familiar approach for this tune than the reinvention of "My Favorite Things". Of the free pieces, "Stacks of Stars" is exemplary. It begins with solo bass, then the drums enter, Kimbrough appearing about two minutes in with some off-kilter music-box sounds, eventually finding a groove before the trio lets things fall apart. "The Shimmer", effectively sequenced after "My Favorite Things", brings the album to a strong conclusion with a brief but memorably thematic improvisation. Conversations With Owls is a rewarding listen start to finish, and it has me wanting to investigate Frank Kimbrough's music further. I tried to come up with some reference points for his sound on this album - Paul Bley, Russ Lossing, Ran Blake, Craig Taborn - but none of those were really right.

Prior to this album, Cosgrove recorded a number of compositions by Paul Motian, whose music I've been listening to lately in podcast form. Uncle Paul's Jazz Closet, hosted (appropriately) by the great drummer's niece, is a community radio show out of Maine that features a wide range of Motian-related recordings, including some real rarities. More info is available here and you can listen here. I thought I knew a lot about Motian's career, but I'm learning and hearing new things every episode. Here's an intriguing album I learned about from listening to the show: it's got a stellar lineup and a very similar title to the one discussed above.

A couple new and upcoming albums I'm looking forward to are Mikal Cronin's MCIII (if III is as much of a leap forward from II as II was from the self-titled debut, it'll be a mind-blower, and the two tracks I've heard so far suggest it might be) and another third album, You've Been Watching Me, from Tim Berne's Snakeoil, this time with the addition of Ryan Ferreira on guitar. I've seen Ferreira play with Berne on a few occasions, as well as in a John Adams concert at BAM, and I'm excited to hear him on record as part of what seems to be Berne's flagship band these days.

Listening to Early Fusion

After mostly ignoring the genre for years, I’ve recently, and I suppose belatedly, been getting into fusion. For decades now, fusion has been kind of a joke or a dirty word to a lot of jazz and rock fans, but some of the earliest records, the ones that really created the genre, still sound pretty radical. I’ve been trying to piece together the origin story, what was happening circa-1969/1970 with the central cast of characters in this music. Before hearing Emergency! by The Tony Williams Lifetime, I’d always assumed that Miles Davis created fusion pretty much single-handedly. Unlike the group effort that birthed bebop (some combination of the efforts and inspiration of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and Thelonious Monk), Miles had dug some Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly Stone records, convened some sessions, and a new genre was born. Right? Well, maybe we can at least co-credit Tony Williams and John McLaughlin.

On the fusion timeline, the 1969 sessions for In A Silent Way preceded those for Emergency! - McLaughlin plays on both, but it was apparently Williams who coaxed the guitarist to move to the U.S. and introduced him to Miles, presumably on the strength of McLaughlin’s debut album. Extrapolation was cut in England with John Surman, still some years away from beginning his long association with ECM, and Tony Oxley, who would go on to avant-legend status after playing drums with the likes of Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, and Cecil Taylor. I didn’t recognize the bassist on Extrapolation, Brian Odgers, but he sounds great in this group - turns out he had quite a career as a session man, playing on Histoire de Melody Nelson, Elton John’s hit “Levon”, and Lou Reed’s first solo album. Extrapolation is a very fine album, much more jazz than rock, with a real collaborative feeling - McLaughlin’s name is on the cover but Surman (on saxes) is given just as much prominence. McLaughlin plays wonderfully, as always, but his guitar tone is still within the bounds of traditional jazz tastefulness at this stage.

The recording of Bitches Brew commenced later in ‘69, after Emergency!, with McLaughlin but not Williams. If Silent Way was hugely influential on a lot of later music and a clear predecessor to fusion - the big leap after the significant but more gradual steps in a new direction represented on Miles’ 1968 releases - it’s really sui generis and beyond genre. Where In A Silent Way is calm, Emergency! and Bitches Brew are both aggressive, even menacing in parts. Emergency! is a trio record, but it sounds just as big as the large ensemble of Bitches Brew, and many people have commented on the fact that Miles apparently needed two drummers to replace Tony Williams. Williams was clearly one of the greatest drummers in the world at this point, but as a 23 year old jazz veteran he was ready to take on some new roles - singer, lyricist, bandleader. Life Time and Spring had come a few years earlier, with Williams as leader, but now he was assembling a working band - Lifetime was to be his vehicle going forward.

Recorded in New York post-Bitches Brew, McLaughlin’s Devotion, a quartet record with Larry Young (his Lifetime bandmate), Buddy Miles (Electric Flag, Band of Gypsies), and Billy Rich (Buddy Miles, Taj Mahal), is probably the most purely and overtly rock of any of the albums under consideration here. The McLaughlin heard on Devotion is miles away (no pun intended) from Extrapolation, recorded only a year previous. He’s wielding the hammer of the gods now, kicking it into interstellar overdrive. With two titles referencing dragons, however, we should perhaps be thankful it’s all instrumental. My only reservation with Devotion is that while it’s an overwhelming experience to listen to, I don’t find any of the tunes particularly memorable - it blows my mind, but leaves little behind. Perhaps McLaughlin, near the end of a contract with a small label, Douglas (run by legendary jazz and rock producer Alan Douglas), and headed for bigger things, was saving his best tunes for some of his other projects.

With 1970’s Turn It Over, Lifetime may have pared their ideas down from the double-album expansiveness of Emergency!, but they still had plenty of them. The three original members contribute tunes, which range from very high intensity to trippy and spaced out, and there are covers of Chick Corea (the outstanding, two-part album opener, which gets to an almost boogie-blues place in the second part, briefly suggesting a proggier Canned Heat) and John Coltrane (“Big Nick” as Hammond organ workout). One inescapable feature of Turn It Over is Williams continued commitment to singing - ”This Night This Song” is something of an uncomfortable listen, with the spare, loose music and Williams’ vocal combining to produce a spooky mood not far from There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which was released the following year. Another vocal number, “Once I Loved”, features eerie organ and a croony Williams melody that somehow reminds me of Alex Chilton’s version of “Nature Boy”. New Lifetime member Jack Bruce makes a strong impression on bass but gets only one vocal feature. Apparently only released as a single at the time, “One Word” closes out the reissue version of the album on an emotional high note.

McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra was a band interested in fusing more than jazz and rock, incorporating influences (and members) from around the world. Their 1971 debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, is a killer, with blazing tempos, engaging and varied compositions and well-realized arrangements. Whereas on Devotion, McLaughlin’s sound is fantastically heavy, here he’s more about speed and precision, with a tone that’s more biting or cutting. On some tracks with Miles Davis, McLaughlin runs wild within the loose, improvisational structures, creating guitar sounds rarely heard before or since. Here, he has laser focus, working with a tight ensemble and often blending with Jerry’s Goodman’s violin. The live version of “The Noonward Race” that appears on the reissue shows that the tightness and intricacy this band was capable of at fast tempos was not just a studio thing. There are four other key words to say about this album: Jan Hammer Ring Modulator!

Other Miles-alum-heavy early fusion band I’ve only begun checking out is Weather Report. I picked up their second album, I Sing The Body Electric, in its original LP format, and it surely makes most sense that way - the two sides are so completely distinct. The first, studio side is eclectic and relatively restrained, with several guest musicians, including guitarist Ralph Towner, and even a small chorus on one track. I usually go straight to Side 2, recorded live in Tokyo with just the core quartet. The energy level is much higher, certainly recalling electric Miles in places. The side closes with an aggressive version of Zawinul's "Directions", which was a concert staple for Miles in the early ‘70s, and there's a remarkable moment in the “Vertical Invader” medley that sounds like Miles has suddenly materialized onstage to take an intense wah-trumpet solo. This is apparently Miroslav Vitous bowing his bass through an effects rig, but I’ve never heard a bass sound like this. There's an originally Japan-only release that presents more of this concert, which I should probably pick up.

An important early fusion group with no direct connections to Miles Davis (unlike everyone mentioned above) was the Soft Machine, whose early exposure in America was as Jimi Hendrix’s opening act. While many of the artists discussed above arrived at fusion from the jazz side, adding rock elements to their music, The Soft Machine came at it from the other direction. Though they remained almost exclusively guitarless until their 8th album, Bundles (the guitarist was Allan Holdsworth, who also turned up in a rebooted Lifetime), their sound (and personnel) changed dramatically over the first several years of their existence. In 1969, the Softs were still an art rock or prog band (though not so easy to categorize), but the move to fusion was nearly complete by 1970’s Third, with Robert Wyatt’s immortal “Moon in June” something of a holdout. (“Moon in June” isn’t fusion, isn’t jazz, but it’s no rock song, either. It isn’t anything but Robert Wyatt music.) Fourth, from 1971, is perhaps more focused, though not necessarily better, than Third, but still finds the group drawing on a wide palette of sounds and inspirations. There’s a prog feel to some of the complex compositions, free jazz in some of the horn solos, and some rock elements - fuzz, distortion, and wah sounds in the bass and keyboards, and the still mostly rock-oriented drumming of Robert Wyatt (in his last outing with the group).

The best of this early fusion has the excitement of discovery and experimentation, even if some of the experiments prove to be dead ends. At this stage in the music's development, there was often a pleasing balance between virtuosity and precision on one side and on the other, a willingness to embrace moments where reach exceeds grasp and texture trumps technicality. As fusion became more codified, more established as a music market category and, ultimately, smoother, Miles, the forefather, only seemed to get weirder, louder, more experimental and less marketable. As with some of his previous innovations, he left it to his colleagues and followers to develop, explore, and refine particular aspects of his music while he moved on. 

Kaiser at The Stone, Frisell at The Vanguard

Henry Kaiser-Melvin Gibbs-Weasel Walter at The Stone

World-class guitarist and Antarctic diver, associate of the Grateful Dead and Werner Herzog, Henry Kaiser is a prolific recording artist and restless sonic explorer. The only set of his recent week at The Stone that I caught was a monster, a trio of heavies going at it hammer and tongs. Sonny Sharrock was one reference point for the music they played, as Kaiser steered the opening improv into Sharrock’s “Blind Willy” and followed by asking Gibbs about his time playing with the legendary guitarist. The between-song banter mostly revolved around mutual respect, with Kaiser talking about seeing Gibbs with Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, and the younger Walter noting the influence of the other musicians’ records in his formative years. Gibbs played plenty of bass, from space-filled dub/funk patterns to fervent, melodic solos high on the neck. One highlight of the set came when Gibbs began soloing over a loop Kaiser had set up. Kaiser himself reentered and the piece reached truly ecstatic territory, with the musicians pushing each other higher and higher. Kaiser used two guitars and a battery of effects to generate sounds ranging from some superb, fairly straightforward rock tones to weirdo sound sculpture. Weasel Walter played the role of disrupter (something he seems to relish), sometimes locking in with but more often playing against what the guitarists were doing. Walter injected non-stop intensity, improvisational energy and surprise to the set with his singular language, incorporating metal drum techniques to great effect.


Bill Frisell at The Village Vanguard

As Henry Kaiser’s week at The Stone wrapped up, Stone director John Zorn began a week at The Village Vanguard, with different configurations of musicians performing his music each night. On the second night, Bill Frisell (Melvin Gibbs’ bandmate in the short-lived but memorable trio Power Tools, with Ronald Shannon Jackson) played his first-ever solo set at the venue where he’s appeared so many times over the years with his own groups and in the great trio with Paul Motian and Joe Lovano. Frisell was set up at the front of the stage, a dual amp setup behind him, Gnostic Trio bandmate Carol Emanuel’s harp beside him (in place for the following set), Telecaster in hand, pedal board at his feet, and a music stand full of Zorn compositions in front of him. If it was strange seeing Frisell, a master improviser, playing through a set of fully composed music, the music itself had a familiar sound to anyone who’s heard much of Zorn’s voluminous and still-growing catalog of Book of Angels recordings. Whether the characteristic sound of these pieces derives from the use of the Phrygian dominant scale or some other Sephardic modes Zorn may have discovered, they have proven to be quite adaptable to a wide variety of musical settings. The solo guitar arrangements that Frisell played were arresting, quite beautiful in places, and clearly took massive concentration and skill to pull off, with several pieces requiring the guitarist to build up and play on top of multiple simultaneous loops. Frisell seemed briefly flustered while negotiating some of the most complex passages, but it was truly an amazing performance, especially for the way the guitarist was able to express so much of his own musical personality through Zorn’s pieces. Frisell’s style is so fully developed and refined at this point, so thoroughly personal, that anything he chooses to play is going to be suffused with his sound. While Frisell tackled the challenges of Zorn’s music, his titles were another matter. There was a very funny moment when he tried announcing the songs, realized he wasn’t sure how to pronounce them, and appealed to Zorn (standing in the back of the venue) for help. Though Zorn left Frisell hanging on this point, the music (and the big hug they shared at the end of the set) reconfirmed the health of the longtime creative relationship between the two.

Best of 2014 - Live!

Here are The Selected Ballads' choices for the Best Live Shows of 2014, loosely categorized and presented in chronological order:

Best of the Best

January 11
Winter Jazzfest: Threadgill Ensemble Double-Up @ Judson / MOPDTK & EYEBONE @ NYU Law
This night of Jazzfest presented some difficult scheduling choices, but I found my way to what must have been some of the finest sets of the festival. Mostly Other People Do The Killing (playing a set derived from their excellent "hot jazz"/Hot Fives-inspired Red Hot album) and EYEBONE (Nels Cline, Teddy Klausner, and Jim Black in aggressive, electric improv mode) were at the NYU Law School lounge, an unlikely venue in terms of both layout and decor, but one that was apparently conducive to good music. If I'm not mistaken, the enthusiastic audience at one point included Andrew WK. The highlight of the night, though, was Henry Threadgill's tribute to Butch Morris, "Old Locks and Irregular Verbs", played by a large ensemble (with most instruments doubled) in the historic Judson Hall. After moving through many tense, unresolved sections, reminiscent of Threadgill's Zooid music and somehow evocative to me of the cold, rainy city outside, the ensemble joined in a overwhelming, cathartic crescendo, providing what may have been my single favorite musical moment of the year. (As a footnote, I had a decent view of Threadgill's chart/score - he was only conducting, not playing. There seemed to be a series of numbers, perhaps corresponding to intervals? or bars?, for each lettered section of the composition, but it didn't give me much of a clue as to how the piece was really constructed.)

January 23
Neutral Milk Hotel @ BAM
After being quite moved by Jeff Mangum's return to the stage at Jersey City's Loew's Theater, I had high but still tempered expectations for the full band reunion. At BAM, it was multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster's dervish-like joy at being back onstage with his old friends that got to me the most, taking me all the way back to the 40 Watt Club circa 1998. While the band doesn't have the almost frightening level of intensity they possessed back then, they can still deliver a gut punch and do it LOUDLY.

January 27
Marc-Andre Hamelin @ Zankel Hall
Closing out an excellent month of music, I saw Marc-Andre Hamelin at Carnegie Hall's piano-friendly Zankel space. After the very quiet ending of his own Barcarolle was marred by an usher prematurely and, in the context of the hushed hall, loudly opening a door, Hamelin did what does so well on Medtner's "Night Wind" sonata - shine a brilliant, clear light into all corners of a forbiddingly dense and difficult piece of music. He was just as impressive on Schubert's Impromptus, applying his prodigious technique to delivery a finely detailed performance, with sensitivity to every nuance of these pieces.

March 21
The Clientele @ Bell House
Though their Baby's All Right show from later in the year was nearly as good, and featured a substantially different setlist, it couldn't match the emotion of seeing The Clientele's return to America as part of Chickfactor 22. I didn't realize how much I'd missed them.

May 30
Tim Berne/Matt Mitchell/David Torn @ IBeam
This was the second of a three-night run at the cozy IBeam space, featuring Torn solo sets and collaborations between the musicians. Berne and Torn have a long-standing relationship, which includes playing on each others albums and Torn producing and recording some of Berne's. Berne is clearly also just a fan of Torn's and seemed as excited as anyone in the room to be hearing him play solo guitar. The Berne-Mitchell relationship has developed more recently, but has already helped produce some of the finest music of Berne's career. All the musicians were in fine form on this night, with Berne and Mitchell playing some intriguing duo compositions, but Torn's solo set was the mind-blower. It may be reductive to think of him as the "American Robert Fripp", but it's not wrong to mention them in the same breath. There are several clips of this run on YouTube, include this grainy one which gives a nice taste of pure, uncut Torn-ism.

June 25
Elvis Costello @ Carnegie Hall
The Beloved Entertainer, not yet ready to be stuffed and mounted.

September 12
Alarm Will Sound @ BAM Harvey
An all John Adams program, which featured performances of Chamber Symphony, Son of Chamber Symphony, Scratchband, and a section of Hoodoo Zephyr, as well as an appearance from the composer himself (shortly to be at the center of a controversy over the Met's production of his Death of Klinghoffer), who made some comments on the pieces and his ongoing relationship with the ensemble. I managed to score some very affordable, last-minute tickets in the front row, and was privileged to have a close-up view of this new music ensemble negotiating the demands of Adams' chamber music with impressive grace. The two Chamber Symphonies made the biggest impression and left me wondering what other Adams works I've been missing out on. This show was part of the "Nonesuch Records at BAM" series, during which I also caught excellent performances by Brad Mehldau and Don Byron.


Also Very Great

January 10
Neil Young @ Carnegie Hall
Of the two rock legends (and personal musical heroes) I saw at Carnegie Hall this year, I have to give Elvis Costello the slight edge, but Neil Young's solo show, which included stories about his guitars and tributes to his folkie heroes (Phil Ochs, Bert Jansch), was certainly a 2014 highlight. The set may have leaned a bit too heavily on the familiar classics for my taste, but there were some surprises, like the inclusion of four (!) Buffalo Springfield songs. Apparently tickets were changing hands for thousands of dollars, but mine were legit and face value. During the window of time when the crush of Neil fans had knocked out Carnegie's online sales system, I was lucky enough to be within walking distance of the box office - no lines, no waiting, no fees.

June 6
Bill Frisell @ JALC - The Electric Guitar in America
The first of two consecutive nights for me at Jazz at Lincoln Center, this was a mostly non-jazz set from Bill Frisell's working trio (with the welcome addition of frequent Frisell collaborator and mighty session guitarist Greg Leisz). With many of the tunes subsequently recorded for a studio album (Guitar in the Space Age), the repertoire was taken from Frisell's early inspirations, including the Kinks, Byrds, Beach Boys, Link Wray, and Wes Montgomery, as well as excursions into Nashville twang and even Rocky Mountain surf by way of a tune from obscure Colorado band The Astronauts.

June 7
JALC Orchestra w/ Wynton Marsalis - Modern Ellington
This program of mostly later, lesser known Ellington compositions was both a reminder of the depth of the Duke's catalog and a great justification for the existence of a well-supported repertory jazz orchestra that could put on such a program. It sparked my interest in pockets of Ellingtonia, like the Queen's Suite, that I didn't even know existed.

July 11
Guided By Voices @ Irving Plaza
Whether it was the return of drummer Kevin March from the final pre-reunion GBV lineup or the inspiration of playing Pollard-fave venue Irving Plaza, this was by far the best show I've seen from the "classic lineup". And the newest material was some of the strongest.

August 9
Darius Jones/Matthew Shipp: Cosmic Lieder @ Shapeshifter

September 3
Tootie Heath/Ethan Iverson/Ben Street @ Jazz Standard
Always a pure pleasure to hear one of the all-time masters of jazz drumming (and stage banter). This trio's version of "The Charleston" never fails to inspire.

September 23
Tweedy @ BAM
Father and son in a multigenerational band that included Darin Gray, bass legend (in certain circles), playing a set of strong, all-new compositions, plus a set from Tweedy Sr. that showed him to be one of the most compelling solo singer-songwriter-type performers alive. The inclusion of Uncle Tupelo-era Doug Sahm cover "Give Back The Key To My Heart" hit me where I live.

September 26
Peter Evans Quintet w/ Evan Parker @ JACK

October 23
The Bad Plus Play Ornette Coleman's Science Fiction @ NYU Skirball
Augmented by Tim Berne, Ron Miles and Sam Newsome, and backed by psychedelic Fillmore East alums The Joshua Light Show, TBP took on one of Ornette's boldest and most singular works, with bassist Reid Anderson acquitting himself well on two vocal numbers.

November 17
New Pornographers @ Hammerstein Ballroom
The full-on Case-Bejar lineup, touring behind one of their best albums, Brill Bruisers. Dan even played a bit of guitar (for one song, with his back to the audience), and I was a bit surprised to realize how many of the show's big, crowd-goes-wild moments were triggered by his songs.


Theatre/Opera/New Music Unclassifiable Hybrid Category

September 13
Here Be Sirens @ Dixon Place
Written by and featuring Kate Soper and directed by Rick Burkhardt (a formidable performer/composer himself), Here Be Sirens featured the Sirens, the Muses, shipwrecks, and layers of history, quotation and self-reflection, all with three performers and a piano (played as much from inside as on the keyboard).


In The Comedy Department

November 29
Andy Kindler @ Union Hall
I saw some great sets this year from James Adomian, Eddie Pepitone and others, but Andy Kindler at Union Hall was my favorite live comedy of the year. Kindler, a New York City native, doesn't appear here that often, and the Park Slope basement was packed with a crowd heavy on notables - I spotted Ira Glass, Todd Barry, Tom Scharpling, and members of Yo La Tengo. I'm sure it's been pointed out before, but watching Andy Kindler perform is like being inside Andy Kindler's head while Andy Kindler is performing. Other comedians do the "commenting on my act while I'm doing it" thing, but no one that I know of does standup like Kindler, not really. You'd have to be a little demented to even try.

Threadgill Quintets: Zooid @ Roulette

I attended the first of two nights of new quintet works by Henry Threadgill at Roulette. Each of the two nights was to feature a short piece followed by two longer works featuring a particular member of the ensemble (the quintet was essentially the most recent incarnation of Threadgill's Zooid group minus bassist Stomu Takeishi). On this first night, the short piece, "In for a Penny, In for a Pound", bore the most resemblance to Threadgill's previous compositions for Zooid. The longer quintet pieces, the first featuring guitar (Liberty Ellman) and the second trombone and tuba (Jose Davila), seemed to reflect a new approach to compositional structure for Threadgill, while still sounding like Zooid music. The featured instrumentalist was given responsibility for counting in certain sections and was afforded a fair amount of solo space, during which they seemed less constrained by Threadgill's intervallic language than in previous Zooid works. There were also solos by other members of the quintet, as well as duos and brief written ensemble passages. The longer quintets seemed to be divided into many short sections, and Threadgill and Davila were kept busy switching between instruments (Threadgill on flute, bass flute, and alto sax; Davila on tuba and a variety of mutes on trombone).

For me, one of the most characteristic Zooid sounds, and one that was present in these quintet pieces, is Threadgill soloing on flute over a chromatically rising and falling bassline, provided by the tuba and rhythmically amplified by guitar and cello. I don't have the musicological chops to analyze it, but I hear in it a kind of questing, impassioned intelligence that must reflect some facet of Threadgill's worldview. While these new pieces didn't reach the heights of Threadgill's tribute to Butch Morris, "Old Locks and Irregular Verbs", that premiered in January at Judson Hall, they certainly indicated that one of the most fertile compositional minds of our time is still seeking and finding new means of expression. On my wish list for 2015: more new music from Henry Threadgill.

Ian McLagan

The Guardian has the best piece I've seen so far on the legacy of Ian McLagan, the Faces and Small Faces keyboardist who died today at 69. I had the intense pleasure of seeing McLagan perform the Faces' "Glad and Sorry" and "Debris" with Billy Bragg when he was touring as a member of Bragg's Blokes backing band. Despite having traveled in the most rarified rock company - touring and recording with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan - McLagan seemed a down-to-earth sort, accessible in person and online at his self-maintained website. Not only was McLagan one of rock's greatest keyboardists - few wielded a B3 as well - he also wrote one of the most purely enjoyable rock memoirs and compiled one of the most essential rock box sets. Mac was scheduled to be at the Bowery Ballroom in just a couple weeks, opening for Nick Lowe - what a show that would've been.

Peter Evans at JACK

I was at the excellent, new-ish performance space JACK in Brooklyn on Friday for the first two sets of a weekend-long Peter Evans residency (which ends tonight, 9/28). The first set was a duo of Evans and Evan Parker, the 70-year old British sax titan slash Euro free improv legend. Evans is a trumpeter of massive technique and creativity, and it was a wonder to see him and Parker go one-on-one. There were some amazing moments when Evans seemed to be tunneling single-mindedly into an idea, only to turn on a dime in reaction to something Parker played, revealing the close listening that was happening in the middle of a firestorm of musical invention.

A set from Evans' current quintet followed and was equally remarkable on its own terms. With Jim Black's powerful drumming and Sam Pluta live-processing the sounds of the various instruments, this is a heavy band. One rather audacious and unsettling moment toward the end of the set: Evans was playing something that sounded a bit like sobbing (animal cries in the night? a restless baby?), and just as a visceral emotional reaction was starting to take hold Black came in with a jarring, pounding beat, completely shifting the mood and direction of the piece. This is a heavy band.

Evans and the current pianist in his quintet, Ron Stabinsky, are on the latest Mostly Other People Do The Killing record, Blue, which I picked up at the JACK show. I hadn't heard anything about the record before buying a copy. From the track list, it was obviously a full album cover of Kind of Blue, and I was wondering what sort of wild spin MOPDTK had put on these familiar tunes. Then I saw the liner notes, which consist of the Borges story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, and I guessed that what lay in store was going to be nothing less than a note-for-note transcription of the famous album. This, of course, raises a lot of interesting questions, many of which are addressed quite lucidly by the band's leader and bassist here. I haven't listened enough to comment on the nuances that this project needs to be judged by, but as a concept it's a helluva thing to have actually followed through and done.

Fedora

Billy Wilder's second-to-last film, Fedora, recently had a run at Film Forum. It appears to be coming to Netflix in October, and it's worth a look, especially for fans of Wilder or his masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. Fedora is an ambitious film, with a rather audacious script by Wilder and longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond. Wilder the writer set Wilder the director some very difficult problems, including a lead actress required to play multiple roles and ages, a complicated plot structure, and a major twist deployed about half way through. The resonances with Sunset Boulevard - William Holden's voiceovers, a reclusive, great star of the past contemplating a comeback (complete with a punishing beauty regimen) - are clear, and Fedora plays like a meditation on some of the same themes, viewed from twenty years down the line. If the later film isn't as effective, a major reason may be the lack of a Gloria Swanson-level talent to pull off the highly challenging, lynchpin role. Holden is fine playing a Hollywood survivor - embattled, cynical, but still chasing the Hollywood dream after the business has passed him by. It's easy to imagine him as a Joe Gillis that escaped Norma Desmond's mansion and persisted through the decades until he became the relic, still trying to make one more great picture.

Reupholstering the Mobius Chair

AUM Fidelity's dual record release concert Saturday night at Shapeshifter Lab featured some of that label's heaviest demonstrating two distinct approaches to improvisation. The duo of Matthew Shipp and Darius Jones, supporting their second Cosmic Lieder album, The Darkseid Recital (someone involved is a Jack Kirby fan), played a series of song-length pieces covering a very wide range of moods/feels/effects. Jones has become one of my favorite saxophonists in the past couple years, and his performance Saturday reminded me of one of the reasons why: no matter what techniques he employs, no matter how far out he goes, I can always hear a vocal or songful (as well as soulful) quality that can be piercingly emotional. "Cosmic lieder", as unlikely as it sounds, is a surprisingly accurate description of what the duo achieves. At times, this song-like quality made me consider Shipp in the traditional role of a pianist accompanying a vocalist - but accompaniment that was telepathically responsive, bold, and fully formed. Quite simply, Shipp always seemed to be right there with Jones, playing the right thing at the right time - whether dense chordal passages or repeating rhythmic figures - though I'm not sure there's any strict musical analysis that could tell you why it was right.

Farmers By Nature (Craig Taborn, William Parker, and Gerald Cleaver), though displaying comparable acuity and invention, tend to take the scenic route. Their new double-disc album Love and Ghosts (like the new Cosmic Lieder, recorded live) consists of two sets worth of extended improvisations, and Saturday's performance felt like a single, unbroken piece in which ideas developed slowly, building to a climax or shifting direction by collective intuition. Although all three had moments when they took on a dominant or featured role, I was most often focused on Parker, who drew me in at the start and held my attention for much of the set - the man never seems to be lacking inspiration. With the venue's AC off for recording purposes, my capacity for close listening was starting to fade toward the end of this night of music, but I knew I'd just witnessed something beyond. 

Parker and Shipp, though they didn't play together on Saturday, are by now a legendary combination, having logged many miles together in the David S. Ware Quartet in addition to collaborations on their own projects. I've been listening to them on the recent trio record, Alternating Current, with drummer Jeff Cosgrove. Superbly recorded by Jimmy Katz (Cosgrove's cymbal work is just one of beautiful sounds that can be enjoyed in great detail thanks to the sonic clarity), who also recorded parts of The Darkseid Recital, the record begins with a very long group improvisation, followed by shorter pieces dedicated to Andrew Cyrille and Paul Motian (Shipp's playing on Motian's "Victoria" is really something to hear).

The Comedians

Elvis Costello's 38-song solo performance at Carnegie Hall last week (I saw the second of two nights - Jon Pareles reviewed the first in the Times) spanned his career and ranged from the biggest hits to the deepest cuts (and some that haven't even been cut). Among the most pleasant surprises for me was a performance of "The Comedians", which I first got to know via Roy Orbison's recording on Mystery Girl. As Elvis details in his reissue liner notes for Goodbye Cruel World (where the song first appeared), "The Comedians" went through a few iterations, including the sort-of intriguing but not really memorable 5/4 arrangement on Cruel World, before being significantly and successfully re-tailored for Orbison with new words and changes. This "final", Orbisonian version of the song, which is what Elvis performed at Carnegie Hall, describes a man looking down from a Ferris wheel but has the drama of a highwire act, especially performed solo and live.

If "The Comedians" is a somewhat lesser-known item, "Tommy's Coming Home", from Costello's songwriting collaboration with Paul McCartney (which yielded another of the show's highlights, "So Like Candy"), is a full-blown rarity, having never been officially released or even performed live by either of its composers before this show. Despite only existing in bootleg form, Nora O'Connor and Robbie Fulks discovered it and worked up a really fine, beautifully harmonized version. With or without McCartney, I hope Elvis takes a crack at this one in the studio. Maybe he should call Nora O'Connor.

While the solo format put Elvis' talents as a singer and guitarist on display, the show was a forceful reminder to me of his deep and continuing achievements as a songwriter and the impossibility of dividing his work into anything like cohesive periods or phases. (I was also reminded that I need to update and revise this list.) He's written great songs in five different decades at this point and still seems very much engaged in the work. As if to illustrate that point, he's named this solo tour for a song, "The Last Year of My Youth", that he's still in the process of revising.  


The Selected Ballads will be back soon with a roundup of some of the many, many albums I've acquired in the last few months and maybe some notes on other recent shows.

Recent Shows & Records - The Return of The Clientele, (Not) Bloodcount, Tzadik Acquisitions

The Clientele (Chickfactor 22 @ The Bell House)
Although they conjure images of London like no other band, I also associate The Clientele's music with New York. They were in my headphones a lot when I first came to the city, and even though I assume they were referring to the street in London, I can't walk down "Delancey Street at night" without thinking of "Joseph Cornell". That song was part of the setlist for their first U.S. show in years, at The Bell House on March 21st. The band, playing in their original trio configuration, seemed slightly shaky at first and were briefly hampered by a vocal-deficient sound mix. As the mix was corrected and the crowd started responding enthusiastically, front man Alasdair MacLean visibly and audibly gained confidence and the music took off, taking the audience with it. We were all reminded that the immersive sound world created by MacLean's voice and guitar (applying Spanish/classical means to psychedelic ends) and the James Hornsey-Mark Keen rhythm section was not just a studio creation but something that was alive and in the room.

The band seemed surprised at the reception, and I noticed a glance from MacLean to Keen that seemed to say, "Can you believe this?". You can hear and see some of this in this video of "Reflections After Jane". I think it was after this song that MacLean joked about how nostalgic the audience must be. Although the set was made up largely of material from the band's first few albums, early singles, and EPs, the later "Here Comes The Phantom" received one of the biggest reactions of the night. Based on the way it hit me, I suspect the springtime feeling of the song connected with the winter-weary New York audience. All in all, this was one of the most moving and satisfying shows I've seen lately, with the clear sense of a band and audience exchanging positive energy. Whether or not MacLean, Keen and Hornsey are inspired to write and record more Clientele music (MacLean's current project, Amor de Dias, is quite excellent and I was disappointed to have missed their opening set the previous night), this set left no doubt that they've created a sound and a body of work that continues to have meaning and find an audience. To me, these three musicians are too good together not to continue collaborating in some fashion. They play the Merge 25 festival in North Carolina this summer (I'm tempted to make the trip), and I look forward to seeing what happens after that.

(To get a better idea of what went down at The Bell House, I recommend this piece.)

Not Bloodcount @ The Stone
Another reunion show (of sorts) happened at The Stone last week, at the beginning of Jim Black's weeklong residency, featuring the members of Tim Berne's influential quartet Bloodcount (Black, Berne, Chris Speed and Michael Formanek) playing as Not Bloodcount. In an interview on Jeremiah Cymerman's 5049 podcast, Black seemed to suggest that the billing had something to do with Berne's reluctance to revisit old projects, but it could also be taken as a simple acknowledgment that they were not going to be playing Berne's Bloodcount compositions. The set was, as far as I could tell, wholly improvised, but they inevitably hit on some themes and grooves that recalled the Bloodcount sound (which, I must admit, I only know from records) and their shared experience showed in the seemingly effortless way Berne and Speed harmonized and supported each other's parts, Black and Formanek locked into rhythmic patterns that slowly developed or emerged out of nowhere, and the group collectively structured their long improvisations into coherent forms. Formanek seems to play a linchpin role in any band I see him in, and I come away more impressed each time. I saw his big band play a memorable show at Shapeshifter Lab last year, and I hope some of that music makes it onto record.

Various Tzadiks
I took advantage of Downtown Music Gallery's recent Tzadik sale to pick up a bunch of discs released on John Zorn's label. The amount and quality of music that is continually being released on Tzadik is rather incredible, and the packaging defies the conventional wisdom that the CD is a dying, disposable format. Zorn has worked with and released music by some of my favorite guitarists, including Bill Frisell and Robert Quine (lately I've been enjoying The Gnostic Preludes and Silent Comedy with Frisell and Tears of Ecstasy with Quine), but the common thread in the albums I've enjoyed most from this recent haul is Marc Ribot. Asmodeus, part of the already voluminous and still growing Masada series, features Ribot in a trio with Trevor Dunn on bass and G. Calvin Weston on drums. I hope this album has gained some kind of reputation among guitarists since it came out in 2007, because it contains some of the most intense, insane rock/free/whatever playing I've ever heard. Ipos, a Masada album from The Dreamers, is a more stylistically diverse and less intense effort, though the album's deliberate mix of genres serves as a showcase for Ribot's ability to sound idiomatically masterful and yet absolutely individual in a wide range of styles. At the Mountains of Madness, a double live album by Electric Masada, is the only one of the three discs I've mentioned that features Zorn on sax, but here too Ribot is in the spotlight, alchemizing Zorn's Masada language into living, improvisational fire.

Bob Reuter

"...in the heart of the city, where the alligator roams..." - Nick Lowe

Like a lot of people who say they're "from" St. Louis when meeting people from other places, I never actually resided within the city limits. I worked there for many years, though, at a job that took me all over the city. I spent a lot of time in the car listening to KDHX, St. Louis' community radio station and in a very real way one of its most important cultural institutions. Bob Reuter's Friday midday show, "Bob's Scratchy Records", was a highlight of the week whenever I got to hear it. On radio, he was a live wire, an open circuit, an improvisor, drawing on the traditions of "wild man" hipster DJs of the '50s and '60s spliced with ol' time "put your hand on the radio" preachers. There was no strict musical format. He'd play r'n'b, garage, gospel, country, rock, soul, blues, but much of it resided at the edges, the margins where musical boundaries, and even those of race, gender, and sexuality, became permeable and blurred into each other. His pledge drive shows, far from being a reason to tune out for a week, were required listening. You might get a little concerned as Bob would work himself into a frenzy to meet his fundraising goal, sometimes seeming to teeter on the edge of sanity. Even the playlists he'd email out were hugely entertaining (and educational), including photos and commentary for many of the artists.

When I read about his death at age 61, from a fall down an elevator shaft at the loft he was just moving into, it made no sense, came out of nowhere, seemed random and cruel. In recent years, he seemed to have attained a sort of elder statesman status in the hipper segment of the St. Louis community, earning respect for his photography, music, and writing without becoming respectable. When I heard the news, I thought of Bob Cassilly, another of the vital creative forces of St. Louis who died an untimely, accidental death in 2011. Two of the essential St. Louisans gone in two years time.

I didn't know Bob. I interacted with him briefly only a few times, by email to comment or ask a question about something on his show or when he was working the door at Frederick's Music Lounge, one of the great lost music venues (owned by another key Southside figure, Fred Friction). I saw him perform a few times, solo and with his band, but it was his radio presence and his work as a photographer that interested me most.

His photography, collected beautifully in the book Light Fuse and Run, is about as "analog" as can be. The pictures are the glorious sum of accumulated imperfections: Bob's own as a self-taught photographer, those of the medium itself, and the often rough-around-the-edges people and places he documented. It's noir, beat photography, sexy and dark, but not affected or touristic. Like some of William Eggleston's best work, the photographs are taken by a man deeply familiar with the places and people he's shooting but with enough distance to turn them into art. Just as I can't visit Memphis or Mississippi without seeing those places, at least a little, through Eggleston's color-saturated vision, Bob's gritty black-and-whites have permanently altered the way I look at and think of South St. Louis.

The last aspect of Bob Reuter's talent I came to know was his writing. I finally started reading Tales of a Talking Dog, published last year, after hearing of his death this week. Like many of my favorite memoirs - Harpo Speaks and Errol Flynn's My Wicked, Wicked Ways come to mind - it's basically a collection of episodes and anecdotes. The stories from Bob's childhood, growing up in a never-prosperous section of a city that was well into its steep decline, are funny, sad, strange, sometimes disturbing or shocking. Racial tension must've been pervasive, often breaking out into outright violence. The young Reuter was drawn to music and fascinated by the black culture that he was in close proximity to but in many fundamental ways totally excluded and isolated from. The colloquial writing style seems like an attempt to capture his own voice as a storyteller, and does so effectively, at least for someone who was familiar with that voice from the radio. His stories are pieces of a puzzle that can never be finished, as a life and a city can never be fully comprehended. I suspect that when I finish Talking Dog I might start another book that's been on my shelf for a while, "Ain't But a Place", the Gerald Early-edited "anthology of African-American writings about St. Louis". St. Louis is a complex, often strange place, requiring multiple perspectives to even begin to understand it. Bob Reuter contributed in a big way to that understanding and, even though he left too soon, we're lucky that he shared as many of his stories, songs and pictures as he did.

Catch-All to Catch Up

Catching up after putting the blog on hiatus for a while, here are some more or less recent albums, books, and live performances I've enjoyed:

Eric Revis' 11:11 - Parallax
Revis doesn't have too many recordings as a leader, but he seems to be picking up the pace. He's already followed up this late 2012 release with a trio album (feat. Kris Davis and Andrew Cyrille). I haven't heard it yet but did see the group at the Vision Festival. I was impressed, but not as overwhelmed as I'd been by the group on Parallax (Nasheet Waits on drums, Jason Moran on piano, and Ken Vandermark on reeds) when I saw them a few years ago at Jazz Gallery. Tarbaby (Revis, Orrin Evans and Nasheet Waits) also has a new record out - not the Frantz Fanon-inspired project I heard them preview at Le Poisson Rouge with Lake and guitarist Marc Ducret, but Ballad of Sam Langford, dedicated to the early 20th-century boxer (a native of Canada later known as the "Boston Tar Baby") and featuring Oliver Lake and Ambrose Akinmusire (after Miles made the connection, it's hard to imagine a boxing-themed album without trumpet). I just got it but haven't heard enough to record any impressions yet. I've spent more time with Lake's most recent big band record, Wheels, and it's a definite winner. The saxophonist (and painter and poet) seems to be more prolific than ever at age 70.

Some of my favorite moments on Parallax occur when at least one member of the quartet is playing the melody or keeping a straight rhythmic pattern going while the others go off/out, a sound that I've heard in other Revis-Waits projects and in the Bandwagon's music. I've discussed my love of Waits' drumming before, and this is a good album to hear the range of what he can do. There's a good mix of tunes here - some that feel more composed, some more freely improvised, and a couple of really strong, spirited interpretations of early jazz pieces by Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton - sequenced with a good flow that avoids fatigue and invites repeat spins.

Volumes have been written elsewhere and everywhere about Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City, so I'll just say that it's the best thing they've done (and I enjoyed their first two quite a bit) and one of the best things I've heard all year.

Two of my favorite recent discoveries in 20th-century music are closely related: Lou Harrison's Piano Concerto (I've mentioned the recording with Keith Jarrett, for whom the piece was written, before but I can't recommend it enough) and John Luther Adams' For Lou Harrison. The Callithumpian Consort recording of the Adams piece has some helpful liner notes - just understanding the concept of tempo layering in one of the two alternating sections of the piece gave me something to listen for and latch onto. As I understand it - imperfectly I'm sure - different instruments play groupings of 4, 5, 6, or 7 notes to the measure against a steady, slow 4/4 beat. There's a clear "one" to orient the ear, so that the different groupings are always audible even as the overall texture becomes more dense and complex. The other section is quite beautiful, with rising glissandos that sound like the whole ensemble is being played like a harp by a giant hand. (A much more detailed discussion can be found here.) The piece works as something to immerse yourself in and lose track of time, but the complexity and slight but constant variations certainly reward more attentive listening. It was reported that For Lou Harrison received a negative audience reaction when it was performed at the recent Ojai Festival, but in my experience even a slight effort to understand what Adams is doing will be repaid many times over.

I just finished reading two music memoirs back-to-back: White Bicycles, producer Joe Boyd's book about the '60s, and Apathy for the Devil, NME writer/notorious London scenester Nick Kent's year-by-year account of the '70s.  Surprisingly, Boyd, who made his name working with sound, not words, comes across as the better writer, but Kent certainly has a way with an anecdote and tells his sometimes squalid tale with verve.

Eyebone, a trio of Nels Cline, Jim Black and Teddy Klausner at Shapeshifter Lab reminded me how much I enjoy a loud, overdriven electric piano sound (something that was also in full effect at The Lilys' blazing Chickfactor set at The Bell House). All three played with great intensity, and there was a nice moment when Cline stopped playing, put down his guitar, and walked over to turn up Klausner's amp - a bit of on-the-fly, onstage mixing to bring the keyboard to the fore, from which point the music took flight.

The big guitar event of the year so far was the trio of Cline, Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot at Le Poisson Rouge. As a fan of all three, I was fascinated by every nuance of their interactions. They played as a trio, a quartet (with Shahzad Ismaily on drums), and as three different duos. Much of the set seemed improvised, as the three created spontaneous, interlocking parts and each in turn nudged the music in different directions. They covered a lot of sonic territory, including '60s-ish jangle and Hank Williams - the Frisell-Ribot duo played "Cold, Cold Heart", including a verse of vocals from Ribot. Frisell and Cline were on solid-body electrics for most of the set (though Cline played some lap steel), while Ribot did some tunes on acoustic and hollow body electric and generally contributed the most bluesy and angular elements to the mix.

Tim Berne 7 @ The Stone
The high point of my second time seeing this beast of a group (video of some of their performances can be found online) was an almost literally unbelievable half-hour-plus performance of Berne's super-intricate/complex "Forever Hammered". I couldn't fully grasp the structure of the piece, but it seemed to fully exploit the sonic possibilities of the group (an important part of their sound is the combo of Dan Weiss on drums and Ches Smith on vibes and other percussion). I don't know his catalog front-to-back, but this piece seems like some kind of milestone for Berne as a composer - pianist Matt Mitchell, on Twitter, called the TB7 gig "possibly the craziest music I've played with other people" - and I hope it has been or will be recorded in a studio soon.

I saw a couple different iterations of Steve Coleman and Five Elements at The Stone and Shapeshifter Lab. Both were excellent sets. The larger group at the Stone demonstrated Coleman's mastery of densely complex, layered rhythms. Coleman and other band members switched between their main instruments and hand cowbells, setting up new (clave-derived?) rhythmic patterns on top of funky bass-and-drum grooves. There was a lot going on, but the set was engaging on multiple levels, from the physical to the intellectual. The quartet version (w/ trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson) at Shapeshifter put the focus more on Coleman's prodigious improvisational imagination as a soloist. The quartet closed the set I saw with a flourish, taking the final tune at a daredevil tempo.

Best Live Music Seen in 2012

Being less a list than a year-end roundup in numbered sections. The order is not to be taken as a ranking of relative quality, except perhaps for #1, which was pretty much transcendent.

1.
Fred Hersch/Dave Holland/Billy Hart @ Jazz Standard
This is the one I've found myself thinking back on most often.

2.
Milton Babbitt Retrospective @ CUNY Graduate Center
Seeing Philomel live is an experience I'll take with me to the underworld.

3.
Oliver Lake @ 70
In the latter half of 2012, especially the period around his 70th birthday, Oliver Lake seemed to be everywhere in NYC. Playing with several different groups at several different venues, it was hard to keep up with all his activities, but I did manage to catch him a few times. Sets with his organ quartet at Shapeshifter and playing new material with Tarbaby at Le Poisson Rouge were memorable, but the high point for me came at Jazz Standard, where Lake joined Andrew Cyrille and Reggie Workman as Trio 3 with Geri Allen guesting on piano. It was as good as those four names would suggest. At Shapeshifter, Lake was preceded by the Darius Jones Trio, who played beautifully and had Lake sit in for a couple tunes of inter-generational altoism.

4.
Tim Berne @ Shapeshifter Lab X3
Like Fred Hersch, Tim Berne figured in my Best of 2011 Iist as part of John Hebert’s Mingus tribute project Sounds of Love. While I didn’t manage to see Berne’s most acclaimed new project this year, Snakeoil, I did catch him in several other groups, including three excellent sets at the new Shapeshifter Lab - trios with David Torn & Ches Smith (Sun of Goldfinger) and Nels Cline & Jim Black (BB&C) and a new septet (the Tim Berne 7) that includes the members of Snakeoil. The guitar trios were both beasts, with highly formidable guitarists and drummers capable of taking the music at any moment from eerie soundscape to titanic freak-out. As for the septet, I haven’t yet gone back and watched it again on YouTube, but I remember having the feeling as I left Shapeshifter that this was one of the best sets I’d seen all year. The combination of Ches Smith on vibes, Matt Mitchell on electric and acoustic piano and Ryan Ferreira on electric guitar brought a sort of depth-of-field and range of color I’d never heard before in Berne’s music. I’m hoping this band, or at least some version of it, has a future within the ever-expanding Berneverse.

5.
Andrew D’Angelo @ Shapeshifter Lab X2
Andrew D’Angelo turned up in last year’s list as a member of the School for Improvised Music Big Band, where he stood out among a very distinguished lineup with show-stopping solo on a Kris Davis arrangement. This year, I followed through on my resolution to check out some of the saxophonist's own projects, two of which I saw at Shapeshifter Lab - a quartet with Bill McHenry, Mike Pride on drums and the young bassist Noah Garabedian, where the two saxophonists displayed some of the best musical chemistry I saw all year, and D’Angelo’s own big band, the DNA Orchestra. D’Angelo writes knotty, rhythmically and melodically intricate tunes in the bop lineage, but plays them with a passion that never allows the music to sound like an intellectual exercise.

6.
Peter Stampfel & The Ether Frolic Mob @ Brooklyn Folk Fest
Stampfel makes friendly, joyful, and joyfully twisted music that still has and probably always will have the power to inspire WTF? reactions, putting him in good company among the truly singular American artists.

7.
Ethan Iverson/Ben Street/Tootie Heath @ the Village Vanguard / The Bad Plus’ On Sacred Ground @ Damrosch Plaza
After several Smalls appearances (two of which I mentioned in 2010 and 2011 roundups) and a live album, it was about time Iverson got to bring his simple-but-profoundly-rewarding concept of playing standard jazz repertoire in trio with some of the Master Elders of the music into the Vanguard. The tunes spanned several decades (from Eubie Blake to Paul Motian) and were well-chosen to showcase the many aspects of Tootie Heath’s drum mastery, to the benefit of a very appreciative audience. If you missed it, the NPR stream will give you a pretty good taste. Seemingly at the opposite end of the spectrum scale-wise from standards at the Vanguard was The Bad Plus’ take on The Rite of Spring, presented with synchronized video projections, in front of a big crowd outside at Lincoln Center (what they had in common: deep attention to rhythm). In the big outdoor venue, On Sacred Ground almost felt like Stravinsky as arena rock, in the best possible way - I even saw people attempting to groove to the Rite's still-radical-sounding mixed meter. The authority with which drummer Dave King, in particular, handled those rhythms was a marvel to behold.

8.
Psychic Paramount @ LPR & Pitchfork Festival / Earth @ Littlefield
Earth’s slooow tempos and repetitive, heavy but spacious riffs add up to a sound that reminds me of Noguchi sculpture - massive but refined, static but seething with potential energy. There’s a temptation to resort to metaphors involving coiled desert snakes and the like, and "menace" is certainly a word that comes to mind. Not a band to be compared to immovable stone objects, the Psychic Paramount are all about forward motion. Although it was fun to see them outside on a sunny day (well, maybe “overcast” is a better word - it poured rain soon after their set) at Pitchfork Fest in Chicago, they were more in their element inside at Le Poisson Rouge (although the set was a bit early by their standards, at least it was in a basement, albeit a pretty fancy one) where they could deploy the smoke machines and strobes that make theirs one of the most unified presentations in music today - they actually care about matching a look to a sound, and it pays off to overwhelming effect.

9.
Nick Lowe @ Town Hall / Human Hearts @ Hank’s Saloon / AC Newman @ Rock Shop
In which I lump three of the great songwriters of our time, all quite distinctive, somewhat arbitrarily into one list entry. Nick Lowe is a tremendous, charismatic solo performer, but with a backing band (including the soulful Welsh keyboardist and singer Geraint Watkins) his songs, new and old, come into full bloom. Franklin Bruno (as The Human Hearts), celebrating the release of his excellent (and in its Kickstarted-funded vinyl incarnation, beautifully packaged) new album Another, did some songs with only a drummer and was joined on others by guest guitarists and singers, including Laura Cantrell. Bruno is a fine guitarist and I'd love to see him sometime with a keyboardist who could get into some of the Steve Nieve-ities that show up on the new record and recent EP. I saw Carl Newman at the record release party for his latest (and best) solo record, and while he didn't play as long a set as I imagine he would on a regular headlining appearance, the combination of his new songs and new band easily made it one of the most satisfying nights of music of the year.

10.
In which I cram A Few More Outstanding Performances into one entry to make an even ten.

The JACK Quartet @ Abrons Art Center

Lee Konitz's Les Enfants Terribles (Bill Frisell/Gary Peacock/Joey Baron) @ the Blue Note 

Billy Budd @ The Met
A fine night at the opera with Benjamin Britten’s Melville-by-way-of-E.M. Forster all-male sea tale. Most impressive: the chorus of sailors (“heave away”!), though the closing epilogue, with Captain Vere alone on stage reprising the opening and completing the frame that contains the rest of the story, is hard to forget.

Jason Kao Hwang’s Spontaneous River @ Brecht Forum


Repeat Performances

I tried to select different artists, or at least different projects or lineups, for this year’s list, but a few acts from last year that I saw again in 2012 are worthy of another mention.

I put Bill McHenry’s quartet w/ Andrew Cyrille, Orrin Evans, and Eric Revis on last year’s list for what I believe was their first engagement at the Vanguard. I saw them at the same venue twice more this year, including during the March run that yielded their new record, La Peur du Vide, and was reinforced in my opinion that this is one of the most exciting groups going. I’ve read varying opinions on this group from some fine critics, often hingeing on the McHenry-Cyrille pairing (as opposed to McHenry’s previous, longstanding collaboration with Paul Motian): pro, con (scroll down), and some of both. While I happen to like both drummers in the context of McHenry's music and admit that the change makes a big difference, I would argue that the change in chording instruments, from Ben Monder’s guitar to Orrin Evans’ piano, is the most important factor in the new McHenry sound, something that comes through very dramatically on the first track of La Peur du Vide, “Siglo XX”. And as anyone who’s seen Tarbaby live can attest, the combination of Evans and bassist Eric Revis is one that always produces urgent, exciting music. The new album, while very strong, hasn’t yet managed to displace McHenry's previous release, Ghosts of the Sun, as my favorite of his - McHenry-Motian was a special combination, and I believe it reached its peak on Ghosts. Based on the way the current quartet were playing in October, though, I'm very eager to hear more from them, live and on record.

Another group from last year's list that I saw twice more in 2012 was Marshall Crenshaw backed by members of the Bottle Rockets. Neither of the two performances I saw (indoor and outdoor shows at City Winery) surpassed the 2011 Chicago show that saw, but they each presented new aspects of this partnership (I've now seen the “Marshall Rockets” in three different configurations, differing in which one or both of the BRox guitarists were available). While City Winery would probably be fine for a Crenshaw solo show, it felt wrong to be seated at a table sipping Gamay while the full force of the three-guitar lineup kicked in. The Winery's back yard stage was a better setting, and the outdoor show featured a tune I hadn’t seen them do at the previous shows, a very creditable cover of Hendrix' “Manic Depression”.

I mentioned Jeremy Denk’s Zankel Hall pairing of the Ligeti Etudes with the Goldberg Variations in last year’s roundup. I saw him again this year, playing a far smaller and more casual (if I remember correctly, Denk wore jeans) venue, Le Poisson Rouge. He played some of the Etudes again, but the centerpiece of this recital was a time-stopping performance of Beethoven’s last sonata (Op.111), which is paired with the Ligetis on Denk’s latest album.

Recent Faves from Pop Vets

The Human Hearts - Flag Pin EP
Franklin Bruno's recent EP is a digital-only appetizer for the forthcoming full-length Human Hearts album Another, which is getting a Kickstarter-funded vinyl release. I'm not familiar with the entire Bruno discography - it's extensive and spans many years and many tiny labels - but I've enjoyed his work with John Darnielle as the Extra Glenns/Lens, his '90s solo material collected on Local Currency, and, especially, the album of his songs recorded with Jenny Toomey and Calexico, Tempting. The title track of the new EP is a rocker that deals with a subject that was (thankfully) more-or-less absent from the recent campaign season. "Flag Pin" features one of the best Bruno vocals I've heard and, as with many of his songs, is a bit more complex than it sounds at first listen. "Plot of a Romance", currently my favorite track on the EP, is a smart, self-aware love song, a bit meta though not unsincere, the kind of song I associate with New Wave, especially early Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello (Bruno is the author of one of the most musically insightful volumes of the 33-1/3 Series, on EC's Armed Forces). Though it nods to the Attractions sound, this is a Franklin Bruno song through and through - who else (outside of the English folk revival) would refer to the couple in the song as "fair maid, ardent swain"?

A.C. Newman - Shut Down the Streets
Carl Newman's latest is for me the first of his solo records to match up to the best of the New Pornographers (by my definition, their first three records). Newman's songwriting took a somewhat different direction after Twin Cinema, and that direction seems to have finally, fully paid off with Shut Down the Streets. Not only did he write a batch of superb songs, but he found the right group of musicians to realize them. At the Rock Shop record release party, I was struck by just how beautiful and intricately detailed the arrangements of these songs are (incorporating flute and banjo, among many other instruments) and how well Newman and the group were able to translate them to the stage. "I'm Not Talking", perhaps the most memorable song on the record, is sequenced first, but I wouldn't call Streets front-loaded. There are plenty of other high points, like "Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns" - the most New Pornographers-y track here, both in sound (Neko Case's harmonies are prominently featured) and title - and "There's Money in New Wave", one of the best (and least treacly) father's-advice-to-his-young-son songs I've ever heard.

Redd Kross - Researching the Blues     
Though Redd Kross' music has been described many ways ("sugar-punk"?!), I would just say that this is one of the best power pop records I've heard in ages. I need to revisit Neurotica, often considered this band's masterpiece. My recollection is that that record, from 1987, had some rather un-assimilated punk and metal elements while Researching fits more comfortably in the lineage of classic guitar-pop, though there is certainly punk attitude. It's a brief album, unabashedly Beatlesque in places (even the total running time is very 1965) and full of brief, super ear-catching gestures - twin George Harrison-style melodic slide guitars, a distorted guitar that appears to play a couple of sustained, bent notes before vanishing, and even some good-old-fashioned "la la la" harmonies. The best of the best for me is "Stay Away From Downtown", the track that the band and their label (the great Merge Records) seem to have recognized as the catchiest thing on a record full of them, promoting it with a KISS-inspired video. "Stay Away" is a three-and-a-half minute masterpiece, with an unstoppable and unforgettable main riff. Another favorite is "Winter Blues", which, despite the title, could be considered one of the great odes to California sunshine ("solar-regulated days"), a category of song that's certainly been well-represented in pop music since the '60s.

Masters

The Master
One of the best movie experiences I've had in a long time was seeing The Master in 70mm at the Ziegfeld Theater. I avoided reviews before seeing it, and still haven't caught up with them (so some of my comments may be inadvertently repeating critical conventional wisdom), but I did see some chatter about the 70mm format possibly being a gimmick. Maybe the images on the screen would've been just as impressive in 35, but on the genuinely big screen of the Ziegfeld, this was a flat-out beautiful-looking movie. One particular beauty shot stands out in my memory, of The Master's Fitzcarraldo-looking ship sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Master seemed like a further exploration by Paul Thomas Anderson of some of the themes/conflicts/relationships seen in There Will Be Blood. Some of those themes, and certainly the title character, made me think of Orson Welles. The Master, Lancaster Dodd, would've been a natural role for Welles - a charismatic patriarch with serious flaws and an outsized gift for bullshit (not to mention a somewhat outsized waistline). Philip Seymour Hoffman (who is commanding in the role) and Anderson surely must've had Welles in mind, at least as one reference point. Joaquin Phoenix is captivating and weird and brilliant, and despite a fairly large cast, the movie almost feels like a two-hander between Phoenix and Hoffman, with the other characters receding into the background when these two are in the same scene.

Oliver Lake
If you've been wanting to see Oliver Lake play in NYC, the last couple months (centered around his 70th birthday) have offered plenty of opportunities. During his multi-group run at Jazz Standard, I saw a set of Trio 3 (Lake, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille) with Geri Allen. This trio, whose combined discographies must be mind-boggling, has a wonderful chemistry, perhaps partly due to their being more-or-less contemporaries, having each made important contributions to the development of the jazz avant-garde. The trio has a strong book of compositions, and Geri Allen was featured effectively, but I was most impressed by Reggie Workman - his sound, his time, and his melodic ideas were all exquisite.

I also saw Lake around the same time with Tarbaby, one of the most exciting groups going, and one Lake has been collaborating with since his appearance on their End of Fear album. Their show at Le Poisson Rouge included a number of compositions from a new, commissioned project inspired by the anti-/post-colonialist writer Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth). I didn't make any notes from which I could try to describe this new music, but there were at least one or two pieces that didn't sound to me like anything this band has done before. The album will definitely be on my must-buy list whenever it appears.

Tarbaby members Orrin Evans and Nasheet Waits were scheduled to be on Oliver Lake's night of improvised duos at Roulette over the weekend, but Waits was apparently under the weather and had to cancel. I only managed to catch one set, but Lake's duo with Evans was a highlight, with the pianist touching on blues, gospel, and what sounded to me like Milton Babbitt. Another of Lake's duo partners, Joe Daley, on tuba, was something of a revelation. I don't have much of a point of comparison for tuba in this context, but Daley seemed to be doing things technically that I hadn't imagined a tuba could do. I missed Lake's Big Band the next night, one of his groups that I have not yet seen, but I did see another excellent big band at Shapeshifter Lab, Andrew D'Angelo's DNA Orchestra. Driven by D'Angelo's charismatic playing, conducting, and composing and a powerful rhythm section of drums and electric bass and guitar, the music embraced relentless rhythm, daunting complexity and unabashed emotion. Both Lake's and D'Angelo's big bands have records on the way, and I'm sure both will be highly worthwhile.

A Patrick Leigh Fermor Glossary

Since completing the first two parts (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) of Patrick Leigh Fermor's as-yet unfinished trilogy (the final, posthumous volume is apparently being assembled for publication as early as next year) recounting his journey between Holland and Constantinople in the early 1930s, I've been compiling a list of some of the more unusual and striking words he uses in these books. Many of them come from the worlds of medieval European architecture, horsemanship, agriculture, warfare, and nobility/heraldry, among other more or less arcane subjects, along with Britishisms and a few archaic words that Fermor must've just liked the sound of. It's a tribute to Fermor's writing that somehow these books make for very smooth and enjoyable reading despite being minefields of obscure words.

I'm not sure whether I'll be able to summon the courage to go through this exercise with Between the Woods and the Water, but here are some of the best and, to me, most unusual words I found in A Time of Gifts, presented roughly in the order they were encountered in the text:

impecunious - penniless
teazles - plant, genus Dipsacus
spinney - a small wood with undergrowth or a thorny thicket
pursuivant - officer of arms, ranking below a herald
aedile - type of Roman official
puttee - strip of cloth wound spirally around the lower leg or a leather legging covering the same area
oleograph - color lithograph in imitation of oil paint
jonkheer - Dutch honorific, “young lord”
besom - broom made of bundled twigs
punctilio - minute detail of (often ceremonial) conduct
aurochs - European wild cattle, ancestors of domestic cattle, Bos primigenius
impedimenta - baggage or objects that impede or encumber
gorgeted - wearing a collar-like piece of armour to protect the throat or (on a bird) having differently-colored feathers covering the same area
mangolds - Swiss chard
postilion - rider guiding the horses of a coach
beetle (noun) - heavy, wood-splitting maul
beetle (verb) - to be suspended over or overhang
caracoling - performing a half turn (by a horse and rider)
margravine - female aristocrat w/ military responsiblities in border territory of a kingdom (margrave is male)
ramify - to have complicating consequences or to divide into branchline parts
toper - drinker [interestingly, my search for this word also returned an image of Amy Winehouse]
undercroft - traditionally, a brick cellar, storage room or crypt, often vaulted
shako - tall cylindrical military cap
comitadjis (or komitadjis) - a band of resistance fighters or irregulars
machicolated - having machicolations - openings btwn. corbels of a projecting gallery or battlement through which stones, etc. could be dropped on attackers
velleity - slight or mild wish or inclination
puggaree - light scarf wrapped as a band around a sun helmet
sabretache - flat bag or pouch worn from the belt of a hussar calvary soldier along with the saber
uhlan - Polish or Prussian light cavalry
czapka - Polish cavalry hat
aigrette - tuft or spray of feathers (esp. from an egret) worn as a headdress
bustards - large, terrestrial European birds
capercaillies - large European grouse
roodscreen - ornamental partition separating choir from nave in Medieval churches
brindled - tawny or grayish with obscure streaks or spots of a darker color
fimbria - Latin for fringe, often used in science and medicine
monstrance - vessel for display of the Eucharistic host in Catholic churches
congener - a person or thing like another in character or action
ostler - stableman, esp. at an inn
purulent - suppurating, full of or discharging pus
ewer - vase-shaped pitcher
scumbled - softened or dulled color by application of thin opaque coat
grisaille - decorative painting in shades of gray, often to represent three-dimensional relief
hawser - thick nautical cable or rope for mooring or towing
loden - water-resistant material made from sheep’s wool, usually green and associated with Austrian traditional dress
junkers - landed nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany (perjorative)
mediatization - process by which a lesser state is annexed by a greater state, permitting ruler of lesser state to retain title
hospodar - Slavonic lord or “master”
boyars - Bulgarian or Old Russian aristocrats
quinquereme - ancient Roman galley with five banks of oars
cicerone - a museum or gallery guide for sightseers
pavane - slow, stately dance of the 16th and 17th centuries
baldachino (or baldacchino or baldachin or baldaquin) - canopy of state over an altar or throne (as Bernini’s in St. Peter’s), originally fabric, later of costlier materials
jocund - cheerful and lighthearted
cincture - belt or sash worn as a liturgical vestment
forage-cap - non-dress (“undress”) military cap, originating with the cap worn by 18th-century British cavalry while gathering forage for their horses
pelf - money, esp. acquired by dishonesty
guerdon - reward
fardel - pack or bundle
creel - wicker fisherman’s basket
kepi - cap with a flat circular top and a visor, associated with the French military
crapulous - marked by intemperance in eating/drinking
noctambulism - sleep walking
crosier - stylized pastoral staff carried by high church officials
manege - a riding academy
lavolta - a Renaissance dance
coranto (or courante or corrente) - a triple meter dance of the late Renaissance and Baroque era
limpet - type of gastropod/mollusk/snail
yatagan - Ottoman knife or short saber
damascened - decorated (metal) with patterns of inlay or etching
sapper - combat engineer
spahis - light cavalry of the French army recruited from North Africa
deracination - act or process of uprooting or displacement from native environment
tarn - glacial mountain lake or pool
spoor - track, trail, trace or scent of animal or person being tracked
danegeld - originally a tax raised in Anglo-Saxon England to pay tribute to Danish invaders or finance protection against them
virago - noisy, domineering woman or strong, heroic woman
swart - swarthy
puszta - Hungarian grassland/prairie
crockets - hook-shaped decorative elements in Gothic architecture
diapered (architecture) - decorated w/ geometric patterns
stickle-back - type of scaleless fish
banneret - rank of knight who led troops under his own banner
ogee - architectural molding in the shape of an s-curve
incunables - books printed in Europe before 1501
uncials - Greek and Latin capital-letter script used from 3rd to 8th Century
imberb - beardless [http://obsoleteword.blogspot.com/2008/05/imberb.html]
pargetted - plaster-coated, as a wall or chimney, often ornamental
irrefragable - irrefutable, indisputable
apricocks - apricots (archaic)
twigged - realized, understood
nacreous - pearly, iridescent (esp. of a cloud)
charabanc - open-topped horse-drawn or early motor coach used for sightseeing outings
dolman - Turkish robe-like garment or uniform jacket worn by hussars

Heard and Seen - Projectors, Shipp on Farfisa, Konitz, Ornette on Film

Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan  
The new DPs album has grown on me after some initial disappointment. Though I've found much to like, I still have a hard time seeing it as a step forward from its predecessor, Bitte Orca, an album that sounded like a sustained, cohesive statement of a new direction without obvious predecessors. Swing Lo is a more stylistically diverse record, but perhaps as a result, there are more weak spots, and I don't think the more Bitte-like songs (like the opening "Offspring Are Blank") quite reach the highs of "Cannibal Resource" or "Temucula Sunrise" (to be fair, that's a very high standard to meet). 

I'm not sure whether to describe it as cloying or grating, but "Dance for You", programmed smack in the middle of the record, breaks up the flow for me to the point where I've taken the liberty of editing it out of the album. Its admittedly strong melody did succeed in getting stuck in my head, but I wish Dave Longstreth had left the melisma on this one to Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle. I'm not quite ready to accept Longstreth singing more or less directly about love and feelings, but he does pull off a solid, honest-to-God love song with "Impregnable Question", an undeniable album highlight. 

While Swing Lo isn't a Nashville Skyline-level WTF? veer into romantic crooning, Longstreth does seem to be trying out some new vocal personas. He really is crooning on the closing "Irresponsible Tune", doing what sounds to me like an impression of late-model Nick Lowe, and it works, so much so that I'd like to start the campaign to get Nick to cover it. Another successful move into what sounds like new territory is "Unto Caesar", with lyrics written in some sort of courtly, high Dylanese leavened with casual, sassy responding harmony vocals and a horn section (plus some prominently mixed studio chatter). Just the sort of eccentric mix of elements that get this band accused of being pretentious or weird-for-weird's-sake, but it all adds up and makes a strong impression, especially sequenced after the beautifully minimal arrangement, featuring (amplified? synthesized?) thumb piano, of "The Socialites". For me, this is one of those rare backloaded albums, with a strong run of tracks at the end making up for some weak spots in the middle.

Black Music Disaster 
A single live improvised track with two electric guitars, a Farfisa organ, and drums. Hearing a Farfisa in this kind of long form, rock-leaning improvisational context makes me think of Rick Wright on the early Syd-era Pink Floyd records - not a reference point you'd normally expect when the keyboardist is Matthew Shipp. John Coxon from Spring Heel Jack and J. Spaceman (Spiritualized) are the guitarists and British improviser (and Derek Bailey collaborator) Steve Noble is on drums. I don't know about Noble, but Spaceman and Coxon have recorded with Shipp before, and it was my appreciation of Spring Heel Jack's Live album (which also features Han Bennick, Evan Parker, and William Parker!) that made me pick this one up. I haven't listened to Live in a while but recall it having quite a bit more space than this record, which is pretty full-on start to finish, with Shipp's seething Farfisa expanding into all the sonic cracks like a luridly colored psychedelic fog. 

Lee Konitz - Satori and Enfants Terribles
One of my better finds at Chicago's great Jazz Record Mart last month was Lee Konitz's mid-'70s Satori. The lineup is pretty stacked - Martial Solal, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, with producer Dick Katz sitting in on electric piano on the free, swinging, and seemingly collectively improvised title track. Though I've never really connected with the only other record I've heard with Konitz and electric piano - Pyramid, with Paul Bley and guitarist Bill Connors - the two electrified tracks here (Solal also switches to electric on "Sometime Ago") fit just fine with the rest of the album - Konitz's approach remains the same and it's just a different texture added to the mix. Solal - virtuosic, restless and unpredictable - has a fine rapport with Konitz developed over many collaborations (their shared, deep commitment to improvisation is very much in evidence on the fine live duo album Star Eyes). Though each has recorded with the saxophonist separately, this is the only Konitz record I'm aware of with both Holland and DeJohnette. Only a few years removed from their epochal recordings with Miles Davis, they're relatively restrained here, but swinging and subtly easing the music forward into adventurous territory. Holland and Konitz have a nice duo passage on "On Green Dolphin Street" which helps make it one of the standout cuts on the album.

Konitz himself is in good form (he sounds particularly strong to me on the closing "Free Blues"), as he was recently at the Blue Note with another sterling lineup - Bill Frisell, Gary Peacock and Joey Baron - playing under the name Enfants Terribles. Some of the tunes I remember hearing were "Devil & the Deep Blue Sea" (intro'd by Peacock), "Subconscious-Lee", "I'll Remember April" (with a beautiful intro and melody statement by Frisell), and at some point, a little hint of "Misterioso". This group has a live album coming out from an earlier Blue Note appearance, which, based on the performance I saw, should definitely be worth getting.

This is another band, like Bill McHenry's quartet with Orrin Evans and Eric Revis, that I imagine might've featured Paul Motian if he was still with us. But as with Andrew Cyrille in McHenry's group, having Joey Baron is not exactly "settling" - it's just a different kind of awesome. This was my first time seeing Konitz live, though I've heard live recordings from various periods of his career, including two highly recommended albums with Motian recorded 50 years apart - Live at the Half Note with Warne Marsh, Bill Evans and Jimmy Garrison, and Live at Birdland with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden. While the early records with Warne Marsh featured some very tight and tricky heads, these days Konitz seems to cultivate a loose atmosphere in which improvisation is valued above all else and form can take care of itself. I don't know at what point Konitz started moving in this direction, but it was already coming into focus (or becoming more diffuse, depending on how you look at it) on Satori. Since Konitz has returned to many of the same tunes throughout his long career, it would be possible (and fascinating) to trace his development by comparing some of the various versions - "Just Friends", for example, or his own "Subconscious-Lee" which he's been playing for over 60 years at this point (for a little context on that, try to imagine how Charlie Parker might've been playing "Confirmation" if he had lived into the Obama administration).

Ornette: Made in America
Finally, I'd urge anyone who's an Ornette Coleman fan to try to see Shirley Clarke's restored and rereleased documentary, Ornette: Made in America, which recently opened at IFC in New York. Made in the mid-'80s and focusing on a Fort Worth (Ornette's birthplace) performance of Skies of America with Prime Time and the Fort Worth Symphony, this is far from cinema verite. Clarke, who directed and edited, deploys a large battery of devices and effects to get at the nature of Ornette and his music - otherwordly, forever futuristic but always rooted in the blues. We see a (very much pre-CGI) Ornette on an exercise bike in space, Ornette eating BBQ and talking about King Curtis, a string quartet (w/ Denardo) in a Buckminster Fuller terrarium, and William Burroughs (no special effects needed), among many other strange and wonderful things. Ornette's early music isn't much represented (and I don't think the great Billy Higgins appears at all), but there is some amazing footage of Ornette and Charlie Haden rehearsing with 12 year old Denardo, plus a bit of Blackwell and Cherry, and Ornette and Robert Palmer playing with the Master Musicians of Jajouka. In other words, wonders upon wonders.