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ep1str0phy

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  1. I just dug this one out for the first time in a couple of years, and I was surprised to discover that my opinion on the recording had drastically changed. Regardless of my initial impressions, I had previously understood this live recording to be of historical value first and musical value second. In a way, it's neither as excessive (and fun) as the previously released Seattle stuff or as focused as the studio album or the '65 Antibes performance. I've now had a few opportunities to listen to the Seattle ALS from beginning to end, and I can see the bigger picture. It's a decisively formalist reading of the music that just so happens to contain a series of tangential features - and many of the improvisations are extraordinary. To those who still complain about Pharoah's contributions to this ensemble - he's dagger-sharp and admirably concise throughout this performance. He's also pretty clued in to the music. Contrast against Carlos Ward - a brilliant player who is just not connected to what's happening around him here. On "Resolution," Ward seems defiantly insistent on avoiding the piece's core tonality, and his largely linear, melodic playing clashes aggressively with everything around him. Pharoah, meanwhile, is all about riding the ensemble's intensity and notching up the energy. Pharoah understood the assignment - he totally belonged on this job. The core quartet's contributions are also quite strong. Coltrane does a superlative job gluing together the guest features and the compositional material, and his short spotlight on "Psalm" matches or even surpasses the energy of the Antibes performance. Elvin is a dynamo throughout, and Garrison (with Garrett) is deeply dialed into the music's half-modal, half-free sonic environment. This document is also a McCoy Tyner master class. His comping throughout - especially on that egregiously out-to-lunch Carlos Ward solo - is brilliant. Free playing may not have been his preferred bag, but he is just so good at pushing the limits of tonality without losing focus. There are long stretches of improvisation that feel both literally and proverbially suspended - i.e., these episodes of harmonic development where it seems like a resolution is coming and it never quite does - and Tyner does not let his foot off the gas. As an aside, his solo on "Pursuance" has to rank among his best as a member of the quartet. I really appreciate revisiting music to see where I may have been (or clearly was) wrong, so my time with this record has been a pleasant late-year surprise.
  2. Thanks for the kind words, all! My opinion is obviously very skewed, but Tatsu's work with Fred is across-the-board stellar. I'm partial to On the Run (a trio with Hamid Drake), and there's a live quartet date which is extraordinary - it's sort of an alternate-universe version of the Die Like A Dog band, with Toshinori Kondo included: https://fperecs.bandcamp.com/album/live-volume-v Finally: for those afar, it's looking like the Saturday show may stream - regardless, here's the link:
  3. Hello, all- I'm very excited to announce two special live dates in Chicago, scheduled for Saturday, October 21 and Sunday, October 22 at Elastic Arts. These dates feature my What Else is There? project, featuring our friend Alexander Hawkins and bassist Tatsu Aoki. Our drummer Michael Zerang features on October 21, and October 22 features Charles Rumback, Mai Sugimoto, and Jeff Chan (in place of Zerang). We'll be celebrating the release of a brand new album on Fundacja Słuchaj, featuring Hawkins, Aoki, and Zerang. When this ensemble first convened, conversation turned to music and family. Pondering this notion, Aoki asked, "What else is there?" - hence the title. The record is an arresting blend of free jazz and free improvisation, melding my original compositions with some choice Asian American and Chicago jazz inflections. More Info: Night 1 Night 2 Thanks, all! https://www.karlevangelista.com
  4. With only a handful of exceptions, all of the records that Moore selected are landmarks. The heavy-handed language may grate a bit, but there's something telling about the fact that we're talking about this list nearly two decades after the fact. In the interval between Moore's list and now, a defined subculture has emerged that valorizes lo-fi free jazz. This contingent is at least significant enough to to have forced a critical appraisal of what constitutes valid improvised music. The advent of streaming fostered a transformation in how we access anachronistic art, which has in turn reshaped the canon. I've leaned away from posting on most topics as of late, largely because of how many of my friends and peers are discussed on this board, but this fact is worth noting: a lot of music that was considered decisively marginal some 10 or so years ago is now quite widely traded. In the early days of new media - back when one's listener base was mediated by literal physical access to LPs, CDs, etc. - history was, by necessity, shaped by the winners. Things are different now. To be perfectly frank, I don't know of many musicians who currently think of Wynton as an existential threat - he merely carries the opprobrium of having made a series of very loud and incredibly ignorant referenda on music that he didn't understand. Talent wins out in the end. I saw it happen, in literal real time, when Roscoe Mitchell began getting his flowers some 15 or so years ago. That dude is a literal genius, but culture had to catch up to his accomplishments. All of this is to say that that Moore list doesn't look nearly as dumb now as it did back when I started checking out this board. Twenty years ago, I would have said that Nommo was an exciting document that is very much of its time. Now that I'm older and am slightly less stupid, I recognize that those Pullen/Graves records are a high watermark for a vernacular that remains undigested. That shit is really advanced. Go ask Jason Moran. Go ask Steve Coleman. It's dealing in rhythmic and timbral concepts that are just so perpendicular to the norm that cats in the past fifty years did not know how to properly copy it. The fact that mammoth figures like Coltrane exist shouldn't numb people to the fact that it's very easy to be wrong about art - a fluid, ultimately subjective thing. Yesterday's dorky free jazz list is today's bellwether for a change in thinking. I'm not saying that Moore is a genius and that the essay is particularly well-conceived - I'm only saying that stuff happened behind the scenes that people rethink a lot of this music.
  5. R.I.P. RE: the above conversation - I'm a tremendous admirer of the first two records, though I have no strong sentimental attachment to the music. When the Band operated as a collaborative entity, it was truly extraordinary. The group understood pocket in a really special way, and the best of the writing somehow sounds both nuanced and effortless. The bass motion and cascading power chords in "King Harvest" are weirdly sophisticated - not in a proggy sense, but in the same way that the Pixies or Mitski would later harmonize around the melody. It deviates from the pop formula of the era by adapting the harmony to a lead voice, rather than just superimposing the vocal line over a predictable diatonic chord progression. In a practical sense, it presages the "chunks of power chord"-type writing that is all over modern indie and alt rock. Incidentally, there is a certain school of creative music that swears by Robbie Robertson's guitar playing. I admit that It's taken me a long time to get to it. It's fundamentally economical, and its specialness is based on feel and rhythmic nuance rather than energy or sophistication of line. But it's perfect for the Band, and a fine contrast to the escalating virtuosity that prevailed in the guitar heroism of the late 60's onward.
  6. Just got back from a wonderful tour (and grueling, near-death-defying cross-country trip) - just now saw this. Thanks, all, for your support! Our guy Clifford runs a fantastic show. If you ever wonder how creative music survives outside of the major cities and festival circuit, know that independent curatorial work and concert production are hugely important. All it takes is one person and some ears.
  7. Thank you, man! I thought it pointless to start a new thread for this - in anticipation of these shows, I conducted a pretty lengthy interview with Andrew. He's (characteristically) loquacious in the first half, but about 10 mins in, he begins offering some pretty intense insights regarding the intersection of race, commerce, and the future of the music. I know that the majority of you reside in lands afar, but hopefully you can find something of interest here:
  8. Hi, all- I'm excited to announce that a long-gestating project is finally coming to fruition. Karl Evangelista's Bukas with Special Guest Andrew Cyrille debuts May 27-28 in the Bay Area. Both of these shows are free admission, with all proceeds going to support local arts organizations. "Bukas" is Tagalog for "tomorrow." This piece explores the idea of Free Jazz/Free Music as an aspirational practice, using musical exploration as a method of imagining better futures. Bukas uses cutting-edge sounds to commemorate and embody the stories of radical Black and Asian artists. More info on the events may be found here: https://www.karlevangelista.com A few bullet points: Andrew is seldom on the US West Coast these days. I just want as many people as possible to get the opportunity to hear him. Thanks to some hard work (and the generosity of the California Arts Council), we were able to make that happen. This isn't a repertory exercise. I've written an entire program of new music for this show, and we're taking some real creative risks. Joining Andrew and me for date will be a cadre of top-flight Bay Area improvisers: Asian Improv aRts cofounder Francis Wong, United Front saxophonist Lewis Jordan, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, and my partner (and bandmate) Rei Scampavia. On May 26, we'll be releasing Ngayon - a more "in-the-idiom" free jazz recording we made back in 2021. Excited to say that we'll have physicals available at the shows. All the best to y'all, K/ep1
  9. This band is absolutely stacked, and I have my doubts that Braxton would pen something and name it "Geese Suite" (unless these are random track titles assigned by a bootleg producer).
  10. Terrible news. I don't much care for the term "underrated," as it tends to serve as shorthand for "something I get and other people do not." If any free jazz saxophonist deserved that honorific, however, it was Kidd. Like Frank Wright or early Frank Lowe, Kidd was an energy improviser. There's a through-line in that continuum that is, obviously, based in R&B and the blues. At the same time, Kidd had such a singular preoccupation with his altissimo register that you could hear multitudes in it. His smears of sound assumed a structural quality that was really remarkable, especially in extended contexts. Outside of Cecil and a handful of others, I can't think of many improvisers who more completely inhabited the intersection of physical stamina and intuitive constructivism. One of the most memorable concerts I ever witnessed was up at Guelph. Kidd was joined by Joel Futterman and Alvin Fielder. As the evening wound down, someone draped a cape over Kidd's shoulders, ala James Brown. In hilariously studied fashion, Kidd whipped around, saxophone in hands, and proceeded to dash around the room. Just bananas. My Mom was in attendance with me and - God bless her - she couldn't stop raving about it.
  11. Exactly. The music conforms to the performers and not the other way around. Emergency sounds to me like an expansion of existing vocabulary. The Tony on this record existed implicitly on Nefertiti.
  12. Jim - something I've always admired about your contributions to this forum is that you're very dialed into context. When I first joined this forum, I was getting a lot of my education from editorialized histories. The practical history of this music is so convoluted that I found myself heavily scrutinizing everything that wasn't a primary (or participatory secondary) source. Like, it's easy to cotton to a series of sensible truths, but seemingly every day of my working life has been filled with - "Welp. I was wrong about that one." A canon informed by documentation is intrinsically unreliable, mainly because western modes of information digestion train us to see patterns where they may not exist. Like, "Fusion" isn't really a thing so much as a series of compatible actions and ideas that happened to manifest in the same timeframe. My occam's razor-informed understanding of Lifetime is that Tony just wanted a rock band. Lifetime is a reverse-engineered Cream, in much the same way that a band like Sonic Youth or Rollins Band gets at free jazz from the opposite direction. The deal is that Lifetime is a syncretic construction - it's simultaneously an organ trio and rock band, and the components don't necessarily mesh into their intended shape. The drums are loud, in part, because they were mixed poorly. The albums are filled with vocals because Tony wanted to play songs. Neither of these identified problems confound Tony's intentions, because - like Raw Power - the music makes more sense when it goes into the red. I can guarantee you that if a young organ trio recorded something that sounded exactly like Emergency in 2023 - with worse mixing and ill-conceived compression - it would find an enthusiastic and un-perplexed audience. This is in part because "acceptable sound quality" has become a generationally subjective phenomenon, and in part because whoever recorded this hypothetical new album would not have played in the Miles Davis Quintet. Understandably, I think that we want badly for things to exist in forms that they do not. The Platonic ideal of Lifetime is not Lifetime. That Trio Beyond record is rad, but it's also not it. The fact that both of the classic Lifetime albums are flawed constructions is exactly the point - it's impossible to both experiment and land every decision.
  13. I also think that the feel is pretty elusive, but it helps to find an anchor point. The first bass note is on the and of 1, and the phrase "You ain't..." starts on the 1 (i.e., "You aint" = "1 &"). I try to focus on the keyboard. I just listened to it again, and I feel like the time feel is a little easier to make sense of if you start at the chorus and move forward.
  14. Stopping by to leave my condolences. Wayne's music has meant so much to me at so many different stages of my life, and it's difficult to process a loss of this magnitude when his music is still virtually everywhere - on stage, at sessions, coming out of other peoples' horns, popping up on news feeds, and on and on. I will say this re: Wayne's taciturnity - the debate over whether he had receded a little too far into the wallpaper of Weather Report - and, indeed, if his late-career resurgence constituted a return to form vs. a mere change of scenery - always struck me as a little wrongheaded. Like, what was the alternative? Did he need to play a two minute solo on every Weather Report track? I feel as if the core principles of Wayne's improvisational ethos - the unerring patience, the care and intention of his phrasing, the unexpected densities and silences - are the same ideas that animated his participation in Weather Report, his later fusion efforts, etc. Maybe he didn't play because he didn't want to? This also gets into some artistically awkward territory with regard to the valuation of maximalism over minimalism. The liners to It's About That Time (the "Lost Quintet" FIllmore shows) touch on this a bit. I do not think that Wayne the "fierce maximalist" is as a rule more appealing than the Wayne who plays two notes and dips. Your milage may vary, yes, but we're dealing at that point in subjectivities rather than qualitative absolutes.
  15. Turn It Over does Bruce a disservice, I think, in that he's clearly peripheral to the trio dynamic. The quartet on that record is not a "band" so much as a "trio + guest" - which is a reality that seems to have been rendered by decision rather than fact. The Laswell reconstruction/remix of the album is far more comprehensive than the original LP, and even that project is hedging between Young and Bruce. There is an unrecorded (or possibly unrealized) version of Lifetime with a fully integrated Bruce that is just as interesting as the Emergency trio. I think that Williams was looking to hook into that liminal space between electric Miles and Cream, which would require that both Young recalibrate his role and the music lose some of its rhythmic dynamism. This semi-imaginary version of the band might have lost the mercurial energy of the trio, but it would have gained something that virtually all of the fusion projects of this era lacked: density of attack. It's not that Bruce was a better technical bass player than, say, Rick Laird - it's just that was arguably a better rock bassist than most of his contemporaries. In terms of audio quality - I agree that the crappiness of the original Lifetime recordings feels correct and oddly necessary, but the Laswell remix changed my mind on everything. It is actually a better album IMO - it's just lacking the original LP's brutal brevity. The improvisations are are more complete, the mix is better, and Bruce at least makes a little more sense:
  16. There's a thesis waiting to be written about how the rapid evolution of jazz in the 1960s produced a slew of musically innovative, improperly recorded albums. One could argue that part of the "problem" is that jazz culture as a gestalt has not (classically) incentivized the use of the recording studio as an editorial tool. I use the word "incentivized" carefully here - it's not as if the artists, producers, and engineers of the 60s were as a rule averse to making records that did more than simply "document" a live event. I do feel, however, that likeminded collaborations like Miles and Teo are the exception rather than the rule, and our cultural preoccupation with live performance and instrumental mastery has meant that jazz has seldom had to rely on the kinds of technical conceits that rock, hip-hop, etc. have ultimately found most durable. I actually prefer Turn It Over to Emergency - but I'll qualify that statement by saying that I think that both records sound poor. I've read a handful of articles - and have even had a number of in-person exchanges - relating out the Jack Bruce era of Lifetime was prohibitively loud. At the same time, I can't imagine that Lifetime was any louder than Cream - the difference being that Lifetime was shunted into jazz clubs and recorded without the assistance of a George Martin or Felix Pappalardi. Turn It Over was recorded by Ray Hall - if I have my info straight, dude was working with crossover fare like Gary Burton and Nina Simone. That band needed someone who could record the fucking Who. Ego sounds a little better, and (notwithstanding the change in concept) I imagine that at least part of that had to do with how studio techniques had evolved to better capture the band's sound. I maintain, however, that some aspect of jazz's cultural habitus continues to pace other genres in terms of utilizing constructive understanding of new technologies - it's just that in the 21st century, we're dealing with home recording, Ableton, live samples, etc. The most fruitful work in this regard is probably being done in jazz-inflected hip-hop, electronic/noise music, and other experimental genres, but we're now talking about variable cultural priorities vs. one genre being savvier than the other. (There are exceptions to everything, of course - I don't think you could level these criticisms against Shabaka Hutchings's stuff or Kassa Overall's studio work, for example.)
  17. This one really hurts - not unexpected, based on rumblings about his health that have been circulating for several years, but still difficult. From his work with the Coltranes to his now-legendary run on Impulse, stopping at some very crucial junctures to commune with the likes of Don Cherry, the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, Sonny Sharrock, and countless others, Pharoah's legacy as a performer and conceptualist is formidable. Regardless of what roses will be sent his way in the coming days, ranking among his greatest achievements must be his mastery of sound as a building block of jazz performance. I don't think that scholarship quite understands just how much this cat - kind of a paradigmatic enfant terrible - affected the vocabulary of this music. It's obvious from the recordings and any number of firsthand accounts that there was a Pharoah before Coltrane, but it's remarkable how Pharoah took the calculus of Coltrane and distilled it into a specific subset of ideas. Every time I listen to Meditations, I hear Coltrane - fleet, virtuosic, and somehow both larger than life and laborious - and then I hear Pharoah. Pharoah just got to it. A burst of sound suffices where a flurry of notes was formerly necessitated. Between his recognition of solo construction and his really unique grasp of compositional formats - minimalistic modal vamps, rubato balladry, and so on - Pharoah presaged both smooth jazz and the harshest European Free Improvisation. If that isn't a testament to an artistic life well lived, then I don't know what is.
  18. Damn. Grachan Moncur III was a huge part of my formative listening. Those two key aspects of his work - that boundlessly deep, economical trombone and his proficiency with a kind of intense jazz minimalism - left an indelible mark on volumes of musicians. In his prime, Moncur had this ability to command your full attention with only a modicum of content - as if the absence of information forced you to explore what was most assuredly - but only elusively - there. You just cannot deny that he had something. The Blue Notes are stellar - and Rooster, thank you for sharing that YouTube vid and the Masters record. Exploration is one of my favorite "recent" big band efforts: clean, conceptually clear, and absolutely true to the composer. However, my absolute favorite Moncur record is New Africa. That's everything right there. It has the grainy-ness and charismatic mystery of the best early free jazz, but the crackling ensemble interplay and the simple depth of the compositions are not merely a vibe. It's "just" a document of some of the best musicians who ever lived showing up to play. RIP - and thank you.
  19. I spent part of my youth around the corner from this place, and I took guitar lessons one building over for something like four years. I purchased my main instrument at Norm's back in 2000. The staff has always been cordial and positive - a not-insignificant thing, considering how forbidding and intimidating "guitar culture" can feel for new initiates. I most certainly wish Norm and co. well.
  20. Hello, all- I've had the good fortune to curate a festival slated for this coming Saturday, April 30, 4-9pm PT (streaming online + in-person from Temescal Art Center in Oakland). We're calling this one the Unlocked Festival - the seventh in a string of online events. This program is particularly stacked, including: Rova Saxophone Quartet, Positive Knowledge (Oluyemi + Ijeoma Thomas), Tom Weeks Trio (with Kazuto Sato + Gerald Cleaver), duo B. (Lisa Mezzcappa + Jason Levis), Lenora Lee + Francis Wong, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Evicshen, and Grex As with previous events, all proceeds will be directed to charitable causes, including Oakland arts spaces (Temescal Art Center and Oaktown Jazz Workshops) and Ukraine Relief. As has long been the case, proceeds collected from Grex's bandcamp sales will be directed to the Milford Graves Memorial Fund. Our streaming link and further details may be accessed here: https://www.grexsounds.com/unlocked.html Best wishes to all, K/ep1
  21. In a practical sense, I wouldn't doubt that that trio operated democratically. From my understanding, notation aside, Cecil gave little to no instruction regarding what the other instrumentalists were to play. I also don't think there there was any conscious subsumption into Cecil's concept on the part of Cyrille, Lyons, etc. It was a perfectly synergistic trio built out of consistent practice, intuitive musicality, and a little bit of unteachable genius. That being said, I think you could have assembled a different trio that put in exactly the same amount of work and not achieved a similar level of success. It's like these three guys were built for this particular music, and a big part of that is the way that Andrew is willing and able to play around (and not just under or on top of) Cecil. Big confession, but I vastly prefer this grouping to the Nefertiti trio. Sunny Murray was basically the first person to indisputably solve a really difficult problem (i.e., the role of free drums in a jazz-inflected context), but I think it's arguable from the peanut gallery that he didn't have the comprehensive technical ability to take that concept to its logical conclusion - that was down to guys like Cyrille, Oxley, Moholo, and others. All due respect to Sunny, of course - this thesis just feels supported by the recorded evidence.
  22. Akisakila is the paradigm for a certain type of collective improvisation, and the trio sounds unbelievable on it. My principal gripe is that it's recorded so terribly. Yes, all three instruments are fully audible - and I'd rather have a lo-fidelity masterpiece than crystal clear mediocrity - but the recording imbalances the energy a little too far toward the drums. In my very biased opinion, Andrew was what made this music click - but he was a horizontal improviser at heart, with an uncanny understanding of how melodic line translates to percussion. Akisakila is kind of an energy recording - still amazing, but the mix feels like a bit of a "lie" to me. "Autumn/Parade" better corroborates my understanding of what makes this music click than Akisakila does. "Prototypical Free Jazz" requires that the drummer instigate shifts in momentum, and middling/average free improvisation basically festoons a capable drummer with melodic and harmonic filigree. In the classic CT units, the piano is dictating the ideational energy, and so the drummer doesn't really have to play at any given moment. Cecil is the head of the snake - in Steph Curry fashion, so to speak - and so the drummer is free to operate as either a rhythmic driver or a surrogate melodist. It so happens that Andrew was and is, like, the all time best at operating in that liminal space. The Return Concert is an exceptional document of this.
  23. Prompted (in recursive fashion) by Clifford's Instagram post, I thought I'd swing by to see what the prevailing opinion on this was/is. IMO, this is one of the most extraordinary historical jazz releases of recent memory. The long track ("Autumn/Parade") could very well be the best thing on the program - which is saying something, considering how superlative the original Spring of Two Blue-J's is. This music is just exceptionally refined. When I last spoke to Andrew Cyrille about this, he mentioned that the core trio (Cecil/Lyons/Cyrille) played together a lot, even though documentation was (and remains) relatively scarce. The quartet with Sam Rivers had a bit of the same dynamism and ideational density, but by '73, the band had been working together for so long that the music manifested in a different way. The roles are so clearly defined on this new release - with Sirone slotting very elegantly into the mix - and much of the music is starkly gestural where you would expect it to be "merely" energetic. If there was any doubt that Cecil's music was motivic at its core, this release would put any uncertainties to rest. The level of communication here, with all four wheels of the car playing independently but in consort, is just completely off the chain. Seriously - this music should be on the Voyager spacecraft.
  24. Whoa, hold on a sec - maybe this is what you're getting at, but Sanborn and Kenny G should not be mentioned in the same breath. Each is an ethos, but whereas Sanborn is a reduction (or maybe simplification) of principles with some very legitimate provenance, Kenny G is almost sui generis with regard to the methodology and consistency of his blandness. That Kenny G lacks artistic validity says more about the frameworks with which we are geared to curate genre than it does Kenny G himself. Of course Kenny G sucks. He sucks in the same way that a Huffy Green Machine is not a suitable substitute for a high end Ducati. IMO the "real problem" is that [the universal we] tend to conflate visual markers with cultural identities. Kenny G, John Coltrane, and Braxton all play soprano, so of course they play the same kind of music. Keep in mind that I'm not arguing that Kenny G's music has any sort of inherent value - more that the controversy over his popularity overlays a more interesting discussion about how expressive art suffers in the face of commodification.
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