ep1str0phy

I've been spending less and less time with archival and historical releases these days, and this record is most certainly one for niche interests (i.e., for those interested in South African/Euro free jazz and/or the extended Ogun roster of musicians, there are like a dozen or so records that I'd recommend before this one). That being said, this is a good one--more satisfying than volume one and maybe even better than a lot of the "canon" material that has been available since the 70's and 80s. The sound quality is superb and a lot of the content here is unique to this set--unusual personnel, as many as three unique compositions (I need cross check the three tunes from '78), and sessions that I haven't seen pop up elsewhere. There's one tune from '77 that has been in circulation for a while (the band with Miller, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Trevor Watts, Alan Wakeman, and Bernie Holland), but the others seem more or less new--three tunes from '78 with Miller, Moholo-Moholo, Watts and Wakeman again, and Keith Tippett and three tunes from '82 with Miller, Moholo-Moholo, Watts again, Alan Tomlinson, and Dave Holdsworth. For obscure Euro free improv nerds, the '78 session is special because it was recorded pretty close to both Moholo's Spirits Rejoice and Miller's In Conference, and the rhythm section is the same (i.e., Miller/Moholo/Tippett). This is in some regards my favorite rhythm section of all time in any medium (especially on the '78 dates), and the playing here is of a pretty high caliber. Everyone is in terrific shape, but Moholo-Moholo was an absolute beast at this vintage--this perfect blend of pocket jazz drumming, blustery free jazz, and impossible funkiness. There's a special kind of beauty to Moholo's cymbal work in the late 70's (a particular timbre to his crash or ride, I haven't seen too many pictures documenting it) that is absolutely unique in the canon; when I interviewed him years ago, he spoke about the lack of cymbal work on typical urban mbaqanga recordings, and a lot of his playing in the 70's is almost obsessively cymbal centric. The only thing in the canon akin to this level of textural fanaticism is later Sunny Murray, but Moholo in the 70's had a degree of versatility and unstoppable technical power that just shades many of his American counterparts. This is a thing that is often ignored in conversations about the divide between "high" post-bop/early free jazz drumming and full blown European free improvisation--only a handful of drummers had both the chops and the psychology to bridge the two, and Moholo was one of them--a technically adept straight ahead drummer with an ear for timbral exploration. As sort of a Blue Notes stan for many years, I admit that I've been disappointed by a lot of the archival releases from this stable subsequent the explosion of Cuneiform stuff several years back. The Reel Recordings stuff is kind of all over the place and much of the sound quality is lacking. The "new" Oguns--especially the Moholo combos with board member Alexander Hawkins--have been pretty good, but a lot of the old stuff has been kind of redundant (the first volume in this series was like the umpteenth set of the same Isipingo compositions). Not this one--based on its pedigree and the rarity of the material, I might even call it a "sub-classic," better than a lot of the other new music released this year (alongside a slew of "contemporary" stuff--A Tribe Called Quest's We Got It From Here..., Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition, Kendrick Lamar's Untitled Unmastered, etc.). For the five people who are interested, this is about as good as it gets for music of this kind.

Two recollections come to mind--(1) Roscoe Mitchell said that Ayler was the loudest saxophonist he'd ever heard, apropos of a conversation he and a friend of mine were having about Coltrane, and (2) an old friend of mine saw Ayler in person in NY in the early 60's--when I quizzed him about which album best captured Ayler's sound, my friend said (almost instantly) "Spiritual Unity."

I think it's worth considering that the ideas of documentation, the presentation of art as product, and the act of producing art are not (necessarily) mutually exclusive. I don't think that there's any singular, comprehensive praxis for how music is created in a given social, cultural, or economic context. There's no news there--but in terms of the notion that "all art is commerce"--well yes, but by levels and degrees. Not all commercial music is made with strictly commercial considerations. Not all--or even any--non-commercial (or outsider, or experimental, or avant-garde, or what have you) art is created in a vacuum devoid of monetary considerations. One of the chief arguments in the ongoing debate about musicians v. promoters/clubs/etc. is that performance comprises services rendered and that this should (in and of itself) guarantee pay of some kind. The rub here is that not all music operates under the same social and commercial pretenses. If you're running a low/mid-sized commercial establishment, you're often guaranteed more patrons for hosting a touring band rather than a local band. For any number of reasons, you can often (but not always) expect a larger audience for electronic dance music than free jazz. So is it fair and economically sound under profit-driven conditions to treat free jazz the same way you would EDM, or a local musician the same as a touring band? If you book these musicians under the pretense that you will make money, is it fair to expect a free jazz musician to promote the show effectively enough to bring in numbers that equate to that of a DJ? Trade is a two way street. The degree to which working musicians are conscious participants in the broader art and entertainment economies is pretty debatable, but often (admittedly not always) you, as a performer, must make some decision about the content and value of your musical practices. As Serious As Your Life is not just a sad story about a bunch of great guys who never got paid for their work--it's (also) a narrative about musicians who made hard, often deliberate choices about their relationship(s) to commerce and audiences.

YUP. In a crowded field of convergent jazz/hip-hop, I've been a little less impressed by hip-hop inflected jazz than I have been jazz inflected hip-hop. In its best self, self-conscious fusion music (i.e., music that is a fusion of genres--I don't mean 70's jazz-rock in a specific sense) elucidates the things that make its source material so exciting. Listening to Yesterday's New Quintet is like the closest thing a jazz musician will ever come to hearing what jazz music sounds like to an untrained/unschooled ear--which is not to say that Madlib's music is illiterate or anything (far from it), only that the things that it places value in tend to be grounded in a musical sensibility that emanates from outside of jazz. For example--I love the Reuben Wilson version of "Stormy," but Madlib's version is the one that teases out this mammoth, growling beast, the rhythm foregrounded and the melodic content scurrying around the stereo field like ants. I would never have gotten that out of that, which is why listening to YNQ is a really enriching experience for me.

It's very possible that the same people who feel threatened by the likes of Chief Keef and Young Chop today are the same folks who will happily listen to N.W.A. without regard to or remembrance of the circumstances of the latter's ascension. The paradox of Straight Outta Compton (the movie) is that it presents an unreal, valorized account of music that was about reality and ugliness. That film was like 50% legacy building and 50% an indication of the fact that N.W.A. had suddenly become either (or both) and institution and/or a cultural artifact--despite the fact that social, political, and racial trends had not and have not kept pace with the ensuing 25+ years of music. The propagation of trap music is in part the world's way of filling a social role that the likes of N.W.A. (and later Tupac, or maybe Nas, or early Jay-Z, or whatever) had vacated, even though said role had never really lost its broader relevance. If there's anything about the vinyl resurgence that has stuck with me, it's that music has an uncanny ability to invent itself over and over and over again. I say "invent" carefully, rather than "reinvent." It's like the stuff my friend said about Madlib (above)--music isn't innovative until suddenly it is, after the necessary time has passed since the last iteration and the social need has arisen again. Another friend of mine, drummer Dave Mihaly, uses the phrase "so old it's new." Willis "Gatortail" Jackson v. Albert Ayler--seriously only years apart and context aside (prior to New Grass, anyway). Hendrix and Buddy Guy. Afrika Bambaataa and P-Funk and Sun Ra. Hell, P-Funk and G-Funk. I once had a champion of the "great white canon" preaching to me that jazz was absolutely nothing new or impressive, and that baroque organ was the provenance of improvisation. I'm sure there's a caveman who would argue differently. On the other hand--and in a very real sense--I think that by the time a lot of socially relevant music reaches the masses (ala N.W.A. or radio-read hip-hop), it has already lost a lot of its immediate danger. Reality will have warped again in the meantime.

Re: "documentary genres"--sloppy/best fit wording on my part that I thought got the point across, but I guess not. I use it to mean genres where the principal goal is the recording of the performance rather than (for lack of a better phrase) the "performative" creation of a sonic work. There's obviously a lot of slippage and play. Recordings of DIY punk, ESP free jazz, and some early no wave are pretty raw, uninflected recordings, but then lo-fi is an aesthetic that people both recognize and try to emulate. Apropos of the conversation here, the mid-60's RVG stuff is on one hand an attempt to capture live performance but on the other a pretty sophisticated and (apparently) arcane convergence of recording technique and well-rehearsed playing by often great musicians. This is now getting into a broader (tangential issue)- it's a major sticking point of mine, though one my knowledge of is incomplete at best, but I've often wondered why there is an (often silent, but present) taboo against the studio inflection of recorded jazz performance. One size definitely does not fit all and I can't imagine how overdubs or excessive panning would benefit 50's Miles or the Jazz Messengers, but when the oft-parroted argument that jazz has lost touch with mainstream audiences rears its head, I imagine a lot of it has to do with the music's broader reluctance to keep pace with trends in production techniques and studio experimentation. The question then becomes spontaneity and performance v. stylistic breadth and the idea of a "finalized" work of art, and I don't think that there's a better or worse option here--rather, it becomes a matter of whether jazz musicians, patrons, producers and the like wish to have a broader or narrower range of possibilities for the music. Too much premium on spontaneity and you have the very dry and underpowered CIMP aesthetic. Too much importance placed on the sound of innovation rather than the approach and you have DIY bass, Roy Haynes playing an oversized drum kit, and synths appearing on random straight ahead jazz albums. A lot has happened in the world and culture since the 1960's, and fetishizing classic Blue Note records as a model for 21st century music ignores the degree of artifice involved--from the RVG piano sound to the sound of Rudy scrambling to pull down the fader as Tony Williams goes balls out on Out to Lunch. And to further qualify the notion of jazz as a genre that is more interested in documentation than experimentation--there's plenty of classic music that undermines this premise: Teo's production work with Miles and Mingus, Creed Taylor stuff, Ornette's post-Science Fiction career, jazz's long history of solo/overdub albums (from Keith's Restoration Ruin to Hutch's Solo/Quartet and so on), bass overdubs on Jazz at Massey Hall, and so on. There are overdubs on A Love Supreme for heaven's sake. So maybe documentation v. production is an illusion, but in my narrow experience this division does exist--if only in the minds and hearts of people rather than history. As for the trap music thing--the long story short is that it's a genre of ultraviolent rap that originated in the 90's but only really flourished in the last decade or so. There's a thematic underpinning to a lot of it--drugs, crime, poverty, violence, etc.--but the notion of "trap music" has also come to serve as a marker for certain now-widespread production techniques: archaic drum machine sounds, swooning strings and synth sounds, and double time hi-hats. It's an interesting case of a series of anachronisms getting remade into something with renewed cultural cache. IIRC, it started in the south and kind of exploded into the mainstream with guys like T.I. and Rick Ross, but it's taken on importance as actual social music in places like Chicago (where the convergence between hip-hop, poverty, and crime are still very real and less the stuff of valorization).

I think it's worth mentioning that while I very much agree with Jim's fundamental reading of RVG's thesis--i.e., that the notion of an "attribute free" digital is largely a statement about the opportunity for fidelity and not necessarily about the product--I think it's impossible to read digitally recorded music as intrinsically value-less. To put things another way, in much the same manner that the pops, clicks, and hiss of analog media have come to be understood as "desirable" under a certain rubric of fidelity, things like excessive compression and digital artifacts have become a part of the broader cultural landscape. This ties a bit into what MG says above, in that genre and studio technology are often developed hand-in-hand. The process is deeply recursive--less so in genres where more value is placed in documentation and more in stuff like EDM or hip-hop, where the music is more receptive to engaging with and disassembling degrees of separation between performance and product. The near-bleeding edge of hip-hop production for the past decade or so--trap music, certain exponents of IDM, self-consciously avant/industrial stuff like Death Grips, etc.--often edges into a territory where the falseness of the medium sort of becomes the medium. Once you infect the musical mainstream, as much of this music has done--both explicitly through tastemakers like Kanye West and insidiously through, say, a jazz band covering Radiohead (essentially) covering Flying Lotus--it's no longer strictly a macro question of analog v. digital but rather a matter of fidelity v. style. Again, this is neither here nor there when it comes to most documentary genres, but then you get into micro stuff like file conversion for itunes and mid-level stuff like remasterings of albums that were already recorded in the digital era. I've had the Axiom issue of Ask the Ages on my ipod for years, and I recently traded up to the Laswell remastering from (I think) last year--to my ears, the compression is significantly more noticeable, and we've entered a realm where both the cold sheen of early CDs and the roughness of analog have been replaced by a weird, dull digital warmth. So again, fidelity v. style. To put things in another another way, I heard a musician in DC say that Yesterday's New Quintet was Madlib's way of trying to play jazz--now everyone is trying to play jazz like Madlib. We've come full circle away from drum machines to digital sampling to performative sampling (ala Dilla and Madlib) to basically just performing again, but trying to sound like drum machines. --and on a completely different note, I'd always read the RVG reverb as being the product of some calculated room miking. With what marginal production knowledge I have, I've always read the RVG sound to be a weird convergence of smallness (e.g., the cloistered, mid-rangy piano and clear stereo separation between instruments, drums included) and bigness (e.g., booming reverb). I've always understood this to be one of the reasons why RVG's music still sounds so vivid and performative--it's the illusion of people in a room (rather than a "recording" of people who happen to be playing close to a microphone).

Yes, please elaborate. Laswell the bassist? Laswell the producer? The curator? etc. etc. Your mileage will vary based on what project or approach you're addressing, but there's such a wide breadth to the music he's traded in that I find blanket condemnations kind of curious. The bass contributions to Last Exit are contentious, and that I kind of get--he's playing this sort of mannered anchor to three of the most incendiary soloists of their epoch, and I don't think even he would argue that the's in the same weight class. He's the one who really edges that band into a metal/pseudo-dub territory, with all of the positives and negatives that that entails. I like it, but only because it means that that band was/is a conceptual monster rather than "just another" raging free jazz ensemble. If you're talking about curation--he is (again) punching at a lower weight class as an instrumentalist or composer than many of the people drawn into Material's orbit, but I don't think that this diminishes the importance or power of something like Memory Serves (which had the foresight to bridge a lot of the gaps between various Downtown NY factions of the 1980's--and the self-awareness to get out of the way when colliding players of the caliber of Sharrock, Fred Frith, George Lewis, Threadgill, Billy Bang, etc.) Killing Time was collaborative, although I know for a fact that a lot of the conceptual underpinning for that was Frith--either way, that part of his oeuvre is fucking unimpeachable and I will rep for that music until the end of my days. That is paradigmatic Downtown/post-no wave/industrial improv. That is absolutely genre defining and the best of its kind, regardless of how you feel about the very different, sort of This Heat-inflected later stuff with Charles Hayward in place of Fred Maher. Add to that stuff like Baselines, The Golden Palominos, Painkiller, the Arcanas (both the bizarre trio album with Derek Bailey and Tony Williams and the more traditional post-Lifetime shredfest), etc. Regardless of how you feel about this music, and especially the later stuff (which subsumes the free improv/Downtown textures and elevates the dub inflection), it is in its own way as definitive as a lot of the much more aggressive and iconoclastic Zorn records of the same era. And lest we lapse into "geniuses are geniuses regardless"-type talking, you can't understate the value of both resurrecting Sharrock's career and editorializing his later music. Listen to Dance With Me Montana and then listen to Guitar. Listen to the live bootlegs of the Ask the Ages Band (with Pheeroan akLaff in place of Elvin) and compare Sharrock's tone and attack with that on the record. We're talking a different caliber of production/curation/shepherding--like 60's post-bop with Van Gelder/Lion and without. Without Laswell, no Last Exit, no Guitar, no Ask the Ages. Lastly, the production stuff is, of course, highly contentious and this I hugely get. Panthalassa is cool but unessential. There's a signature sound that suffuses the Sharrocks, the Materials, Album, Herbie's 80's records, and miscellaneous music by the likes of Ginger Baker, Akira Sakata, James "Blood" Ulmer, etc. that some may find sterile and synthetic (and which, by virtue of it's dominance in a certain era, does actually sound kind of dated now). But I challenge anyone to listen to the unreleased (circulating) remix of Tony Williams's Turn It Over or the John McLaughlin/Santana stuff and tell me that Laswell doesn't understand that early fusion/jazz-rock music on a deep and fundamentally creative level. To this degree (at least), Laswell is lightyears ahead of many of his peers--able to listen past the facile divisions between genres and confront the music on its own (deeply historical, when necessary) terms. The Turn It Over remix is one of my favorite records, period--and it's because Laswell picks up on so many things that others have kind of glossed over in the process of evaluating that music--namely, he subsumes the soloistic stuff (with certain important exceptions) in favor of the broader textural extremes (Young's atonal keyboards, the proto-prog/metal intensity of the rhythm section). He understood, like few people have, that that music was both deeply conservative (groove-based, like an organ trio) and wildly futuristic (percussion and texture-heavy, like Sun Ra rather than, like, Grand Funk or something). For me, that's a tremendous caliber of insight.

Yes, yes, yes--exactly. It's the greatness of pursuit v. the pursuit of greatness. (And Jeff, I appreciate you parsing my screed and getting to the heart of this, too.) The not-so-secret secret of the gigging musician is that a tremendous portion of life is spent on stage, in practice, or in rehearsal--again with this phrase, but records only capture part of the story. Part of what is so remarkable about Bobby to me is that he attained the remarkable so often in a life less about the grandiose and more about the sheer practice of it. That's a big part of why albums like Choma or San Francisco--or even way later music like Acoustic Masters II--still have a spark, if less touched by chimerical greatness. My FB feed has been inundated by stories of one-offs or unheralded gigs that were just as memorable in their own ways to any number of folks as Out to Lunch is to the sub-popular consciousness. When McCoy used the phrase "As Serious As Your Life"--this was the "Life" he was talking about.

I've had trouble processing Bobby's passing, because he hadn't been very (physically) present in the music as of late. So much of the music he made is tied to a particular moment in jazz, although I'd imagine that the years he registered specializing in fairly centrist post-bop are far greater in number than those he spent at the vanguard of the music. It's a lesson to me that contemporary musicians, fans, and critics will be quick to engage with hagiography when it comes to this caliber of musician, because the truth of the music is both much more complex and much more mundane. Bobby was in many ways "just" a diehard gigging musician who "just" so happened to play innovative vibraphone on some of the most important and adventurous albums in the music. I also think it's worthwhile to articulate the degree to which Bobby's embodied work sort of undermines the heroic narrative of the jazz innovator. Unlike an Ayler or an Ornette, Bobby's sound wasn't outright heretic and he didn't emerge more or less fully realized--Hutcherson is (more like Dolphy, for example) a testament to how the gradual work of gigging and rehearsing music will often foster its own revolutionaries. Hutcherson did so much work in the trenches, some of it even on record, that I think it's sort of easy to miss that (A) there was no Bobby Hutcherson before Bobby Hutcherson and (B) there were tons of Bobby Hutchersons only after Bobby Hutcherson. The subsequent arc of jazz and free improv vibraphone is way more complex than I'm suggesting here, but it seems apparent to me that we would not have had Gunter Hampel with Marion Brown, Bobby Naughton with Wadada, Steve Nelson with Dave Holland, Bryan Carrott with Threadgill or Osby, or Chris Dingman with Steve Lehman without Bobby's influence. Appropos of a different conversation, I think Larry Young is a useful point of comparison. Like Larry (who was styled early on as a kind of secondary Jimmy Smith), a lot of Bobby's first music on record sounds like it could have been played by someone else--the vibraphone contributions to This Is Billy Mitchell are kind of sub-Milt Jackson-type stuff. That being said, like Young, Bobby discovered a kind of impressionistic softening and abstraction of earlier stylists that signaled a new way forward for both his instrument and jazz ensemble dynamics in general. Bobby's playing on the really epochal abstract stuff--like Out to Lunch, Evolution, or Dialogue--teeters between diamond hard and sustained, resonant, and pulsing. Other people were working in parallel compositional and conceptual veins--great players like Gary Burton, Walt Dickerson, or even Roy Ayers--but Bobby inhabited this duality of tonal precision and utter abstraction that is just mind-boggling. In this way, he was a perfect match for a certain school of inside-outside player that was both tonally literate and conceptually free (e.g., Dolphy, Moncur, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, etc.)--but with these elastic chops that could either dive hard into the pocket (Let 'Em Roll, Idle Moments) or way out (the stuff with Archie Shepp). Hutcherson could play a little or a lot, but he always seemed to play what was exactly appropriate for a given context. One of the two times I met Hutcherson was backstage at this ridiculous all-star benefit that I somehow found my way onto. In-between my five minutes of stage time and taking photos for Steve Turre, I found Bobby backstage and began to wax prolific about Out to Lunch (i.e., "You changed the way I see music," "It's one of my favorite records," etc. etc.). Bobby echoed something he had said in the press a while back (at the Blue Note sort-of reunion thing a while back, where Hutcherson played "Hat and Beard" in a Dolphian quartet with James Newton), which is that he couldn't believe he played so much on that record. It's weird--Out to Lunch is absolutely a maximalist album, but it has moments of tenderness and sublime rhythmic hookup that a lesser chordal improviser would have completely disfigured. Hutcherson was clearly still proud of that music, and it must have felt like a lifetime ago for someone who had left the sound of the 60's somewhere in the dust. That being said, anyone who heard Hutcherson in the last couple decades of his life could hear that he hadn't lost the soft impressionism of his youth (even though he often engaged with a virtuosic prolixity that was probably closer to Lionel Hampton than the stuff on Street of Dreams). The entirety of that man's work--"early" and "late"--stands as a monument to the power of the practice of music--or, rather, Bobby's music serves as a reminder that the very act of making music will both reward and renew itself.

Thanks for sharing, man--my first thoughts being (and my fault for reading this past midnight) (1) I feel gladdened that the Paris release has engendered some measure of press coverage and critical (re)assessment, and (2) I feel compelled to complain about this article (also my fault). There's a bit of narrative construction at work in Morris's article that I find questionable. I take no issue with a critic and/or theorist articulating some sort of conceptual bias when discussing music--I think this sort of thing can actually color and enliven the writing--so despite my feelings to the contrary, editorializing the playing of Grant Green is absolutely within rights. That being said, if a writer is going to introduce this sort of critical angle, I'd hope that amounts to something more substantial than avant-garde > soul jazz. That is the stuff of banality. Maybe I'm being harsh on Morris because I've been guilty of this sort of thing in my own writing, but as someone who loves both the "early" (and, in some regards, more mannered) Young recordings and the more ballistic Lifetime-era stuff, it seems evident to me that inside and outside are equal parts of Young's continuum. Young was not some sui generis genius that emerged Aylerlike upon the sub-popular consciousness--he was a kind of technical gradualist, and a big part of his magic resides in the fact that he was able to both absorb and reconfigure convention in ways that were compatible with a wide variety of contexts. The dude basically translated Trane onto soul jazz organ--reverse engineered Ayler, Stockhausen, and Hendrix into the "anachronism" of the organ trio. To put it another way--I challenge anyone to find a single full album where Young plays without either (a) some kind of harmonic form or (b) some kind of tempo or rhythmic feel. (Really--if this exists, I want to hear it.) Morris points to Unity as some kind of drastic overture to the dramatic tendencies of both energy music and Dolphy-an modernism, but that record operates within harmonic conventions that were already kind of old hat for Trane in '66, encompassing this spectrum from Monk to Giant Steps to Impressions but only barely nodding at the extreme textural freedoms of the '64-65 Impulse stuff. Yes, Of Love and Peace is crazier, but even that has a standard on it ("Seven Steps to Heaven")--even if the intent was to deconstruct and destroy "Seven Steps" (and I'd venture to say that it wasn't), the inclusion of a standard is only remarkable so much as it implies that Young cared enough in '66 to even question the utility of the harmonic form. That is very center of the aisle thinking in a year when Ayler was playing marching band music, Ornette was recording with his 10 year old son, and Coltrane was playing with Pharoah. (Incidentally, I've worked with Eddie Gale, and if you think that even that most radical wing of the avant-garde family tree was interested in completely dispensing with jazz convention, I can confirm that you are dead wrong.) I think a bigger and much more important thesis than "Larry Young changed the music forever!"--which yes, he did, but how and why--is "not only did Larry Young alter the mechanics of the Hammond organ for all time, but he also made some very timely and still widely unheralded statements about the nature of innovation v. populism in jazz." For real. I love Lawrence of Newark. That album is my shit--we listened to it on a loop on tour. But that album is hardly an "expansive summation of Young's free-form brilliance." It is technical and structured in a manner akin to the heaviest of 70's Miles and Mwandishi, drawing (too) from both afrocentric kosmigroov and Gypsy Sun and Rainbows-era Hendrix in liberal fashion. The record engages with psychedelic rock and presages hip-hop in both its textural complexity and commitment to rhythmic stasis. I'm no organ player and someone else can speak to Young's specific technical brilliance, but it's worth noting that Newark is (again) very modal in construction--and even as a keyboard player (here and elsewhere, like on the Woody Shaw session mentioned above) Young eschews Tynerian bombast and localizes his dynamism in the electricity of his instrument. Like Tyner, Young leans on pentatonic phrases and quartal harmonies, but they're remixed in real time by Young's insane drawbar facility. Lifetime is also my shit, and though I am deeply fond of Emergency, Turn It Over is absolute top of the heap stuff for me. The original mix is an absolute swamp, but it's beautiful for that in a There's A Riot Goin' On kind of way. Laswell's remix is another matter altogether--and were one inclined to dig deep enough into that, it might help both (a) validate the addition of Jack Bruce and (b) recontextualize the music as less free jazz or even proto-punk and more a hybridization of psych rock and more traditional organ trio conceits. For one thing, a lot of stuff got left on the floor that is waaaay closer in character to live Cream than either MC5 or Sun Ra. Bruce isn't there to play basslines--he's there to thicken the percussive texture of the band (in typical early 70's Bruce-ian fashion, the attack is overdriven and very hard). What is "Vuelta Abajo" if not a Tony Williams-ized, odd-metered take on the "Sunshine of Your Love"/"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" lineage of sludgy, semi-chromatic rock riffs? When Bruce is extracted, it's telling that the band lightens up and plays (as on the solo sections of "Allah Be Praised" or "Big Nick") these lithe, often swinging basslines--not so far removed from (*gasp*) the stuff Young was doing on Unity or Talkin' About! This is Jazz 101--"ancient to the future" stuff. (As an aside, I've often read Turn It Over as something akin to Muddy Waters's Electric Mud--a record yes, but also a sort of concept album whereby the musicians are both playing "at" genre as much as "with" genre. Lifetime has their screwed up, asynchronous bossa moment with "Once I Loved," their pithy Trane paean with "Big Nick," their self-consciously greasy and actually kind of ironic organ feature with "Allah Be Praised"--all funneled through this overloud psych rock bag.) The last and maybe most important note is something that gets brought up on this board time and time again, and that's that recordings don't tell the full story. Money doesn't either. The idea that a musician will go conservative --> avant-garde --> conservative again (but because of money this time) is a convenient narrative that is, while often right, also kind of incomplete. I'm a tremendous supporter of and participant in so-called "experimental" aesthetics, and I can't abide by the notion that an ineluctable shift toward progressivism is the logical outcome for all intelligent musicians, all things being equal. The supposedly regressive/passive/populist organ trio stuff was always a part of Larry Young's music--as was the exploratory--and it was arguably the synthesis of and interaction between these two poles that fostered his most exciting work.

Hey folks- I'm emerging from a period of relative inactivity out here to share some wild news: my art rock project Grex is touring the American West Coast for the entirety of June. I've (happily) met and encountered some of you at Grex jaunts in the past. This one is a little different--for the first time in something like five years, we're touring with the duo iteration of the band. We've expanded our arsenal from keys and guitar to a pretty strange multi-percussion setup--it's a "two man band" in the vein of Skeleton Crew, and we're excited to be tapping into that tradition of hybridized songs, psychedelic filigree, noise, and free jazz. More information here: http://www.grexsounds.com The dates: June 4, Joshua Tree, CA, 7pm at Beatnik Lounge (w/Ahead Change & Hive Minds) June 5, Long Beach, CA, 9pm at Que Sera (w/Celik Brothers & DJ Dank Steak) June 6, Los Angeles, CA, 8pm at The Mint (w/featuring Joe Berardi, w/Beyond Rare & The HiGrounds) June 8, Los Angeles, CA, 10pm at Hyperion Tavern June 9, San Diego, CA, 9pm at The Merrow (w/Nexus 4000 & Whelmer) June 10, Pasadena, CA, 8pm at Battery Books (featuring Dan Clucas) June 11, Long Beach, CA, 8pm at Rebel Bite (w/Nathanael and Frankie) June 14, Eugene, OR, 9pm at Old Nicks (w/Mood Area 52) June 16, Portland, OR, 9:30pm at Kenton Club (w/Alto!, Noah Bernstein) June 17, Seattle, WA, 7:30pm at Good Shepherd Center (Wayward Music Series w/Citizens Band) June 18, Portland, OR, 8:30pm at Turn Turn Turn (w/Toyboat Toyboat Toyboat, Bubble Cats) June 20, Seattle, WA, 7:30pm at The Royal Room (part of Father Daughter) June 23, Quincy, CA, at Main Street Sports Bar June 24, Sacramento, CA, at Gold Lion Arts (part of Gold Lion Festival) June 25, Berkeley, CA, 9pm, at The Starry Plough (w/3 Leafs, Dire Wolves) I'm especially excited to be playing with a couple of remarkable guests: ace journeyman Joe Berardi on percussion (6/6) and the remarkable LA trumpeter Dan Clucas (6/10). Also of possible (particular) interest to Organissimo people: we're sharing the bill with some of Seattle's best young improvisers at the longstanding Wayward Music Series (6/17), and with a murderers' row of creative musicians in Sacramento (6/24--featuring the great Stuart Liebig, bassist on Julius Hemphill's Georgia Blue). Lastly, a couple of samples: the first (Stump F***ers) is from the band's first run as a duo, the second (Mango Mango) from our current book. We can't wait to share this bizarre new version of the band with everyone.

This is a huge loss. I didn't know Marco very well, and even given a large volume of mutual friends, I only ever exchanged a handful of words with him. He seemed to be in the mode of "itinerant musician" by the time I got into playing music full time, so I only really heard and heard about him in passing--glowing, awed remarks from colleagues and echoes of his laser-focused alto in the interstices of the Bay Area scene. I fully admit that he was the kind of talent that I neither had the opportunity nor insight to truly appreciate in his time, which is positively gutting today (with so many friends--many of them my "seniors"--offering tributes and condolences on FB). In a more general sense, despite Marco's epochal work with the likes of Cecil Taylor, Peter Kowald, William Parker, Bill DIxon, and the legendary American Jungle Orchestra, he was somewhat unheralded outside of musician and hardcore improv circles. Part of this is regional--he spent so much time in the Bay Area, a perpetual press vacuum--part of this is the nature of playing uncompromising music in a fundamentally compromised epoch, itself saturated in compromised culture. Folks like Marco--the diehards, the warriors--may not be your heroes (or, rather, you may not know that they are your heroes), but they live heroic lives, surviving and thriving through sheer willpower, conviction, and--in defiance of every bullshit stereotype you might imagine regarding jazz and/or creative musicians--fundamental decency and staggering focus. If you want to celebrate folks like Marco, listen to his music, go see a live show, and spend some time digging into the unseen and unheard. The music is there--and I mean deeply, profoundly there--if you're willing to look.

To what Chuck said, I'll never stop being astounded by the degree to which some of "the cats" will go out of their way to make neophytes feel welcome. Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith, Myra Melford, Muhal Richard Abrams, Bobby Bradford, Andrew Hill, Oliver Lake, Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Lewis Jordan, Vinny Golia, Alex Cline, and a handful of others whom I've very irresponsibly "forgot" at the moment were all making valuable music decades (some roughly a half century) ago and must rank as some of the most decent professionals I've ever met. These were guys I grew up listening to, and they're all amazing folks now that I've passed onto the other side of the river. A special shoutout/tribute to guys like Roscoe, Fred, and Myra, with whom I was fortunate enough to study at length--I feel like it's important for artists who exist on the fringes to communicate not only practical skills but also a degree of philosophy. Those three--and folks like Francis, since we work together pretty frequently--were/are exceptional leaders for the fact that they make the people they are working with feel like their contributions are both necessary and important. For all the talk I hear about musicians haranguing/shaming their underlings into "greatness"--and we fetishize this in jazz culture, to a degree--it's really important to consider that you can achieve similar goals just by teaching your students both a measure of responsibility and the value of hard work.

You're right--that was a flip, offhand example on my part, and it doesn't hold water. That being said (and this is probably obvious), but getting reviewed in Pitchfork isn't really my point. Kamasi is playing Coachella and (less exciting but still remarkable in Bay Area terms) Noise Pop. It would be an unbelievable and improbable coup for Matthew Shipp to play a festival like that. (And I'd be very pleased if I'm wrong about this and somehow someone like Shipp has made it onto this circuit.) Let me pose an earnest question, since I'm really curious what informed, diehard jazz fans and musicians have to say about it (and not for the purposes of drinking the Kool-Aid one way or another): what would it take for Kamasi to be ok? I get it--the press and acclaim are disproportionate to his contribution to the canon. So to expand on the question above: who would be an "ok" alternative to Kamasi? Is the issue that this prefab messiah isn't "good enough," or that we neither need nor want one? Would it allay our collective internal frustration if we were talking about Meltframe or Break Stuff in lieu of The Epic? For my part, I would love to see critical and musical consensus crown a "next Coltrane"--in part because of the obvious musical considerations, in part because I've grown increasingly weary of contemptuousness. Every time someone like Kamasi spills into mainstream consciousness (The Bad Plus, Badbadnotgood, VIjay Iyer, etc. etc.), the jazz community will be quick to say, "This has been done before, but better." At the same time--and like clockwork--we see articles, blog posts, Facebook rants, etc. about jazz's dwindling audience and economic unviability. Jazz culture is protective of its past in a way that is depressingly compatible with its own ossification and obsolescence. It's "ok" to hold the opinion that the Bad Plus are hacks for playing pop tunes, but it's completely self-defeating to then complain when Ethan Iverson attempts to engage with Billy Hart in a straightahead context. I've seen people herald obviously talented folks like Mary Halvorson or Tyshawn Sorey as next generation masters, but a big part of this has to do with deep and apparent connections to folks like Braxton, Roscoe, and Steve Coleman. Kamasi's music emanates from the same community that fostered the UGMAA's music. We complain when Kamasi plays Tapscott-ian jazz, but not when Halvorson engages with Braxtonian conceits? So I ask again--not in a rhetorical sense, but because I want to learn--what would it take for Kamasi to be ok? What are we waiting for, and is there a way that we can expedite the future for the art form/music that we want? Or have we (even more depressing, especially for young musicians) just a reached a point where we're circling the drain and someone uses the wrong plug?

I think it's important to note that the real estate that Kamasi presently occupies has almost nothing to do with the press (or lack thereof) given to the likes of Roscoe, Evan Parker, etc. Discussion of The Epic is often accompanied by intra-community hand-wringing about the economic, social, and cultural viability of jazz as an art form, when the marketing and performance of Kamasi's recent music has happened largely outside of traditional "jazz" channels. I don't think this is an instance of crossover success so much as it is a presentation of jazz tropes and ideas within the context of pop music infrastructure. I mean, he's on Brainfeeder (Flying Lotus's label). I imagine the marketing of this record isn't so different from something like FlyLo's "You're Dead!"--a legacy musician engaging with decades old mechanics, imbuing said mechanics with a modern sheen and nods to the zeitgeist. Actual crossover success--like getting an earnest Pitchfork review of a new Matthew Shipp album or something like that--is something else entirely, and it is absolutely beyond the scope of most of jazz's deeply insular promotional schema. As others have noted, interpenetration is virtually impossible without some external stimulus. Consider the notion that few people in the mainstream knew about Nels Cline before he joined Wilco. I trust that similarly few would have had impetus to listen to Kamasi prior to To Pimp A Butterfly. Putting this another way: it's arguable that the success of Star Wars did little to affect the mainstream popularity of Akira Kurosawa's movies outside of film students and hardcore fans. As someone who loves both Star Wars and Kurosawa, I recognize that the monumental success of the former in the West doesn't have anything to do with the lack of recognition for, say, Ikiru or Stray Dog. There's some mutual exclusivity at play--but, more importantly, we're talking about two different (but parallel) "things" made in different ways by different people for totally different audiences. "We" can still have our Sonny Rollins Village Gate boxed sets, and it's probably true that the existence of The Epic will neither negate nor reinforce this.

Well, again--I agree it's fruitless to compare folks who have attained this sort of "master seniority" status with the younger people in the trenches, but then (and I feel like this is implicit in both your statement and Clifford's) I feel like the methods of evaluating contemporary free jazz and free improvisation have very little to do with "traditional" jazz criticism or listening. If you can't use Roscoe or Braxton (or, for that matter, Boulez, or Luigi Nono, or Bach, etc.) as some sort of "objective" criteria, according to what standard are we even receiving this music right now? Speaking to what you said (i.e., "and which is shaped to address the very kinds of questions you raise")--I feel like this in some way applies to all contemporary experimental music insofar as that music participates in this lineage that can be traced back to early free jazz and 20th century new music (whether that be the New York School, Darmstadt, or whatever). We're officially living in a "post" era, and this is evident in not only explicitly postmodern improvised music (from the likes of Zorn or Eugene Chadbourne--going on like four decades worth, at this point) but also with folks like Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Vijay Iyer, etc. etc. So in a way, it's unfair to compare this music to the undiluted restructuralism of an Ornette (or, for that matter, a Braxton or Roscoe). At the same time, this is what I meant (above) about stuff like the burden of history. Like Clifford (very acutely) says, being a thirty year old jazz musician in 2015 is nothing like it was in the 60's or 70's. We're not only confronted with the burden of creating anything new, but we're also struggling with the responsibility of accumulated knowledge. Improvisers coming up now are forced to deal with a glut of sorted information that is easy to access. The challenge is in digesting, reconstituting, and re-creating. So yes, it's absolutely unfair to compare Laubrock with Braxton, because the social and cultural inputs are very different. At the same time, there is no explicit model for the music of the 21st century. It is either/both being created or has not been created yet. It is somehow "not enough" to be a Braxton clone, but I'm hard pressed to identify many new creative modalities in the lineage of jazz improvisation since the 1980's--and, moreover, thirtysomethings don't have a Bird, Coltrane, Braxton, or even Steve Coleman to rally around. Kamasi Washington is 34 and (by reputation--on these boards) is adding nothing new to the Coltrane continuum. Vijay Iyer is 44 years old and an icon of sorts, but even he is often preoccupied with digesting the repertoire and rhythmic mechanics of much older music. This plays more directly into what Allen says (and thank you for the kind words, Allen)--I think it really is up to contemporary improvisers to create their own frame(s) of reference. In a self-critical and peer-critical sense, however, I feel like the possibilities therein are absolutely endless, and I also hear so few people who are willing to push their own boundaries in really exciting--maybe stupid, maybe unsuccessful, but also creative--ways. I think that the jazz continuum (in a historical sense, if not a technical sense) is still alive and densely populated with very talented players and composers--but I also think that it hasn't pushed itself hard and wild enough in the 21st century for it to have had any big, "boundary breaking" moments.

Actually, I'm saying that she does use climaxes in that way--or at least she did in this video. In the examples I cited, the multiphonics/skronk happen at the literal climax of the piece(s)--they both end shortly thereafter. I agree, though, that it's fruitless to be setting up Laubrock as some sort of straw person to rage against--she's too good of a player doing work that is much too interesting. The issue to me is more the broad strokes, as you mention--the nature of repetition, its place in improvised music, and the role of composition and tradition in offsetting (or possibly reinforcing) predictability. I agree that Messrs. Frith, Mitchell, and Braxton all repeat themselves a lot, but the nature of this repetition is fluid. To paraphrase Ornette, it's ok to repeat yourself, but you have to mean something different every time. Part of the nature of improvisation in the advent of the AACM and EFI is the organization and (sort of) codification of technical knowledge--there's a little bit of this in Forces in Motion, and it's a little more thorough in the Tri-Axium Writings (I know about this firsthand from Frith and Mitchell because, as I can't seem to shut up about, I studied under both of them). Guys of this caliber are hardly the only purveyors of "good" applied technical knowledge, but the difference I see is a degree of consistency, facility, and surprise in their ability to apply a set of recurrent tools to different contexts. For example--there's a pretty fixed shape to most versions of Nonaah--it's a loose sonata form that tends to get organized into statement/subdued improvisation/explosive improvisation. The tools that Roscoe has used have surely varied over time, and even the motivic material is different from performance to performance (the infamous solo Nonaah on Nessa doesn't really sound like the Art Ensemble version, and the chamber, guitar, and sax quartets all sound different). I think this is kind of the point. Even though the macro processes are sort of fixed, the actual content is widely variable. When I listen to an iteration of Nonaah, I'm hearing the gradations of difference within the nexus of two entities (i.e., Roscoe and the composition "Nonaah.") In other words, the same information "means" something different every time. As you note, there's something fundamentally hazardous about improvising in general, and even those who avoid rote forms of "technical application" will have to take other creative risks. I rage against the "aggressive climax" thing discussed above because it's easy and a little manipulative, and this really comes from the part of me who strives for creative spontaneity but sometimes/often succumbs to the lure of easy gestures. This plays into a broader conversation that I've had with a few folks on this board in the past few years, which is something like, "If you can't say it your own way, what is the point of saying it?" This is most definitely where composition comes in for many folks, and I think this is also what makes a guy like Roscoe tick: the improvisation is predicated on either explicit compositional organization or a compositional sensibility. On an extremist/personal level, I don't think there is any point to composing for an improviser other than to provide information that will help shape or reframe said improviser's playing. Returning to my aimless rant above, this is why I love Out to Lunch so much--it's the only one of Dolphy's recordings to sound like that, and (as such) it's maybe our only window into a very particular aspect of Dolphy's genius. Out There, Last Date, The Illinois stuff, the Five Spot stuff, etc. are all excellent--but on Out to Lunch, Dolphy sounds less like a piquant iconoclast and more like an extraordinary harmonic voice (suddenly) in command of his element.

I want to preface this by saying that (1) I'm multitasking like an idiot and arranging the Star Wars theme for a guitar quartet, so this may come out addled, and (2) I actually have no issue with Laubrock's playing--my sentiments above were largely just addressing what (as Allen notes) seems to be some (possibly vague) causal relationship between the vestiges of jazz showmanship and an undercurrent of predictability in energy saxophone. I also want to preface these sentiments by saying that I have nothing but respect for Rainey and Laubrock as both improvisers and technicians, and there's a ton of nuance, ebb and flow to the video I link to above. I actually saw this duo at a local series in Oakland not too long ago, and it was quite strong. Also, I have admittedly mixed feelings about dissecting an improvisation as a "finished" work of art, since--while I acknowledge that this is kind of a necessary practice for anyone who improvises these days--too much of this is what led me to work and think in alternate idioms for the bulk of my adult life. Also, I'm too young and fresh to be an expert at this, but I am "in the shit"--so: That being said, if you identify the aspects of this (live, not for the record) duo performance that stand out as particularly unique or conceptually enticing, you (the universal "you," not David or Allen or anyone in particular) will probably argue for the interstitial material at around 5:00 or the beginning of the second improv. As far as I'm concerned, this is because it disabuses itself of any sort of thanatal urge to "complete" itself--it's exploratory and fundamentally textural in nature, and the sorts of effects that these cats are getting (I'm thinking of the really articulate cymbal work at the beginning of improv #2, paired with the really pithy melodic abstractions--around 12 mins or so) can ride for hours. As a free improviser, this is meat. You know how you sometimes go to three deep concerts--excellent bills--but the headliner is just in another universe? That's akin to the feeling I get when listening to someone like Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, or Braxton--eminent patience, control, and comprehension of both short game details and long form organization. If you listen to Roscoe's less frequently discussed solo work--like the vaporous and seemingly incessant The Flow of Things, or his actual "solo" records--there's a striking obliviousness to the sort of "overt" signaling you can identify in, say, an Eric Clapton solo. You know when Clapton (even/especially early Clapton--of the still very good Cream vintage) is going for the kill shot. Roscoe may be playing a lot of stuff for a long period of time, but he is 99% of the time absolutely unpredictable--or when he is (like on the epic Ohnedaruth solo on Phase One), it's so immaculately and unconventionally paced that it doesn't matter that you could see the end coming from a mile away. Contrast this with Laubrock at around 8:30 or around 24 minutes. The build up is very obviously telegraphed. There's a lot of motivic and melodic information flying by really fast, and this type of playing is not easy to do--but it is arguably predictable, and anyone who listens to a ton of this music can detect this phenomenon when it's happening. Keep in mind that the improvs/pieces end not long after the markers I noted--it's just a hair away from "the end is near, guys--big finish!" (I will say that Rainey is obviating this with some really crazy shit in that second example in particular--most guys would probably just go into full barrel Rashied Ali mode at that point--but Rainey is a fucking pro.) Again, these are just my impressions, and Rainey and Laubrock are top drawer technicians as far as this sort of thing is concerned--so who am I to talk? I will, however, note that sitting through hour after hour after hour of free music that follows parameters of predictability--the same endings, the same interstitial textures, the same cymbal harmonics, the same episodes of altissimo ecstasy--can be absolutely numbing. It's just as whack as listening to lame straightahead jazz, and the music is (arguably) just as conventional. At this point in my life, I'd rather listen to either total chaos or someone who just refuses to play by the basic rules--i.e., masters in this form (like Roscoe, or guys like Weasel, whose music is fucking nuts and very cognizant of the sort of ennui that I mention.)

Not to bogart this conversation, but some of the guys who might fit this description: the aforementioned David Murray, Pharoah, Frank Wright, Noah Howard, Peter Brotzmann, Willem Breuker, Wayne Shorter circa the Jazz Messengers, Jim Pepper, sometimes Michael Brecker, and Jon Irabagon. I have a few really good friends and playing partners (at least semi-well known) who fall into this category. The thing is, I actually like all of these guys and I'd venture to say that many of the folks on here do, too (I mean, a huge chunk of Ascension and Machine Gun are predicted on this kind of thing)--it really does just come down to context in a lot of circumstances. On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, Arthur Doyle heats up almost instantly and strays in these ungodly frequencies for like forever. Repent-era Charles Gayle, too. I know Doyle has gotten a ton of flak on these boards, but I actually admire the guy for how much of a diehard he is. In other words, part of me feels like if you're listening to Black Ark for a meticulously constructed Wayne solo--or even something more incendiary, albeit with supreme technical control (ala Roscoe Mitchell)--you're better served just digging into something else.

Well, manipulative showboating and general ennui are two completely different improvisers' problems. As per what Steve said, Murray gets brought up pretty frequently w/regard to overly emotive/overripe soloing, though I'm actually a fan of this approach in context; Murray's soloing is often "aside from the point" in that it's framed by these vaguely neo-classicist arrangements. I see Murray as a pseudo-curator in a way--he has a Zornian knack for assembling these unbelievable bands that he just happens to be shunted into. Dudu Pukwana is a player of much higher repute in improv circles (admittedly, one of my favorite altos) who operates in a similar fashion--the difference is that he manages to deconstruct these sorts of overheated blues inflections into solo constructions that might be considered circuitous or even non-narrative. The overall effect can be pretty shocking: I love Pukwana's solo (the second horn solo--IIRC, both Tchicai and Pukwana are playing alto on this one) because it's comprised of all of these clipped, decontextualized jump blues and mbaqanga phrases. There's even this gaping hole before the tutti/shout chorus thing. There is no linear objective here--it's just perpetually there--not building, not receding, just there. It's a harsh, bloody version of what Dolphy was doing with these more meticulously constructed, tonally complex solos. This is the reason that, despite the very specific inflections and mannerisms, I could listen to the Blue Notes guys for literally hours at a time. Contrast this with what we talked about above. I've heard/read Allen rage about a lot of contemporary improvisers, and while I could never speak on his behalf and probably don't understand the full throttle of it, I can get to a lot of what he's saying. Sometimes there's the overripe soloing, but it's framed within these weakly constructed, relentlessly non-dynamic burnout improvs. Murray does this some times--thirty or so minutes of "troughs and valleys," this relentless cycle of peaking and recession. Alternately, you can have a meticulously constructed group sound and arrangement but soloing that lacks dynamic punch or emotional logic. Sometimes you can have both--hours of unrelieved, relatively static rhythmic section playing with relatively dull free association scattered on top of it. I saw a trio of musicians play Yoshi's a couple of years ago (I'll refrain from naming names, because when it gets this dicey, I'd rather rag on concepts rather than people), and it was actually the most boring free jazz I'd heard up until that point--players of international repute, and undeniably the most uninspired episode in a program rife with local musicians. At one point, Marshall Allen (no stranger to either interesting contexts or emotionally aggressive playing) actually thrust his bell into the piano player's ear and starting exploding--the entire room seemed to go up in flames, and the improvisation transitioned from tortuously dull to positively electric. I don't think there's anything wrong with playing to a room, engaging with an audience, and playing creative music with a visceral edge. Guys like Dudu did this all the time--and there are folks who are still absent form a lot of the "big" narratives who will not get their say on this account (Rahsaan Roland Kirk, for one). In fact, I think that in our ascent/descent into the realms of art music, we've thrown out a ton of stagecraft babies with the proverbial bathwater--and I'm often left thinking that, if/when we are to "evolve" as an art, why emotional detachment (however it may sound--furious or, well, nonplussed) is suddenly an affirmative quality. I mean, speaking to what Steve said, guys like Weasel play some of the most legitimately dangerous live improvised music around. Mostly Other People Do the Killing, despite the controversy, understands both the art of inciting furor and stagecraft. Yes, of course--in a music that has had room for Bill Evans as well as, say, Hank Jones, there will always be room for both Vijay Iyer and Alexander Von Schlippenbach--but part of me will always wonder why, in this music that has its foundations in Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory, there is so much of a premium on antiseptic (if virtuosic) music.

Perhaps it has to do with their listening to other forms of music, in particular indie rock, punk or the like. Allen, I feel like this is a really interesting topic--it engages with a handful of issues that are "macro musical" but also of endemic concern to free jazz in particular. The genetics of free jazz are coded in more traditional mechanics (i.e., rhythm combo instrumentation, the dynamic between improvisation and composition, soloist v. accompanist, etc.), and I feel like the rub with a lot of music that gets lumped into this category concerns the degree to which said music is capable of undermining these more traditional considerations. I guess this is where EFI comes in, because it seems like the first music to get categorized under this (also) very broad banner seemed to confront these issues head-on. There are things like range, timbre, volume (and even things like directional sound--this is guitar player bullshit, and I'm sure many other kinds of amplified instrumentalists will be able to relate) that will serve to foreground or background certain instruments in a psychological sense, and I'm fascinated by the (even by modern standards) insane technical solutions formulated by the likes of the John Stevens, Derek Bailey, Paul Lytton, Toshinori Kondo, etc. Even guys who don't normally fall under this banner--like Fred Frith, Keith Rowe, or even Syd Barrett (all heroes of mine)--were dealing as far back as the 60's with considerations much more closely aligned with contemporaneous "new music" than American free jazz. I mean, when you get into Topography of the Lungs territory, you're know confronting this brave new world of textural organization--it's not just soloist v. rhythm section anymore. None of this is to say (and I speak also to my admittedly limited understanding of a lot of post-80's American free jazz and EFI, EAI, etc.) that the free music of an American lineage wasn't confronting these more convoluted problems in the past couple of decades--only that this does not seem to have ever been the foremost concern of free jazz as a loosely conglomerated entity. It's called free jazz--liberty from/of--with all of the positive and negatives that emanate from that continuum. For me (and returning, at last, to Allen's point), the big thing has to do with these "traditional" dynamics of tension and release. An occasional "point of contention"--and I'm surprised when it is, actually--is the relative merit of Out to Lunch with regard to the rest of Dolphy's discography. I (along with like 99% of the free music-loving population) swing closer to the "it's a masterpiece" line of thinking. The main triumph of that record, AFAIC, is the fact that it takes some of the greatest accompanists in the music (Davis/Williams), mixes them up with some of its preeminent soloists (Dolphy/Hubbard/Hutch), and spends around 40 minutes in this relentless upheaval of foreground/background. For my money, it is the best illustration of an attribute that always made Dolphy stand out from his peers: the solos don't peak. Listen again to Out to Lunch and try to identify a "best solo"--you might be able to articulate certain moments or episodes, but that record is not a soloist's album. Listen to Dolphy on most of his most extraordinary "soloist" features--from well-known stuff like his "Epistrophy" solo on Last Date and "Mendacity" to just totally obscure material like Mingus's "Hora Decubitus." Dolphy is a master of tension and release, with eminent control of his horn--but he also never goes for the cheap shot when it comes to solo construction. I feel like all soloists in the jazz tradition must be aware of the anxiety-inducing desire to "tell a story" or "grab the audience," etc., but it's at least arguable that many of the music's great soloists knew how to construct sequences of melody and structure that sound dynamic, developmental, and rovingly complex. This is why we celebrate Rollins or even guys like Clifford Jordan as soloists, but less (classic, Impulse! era) Pharoah--we think of Pharoah as a "total sound" soloist, but I feel like it's more than he's emanating from this continuum of barwalking powerhouses, always building toward these clear (but also somewhat predictable) climaxes. Ayler was a "climaxer," too--but recognize that he doesn't really enter this realm until the marching band music, when it's all about systematic building/release rather than free association per se. Guys like Rollins wouldn't be extraordinary were it not for the fact that they were (and are) fighting these small-scale battles against the tides of musical habit and embodied history. Keep in mind that this shouldn't serve as condemnation of Laubrock or Chapin, both of whom are surely capable of doing what I say Dolphy does above--but the more vindictive and self-critical musician in me understands soloing of the "slow build, then chaos" sort to be sort of irresponsible in light of all of the really innovative shit we've been exposed to in the last couple of decades. Yes, playing free jazz means dealing with the burden of history, but part of me also feels that this burden engenders responsibility--not going for the easy dynamics, sounds, and structures. Speaking again to Allen's point, when I hear so much music that sounds like this (and I'll freely admit to playing like this on occasion, and it's something that I'll of course always wish to work on), it can feel both lazy and emotionally manipulative.

YES. Incidentally (and in a circular fashion), I think I first heard about that album via Do the Math--Iverson pretty aptly described Richard Davis as a "rogue bassist." That record is in a lot of ways the epitome of what I'm talking about--it's sincere and direct "inside" music played with a daring sense of rhythmic logic. Or, rather, it's "total effect" music--there's plenty of elision of time, harmony, etc., but the band sounds like it is in dialogue with its own chaos, if that makes sense. I'm reminded a bit of this session: ...which is, like, "Maximum Richard Davis." There's this sludgy groove to his playing on the sharper, more classic stuff (the bands with Jaki Byard come to mind, as does his Blue Note work with Andrew Hill in particular) that verges on unhinged in 70's (also: Hill's Nefertiti). The best way I can think to describe it is that it's more about the existence of the bottom end rather than the definitive "clarity" of it. (As an aside, I know that Richard Davis was on Coltrane's short list of possible bassists, and I wonder if this attribute--i.e., the ability to play complex inside material with both dizzying liberty and absolute heaviness--was a big part of it.) I'm sometimes on the fence about "changes" music that either intentionally confounds or subsumes commitment to form, and I think that the debate over music of this sort is a weird sort of final frontier for jazz criticism. I definitely think that this stuff is more of a rhetorical trap for post-academic jazz than, say, Ornette or Ayler, where (in the latter case) you're dealing with fully-realized worldviews that don't even need to reference someone else's rules. It's like contemporary blues music; I think the tension for guys of a younger mold (myself included) is that we're so far removed from the historical circumstances of the music that we're now dealing with questions of legitimacy, validation, and valuation. In other words, if the OG cats aren't around to yell at you on the bandstand, who will be your overlord? (One) short answer is that we create our own overlords, which is akin to fabricating our own personal hell(s).

Ha, wow. I never thought of myself as a 'cat,' don't know about the rest of y'all. Having not posted anything for the past few weeks (and visiting only sporadically)--and then only learning about this thread via Do the Math--I feel like I just read a newspaper article about my apartment complex going up in flames. In terms of the Bee HIve stuff, I'm reminded of something I heard recently... paraphrasing, of course, but Herbie Hancock was saying that the classic Blue Note stuff presented a misleading picture of the music of that time period--that it was "perfect," when it was more ragged and exploratory on the bandstand. Something I love about the rise of independent record labels in the late 60's onward is that a lot more "wart-y" music seemed to get immortalized on wax. I'm sure a lot of this had to do with factors beyond my knowledge or awareness (in addition to obvious stuff like the rise of bass amplification, the prevalence of rock kits, the electric guitar, hazarding the post-Coltrane-era, etc.), but whatever the case may be, it's produced some of my favorite music. I spent the morning perusing the music discussed in this thread, and (incidentally) I've also been listening to a ton of Rahsaan and Strata-East-vintage pseudo-mainstream stuff. Dogma aside, stuff like Charles Davis's Ingia or the Charles Tolliver Slugs stuff just sounds so much closer to my experiences with tonal jazz in a pragmatic context than a lot of those (wonderful, immaculate) Blue Note dates. In a postmodern sense, that probably says more about my predilections and playing circles than it does about "the music," but I imagine there must be some sort of common reality to all this. All the talk about the Brignola album is right on--parts of "Donna Lee" are indeed fucked up and "wrong," but it's also feverishly exploratory and honest in a way that I think a lot of practicing musicians could probably identify with. I'm also reminded of that furor over this thing: Apparently JG loses the form for a little bit--exactly how and to what extent was in a ton of contention for a minute. IIRC, the two strains of thought were: (1) JG fucked up "All the Things You Are," which makes this a subpar document, and (2) who gives a shit? For my (very late to the party) part, this is a really roundabout way of trying to consider what these recordings are "as they are," rather than what they are not. I recognize the slippery critical slope of failing to evaluate music by quantifiable standards, and I think that our contemporary preoccupation with technical perfection has positives as well as negatives. At the same time--and in a muso-jerkoff-y sense--is there not some value in listening to 1978 Dave Holland (post-Braxton, still playing with Sam Rivers, early ECM) play with cats like Haynes and Brignola? Would this have been a "better" session with Sam Jones or Ron Carter or (even more chaotic, but definitely "in the idiom" and among that group of players) Richard Davis? After a while, it begins to feel a lot more like fantasy football than listening as an earnest endeavor, which is where I put my laptop on sleep and start running left hand exercises again.

Last one, I swear: Playing Brooklyn for a couple of hits in the next three days--Muchmore's tonight, Pine Box Rock Shop on Friday, Panoply on Saturday. After some miserable travel but some great music (especially in Arlington and Cambridge), psyched to be playing NY.