ep1str0phy

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.

I admit, I haven't spent as much time with "iconic thug rocker" Chris Spedding, though I enjoy much of what I've heard. There was a beef mentioned in the Jack Bruce biography regarding Spedding's alleged distaste for the more complex/less-accessible music that he was playing prior to his "turn" to more explicit rockisms (I'd grab the quote, but I don't have the book in front of me), but Spedding has made it clear in subsequent years that he didn't intend to decry the music he made with Jack. (Though he apparently despises Songs Without Words, for the reasons mentioned above.) For pre-Motor Bikin' Spedding, the aforementioned Ricotti and Westbrook albums are great, as are his contributions to Nucleus. For my money, though, his playing on both Songs for A Tailor and Harmony Row is some of the clearest, most organic playing in the jazz-rock/prog/fusion canon. The Battered Ornaments stuff is more all over the place and messy, but (due to internal baggage) he makes most of the major vocal (and many of the instrumental) contributions to Mantle-PIece, and it's kind of a low-intensity classic. I think the synergy with Pete Brown was real and exciting, and it gave Spedding's semi-primitivist Curtis Mayfield/Hendrix shtick some real contextual heft.

Spedding is one of my absolute favorite guitarists (due in large part to his participation on Jack Bruce's early solo projects + The Battered Ornaments--whose two proper albums rank among the more idiosyncratic blends of free jazz and rock). This record has been a holy grail of mine for ages, despite the fact that Spedding has sort of disavowed it--I will most definitely be checking this out.

Ha--thanks, folks! We're officially out East and ready to hit: playing Philadelphia tonight in advance of the Papal Hysteria, DC tomorrow and Arlington on Sunday. We'll of course be bringing our A game. Cheers and libations, of course, to any Organissimo folks we meet on the way!

Hello, all- I'm breathlessly excited to be announcing that Grex--my Oakland-based trio--will be hitting the East Coast for a special run of dates (split between NY, DC, Virginia, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.) We've entitled the tour Electric Ghost Parade. The music we're taking on tour with us--none of which has been played on the East Cost before--is different from the stuff we've done in the past. A lot of the process of creating this music has centered on confronting our "creative apparitions"--the "big" stuff that a lot of outre jazz, rock, and electronic music is beholden to. When at first we thought we'd be consumed by the catastrophic burden of "creating something new," we've come to rejoice in the process. (Hence the "parade.") So we're proud to be bringing this fresh slew of music--which jousts and/or battles, in phases, with everything from Enemy-era Sonny Sharrock, Are You Experienced Hendrix, Surfer Rosa Pixies, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, J Dilla's Donuts, and Deerhoof--out East. For fans of interesting "local music" of all stripes: we have some pretty killer bills in order, featuring some genuine underground powerhouses. So it's "art rock" or "post jazz" or whatever, but more than anything else, I'm proud of it and it's fun. If I catch any Organissimo folk when I'm out on tour, beverages are in order. Details: TOUR DATES Sept. 24, Philadelphia, PA, 8pm at AUX Space (Fire Museum Presents, w/Superlith, George Korein & the Spleen) Sept. 25, Washington, DC, 9pm at Velvet Lounge (with Chester Hawkins, Plums) Sept. 27, Arlington, VA, 9pm at Galaxy Hut (with Lost Civilizations) Sept. 29, Montclair, NJ, 9pm at Meatlocker (with PA Angelo, Ghypsee and the Wichts, et al.) Sept. 30, Cambridge, MA, 7pm at Lilypad (with Kenne Highland of the Gizmos, Fable Grazer) Oct. 1, Brooklyn, NY, 9pm at Muchmore’s (with Weasel Walter/Chris Pitsiokos Duo, Andrew Barker Trio, Max Jaffe/Brandon Seabrook/Tim Dahl) Oct. 2, Brooklyn, NY, 9:30pm at Pine Box Rock Shop (with Young Nudist, Aaron Novik's Abebbe (w/Ava Mendoza, etc.), Marc Edwards & Slipstream Time Travel) Oct. 3, Brooklyn, NY, 8pm at Panoply (Brooklyn Experimental Song Carnival, with Naked Roots, et al.) Listen to Grex: http://grex.bandcamp.com More Info: http://www.grexsounds.com

Well, I don't disagree with either of you guys. Reductionist analysis is dangerous at every stage--is that not what Jost is doing to an extent? The Free Jazz book is predicated on effective myth busting--i.e., yes this stuff is fire-y and dense, but there is a logic and calculation to it that cannot be denied. I imagine that this was a fresh and maybe even controversial perspective at the time that the book was initially published. What I find invidious about Jost's argument is the notion that analysis of this kind somehow "validates" the likes of Ornette, Trane, Ayler, etc. This sort of canon baiting is self-defeating; it's like the anecdote about Monk playing complex pieces of classical piano music. Yes, but what? Is Monk reducible to a Chopin quote? Or are there other (additional) factors at play? I definitely flinch at the talk of "fire music" and "angry black free jazz"--because it's clearly not the whole story. And I agree that if music is pigeonholed into a long and endless narrative of political struggle, it loses quite a bit of its identity--it's important (again) to note that much of this music (Ornette, Trane, Ayler, etc.) makes no explicit political arguments. But just because we're moving into an era of narrative complexity doesn't mean that we must or should lose the scope of political undercurrent (not to mention mythological esotericism) that does underpin a lot of this historical music. I mean, Skies of America is not just Ornette's big concerto grosso--it's also a bunch of his compositions strung together, and it's also an intended convergence of black rhythm and western art music methodology, and it's also a rumination on America both ugly and beautiful, etc.

Jost's Free Jazz is simultaneously an essential historical document, an invaluable resource for a music that has too seldom been examined with any sort of technical rigor, and semi-dogmatic bullshit that furthers some profoundly dated conceptual (and, at its worst, racial) bias. I pulled out my copy just to look at the agonized notes that 19-year-old scribbled in the margins: "Ugh." "This is an oversimplification." "Jost is really grating on me." In retrospect, the book is important in that it's a rare musicological study of early free jazz amidst a staggering glut of rote historical documentation and sociopolitical analyses. (As an aside, I'd argue that As Serious As Your Life, Mr. Litweiler's The Freedom Principle, and maybe the Kofsky and a couple of LeRoi Jones books are "essential" reading to this effect, notwithstanding the relevant bios of Ornette, Trane, Sun Ra, the AACM, etc.) The very thing that makes Free Jazz an interesting document in and of itself is the fact that it interfaces with and comments on the historical understanding of free jazz as that genre of music was being formulated. Pertinent to our discussion of Scott's book, Free Jazz always suggested to me a dual-pronged question: (1) why don't more people think about free jazz (or much black music) in this way, and (2) does free jazz (or much black music) even need to be assessed by these standards? The worst offenders are the AACM and Sun Ra chapters. Jost makes an effort to think about this music in an objective sense, but it's with these more mythical aesthetic systems that the author's closeness to the continuum of "Western Art Music" analysis fails him. He can't go more than two paragraphs without saying something abstractly dismissive: referring to the sophisticated use of small percussion as "undifferentiated clanking and jingling," hatchet jobbing Braxton, belittling Sun Ra's conception as beholden to an "imaginary "cosmic" force" (the word cosmic is in quotation marks in Free Jazz), and so on. In short, Jost is OK applying rigorous methods of tonal (and new music-derived) analysis to the stuff that is more quantifiable--Ornette heads, the shape of a CT improvisation, the interconnected-ness of Don Cherry's BN suites--but he shies away from confronting the (then) newer, more abstract creative principles on their own terms. You can literally see (i.e., read) the generation gap in Jost's book. I recently had a discussion with a friend about how there's still difficulty teaching hip-hop in institutions, due in part to extra-institutional/personal biases on the part of the students--i.e., "Isn't hip-hop just frivolous, fun party music?" (well, yes, maybe it is--but the frivolity underpins some very real social and aesthetic traditions and considerations). Jost plays into this: at the veeery end of the Sun Ra chapter, he gives us this nugget: "On the one hand, there are passages that presumably could not be played by anyone but a jazz musician. The decisive criterion - as always - is the rhythmic substance..." This is the same tired, racialized bullshit that has prevailed in jazz scholarship since time immemorial: the implication here is not just that "they're jazz musicians, so they have rhythm," but rather that Sun Ra's complex system of afrocentric futurism is in some way reducible to "well, they have natural rhythm." Uhhhh... Going back to the Saul book, this is what I mean when I say that the music has some symbolic value that transcends its literal value. While it's both necessary and relevant to examine the music independent of its rhetoric and political pressures, it's equally important to confront the music as a composite that operates on its own terms. If Archie Shepp says that Attica Blues is about, well, Attica, well shit--then it is; it's also about the convergence of soul, rock, and jazz and the conservative turn in free jazz post-Coltrane. But Archie Shepp is not Bob James is not (even) Pharoah Sanders, so a comprehensive understanding of the guy's art has to confront the more nebulous (and charged) political-philosophical stuff. And there's more: when I say there's some symbolic value to dealing with avant-garde jazz as a weapon of struggle, it's because the "mythical/aesthetic" stuff has real power. Some of this power is racial, and I completely understand that this turns some people off. But ask Louis Moholo-Moholo--he still thinks that the goal of the Blue Notes was to free South Africa (and he was right, in a way). Sun Ra's soupy afrofuturism set an example for Braxton's mathematical abstractions, P-Funk's apocalyptic genre convergence, and Steve Coleman's mathy fusion. The AACM and UGMAA paved the way for organizations like Asian Improv aRts (whom I work with) to empower ethnocentric creativity. You can't dismiss this stuff, just like you can't deny the contributions of the Tristano school, the innovations of the Third Stream, and the monumental artistic achievements of many white jazz musicians.

Somewhat tangential to your question, KU, but Scott Saul was actually my thesis adviser at Berkeley--deeply inquisitive and (like a lot of liberal arts faculty I encountered) rather jazz savvy. As for Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't, however--it might be considered less (or even "not at all") musicological analysis--more ethnomusicology with a political science/sociology bent. On that level, it's not terribly surprising that it doesn't address the topics that Allen mentions. I admit that it's been a really long time since I read it, but the book focuses on only a handful of "usual suspect" politically active jazz musicians. It doesn't even deal with second wave free jazz (and later) very thoroughly--though on a surface level, you'd think that this material would be pretty ripe for investigation. The text being fairly vague to my memory at this point, I can't really accuse Scott of championing a "convenient" narrative, though this does beg the question of whether certain "inconvenient truths" about jazz experimentation have resulted in the proportional erasure of certain key contributions (Tristano is the "big" one, but the other players that Allen mentions are cases in point). We've expounded (though maybe not at length) about this topic on this board, but the notion of free jazz as "angry black music" is clearly a partial truth and somewhat a-historic (for every Shepp or Mingus, there is a more apolitical Ornette or, to an extent, Coltrane). In more complex terms, I think that the symbolic value of avant-garde jazz as a weapon of struggle is almost more valuable than the literal value of avant-garde jazz as artistically emancipatory. I think it's valid to ask if there are many artforms in which experimentation is so closely paired with actual political struggle; I'm reminded a bit of something Clifford once said (I'm paraphrasing from memory, so I may get this wrong) about social liberals tending to be kind of rearguard in their artistic tastes. At the same time, I empathize with the notion that political accomplishment shouldn't necessarily subvert artistic accomplishment, and I find that the extraction of less politically charged artists from the narrative (yes, white musicians like Tristano and Konitz--but also guys like Joe Harriott and Bill Dixon, who are harder to slot into conventional rubrics) to be a tragedy.

Germane to the discussion at hand, I admit that I've been talking more about the elision of production (in the way of stylistic choices, sonic character, musical direction, repertoire, etc.) and mixing/technical knowledge. Chuck, I'm actually curious what you have to say about the role of production in producing jazz and works of acoustic new music (especially in terms of how this is or is not different from, say, making a rock record). The Nessa catalog has a definite character/je ne sais quoi that is very unique, and I know that it's coaxed some of the best work from a roster of (already) accomplished musicians--Nonaah, Saga of the Outlaws, Air Time, and so on...

Thank you for the kind words, guys--but in all seriousness, this forum has been such a welcoming context for my amorphous rambling that I'm not sure I can see an alternative anymore. And in all (serious) seriousness, I feel like I've actually learned more from similar digressions on this board than I have from most articles or academic texts in the past several years--there are things that have been said on here that will stick with me for a lifetime. As for In the Townships (and not to go on too huge a tangent)--I wonder if that was more a matter of artistic license on the leader's part of producer oversight. The thing I admire about the extended family of Brotherhood musicians is their willingness to take really wily creative risks, and whether through Dudu & the Spears, work with McGregor, Assagai (which In the Townships is sort of an extension of), or whatever, those guys had gotten proficient at making legitimate pop albums that did not dilute the creative jazz content. If Mr. Hawkins shows up here some time soon, I'd ask him if he ever quizzed Moholo about his recordings at this time, because there's nothing quite like them. When I spoke to Louis, he made a point of noting that his playing on In the Townships was meant to be sort of an alternative to the relatively mundane drumming that prevailed in mbaqanga at that time--which is why Louis is sticking to cymbals on almost the entire record (i.e., "there's no cymbal work" on the other mbaqanga stuff, so why not be contrarian). When he does explode onto the kit (as he does on Angel Nemali), the effect is staggering and really unique in the canon. This is the thing I love about this album--it strikes a unique balance between coyness and rage, coiled intensity and unhinged power--and it does so with intention and a mastery of the studio space. Speaking more to the issue of producer oversight and its effect on the delicate balance between genius and indulgence, compare Ubagile to Black Horse (an mp3 album of outtakes released online as part of the Black Lion reissue program). Ubagile is more of a straightforward Brotherhood album and less special because of it, IMO--consistent dynamics throughout, less thoughtful and more streamlined arrangements. Black Horse (which is culled from the same sessions with essentially the same set of musicians), on the other hand, is as close to a "mess" as any of these guys managed to make: cluttered, unstable, and actually kind of boring. It's a testament to how even middling albums take a lot of work to assemble, and how magical records (like In the Townships--again, in my estimation) are the rare work of vision, cooperation, and having the right hands on deck.

I see what you mean, and while I'm not overly convinced by Lehman's music as more than experimental in its approach to confronting hip-hop culture and practices, it's clear that he knows that music. At the same time, I do wonder if the "great" music that can surely/hopefully be made in this vein will have to be made by someone with less institutional or conceptual baggage. In a way, I feel like Flying Lotus is this someone, but musical semantics will steer the conversation away from this so long as jazz and pop criticism continue to occupy such (seemingly) irreconcilable spaces. And if we're going down that road, I feel like we've already seen an organic neither jazz nor hip-hop/hybrid music in starts and fits. I definitely hear it on the Neneh Cherry & The Thing collaboration. That cover of "Accordion" is on point--it's is absolutely beholden to the source material but also sounds fluid and dynamic in a definitively jazz sense. That was only one part of an entire album that wasn't entirely as innovative or thoughtful, but that one track conveys the sort of invention that should start some real conversations out progress rather than regression.

If we're going down that road (fusion-wise), then it's probably worthwhile to mention David Rubinson, whose role in producing the Mwandishi albums (if even/if only to give Herbie some free rein) cannot be understated. I think that those--even more than the original mixes of the Lifetime records or Weather Report--are the most exploratory and inventive of the early fusion/jazz rock records (outside of Miles, of course). Sextant is particularly off the rails, and the conjunction of pure electronic abstraction, swing, and Funkadelic-caliber R&B weirdness is a prescient one. We've mentioned but not really delved into Bob Thiele (and Ed Michel). While I'm not really well versed in their respective roles w/regard to the Impulse! catalog (outside of the oft-mentioned thing about giving Coltrane the liberty to record with borderline irresponsible frequency), their tenures are responsible for some of the most curious artifacts of early free jazz: New Grass and late-60's Shepp, Pharoah, and Marion Brown in particular. I think it's possible to read these overtures to 60's counterculture(s) as misguided attempts at reading the aesthetic value of free jazz saxophone, but plenty of this music has wound up being influential in interesting ways (New Grass to noise rock people, Thembi to chill out/electronica musicians, etc.). Personally, I think a lot of this wave of releases is free jazz of questionable value but mixed-genre music of quality and odd beauty.

One of the things that i like about jazz is that it's relatively unproduced. I do enjoy heavily produced metal, hip hop, industrial, electronica etc but it's a key point of difference with jazz for me. I like the idea of hearing 5 people in a room (or rooms depending on the studio) working together and making something in real time over 1 or 2 days, as opposed to sitting in front of the iMac one at a time and doing their indivdual parts over the course of weeks or months. Of course, with jazz engineering comes in to it, the producer can have an influence and there can be splices of separate takes etc and probably the odd punch in but as i say, relatively unproduced. Off the top of my head i can't think of anything other than those already mentioned. Yeah, this is a huge point. I don't want my personal musical politics to infect too much of either this thread or how I voice my opinion, but the relative subtlety of jazz production has kind of taken on its own character. In a weird way, this posits jazz in-between popular/"sub-high" art forms (since jazz is so deeply rooted in dance musics) and "art music," the documentation of which is usually, well, pretty "documentarian" in nature. (Quotation marks here meant to undercut the potentially incendiary nature of the terms I'm using, since there's really no hierarchy in play here.) I've often wondered about why jazz production has resisted pace with pop when so much of that music has thoroughly invaded the conceptual framework of how jazz is played, and after a certain point, it's evident that it is a choice rather than a random incongruity. In 99% of cases, this is cool and necessary, but in that last 1% of cases, jazz production feels like a box that the music is straining to explode from within. The Blue Series stuff I talked about in the Kamasi thread is one example--if you're going to bring hip-hop into it in such a direct way, then why not just fuck up the stereo image and throw a bunch of random stuff in there? Similarly, if Prime Time is all about sonic convergence and undermining genre conceits, then why not go all out with the production? I know a lot of people hate it, but I enjoy Tone Dialing for this reason. I feel like In All Languages might be the most exciting Prime Time album for this very reason, and Denardo Coleman's production work on both of these records is admirable in that it ventures into territories that Ornette alone would not or could not journey. Speaking a bit to what Clifford said, John Jack's versatility in working with both rock and jazz went a big way toward producing some music that exercised some of the best attributes of both worlds. Dudu Pukwana's In the Townships (co-produced by Steve Verroca, who I'm not familiar with) is extraordinary for this reason--it takes a quintet and turns it into a tiny orchestra. The overdubs and mixing on that record transform it from a "merely good" album of South African experimental dance music to something akin to a free jazz Motown album. Having that many Dudus and Mongezis ping-ponging around the recording is sensational. As for personal preference, I know he's gotten a lot of flak, but I have to hand it to Bill Laswell for being one of the few mainstream producers savvy enough to nuance the (very flimsy) tipping point beyond which jazz freedom and pop production just don't mix. His work with James "Blood" Ulmer, Threadgill, and Ronald Shannon Jackson is excellent, and I hope I'm not one of only a few to really enjoy how much he got out of revising the Miles catalog. That being said, his work with Tony Williams and Sonny Sharrock in particular is just unbelievable. The unreleased remix of Turn It Over transforms that record from a wacky, Metal Machine Music-type curiosity to a killer psych rock record in spitting distance of late Hendrix, MC5, and The Stooges. Interested listeners had already connected the dots, but Turn It Over Redux--with it's more sensitive mix, Macero-like studio trickery (e.g., swapping organ parts between tracks), and genuine understanding of the bottom end (waaaay more Jack Bruce on Redux, for better and definitely not for worse)--is very well-realized. It suddenly crushes both the original mix and Emergency and Ego as the best Lifetime album. His work with Sharrock is similarly great in that it recognizes that, with a player with that much combustibility and power, a light touch is the best. Laswell also understood that Sharrock was playing an electric instrument, and his work on Sharrock's Enemy catalog in particular (Guitar and Seize the Rainbow being the best) is remarkable in how understated it is with both navigating the best tones and sonic environments for Sonny's guitar. I cannot think of another producer "of jazz" (albeit not necessarily a "jazz producer") who understands just how simultaneously versatile and fragile the electric guitar is. Laswell finds the best sounds for Sonny and then just gets out of the way--the mixing just enhances the power of the playing. It's magical stuff. Ask the Ages is of course monumental, and it's interesting in that it undermines exactly the dynamic xybert mentions. The success of free jazz on record is predicated to an extent on the relative fluidity and clarity of the recording--too light and you have zero bottom end, like Spiritual Unity (which, I might argue, actually enhances the spectral qualities of Ayler's playing); too dense and you have Echo or Atlantis, which makes the music closer to Sunn O))) than a Dial recording. Ask the Ages is the odd jazz guitar album that retains the power and suppleness of the rhythm section while surrounding it with a sort of phantom army of overdubs; the overdubs don't get in the way of the freedom, but the recording also doesn't sound arid or slick. Sonny, who sounds strong but weirdly clunky on something like Dance With Me Montana, sounds both sensitive and powerful on Ask the Ages--every bit as expressive as Pharoah. As a guitarist, I can't underestimate just how enormous an impact this had on me when first exploring the sonic possibilities of jazz on record. Right on--this is what I'm talking about. 3 Sided Dream is produced like a Hendrix album. It isn't as extraordinary to me as Ask the Ages in that Dream isn't quite a jazz record, but props to that guy for putting Rahsaan in so many varied and compatible contexts.

Allen, maybe I wasn't very clear here, but my intention wasn't to elevate Kamasi to the level of Lehman and Iyer. Rather, my point is that listening to Kamasi as jazz in and of itself is kind of self-defeating. The music is not equipped to be evaluated in that fashion--you wind up listening for depths and narratives that are just not there. By this point in the thread, all of that should be obvious and self-evident. OK, it's not particularly innovative or inventive music--sure. What does need to be addressed is the two-sided critical blind spot in play here. Look at The Epic's wikipedia page--when was the last time you saw a jazz album reviewed in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Guardian--and with marks that high? You want to talk about fucked up? Press, Promo, and reviews can be bought--that's been part of the business for ages. If there's a "problem" here, is has nothing to do with Kamasi getting so much playing and everything to do with how people are talking about him. Look at the reviews on the wikipedia page again--there's virtually no mention of any jazz or improvised music that emerged after 1970. Thom Jurek, of all people, is the one to mention Tapscott and Eddie Gale (who, btw, were making important music before/by 1970)--there's no talk of the AACM, BAG, and downtown NY stuff/post-Prime Time music, let alone either free improvisation or usual suspects in jazz/hip-hop hybridization. Maybe I'm wrong, please someone correct me if so- The people who do get mentioned are the Tranes, Pharoah, Ayler, (weirdly, but props to John Fordham for not echoing the other cats) Sun Ra, and other 60's guys--plus Miles and Weather Report. This is like a weird inverse of the "jazz is back!" bullshit from the 80's. Did you miss Coltrane and Pharoah? Well they're back. You can forget about all of that fucked up stuff that happened afterward, because it's all good now. We've been through this before, and we called it historical erasure. That's one part of the critical blind spot. The other half is, I would argue, real but harder to quantify. It has to do with the fact that most jazz criticism is just baldly under-equipped to evaluate jazz outside of the framework of jazz, its antecedents, and other art music. I wouldn't say that this is a deficiency so much as a matter of fact (i.e., why criticize a Honda Civic for not being a Dodge Challenger--they're two different things). But when we're talking about music like Kamasi's that is inextricably connected to hip-hop and modern R&B--not necessarily conceptually, but in terms of its technical choices and general direction--we have to understand that that (too) is part of the conversation. I'm not defending this music--again, just trying to articulate my feelings on it--but I will say that Greg Tate is one of the few critics who can deal with both jazz and hip-hop with real chops. If I had to get deep into it, I'd say that this is where the frustration is coming from--we're looking at this music like it's trying to be Trane after Trane when we also live in a world that had Braxton, Roscoe, James "Blood" Ulmer, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Matthew Shipp, Robert Glasper, and so on. We're also confronted with this music that looks facile and a-historical without earnest critical appraisal of its roots in G-Funk, A Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul (and other early jazz/hip-hop pioneers), the spectrum of alternative hip-hop, and the Brainfeeder label. To paraphrase a line off of To Pimp A Butterfly, look both ways before this music crosses your mind. As for what you say, Allen, about the desperation of being current leaving us behind the art form--yes, I agree. If anything, this is my criticism of guys like Iyer and Lehman (and again, what I was saying about Equilibrium)--there's a difference between engaging with a new art form on its own terms (he has been demolished on this board, but really--Robert Glasper) and only engaging with the surface elements. Kamasi and Iyer, for example, maybe are--maybe aren't--on the same level, but they're both asking us to take "surface work" at face value. There may be some deeper stuff in there (Shipp, for example, is way deeper on Equilibrium than the hip-hop trappings might suggest), but again--we have to get past the surface. Here's a different and more useful question: at what point in jazz did we feel that all music had to be all things to all people? Is this not why the jazz press has championed Iyer? Because it's free jazz/mainstream/hip-hop/new music/pop/electronic/improvisation? We decry the fact that we have so few new relevant artistic statements when the critical baggage in this genre is just impossible. Oppositely--and maybe rightly--when something comes along that is oblivious in some fashion--like Kamasi, or Badbadnotgood, or whatever--we trash it. So what music is there left to make? Or should we just blow it all up and start over again? Yeah, you're right--and though I was speaking more to the "responsibility" of musicians now (i.e., after Dilla, Madlib, and so on--in 2015--what is it that we must do or know beforehand), you do raise an interesting point about these "early" hip-hop/jazz collaborations. When your frame of reference is Low End Theory but not (yet) Madvillain or even Madlib's Shades of Blue (also released in 2003), there is some information missing that might color your perspective. These cross-genre applications are interesting in that--unlike with jazz, whose chief innovations have been historical for decades now--hip-hop has only really since the turn of the century been in the midst of its experimental explosion. History-as-moving-target has not been the purview of jazz criticism for a while now.

Considering starting a new topic for this, but considering the fact that this touches upon some of the discussion here, I thought I'd re-up this dead or dying horse- I was fascinated by the Terrace Martin article linked elsewhere: http://www.npr.org/sections/microphonecheck/2015/02/11/385218373/terrace-martin-everything-got-a-little-bit-of-funk-in-it (apologies to whomever found it, I can't seem to re-find the link at this hour). It's instructive in that it details the sort-of inner creative life of someone in Kamasi's extended community of musicians. This was pretty illuminating: MARTIN: Oh, yeah. Easily. Because I'm from South Central LA. So jazz — although my father is a jazz musician — but when you young, you not really into hearing John Coltrane. It sounds crazy to you. Crazy. So, it's just like, the Midnight Marauders album was the closest thing that I felt kinda familiar with as a kid listening to with my father, you know what I'm saying? As a saxophonist whose own music veers into dance music and R&B territory--and one of the more prominent among the younger set of jazz-informed LA cats to take an active role in the shaping of 21st century hip-hop--Martin is straddling multiple traditions. We often speak of the jazz tradition as something fluid but still monolithic, like a centipede in that it has a multitude of appendages but definable beginnings and ends. I know I'm preaching to the choir on the O board, but the aforementioned logic is peculiar in that it tends to ignore the idiomatic slippage and play that is in effect with regard to musicians who have come of age after the jazz "crisis" point of the 80's. A working knowledge of jazz may still be a cultural imperative for for the vast majority of young musicians working in black diasporic musics, but a practicing engagement with jazz is another story altogether. I've been listening to a ton of hip-hop lately--in part because it's become evident that (as both an LA cat and a musician of color) this is part of my embodied cultural heritage, in part because we've now reached a point with that music where we can look at it with critical and generational distance. In a weird sense, hip-hop has had it's "bebop" moment of superlative cultural achievement, and it's arguable that that it's reached a juncture of dissipating cultural returns and diminishing scope (e.g., "hip-hop is dead" as the new "jazz is dead"). This doesn’t mean that new epochal artistic statements under the hip-hop rubric are impossible (re: To Pimp A Butterfly), only that it’s now a “post” art and needs to be understood as such. I’m (really) not pointing fingers when saying this, but it’s sort of silly to yell at kids for “that rap shit” when NWA has a canonizing biopic in theaters. Coming back to Kamasi, we can now look at that music as not just commercial or mainstream jazz (or a facsimile of such), but rather the sound of a younger generation of musicians coming to terms with jazz as fertile--if secondary--ground for creativity. Kamasi’s links to the Tapscott ethos are as legit as it gets out on the WC, but it’s not a straight line from Tapscott to The Epic--it zips through both mainstream and alternative rap, contemporary R&B, electronic dance music, and so on. Dealing with Kamasi as jazz per se is kind of self-defeating, because this music is jazz in the same way that Jonny Greenwood’s soundtracks are Western New Music--that is, absolutely but also not really. Looking at this a different way, I decided to listen to some Blue Series music again (after Clifford’s mention and a long time in-between). Matthew Shipp’s Equilibrium was always my favorite. In retrospect, I like it only ok. I think--especially now, in the wake of guys like J Dilla, Madlib, and Flying Lotus--it’s a little irresponsible to be dealing only with the surface mechanics of hip-hop. Equilibrium came out the same year as Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which is mystifying to me. There is jazz all over The Love Below, but it gets at the root of that music in profound and meaningful ways. There are free jazz horns--used with effective context--on The Love Below. There is a cover of “My Favorite Things” that makes an earnest attempt at engaging with the harmonic reality of the Coltrane Quartet. Equilibrium has vamps, some sampled beats, and some hip-hop production. There is no exigency to this process. In the best contexts, beats are simultaneously fixture and firmament--their fixity and the creative undermining of said fixity is what makes that music work. Equilibrium strains at this repetitiveness even as said constancy undercuts the improvisers’ fluidity and power. This isn’t hybrid music so much as constrained jazz that wants to get at the sound but not the procedure of hip-hop. Some of Vijay Iyer’s (much more recent) music is like this--Steve Lehman’s too. While both of these guys have real feels for hip-hop and (I’m sure) know that music intimately, there’s something about how their musics engage with rap that feels more like NPR headline grabbing than organic musicmaking. Again, the problem isn’t with the musicianship so much as it is procedural: you can make the music using the techniques and the logics, but Wu Tang is not Coltrane and failure to bow to the nuances therein is creatively damning. To reiterate and clarify my point after this very longwinded post, appreciate (or don’t) Kamasi’s music for what it is--jazz that tries to get back to jazz way after half a century’s worth of alternative narratives. The critical and promotional agendas are something else entirely, and they’re tied into the physics of two genres (jazz and hip-hop) in respective processes of urgent, desperate survival. The “worthy” art in and among all of this chaos is maybe good but definitely far more complex than might seem evident.

The last I'll post on this, but the band is in LA and primed to play tonight (6/12) with Mr. Golia at Ham & Eggs Tavern. Doors at 7:30pm, show at 8pm. For obvious (communal) reasons, there has been this momentous, uncanny energy in the music over the course of the past couple of days, and I'm looking forward to engaging with it.

This band and its precursor (the trio with Denardo and Charnett Moffett--never got to see the band with Geri Allen) completely flattened me. The Charnett/Denardo band was muscular, dynamic, and strange, and witnessing this band's truly surreal not jazz/not electric hybrid (with Ornette on violin and Denardo in full John Bonham mode) was a formative experience. The second time I saw Ornette, it was the Sound Grammar band--Charlie Haden's Quartet West opened, and Haden actually joined Ornette for the inevitable encore of "Lonely Woman"--it was more subdued, and the crowd was almost openly hostile for the duration of the show, but Ornette's playing assumed this plaintive, evasive quality that I'd only rarely heard on record up to that point. The last time I saw him was almost an otherworldly experience--it was the three bass band (with Charnett in tow), and at that advanced stage, Ornette's playing had been reduced to a spectral murmur. All of the rhythmic momentum was in the hands of the younger cats (including Al MacDowell--who, in being saddled with playing all of the heads, was the night's secret MVP). The music itself was unbelievable--conceptually rich, sonically complex, and somehow (sounding) absolutely spontaneous. It was more thoroughly "avant-garde" than any Ornette on record: spontaneous group rhythmic displacement (i.e., the band coming together on these seemingly improvised streams of mixed meter), insane melodic communication, crazy juxtaposition of feels and sounds. Denardo took this post-"Wipeout"/pseudo-Mitch Mitchell drum solo that was absolutely out of this world--the maturation of a path that Ornette had set out on back when he and son first teamed for the audacious The Empty Foxhole all those years ago. I had a cold when I arrived that evening, and it was gone by the end of the show.

My Facebook feed is flooded with obituaries, and I’m reminded of the role Ornette Coleman’s music has played in the shaping and liberation of so much culture. The filaments of the 21st century are suffused with his aesthetic. There are themes and notions in Ornette’s music that would be relevant in any era: freedom, communication, coexistence, agency, authority (and the deconstruction of hierarchy), and so on. It’s mind-boggling to consider that for every great album issued under his name--and for every concert he played--there are thousands of artists whose whose work is charged by the atom of harmolodics. John Coltrane recorded with Ornette’s rhythm section. Dolphy edged closer to his mature music in commune with early free jazz. Roscoe Mitchell made his first “big” statement on an album that opened with a tune called “Ornette.” The musics of Miles, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and other “pre-free” figureheads were upended by Ornette’s innovations. Early harmolodic music presaged the innovations of Albert Ayler, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and AMM, and Ornette was part of the genetics of punk rock. Pop culture iconology from Lou Reed to Patti Smith to Yoko Ono owes obvious (and sometimes direct) debt to Ornette’s music. And this is the famous stuff- I (like many others) will probably be listening to the classics over the course of the next few days: The Shape of Jazz to Come, Crisis, Science Fiction, and so on. The microcosmic universe that Ornette cultivated with the likes of Cherry, Haden, Higgins, and Blackwell (all dearly departed, now each his own undeniable and monumental influence) is as much a triumph of genuine ingenuity and experimentation as it is (post hoc) a victory for innovation and the American spirit of individuality. The Ornette that has played the greatest role in my life, however, is the marginal one. I didn’t know him as a person and received the gift of his music decades after the initial flush of fury and awe--but listen to the wiry and chaotic violinist/trumpeter on “Snowflakes and Sunshine” (Live at the Golden Circle Vol. 2), the man who enabled and emboldened a 10 year old drummer on The Empty Foxhole, the daring and maybe even overbold auteur of Skies of America and Tone Dialing. Like the entreaties of some parallel universe life coach, Ornette’s musical life was an invitation (for many, like me, a dictum): ”don’t play like me, don’t live like this, do your own thing.” So today, and ever day after this, I’ll play my own shit. I’ll do my best to foster creativity in my friends, peers, students, and (even? hopefully?) my elders. I’ll make it out to shows, and I’ll let people know when there’s some “cool new music” happening. I’ll work hard at perfecting my craft, but I’ll make room for life, inquiry, and the invention of change. Maybe I’ll go left, but if I do it three times, I’ll be going right, too. To paraphrase Hendrix, Ornette was the first ray of a new rising sun. We are the change of the century. We are the shape of jazz to come.

This is hilarious to me in that I play with Jon Arkin semi-frequently, and though I've known that this collaboration was happening, he has been pretty quiet about it. I had know idea about the record, for one. Anyway, I've heard great things about this group, and the cast of characters is of very high repute (speaking more about the locals, which I know people are likely less hip to). Jon, for one, is a tremendously versatile player and (especially) a preternaturally sensitive drummer. It makes him both a really creative changes drummer and a joy to improvise with in freer contexts. I look forward to hearing this one...

But tell us how you really feel