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.   

Top Ten Things Currently on My iPod

In no particular order:

Sebadoh - Harmacy
I imagine this is an unusual entry point into the Sebadoh catalog (I almost entirely slept on them in the '90s), but I picked up this second last of their records after hearing "Ocean" on The Best Show on WFMU. Best Show boss Tom Scharpling's interview with Lou Barlow on the Low Times podcast also pushed me toward finally catching up on this band. With a mix of well-written, often moving jangly pop songs broken up by shorter, harder punkish outbursts, Harmacy is a mighty fine electric guitar record considering this was a band that made their name mostly with lo-fi acoustic recordings.

Miles Davis - Big Fun
A copious mixed bag spanning a few years worth of different sessions and employing an all-star army of musicians, this is a strong and semi-essential if not a cohesive electric Miles record. There's a particular pleasure, almost unique to '70s Miles, in hearing some of these long, sketchy pieces coalesce into the beautiful and/or wildly grooving passages that justify the whole enterprise. Miles did seem to be making truly "experimental" music in that there seems to be no way he could've fully anticipated the results of the musical situations he was setting up. Teo Macero's cutting, pasting, and sound manipulation, so important a component of Miles' studio work in this era, is very much in evidence here, nowhere more than on "Go Ahead John", with its wild noise gate effects, hard whip pans, and multi-Milesing overdubs.

Jack White - Blunderbuss 
This first White solo record has enough strong songs and stylistic diversity to make it highly re-listenable. Once it's done, I want to hear it again. Scattered notes: the title track reminds me of a Dylan song, though I'm not sure which one ("Isis"? "Time Passes Slowly"?); White makes good use of keys and acoustic instruments, expanding on a trend which started to appear on later White Stripes records, but there are still enough deliciously nasty guitar tones here to meet expectations. In fact, there's even a moment that reminds me of John McLaughlin's damaged, can-of-bees solo from the aforementioned "Go Ahead John".

Richard Strauss' Don Juan (NY Philharmonic 1998 live recording)
I still haven't quite connected with the rendition of Death and Transfiguration on his disc, but the Don Juan is exuberance itself and I can't get enough of it. Now I need to seek out more versions of both and go on a Strauss tone poem binge.

Nick Lowe - The Old Magic
In which Lowe continues to refine his already quite aesthetically refined, relaxed late-period style - retro in a non-period-specific way, with mellow sounds often serving as camouflage for the lyrical barbs that have never not been present in Lowe's music. His recent show at Town Hall presented this music in the best possible light, and it was a treat to finally see him with a full band (including frequent collaborator Geraint Watkins, quite an artist in his own right and sort of a Welsh Spooner Oldham), though he's just as effective as a solo performer, a fact that testifies to his personal charm onstage and the strength of his songs.

Ches Smith & These Arches - Finally Out of My Hands
Although these musicians, individually and collectively, have a penchant for (usually quite rewarding) trips to Weirdsville, this album is distinguished by some really strong, even hummable, tunes. Disc opener "Anxiety Disorder" is one of the strongest and features some especially fine drumming from Smith (love that fast cymbal pattern!).

BB&C (Tim Berne, Jim Black, Nels Cline) - The Veil
Though I missed the Stone show documented on this album, I did catch the trio (also known as the Sons of Champignon) at the promising new venue Shapeshifter Lab in the Gowanus. It's obvious that Tim Berne is not a musician to be easily intimidated, as evidenced by his willingness to step onstage with guitar demons the likes of David Torn or Nels Cline armed only with an alto saxophone, looking to the uninitiated like a man bringing a knife to a gunfight. Fortunately, this music is about collaboration, not competition - if the music sounded violent at times, it was a three-way, collaborative violence.

It's hard to describe the kinds of sounds Nels Cline is capable of producing, and at close range in a smallish venue, it can be an overwhelming, immersive experience. If a Wilco show doles out the high-proof Nels in sensible drams, contained-though-dramatic outbursts, this was like bathing in the stuff, football-coach-Gatorade-bath-style. At a few different points, Cline and Black locked into some ferocious grooves, driving the music along with an incredible intensity. At other times, when Black switched to laptop sound manipulation, it was possible to imagine Berne's saxophone as a lone human voice calling out amid the electronic thunderstorm. An argument could be made that this group is the legitimate successor to Motian-Lovano-Frisell, the drums-sax-electric guitar trio. Though their music may seem radically different on the surface, there is some overlap in the textures and moods the two groups explore as well as a history of collaboration and influence (Berne recorded with both Frisell and Motian, Cline and Frisell have collaborated live, and I once saw Black studying Motian at the Vanguard from the front row, directly in front of his kit).

Billy Hart - All Our Reasons
I've been listening to this for about a week now, and it keeps getting better. It's well-written, well-played, well-recorded, and most importantly, is animated by moments of spontaneous invention and surprise of the kind that aren't always captured on a studio record. Current favorites are Mark Turner's "Nigeria", which ends with the kind of interplay between Hart and Ethan Iverson that I enjoyed so much when I saw this group live, Iverson's "Ohnedaruth", with a piano intro (featuring a hard-to-describe but very distinctive touch and rubato-ish time feel - sort of swaying rather than swinging) which is one of the album's most ear-catching moments, and the memorable closer "Imke's March", composed by Hart and bookended by group whistling(!).

WTF
Marc Maron has done some excellent interviews on his long-running podcast in recent weeks, including a surprisingly personal look into David Cross' childhood and early career and a very easy, free-flowing conversation with a man whose outlook I always find inspiring, the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne.

The Pod F. Tompkast
I haven't even scratched the surface of everything that's going on in comedy podcasting right now, but it's hard to imagine that anyone is doing more with the format than Paul F. Tompkins. I can't recommend starting with the latest episode (#17) if you're new - this is one of those things that's best experienced from the beginning - but it is one of the funniest I've heard. Tompkins is developing the stream-of-consciousness, improvised monologues (accompanied live-in-the-studio by Eban Schletter's piano) he does between recorded bits into a viable comedic form that he totally owns.

Recent Listening - Jones and More

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.

Three Brief Music Items (w/ many links)

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...]

The Selected Ballads Selects A Ballad

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.]  

Best Of 2010 - Best Live Music

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.

Don't Sully My Aeroplane

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.

The Holiday Season Is Box Set Season

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)