ep1str0phy

I mean, please don't take my statements to mean that proficiency is in any way a substitute for vision or identity--and that's precisely my point. The root resources for strong statements are if anything more widely available now than they were in jazz's (maybe partly misremembered) heyday. What I'm saying is that something in the intersection between hagiography, ennui, and the myriad economic and philosophical considerations discussed above has elided the fact that jazz has had a crisis of vision and identity since (at least) the 1960s--or, rather, a kind of crisis-state that is permanent and impossible to argue out of. I'm poking at a beehive a bit with this, since I know there are people on this board far better equipped to tackle this topic than I, but the general dint of jazz musical practice post-1970 or so (and as might be affirmed by the discombobulated ethos of 21st century jazz critical theory) feels a lot like unresolved postmodernity--a plurality of voices that the broader community has struggled, time and time again, to shunt into installed hierarchies that no longer have any real relevance to either the players or the listeners. Post-Coltrane, what need have we for virtuosos?--and I'm not talking about great technicians per se, I'm asking why heroic virtuosity is still a standard by which we discuss this music when that archetype came, went, and blew his own iconology apart in a definitive, sadly final way. Remember that Kurt Rosenwinkel debacle where he called out people for (I'm paraphrasing) not practicing or working hard enough? Consider how almost every documentary on or involving Coltrane pauses right before late Coltrane and starts talking about metaphysics without addressing the implications of that music to Trane's own ethos of virtuosity. Like I said: not only are we placing unnecessary burden on our young musicians, but we're also stuck in a Groundhog Day of reliving jazz's great Jesus moment and trying to reclaim the last sure time that everything actually made sense. This is what I mean when I say that a lot of the most meaningful and resonant material being made right now issues from music that fails to resolve its own existential dilemma. None of this is to say "don't practice"--quite the opposite: stock up on Move Free in your 30s and get your 3+ hours in a day, please--but I would argue that transcendent meaning is a more "real" artistic consideration now than whatever it is that jazz is so preoccupied with every few months. Steve, you mention John Edwards--my constant invocation of Louis (who works with John frequently) is related to this--his is an example of the kind of passion, intensity, and risk that has both visceral impact and undeniable purpose. Speaking of Louis--how many here have given a real listen to his duo album with Cecil Taylor (Remembrance)? We embrace passion before practiced ideologies, but I wonder how many players have been able to elicit that kind of performance alongside Cecil after the heady explosion of the 60s. The folks on here who are players will know this. Real improvisation vs. practiced improvisation are very different things. I'm sure Louis would attest that not everything that he plays lands to his satisfaction, but I would argue that everything that he plays on Remembrance, at least, is really and truly improvised. That's enough reason to get me to listen.

Thanks to all for the very reasoned and even-tempered replies to the always incendiary topic of "jazz is dead vs. I could care less." In a way I feel like we've reached a juncture in the music when it's ok to have these conversations in a casual, low-stakes way, though I don't know if that says more about the failing health of genre economics than it does speak to, as I said, a growing meta-consciousness about jazz's lack of macro narrative. In terms of the "perverse desires" thing--yes, I think it's absolutely the case that this music's now-intrinsic existential problems are tied into broader social trends regarding some kind of epigonal, maybe imagined sense of purpose and structure. Without getting explicitly political, we've been confronting these issues in world religion, political structure, and broader art worlds for well over a century at this point. It's only that jazz experienced it's big conservative/retrogressive movement in the 1980s, and now that that's said and done, we're left with the awful truth that nothing has really changed in any definitive sense (jazz education and certain monied institutions notwithstanding). Nothing got "saved"--things just happened: good music, average music, and some of the third kind. In my conversations with veteran musicians, the substantive changes were largely economic--i.e., diminished professional opportunities for certain genres and practices at the onset of the young lions--and many of the parallel transformations in the economic structure of the jazz industry were induced by outside forces, many of them unpredictable. More has been done "to" jazz by the rise of the internet, the collapse of traditional label structures, digital media, and rampant inflation than absolutely anything Wynton Marsalis or even the broader category of jazz education might be responsible for. To put things in a different, maybe more nebulous way--one of my all-time favorite records is Peter Brotzmann's Opened, But Hardly Touched (with the Harry Miller/Louis Moholo-Moholo rhythm team). I love me some Michael Mantler/No Answer, but in terms of translating the utter feeling of post-everything, "the party's over" nothingness that emerged in the wake of the mid-20th century into an improvised context, that record is it. It engages with a lot of sometimes contradictory jazz dogmas--the vestiges of swing music (via Brotzmann's expressive but lumbering saxophone and Moholo-Moholo's Sid Catlett on psychedelics drum sound), post-Mingus rhythmic mobility and bebop rhythm logics in the bass/drums, hard bop heaviness and rock/soul-inflected backbeats, elements of revolutionary folk motives ala Liberation Music Orchestra, the expected EFI/South African jazz inflections, and so on--in an almost passive way. I mean this as a complement in that that rhythm section is maybe my favorite ever, but that record has absolutely everything and nothing happening all at once. Whenever I'm in the very Western mindset of trying to figure out what happened to position me in the music world of 2018, I listen to that record and remember that some time before 1981, at least three musicians figured out that everything that was going to be said had been said and decided to play something new anyway. In a very real way, this is maybe the best era in the history of jazz to play music. There's a Threadgill interview where he says something similar. I'm not saying that we have most or even more than a few of our great innovators left, and we're not getting regular features in Esquire on our wardrobes or watch ads or anything like that, but you can walk into almost any major city in the world right now and assemble an affordable band that is technically proficient, good to great at sight reading, literate in any number of major genres (jazz or otherwise), and not a bad hang. Not just in New York. The problem I see now is less in the doing or even the making and more in the impetus--the reasoning, the saying. Some of the best music being made right now either declines or refuses to address these issues. I think the most meaningful and resonant material being made in 2018 is at least attempting to confront the existential problems in question--and often failing, nobly, to arrive at some kind of resolution.

Before I go off on this short-form rant, I wanted to say that I'm not directing this to anyone in particular--least of all Allen (whom I have the privilege of knowing in a non-internet way and whose thoughtfulness and profound understanding of the music I've never called into question). I just got a copy of Universal Beings, and I enjoy it quite a bit. I also question why we're again seeing jazz criticism pushing a macro narrative--e.g., "X Isn't Interested in Saving Jazz," "X Gives Jazz A New Groove," "X Pulls Jazz Back from the Brink,"--when there is absolutely none to be found. The basic answer is sort of self-evident--i.e., to sell records--but the "deeper" why has something to do with this music's enduring, paradoxically self-destructive preoccupation with death, survival, messiah figures, and continuity. To put it another way, we live in a post-Coltrane world that has a perverse desire to invent Coltrane over and over and over again. Anyone who is playing music now can tell you that the micro narrative of jazz remains fluid and very vibrant. The 21st century critical and historical theory on this music is a fucking mess. What this does is impose unrealistic expectations on both every young working musician with a story to tell and every seasoned listener who wakes to a Groundhog Day of jazz attempting to relive its past value. Somewhere in the middle of that is the sad truth that we reward both youth and imminent death with little real regard, either economically or philosophically, for the long period in-between. I've often wondered why the tremendous volume of really happening music I hear out in the world never gets discussed on here, and I think it's because the infrastructure that we've built to share experiences--jazz criticism being a big part of that--is in the midst of a kind of protracted existential crisis. We're roughly 50 years removed from the first recordings of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the SME, ICP, and the Blue Notes, the final recordings of Coltrane, the initial stages of fusion, and the beginnings of the Last Poets. What has happened in this music since 1968? The answer is everything and nothing, and the tools we've long used to evaluate the music probably stopped working half a century ago. So while I can't blame any of the older guard cats who are often saying this like "Coltrane did X back in the 60's" or "X is all marketing hype," that's also very much besides the point. The working reality of this music has survived decades of meaning everything and nothing, and so I feel now more than ever that jazz as an embodied system of rules and hierarchies has no real value. Speaking more to Makaya's record--I wouldn't turn my nose up at this music completely before listening to the Chicago Side of Universal Beings. The band is legit--Tomeka Reid and Junius Paul (two of Roscoe's people, lest it go unsaid) and Shabaka Hutchings (who has worked with both board great Alexander Hawkins and personal hero Louis Moholo-Moholo). The Madlib-cum-Eremite vibe of this project is maybe most fully realized on those tracks. Makaya does some stuff with the production--looped, atonal hocketing, some bizarre spatialization stuff with the panning, blending of what sound like live spontaneous sections with these very syncretic, chopped up sound environments--that I honestly don't think I've heard done in quite this way. I haven't heard much discussion of Shabaka's playing on here, but his surreal, tenorized version of Busta Rhymes's cadence is one of the few legitimately new sounding things I think I've heard on record in a while. It's like Gary Windo's hyper altissimo thing in that the conceit is so straightforward that you wonder why no one else really did it that way before.

I'm paraphrasing and possibly even misattributing, but I recall Archie Shepp saying something to the effect that you cannot understate the value of comic books in teaching the underprivileged and communities of color how to read. I'd do one better and say that my early love of comic books gave a kind of anchor in the way of personhood that neither traditional literature nor even music were able to offer. I have very vivid memories of spending Christmas in the Philippines and reading a holiday themed issue of Superman that helped contextualize my sort of mixed heritage--Superman being, of course, a kind of paradigmatic immigrant. I was always more of a DC guy, but I think Stan Lee's mark on his medium cannot be understated. The idea that these mythical figures were at heart deeply human had a profound impact on both comic books as a narrative artform and popular fiction in general. Despite his outsize celebrity, I think it's his contributions as a writer and conceptualist that will persevere. Huge, incalculable thanks from me.

Chiming in--this has been pretty worrying. As a lifelong Californian, the peril feels very real and, if it makes sense, real like never before. The 2017 fires got close to my family both down in LA and up in Plumas County; the 2018 fires are also very close but coming from different directions. I have very vivid memories of a miserable holiday season spent jogging in desperate, ashen weather and mainlining Joe McPhee albums like they were the only thing alleviating the strangling touch of the LA air. BFrank is not underselling things. The air in the Bay area is really, really bad--maybe worse than last year. I hopped out of an elevator at the hospital the other day only to find an elderly lady wearing a full-on gas mask. Activities are more or less limited to indoor stuff (not so hard for music work), but a week into this air quality and I'm feeling the effects both inside and out. Underreported (due to lesser significance) is that we had fires out in the East Bay the other week--they were contained with immediacy, but with the climate this time of year I'd advise any fellow locals to assemble something resembling an emergency plan.

Wow, that's a huge one that I forgot about--I knew there was at least one more version with Dudu. Thanks for the journey. For the longest time I'd just thought of this tune as a kind of leitmotif stringing itself across Dyani's discography--I'd never really connected the dots before. FWIW I know a few bass players who swear by the Song for Biko version. I don't know if it was omitted for time or what, but it's a really heavy performance--both energy-wise and in a literal sense, in that the bass is so forward and dominant. The hookup with Ntshoko in interesting in that Dyani seems to be the anchor point; though I wouldn't necessarily call Ntshoko a light drummer, he's not allergic to either eliding the beat or spreading the time--and the cymbal-dominant afro-latin feel on this particular performance changes the shape of the groove a ton. It's an interesting point of comparison with the more-or-less contemporaneous Blue Notes performances, since Louis Moholo-Moholo is a lot more unpredictable. Sometimes, as on Blue Notes for Mongezi, Moholo-Moholo is content to let a minimalist beat ride, and Dyani's tempo/meter/groove shifts dictate the flow of the rhythm. There's also a live recording from '79 called Before the Wind Changes on which "I Wish You Sunshine" appears, and it's kind of disarming just how different the tune feels with Moholo-Moholo's obstinate pseudo-martial cadence underpinning the form. Elsewhere, as on Blue Notes in Concert, Moholo-Moholo's drumming is pure maverick abstraction--full of aggressive double-time and chaotic expansion/contraction of the beat--and (as on "Lonely Flower") it's Dyani who is providing a sense of stasis and cohesion. This isn't the sample (below) I would have chosen (can't find the album's version of "Now," which is really fucked up in the best possible way), but it goes a long way toward demonstrating just how liquid that band was--in and out of grooves, tonality, etc. with maximum freedom. The Song for Biko band is almost there--and that album has a ton of really beautiful features and compositions, no question--but it's lacking the mercurial, often contrarian push-and-pull that underpins the Blue Notes. I think it goes unnoticed that both Dyani and Moholo-Moholo were both exceptional time players and surpassing free improvisers--Dyani playing this wild post-prog stuff with Witchdoctor's Son, Moholo-Moholo participating in some wild art rock/prog in the cohort of Keith Tippett and Julie Tippetts--and still getting sampled for the intro to "Telephone Girl," etc. etc. The breadth of those guys was unreal.

This tune appears a lot throughout Dyani's discography--this version and the version on Together (which features Dudu Pukwana) came to mind first. The piece is credited to Dyani on both albums, fwiw.

Yes and no--the touring iteration is a duo, since the Skeleton Crew-y two kick drum formation made a kind of aesthetic sense. It's more idiosyncratic, though it suits the performance needs of this repertoire well. We're trio or larger for special projects. Drummer Robert Lopez is on the most recent record, and the great LA trumpeter Dan Clucas joined for our iteration of A Love Supreme. I'm of the mind that the studio, at least insofar as concerns this stylistically liminal music, is a different enough animal that all bets are off in the way of instrumentation and arrangement.

One more re-up, if you'll please indulge me! A couple more reviews in: "Evangelista wields a swell grouchy guitar tone, Scampavia’s pipes are sweet, and when they freak out, they freak out good." - The Vinyl District (Joseph Neff) "...as far as quirky, avant-garde original music goes, I give them loads of credit for putting together something this far out and miles removed from anything commercial sounding. Go in with an open mind and see what you think." - Sea of Tranquility (Pete Pardo) Apropos of all that, here's one more video. This piece has evolved over the course of several albums, dedicated to our pet rats. It's weird, but it's our earnest (though irony-conscious) attempt at connecting the extremes of pointillistic improv and flashy skronkism:

Right on, sir! It's deeply appreciated--that back catalog stuff is some of the deeper cut material (the album with Francis Wong is very old, but I'm very proud of everyone's contributions on there). Hope you enjoy!

Forgot to add--I was a guest on Mike Watt's podcast a couple of weeks back. The audio (intimidatingly) starts with Miles/Coltrane, which I found hilarious but at least tonally appropriate. We talk about our musical origins, the design of the band, and some misremembered (on my part) pieces of the West Coast jazz legacy. Mike is of course the bassist/co-founder of the Minutemen, but he's worked with a large volume of wonderful improvisers, and his musical literacy is nuts. Here: The Watt from Pedro Show, On-Air Guest Karl Evangelista

Hey--thank you, Chuck, for lending your support!

Hey, all- Not so much jazz as "jazz adjacent", but I'm deeply excited about this and wish to share--after several years of blood, sweat, and the other things, my project Grex has released its brand new album, entitled Electric Ghost Parade. I've never worked on anything as hard as I've worked on this record, so if you have the time and ears, this is the one. It's an unpredictable but incendiary and exhilarating paean to the epic psychedelic albums of the 1960's, traversing the cutting edge of modern indie rock, noise, and free jazz. It summarizes lessons I've learned from the likes of (former teachers) Fred Frith and Roscoe Mitchell, and it captures, I think, a lot of the character of the Bay Area avant rock scene as it's existed in the past decade. You can purchase the album, and listen to a few choice tracks, here: https://grex.bandcamp.com/album/electric-ghost-parade Some early reviews: “Grex strikes an interesting balance between the exploratory tendencies of psychedelic rock and free jazz with a more modern indie-pop sensibility.” - The Los Angeles Beat (Ted Kane) “a wide-ranging and excitingly unpredictable sound” - The Bay Bridged (Ben Van Houten) “I haven’t heard such varying psych sounds in more recent times since The Fiery Furnaces went their separate ways some nine years ago. An excellent release.” - Echoes and Dust (Ljubinko Zivkovic) “Coming from a free-jazz, improvisational background, creating spontaneous art was Evangelista's general methodology with Grex…The resulting songs are dynamic and at times quirky and jubilant, like something Bay Area avant-pop band Deerhoof might play.” - East Bay Express (Aaron Carnes) “these Bay Area brainiacs trip out on a chilled-out yet complex attack of math-rock heroics, free-improvisational freak-outs, and psych-rock weirdness as they channel Henry Kaiser and Hendrix.” - The Brooklyn Rail (Brad Cohan) “It’s a sardonically noisy psychedelic rock record with a little free jazz thrown in to keep you guessing. And it’s an awful lot of fun.” - New York Music Daily (Alan Young) Here's a video of our two piece in action: You can hear more about us here: http://www.grexsounds.com More music here: http://grex.bandcamp.com And we're on Spotify and Tidal, if that suits your fancy. Thanks for listening, folks!

One more bump with the East Coast leg coming up--some tremendous bills on the horizon (including the murderers' row of folks on the NY dates--of interest here is that Aaron Novik's all-wind group for the H0L0 date includes Thomas Heberer, Patrick Holmes, and Vincent Chancey (!)). @JSngry --that Amarillo date was amazing. Apparently the arts community there is in its earlier stages but very strong--a lot of energy revolving around avant-rock, drone, and the like, though maybe not so much pure jazz. The Mariposa Eco-Village people are largely on the younger side and very committed.

Granted the the gatekeeper-y nature of what I said, let me phrase things a different way: as someone who will listen to anything Coltrane at least once--and almost anything many times--listening to Both Directions at Once made me wish I could hear Interstellar Space or Transition for the first time again. Of course you can listen to anything in any order, and any given person will hear something different from the next--but the eminence of Coltrane seems to dull the keenness of value judgements if and when they are useful. Clearly a subjective problem and not an objective one, but as someone who loves this music and has studied it as best I can, I'd love to hear more assessments of this stuff not only as pertains to some kind of canon but also in the way of what's useful and valuable there. I've seen a lot of "this is great" but not so much "this is what it adds to the picture," if that makes sense. I'll qualify that by saying that while I think we've had enough as a culture in the way of endless dissection of tertian root movements, I'd love to know more about the Coltrane-as-thinker/philosopher that's much more abstract than Slonimsky patterns--the guy who derived synthetic scales from maps, and the guy who assembled the diagrams of cascading whole tone scales that resolve into a five-point star (the kinds of diagrams found in the packaging for Both Directions at Once, and with no explanation or detail). Lost somewhere in the hagiography of all this is, to me at least, the notion that there's something deeper in there than the technocratic business that preoccupies so much Coltrane-informed jazz, and that time spent on a rehearsal tape could just as well be spent taking apart Stellar Regions or something. I say this as someone who should in theory be practicing/studying right now, (again) granted the fact that I wouldn't dream of having the brute force comprehension to take this stuff apart on my own.

I'm surprised by the relative lack of discussion on this one. On the one hand, it is (mostly) new Coltrane not very far removed from the classic quartet's peak; on the other hand, this is another instance of impossibly large hype for a project whose present-day historical importance outstrips its relative value in the oeuvre of the artist in question. I'm on tour and have picked up the habit of perusing O and the Hoffman board between sets, and the general vibe is neither hugely positive or negative (or even ranty/cynical)--just somewhere in the middle. On the other other hand--Imagine an enthusiastic newcomer to Coltrane's catalog hearing, say, Giant Steps or A Love Supreme for the first time and trying to figure out where to go next--can you imagine listening to this before something like Coltrane's Sound, let alone a marginal classic like Crescent or even First Meditations? In my cursory and probably incomplete read, this is like third or fourth tier stuff, with the caveat that it's Coltrane in his heyday and, well, even lo-fi classic Trane at incorrect speeds is dope as shit. The familiar repertoire--like the takes of "Impressions" or the new take of "Nature Boy"--feels makeweight, and the "new" pieces have an unfinished character (offset, admittedly, by episodes of inspired soloing and committed ensemble interplay). Very little of this feels like it's down for posterity. It's like a '63 version of the Living Space comp--the intensity, conviction, and completeness of the band are what carry over the moments of maladroitness. If there's a lesson to be glommed from this recording, it's that the mechanical stuff of Coltrane's individual voice--the wild harmonic interpolations, the calculated multiphonics, the devastating lyricism--is so thoroughly practiced that it speaks through even the least accomplished of the quartet's music. Time to practice, man.

It's part of "a" touring circuit. My friend Andrew Weathers (who plays compelling American primitivist guitar with some electronic elements) would know more about it--he's living in Texas right now. These aren't proper jazz channels, but the touring options for general experimental/improvised music are surprisingly broad these days. Waffles in Portland, then Kenton Club tonight...

Thanks for the rec, Chuck! Hopefully we'll make it out that way next time. Seattle coming up (today) at the Royal Room with Chris Icasiano of the brilliant sax/drum duo Bad Luck (http://www.badluckband.net/) and the sublime chamber jazz ensemble Tiny Ghost. First two dates have been intense.

Hey, all- Getting this in just under the wire! Thank you in advance for the indulgence, and for humoring me- I'm very proud to be announcing that, after several years of blood, sweat, and tears, my project Grex is gearing up for the release our brand new full-length album, entitled Electric Ghost Parade. The album is sort of a paean to the high concept jazz and psychedelic rock albums of the 1960's, but the music is a very contemporary synthesis of song and fringe improvisation. In preparation for the album release, we’ll be mounting a wild nationwide tour, covering parts of the Bay Area, the American NW, So Cal, the Southwest, the EC, and the midwest. It’s a jam-packed itinerary, but we’re thrilled: we’ll be featuring all-new, never-before-heard arrangements of the album material. Rehearsals have been sublime—it’s the best set we’ve ever had. I'm also pretty proud of the bills, many of which should be of interest to some of the folks on here (Allen Lowe features on the CT show, below). The album streets on July 20, but preorders (and some sample listening) are available now: https://grex.bandcamp.com/album/electric-ghost-parade And more about us here: http://www.grexsounds.com Tour Dates: June 15, Sacramento, CA at Fox & Goose (w/Gentleman Surfer, Amy Reed) June 16, Reno, NV at Reno Community Radio Station (w/Rob Ford Explorer, Everybody Dies for Now) June 18, Seattle, WA at the Royal Room (w/Chris Icasiano, Tiny Ghost) June 19, Olympia, WA at Le Voyeur (w/Hammer of Hathor, Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat Dan Singa) June 20, Eugene, OR at Old Nicks (w/Mood Area 52, Megan Johns) June 21, Portland, OR at Kenton Club (w/Rllrbll, Galaxy Research) June 22, Bellingham, WA at Alternative Library (w/Tetrachromat, Nauticult, Bliss Point) June 23, Portland, OR at Mothership Music (w/The Social Stomach, San Kazakgascar Solo) June 26, San Diego, CA at The Merrow (w/The Grok, Nicey Nice World) June 27, Los Angeles, CA at The Silverlake Lounge (with Steuart Liebig and Emily Hay, Logan Hone, Max Kutner) June 29, Long Beach, CA at 4th Street Vine (w/Baast) June 30, Joshua Tree, CA at Joshua Tree Saloon July 3, Truth or Consequences, NM at TOC Brewing Co. (w/Tatsuya Nakatani) July 4, Amarillo, TX at Mariposa Eco-Village (w/Hayden Pedigo, Andrew Weathers, Fat Lava) July 7, Washington, DC at Rhizome (w/Ted Zook's Heterodyne, Pagan Reagan) July 8, Arlington, VA at Galaxy Hut (w/Chester Hawkins) July 9, Providence, RI at Alchemy July 10, Boston, MA at Midway Cafe (w/Fable Grazer, The Modern Voice, Brown Lasers) July 11, Queens, NY at H0L0 (w/Ron Anderson/Kevin Shea, Max Jaffe, Aaron Novik Quartet) July 12, Brooklyn, NY at Pine Box Rock Shop (w/Devin Hoff Solo, Dunkelman/Yang/Mcmurray) July 13, Philadelphia, PA at Random Tea Room (w/Mitch Esparza) July 14, Hamden, CT at Best Video (w/Special Guest Allen Lowe) July 15, Chicago, IL at Elbo Room (w/Tatsu Aoki, La Cosa) July 16, Kansas City, MO at Uptown Arts Bar (w/Music Research Strategies/Marshall Trammell [of Black Spirituals]) July 19, Live Mic on KFJC July 20, Alameda, CA at The Fireside Lounge (w/IMA, Qualia, Scott Amendola’s Orchestra) Hope to see you! K/ep1str0phy

So sad to hear about this. Those first few Colosseum albums really meant a lot to me when I was first getting into music--and Hiseman's drumming on Jack Bruce's Songs for a Tailor might be my favorite in that specific rock-jazz vein. Of the great early British jazz-rock drummers, I credit Hiseman and John Marshall--and the lesser-known Rob Tait, too--with being the most successful at rounding off the complexity of post-Elvin jazz drumming without sounding either too boxy or simplistic. A tough task done surpassingly well. RIP.

Whoa, what the hell? Where did this come from? I don't have a copy of the John Coltrane Reference, but was there any prior indication that this session even existed? Let alone 2 CDs worth of contiguous material? Maybe (?) our fault as a broader listening/playing community for entertaining an endless stream of posthumous releases, but this one sounds like a big deal. And legit. Hasn't it been decades at this point since we've heard a "new", more or less complete record/session from Coltrane's archives?

He was a really cool guy--and a great player. Never actually played with him, but shared a bill with him once (with the similarly great Tim DuRoche), and we had plenty of mutual friends. He was a light out in Portland. Many of the guys emanating from that 70-80's WC scene--all on records that might now only seem legendary/obscure--are still very active. India Cooke was on the Mills faculty while I was there, and virtually all of the folks from United Front are still active in the Bay.

Thanks for that, Jim--similar to how it goes with internet discourse, a lot more is communicated through tone and visuals than one might grok from text interviews. So this confirms a bit of my suspicion--i.e., that the staid mechanics of her later bands are intentional, or at least the upshot of certain aesthetic preferences. On the other hand, what she says about Valente is instructive. Bley seems to have a preoccupation with order and structure that is in tension with a lot of her (at least from my perspective) most interesting music. It's as if, especially in light of what she says about free jazz, Ayler, Ornette, Elton Dean, Brotzmann, etc., her takeaway from the avant-garde of the last century is everything but the mechanics--an inversion of a lot of the other compositional music related to or descended from classic free jazz (i.e., where the mechanics remain but the compositional stuff is replaced). This piece is pretty telling: Iverson, for one, seems to favor Ballad of the Fallen, though while I very much enjoy it, it seems to lack the shattering fervor that I love so much about the first LMO album. Both albums utilize similar source material (at least in terms of sound and structure), but on Ballad the filigree of abstraction is stripped away and confined. The solos on this piece in particular seem to emanate from a different environment entirely, Cherry almost cut-and-pasted from an Old and New Dreams record. The rhythmic nebulousness and aggressive dissonance on his solo are almost too disconnected from everything else, at least until the ripieno enters. It feels like a stark contrast to his episodes on this suite from the first LMO, which bubble up from the ensemble ether and subsequently direct the action of the full band: Different time periods, recording environment/fidelity, etc. etc., and yes there's a deliberate sense of collage on "El Quinto Regimiento," but I think the first LMO album is the only one to really get the programmatic underpinning "right"--i.e., that revolution is violent, populist, and uncontrolled. Maybe this isn't the music Carla (or Haden) wanted to make, but I certainly think that it's the more powerful document--incidentally, Bley sounds freaking awesome banging away in the midst of this free tempo chaos.

Actually, this band did happen and is on a few of Jack's official releases. There's even video: Again, I have a strong appreciation for much of Bley's music but Bruce's is some of my favorite vocal rock music of any era--and having listened to a lot of what Bley has done and (I think) most of what Bruce recorded, I'd say that this band was kind of middling for both folks. I don't think that Bley's talents as an instrumentalist really benefit in a context in which she isn't the focus (and in which the arrangement is more or less tailored to spotlight her manner of off-kilter composer's piano, ala "War Orphans" or her feature on Relativity Suite), as was the case in this project. Bruce's voice was in the midst of a transition and it's pretty rough going for most of this band's appearances, and the other big star in the ensemble (Taylor) was relegated to a perplexing middle-ground between warmed-over Claptonisms and pseudo-Robben Ford stuff. Tangent time: I have no idea what the party line on proper jazz-rock is anymore (vs. the more overt avant-gardeisms of the Canterbury bands or the more aggressively experimental stuff emanating from the likes of John Stevens, Trevor Watts, or even--to stretch the genre to its limits--some of the South African improvisers of that vintage), and Jack's appearances within this axis always struck me as kind of peripheral to the action (occupied as he often was with more commercial fare). But I'd commit to the notion that the studio versions of much of the repertoire from the Bley-Taylor band--the things from Harmony Row especially--are abso-fucking-lutely brilliant. As more "rock with a jazz inflection" rather than "jazz with a rock inflection," the music sounds at once experimental, fluid, and fully-realized. Example (featuring Chris Spedding and John Marshall of Nucleus):

"Real" in that I seldom feel like she's tackling the musical content--with its contextual implications, the technical possibilities inherent in the material, the broader narrative of whatever culture on genre she's plugging into--on its own terms. Keep in mind I don't feel as if she's under any obligation to do so, and I should also state that I feel as if Bley is a great artist in her own right--but as I (kind of) said above, I feel as if her genius resides in concept play and curation of genres rather than engaging with those genres in any really profound way. My assumption is that "Very Very Simple" is meant to serve as a counterexample to "Two Banana," since it's the same kind of blues shuffle feel and it's a lot less buttoned down. I think it actually reinforces my core point--the band is playing pretty mundane stuff, with the exception of Valente's solo (which is it's own kind of mannered, to be fair--but what isn't, and that's splitting hairs). The music is basically just a prop for some irony and clever concept work. It's 100% Carla Bley, which is why I agree that it's unfair to say that her music is any less personal than anyone else's--but I also think that it's so disengaged from the base materials of the music that it has to have been by design. I think it's telling that Bley says what she does about D Sharpe in Iverson's article: “I just loved him at first sight and first sound. He was from the rock and roll world. D. Sharpe dressed really great. He had a cool demeanor about him. He looked so different. I liked him the way he was physically. Then, he would use two loaves of Italian bread or something to take a solo. He had a good sense of humor. I thought he had a nice groove, too.” It's very personal stuff--about vibe and appearance, and a little bit about Sharpe's musical piquancy. One would assume that these are many of the things that are most meaningful to her about that relationship--and it's little about what Sharpe actually plays. Maybe she'd go into more detail in another context, who knows. But, again, I don't think CB is under any obligation to do so, and that's not a knock. And lest it go unsaid, I wouldn't knock anyone for being, as you say, "a roller skating Nordic-American church girl." And that's definitely a part of her aesthetic ethos. And again--again--I say this as someone who really admires a lot of Carla's work and loves, on a profound level, a significant amount of that work. I do have some personal (which are consequentially musical) reservations about how she handles music that lies outside of her purview. There is actually a much denser conversation here that I willingly open myself up to--but which I will say up front I am not totally equipped to unpack--about race and perception. There is a lot to dissect about the phrase, "Just as it was, I thought free jazz needed work"--and that enters the realm where personal reservations veer into issues of identity and ideology and axes to grind.