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.

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.

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.   

Recent Listening - In Their Absence

Thoughts on two records featuring the compositions, but not the playing, of two of the most distinctive instrumentalist-composers of the past fifty (or so) years:

Charlie Haden w/ Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell - Montreal Tapes
I've been gradually acquiring Haden's Montreal Tapes albums as I come across them. There are ten or so in all, recorded live in '89 and each featuring Haden with a different lineup. This is one of the best I've heard so far and one of the best of the "Ornette without Ornette" genre that is best exemplified by Old & New Dreams. This is essentially that group minus Dewey Redman, or to think of it another way, the Ornette Coleman Quartet of This Is Our Music minus Ornette. Ornette's music tends to bring out a special dimension in Haden's playing, and his sound is very much large and in-charge on this set, which is made up of six Ornette tunes and two from Cherry. There's a wonderful moment in "Lonely Woman" when Haden starts playing the old folk outlaw song "John Hardy" ("...was a desperate little man / carried two guns every day"), flaunting the freedom available in Ornette's music, which is large enough and open enough to contain the folk and country Haden grew up with. And what really makes this passage work is the way Blackwell comes in to simply but perfectly support Haden's line. (Apparently, "John Hardy" also pops up on the Ornette Reunion 1990 live set, which I intend to get soon.) I tend to enjoy Don Cherry most when he's playing Ornette's music - I love hearing those unison heads and his interactions with Ornette and/or Dewey Redman - but he carries the front line very well here on his own, standing on the powerful yet fluid foundation created by Haden and Blackwell.

I also revisited the Quartet West record Haunted Heart after reading Haden's comments on the passing of drummer Larance Marable on DTM and it was even better than I remembered it - a super-evocative and well-balanced blend of standard ballads, bebop tunes (by Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, and Bud Powell), and originals inspired by classic Hollywood and/or noir. On the ballads, Haden reverses the procedure sometimes used live by the Bandwagon of playing a recording (of Billie Holiday, for example) and then launching into an improvisation based on it. Here, the vintage vocal performances (by Jeri Southern, Jo Stafford, and Billie Holiday) follow and sort of flow seamlessly out of Quartet West's renditions of the tunes. As this is the only one I've heard, I certainly need to catch up with the rest of Quartet West's output.


Motian Sickness - For the Love of Sarah
I mentioned this album in my previous post and have now had the chance to check it out in more depth. Motian Sickness is West Virginia/DC-area drummer Jeff Cosgrove's Paul Motian tribute project, apparently conceived and recorded before but not released until after Motian's passing last year. After the group name, the instrumentation is the first thing that might raise eyebrows - mandolin/viola/bass/drums. While the mood and the approach taken to the compositions is very much in the spirit of their composer - this isn't Pickin' on Paul: A Bluegrass Tribute to Paul Motian - the mandolin does give the music a dimension that isn't present on any Motian recordings I know of. There's no one dominant voice, but the mandolin (played by Jamie Masefield of the stylistically eclectic Jazz Mandolin Project), with its distinct timbre and characteristic tremolo picking technique, is the element that first grabs the ear in this context.

There's some good background on the album in this interview with Cosgrove. One interesting point is that the album was originally supposed to feature fiddle and that violist Mat Maneri was a last-minute sub. As Maneri is a strong and distinctive musical voice and a veteran of a few different Motian groups, I can only imagine that this would've been a very different record without him. Despite the unusual instrumentation and charismatic players, Motian's compositions still exert the strongest influence on the overall sound - it seems that however they're arranged, they bring their own inescapable mood, evoking sometimes nameless emotions. "Dance", which originally appeared on an ECM trio record with David Izenzon and Charles Brackeen, works well here as an opener.  Relatively brief and upbeat but a bit thorny, it's a good intro into the Motian sound-world, preceding a plunge into the deeper, darker waters of "Conception Vessel".

Many of the following tunes are ones I associate with Motian's Soul Note era (though he recorded most of them multiple times), and the tracklist reminds me of the depth of Motian's catalogue (and the potential for a Motian Sickness sequel) in that it's full of strong tunes despite the fact that it includes almost none of the ones I might list as my favorites or the ones I'd be most likely to recognize in a few notes (there's no "Abacus", "Etude", "Byablue", "Cathedral Song", "Blue Midnight", "Yahllah", or "Drum Music"). Motian Sickness has already brought me back to the Soul Note records (some of the best and, until the recent box set reissues, perhaps least known of Paul Motian's recording career as a leader) with renewed attention and given me a deeper appreciation of tunes like "The Owl of Cranston" and "The Story of Maryam". Ending with "Trieste" was another good sequencing choice, closing the record with one of Motian's loveliest and most melancholy tunes, highlighted by Maneri's viola.

Cosgrove has, of course, the difficult task of being the drummer on a Paul Motian tribute record, a situation that doesn't exist on recent Motian-themed records by Russ Lossing (solo piano) and Joel Harrison (on guitar with his String Choir). He doesn't seem to be copying Motian's style (which would probably be impossible to pull off convincingly, anyway), but his playing does seem to embrace the more open, free, coloristic side of Motian, with an emphasis on interplay and reaction. The bassist, John Hebert, set himself a similar challenge last year when he assembled a Charles Mingus tribute group at the Stone (one of the best sets of music I saw all year). I don't know if he ever played in any of Motian's bands, but they did play together (here's some video of them with Russ Lossing) and, as seems to be the case in just about any situation, his sound and his ideas play a major role in shaping the music on this album. Insomuch as there's any such thing as a "standard repertoire" anymore, I hope For the Love of Sarah will play a part in cementing Paul Motian's place in it.

[Update: Just noticed that the Bad Plus plus Bill Frisell set from Newport has been posted. Four of five tunes in the set are by Paul Motian. If you've somehow read this post to this point and are not already aware of this set of music, YOU ARE ADVISED TO LISTEN TO IT IMMEDIATELY. Frisell's guitar sounds on this. Oh man.]

Bonus Links
I've been reading some older essays on Kyle Gann's blog lately (his pieces on just intonation and historical tunings are by far the clearest explanation of these subjects I've ever seen) which led me to this series on the history of American piano music by pianist-composer "Blue" Gene Tyranny. All of this has had me Googling and YouTubing all sorts of amazing piano works. One new favorite is Lou Harrison's Piano Concerto from the mid-'80s performed by Keith Jarrett.

Next time out, I'll probably be talking recent pop/rock-oriented records and stuff I bought in Chicago (good haul at the Jazz Record Mart).

Talking Motian

Check out this panel on Paul Motian with the drummer Matt Wilson (who recently organized a tribute band, Mumbo Jumbo) and frequent Motian band members Steve Cardenas and Chris Cheek (video is in 4 parts starting here). They tell some good stories and provide some insights on the man and his music. And unlike so many panel discussions, the moderator mostly stays out of the way and lets the participants have a free-flowing conversation. I hope somebody can make the imagined book of Motian compositions that's discussed into a reality - that's one Kickstarter campaign I would most certainly contribute to. I also hope the Mumbo Jumbo band plays in NYC soon. One last link: the Motian tribute with bluegrass instrumentation that's mentioned in the panel can be found here and it sounds mighty fine.

Brief Notes on Recent Shapeshifter Shows

The new Shapeshifter Lab in the Gowanus is really taking off, with strong bookings multiple nights a week for the past month or so. I was able to catch the trio Sun of Goldfinger (Tim Berne, David Torn, Ches Smith) at the Lab last week. It was a great follow-up to the recent Tim Berne/Nels Cline/Jim Black appearance at the same venue. In either case, take Tim Berne on alto, add a guitar magus/shaman/mad scientist and a heavy, multi-genre-spanning drum presence doubling on electronics, and you've got something that could be its own sub-genre of improvised music, though I wouldn't know what to call it.

I also saw the middle night of Oliver Lake's three-night run at the Lab, which featured the Darius Jones Trio playing before Lake's Organ Quartet. I've been enjoying Jones' new quartet record, but seeing the trio (Jones is the only musician the quartet and trio have in common) made me realize I need to catch up with his earlier stuff too. Jones' musical voice is strong and clear and there seems to be no limitations on what he can do technically on his instrument. Seeing him play with Oliver Lake was a pleasure, with Lake stepping in to contribute some fiery solos on a couple of Jones' tunes.

I think this was my third time seeing the Organ Quartet, and what I noticed most this time was the richness of Lake's compositions. They can be enjoyed, but certainly not wholly apprehended at first listen (at least not by me). There's a lot going on in these tunes - rhythmically, harmonically, structurally - and the format - alto/trumpet/organ/drums - adds to the sense that Lake has carved out his own territory with this music. It's recognizably part of a tradition (or maybe multiple traditions) but there are no real, obvious antecedents that come to mind. I'm looking forward to hearing how Lake's compositions sound on the big band record he's been working on.

Three Nights in May

Psychic Paramount @ Le Poisson Rouge
I finally got the chance to see the Psychic Paramount, the heavy, vocal-less guitar-bass-drums trio whose albums I've been enjoying for the last year or so (especially the latest, II). There's a great purity to what they do, with everything, including their look, stage lighting (and smoke!), and album packaging contributing to the total effect. And it is very effective. On record, their sound is an enveloping, physical experience (and a frightening one if you've been listening to something quiet before a Psychic Paramount album comes up on the iPod - they master their music LOUD). Live, they sacrifice none of the precision of the studio and, as it should be, the experience is more overwhelming.  As in any successful trio, and especially for one that produces this big a sound, all three musicians have to pull some serious weight. Jeff Conaway on drums sets a high level of intensity while getting into some complex patterns and remaining locked in with Ben Armstrong's bass, which is often the most steady, insistent rhythmic element, relentlessly propelling the music forward. Drew St. Ivany, on Les Paul, alternates between contributing to the rhythmic drive and taking effects- and feedback-aided solo excursions. Much of the variation and drama in the music comes from these shifts in what the guitar is doing. There's no loud-quiet-loud here, but it is surprising how many different kinds of loud these three musicians are able to produce.

Fred Hersch/Dave Holland/Billy Hart @ Jazz Standard
On paper, this lineup sounded like the product of a very hip jazz fantasy league draft. In practice, this was a dream team that lived up to its promise, giving me the feeling that I might just be listening to the world's greatest piano trio (though I really wouldn't want to get into a debate on that question - how can you compare, for example, Hersch's regular working trio with John Hebert and Eric McPherson - just about the gold standard these days - with The Bandwagon and The Bad Plus, two long-running trios who are almost in their own separate categories, existing in musical worlds of their own creation?) The set included some tunes from Hersch's repertoire - "Still Here", Ornette's "Forerunner" (probably the best version I've ever heard from a Hersch group, surpassing even a very memorable one at the Vanguard with Paul Motian) - as well as at least one Holland composition and, to close, Charlie Parker's minor-key "Segment".

I was seated to extreme stage left, so that I was closest to Hart's kit. From this location, the sound mix was a bit off, but it was worth it to have such a privileged vantage point on exactly what the drummer was doing. I don't recall hearing Hart in a piano trio context before (though there are some fine trio moments on his latest quartet album, All Our Reasons), but he supported Hersch beautifully and the feel he brought to the music was supreme. Holland played through an amplifier, which didn't seem to color his tone much but did help make every note distinct (something his technique had a lot to do with too, I'm sure). He seemed to be having a ball playing with Hart, and his solos were full of clear, spontaneously realized ideas - he seemed to be improvising in complete sentences. There was a nice moment on Hersch's "Mandevilla" where Holland played a brief idea based on a descending pattern, only to have Hersch echo it part way through his solo which followed - just the kind of detail that makes piano trio music, at its best, a deep, rich music rewarding (and sometimes requiring) close listening. There were also a few of those moments which seem to happen in every Hersch set, and on his records, where he seems to have reached a peak of invention in the course of a solo only to go beyond it, fluidly unspooling a few more yards worth of brilliance before coming back to earth (apologies for the mixed metaphors!).

Milton Babbitt Retrospective @ Elebash Recital Hall
This memorial retrospective at the CUNY Graduate Center, featuring nine of Babbitt's compositions spanning almost 60 years, was a good crash course for me. I'd heard only a few Babbitt compositions, though I did get the chance to see the massive (and currently non-working) RCA Mark II synthesizer he used up at Columbia a year or so ago. Perhaps because it was the first time I was hearing many of these extremely dense, complex pieces, I tended to enjoy the solo works best, particularly None but the Lonely Flute, More Melismata (for cello, and one of Babbitt's last works), and My Ends are My Beginnings (in which a single performer alternates between clarinet and bass clarinet). While the program was full of impressive performances, the undoubted highlight was Philomel, the Babbitt work that is probably most often tagged with the term "masterpiece". Like "masterpiece", "stunning" is an overused term of praise, but it accurately describes the effect of Judith Bettina's performance (in conjunction with the backing tape featuring the Mark II). Combining otherworldly (and now probably unrepeatable) synth textures and Ovid-derived serialist arias, Philomel (composed in the Year of Beatlemania, 1964) is still a revelation (as Ethan Iverson put it in his Babbitt obit, this is "permanently avant-garde" music). If you follow that last link, I recommend you go one step further and check out the really excellent Babbitt documentary Iverson links to (also available on YouTube).

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.

Heard and Seen - Windmills to Snuff Box

Paul Motian - Windmills of Your Mind
It couldn't have been a particularly easy task singing while backed by late-period Paul Motian. Left to fill in the thin-stroke pencil sketches of the song forms by Motian, Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan, Petra Haden comes through beautifully on this record, with an appealingly straightforward style which admits just enough sweetness to sell the love songs ("Easy Living", originally from a Jean Arthur film of the '30s, is a high point). I haven't yet heard On Broadway 4 w/ Rebecca Martin, but it's hard to imagine any singer doing better than Haden in this musical context. (I've also been meaning to get Haden's album with Bill Frisell from several years ago.)

The format on Windmills is standards sung by Haden, interspersed with generally brief trio versions of Motian tunes w/ Frisell and Morgan (there have to be more tracks on this album than any other single disc Motian release). The Motian tunes come off very well as miniatures, including two I don't remember hearing before - "Backup", built around some sort of minor arpeggios played by Frisell, and "Little Foot", which could almost be mistaken for one of Frisell's folk/country-flavored compositions. Hearing Paul Motian play a standard ballad was and is (on his many recordings) a sublime experience. From all evidence, he didn't treat standards as merely vehicles for improvisation - he played tunes that meant something to him. I don't know what other releases of previously recorded material might be planned, but if Windmills turns out to be Motian's last as a leader, an album that so eloquently demonstrates his love for songs would be a fine conclusion to one of the great recording careers.

Whether released on Winter+Winter, like Windmills, or ECM, Motian's albums always have excellent sound. They're clearly recorded with precision and care (though the ECM reverb treatment sometimes goes a bit over the line to my ears - something I noticed recently when listening to the still most excellent It Should've Happened A Long Time Ago from 1985). I was thinking about this issue of recording quality and record labels after finally catching up to Mark Turner's Dharma Days from 2001. I've wanted to get this one for a while, and after hearing it, I can understand why Turner and Kurt Rosenwinkel became such important influences on the next generation of musicians. The record also features one of my favorite drummers, Nasheet Waits, and I was immediately struck by how good the drums sound - both the performance and the recording quality. Every detail of Nasheet's playing seems to have been captured vividly and three-dimensionally. Not coincidentally, Dharma Days (a major label - Warner Bros. - release) was recorded at NYC's Sear Sound, by most accounts one of the last great old-school recording temples, with a legendary and priceless microphone collection. A lot of excellent work gets done in small and even home studios, but how many future jazz albums will be recorded to the highest quality standards as record label money dries up?

I noticed in some of the press for Tim Berne's new ECM album that he'd been putting out live albums for the last several years because the money just wasn't there for a proper studio date. If this is the case with a major figure like Berne, where does that leave all the up-and-comers who deserve to be properly documented? Though lo-fi can convey a certain immediate, crucible-of-spontaneous-creation feeling (Greg Osby's bootleg-esque Banned in New York comes to mind, though ironically it was released on the legendarily sound-quality-conscious Blue Note), music that's full of intricate details and shadings of tone color will obviously benefit from being recorded on top quality equipment by serious professionals, something that doesn't come cheap, even in the digital recording age. Of course, there's a huge middle ground between bootleg quality and Sear Sound, but is "good enough" good enough? A recent post over at DTM has sparked a good conversation on the ethics of file sharing and its effect on the survival of the small labels, like ECM, that have been so important in documenting the music.

David Torn - Prezens
I saw David Torn at Barbes last year w/ Tim Berne, Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith, but I was still not quite prepared for the ass-kicking/name-taking that occurs on this album (if you saw ECM on the label but didn't know anything about Torn, some of the more aggressive sounds - such as on "Bulbs" - might be pretty surprising). Berne is here, along with Craig Taborn on various keys and electronics and Tom Rainey on drums. Like Smith, Rainey sounds more than comfortable in heavy rock territory when the music takes that turn, and I think there might even be some drum'n'bass-y moments, though I don't know that style well enough to really say. (Rainey on this album back-to-back with some of his trio work with Fred Hersch would make for a mind-blowing blindfold test.) Together with Torn's guitar, effects, and loops, they establish a broad sonic palette over the first several tracks, and the variety of sounds and moods easily sustains interest over a 70+ min running time. I would've thought all the sonic cards would be on the table by the second-to-last track, but then Torn throws in acoustic slide guitar, string-emulating mellotron, and tabla-like percussion on "Miss Place, The Mist...". Even though it's five or so years old, Prezens is one of the best things I've heard this year so far.

JACK Quartet at Henry St. Settlement
This concert, part of Carnegie Hall's American Mavericks series, featured string quartets by Charles Ives (No. 2) and Ruth Crawford Seeger, and a quartet-plus-electric-guitar piece ("Physical Property") by Steven Mackey. I was hearing all the pieces for the first time, so I'll just record a few surface impressions. The Ives struck me as a pretty major work, built on an effective structure of three movements (titled "Discussions", "Arguments", and "The Call of the Mountains") - the first setting the table, not-too-gently ushering the audience into Ives' sound world, and the last two building to powerful, though quite different, conclusions. The Seeger quartet seemed to derive most of its considerable interest from rhythm - Seeger apparently was a pioneer in applying serial techniques to rhythm and duration, as well as pitch - and certainly would require multiple listens to fully grasp. Mackey, appearing on guitar with the quartet, had the probably impossible task of following these two pieces. Though I think the work was, on the whole, successful and certainly moved along with a strong momentum, I was unsure what to think about Mackey's guitar language. Was his occasional flirtation with rock guitar cliche a sort of fun, effectively anarchic juxtaposition with a string quartet or did it just sound a little dated? Or are these elements intended to have a similar effect on someone who grew up listening to rock guitar as Ives' hymn and popular song quotations might've to one of his contemporaries?


Snuff Box
I just watched the complete series (comprising only six episodes) of Snuff Box, the sketch comedy from Mighty Boosh alums Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher (who appears in this rather amazing new Nick Lowe video). Though it aired on the BBC almost six years ago, it's only recently been released in the US. Snuff Box can safely, though perhaps inadequately, be classified as a descendent of Monty Python and Mr. Show in the lineage of sketch shows - Berry and Fulcher are unafraid to go to dark places (the show is mostly set in a private club for hangmen) but also indulge silly and surreal impulses while making good use of linkages between scenes to give each episode a smooth but unpredicable flow.

The use of music in Snuff Box is more sophisticated than most of its predecessors, thanks to Berry, who composed and performed the retro/psych/lounge-y theme music that appears in various forms throughout the series (I had the theme stuck in my head for days after seeing the final episode). In one episode, a seemingly pointless recurring character (a Python-esque bowler-hat-and-umbrella type with a penchant for profanity - a common trait for Fulcher's characters) touches off a sort of swear word concerto that unexpectedly resolves into the closing theme - a brilliant moment of profane whimsy, like something out of a hard-R-rated Sesame Street. Some of the shows most successful sketches are music-themed, including left-field parodies of the Old Grey Whistle Test and instructional guitar videos and a recurring bit that has an old-school songwriting duo having uncomfortable encounters with rock stars (at one point, they murder Elton John).

Unlike Mr. Show, which also had a writing/acting duo at its center, Snuff Box doesn't rely on a deep supporting cast. Though there's some fine supporting work from Richard Ayoade, a familiar face in British comedy, Guy Ritchie-favorite Alan Ford, who plays the priest in the hanging scenes, and the ensemble of old-timers at the hangmen's club, the show focuses almost entirely on Berry and Fulcher. They frequently appear as two or more characters in the same scene, most memorably playing their main characters' brothers. The Berry brother, a near-deaf musician, is one of the show's finest creations. I found Fulcher grating and basically unpalatable when I first saw him as Bob Fossil on the Mighty Boosh, but he's grown on me, especially as I've realized that being grating and unpalatable is his gift, something that he's developed to a world-class level. The Berry-Fulcher relationship on Snuff Box somewhat resembles that of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip and Tristram Shandy, with Fulcher and Brydon as the barely tolerated junior partners (it may or may not reflect some kind of trend that real names are used in both of these fictional relationships).

Recent Record Finds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...and last and also least:

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

Best Live Music Seen in 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Music-Related Highlights of 2011

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

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