ep1str0phy

Whoa--yeah, I had a duo with Will Redmond. To be fair, that duo wasn't particularly well developed at the time (and the time constraints on that concert were kind of tense), but that gig was fun. Good to meet you!

Thanks for the interest, guys! PayPal works--send me your address via the email above (and I'll get you details)... As far as the chamber pop thing--one of the weird attributes of the Bay Area free jazz scene--and this seems to be the case with many of the younger scenes in the States--is a seeming ambivalence toward classification "as" jazz. A lot of the most creative territory is being tilled by folks who essentially play jazz but have limited interaction with the straight ahead scene (not a rule, just a common thread... and by "limited," I mean it's never anyone's bread and butter--just one of many things folks out here do). Mills College is sort of an axis of this kind of music making... a lot of nominal "jazz people" have come in and out of teaching situations at the institution (Braxton, most famously, but also Roscoe and a number of other people in stints--India Cooke, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, Muhal...). In fact, I don't think I ever heard the word jazz in one of Roscoe's classes--and we certainly didn't use any conventional jazz "texts" (though there was plenty of stuff out of classical pedgagoy--Adler's The Study of Orchestration, Read's Music Notation, Stick Control, a whole bunch of Schoenberg...). I think the "chamber pop" term came about as a means of classifying what is more or less a hybrid of mainstream pop and 20th century/new music tendencies (Joanna Newsom was a Mills person and seems to be the textbook practitioner of this), but I think of it as a catch all for a hybridization of general experimental tendencies (taking after both Western tradition and, at this point, kind of idiom-transcendent guys like Roscoe or Fred Frith) and any number of popular song traditions.

Hello, all- Scarce few of you will know that my secret identity is Karl Evangelista (www.karlevangelista.com) of the group Grex (www.grexsounds.com)--I'm a Bay Area music guy/frequent hustler in an artistically rich environment that is (at the same time) more or less a press vacuum. For "name" perspective (though I'm reluctant to do that, often), I've studied heavily under Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, and Myra Melford, and I've played under some names that (occasionally) come up in these parts--Frith, Eddie Gale, Ben Goldberg, Damon Smith, and Francis Wong. That these guys are themselves not more well known is a shame unto itself, but there you go... Anyway, Grex recently released an album (entitled "Second Marriage") on my SUA label. I thought there might be some interest here. Some sound samples: Grex on Soundcloud... Grex is augmented on this date by drummer Jordan Glenn (a Bay Area staple, of the criminally unsung trio Wiener Kids), reedman Cory Wright, and bassist Jason Hoopes. The sound of the album is itself kind of difficult to summarize, but it's an amalgamation of the local lineage of free improv, the sort of chamber pop that still flourishes at Mills College, and the darker edges of free jazz that the band has come to love so much (Bill Dixon, some Mal Waldron, Sonny Sharrock's jazz projects, late Trane, etc.). For perspective, we were recorded by local "hyperpianist" Scott R. Looney and had the album mastered by Splatter Trio mastermind (and brilliant guitarist) Myles Boisen. If you're looking for a capsule of what the extremely fertile but inexplicably invisible Bay Area scene is like right now--or are simply looking for something new and weird to listen to--I'm unabashedly proud of this particular project. It'll be a second before our distribution channels float this album nationwide, but it's available via me right now (ep1str0phy@hotmail.com). I'll discount it for O people to $10 (and that includes shipping). Thanks! K/Ep1

Thanks, Larry!

Having spent the most time in the past with vinyl rips of Dogon A.D. (I think Screwgun's online "release" of the album in the mid-2000s was a big part of how the music developed such a huge cultural cache in recent years--though I don't think I'm overstating the case when I say that this has long been one of the most influential albums among the under 40 set of jazz experimentalists), this reissue is a revelation. The depth of the sound field and the starkness of the separation make it sound like something else altogether... I'd been listening to this clammy, fuzzy sound for so long that it felt like vinyl clicks and pops were a fundamental part of the album. That being said, I'm really amazed at how rough this music is--and I mean that in the best way possible. The passage of time, naturally, forges innovations into steely, precise techniques--this being one of my criticisms of a lot of free jazz of the past fifteen or twenty years. Any number of younger bands could cut the living hell out of an 11/4 vamp (or 11/16--I heard someone say that the "Dogon" vamp was 11/4, but it's pretty easy to hear as two quarters + three 16ths, I think), but I can't think of too many current musicians who could take an odd-metered exercise and make it about anything other than the meter--which is precisely what this band does. I love how/when Wadud and Wilson get off each other now and again, because this would totally derail a lesser music; Dogon just floats through its technical hiccups because Hemphill's music prioritizes the vocalistic and sonic over the mechanical. It's actually easy to hear Dogon as the inception of later schools of riff-y/odd-metered experimentalism, or rather as a validation of that "idiom" as a platform for freer improvisation. Kind of like how Roscoe, Muhal, and the AACM invoked subtraction and silence as a different way of getting at the emotional/spiritual ecstasy of old-school, combustible free jazz (ala Trane), Hemphill invoked angular cyclicalism and stasis as organizing principles--just another way "out" of the free music soup and into something fresh and full of possibility.

I really enjoy The Big Gundown, though I'll admit that I have a difficult to listening to it "objectively," or rather without an ear for the subsequent twenty five or so years of musical development. This sort of brutal, quick cut postmodernism is common parlance in jazz, rock, and experimental music now, and I have a hard time listening to The Big Gundown as anything other than a fine example of certain performance practices. On the other hand, I have a visceral, deep reaction to stuff like Material's Memory Serves or Massacre's Killing Time--the sort of music that wonderfully and perfectly captures a specific concept and time (probably more limited in "scope" than The Big Gundown, although by no means less thoughtful or technically spectacular). Maybe the narrower focus of those albums makes the music sound less esoteric/conceptual and more "free"? The conceptual angle keeps stuff like the Lulu trios or Spy vs. Spy at a distance. The Ornette album in particular is a spectacularly drastic deconstruction of Ornette's music--actually really fascinating for the fact that it makes those warm themes sound alienating and disconcerting without altering them in any fundamental way. At the same time, I much more likely to "get" something aesthetic or deep out of the source material (be it Morricone, 50's/60's hard bop, or Ornette), if only because commentary on an idea is by its very nature a step removed from what made the idea so appealing in the first place.

Thanks for calling me out on that--and also, well, there you go--and that band had Jimmy Garrison, too, yes? That's the last time, for me, Shepp ever hit as hard and as directly as when Trane was alive (excepting the '71 stuff with Alice Coltrane--which never really recorded and was really guided by the old master's ghost). The BYG/Actuel stuff is extremely diffuse--free, yes, but creatively all over the map. I could be reading too much into things, but I get the distinct sense that those few years after '67 were a "coming to terms with Trane's specter" time for everyone. To put things another way--that Jimmy Garrison interlude on Attica Blues always struck me as extremely referential, in a postmodern sort of sense. It's like, only a handful of years after the fact, Shepp was having Garrison play an artifact of himself, bridging the gap between this new sort of hybridized R&B/free jazz/pop muchness (a spiritual cousin to what Pharoah or even Ayler, briefly, were doing at the turn of the 70's) and "classic" free jazz by self-consciously invoking the sound of the 60's. It's a really "you can't go home again" kind of moment, to my ears.

Absolutely--those all strike me as "waning 60's" albums. I only have a general sense regarding whether or not Trane's death had an immediate and brutal impact on the course of improvised music at the time, but it did sort of coincide with the peak of the 60's counterculture. All the "major" 60's albums after that seem to be either assessing the foregoing decade or offering possibilities for the future (seriously--Brotzmann, SME, The Blue Notes, The Art Ensemble, Braxton, etc.) Think about two of the key Trane acolytes--Shepp and Pharoah. Shepp's first album (someone please correct me if I'm off base) post-Trane is entitled The Way Ahead, for heaven's sakes--and what ensued, in that cat's catalog, at least, was a slow scramble for thematic and idiomatic coherence--sort of a trainwreck when you considered the brute focus of stuff like Four For Trane or Shepp's last album prior to Trane's passing (The Magic of Ju-Ju). It's of course often wonderful music--and I know at least Jim has extolled the virtues of this period--but I think a lot of that has to do with the sense of confusion rather than in spite of it. Pharoah, too, seemed to alter his aesthetic trajectory in the wake of Trane's passing--evolving his spiritual abstractions into these monolithic, immoveable, cyclical swaths of modalism--and, really, stuff like Izipho Zam and Karma does sound like it's trying to reconcile the preceding decade's pull toward openness and "outward motion" with the exact opposite (closed cycles, musical that always pulls "in").

That's certainly true for certain "self-conscious" avant rock acts like early Gong or even Yoko/out John Lennon, but there are certainly a number of so-called prog or avant rock bands that wound up interacting with and/or engaging in unprecedented sonic innovation. Hendrix for one. Henry Cow (a more obvious "avant" suspect) is another; while drawing heavily from blues and classical traditions, they spawned at least some music that was the first of its kind (Fred Frith--who, fully disclosure, I've studied under for a lengthy period--and yes, this probably does color my opinion, but in this case we're dealing with a common opinion/sentiment--was one of the key innovators of free improv guitar/prepared electronic instrumentation alongside Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe, among others. I reference the ongoing and actually pretty inane debate regarding who used alligator clips as guitar preparation first--Rowe or Frith... prepared/extended electric guitar certainly did not originate in jazz or classical any more than outre/extended drum kit--emphasis on drum kit and not percussion--started anywhere outside of free jazz.) Also--yeah, Sonny Sharrock and James "Blood" Ulmer--and, really, just Sonny here, since Blood was technically later--but Sonny is/was special--a total anomaly whose innovations (unlike Ayler's) were not immediately adopted by his contemporaries and whose personal technical extensions did not really come out of jazz (more an extrapolation on R&B/rock chording inspired by free jazz saxophone). Larry Coryell, certain elements of Jim Hall, and early John McLaughlin were pretty out, too, but none of that was really "extended" stuff that wasn't already informed by rock innovations (namely Hendrix in the first and third casees).

Oh yeah--Gong (the early incarnations of which date to the late 60's and interacted with the free jazz diaspora in the Euro/BYG camp), Musica Elettronica Viva, Third Ear Band, Taj Mahal Travellers, Yoshi Wada, Yoko Ono--just following different threads (Japanese Fluxus, Euro prog/avant rock). Interesting discussion a little ways up--there are plenty of artists whose work began in the 60's but peaked (in terms of both creativity and timeliness) in the 1970s. I've always understood a lot of paradigmatic Euro free improv--and even some American restructuralist music like the Art Ensemble--to be fundamentally 70's or 80's in character. It's interesting how some of Brotzmann's most lucid and aggressive work was essayed in the late 60's, even though his music (as Niko notes) has a very post-60's feel to it: not so much "free" and "consciousness-expanding" as it is dark, cynical, and at times strikingly internal. I'm really moved by the trio with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo for this reason--it's inebriated, wounded music, sort of subsisting through the shit rather than actively combating it. Granted, guys like Moholo were truly and actively combating something--Apartheid--but these guys are different sorts of warriors from truth-is-marching-in Ayler or even melt-your-face late 60's Brotzmann and Blue Notes. It's almost as if the "fight" in this music is in the mere fact of its existence. It's not building something up out of the 60's (or "with" the 60's, as real recombinative music like the Art Ensemble or Braxton does)--it's played squarely in a format pioneered like a decade and a half earlier, and it's fighting against the notion of (to put it harshly) its own political and social fecklessness. This is the music of its era in the way that Ayler was a 60's joint (and, for that reason, maybe did peak much later than its inception, as Clifford mentions).

Speaking of Pink Floyd--the early stages of the Canterbury scene predate the 70's by a couple of years, so you can at least include Soft Machine (Soft Machine III is brutal avant-rock in its own way). Very early Can and Magma can also be slotted into late 60's/70's. Early jazz rock (not fusion), too--not just Miles but also the Tony Williams Lifetime, Mwandishi (the eponymous album was recorded in 1969), and early Sonny Sharrock (more "free jazz" than jazz rock, but distinct enough in its use of the electric guitar to merit its own category). Also, the Blue Notes (South African free improv/free jazz) were playing in a very free/avant idiom prior to 1970 (their very out "debut," Very Urgent, dates from 1968). Even though they're essentially contemporaries of the UK/German/Dutch free improvisers, their particular kind of radicalism lines up more clearly (timeline-wise) with Shepp, Ornette, etc. Don't want to be "that guy," but you mean AMM, right? Great call, btw.

Having spent the last several years playing music on a daily basis, I can confirm both the existence and severity of avant-garde tinnitus.

I've seen Haden a couple of times in the last few years and, at least in the company of Ornette or similar musicians who can energize him, his can still bring some of his old edge. I have heard that he was somewhat unhappy with the last LMO's Grammy loss (since said win would have opened up any number of opportunities--maybe just because he's Charlie Haden, though, since I know other Grammy winners for whom the accolade is itself not very useful)... maybe he's just a little tired of/angry at it all? That's all totally speculative, but hustling is hard at any age, let alone when you can (or even should) just be soaking it all up. People get turned off to Charnett pretty often, but he can bring a ton of energy to the proceedings on the right night. (I'm not of the mind, for example, that he's outclassed on Ask the Ages--I think he balances out Elvin's latter-day conciseness and regality very well.) There's also Buster Williams, since he subbed for Haden in some of Ornette's 70's bands. And I think someone like Trevor Dunn or Greg Cohen would be a fantastic choice, assuming you're looking for a mix of jazz classicism and new music edginess.

Though my time spent with him was terribly brief, my week or so under Muhal's tutelage (when I was studying at Mills) was one of the most memorable and enriching of my life. I had a one-on-one with him that completely changed my life--I was up until then extremely high strung about improvisation and the incorporation of silence into an open musical space, and I'll never forget the sort of calm and creative rightness that his playing induced in mine. My whole perspective on music was instantly changed--and in an emotional (rather than just intellectual) way. One of the ensembles I was a part of also performed a piece of his, originally scored for a mid-sized ensemble. The first rehearsal of this piece was one of the most hysterically free performances I've ever been a part of. It wasn't even really a "noise" thing--the vibe was just uncanny... people getting up and reading old almanacs, the conductor getting up on a ladder attempting to change a lightbulb, Muhal putting his coat over his head and wandering into a corner (repeating the phrase, "I have sand in my mouth!"). There were tons of discreet, clearly notated sections, too--tonally nebulous but really conceptually clear--and it was really something to hear these Webern-y snippets, alternating with improvisation of all sorts, peppered into this chasm of activity. At no point was I taken out of it, though... it just so happened that the canvas of the piece had expanded to the room--and really just the room, since you could look in on at all and perceive it as a performative experience. The week ended with a Muhal/Roscoe Mitchell duo concert, and damn--that was easily one of the best musical experiences of my life. Zanonesdelpueblo was there, too. Muhal and Roscoe held the audience in rapt attention for the full duration--including a solid twenty to thirty minutes of extremely sparse, super-minimal, little instrument-type improvisation. That whole night was a lesson in both defining your own realm as a performer and making that realm an area of shared experience--and there was an absolute shamanic/ritualistic character to the proceedings. I spent the first ten or so years of my life in Catholic schooling of various sorts, and I could recognize on that night vibrations extremely redolent of the church--but man, something so different, so universal, and so much more spiritual in any number of ways. Since then, I'd always aimed to make music in that way--the way guys like Muhal seem to live and breathe.

I'm sure if we parsed things, we'd find that virtually all of the commentators on this board either are putting in their time or have put in their time--that's the real world, and that isn't this. I say this as someone who literally spends at least 15 or so of my 18 or so waking hours playing, gigging, recording, and teaching. I come here to deflate, knowing that I can learn plenty from the friendly and/or intensely opinionated (but always passionate) dialogue here.

And not to harp on this too much--and this isn't necessarily addressing what Larry said above, just a more general thing--but I really don't think there's as clean a disconnect between virtuosity and any sort of primitivist, expressivist, or intuitive ethos--in practice, at least--as there may seem. Studying under Roscoe Mitchell turned my brain upside down on this. That man is all about technique. Obviously I don't know if he was always so single-minded, but I'm frankly astonished by his knowledge of and pursuance of Western method. He also knows he has to keep his shit up, and he's an early riser who practices for hours on end to get himself straight (some of this is of course playing--beautiful playing, as I'm sure many at Mills are currently privy to in the wee hours of the morning--but there's plenty of time spent on playing Western repertoire, etudes, etc.). Again, this isn't the whole story and there are tons of non-techincal things that make Roscoe special, but classical virtuosity is definitely in the picture.

Now I'll be the last person to defend Marsalis in and of himself, as I'm a fan of neither his music nor his ethos. I mean, I've at times had a violent, violent aversion to his shit. But isn't this lambasting the dude on false premises? At the very least, I'm a little wonky on the specifics of the criticism. If it's merely to say that Wynton had/has nothing to say with all his bluster and technique, then I get that--and if it's a matter of calling him out on hypocrisy (especially in light of the Art Ensemble deal, with Wynton weakly decrying the AECO for bringing in 20th century Western influences even while trumpeting all these straight up Eurocentrisms), I get that, too. But if its a matter of taking issue with how Wynton's playing comes down to a sourcing of elements of the Western virtuosic repertoire/lexicon, isn't this the case with tons of stuff? Or rather, aren't the boundaries elided in even the greatest players? Coltrane is the obvious counterexample, what with his study and application of Hanon and Slonimsky and harmonic dedication (to the end) to sequences and specific harmonic patterns. Trane obviously found a non-Western (hell, non-Eastern--maybe "pan" or "cosmic") method of rationalizing all of these elements into his ethos, and all of that technique was married to tone, adventure, and an element of timbral tightrope walking, but you can't abstract all that from his thing--that was a crucial element of what made him "him."

According to what standards, though? For one thing, it's hard to gauge where individual expressivity ends and the articulation of an accumulated lexicon of techniques, ideas, etc. begins. Even if the "truest" blues prioritizes any number of elements above virtuosity--and maybe we are talking traditional Western virtuosity, which emphasizes control, precision, and tonal/timbral cleanness (none mutually exclusive)--the most well developed music that gets categorized under the blues genre is extremely technically advanced on its own terms--or, at least, music of that ilk requires the development of some serious physical and intellectual muscles to replicate. Obviously, "replication" is not the point--unless you're a re-creationist, which even guys like Green, Bloomfield, and SRV are, to various extents (which would explain why any number of Bluesbreakers guitarists could be considered virtuosic in a "classic" sense, since they've mastered things that have already existed). So even if virtuosity is not necessarily the aim in creating something as unheralded and intrinsically expressive as Blind Willie Johnson, that music becomes virtuosic after the fact by virtue of defining the idiom. I mean, it's all really occidental, but it's true.

Chiming in with an opinion, since I went through a period of extreme Clapton hero worship in my first couple years of playing electric guitar--a period succeeded by a feeling of distaste at even the slightest echo of blues rock histrionics in own playing (followed by the subsequent/current period of aesthetic consolidation in which I had to, whether by want or by force, come to terms with the genetics of my own coding). It's now difficult for me to listen to Clapton of any vintage, but I can apprehend why his most original work is at all instructive. I actually got into jazz via Cream, since Jack Bruce's own hero worship of Ornette Coleman carved a number of inroads to free jazz. Not speaking to the current project, per se, but I've found that it's a pretty common thing ("out in the world" and not just here) to bash Clapton wholesale for the sort of excess and tastelessness that other folks (both less celebrated 60's blues people and especially any number of blues-informed acts of subsequent years--from Zeppelin and Sabbath on down to Guns N'Roses and Joe Bonamassa, for heaven's sake) seem to get off easy for. Not a criticism--more an observation. I fell out with Clapton after catching him live... he's in the past few decades codified his sensibilities and substituted what adventure there was for a level of professionalism that doesn't really serve the roughhewn-ness of his source material. That being said, it's absolute bullshit to call out Clapton on total unoriginality. It's plain that he was never a sui generis player, and laaaaarge swathes of his discography from the early days on down are endlessly indebted to the usual suspects. IIRC, the solos from "Strange Brew" are basically note-for-note paraphrases of Albert King (I think the solo "proper" might be ripped from "Crosscut Saw"--it's been a while). Clapton picked up the Les Paul because of Freddie King. There are a long list of more specific phrasing debts Clapton owes (owed) to Otis Rush, BB, and what have you--yes. But--Clapton's chief period of experimentation was a consolidation of and extrapolation on things the black American bluesmen had pioneered. It was a matter of pairing these ideas up with velocity and intense volume--in a way dissimilar to, say, Buddy Guy or even Hendrix--that made Clapton's old idiom really recognizable. There's a reason that the Cream version of "Crossroads" is deified, and that's because it is cutting shit--fast and deadly precise. It's an objective truth that it's as technically challenging as the heaviest work of Bloomfield and Hendrix. This is not "aping"--it's synthesis and metamorphosis, in a way analogous to Trane with Pres but, naturally, not as liberating or aesthetically effective. The biggest "mistake" Clapton made in his career was to frame his abilities in terms of his forebears. Clapton would not and will not ever cut Buddy Guy, the Kings, Hubert Sumlin--to say nothing of Robert Johnson, Skip James, etc.) (all amazing players who I ultimately find more satisfying than Clapton)--because he's second to that party. IClearly, this is something Clapton wanted to do--and he's been amply rewarded, financially, several times over for it--but the self-inflicted comparison is extremely unflattering and has done extreme retroactive disservice to the things Clapton did interestingly. I think that SRV was more capable of meeting the masters on their own terms, but I don't think he was any better at doing what he did than Clapton was at doing "his thing" when his thing was something that existed and was nourished. By the way--Jack Bruce's first couple of proper solo albums--Songs for A Tailor and Harmony Row--are only marginally informed by the UK blues rock hoopla and easily the match of/better of, IMO, any other left leaning rock of the era. These are absolute classics with amazingly subtle, intelligent songwriting and musicianship that get lost in the endless Cream bashing.

RIP. I'll give "Deep Dark Blue Centre" a spin, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRgJ3EU7clE

EXACTLY. People will always operate at different levels of development, but--at least in the circles I circle and center--it's difficult to question commitment. Practice is good, of course, but it takes courage and conviction to even attempt to treat this as a lifestyle these days. As serious as your life and all that.

I honestly think that Rosenwinkel's words have more to do with noticing a lack of commitment and practice in apparently professional situations than they do with genre or style. What compelled Rosenwinkel to call lord knows who out, who knows. None of these problems are inherently new, though I do agree that it's useful to reevaluate one's own performance praxis every so often (i.e., are these arrangements clear? Have we worked out how to end a song cleanly? Do we know these changes well enough to open it up and not get extremely lost?) What does suck is couching one's sentiments in salacious language and assuming that people won't take it the wrong way. People have FREAKED OUT because the very notion that "jazz sucks" (regardless of the intent of that message) opens up any number of wounds and insecurities. Rosenwinkel's tweets have forced people to voice opinions--often negative--intrinsically connected to their own respective beliefs, rather than calling on people to address any overlying problem or mass cultural concern. One thing is for sure: this whole thing right here--this is not the way to solve any problems.

He was on a Sunn O))) album for heaven's sake. I of course enjoy many of his more canonical/"classic" performances (especially with Mwandishi), but I think my favorite Priester may be the work he did for the Postcards label in the 90's. Summit Conference is as solid a free jazz album (emphasis on the jazz, because the swing feel is wild but extraordinarily present) as anyone has released in the past couple of decades.

As a Bay Area musician, this loss hits hard. The older generations of jazz musicians, including the handful of truly generous and insightful drummers that have hung around from the salad days of bop, free, and beyond, often take an active role out here. It's all one big generational story, and I'm sad to see Marshall--as one of the really big lights--pass on. One album of his (not really as a sideman--more as a co-leader) that I've always really loved--but can't really find mention of anywhere--is the Improvising Artists album Almanac (with Mike Nock, Bennie Maupin, and Cecil McBee). The band is the match of any post-bop or straight ahead ensemble operating in those waters (whatever those waters were) in the late 60's, and Eddie plays spectacularly.