_forumlogo.png.a607ef20a6e0c299ab2aa6443aa1f32e.png)
ep1str0phy
-
Posts
2,550 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Donations
0.00 USD
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Posts posted by ep1str0phy
-
-
Two rather different things. A proper "practice" environment enables precision and control, whereas the best live settings can induce moments of creative frenzy and even more intense listening/communication (these latter phenomena are especially true for improvisers/improvising). Then again, either situation can provoke the opposite effect.
I feel like absolute masters can sort of bridge the gap in body chemistry and psychology that renders the two situations somewhat mutually exclusive. Granted this, I more or less feel like gigs (like recordings) are snapshots--sometimes beautiful, sometimes unflattering--of what is an ongoing life. I'm sure many musicians here could relate when I say that I'm a musician 100% of the time (just as I'm a human being 100% of the time etc.), and of those several waking hours I spend doing creative stuff, only a fraction is really comprised of "live performance." Sometimes my best nights are gig nights, sometimes they're in a remote location rehearsing for several hours in a row.
-
Recognize anyone here? (Brits not allowed to answer.)
Boris Johnson?
-
-
One of my favorite performances of Trane's in any format is the 1965 Downbeat Jazz Festival hit (with the classic quartet and Shepp). Trane's solo on that is literally out of control. On the recording that has been circulating, you can literally hear the audience react to the beginning of late Trane (some random heckling, nervous laughter, disbelief, then ecastatic cheering). I think that, of the actual albums, Transition and Sun Ship might come closest to matching that sense of mania and wonder, but Transition gets a minor edge on that tally for the eloquence of its construction (both compositionally and improvisationally) and the huge surprise elicited from the apeshit Ayleresque histrionics like halfway through.
-
...which leads us to harmolodics. Judging by any number of often contrary opinions (by bandmates, "official" critics, and armchair commentators alike--no slight to any one, naturally), a length's time of listening habits, and conversations with friends (some of them at least occasional musical intimates of Ornette's), "true" harmolodicism has something to do with achieving a sort of uncompromised self expression within a group and with others. I think that at least one of the reasons the term/ethos of harmolodicism has never been textbook defined is because textbook definition sort of defeats the purpose. Harmolodics is/are what you make it/them, and external definition just sort of institutionalizes everything (and transforms said everything into that very thing that harmolodics is opposite of--i.e., prescribed methodologies and idiomatic strictures).
I actually had a conversation about this after criticizing Christian McBride's impromptu performance with Ornette at the big Rollins extravaganza like a year or so ago. To me, McBride's pseudo-aping of Charlie Haden's idiom--the double stops, pedal points, etc.--struck me as forced and halfway; my sense/conclusion was that it took a special "kind" of musician to play harmolodic music convincingly. Ornette's thought on this might be (and again, I can't speak to this either directly or even first-degree indirectly) that in not "trying" to play a certain way to "fit in," and in playing what came naturally in that moment (consisting of, I suppose, the Hadenisms), McBride did the music right.
The essential "problem" here is that this leads to a degree of artistic relativism and it becomes difficult to weigh the relative merits of one guy/gal or the other. Ultimately, I don't see this as a bad thing, especially when viewed from the perspective of Ornette's career--he's spent decades creating music that has bucked even his own listeners' expectations (incontrovertibly true, even if just looking at the post-Atlantic music--(1) trumpet/violin, (2) chamber music excursions, where the rail between totally composed and totally improvised is actually pretty wobbly, (3) orchestral work, (4) vocal-centric music, (5) Prime Time, (6) Prime Time/Time Design, (7) electric music with Pat Metheny, (8) playing with Jerry Garcia, Lou Reed, Claude Nougaro, etc., (9) multimedia spectacle with Prime Time, (10) integration of electronic music, rap, etc. and other post-jazz/contemporary idioms into his music, the list goes on...). Nothing in this ethos is necessarily "better" because it is/can be just a different experience. This is what I was getting at talking about Denardo above, because (especially in his preteens) Denardo has barely a fraction of the chops of a Blackwell or Jones--but he's perfect for that music and he's committed to both himself and his role. In that music (and not necessarily, say, a repertory performance of Le sacre du printemps or even recreationist Coltrane modalism), that's all that it takes for the art to work. Ultimately, it just has to operate and operate well on its own terms.
None of this means that one shouldn't have a preference for one style or the other, and I genuinely think that Jones & Garrison don't have as strong of a feel for what I like about Ornette's music than, say, Blackwell and Haden. It's just that New York Is Now and Love Call aren't necessarily less legitimate pieces of Ornette's discography than the Atlantic stuff is, taken on harmolodic terms.
As for The Avant-Garde--I don't really like it, either, if only because Trane at that point was looking for lateral motion in his rhythm section and the band is trying to play either (a) in a generalized, post-1st Miles Quintet/post-Monk mode or (b) like Ornette. It sounds like the band is literally waiting for something to happen, whereas Trane figured out that, for him, motion could happen sideways--inside of the idea and not necessarily in the bridges between concepts. It's a testament to just how mutually challenging Ornette and Trane were/are that Ornette had a difficult time finding musicians for his music and those musicians, in turn, had a difficult time making Trane sound his "best." Ironically, and indicative of how narrow the walls between these idioms may have actually been, the Ornette crew later found their own ways to turn stasis into motion. Old and New dreams is rife with that stuff--"Mopti" and "Togo" being brilliant examples of this. (When Cherry nails that piano entrance on the ECM version of "Togo," go the fk home. That's it right there.)
As far as moods and emotional personalities are concerned, I love Ornette and Trane equally (as my #1 and my #1, in certain respects), but Ornette does make me feel "happier" in a mundane sort of way. Trane's music is ecstatic and large, but its emotions are so unfailingly operatic in scope that the ground view is kind of obscured. (The solo intro to "Song of Praise" on One Down, One Up is one of the times in Trane's recorded legacy that this is not the case, and it scared me to death when I first heard it.) At the same time, I think both musics are equally confrontational. Trane's music is often harder in content and energy, but Ornette's music is striking to me for the sheer kaleidoscope of grounded, naked emotion it evokes--not just happiness or elation but often rage, confusion, and hurt. I'm the last guy to say that free jazz is intrinsically "angry people's music," but I don't blame the guy for flashing a little cynicism or edge--and it might be more cutting precisely because it isn't so exalted. Listen to "Crossroads"/"The Circle with a Hole in the Middle," "Written Word" on the Science Fiction sessions, or some of the music on Who's Crazy. If you're listening for what inflicts your gut (rather than what triggers your formal mind), that some bruising music.
-
Whoa. Sounds like an amazing night! I had a (vaguely) similar experience with Andrew Hill in Los Angeles years ago--I talked to him for something in the area of fifteen minutes way before the concert, quizzing him about the "state of jazz" (or whatever "relevant" phrase or term I was bandying about at the time...). Funny thing was, I didn't know it was Andrew Hill at the time. I had heard most of his Blue Note albums, so I knew what he looked like, but something about seeing the guy in person didn't trigger any mental alarms. He kind of winked at me when he strode on stage, which pretty much made the evening for me.
-
Whoa, Allen--was this the band with Haden/Blackwell, or really Haden/Elvin?
The RVG remasters of the Golden Circle music are a mixed bag. I love how beautifully foregrounded the alto is, and the separation is wonderful. As a live recording, though, the remastered GC albums have this sort of digital sheen that is really pungent in spots, and the stereo image can come across as slightly artificial. Part of me loves the sheer muddiness of the 80's reissues, but--when it comes down to it--the quality of that music carries everything over.
I do wish that Love Call/New York Is Now had gotten the RVG treatment, seeing has how they're studio albums and reasonably well recorded. Might-have-beens are always kind of beside the point, but I can't fathom how amazing those albums (compositions, arrangements, etc.) would sound anchored by Haden/Blackwell or even Haden/Denardo. The superimposition of Ornette's concept over the Coltrane rhythmic logic is interesting but lacks that crackling energy that a "real" Ornette band brings to the table.
"Classic" Coltrane rhythm is dispersed and multifaceted, turgid and magnificent, whereas "classic" Ornette rhythm is sharp, linear, and almost anxiously energetic. Granted, Garrison/Jones is one of my favorite rhythm sections--maybe my favorite--but one of the things they couldn't really do was that breathless, vertical sort of burnout swing time that the Atlantic Ornette rhythm sections excelled at. I guess the Coltrane bag is more physical (maybe more "African") in how enveloping and polyrhythmic it is, but Ornette's early rhythmic construction struck me as an even more logical conclusion to bebop--faster, faster, faster until the broad strokes start sounding like short strokes and the short strokes just disappear into swatches of sound. More than anything else, Haden and Blackwell (or Higgins) were propulsive and sparse, which is ideally suited to a melodically-based music. Garrison and Elvin don't shine like that on the Blue Note albums.
Interesting comparison to Denardo on what could very well be my favorite Ornette album ever, Crisis--Denardo's tendency (for lack of technique, at the time) is to break up the time. He's still a melodic player--ala Blackwell--but something about the sound of his drums, his touch/articulation, and his melodic sense just sounds inherently fatter and less sharp than Higgins or Blackwell (even when playing the same sort of stuff). Haden knows this and stops doing his walking bag, playing more like he did with the Jarrett group and a similarly dispersed (but melodic) drummer, Paul Motian--double stops, melodic phrases that play against (rather than with) the tempo, pedal points, etc. The overall effect is vaguely Coltraneish, or at least in a middle ground between the Atlantic Ornette feel and mid/late Trane. This, also, makes the band sound more "turgid and magnificent," and Crisis renders some of the most effective versions of some epic themes that don't sound quite as epic with, say, Blackwell or Higgins--"Song for Che," "Broken Shadows," etc.
-
I half agree--I think that music like Vol. 1 of Golden Circle and the alto features on Love Call and New York Is Now is as accessible and unabashedly swinging as any music Ornette had made up to that point. At the same time, much of Ornette's mid-60's music--captured on Blue Note and elsewhere--is as abstract as anything he's ever done. Most of this has to do with his doubling. Ornette's untutored sound on trumpet and violin went, in a way, a step further than Ayler, since Ornette's facility on those instruments was not predicated on an understanding of even basic technical facility. Same result, in a way, since Ayler got to "the point" of complete tonal denaturation--in that respect, Ornette's violin work strikes me as an early string analog to the sort of brute force sound exploration that would prevail here and there in subsequent times--but Ornette was among the first to get at the point that you didn't even really need to "play" the instrument in order to make it sing. (And yes, as Ornette has pointed out, there are elements of his trumpet technique that, developed via auto-didacticism, would cause problems for a more conventionally schooled cat.)
Granted all that, I think that "Love Call," "Snowflakes and Sunshine," and especially the masters thesis of untutored improvisation--The Empty Foxhole--would still freak a lot of people out (including those well-versed in free jazz/free improv, since, again, even the "basic technique" is hard to hear). I think those works are closer, in at least a conceptual-spiritual-philosohpical sense, to a lot of Euro/Asian free improv and EAI, in that sound production and feel are the prominent focus. The blues/folk basis that most of what is recognized as free jazz has internalized is still there, of course, but I think that these elements are less ostensibly the focus (or even "the point") than in Ornette's Atlantic music, stuff like Old and New Dreams, or even stuff as visceral as Ayler or some Cecil Taylor. Ornette's mid-60's music is really singular since it is simultaneously emotionally gripping and daringly technically abstract, and it calls attention to what it aspires to be (or, rather, the thing that it "is" other than jazz) by virtue of being so casual with the cylinders it fires on. Or, rather, there's something in there that doesn't necessarily make you shout or move your body, and it is weird.
-
The only thing I've heard (and heard of) is the quartet recording with Gary Peacock standing in for Ron Carter.
-
do u guys like love call more than new york is now. im listening to jsngrys clip, do not dig the violin. not to much into ornette really but i DUG love call. it all made sense and was attractive music i thought
]
To be fair, there's only one violin cut on New York Is Now, and it's very brief (as JS noted, it's supposed to be an "interruption"). New York is more dispersed than Love Call--that is, the energy is more decompressed--but I feel like there's a lot more going on in the rhythm section on the New York sides. Basically, I hear at as Love Call = the shredders, New York Is Now = the more introspective, interactive cuts. Granted that, all of this music is from the same set of dates, so the basic group "sound" of the two albums is the same.
-
Incidentally I played though the atlantics recently after a (very) long period without them. Not so 'free'? Maybe. BUT incredibly lucid, much more thought-through and composed and less belonging-to-nature than I guess I used to think. I never found as much in Cherry as I do here, where the context or guidance or just sheer on-the-day in-that-band form makes him sound like a genius, and the genius he sounds like is Ornette.
I think that listening to both the post-Atlantics groups and any number of Ornette repertory projects have heightened my appreciation for those late 50's/early 60's bands. For one thing, I don't think that either Old and New Dreams or the post-70's Ornette/Cherry pairings were as effortlessly virtuosic as the Atlantic bands. It's interesting that Ornette is identified as this primitivist par excellence--first and foremost. The blues is, of course, there, but it's been transmogrified/transported; the sound of the Ornette/Cherry/Haden bands always struck me as both primeval and staggeringly futuristic. Laying down something like "Eventually"--with its ridiculously dense unison line and breaking-the-sound-barrier fast tempo--is more like a riff on/logical conclusion to the verticality of bebop. Anyway, everyone talks about "Lonely Woman" and "Ramblin'" and the blues, but JESUS was there a lot of straight up (not just, "post," but like "supra" bebop) technique on the Atlantic sides.
-
Golden Circle, Volume 2 was always my jam back when I was getting into Ornette. I cannot understate the impact of my first exposure to "Snowflakes and Sunshine" (which I later discovered to be somewhat of a regular set piece for the trio). Consuming all of this music with the virtue/curse of hindsight makes for some weird narrative disjunction... I think I leapt from Shape of Jazz to Come to Golden Circle 2 to Science Fiction (or maybe Sci Fi was in the middle, I can't remember), which did wonders for my appreciation for Ornette as this sort of comprehensive avant genius (though, at the same time, blunting my understanding of the ENORMOUS leap in terms of liberty/looseness between the Atlantics and the trio music--or rather, the unreal virtuosic tightening up between the Blue Note music and the reformed Haden/Blackwell group).
I still hold that Vol. 2 is the superior album (compared to 1), even though the performances are easily appreciated as a whole. Vol. 1 is pure shredding and motivic invention, whereas Vol. 2 is ragged creation, big ideas, and emotional projection (the latter of which meaning the most to me). I still hear Vol. 1 as an enjoyable but relatively facile representation of Ornette's emotional dimensions (the ballad, "Dawn," sounds far less direct and earnest than Vol. 2's "Morning Song"), and the one real "big idea" track on the album ("European Echoes") teeters really close to laboriousness (I love the insistence of Ornette's more repetitive melodies, but I wonder if the trio had difficulty saying much with the waltz idea). Anyway, 2 has the balls-to-the-wall, terrifyingly untutored blowout ("Snowflakes"), a stark and movingly unguarded ballad ("Morning Song"), a ridiculous uptempo alto feature ("The Riddle"), and the sort of warm, slow-burn, rhythmic juggling that Ornette's music excels at ("Antiques"). Anyway, Vol. 2 has everything.
I almost wished I voted for Foxhole, though, because the sheer balls on that album are a miracle. Of course, it works as a musical piece, and as a sort of jazz art brut it's in the upper echelons (alongside some of Rahsaan's weirder works, early Art Ensemble, some of the wackier stuff Dudu Pukwana was involved in, and a number of other things). I can understand it might not be everyone's taste, but taken on its own grounds (as a "folk music" and not, say, the apotheosis of the pianoless trio concept), it's a stunner. I think it accomplishes exactly what it seems Ornette wanted it to accomplish.
My love for the Redman/Garrison/Jones dates is an up and down kind of thing--I think everyone is there to play, but Garrison in particular sounds a little spent for ideas in spots--but the quality of the heads and the general musicianship on display is of such a high quality that I'd consider all of it worth listening to. I actually don't think these albums are as "successful" in and of themselves as Empty Foxhole or the bordering-on-sublime Golden Circle records, but I would rather hear Elvin jones work through an unfamiliar idiom than I would virtually any contemporary jazz drummer burn through your (now) typical post-Tony Williams, post-Miles sort of bag.
I think that the piece "Old Gospel" is an amazing performance and everyone plays through the McLean album wonderfully, but the other compositions seem a little too self-conscious for my tastes. I think McLean thrived in that mysterious, not-quite-earworm space that Grachan Moncur III conjured so effortlessly, and the Ornette-ish context is simultaneously liberating for Jackie and kind of straightjacketing (all bright edges and less mystery). Again, worth listening to, still.
-
Wow--I've wanted to see this for ages.
-
No, Jay, side spam is awesome--thanks for the kind words! Seats are filling up, so it's good to get the word out before it's too late (at all). Also, this interview just happened:
...which I'm very happy about. Pre-concert press is often mangled and weird, but Memory Select is pretty straight with its use of interview materials... this one is a good summary of what we're "aiming for" on Sunday.
-
CB does have a NY show at Roulette coming up. (Checks Fred's website...) September 18.
-
Hi, all-
Since Frith's music has been discussed here on several occasions, I thought some folks would be interested... my duo Grex (grex.bandcamp.com) will be playing on a bill with Bay Area chamber folk band Jack O' the Clock (www.jackotheclock.com) and Fred Frith's Cosa Brava this Sunday, August 14, 7:00pm (doors) at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall.
Cosa Brava doesn't play out very much, but it has a fairly unique, hybridized 20th century chamber/avant rock sort of sound. It may sound closer to Henry Cow than any of Fred's other band projects under his name in recent years. In the band: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum members Matthias Bossi (dms) and Carla Kihlstedt (vln), bassist Shahzad Ismaily, harpist/keyboardist Zeena Parkins, electronics maestro the Norman Conquest, and Frith himself. This is, I think, their only WC date in 2011, and they really never play out.
We're treating this as an opportunity to alert folks to the extraordinarily diverse and often intensely strange Bay Area experimental song scene. It's a movement that originated at Mills College and has close ties to the local free jazz, noise, folk rock, prog rock, and contemporary classical scenes. Hailing from this milieu is Jack O' the Clock, whose crazy Canterbury-esque hybridism is on full display here:
Jack O' the Clock: Novaya Zemlya
And my duo Grex, which is what happens when you grow up on a steady diet of free jazz, EFI, grunge rock, and chamber pop. Here's one (untypically vocal-less) sample:
Anyway, if you're interested, tickets/further info available here:
Looking for a way to blow minds... E
-
Thanks for the info!
I know about his interest in Kirk, but I didn't know about the Byard connection. Byard's music--especially those two albums--that makes so much sense. Byard had and an extremely unusual and prescient sense of album repertoire and construction; I mean, it's jazz music, but a lot of those albums (those and the fittingly titled Jaki Byard Experience) have the programming and sensibility of pop albums.
-
Even having been exposed to the Paul Motian Quintet's unbelievable The Story of Maryam for some time now, I wasn't prepared to hear that group's recorded legacy in its (essential) entirety (Maryam + Jack of Clubs and Misterioso). The rest of the material on Motian's Soul Note box is fine, but that Quintet is one of the most distinctive and powerful jazz combos of the past 30 or so years. (For those unfamiliar, the personnel is Joe Lovano (ts), Jim Pepper (ts/ss), Bill Frisell (g), Ed Schuller (b), and Motian (dms).)
One thing that really strikes me about this music is what it isn't. The obvious point of comparison/the group's closest relative (barring earlier, shorter-lived iterations of the quintet) is the Lovano/Frisell/Motian trio--another band that is only really derivate insofar as it has become self-referential with time. The trio, however, is often times this delicate, gossamer thing, even in its hairier, more adventurous moments beholden to a kind of soft-focus experimentalism and dogged bitelessness. The Quintet, on the other hand, is angles and aggression, and even when it lapses into Motian's trademark sentimentalism--and a lot of this has to do with Frisell's swathy, delay/reverb-driven sound--it's a respite to weirder things happening elsewhere.
The quintet does what the trio does and, literally, everything it doesn't--there's a bass player (the committed although not-particularly-dynamic Ed Schuller) and a more aggressively experimental saxophonist/outcat (Jim Pepper), and Frisell plays with a dark edge that has been conspicuously absent from his more recent, Americana-tinged work. I can't stress just how insane and virtuosic this band gets. Motian is an almost total maximalist for what seems to be like the last time out, and it's kind of striking just how different and correct he sounds for playing music this consistently rhythmically engaged. The sax duo both throws into focus and compounds Lovano's normally-kind-of-detached harmonic virtuosity by having Pepper burst into hardcore early-Pharoah Sanderisms every couple of minutes. And Frisell--I talked to Fred Frith about this, and that man--who is a total master of extended techniques--has a deep respect for the Frisell of this vintage, who can somehow summon Derek Bailey, Hendrix, Jim Hall, and James "Blood" Ulmer--as well as something odd and unique--all at once. The fact that Frisell at the inception of his powers sounds so dizzyingly into creating this new idiom is a plus--it doesn't sound the slightest bit hackneyed, and it is genuinely, endlessly free sounding.
Anyway, that Motian box--if you don't have the Quintet music, pull the trigger on that sucker.
-
I think that Mehldau is very heavy on this disc--definitely my favorite playing of his, by far. Konitz's presence opens up all sorts of room for contrapuntal escapades, and Mehldau's harmonic vocabulary is (winningly) up to the task.
I guess I hadn't heard Konitz recently, but his tone leans way sharper and his lines way wobblier, way more fugitive than I remember. Mehldau is the conventional virtuosity on the record--a more adventurous iteration on the Evans thing--but Kontiz pushes things into free jazz territory at times. It's a really weird, really piquant combo.
A little more disappointing is the Haden/Motian pairing, if only because those two can generate so much heat and Haden is so far back in the mix that he's almost nonexistant at times. Haden is a super meaty player, but he doesn't pop here. Between this and Motian's ultra-minimalist timekeeping--sort of a rhythmic foil to what Konitz is doing--the recording is definitely balanced in favor of the frontline.
-
I haven't heard it, but Ornette plays on the album "So Tranqulizin'" by Cosmetic w/Jamaaladeen Tacuma. I haven't heard good things.
I have the "Of Human Feelings" Japanese issue, and there are no bonus tracks.
-
Phillip is a friend of mine (actually playing again in June) and I'm a fan of Joelle's. Best of luck to this project--some amazing talent on board for this!
-
I think that Ascension's mixed bag of personnel is just part of the flavor. There's a bit of a manifesto quality to it, Trane being the intersection of, one the one hand, this logical conclusion of mainstream/post-bop virtuosity and, on the other, a father figure and icon of the maturing but still new and hairy avant-garde. It gets a little schizophrenic in a way that Free Jazz is not--the differences in approach/shift in rhythm section feels getting wildly divergent from solo to solo toward the end--but that sense of mania, the sheer heterogeneity encompassed within it, plays into this very dialogic, Diasporic sense of music-as-community-ritual/social polyphony. I don't think Ascension's approach is in any way more valid that Free Jazz's, but I think it makes its point as a period earmark much more dramatically and powerfully. In other words, Free Jazz feels at all points like Ornette's music, but there are times--and wonderfully so--that Ascension gets close to a music that is not Trane's.
Speaking to that a bit, I think that my negative feelings about Ascension have to do with my personal distaste for a couple of the soloists' approaches (rendered much more vividly here than on Free Jazz, if only because the everyone gets a distinct soloist + rhythm section moment). Everyone showed up to play, and the tutti passages are fittingly big and explosive. At the same time, I think the sense of disjunctness that is one of Ascension's strengths is at times its weakness. Freddie Hubbard was a monster trumpet player who was wonderful in a straight ahead context, but (with the exception of Components and maybe Out to Lunch) he never played a convincing free solo to me; he just pops back into this weird pseudo-Speak No Evil mode when his solo starts, which suggests (but doesn't quite go there) this mainstream-y reluctance to make a full-on void dive. It's a buzz kill.
On the other hand--and this really isn't a problem with Free Jazz--avant-garde egalitarianism dropped Dewey Johnson into the party, which I'm still out to lunch on. There's no doubt that one of the "iconic" free jazz trumpets, like Don Cherry, Donald Ayler, or even Eddie Gale at that time, could have cut a lot harder. As it is, Johnson's solo sags in a way that shows the weaker parts of the "all-in" aesthetic. I don't really have this issue with any of the other soloists, but when you have Pharoah, Shepp, Tchicai, and Marion Brown as your other horns, I'd rather you better bring a weapons-grade trumpet to your knife fight.
I think what turns me off to Free Jazz, on the other hand, is the unrelenting sense of rhythmic stasis. The Science Fiction sessions will often get the clear vote because (1) the pieces are shorter and Higgins and Blackwell get to play in plenty of different time feels and (2) what the rhythm section is doing, Haden included, is much weirder and more open-ended on the big band Sci-Fi stuff. Free Jazz has this incessant walk, walk, walk and ride cymbal pulse that is attractive as a sort of idiomatic "statement" (very clearly superimposing a lot of bebop tropes onto a non-bebop situation, or, rather, suggesting the notion of slapping two bop rhythm sections on top of one another), but it gets to a little overbearing after a while. Even with Prime Time--by the 70's, Ornette's group music had learned to breathe a bit.
I do love how interactive and on an even plane the horns are--in a way that wasn't foregrounded as consistently and obstinately in a lot of the Science Fiction stuff (with the exception of, IIRC Elizabeth, which may be totally collective--need to listen again)... even during the "solos," there's this sense of density that is really unique. Also, title be damned, I don't get the sense that Free Jazz was anything more than a sized-up experiment on Ornette's part (like Ascension was "just" a big band album--but that one still has a manifesto-like weight that I'm not sure Free Jazz has); it's not a logical conclusion, but rather a goal that was reached, assessed, and developed. Taken as a fluid piece of work--or, rather, guys working stuff out--Free Jazz is awesome.
-
Good news-Walt Dickerson- 1976-originally released on WhyNot way back when, is coming out on cd this month on Candid.The tracks are(if i read the notes correctly) a duo with Jamaladeen Tacuma(then Rudy McDaniel) on electric bass; a solo vibes track; and three trios with Wilbur Ware-bass and Edgar Bateman-drums.Very curious about this because i never owned it on vinyl,and if i knew it existed back then i would have snapped it up.
Excllent news...that's a fantastic record.
I actually saw this at the local Amoeba already.
-
The better portion of Taylor "overviews" I've encountered make a point of signaling, up front, "classical training." A more measured analysis (still emphasizing the classical element), which is kind of a "classic" example, is Ekkehard Jost's book (a European dude, keep in mind, evaluating free jazz with more traditional/formalized analysis):
In terms of Cecil's percussivity:
"[...] He started taking piano lessons at the age of five. A few years later he also began to study percussion, with a timpanist who at that time was playing under Toscanini; we can ascribe some significance to this fact in view of Taylor's later stylistic evolution."
More generally:
"Without considering direct influences (i.e., models), we can assume that Taylor heard his own ideas confirmed in the playing of Tristano and Brubeck, ideas whose realization he could not yet envision because of his preoccupation with "Occidental" ways of musical thinking. Taylor doubtless had in mind, like Brubeck and Tristano, the integration of European avantgarde elements into a jazz context."
And I feel like the Anglicization of Cecil's playing happens often. Here's on example (literally the first review I opened up after searching for the Wilmer chapter on Cecil online... I lent someone my copy of "As Serious..."!):
"The performance also included more placid, pastoral segments than one normally expects from his trios. Grimes' frequent use of a bow and akLaff's reliance on brushes certainly contributed to the greater emphasis on soft textures.
The pianist apparently steered them in that direction, as demonstrated by his willingness to allow more space between notes, to the point of sounding almost minimalist on occasion. In fact, he closed the first set with a brief solo more reminiscent of Eric Satie's impressionism than any jazz style. And yet it was classic Cecil Taylor, delivered in a context that only he could generate. It also happened to be the most achingly beautiful passage that this listener has experienced at a Taylor concert over the past 20 years." (http://articles.courant.com/2006-10-23/features/0610230467_1_taylor-concert-cecil-taylor-henry-grimes)
The Nessa Juggernaut rolls on
in Offering and Looking For...
Posted
Oh man. I'm picking up both of these.