ep1str0phy

Not necessarily "ballads," but slow and very contemplative--Grachan Moncur III on Evolution. Then again, Grachan's playing on Jackie McLean's Destination Out!--especially the sublime, unbelievably moody "Love and Hate," is probably up there with the best of them.

Definitely earlier. How many 1970s jazz albums have you heard that seem to be lacking the "real" meat on the bones? Not only poorly (and cheaply) recorded, but poorly conceived as well. This seems to be true, I believe, more in the area of the avant-garde, where people are especially quick to heap the word "genius" onto music that sometimes is too difficult for the music consuming public to understand. "If we don't get it, it must be great". I hear this often, and while I do agree that criticism is often more slack when it comes to the avant-garde, I only rarely hear people use the word "genius" or connotations thereof in reference to a musician or work that isn't elsewhere, and with some frequency, appreciated and/or dissected with some degree of critical aptitude. In other words, I don't usually hear people go, "genius!" when it comes to some marginal India Navigation album--almost always this goes in reference to something that is either part of an established critical canon or, by its own internal logic, undeniably well-realized (like Nonaah, which seems to get that a lot, a 70's Cecil Taylor solo album, or Braxton's Arista stuff). On the other hand, especially on this board, for example, people are pretty quick to call out bullshit on controversial--or, if you want to call it that way, "marginal" and harder to quantify--genius. I remember some shit going down about Arthur Doyle a while back, and the camp was divided in a heated way. I think folks are quicker to recognize when the genius nomenclature is bandied about more liberally, so that can't be a threat- Now, in terms of people quick to heap the word "genius" onto music that is difficult for the music consuming public to understand--well, hell yes. Charlie Parker is hard to understand, and I don't know how many people on this board wouldn't call him a genius. Same with Coltrane and, to another extreme, Hemphill. And there doesn't need to be a discussion, I think, about whether genius is a function of mass recognition. ...I certainly hope that most critical appraisals by the allegedly well-informed don't follow the logic of "If we don't get it, it must be great"--I mean, the devices of the avant-garde are digestible to such a degree at this historical juncture that I'd be pretty surprised if everyone who does dig this often less palatable strain didn't have some sort of coherent criteria to go by. You'll hear it again and again by a lot of the AACM guys, who have the scope and purview to call out the prior wave's excesses for what they are/were--"No such thing as free," or some permutation of that. All music must by nature follow some organizing principles--or, at least, I am 100% confident that a lot of the most celebrated "out" jazz does.

I guess it took someone really pointing it out to get me to do it, but I really, really listened to the Hemphill big band album today--I've had it since I was like 15, haven't thought too much about it since--and it is a motherfucker. I can understand where you're coming from, Allen, in terms of seeing this album as a potential "solution" after energy freedom-- It grapples with issues of instrumentation, ensemble inter/independence, and improvisational liberty with the postmodern flair of the AACM generation--the kind of "kitchen sink" sense of anything possible that doesn't get annoying or draw attention to itself. It's almost how "in" the album sounds while being drastically, rule-breakingly out. There are chord changes all over the place without ever sounding like a conventional post-bop record, and I think a lot of this has to do with how detailed--freely detailed--the ensemble is: -a perfectly balanced use of twin guitars, oftentimes simultaneously comping--this degree of harmonic complexity, which would usually cause a trainwreck in a jazz ensemble of any size, is elided by the timbral freedom exercised by the guitarists. Oh yeah--no piano, and there's electric bass. -Solos that both ride the changes and sound apeshit out--my impression is that part of the reason this works is that, although many of the central melodies are consonant in an almost square way, and though the basic harmonic foundation of most of the pieces is pretty simple, the group harmonies are packed with dissonant extensions/superimpositions. Sometimes the band sounds like a series of moving clusters. -Speaking to the quote about Hemphill being the "Ellington of the avant-garde," what would in other hands sound like tightly-packed, crowded ensembles come across as surprisingly light--part of this has to do with the mix, to be sure, but the band isn't trying to achieve a homogeneous blend--it's individuals playing at together. -Some of Hemphill's arrangement choices are just fucking weird--and this definitely happens on a dime. Moving in and out of swung time at the drop of a hat--and just when it sounds like it was something the drummer felt like doing on the fly, *bam*--the ensemble drops right back into something else. I was listening to "Bordertown" on the way back from the grocery, and shit pops up out of nowhere in the rightest way possible--there's this WSQ-esque ensemble sax passage toward the end that sounds totally dropped in, but instead of disrupting the flow, it ratchets the energy up in a really exhilarating fashion. --and the facility with which Hemphill and the band accomplish this almost insults logic--the same sort of feeling I get when listening to early Art Ensemble, right when Moye joined the band, and he's already anticipating and doubling everything the soloists do. I mean, shit--I'm so high on this album right now, having attempted to listen with new ears--thanks for pointing this one out, Allen.

Something really startling to me, living with these recordings the past couple of days, is that the most cohesive tracks--compositionally, in terms of group dynamics/responsiveness, and improvisational fluidity--are by and large waxed by musicians whose approaches weren't exactly challenging the status quo. Sam Rivers had been working in his idiom since the early/mid 60's, the same with Sunny Murray (who rides the wave of energy improv on Wildflowers truer and more directly than anyone else, IMO). Ken McIntyre, who, listening more closely, kicks maybe the most ass out of any of the traditional "solo" voices on these sides (his spotlight on "New Times" is blisteringly forceful), recorded opposite Dolphy, for chrissakes. On the other hand, many of the musicians here who might elsewhere be understood as the most innovative and fresh exponents of post-energy formalism--and a lot of them are present--don't shine so bright. To be fair, Wildflowers doesn't supoort the notion that avant-garde jazz is (from the liners) "incohate bleating," but it doesn't really challenge the norms of energy/modal free jazz, by '76 themselves cliches, very successfully, either. (The comp does illustrate a sense I've had of late that all the chaotic juju just sort of drained out of energy music somewhere in the early/mid 70's; there's all of the bluster, but none of the baptismal scariness, of Ayler on these recordings.) I think that's why I like "Chant" so much--it's maybe the only side on Wildflowers that actively challenges what were then still-prevailing forms and works as a cohesive performance. You could even argue that it challenges the artists' norms, as well; although Roscoe and the Art Ensemble had been operating in an idiomatically dialogic, silence-based music of contrasts for yeeeears before the late 70's, I think the degree of exactitude and brutal logic found in compositions like "Chant" or "Nonaah" was really unheralded at that time. The other pieces that do take serious formal risks on these recordings, like the Braxton piece, the Dalta Akhri piece, and Hemphill's, are just way too sloppy to get across the point that something new was going on. I kept thinking, listening to Wildflowers, that if something both as idiomatically complete and fresh as the Braxton Arista small group sides, something off of Air Time (especially as ascetic as "Subtraction"), Afternoon of A Georgia Faun, or a piece from Wadada's Kabell box were to show up, it would stop me dead in my tracks. There's a knifelike precision to a lot of that music that even now, I think, poses issues for composers and improvisers (and composer-improvisers) to grapple with. While I feel many of the skronkiest abstractions of 60's free jazz have been digested into the mainstream, there is a very large reluctance, or maybe inhibitedness, among even many young radicals to come to grips with the sonic innovations of 70's improv--and many who try to do this don't play in the cultural area of "jazz" at all. (I'll be happily proven wrong when I hear an Ayler tribute as ballsily sober as the second half of the AEoC's Phase One.)

A little late to the party since I just obtained a copy/first heard these sessions today, but man am I surprised at how variable the quality of these sessions is. Saga really was an outstanding moment at the festival. Some moments are very, very good, maybe only a couple truly superlative, and just as much of what works, IMO, falls flat. All this raises a series of perceptual questions--most notable among these being whether quick absorption of materials hinders one's enjoyment of the recordings, whether the ensuing decades of recapitulation/recycling of certain among Wildflowers' musical practices will negatively affect one's perception of the music that existed at the time, and whether it's really fair to evaluate these excerpts, shorn of context, alongside often similar-sounding, but otherwise largely unrelated, recordings. For my sakes, I'm going to say that listening with modern ears is about all I can do--and, granted this-- (1) I'm surprised by how much of this music sounds homogenous/similar--a criticism/observation that could be leveled at bebop or hard bop or burnout or whatever--let alone "contemporary" free jazz that follows in this lineage--but not quite what I was expecting. Much of this may have to do with duplicated personnel. I think it's more on the level that none of these sides are quite as distinguished/fully realized (due to the limitations of the compilation medium) as the artists' contemporaneous full-length albums; it's a lot of cut-and-burn excerpts, oftentimes a common breed of intense, detailed, but at the same time breathless free-time/fast melody improvisation. (2) Alan Douglas mentions in the liners that (paraphrasing) the loft jazz period was the last time anything new was developed in jazz, and I'm slowly, more and more, inclined to agree. I think that much of this has to do with my frustration at how much of the jazz left has, as of late, come to observe the "cutting edge" of the music (the jazz right often doesn't give a shit)... when we're celebrating hard-grooves and cyclical lines, observe how these overtures to hip-hop/mainstream popular music conceits were already being activated/celebrated by musicians of the Wildflowers vintage--obvious debts held to Julius Hemphill and the BAG constituency, the AACM, and--hell--Randy Weston, Dave Burrell. Also--talk about future of electric guitar this, etc., etc., etc.--not knocking anyone, but the now anonymous Michael Gregory Jackson was doing this in Braxton's band in the 70's. There is nothing contemporary jazz guitar heralds are doing, save for sheer advancements in hardware, that gets substantially more complex than what Jackson accomplishes on Wildflowers. Which is, again paraphrasing Douglas, not to say that there aren't any good albums or artists these days, just that the whole concept of "new" or "future" (versus tangential) directions is sort of ridiculous now. (3) There is very, very little A game on these sessions, and this with more than a passing familiarity with these very A game musicians. -Sam Rivers's feature is great, on par with many of his sessions from this vintage. -Air's "USO Dance" sounds like a fine set closer, but extracted from a full concert, it doesn't articulate just how creatively this band dealt with structure, both composed and improvised, and hierarchical rhythm/front-line relationships--the piece could just as easily suit the approach of Rivers's band. -Ken McIntyre, a favorite of mine, would sound almost entirely out of place were it not for his ensemble's atypical instrumentation; as it is, he does a fine bit with conventional jazz form and brings a little authority and seniority to the environs. -New Dalta Akhri starts out fucking strong, but the piece seems to lose focus about midway; the group is heard to better effect, in a much better formation, on Wadada's Kabell recordings. -Sunny Murray's band actually kicks ass. I'm not overly fond of this rendition of "Over the Rainbow"--I think it's been more completely realized, in this idiom, elsewhere--but "Something's Cookin'" is maybe the strongest, ballsiest sheer "blowing" piece of all the Wildflowers recordings. -Perhaps I'm too partial to Roscoe, but "Chant" is for me the out-and-out strongest thing on Wildflowers. Virtually all of the preceding <3 hrs sounds immediately obsolete once Roscoe gets down. It's not flawless, and there appears to be some sloppiness transitioning between sections. But it is ambitious. This piece blew me away on the reissue of Nonaah, and it loses none of its balls--it maybe gains a pair--in the trio context, where the tension of the melody line gets magnified by virtue of rhythmic contrast (the drummers are in full gear). The performance pretty clearly employs sonata form, and the formal strictness of it is really piquant, in light of the preceding few hours of explode. Roscoe's focus on discreet musical ideas and techniques concentrates the energy of the performance, expends it much more efficiently, than even the most exhilaratingly bashy music elsewhere on the compilation. Also, and this is supposedly the AACM's marker of individuality (not really evident elsewhere on Wildflowers), but "Chant" makes extensive use of space and silence--shuffled off to the end of the compilation, as if to inform the listener, "oh shit, you can do that?" -Elsewhere there are a lot of noble experiments, but I think almost everyone on the set can be heard to better effect elsewhere. Julius Hemphill kills it on the earlier, ragged but beautiful and innovative Dogon A.D., but it's hard to get a sense of his genius approach to arrangement or orchestration here. Braxton and Cyrille's pieces, in particular, don't pack much punch out of context (very surprised at how relatively lackluster Braxton's piece is here). I don't know if even "Chant" is an essential piece in the oeuvre of the artist--not when Nonaah exists, or even something as early as Sound, or his very ambitious, less clearly jazz-related compositions these days. Rambling again, but there's little great, some good, a lot of OK, and a hell of a lot of "interesting, but so-so" on this legendary set. Which, if you're documenting a milieu versus a musical concept or outlook, makes sense--but I might recommend before Wildflowers any one of these artists' prime solo works to someone trying to figure out what made 70's jazz so great.

I think that that Tzadik disc is fantastic--actually one of the strongest offerings by several of the performers involved (particularly the Dogon/Raw Materials-ish trio with Ehrlich). The compositions are uniformly strong and played with gusto... I may actually prefer this to some of the Hephill sax group sets that don't have Hemphill playing on them. It's weird to think of it now, but it's (gradually) becoming more apparent that Dogon A.D. may represent Hemphill's "greatest" recorded legacy--not necessarily best, though it's clearly one of the best, but without a doubt the one that seems to have the widest influence among younger musicians today. Virtually everyone in my extended musicians network knows this recording--and many came into it independently. I'm wondering if Berne's subversive online "deployment" of the album added anything to its status (this actually predated the "sharity" blog explosion, IIRC). 1234-1234-123... 1234-1234-123... (it also sticks in the brains)

I know--this isn't really good stuff to go off of, but- Purely watching hands (and as a guitar player who actively plays this stuff), George is definitely not soloing in the first video and Paul is on bass. But--a solo is happening at about 1:30. There are some 16th note figures ([da-ga-da-ga]-[duh] or some permutation of that) at around 1:45 that correspond to the solo, and George's hands are clearly visible--he's not playing them. Since the guitarist that is visible isn't playing that part, the other one (John) is the likely candidate. On the second video, the guitars are interlocked and for whatever reason George is more forward in the mix--but, the bluesy line (the part with the string bends, the 16th note figure, etc.--clearly the solo on the album version) is being played by John. I think that the 12-string is dominating because of the balance, but it's technically playing the accompanist role that it does on other versions of this tune.

And cutting away when it's your turn to play.

OK--this is ridiculous to the extent that every live video of YCDT cuts away from Lennon at the guitar solo, but in this one: YCDT Which is pretty clearly live, George isn't playing the solo. In this one: This one: YCDT You can actually catch a second of the solo, but it goes by so fast that it's hard to tell if it's George or John (by George's right hand, it looks like he's playing the rhythm part, right down to the psuedo-lead chording right before it cuts to Ringo). Enough to convince me, but then I always get thrown off of juries...

It's a logical leap, but the fact that Lennon syncs to the solo makes me think that it was his to begin with. (Unless there's another instance of John/George trading solos for live syncing. For the hell of it?) Too much youtube after late? Yes, I think so. This video would seem to confirm your suspicions, TTK: Not really - I am pretty sure that is a lip-synched performance. DId you notice there are no microphones for the singers and the electric guitars have no chords coming out of them? Also people in the audience dancing only inches away from Lennon and clapping hands and yet those sounds not picked up. Finally, this sounds exactly like the recorded version. I rest my case.

The balancing-a-trumpet-while-playing-bass thing reminds me of the rumored Rahsaan trick of balancing an upright bass on his head while circular breathing. Also: not enough instruments.

Reminds me a lot of the Monks' "I Can't Get Over You," which employs a similar rhythmic conceit: Funny how raw the early Beatles actually do sound in comparison to the much more overtly dark and aggressive Monks; on a purely aesthetic level, the Beatles at their most grungy can stand up with the best garage rock. (And I for one think that the Monks were one of the hardest swinging rock groups of the day.)

Muhal came and visited my last year at Mills-I managed a one-on-one with him, and it totally changed my life. He had me playing "Crepuscule with Nellie" a second after I got plugged in. The open-form stuff we did that day was some of the best music I've played in my life; Muhal has a tremendous, and at this point quite storied, way of relaxing tensions and extracting from those around him the very best of feelings and talent. I may have mentioned this somewhere before, but with the brief time I spent with him, I really, really learned a lot. The amazing thing was that every one of the dozens of other students and itinerant musicians who got to meet and spend time with Muhal that week came away with much the same reaction... That Roscoe/Muhal duet concert that closed the week--that was something else. The tapes are stuck somewhere at Mills--that is, until the department can scrape together the time and funds to put together a "live from Mills" series (when that will be, who knows... but there is a treasure trove of music logged in there). I'll be listening to the Braxton/Muhal Arista duets, maybe The Hearinga Suite--there's so much. What's amazing about Muhal's discography is that it's so big, and he has this uncanny ability to get top-drawer players to reach for their best (hence the consummate quality of these recordings)... Happy B-Day! (And earlier I bought a birthday card for my Dad. Happy returns for great men.)

I've been doing something akin to this, although using much less "hip" repertoire, with my little guitar students (just transcribed the Harry Potter main theme so that an 8 yo could practice reading in G major). Simplifying melody like this is hard when trying to keep the music interesting. First thing that comes to mind (in addition to some of the other Kind of Blue tracks)--"Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise" (at least the "A"--transposed. It's a strong melody on its own).

Christ, I just found out that Paul played the solo on "Good Morning, Good Morning," which is one of the best Beatles solos for me, period. A fine, fine rock soloist. There were also those rumors that Clapton played some of the solos on the White Album (an old teacher of mine tried to convince me that he played the lead breakdown on "I Want You," but I don't buy it--the articulation is all wrong).

I don't think this one has as many fans, but I love it.

RE: Clapton--this video answered my own question. The look on his face is priceless: Clapton having Cream/pseudo-harmolodic flashbacks in Toronto.

This video would seem to confirm your suspicions, TTK:

Whoops. I guess a single google search would have sufficed to fact-check my last statement. Maybe more compelling in person? Fred was pretty transfixed by it. Somehow the surreal SME/Ono band pairing brings to mind (for me) the even more surreal Live Peace Toronto version of the Ono band, with Clapton on guitar. Again, I don't have the recording in front of me, but I think he stays in for the duration of the free jam "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow"--which is, if anything, rawer and less controlled than the stuff on Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band.

Can, Coltrane, Dudu Pukwana (esp. In the Townships), the Brotherhood of Breath, Brotzmann w/Miller & Moholo, Kind of Blue, Orgasm by Alan Shorter, Touchin' On Trane, Howlin' Wolf, Abbey Road and the White Album--that's been my pick me up flavor for the past few months. I can detect no trends, only things that always, always work. What's interesting about this to me is that a lot of my understanding of this music is as closed systems--that is, full discographical chunks that I own and cannot be added to (hence there's nothing to really plunk down for at the record shop... I usually just buy new stuff and hope i like it).

Couple more things--there's a dissertation floating around that has apparently done extended, intense dissection of the Jazz Composers' Guild. I wonder if you've read it? Last time I checked, the cat who wrote the paper was on the way to getting the JCG chapter published... don't know if it was in the ether when you were researching for the interview. Also: very cool to hear about Bob Ralston. He's one of those spectral voices I always thought may have played a notable role in 60's/70's free music.

Creativity is fun, no?

Oh, let's not forget Ringo. He kills it on both parts of Plastic Ono Band, though I can only wonder what he was thinking when the whole thing was going down. Rock steady. There was a Downbeat (?) feature on Hendrix's influence on jazz a while back, and I think it was Branford Marsalis who said that Band of Gypsys achieved the grease that the Beatles and Led Zeppelin got close to--but I'd be damned if even Buddy Miles could lay it down as straight, fat, and relaxed as Ringo's drumming on those Plastic Ono Band albums... close to no embellishment, just perfectly minimalist.

Wait--are you doing a whole thing as a samba, or just the verse? That actually sounds like it would fit pretty nicely--I'd think that Damage, Inc. might work similarly (I can actually hear a bossa nova clave under some of the first few riffs, matching the rhythm pretty well).

Shit, "Battery." If there's no melody--like there is no real, active vocal melody in this context--I would just find one. My first step would be to shrink down the wall-of-sound guitar and bass parts into more manageable, less dense melodic lines--just forget the vocals. I agree that this would fit an afro-cuban vibe well to the extent that this sort of metal is not only rhythmically intricate, but also modular in design. This is related, I think, to what J said, but once you abstract the melody from the guitar and bass parts, it should be easy to play with it.