ep1str0phy

It's Mbizo. If it's the Actuel Festival, Dyani being there squares out. Louis was there, too. Check the photo here:

Thanks for reading all that! There are a handful of studio recordings, yes - though (speaking only for myself) they don't really reflect the sound of this band on stage. Our big endeavor during my tenure in the band was remaking the Blue Note material, and I sense that Eddie was looking for polished work rather than fiery extrapolation. This track is kind of in the middle: Whatever may or may not have survived the 2010s, I know that Eddie often had a camera running at shows. There were a handful of performances, many of them in front of actual crowds, that were unreal. In my admittedly incomplete knowledge of Eddie, these performances might be considered too rough or aggressive to issue, but were they to get out, they might offer a more "honest" perspective on the way that this music communicated to both its audiences and its participants. There were things that Eddie allowed (or wanted) us to do on stage that never made it to record, and those are the moments that I'll always remember the most fondly. As an aside, Damon Smith recently posted about a Bay Area show that featured Eddie, Damon, Brotzmann, and Jackson Krall. They were performing for a group of school children. I feel as if Eddie was up to this kind of activity all the time, and as a player, he had a remarkable penchant for making himself heard (in the best way possible) in contexts where brevity or restraint were encouraged. I wish that more of this music had survived for posterity.

First off, thanks to everyone for the kind words and remembrances. Not to speak on his behalf, but I sense that Eddie would have enjoyed being remembered in this way. Second - and with the intention of demythologizing a little bit - Eddie did these kinds of gigs all the time. This was actually one of the things that caused friction - it was impossible to tell when Eddie had booked a "public rehearsal" vs. a "real gig" (his distinction). I'll never forget this one time when I barreled from Richmond out to San Jose in rush hour traffic, only to arrive at an empty bistro with six, seven band members on stage. I cut my hand open while setting up, which resulted in the hilarious image of the guitar player frantically searching for unbloodied paper towels, hardcore freebop blasting out at an audience of no one. To speak more analytically - over time, I had a deepening feeling that this weird quirk of Eddie's performance practice was generational in nature. He came up at a time when the notion of live casual performance had different implications, and despite the passage of time and the changing topography of the music business, I still think that this is where his head was at most of the time. But - and this is an object lesson in what it takes to survive at the fringes of this music for, what, half a century or more - Eddie was very big into the business aspects of the music. There was an entrepreneurial charisma to him that forgave some of the wobblier musical and bureaucratic decisions - you just couldn't bring yourself to be upset at anything for too long, because everything he did was just so audacious. We'd play two, three shows to middling audiences, and then out of nowhere, we'd be playing a concert hall (in the middle of nowhere) to hundreds of strangers. Sometimes the "company" would be a little questionable - we'd grumble about it for a bit - and two gigs later, this shredding drummer will have come out of nowhere. Then there was this one time that we played a benefit at Yoshi's - really difficult gig - in the company of John Handy, George Cables, Bobby Hutcherson, Steve Turre, and countless others. I got to hang out with those guys thanks to Eddie, and, again, I was pretty young. It still blows my mind when I think about it. To put it a different way, late last year, I was at a gig under the leadership of a different "Great Free Jazz" musician (who I'll refrain from naming, if only because the anecdote is kind of bullshit) - not long after the gig, I heard a guy in the corner say - in the loudest, most obnoxious voice possible - "Wow. A lot of people came out here for Musician X. The last time I saw him there was absolutely no one there." Musician X was and is a superstar. What troubled me is that obnoxious voice guy clearly said it in order to convey his own cultural cache. Obviously this isn't what you're doing, duaneiac (or anyone else where, for that matter) - I only remain troubled at this notion that the suffering in this music equates in some way to value. I think that we as acolytes and, if we're lucky, participants in this music are trained to fetishize its marginality. For me, the valuable takeaway in music like Eddie's is its ability to survive and thrive at any cost, which is as beautifully (and quaintly) American a thing as you can enjoy at a time as dark as this.

Seizing permission to speak freely here - Eddie was and is very important to me. We had a complicated working relationship insofar as he was tremendously exacting, and often in ways that could be frustrating of off-putting, but I never - for a second - doubted the integrity of his artistry or his realness as a person. I owe multitudes to him for taking me under his wing at a very early stage of my career. He was warm, generous, and infectiously excitable, and he give me the invaluable experience of working with an actual, dyed-in-the-wool free jazz auteur. I think that only those among us who've had the opportunity to work with the old school free guys will understand what I'm saying here - and I say this not by way of self-aggrandizing or humble-bragging, but in order to document a phenomenon that is so specific and so quickly passing from the land of the living. It's difficult to define, but it's analogous to playing changes you're really comfortable with in company that is surpassingly facile at them - when you're thrown in the pool with people who are master improvisers in accordance with some metric, you just hang on. When you're able to ride the wave, as I've been fortunate enough to on occasion, you feel these flashes of profundity that remind you why you fell in love with this music in the first place. At its best, playing with Eddie was like that. It's a tragedy to me that this lesson cannot be communicated in a classroom or through a book, because the number of people who can teach it numbers so very few. Eddie was an iron man - like he was in crazy good shape some 5-10 years ago, back when I was working with him - so his passing is a reminder that you need to seek out the OGs while they're still here. As Milford Graves once told me, "Spend time with people." RIP, Eddie. You were a real one. Not a doubt in my mind.

Hey, folks- Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, but I'm getting reports all across my social media feed of Lee Konitz's passing (Birdland Jazz Club's FB page seems the most "official" as of yet, but info is spreading inside the musicians community). BTW: I should note that I'm receiving this info from inside the community. Said sources tend to be reliable, otherwise I wouldn't have posted. If someone can verify either way, please do (and I'd be happy to delete/modify this thread as necessary).

Greetings to you, my much beleaguered friends/colleagues/community, This a bit of self-promotion, but also (I think) a project of interest. I have an album releasing on the stellar Astral Spirits label next Friday, May 22. This record, entitled Apura! (Tagalog for "very urgent"), is a collection of improvised trios and quartets featuring the company of the O board's own Alexander Hawkins, South African legend Louis Moholo-Moholo, and UK great Trevor Watts. This project is the fulfillment of a longtime dream to convene an international, intergenerational quartet of creative voices for the goal of making music that is at once spontaneous, contemporary, and suffused with the energies of the incendiary past. To put it in so many words, this felt and feels like crisis music for today in much the same way that the music of the Blue Notes, Amalgam, etc. was crisis music for its era. You can pre-order and preview some tracks here: https://apura.bandcamp.com/ As some of you may know, it was my goal to bring a version of this project out to the US for a run of May concerts. Clearly this didn't/won't happen, though we're going to try for a series of December dates featuring myself, Alex, Asian American jazz innovator Francis Wong, and the great Andrew Cyrille. Will keep you posted, but in the meantime, I've scheduled a livestream "Album Release Concert" (accompanied by prerecorded elements from the Moholo/Tippett album No Gossip). In summary: it's going to be strange, but it's going to be cool. May 22, 7pm PT: https://youtu.be/daAtrW-nAF8

Thank you, folks! I'm just excited that it's going to be out in the world. If/when folks can get to it, I hope that the listen brings you some (much needed?) joy--it's the closest you can get to the energy that was in the room those two days we tracked, the residuals of which have kept me going during some of quarantine's heavier moments.

Did anyone here ever catch Lester's 59-piece Sho' Nuff orchestra in action? (one of the legendary ensembles that, it seems, is lost to lore--featuring many of the major AACM and BAG saxes, plus guys like Frank Lowe, Frank Wright, Charles Tyler...)

RRK's political philosophy (for lack of a better term & lack of complete understanding on my part, and not for lack of trying) is pretty interesting in this way. The entire Jazz & People's Movement has an American blue collar undercurrent the intersects with, but doesn't totally coincide with, the kind of socialist mentality that was prevailing in avant-garde circles at the time (it bears note that Shepp was involved, as were, apparently, a lot of "free jazz people" who didn't make the Ed Sullivan appearance). Rubbing against this is Rahsaan's apparent preoccupation with mainstream commercial appeal, something analogous to (but probably more fruitful than) Ayler's late career obsession with making his music accessible. This is getting into some aggressive pseudo-intellectualism, I know, but I've always found it interesting that Rahsaan's music was insistent on juxtaposing this ongoing complaint against (racialized) music business machinery against a tacit approval of music business capitalism. I think RRK's spiel you quoted above is pretty close to the money, and it maybe goes a bit deeper. He seemed to resent the most popular (mostly young, mostly white, mostly electric, often British) artists of the time for the simple fact that they kind of couldn't play their instruments at a level comparable to that of most professional jazz musicians. This is not a value judgment issue per se--it's more a "dues paying" issue emergent to a time in history when the historical continuity of jazz seemed to become irreparably fucked up. I think that to RRK, folks like the Beatles represented a massive reconfiguration of cultural priorities, undoing, surely, some of the work that Rahsaan had invested so much time in. Germane to this thread, but this reminds me of one of the talking head spiels from the Wrecking Crew documentary--i.e., "We studied the [Beatles/British invasion/young person rock music] and learned how to play it better than they did." I think that that faction of the LA studio scene, with all of its own blue collar trappings, had many of the same hangups that RRK did--the difference being that the Wrecking Crew folks found a way to live with the problem and even thrive because of (and not in spite of) it.

Come on folks, this is hilarious. I love this kind of discussion fodder - it's satirical on the surface and meaningful if you want do dig underneath. I'm not very familiar with most of the music TTK has posted, but I do appreciate the listen. I think it's worth noting that while a lot of this time-trapped, rock-inflected jazz is more or less apocrypha to the overarching story of jazz, there were and are certain recordings with similar intentions that now sound entirely successful for (maybe unintentional) reasons. I was just having a conversation with a friend about the degree to which Rahsaan Roland Kirk was suspicious of, and in some cases outright hostile to, the use of electronics and rock elements in jazz. (There's also a throughline there about the conceptual bankruptcy of free jazz, but that's of only tangential relevance.) The irony is, of course, that a lot of the music that Rahsaan formulated as a response to rock music wound up presaging a lot of the fully-realized mixed genre music of the ensuing decades. There's an argument to be made that The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color, which is at turns pastiche and at others an earnest attempt at some kind of Varese-ian mainstream jazz, contained some of the earliest inklings of what would later become full-blown hip-hop and beat culture.

Sorry everyone for, like, everything (including my second post of this nature in a couple of days), but I'm hearing that the great Henry Grimes is gone. (Not confirmed by any official outlets, but I'm hearing the word "confirmed" from other musicians on social media, including Stephen Haynes) I was just confronting the monumental task of unraveling what I have of Lee Konitz's discography when I got this news. Henry's 60s work is of course legendary, but it's also valuable to note that he's one of only a handful of greats from the heyday of free jazz who managed a true second act. I, for one, will return to epochal sideman appearances like Out of the Afternoon or Where is Brooklyn--and/or Henry's own The Call--to memorialize his contribution to this music. There's so much to hear for those of us now left.

Thanks for the kind words, folks. I know I'm not exactly objective in these matters, but I have to cop to the fact that I've enjoyed a lot of these autumnal, abstracted "drummer albums" that ECM has been churning out as of late. I don't think that the prototypical ECM excesses are made-up or necessarily unfair, but I do think that the ECM aesthetic can service certain projects or players really well. In the case of Andrew's record--he's one of our living masters and, among those masters, maybe one of the best equipped to play at low-to-medium dynamics and with expansive attention to space--and so this one is right up my alley. I have to admit that I haven't listened much to Double Clutch (but will have to do so very soon), but that's in a completely different universe, sound-wise. It might better convey the energy and propulsion of the Cyrille-Teitelbaum collaboration that one finds lacking on the ECM.

This situation is a little more nuanced than immediately evident, and I say this as both an arts professional (I plink on the guitar for a living) and a Bay Area resident. For one thing, the Bay and SF in particular are egregiously expensive for both businesses and workers. The Bay has had a lot of independent bookstore closures in the past decade or so, and I might argue that the coronavirus situation has compounded what was already a worsening problem. What is important to note is that this lockdown is not just affecting cultural fixtures like City Lights, but also restaurants, performances venues of all sizes, arts spaces, etc. Here's the rub: speaking as an artist, gig workers (as ejp mentions) are in dire need of immediate assistance. I know a lot of other musicians who due to luck of the draw (housing logistics, the nature of their employment, and even their chosen instrument) are almost or completely unemployed right now. But - if and when this crisis alleviates, we have to come to terms with the fact that the infrastructure that we have long relied on for our meager opportunities may be drastically reduced. Do venues like the Make-Out Room or the Uptown, who have long been ardent supporters of jazz and experimental music, deserve to go under by forgoing aid? I have both participated in and been deeply heartened by our community's contributions to institutional and/or peer-to-peer relief efforts like the Safety Net Fund and the New Music Solidarity Fund, but I will admit that I have a difficult time tiering need when it comes to sorting out "who needs the money the most." City Lights is a big part of San Francisco's cultural history, yes--but it is also one of a handful of venues in the area that carries a diverse stock of jazz literature. It's maybe the only bookstore in the area that would or could realistically carry new copies of a book by Larry Kart or Will Gluck. When George Lewis's AACM book came out, City Lights held a signing (IIRC Roscoe participated in some way). I have no working understanding of the personal ethics or ownership of the bookstore, so it would or wouldn't surprise me to hear something ugly behind the scenes, but I do know that City Lights supports independent and small-scale publishers in a way that is commendable. The employee pay situation is also complicated. Remember that the Bay was one of the earliest regions to enact hard social distancing rules (I remember, because I lost > $1000 in gig revenue in one day). Are you to suddenly disenfranchise your longterm employees, in a city that (despite very mixed efforts to confront the issue of evictions in the midst of the lockdown) is already, as I said, egregiously expensive? Are said employees meant to get in line behind the thousands of local residents who are already filing for unemployment? I'm not saying there's a right or wrong answer, but I will say that a lot of hard decisions right now are being made on principle, because there are no right turns when no roads or map exist. This is all I know--our local community is in dire straits, but this social distancing thing needs to happen, and we need to continue to exercise initiative when it comes to serving all parts of our infrastructure. Hard decisions need to be made and, well, you can't have it all, but you also don't want absolutely nothing or no one to be left standing at the end of the year.

Contrasting opinion, but I really love this release. There's this throughline on the ECM of the past several years whereby powerhouse drummers are re-contextualized inside of abstracted, sometimes languid environments: Paul Motian's later material, Billy Hart's Quartet, Jack DeJohnette, etc. I think that what makes this one stand apart from the crowd is that it retains a kind of coiled experimental energy, and there's connective tissue between the coloristic harmony and electronic emphasis that define this ensemble and the guitar and piano-driven groups that Andrew was putting together as far back as the 70s. Putting it another way, I don't think that this music is fundamentally dissimilar in concept to a lot of wackier loft jazz, and the Cyrille and Teitelbaum that show up here aren't really different players from the ones who were making such aggressive noise on, say, Leroy Jenkins's Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America. None of these losses are easy, and this one is made more difficult in that I really enjoyed what I've heard from Teitelbaum's recent appearances. The MEV factor is hugely important in terms of RT's place in the history of this music, but it's also crucial to note that he made a lot of very early, hugely trailblazing contributions to the liminal free and creative music of the era. The Jenkins album I mention above is one example, but there's also his work with Braxton, George Lewis's Homage to Charlie Parker, his work with Steve Lacy, and so on. The melding of electronics and jazz-inflected improvisation is an idea whose time had to come one way or another, but I also don't think it's unfair to say that a lot of this kind of practice--so common now--owes a partial debt to RT's contributions.

I'll give it up for this one.

Sizable livestream festival on Facebook Live and a handful of other platforms tomorrow, April 4, 4-8:30pm PT: https://www.facebook.com/events/275032363670668/ We're using this as an opportunity to drive donations to a handful of the many very worthy charitable causes established in the wake of coronavirus, many of which are helping to keep the Bay's (very imperiled) music community afloat during the pause in public performance activity. Schedule (I'm on at 7pm, fwiw): -All Times PT- 4pm Marshall Trammell 4:30pm Voicehandler 5pm Joel Nelson (https://youtu.be/za_P4D0heUo) 5:30pm Sobacoe Bruja (https://www.instagram.com/spectralbinch/) 6pm Scott Amendola (https://youtu.be/aT8RGmpyVo8) 6:30pm Bob Woods-LaDue (https://youtu.be/4-JP7C2B9b4) 7pm Grex (https://youtu.be/p6ZvLnK4q1w) 7:30pm Inner Movements (Crystal Pascucci/Mark Clifford) 8pm Phillip Greenlief (Video Premiere) - featuring Fred Frith, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, Evelyn Davis

Tough news. If ever it were possible for a voice to embody an ethos and a culture, Bill's most certainly did. His is the voice I turn to when I search for the sound of a kind of blue collar soul. I mean it when I say that as a Filipino kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley, this is the music I remember hearing on the radio on the way to school, at community parties, near the kitchen while dinner got made. The fact that I'm considerably younger than the vintage of (most of) this stuff should give testament to just how finely woven Bill Withers was into the background sound of contemporary America. Bill's voice has untold resonance, but the band here (and the guitar playing, really) is deeep pocket. That much groove with that much exactitude and that much economy of gesture is absolutely mindblowing.

Speaking only for myself, there's no right or wrong way to mourn, but if there's any universal truth that I subscribe to in matters of bereavement, it's that loss makes family of us all. This takes me back a couple of months to when Kobe Bryant passed away. I'm a Bay Area guy now but I grew up (mostly) in LA, so things like LA basketball are part of my blood. All I can remember was that for at least a couple of weeks, the Clippers-Lakers beef was subsumed under this macrocosmic feeling of extreme grief. I think that the world--and not just America and not just California and not just the jazz world--can share a bit in that feeling today. Not that my opinion really matters here, but I think Wynton's words are heartfelt and beautiful in their own (profoundly sad) way. The neocon v. progressive jazz wars were this huge, consuming phenomenon that dictated so much of how people came to interface with this music in the past several decades. I don't think it's unfair to say that there are many who would have staked their "lives" on their allegiance to one faction or another. As serious as your life and all that. This thing that's happening in the world right now is literally as serious as your life, and whatever previously separated the Marsalises from the avant folks seems so, so small right now. I don't want to co-opt this memorial thread to ramble, but we're experiencing a kind of doomsday in jazz's cultural habitus--all of the in-person gigs canceled, the culture of group performance put on hold, our elders more imperiled than ever--and, again speaking only for myself, we've had to adjust super fast. I've found myself caring less about ideological schisms and more about, well, people. I'm using this as an opportunity to celebrate lives, careers, and contributions like Ellis's that I might not have interfaced with on any deep level before now. I've returned to the American Jazz Quintet material--with all four of those core guys now gone--and found music full of life. That's really more than enough right now.

Wow! I had no idea Murray was playing with Cecil this late--the Newport set has Andrew Cyrille already. My deeply partial (recording-centric) opinion has it that Andrew's bag kind of fit CT's music better around this vintage, but I'm sure that this quartet was fantastic. That's really too bad that the recording didn't work out.

I've said this before, but the '65 Coltrane set is one of my favorite live Trane recordings of any vintage. You can only ever find it in middling or terrible fidelity, but it sounds like absolute pandemonium on stage and off. Shepp guests and the band sounds quite a bit more dialed in to his energy here than they were on the ALS studio stuff the year prior. Of course the recording is merely a ghost of the real thing--I'm sure an actual attendee might have a very different perspective on the whole thing. I'm also very curious what the CT set was like. The Newport Jazz Fest set from July of the same year is up (on "official channels") online and it is fantastic.

Chiming in to say that, dependent on how this plays out, musicians and other performing artists will have to find a mechanism of delivery lest our work go unheard or, worse still, undone. What this will require is both a degree of vision and the willing efforts of facilitators--i.e., those whose work is centered on the process of organization, documentation, delivery, and audience interface. Those of us unlucky enough to be working musicians at a time filled with uncertainty and sudden disenfranchisement are still trying to respond to the current problem and prepare for contingencies. The big festivals and venues are, I assume, reeling from cancelation costs and lost revenue. Obviously some of us can wear two hats, but this is a problem that may require ingenuity, collaboration, and new voices.

The Dark Tree email didn't list personnel, correct? What makes this particularly appealing to me is the vintage. All eras of PAPA are valuable, but the personnel around '76 would be very special indeed. (I'm hoping for/guessing the drummer is Everett Brown Jr., the slashing Elvin Jones-cum-Steve McCall figure who features on Sonny's Dream, The Giant is Awakened, and most of the older Arkestra material.) The date would also make it, IIRC, the oldest or one of the oldest full documents of the Arkestra on record.

In certain very real ways, there is no musical universe of legend that means more to me than the one created by John Coltrane in his peak years of innovation. Inside the stretch of music that encompasses Trane's classic period, McCoy Tyner was a--if not *the*--definitive component. The harmonic and coloristic language that McCoy created to balance Trane's increasingly abstract constructions was the fulcrum point upon which advanced hard bop transformed into something completely new and endlessly influential. I think it can be argued that Trane began to transition into a kind of paradigm around the time his sound was first paired with McCoy's: None of this goes to diminish McCoy's own really significant body of work, which is in its own way the Platonic form of a kind of muscular, Afrocentric jazz. McCoy's Blue Note period plays like an earthier variation on the early 60's Coltrane Quartet music, but it's on the Milestone label, with albums like Sahara and Song for My Lady, that McCoy took the genetics of the classic Coltrane sound and mutated them into a shape that better reflected the exigencies of a different era. The almost hilariously virtuosic music that McCoy essayed in the ensuing few decades exposes, at its beating core, the soul of an artist who confronted his own (already significant) legacy and sought to make it both stronger and more meaningful. You know what will always stick with me about McCoy? The (in a way) deeply masculine muscularity of his own music belies a sensitivity and practical versatility that cannot be understated. Without McCoy's innovations we would not have been gifted the lush, effervescent soundscapes that Alice Coltrane contributed to John's late Quintet. A lot of the greats cribbed bits and pieces of McCoy's thing, from Chick Corea to Horace Tapscott to Geri Allen and so on. Legit, listen to Flying Lotus's "Never Catch Me"- -and you'll hear the echoes, a couple of generations removed, of the equation that McCoy was the first one to solve. RIP, sir.

Chiming in with a bit of minutiae here, but RTI is legit. I had a Grex record pressed through them several years ago and the quality was very strong (IIRC a lot of recent Blue Note reissues were pressed through them, too). Excellent pressing isn't going to compensate for a high noise floor or egregious tape artifacts, of course, but so much classic free jazz was and has been recorded in terrible fidelity that I think listening past imperfections is more or less part of the genre at this point. I will say that based purely on an A/B comparison of the bandcamp audio with the old CD reissue of Duo Exchange that the new issue sounds markedly clearer.

Hello, all- I've been posting here with (admitted) scarcity as of late, but I thought that, considering the pedigree, this project might be of interest to some of the folks on here. The project in question is Apura, a brand new program meant to explore the intersection between legacies in free improvised music and social transformation in an era of worldwide political upheaval. For this project, I'm doubly excited to be working with Francis Wong (co-founder of Asian Improv aRts and associate of the late Glenn Horiuchi, Jon Jang, Fred Anderson, etc.), the O board's own (brilliant) Alexander Hawkins, and the legendary Louis Moholo-Moholo. The project is slated for two dates in the SF Bay Area in May of 2020--May 21 at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, May 22 at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley. It's our intention to document the proceedings for our out-of-town listeners. Considering the sheer complexity of this project, we're actively seeking donors to help offset some of the considerable costs. It's a tough time of the year, but absolutely anything, big or small, helps. More info/donation page is here: https://chuffed.org/project/apura-improvised-music-bay-area Perks include a download of Grex's full discography (HERE) + a copy of a forthcoming record that, I by the way, also need to introduce: a double album featuring the UK version of this project (w/Messrs. Hawkins + Moholo-Moholo + the great Trevor Watts) is slated for release in April of next year. Wherever/however you may be, happy holidays to all and hope to trade some overlong screeds with you soon, Karl Evangelista/ep1str0phy