ep1str0phy

Jazz isn't dying, but its (previous) fans are. Anyway, you guys have perked up my interest - will give it a listen. I think that the "don't hate the player, hate the game" adage applies here- The fact that there has been so much hoopla surrounding both Washington's album and To Pimp a Butterfly testifies to the notions that (a) jazz people and jazz audiences are receptive to the infusion of new blood and (b) there is nothing inherently inaccessible about jazz as a music, even if there is a degree of toxicity to "jazz" as both an institution and genre (in a mass appeal/populist sense). Yes, a lot of folks here may not find a lot to appreciate about Kamasi's music, but it's worth noting that so many people took the time to (bother to) listen. I sense that a lot of what makes it difficult to penetrate the "Jazz Market" in any meaningful way is couched in a degree of equilibrium. For any number of reasons, the market share of this music has decreased and continues to decrease in a very active way, and the end result is a lack of resources--compositions, styles, and people get regurgitated in jazz because the reach of the jazz press, the enterprising spirit of the musicians, etc. are overextended. Touring jazz musicians can't always book jazz clubs in the Bay Area anymore--two high profile ECM artists booked DIY spaces in Northern CA in the past few months alone. You wake up to discover that it's hard enough to subsist, let alone get over. This is why I bring up Braxton. The AACM guys who so many younger guys look up to comprise a sense of creative leftism that has been "left" for a very long time. Hendrix was still alive when the Art Ensemble and Braxton were cutting their first, epochal recordings. I've heard people call Rowe-ian EAI cutting-edge, but AMM was already making some aggressively minimal music (with at least similar operating procedures) as far back as the 70's, maybe 80's. Even if this music still has the power to excite and shock, I find it impossible to think of any of it as qualitative fringe music anymore--and if it is, why does that say about us as improvising musicians? In a way, that's why I kind of have to give it up to guys like Flying Lotus, Kendrick, Washington, etc.--not necessarily because their music does represent a kind of cutting-edge (an argument really could be made for Flying Lotus, in this regard), but because these are guys with definitive jazz roots and relationships whose creativity is unencumbered by the unbearable weight of its genesis. What if someone with Washington's resources and irreverence shows up and has the vision and technicality to back it up? The infrastructure can and needs to "be there." Mary Halvorson may be cutting some spectacular music these days, but I've long gotten the sense that the next sound to really jolt us to attention (in a "jazz" sense, at least) may arrive in a form none of us will have anticipated.

Didn't we have an iteration of this exchange the last time FlyLo came up? It's one of those discussions that can feel like playing Pong--the participation is there, but it's also dark and kind of lonely. This is a huge topic. I've been reading Charles Shaar Murray's truly remarkable Crosstown Traffic recently, and one of the points it makes is that critical, popular, and creative reception to Jimi Hendrix was a confluence of a multitude of attitudes, biases, and ideologies. I mean, Hendrix was one of the first real post jazz artists in that he engaged with critical parts of the jazz mythology (centrifuging race and improvised music) even while he was in the process of creating an entirely new set of musical categories. Are You Experienced is nearly 50 years old--why then is there so little critical discourse regarding "the jazz" of Hendrix? I think it's pretty plain that our shared categories are pretty limited. This says nothing about taste or the biases (imagined or real) of the listening audience, O board people included--by "our," I'm referring to the collective cultural consciousness (insofar as it exists). We don't talk about FlyLo (a relative of Alice and John Coltrane), Madlib (who is really just making "jazz albums" half of the time), D'Angelo, etc. etc. because, well, none of this stuff is "effectively" jazz--it may smell, feel, and for all intents and purposes be jazz, but none of this music has to deal with the parochial cultural geography of Jazz Music. Hip-hop is cut off from the lineage by virtue of the fact that it never succumbed to the question of its own validity. You can take or leave Kendrick, but To Pimp a Butterfly *should* be a big deal for "us." I cannot think of the last mainstream hip-hop album that waved the freak flag for jazz this emphatically and overtly. Madlib's Shades of Blue is cheating, since it's more of a boutique effort, and there are mostly "just" shades in MF Doom, Common, and so on. I feel really lame saying that A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory is the clearest point of comparison. In a time when jazz is starved for megastars, Kendrick making what is essentially a jazz/hip-hop hybrid is almost the equivalent of what would have happened had Hendrix lived to collaborate with Gil Evans. As sort of the heir apparent to Tupac Shakur, Kendrick taps into both the ethos of accessible, sensitive, alternative hip-hop and the WC gangsta rap lineage of the 80's and 90's--Kendrick's music is relevant precisely because it sits at the intersection of so many different methodologies. To Pimp a Butterfly is not just socially conscious--it's musically conscious, and that album's very existence and mainstream acceptance can be read as validation of the continuing importance of jazz as America's cultural totem. It's not a huge leap to see what this extraordinarily hyped music has in common with Hendrix's overtures to jazz (or, in a recursive way, Miles's creative resurgence after his godfathering of jazz-rock). What's fascinating about this discussion to me is that the dialogues about To Pimp a Butterfly's "hands across the aisle" genre conceits seem to be limited to pop, hip-hop, and more mainstream media outlets. It's like everyone is talking about this stuff except for jazz enthusiasts. One conclusion I've come to is that, even for jazz (which has been caught up in reports of its own death over the course of the past few decades), the time for seeking "validity" and "relevance" is just over. Maybe we can just get back to making music? As a musician and listener, I'm 100% in favor of just going back to making music--I only see a "problem" insofar as the "powers that be" take this as a tacit agreement that the jazz community is a country with closed borders. The moment that artistic independence becomes myopia--and when myopia becomes stagnancy, and when stagnancy becomes necrosis--that's when the cats start jumping ship on jazz as an entity. So dig, Kamasi Washington's music may not be good or even worthwhile jazz, and it definitely won't have a stitch on Coltrane in the same way that Mike Stern isn't a stone's throw next to Hendrix, but it just goes to show that even the mediocre guys (keep in mind I'm not even trying to level a value judgment against Mr. Washington here--this is purely rhetorical) find it more fruitful to play, eat, and smell like jazz--but not be "jazz artists"--than to go down with a sinking ship. Jazz will never die, but the jazz industry is already unviable. I don't doubt for a second that a lot of the people who dislike Kamasi are listening with their ears, that there's no real "but" there. Maybe Kamasi (and maybe Kendrick) just aren't very good music. At the same time, the next time someone invariably posts the "Jazz is the least popular genre in the U.S." thing, it's worthwhile to consider that it isn't a question of whether people are still making "good" or "bad" music--it's a matter of whether "being popular" and "being jazz" even exist in the same continuum anymore. Sooner or later we'll be sadly out of Braxtons and Braxton proteges, and then who will we listen to? And what are we going to play?

Ethan Iverson made an interesting post about the lack of attribution surrounding this release (not on the liners themselves, apparently--I haven't purchased a hard copy of the album)--apparently the personnel have been largely absent from the promotional discussion. There are reasons for this, of course--not least being a supposed desire to emphasize the "jazz auteur" iconology. If you look at the music within the framework of a heavily orchestrated Milestone album or even a Creed Taylor production, it makes slightly more sense. Two things that pop out to me in terms of this topic: (1) Although at times more subliminal than overt, there is some connective tissue between this music and the extended UGMAA community. (2) If you want to hear something from this cast that is harder and more ostensibly creative (but also waaay more stoned), check out Flying Lotus's album You're Dead. That's the sort of meaty, inventive-but-earthy "jazz" that might qualify as innovation in and among the mainstream. The press will treat Flying Lotus, Washington, and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly as sort of a continuum, but it's with FlyLo and Kendrick that I hear the spiritual afterimage of the classic Strata Easts, vocal choir Max Roach, etc.

Right on, guys! It's going to be a killer run of shows. Of course, I can completely empathize with the hazards and stress of LA traffic--at this point, I just use it as an opportunity to give my car stereo a workout.

Absolutely understandable, of course. Thanks, Chuck!

Hey, all- I haven't made a post like this a minute, but I thought that this particular run of dates might be interesting to Organissimo-ites of the Southern CA persuasion- My art rock/psych trio Grex (http://www.grexsounds.com) has been in the midst of a very heavy regimen of recording, rehearsal, and giging, and whatever you wish to call the music that we've arrived at, I can say with some certainty that I've never been prouder of anything I've worked on in my life. It's the post-Hendrix/Dudu Pukwana/Deerhoof thing we've been trying to get to for ages. We're bringing this new round of songs to LA for a few choice dates--the 1st (on June 12) with a new configuration of the Vinny Golia Ensemble. If you don't know Vinny, he's the daddy of the Nine Winds label and one of the true living legends of the LA Jazz scene (having worked with the likes of Bobby Bradford, John Carter, Alex Cline, Horace Tapscott, etc.). On June 13, we're joined by a few LA experimental pop mainstays (Helene Renaut, My Hawaii) and a special duo of Steuart Liebig and Joe Berardi. Steuart has been bassist for Les McCann and Julius Hemphill (on the beautiful and atypical Georgia Blue), and Joe Berardi is an LA session heavyhitter (with the great band Non Credo and, surprisingly, Megan Mullally's group--he can actually be seen on a few episodes of Parks and Recreation). June 14 is our sole Long Beach date and features one of the great local psych/prog ensembles (Karl?)--it's an opportunity to stretch out at a venue that that is shockingly (1) clean and (2) very hospitable to adventurous music. The dates: Grex w/Vinny Golia Ensemble June 12, 8-10pm (7:30pm doors) @ Ham & Eggs Tavern 433 W 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90014 $5 Cover http://www.vinnygolia.com Grex w/My Hawaii, Helene Renaut, Joe Berardi/Steuart Liebig June 13, 8pm Doors/8:30pm Music @ Human Resources 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA 90012 $7 Cover http://myhawaii.bandcamp.com http://www.helenerenaut.com Grex w/Karl? June 14, 6pm-9pm (Grex on 1st) @ 4th Street Vine 2142 E 4th Street, Long Beach, CA 90814 Free/Donations Accepted http://www.facebook.com/karlqmark Of course, we'd love to see some O folks. There's great music happening everywhere--naturally, we're just hoping (and trying) to add to it. -K/ep1

The only credibility I can lend to these sentiments is the fact that I was there and am there for the "tail end" of this particular moment in the music. There's a phrase that I heard Evan Parker use that really sticks with me, and it's something to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing), "There are things that happen live that will not travel down a wire." There is some recorded music that is more magically live/alive than others, and the Nimbus West stuff must be counted in that number. Listen to the PAPA at Live at I.U.C.C.--you hear this simultaneity of rawness, passion, and rhythm. This is that "West Coast Hot" thing that is discussed more often than heard. The Giant Is Awakened has this, too--the music may not always have the finesse or casual virtuosity of contemporaneous East Coast stuff, but it has this rhythmic vitality and dark momentum that is both undeniable and irreplicable. There is a lot of music in and around this lineage that is happening these days, and much of it to very minimal fanfare. I haven't seen Sessions play for a while, but he must still be up to this. Vinny Golia, Steuart Liebig, the Cline brothers (though Nels is in NY now), Phillip Greenlief, GE Stinson, Ben Goldberg, Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Dan Clucas, Lewis Jordan, India Cooke, Ross Hammond--it is all very heavy music that doesn't hew cleanly into any narratives about free v. mainstream, in v. out, modern v. postmodern, and so on. And those are just some of the cats who have been around "for a minute."

I bought this one from Michael Session a few years back--there are some really thrilling moments (especially on the tunes with Horace), but it doesn't really compare to just how exciting Session was (and is) live. Back in my college years, I would spend summers with my family in Los Angeles, and I would catch incarnations of the Session band whenever possible. Much of this was either at LACMA or somewhere near Leimert Park (which was in the midst of a bit of a renaissance at the time)--I even hit some sessions at the World Stage, though I was never around long enough to visit regularly. For all the talk about live jazz being in a downward spiral since the 80's, there was a ton of "classic" legacy music going on in Los Angeles in the early 2000s--Gerald Wilson was still leading his big band, Charlie O's was still open in the SF Valley (saw a killer set with Azar Lawrence and Lorca Hart--:45-1hr version of "Impressions," just scalding music), the Jazz Bakery was bringing in Andrew Hill, Sonny Fortune/Rashied Ali, and so on, Bobby Bradford was regularly visible, and, of course the Session band. Of all of the guys I saw back when I was a resident, I now (even in LA) only really see Vinny Golia, Steuart Liebig, Alex Cline, and a handful of other guys who commute to the Bay Area for gigs. I will never forget the handful of occasions I actually got to sit through full concerts of the Session ensemble with Steve Smith and Nate Morgan, because that music was formative for me. That band stood in outright defiance of the notion that the shredding inside/out jazz of the 70's was a lost concept with the advent of Wynton. I've still never seen another live band that played gutsier music in this particular mode--the energy was insane, and much of that had to do with just how tapped into the community these guys were. I'd heard stories of the UGMAA in the old days, and this was exactly that: music happening among and feeding off of the people, participating in the performance of socialization rather than cloistering itself off into some hallowed realm. Every day seems to be a new RIP on the Artists page, and it reminds me of just how much of this stuff I can take for granted. It's easy to view this music as distant and historical, but it never really stops happening--jazz fights to the last man, and he's still there (if you're willing to look for him).

Have fun, Eric! BTW--last time I checked, Groove Merchant still exists, though it's one of the places I never hit (for some reason). Amoeba has been having a lot of ups and downs in the past few years. The last I heard, the LA store was the one doing the "best," and through various means the others have been able to stay afloat. There's been some diversification into books, collectibles, and so on, but the fact that those three shops have been able to retain such sizable and diverse stocks of both LPs and CDs is remarkable. The three Amoeba stores have the only jazz sections in close proximity that don't make me feel like I've been "cheated" by poor/rote selection. On that note, there truly are scarce few "big" CD outlets left. I could run down the literal handful (maybe 3-4 shops) in the San Fernando Valley (we're talking So Cal now) that still carry anything resembling a worthwhile CD selection. Meanwhile, there is still a brick and mortar Wherehouse Music closer to Palos Verdes--how this place survived (maybe it got franchised out?) is beyond me.

Those guys are great--I'm actually playing there in September, just did a hit last month. Not an enormous record selection, but a great supporter of the music--we definitely need more places like that.

Stranded is cool. It's a bit smaller than most of the others, but they do get some interesting new stock in fairly often. In LP terms, Grooveyard has all of them beat. It has an insanely fast stock turnover rate and manages to bring in rare stuff that I don't see anywhere else. It's not the best place if you're just looking to pick up an LP copy of a well known title (I'd say that the Rasputin in Berkeley is best for that), but it's the one that a visiting collector might want to check out. Grooves (in SF) is similar, just less extreme in how much crazy stuff comes in.

Just a tangential note to give props to the Trio Records album Kalaparusha, which features the eponymous saxophonist, Karl Berger, Ingrid Berger, Tom Schmidt, and mostly Jack DeJohnette on drums (w/Jumma Santons on one track). I think that Humility in the Light of the Creator is Kalaparusha's "moment," but Kalaparusha is just so good and unjustly obscure--it touches on many of the same beats as Humility but adds a degree of open-endedness that serves the music very well.

I just got that Kahil album in the mail (it's been reissued on CD on what looks like a "below board" label, but it could just be a budget/DIY-type situation on the part of whomever owns the rights). It's really great, with some ripping Lester and Malachi. That Braxton Antilles is indeed a major stretch, especially considering there's only one actual AACM member onboard (though I guess this could be said of most of Braxton's music?). The wild card is Ed Blackwell, who digs into this music with a pocket so deep--but organically integrated--that it's simultaneously a testament to the flexibility of Braxton's music and an essay on how to make absolutely anything groove.

Bay Area guy here. These are (in my estimation) the best ones: Grooveyard (Rockridge/Oakland) Amoeba (Berkeley) Amoeba (San Francisco) Everything else is a "Your Mileage May Vary"-type situation. These shops are all worthwhile in different ways: Rasputin (Berkeley) Rasputin (San Francisco/Union Square) Grooves (San Francisco) Recycled Records (San Francisco) Aquarius Records (San Francisco)

Ha! This is impossible. I feel like you can't take a fraction of the Art Ensemble back catalog (especially the early stuff) without taking all of it--it's so tightly packed chronologically, and there's such seamless conceptual continuity between all of those records. I feel this way about all of the "great AACM bands"--Air with Steve McCall, Braxton with Crispell/Dresser/Hemingway, and so on. I can't rightly stick with three, but these are most of my favorites. Some of these probably don't even rightly "count" as proper AACM albums (in terms of personnel), but whatever. Muhal Richard Abrams: Young At Heart/Wise in Time AEC: Congliptious AEC: Phase One AEC: Les Stances a Sophie AEC: People in Sorrow AEC: Nice Guys Air: Air Time Lester Bowie/Brass Fantasy: Twilight Dreams Anthony Braxton: New York, Fall 1974 Anthony Braxton: Dortmund (Quartet) 1976 Anthony Braxton/Max Roach: Birth and Rebirth Anthony Braxton: Six Compositions: Quartet (Antilles) Roscoe Mitchell: Sound Roscoe Mitchell: Nonaah Roscoe Mitchell: Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancin' Shoes Revolutionary Ensemble (this is really stretching it): Vietnam Wadada Leo Smith: Songs of Humanity Henry Threadgill: Where's Your Cup? (w/special mention to Marion Brown's Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, since there are so many AACM guys involved) If I absolutely had to choose 3 (based on play volume), I would go with Phase One, Les Stances a Sophie, and People in Sorrow. There's enough music between those three to keep anyone occupied for a stretch.

I've been listening to this one nonstop since Wednesday. It's interesting to me that Uppercase historical legacy of the AACM will have much to do with the braided legacies of innovation and civil rights in jazz, because this sort of belies the fact that a lot of their operative contribution to the modern musical landscape has been multidirectional rather than strictly progressive. To put it another way, unlike, say, the music of Mingus, which was deeply social conscious but firmly embedded in the sonic iconology of its idiom--or, for that matter, the music of Albert Ayler, which takes the music to its formal breaking point even as it's intended to be socially visionary--I've understood the AACM's uniquest gift to be the way in which it expanded the possibilities of what can be done, where, and with whom. When I listen to Roscoe, Muhal, Threadgill, etc., I don't hear either terminal points or new beginnings--I see a lateral redefinition of what things are at a given point in time. You cannot understate the social value of this. Guys like Braxton and Roscoe have reconfigured what it means to be a Black American Musician--and, in turn, they have blown the doors completely away for many in subsequent generations. When I first "got" to the Art Ensemble, and when I began interacting with musicians who had come of age in the post-AACM climate of jazz, it actually kind of gave me (as a Filipino-American preoccupied with abstract improvisation) back to myself, whole. I imagine that my experience is not necessarily rare. I've listened to Made in Chicago a number of times in the past couple of days, and what sticks out to me the most is that this--in the broad strokes, at least--is what we need more of. Not necessarily by and from these musicians, who have given so much and will hopefully continue to do so, but by musicians and artists in a general sense. If the AACM is like NASA, we need more space explorers. None of this is to say that this is the greatest album of the year, month, or day--it's in fact alternately breathtaking and weirdly halting (the WSJ article is pretty close to my initial impressions). What really got to me, though, is just how deeply individualistic all of the voices on this record are. It is a real live document. Although many of the ensemble passages are ragged, you actually get to hear these august explorers negotiate their musical relationships in real time, and it's an essay in both musical risk taking and the boldness of exploded expectations. The closest comparison I can think of is Braxton's Ensemble (Victoriaville) 1998--similarly all-star, but also kind of unpolished and discursive--but this one is on another level. I'd love for someone to tell me about a recent album by a vetted and/or relatively mainstream musician (jazz or otherwise) that is so demonstratively searching. And then I'd love for someone to tell me why there aren't more examples. One illustrative moment really springs to mind, and that's right in the middle of the opening track ("Chant")--Roscoe is in the midst of this phenomenal circular breathing enterprise, with Muhal, Gray, and DeJohnette playing very coloristically behind (it's reminiscent, in the inverted rhythmic momentum of powerhouse saxophone + more textural rhythm section, of The Flow of Things), and then Threadgill jumps in for a sort-of solo. What do you do on top of this? And then Threadgill plays this deeply funky, Robert McCollough-cum-Albert Ayler shit (similar to his playing with Zooid), and it, again, recontextualizes the whole thing. Now it's not strictly what you expected--it's both a clashing and melding of identities, Roscoe +/vs Threadgill. That's a real collaboration, a real band hit. These guys, I hope they're here forever--if not here physically, then definitely here spiritually. I hope that Roscoe knows what he's done for me on a really high musical and personal level, though our personal conversations have always been either deeply casual or just nuts-and-bolts mechanical. This band DeJohnette put together--in the best possible way, it reminds me of both why I can and that I should create, and that's not a small thing.

Damn- I wish I'd gotten to this topic when more lucid. Daylight savings time and endless hours of rehearsal have completely sapped my sense of rhetorical cogency. As with any of us, I can only give a personalized "man on the street" perspective as to why jazz's recorded financial unpopularity may be the case, and I see a couple of notable issues- (A) Despite the subsistence of the artform and the continued vitality of younger jazz musicians, it's clear that (as many have stated above) the common wisdom posits musicians from a bygone era as the paragons of excellence. This has reinforced a secondhand buying culture (e.g., old records, burns, digital sharing, used CDs) that, if I understand correctly, is not properly tracked by Nielsen. If you compound this by the fact that many younger people listening to jazz are actual musicians, and that many musicians are broke, it only reinforces the notion that jazz operates more on the fringes of buying culture. (B) Much of the most vital jazz I've heard in the past few years issues from independent, artist-run labels with limited distribution and/or limited penetration into avenues that are tracked by Nielsen (e.g., in-person sales at gigs). These sales tend to account for the majority of "buys" from people at my local level. © The most creatively viable and genuinely original music I've heard as of late comes from musicians who are operating outside of the fringes of what is commonly understood as jazz (with a lot of overlap with avenues in indie rock, experimental hip-hop, etc.). What unifies this music is a certain degree of jazz literacy. In a "large scale" sense, if you filed Flying Lotus in the jazz section, you'd be forced to file a lot of other experimental electronic music there, too. This is not the case, but Flying Lotus's most recent album (You're Dead) actually has much sonic jazz cred and relevant personnel (Herbie Hancock, post-UGMAA guys) as your average Robert Glasper album--probably a lot more on certain levels. (If you're interested in this strain of thought at all, there is plenty of deeply creative music by thoroughly schooled jazz musicians that does not much sound like archetypal jazz. Naming a few names--all friends of mine, but a few of them reasonably successful in underground circles--Beep, Naytronix, Ava Mendoza, Jack O' the Clock, Black Spirituals, Bells Atlas, Gentleman Surfer... full disclosure-my own group, Grex, issues from this scene.) (D) I feel like everyone here is way ahead of me on this, but ultimately, this does not matter. I'm not even sure if this affects the relative toxicity of the genre--the upper echelons of jazz have penetrated the sanctum of funded art music, and the lowercase terrain of clubs and casual gigs is more rightly threatened by the relative cheapness of DJs--not by other genres. The creative fringes will, as they always have, persevere, and a lot of it will infiltrate more popular avenues in unexpected guises--certain indie rock bands with an intense amount of jazz/new music cred, like Deerhoof, Tune-Yards, or even Nels Cline, come to mind. I think the bigger question is whether we, as the intended audience, are still game for the sometimes bitter work of listening to and engaging with the increasingly volatile modern musical landscape, but I would imagine the answers to that one are diverse and often deeply complex.

OK, to at least a certain degree, this is getting to the meat of the matter w/regard to tension between originality and repertory performance. Dumb but real question: what is it that dictates a successful performance v. an unsuccessful performance? If we're dealing with a set of generic chord changes with infinitely variable pieces--e.g., 12 bar blues or rhythm changes--then maybe can say that we're dealing with a formal cipher--the "reality" of it resides within what we actually do within that formal context (e.g., the Flintstones theme is not the same thing as Oleo). If we're talking about something more idiosyncratic, like a really bizarre set of Monk changes that are used as vehicle for improvisation, then it's harder to say what constitutes a "legit" performance--because this isn't Brilliant Corners, but it also totally is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHDnF3Lf7xM A lot of the key structural markers are present, it's in the proper key, the basic shape of the melody is there, and so on--but for Monk, who was not down with the Miles "Well You Needn't" changes and was known to criticize alternates to his harmonies, this is probably a "wrong" performance--way more wrong than a jazz ensemble playing a relatively rote/faithful iteration of Monk's music. We're not even talking if it's "good" or not--we're talking about it being successful/"real." I totally agree with you in that no one really has the privilege of saying what constitutes "understanding" of that tune and what does not--we can talk about what a Monk rendition of that tune would be, but we are in the end just dealing with notes and tones. People flipped out about that Mostly Other People Do the Killing Blue album a few months back but, ultimately, as a grotesque sort of artifact, it has a rationale and as much a right to exist as anything else. The relative value of said project gets into some Jasper Johns/"According to What" standards-type territory. What spurred the discussion of the Ornette thing was my initial distaste for what Christian McBride played under Ornette on that Sonny Rollins Road Show performance of "Sonnymoon for Two"--I've since walked back on this, because I can't really hear that much of it on the actual recording, but back when we only had youtube clips of the event, I thought he was going into some very overt Haden-isms (that slushy octave/double stop thing that he did from the 70's on) and found this kind of distasteful. If we're dealing with music that's supposed to be about free expression, why are you just wearing the skin of the guy who went out on a limb to try something new? I got sort of excoriated by a friend of mine, because the argument was that the harmolodic ethos should allow you to do whatever you feel and, incidentally, McBride was just feeling the Haden thing. This struck me as a little circular, because wouldn't you want to try to sound as original as possible? I honestly don't know if there's a clear answer to this question, and I go back and forth on it now and again--and maybe, and I guess this is the point, there is absolutely no way of knowing if there are answers to any of these questions, and it's ultimately best to just play whatever you're going to play and sort it out afterward. Or, to paraphrase Monk in what is probably a totally meaningless way, Who Knows?

Basically this. In a pragmatic sense, one of the key issues with performing Monk as Contemporary Jazz Repertoire is that it often sits outside of the parameters of Contemporary Jazz Performance. It's not simply that Monk tunes are challenging vehicles for improvisation--they are, but they're also largely incompatible with a lot of the improvisational habits that have emerged in jazz in Marsalis's wake--i.e., vertiginous, hypertechnical blowing, extreme rhythmic interplay, etc. The number of players on record that could slouch into a Monk tune, engage with non/later than Monk (I hesitate to say "post") aesthetics, and come out creatively unscathed is pretty small--they've been named in this thread, and that's either because of years of study with the music (Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd) and/or a fundamental compatibility in personal approach (Don Cherry, Misha Mengelberg, Motian). It's tough to step into this music with your battery of Coltrane changes, tritone subsitutions, metric superimpositions, and so on without encountering and confronting a language barrier--as it should be with any deeply personal music. (As an aside, I've had debates about whether or not Ornette's music can be appropriately played in a non-Ornette setting, and you run into the same basic considerations. On the one hand (and these were points made by a one-time intimate of Ornette's), that music is built to be an open, endlessly compatible framework for combining and juxtaposing seemingly contrary operating procedures--and, thereby, finding commonality between those procedures. On the other hand, you're dealing with the nuts and bolts of a harmonic and melodic language that is deeply singular and regarding which a handful of performance approaches--e.g., Haden on bass, Blackwell as timekeeper/participant, etc.--have been canonized as "more successful than others." Can you play this music wrong, better, or badly? If so, you rub up against the fact a supposedly open system does, like Monk's, require some personal give.) As for the comping debate--has there been a consensus on what comping is sense the advent of Herbie Hancock? Yes, it's a concept fundamentally and etymologically tied to accompaniment, but the piano player has been an interactive and often equal voice behind the soloist since (at least) the 2nd Miles Quintet. Monk is neither playing in this much later Hancockian mode nor in the strictly supportive sense, but I'd imagine that the definition is wide enough to encompass the orchestrational colorist (of which Monk isn't necessarily the only important voice in jazz). One more thing--there are a lot of cats who don't like Ethan Iverson's playing or writing, and he's come on this board to debate points I've made, and far be it from anyone--especially at this epoch in music--to say something like "ignore X at your own peril." That being said, I think that there's something that he's tapped into that is iconic to the present milieu--whatever your thoughts on that may be--and he is, for that reason, one of this era's most relevant voices. People still give The Bad Plus a lot of shit for their first couple of albums, but we're dealing with concepts of repertoire, study, and conceptual broadness that have been influencing the current crop of musicians for well over a decade now. There isn't much philosphical territory here that wasn't already being dealt with by the AACM, BAG, ICP, and so on years and years ago, but what the Bad Plus have done (through iconology, status, and yes, touchy issues like demographics) is redirect the energies of the Whiplash infected jazz scholar into earnest study of the broader jazz and creative music canon, and that definitely counts for something. Musically, they get a little arid and overwrought at times, and this is what makes it tougher to handle than, say, a Mengelberg piano trio or especially a Muhal Richard Abrams combo, but there's an earnestness under that technical precision that is worthy in the same way it's worthy to get inside of Brubeck or Jarrett.

No bullshit detected--that's some real truth--words I've been mulling over for the past day or two. As an aside, I'm deeply grateful for the positive feedback and reinforcement bouncing across this forum. No two tastes are alike, and there is a hefty and healthy amount of disagreement on here, but I think that this board is united in that every person seems to be trying to "get" to the music in a different way--and, in a microcosm of what Jim is talking about, that's a pretty deep thing. Since the doors have been blown wide open, I hope some abstract and hopefully not wrongheaded philosophizing is acceptable: As someone who has taken an active role in street level creative music these past several years, the reasoning and meaning behind creative music/free improvisation/etc. can lose me. I can only imagine what it's like for people who have been doing this for decades. If you can get past the alienation, danger of marginalization, and financial ruin, you're still looking at a continual process of invention and dogged creativity, which is itself unrelentingly draining and both mentally and emotionally taxing. You can't really feel the "As Serious As Your Life" thing unless you've lived it, even if peripherally. Digging into these Bowie and Lowe albums reminded me a bit of why I got into this, and weirdly helped validate a lot of musical directions and personal interactions I've had as of late. The notion of "an experimental music" as creative, active, free, and other such suggestive descriptors has no intrinsic value in an idiomatic sense--what you're essentially dealing with is music that expands the limits of what can be felt or, yeah, understood as meaningful and/or beautiful and/or personally resonant. I'm reminded a bit of Mal Waldron's liner notes to Free at Last, wherein he defines music as "organized sound." This is contestable and digs into some truly abstract rhetorical territory, but the point is that, to Waldron, coming to terms with free jazz was as much about stricture as it was about "opening up"--his free music is proscriptive, expanding its breadth while further defining its conceptual parameters. In Sun Ra terms, "freedom is an illusion"--or, rather, some of even the most scatterbrained music is in fact organized as shit. This is why Jim's words are so intense to me. A "popular understanding" of this music entails so much work and change, and this effort can have a reciprocal affect on people and communities that is truly beautiful. Getting to the multi-idiomatic music Frank Lowe, or listening to the bizarre treatment of "Hello Dolly," Hemphill's 70's soul jazz breakdowns, and Bowie's perverse march concepts on Fast Last!--that's listening to creativity that is reaching for a broader definition of music, people, and art, and it's both worthwhile and truly deep for even going there and suggesting that, again, there is a "there" there. This isn't to say that music needs to be as broad as possible, as dissonant as possible, as futuristic or anachronistic as possible, etc.--and in practice (and speaking for myself, of course), "extreme" music that operates on the unrelenting fringes is often alienating because of how parochial it is, rather than how open. That being said, the process of negotiating "understanding" is itself as worthy as lot of art that is digested and canonized, and for some people, that's just about enough reason to get up in the morning.

FWIW, Clifford, that AEC + Frank Lowe (and Braxton, too, is on that session) is "around" and accessible. Something that Clifford said in passing in the midst of a discussion of Mal Waldron really reignited my interest in music of this vintage--something about having some attachment (?) to these years/this era. It's interesting in that albums like Fresh, Rope-a-Dope, Fast Last!, etc. are simultaneously indications of the music in transition and "sites" of their own. There's a sound to these recordings that is definitely more concrete than the cataclysmic music of early free jazz but not yet set in the way that a lot of 80's creative music was. The version of "Lonely Woman" on Fast Last!, for example, is something that could have only happened around that time--the arrangement is just too diffuse and deconstructed to be read as an earnest Ornettian artifact, and there's a detachment there as a result. The closest "thing" to Ornette is Hemphill's alto, but it's relegated to these ghostlike obbligatos. At the same time, the orchestration is juxtaposed against these prototypical, immeasurably deep Bowie vocalisms, and it's clear that you're listening to music that is once primordially serious and profoundly conversational (both literally and figuratively). In pithier terms, I can't remember the last time I heard something like this that wasn't overtly referencing the AACM ethos in some way--in a (sloppy) quantum sense, it's like the minute like this music happened, it became an edifice that had to be scaled in some way. Returning to some thoughts above, I don't think it would be possible to look at The Music in this way without the benefit of historical distance. The dominant historical narrative is that there wasn't much "there" there when it came to jazz in the post-60's/pre-Marsalis area--this is bullshit, as many here know, but I feel like there wasn't a large scale change in the popular understanding of this period until relatively recently.

LOL--Jim has seniority and the chops- In terms of the Fresh/Bowie Muse discussion, this does raise the most interesting boring question in the world--i.e., how does the availability of documentation affect the reception of an artist's work, and (pt. 2) isn't availability a two-sided thing? Naturally, guys who got to this music decades after the fact have the benefit of "calling" these huge evolutionary arcs that may or may not have been evident in real time, but (in a recursive sort of way) the nature of this analysis hinges on whatever documentation the listener has in his or her possession at a given time. I wonder if something like Fast Last! gets "marginalized" because, naturally, we now have the conceptually related The Great Pretender more widely available and in better fidelity (though I'm not sure if one album is better than the other), not to mention easy access to the staggeringly important early Art Ensemble discs. My favorite Brass Fantasy disc is Twilight Dreams, which completely changed my perspective on how creative and exciting that project could be--but I wouldn't have even heard about it had I not found it in a cutout bin a few years back. Now you can buy it on Amazon for $10. Fresh was the first Frank Lowe disc I got my hands on, but it was hard for me to "get to" that one first with Black Beings and Duo Exchange readily available back when I was getting into Lowe's music. That being said, was Fresh actually recorded for Freedom? And, if so, since Freedom had an actual distribution system in place, was Lowe thinking that Fresh would get to more people? I wonder if that might something to do with the wider conceptual breadth of that record, though I might just be spinning my wheels. As a musician, it behooves me to lean on primary resources as a learning tool, but in a much nerdier/academic sense, secondary resource analysis is really interesting. This sort of salvaged the Ratliff Coltrane book for me, in that it's one thing to listen to late Trane with the comfort of time, but it's another thing to read the contemporaneous reactions to that music and be reminded that this was (and still is) a holy war for some people. Charles Moore telling Don Ellis that he "must die" captures a specific race/conceptual divide that I can only understand with cool, objective distance. Also, Clifford--I take your recommendations 100% seriously, though I have the same reservation as most when it comes to something like Out Loud--I have a hard time rationalizing a purchase like that. It's the same reason I'll never get that NYAQ box, and the same reason why a lot of people didn't get the Ayler box (though I did, but I had more disposable income back then). I'm sure listening to the Cecil trio track w/Albert Ayler would go a long way toward explaining the development of both of those artists, but it's buried amidst what was <$100 worth of live recordings with the Beaver Harris band, and I know a lot of people couldn't get to that. But then here comes youtube, and it's a whole new world.

Just curious, Jim--had you followed Lowe up to that point (live or on record)? It sounds like such an abrupt turn to me. With the exception of episodes of Noah Howard's Live at the Village Vanguard, Lowe doesn't really sound like he does on Fresh before '74. It's different than, say, Marion Brown or Archie Shepp, both of whom sort of transitioned into more melodic (but also, for the most part, more subdued) playing after the fire music heyday--Lowe plays more melodically after the early 70's, but with this sort of blotchy abandon that is more akin to Braxton or Roscoe than an Ellingtonian horn. For all suggestions that the music went into severe crisis mode after the unleashing of Ayler and late Coltrane, I definitely feel this vibe that "something's happening" on a lot of early 70's free music--and it's all at once geographical, generational, and conceptual. Even on supposedly marginal stuff like Fresh or, again, the Bowie Muse albums, there's this sense that doors once blown open raise a lot of interesting questions about residence, property, and sanctuary.

Fresh is weird, and I hadn't listened to it for ages until I dug up my copy a few weeks ago. IIRC, it's the first Frank Lowe album that isn't a nonstop essay in firebreathing, and this turned me off a bit on first listen. Having (now) come to terms with a lot of the self-conscious inside/outside music of this period (and having developed a taste for later, more melody/rhythm-oriented Lowe), it makes a lot more sense. I read it as a post-AACM album that doesn't make any profound statements about the structural or conceptual possibilities of a post-free landscape; it's an album about what you do do in the post-free epoch, rather than what you can do. It's fascinating because it's one of the few documents of a definitive second/third wave energy player coming to terms with the ethoses of jazz postmodernism and Great Black Music (as opposed to a document of a player "born" into one or the other--e.g., Jarman, Kalaparusha, Windo, Glenn Spearman, sort-of David Murray, etc.)--it's a sonic pivot point between diehard loft post-Coltraneisms and the "later stuff," and it's suitably messy, conceptually scattered, and imbalanced. It's sort of a "freer" album than Black Beings in this way--it's not shackled to any particular MO, and so these previously obscured attributes of Lowe's playing are coming to the fore--"OK, let's play some Monk. Let's play some straight R&B (etc.)." The Art Ensemble, for example, always walks a fine line between irony and deathly seriousness when it participates in these sort of idiomatic conceits--with Lowe, I only hear seriousness. If the actual meat of the ensemble work and the playing still sound like they're being worked out, it's OK--it's the first album with Lowe as leader that really "sounds" like prototypical, inimitable Lowe, and as such it's kind of a stealth bellwether for so much wonderful but stylistically scattered 80's creative music. Now The Flam--that sounds much more "together." The quartet stuff with Butch Morris--much more together. And of course, as people say religiously on these boards, the recordings tell only part of the story. Fresh--much like these Lester Bowie Muse sides--is cool because it sounds like we're listening in on a marginal point in history--not the unbelievable capital letter stuff, but the nuts and bolts of music transitioning from one psychology to the next. Sometimes this music is the most telling, because I don't think the painful work of figuring out what to do post-Coltrane/post-Cage is really done. These days, I feel like it's more about personal solutions than either catastrophic change or definitive innovation.

African Children is pretty good--a lot more roving than The 5th Power. I think that giving this particular ensemble space to stretch enlivens the proceedings, since the group is ultimately "just" a first rate blowing band. The music is (in relation to most Art Ensemble stuff and even a lot of Bowie music) sort of formally conventional, and it has that kind of lopsided groove that characterizes a lot of loft-era inside/outside jazz--but it's Bowie in a too-seldom-documented extended ass-kicking mode, which makes it worthwhile. FWIW, I like both of the Muse sessions--Fast Last! a little more because of the sublime Julius Hemphill contributions. Bowie and Hemphill share a raw funkiness that is simultaneously deeply earthy and surreal, so it's interesting to hear them together. Bowie's playing on Frank Lowe's Fresh is similarly facinating--pranksterish and kind of perverse, but also very direct and punchy. I've always felt that this was something to aspire to as both a soloist and ensemble voice--the character of being deeply self-aware and cognizant of one's surroundings, allowing this sort of intelligence to direct and not limit your power, energy, or ingenuity.