Peter Stampfel @ Brooklyn Folk Festival

Peter Stampfel utterly lacks all the qualities that sometimes make folk music boring to me. Though his knowledge of American music matches that of the most scholarly revivalist, none of the following adjectives apply to him: tradition-bound, conservative, retrograde, humorless. While he plays multiple instruments, including a mean fiddle, Stampfel's art is one in which instrumental technique for its own sake is not a concern. His voice is, and has been for almost 40 years, one of the strangest in any genre of American music, though it wouldn't sound out of place on the Harry Smith Anthology - for which he contributed Grammy-winning liner notes - among the likes of Dock Boggs. This live uke rendition of one of Stampfel's signature covers, "Goldfinger", makes for a bracing immersion in the man's singular artistry. I'm glad whoever made this video got some audience reaction shots - lots of smiles ranging from politely baffled to genuinely amused, a few blank looks suggesting a state of shock, and one dude absolutely loving it.

My first exposure to Stampfel was via a live album he made in the mid-'90s with Chicago's Dysfunctionelles, a band of folk-rock weirdos every bit as great as their name. Though they played at least one show with fellow founding Rounder Steve Weber, the album, Not In Their Wildest Dreams, just features Stampfel and was compiled from shows in New York and Chicago. The album features Stampfel classics like "Griselda" and "Hoodoo Bash" and wacky covers of "Be True to Your School" and the Springsteen/Pointer Sisters "Fire", but it may have been Stampfel's solo banjo version of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", from a soundcheck, that made the biggest impression on me. Desert island material, for sure. Unhinged but capable of playing anything, the Dysfunctionelles seemed like the ideal band to stimulate and support Stampfel's peculiar genius, and it's a shame their collaboration produced just the one micro-label tape (which I desperately need to dig out of storage and transfer to digital - my comments above are strictly from memory). I did find an old article from the mid-'90s that referred to a planned follow-up session, but as far as I know nothing ever came of it. Note to the possessor of the master tapes: Not In Their Wildest Dreams deserves a reissue - a digital download, a CD, vinyl, whatever!

At the Folk Fest, Stampfel played one tune that I knew from Wildest Dreams, "Screaming Industrial Breakdown", which also appears on 1986's Peter Stampfel & The Bottle Caps. Robert Christgau has a typically perceptive appreciation of Stampfel in which he reviews the Bottle Caps album. Though not wholly uncritical, he goes so far in his enthusiasm as to declare it better than the contemporaneous Psychocandy(!). I found a vinyl copy a couple years ago, and it is, as Christgau says, "well-made", but despite having strong songs and imaginative arrangments, it suffers a bit from the unmistakable time-stamp of a well-made '80s record - yes, even folk-rock records on Rounder had that reverb-y drum sound. I'd like to hear some of the later Bottle Caps recordings, as these guys are clearly excellent musicians with a feel for Stampfel's music.

His current band, the Ether Frolic Mob (I hope they were named in honor of this Bugs Bunny cartoon), which in this incarnation included a variety of stringed acoustic instruments, an electric bass, Stampfel's daughter Zoe on percussion and vocals, and fellow '60s folk legend John Cohen on guitar, is agreeably loose and plenty capable of getting in the right spirit for this music. Their too-brief Folk Fest set started with "Shambalor", setting the bar high for weirdness (read more about this incredible '50s artifact here), and peaked for me with "Demon in the Ground", an answer song to/parody of "Spirit in the Sky", which Stampfel instructed the band to play with (if I heard correctly) a "boogie shuffle machine"(!) feel. My repeated exposure to the latter on classic rock radio as a teenager primed me to appreciate the Satanic glee (and who can do Satanic glee better than Peter Stampfel?) of the former, including the lyrics "I gotta friend in Sa-tan" and "when I die my soul will be cursed/I'm gonna go to the place that's the worst".

I also saw Dennis Lichtman's Western Swing outfit Brain Cloud at the Festival. They escape the trap of merely turning out museum-quality reproductions of period music (something they clearly have the chops for) with song choices both obscure and wide-ranging (true to the spirit of the original Western Swing bands, which drew from blues, Dixieland and Big Band jazz, country, and various strains of "old-timey" string band music to create one of America's most ear-catchingly potent though still somewhat underappreciated forms of music) and the presence of vocalist Tamar Korn. Korn's vocals, seemingly inspired by the great radio and Big Band singers from, I'd guess, Annette Hanshaw to Ella Fitzgerald, feature many of the vocal mannerisms common to that era, but eccentrically magnified to great effect. Lichtman and company succeed by doing justice to the inherently lively quality of a style that was essentially created as dance music, and at the Folk Fest they received the best possible endorsement by inspiring widespread dancing in the crowd.

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.

Symphony of Souls, etc.

Symphony of Souls at Brecht Forum
Last Saturday, I saw Jason Kao Hwang's Symphony of Souls performed by the composer and his 38-piece "improvising string orchestra" Spontaneous River. The room at the Brecht Forum (on the far western edge of the West Village) was small enough that the orchestra took up about half of it. Even if every seat had been filled, the audience to performer ratio still would've barely topped 1:1. While I enjoyed watching the musicians at close range and being immersed in the sound, it is a shame that we don't live in a time and place where a piece like this could've been played in a big hall and touched off a Rite of Spring-like riot.

Though it has been done by Braxton and others, it still seems like a major accomplishment to put together this large of a group of musicians who can creditably improvise while making their way through a complex score. Yet this wasn't a Dr. Johnson's dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs type of thing, but a fully-realized, powerful piece of music that moved confidently through improvised and written, fragmented and unison sections, producing thrills and surprises that seemed to be shared by audience and performers. In his composition, Hwang seems to have handled the basses (there were 6 bassists) and drums particularly well, deploying them to power some strongly rhythmic passages that provided effective contrast to the relatively open spaces featuring acoustic guitars (which I'm tempted to describe as "post-Derek Bailey") and solo improvisation. Although individual solos were not a dominant part of the work, I thought the violins stood out in this area, with a particularly fine solo early on from (I believe) Mazz Swift.


A few more things heard and seen recently:

This East Village poetry walk audio guide, written up by the NY Times and featuring a soundtrack of John Zorn music and narration by Jim Jarmusch, makes for good listening even if you're not actually walking the route. If you're not up to speed on the so-called "Second-Generation New York School", this will put you on the path (literally and figuratively).

All too appropriately, soon after listening to the poetry walk, which talks about the changing neighborhood, I heard that the Lakeside Lounge is closing at the end of this month. The Lakeside, just off the corner of Tompkins Square Park, was a place I never went to enough, but I did see some excellent shows there and the jukebox certainly lived up to its reputation.

I'm not a big fan of Charlie Rose (I can't completely trust a man  who rocks the loafers-with-no-socks look), but I have to commend him for putting together a fine hour of TV in tribute to Christopher Hitchens. The panel was made up of Hitch pals Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and the poet and journalist James Fenton. As to be expected, the anecdotes flow like Hitchens' favored Johnnie Walker Black.

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).

Slava + The Raj

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

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

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

Recent Record Finds

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.