[Ikutaro Kakehashi, Engineer Behind Revolutionary Drum Machine, Dies at 87]

As a needs to/but doesn't need to be said aside in an RIP thread, I can't really listen to Afrika Bambaataa anymore without thinking of the sexual abuse allegations--the second saddest part (the first being self-evident) being that they've cast a gigantic pall over some monumental and innovative musical contributions. 

As per your point, Jim--you could match the rhythms with multiple drummers but not the timbres, but that's really beside the point--it's more a matter of "why would you want to?" There are many musicians in the 21st century who trade in live approximation of less synthetic hip-hop feels--the Roots, Badbadnotgood, Glasper's projects, and so on--and it's never exactly the same thing. 

Conversely, there's early use of drum machines in a lot of improvised music and out jazz (not necessarily, apropos of this thread, the TR-808), and it's often for sonic effect rather than to mask the absence of acoustic textures. See:

 

[Ikutaro Kakehashi, Engineer Behind Revolutionary Drum Machine, Dies at 87]

Not you. It was the implied conclusion of the one guy's statement that the drum machine has destroyed the beauty of Black Music forever.

I'm like, ok, no more beauty, what's left? "Pretty", I guess? Maybe?

I read sgcim's comment as sarcastic (hence the "robotic overlords" thing), fwiw. Jim, as per your initial comment, I very much agree--whatever the initial application of the 808, its operative use is as a musical "tool." I think that the mechanics and sonics of archaic drum machine sounds make it virtually impossible to argue that something like the 808 is either a suitable substitute or replacement for a "real drummer"--the two entities don't correlate any more than an electric bass correlates to an upright bass... possibly less even, like the relationship between CGI and oil painting.

The Zappa/Synclavier comparison is instructive but not quite the same, since the application of said instrument in Zappa's music was to perform music that was more or less unperformable at a certain time. I wish I knew more and hope to learn more about the topic, but the early application of drum machines in popular music was a little more complex--it had to do with economics as well as practical mechanical application.

The kind of percussion parts you get on an early Beastie Boys or Run-D.M.C. album would have been playable by a handful of gifted percussionists in the 1980s, but you're talking about music that might be (a) manufactured in the studio for the purposes of providing perfectly looped/quantized backing for music that was largely vocal in emphasis, (b) meant to accord with the sonics of a particular sort of performance practice, and (c) often performed (either live or in the studio) by a limited number of musicians/producers. Also, consider the 1977 New York blackout that was said to have catalyzed early hip-hop--legend has it that people were looting for turntables and mixers, and not--for whatever reason--drum kits.

As a total aside and not meant to reflect on any of the conversationalists here, each of whom I know deserves a great deal of respect--but while jazz as a sound and institution has my heart, very little jazz of this century has captured my imagination like the most creative music in other major genres, hip-hop and dance music included. I do think it's funny that this (very well educated and listened) jazz forum frequently lapses into discussions about the validity of decades old production techniques. It's as if we spend more time discussing what we should do rather than what we did and what we will. RIP Ikutaro. 

[Mystery session - Grachan Moncur & Karl Berger]

I'm glad you figured it out! If nothing else, this gave me the opportunity to check out this record again. 

[Mystery session - Grachan Moncur & Karl Berger]

I thought I recognized this--it's this:

Turns out it's valve trombone. Good ear on Karl Berger--before I figured it out, I was iffy on the trombone being Moncur--but Berger was unmistakeable. 

[Mystery session - Grachan Moncur & Karl Berger]

Berger on vibes (and not piano)? That instrumentation is quizzical, since it matches up to the Jackie McLeans and doesn't, to my recollection, recur much elsewhere. There is a Khan Jamal album from 2005 called Black Awareness that matches up, fwiw.  

New Wave in Jazz has a quartet w/Beaver and Cecil McBee + Bobby Hutcherson, but no alto.

New Africa is a quintet date that matches ensemble size, but it's piano and not vibes. 

The Marion Brown Caligs have Gunter Hampel on vibes, but trumpet and not trombone. 

There is the seldom heard/seen Shadows from the late 70's that has both Brown and Moncur but no vibes (just piano, played by Dave Burrell). 

My vote would be that it's either not Moncur or not Berger, the vintage is off, or it's possibly a bootleg of some sort.

[Who are you just discovering?]

4 hours ago, Steve Reynolds said:

Really listening to Fred Frith & Louis Sclavis on this awesome CD on Victo from 5/21/2000

"I Dream of You Jumping"

as good as free music gets - plus this percussion dude named Jean-Pierre Drouet - wow 

saw Frith for the first time last November and it was the best night of music for me of the whole year or decade?!?

My personal ties to Fred notwithstanding, I think it's difficult to overstate the importance of his contribution to a certain school of free improvising. Along with Keith Rowe, Derek Bailey, Sharrock, and a couple of others, he was one of the first dedicated and significant free players on electric guitar--and he was one of only a handful of guys to emerge from that late century wild west period of sheer invention with a series of technical innovations that have had a lasting technical impact--e.g., preparation, extended techniques, mechanics that enable sustain, alternative methods of amplification, textural improvisation, and so on. On a completely different level, I don't think I've ever met another guitarist with as complete a knowledge of practical sound production on the instrument--I had detailed conversations with the guy about Clapton and Bill Frisell. Dude is legit.

Fred's been touring with two really great friends of mine--bassist Jason Hoopes and Jordan Glenn (they also feature as the rhythm section for a sister band of ours--Jack O' the Clock--and I played with them in a Blood Count-type quartet called Host Family). Again, I can't listen to this music with any sort of impartiality, but some of the spaces that they get into are just in another universe. The group recalls Massacre, the heavier days of Material, and even a bit of Last Exit in a way that can't be done justice in words. They just released a record (called Another Day in Fucking Paradise): 

 

[Root Down -- Jimmy Smith Live!]

I love this record, though i recognize that a lot of its cache has something to do with its status among beatmakers (esp. Beastie Boys) and rare groove collectors. The thing that sets this one apart is that there's genuine spontaneity and momentum driving the period affectations, and I feel like it's more the apotheosis of this style rather than a cash in. Paul Humphrey is fucking unbelievable throughout, for one:

 

[Who are you just discovering?]

(1) In the interest of showing up for some (actual) new music, I just heard this duo project yesterday: https://jonbafus.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-earthtone

Full disclosure: Randy and Jon are friends of mine, and I'm also a huge admirer of both. Randy plays as part of the inimitable chamber improv quartet Bristle (also featuring saxophonist Cory Wright, who has been on a few of Grex's records), and Jon is drummer/leader of the Sacramento prog-punk-avant quartet Gentleman Surfer. (Gentleman Sufer is--like fellow Nor Cal band Hella--both immaculately structured and awesomely, calculatedly chaotic.)

The first and simplest way in which this music strikes me is that the drums are not playing in the obvious, now rote mode of Interstellar Space-era Rashied--the music is more harried and schizophrenic than that, though not in an ironic way (ala Zorn or some of the new Dutch music). The full spectrum of ideas suggests a more hectic version of the Evan Parker/John Stevens duo, if that makes sense. The last new duo I loved this much was (Seattle band) Bad Luck, which is itself a fully realized and completely unique variation on classic late Coltrane dynamics.

(2) You guys were not kidding about the Bill Barron material. Sheesh. I'm most familiar with The Tenor Stylings of Bill Barron--a record both quirky and conventional, buoyed by some deft interplay and some brief, fleeting moments of weirdness. I've also heard and own Tears for Dolphy, a record that I admit I should (and should have) spent more time with.

This week I finally got around to Barron's Motivation and Curon's and The New Thing & The Blue Thing. The Curson material of this vintage can be a little formulaic, and I mean that in the classic sense--a lot of it is structured around Mingus's ensemble and rhythm dynamics, but without the pliancy or surrealism that make the Mingus quartet stuff so exceptional. As players, though, Curson and Barron are tremendous.

Speaking of which, Jim is not overselling Motivation. It's that good. Barron has the rounded voice and voluptuous texture of a Texas tenor, but his phrasing and command of timbral improvisation recall Rollins or early Wayne. It is weird shit--like hearing Ayler on a Kenny Dorham record or something. The compositions, too, are genuinely strange--maybe more so for trying to accommodate the format and context of a "normal" hard bop ensemble. I think it actually suggests Joe Maneri in the superimposition of these darting, almost atonal lines over a texturally static rhythm section dynamic. It's the sound of anachronism, and it's aged hugely well--guys like Tony Malaby or even Mark Turner make bread out of music like this now. 

[Chuck Berry R.I.P.]

I for one can hear connections between T-Bone Walker's guitar playing and Chuck Berry.

But OTOH, how about drawing additional lines between predecessors like Pee Wee Crayton and Saunders King and their guitar styles leading towards Chuck Berry, maybe?

See his "Rockin' At The Philharmonic" (Chess 5121), for example.

That's a good call in terms of precedent, especially with Crayton--there is a very explicit relationship there in terms of phraseology and articulation:

Apropos of this, an old teacher of mine told me that the thing that had gotten lost in translation with Berry's imitators and successors after the 1950's was the swing feel. A prototypical Berry rhythm part is a blues shuffle ratcheted up to a frantic tempo, and like you suggest, there's some interstitial material there with R&B and (again) jump blues and swing. There's a tendency to even out the eighth notes at fast tempi, and a couple of decades removed, the performance practice of the music is abstracted from its origins. Then you get this:

And that's not a knock on Hendrix, who was his own kind of genius and the genuine article in a crowded field of fannish practitioners--it's only a commentary on the fact that, somewhere down the line, rock music-as-homage had played enough telephone to nearly divorce itself from the sort of antecedent practices and concepts were at the root of music like Chuck's. It's weird, too, because guys like Hendrix were reforging ties with jazz and entrenching themselves in blues and R&B in a classicist sense. 

When I say there's a wider breadth between T-Bone and Chuck than between Chuck and Hendrix, I refer more to what later rock musicians took from Chuck rather than what Chuck took from his predecessors. That's not to diminish the very clear ties with guys like Crayton--and I wish I knew more about the intermediate stages of black popular music than I do--so much as to draw attention to the fact that, like guys like Bird, the Beatles, or, yeah, Hendrix, Berry was as much (or more) the first of a new breed rather than part of a definitive continuum. 

[Chuck Berry R.I.P.]

Sad to hear this, though (like many) astonished that he was still with us in the 21st century. I was just the other day teaching a kid how to play Johnny B. Goode, and the process illustrated to me how the basic mechanics of rock guitar have retained a kind of root integrity for over half a century now. A lot of Chuck's playing is turbocharged blues, jump blues, hillbilly, and swing vocabulary consolidated into something both faster and slicker, but there may very well be a wider berth between Chuck and, say, T Bone Walker than there is between Chuck and Hendrix. You can draw straight line from Berry to Hendrix to the MC5 to the Sex Pistols to the Pixies to Deerhoof or Queens of the Stone Age or whatever even exists right now. I know I'm playing that shit. 

Berry's own music is a remarkable historical achievement, but I can't fathom the notion of imprinting yourself on an instrument so completely that the basic genetics of your vocabulary get passed down to kids who don't even know your name. That's both a legacy and a service--though the capital letter Important stuff should not undercut the fact that the dude wrote and played some straight up bad shit. 

[Misha Mengelberg RIP]

1 hour ago, clifford_thornton said:

me too.

Dolphy was a major figure in the development of modern jazz, but that doesn't mean that musician x, y or z has to like what he does. Last Date is an excellent record, yet it's also clear that Misha occupied a different zone with respect to saxophonists/reed players. As obstinate as he was, Misha seemed to prefer regular playing partners/groups and Dolphy, as structured as his improvisations and tunes were, might've seen this more as a blowing session opportunity. I got the feeling that Misha felt underestimated in this environment, so he threw a monkeywrench into the proceedings with "Hypochristmutreefuzz." I don't mind a healthy dose of absurdism/making fun/etc in my music and art so the games he played with the Dutch public (many out of the neo-Dada/Fluxus environment) -- even if some might've resulted in thumbed noses -- aren't things that I would find offensive.  Mostly, it resulted in music that I find endlessly rewarding.

First off, RIP Misha. I have a deep love for the Dutch innovators even if I came to much of that music through other channels (particularly South African and German music with which the ICP folks shared so much interstitial material). The latter day orchestra was largely responsible for acclimating my family to the notion that their son would be playing music for a living, my mother accompanying me to (first) a handful of colorful performances at the Guelph festival and (second) a pretty daring night at Yoshi's in Oakland.

I'm not sure if you could call either Misha's absurdist impulses or his penchant for sideways revivalism "populist" in any way, but I do think that these tendencies went and still go a long way toward normalizing the sometimes extremist practices of EFI. I used to play with a bass player who (in turn) used to play with Bennink, and said bass player scoffed when I used the word "virtuoso" to describe Bennink. I see where my bass player friend was coming from, but at the same time I do think that the ICP's inclination toward swing era grotesquerie and surreal showmanship does have a bit of virtuosity to it (in much the same way that Rahsaan Roland Kirk did).

Again, the superimposition of hard abstraction over overt idiomatic performance does huge work reframing Dutch free improvisation and experimentalism in a way that just isn't present in, say, the contemporary English or even German music--and, in Misha's case, it does a tremendous job of making both the more "inside" and more roving moments seem weirdly (and I use that word carefully) earnest. Who's Bridge is successful in a way that a lot of other idiomatic records waxed by free improv masters are not. 

As for the Dolphy connection--the hookup with the Dutch guys went only so far as the shared surrealist tendencies and the extreme stretching of swing and bebop vernacular. I think the big difference is that Dolphy never really sounds comical (or, rather, that Dolphy seems extraordinarily devoid of irony), whereas the Dutch guys always sound like they have a degree of self-awareness. I do think that Dolphy's level of self-seriousness is the reason that he could record something like Out to Lunch and make it sound truly, incontrovertibly valid, but it's also the thing that fosters this tremendous divide on Last Date. When they play "Epistrophy," Dolphy is playing the distorted image of a continuum that he had some active participation in; the Dutch guys are more "talking about" that continuum, and they never really intersect so much as subsume their respective personalities into some weird compromise (e.g., "You Don't Know What Love Is"). Compare with Mingus's European recordings and the tonal distinction is remarkable--Dolphy is actually something close to humorous in Mingus's music, and I think it's because both Dolphy and Mingus are able to engage with a degree of anger and caustic wit that probably had something to do with, well, being a Black American of a certain era.

[Long Shot.... Looking For Black Unity Trio - Al-Fatihah]

I agree that it's a bit of a false equivalency to the degree that the investment in recording inputs isn't quite the same thing as spending on recording output, but I do hear what Chuck is saying, at least in a private press/self-release sense.  

A digital only release where the musicians are the initial investors (i.e., you're not paying session fees because the artists are fronting the bread) can be done for pennies on the dime today. You can get professional level 2 track recording + digital mastering for under $600. After that, straight to bandcamp. If you're using bandcamp pro ($10/mo) you can even send out digital review copies without having to pay postage. The only unaccounted for expenses in this scenario are (1) time (including rehearsal/practice time and/or facility rental, though many working musicians will have already invested in one or the other) and (2) any possible design work.

As a longtime fan of classic free jazz/improvised music/creative music--and as an active participant in contemporary music that shares a lot of interstitial material with the classic stuff in question--I think that it's important to consider the degree to which things like press and historical fetishization alter our perspective on what constitutes a successful recording. I hear a lot of terrible improvised music these days but also a lot of truly extraordinary stuff that virtually no one--by virtue of geography, listener interest or initiative, and (again) press--will ever get to hear.

I know that it's sort of stock-in-trade for musicians to champion their regional communities, but I've been in and out of love with the practice of this music for decades now and I will gladly throw relatively untouted WC artists like Wiener Kids, Black Spirituals, Bad Luck, Beep!, Francis Wong and the like up against absolutely anything recorded in the past several decades barring the upper tier of material by acknowledged masters. Records like Nonaah or Derek Bailey's Aida are still pretty untouchable in their genres, but it's (again) important to consider that new musicians are trying and have been trying to generate new genres every day for the past, I don't know, eternity. 

[Harry Miller_Different Times Different Places Volume 2]

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. 

[Remembering Albert Ayler at the London School of Economics in November 1966]

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." 

[Rudy Van Gelder interview from 1995]

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.

[Rudy Van Gelder interview from 1995]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

About Madlib...the thing that really struck me about the Yesterday's New Quintet stuff was that it had all the noises and shapes of a jazz record without hardly having any of the literal notes, like this what jazz probably sounds like to a lot of people who like it, and even more who don't.  I thought it was brilliant insight to make sounds like that, to take all the music out of the music and still have the music left over. That cuts to the chase a zinkabahillion times more than all the literalist reiterations combined.

Maybe that's not his point, but that's what I got out of it

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.

[Rudy Van Gelder interview from 1995]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

But as somebody who does, occasionly yet ongoingly, listen to local hip-hop radio, commercial and community access, just because  Black Radio is something that has never not been a part of My Jazz Awareness, I feel very strongly when going from a day or two of K104 to KNTU that I've been taken from the streets, paved with fool's gold that they may often be, and placed in some world that no longer exists except by some type of unnatural intervention, endless iterations of That Same Thing, only "cleaner" in EVERY way, it's just creepy, especially when the occasional REAL That Thing gets played...it's like trotting out animatronic POWs or some shit,  I don't know. But I can handle local hip-hop radio better and for longer than I can handle local jazz radio. Right now, though, between the Desi stations and the 50 Bajillion Spanish stations that each play a seemingly different variety of THAT Same Thing, hey, why stay too long anyplace where the food's not fresh?

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. 

[Rudy Van Gelder interview from 1995]

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). 

[Rudy Van Gelder interview from 1995]

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).

[Material - Seven Souls Remixes]

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. 

[Bobby Hutcherson RIP]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

I dig the minor, insignificant work, just because as hard as it is to be great, it's possibly even harder to never coast or phone it in or do anything but show up and be happy on the job when the job does not involve the pursuit of greatness. That's when big ears and big heart will combine, not combat, and then make the difference.

God bless a player, whoever, wherever, whatever.

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. 

[Bobby Hutcherson RIP]

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. 

[Larry young In Paris]

5 hours ago, BFrank said:

Nice piece: How Larry Young Changed The Shape Of Jazz

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.

[Grex (Duo) "Overture" Tour, Summer 2016]

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.

 

 

 

[Marco Eneidi (1956-2016)]

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.