ep1str0phy

I'll trust that Harold is right, as I certainly don't have a firm hold on the area in question and liner notes can easily be wrong. This would mean, however, that the Pieces liners are wrong, and I'd hope that someone could verify to that effect (discographically?).

I'm all over Ella Meets the Last Poets: Live at Carnegie Hall. Thanks for the heads up, clem.

I just took a look at a CD reissue of the Flying Dutchman Pieces of a Man, and Ron is the only bass player listed (the sleeve is a reproduction of the LP interior). "Revolution" is on that one, so I guess that's it (unless there's some info missing).

Jacknife has some awesome Lee, but Tolliver is young and hungry on that one. That's certainly one of my favorite "later" Blue Note trumpet dates.

To be fair, when the performers are operating at a certain caliber, more might still be too little... but I absolutely respect the "no encores" perspective. I don't always agree, but it sometimes seems appropriate.

Peace to Albert. I'll break out Witches and Devils--for Norman Howard, too.

Music is music is music. Packaging of some sort is preferable to a white Staples CD sleeve and black sharpie inscriptions, anyhow. Thanks, Clifford. I think the one non-Phillips tune is "Burn Baby Burn", if I indeed read the liner notes correctly.

Pretty sure that's right.

Re: Holy Ghost and Clifford--to be fair, again, the liner suckage of the new ESPs is not a hard-and-fast rule. I've had no real issues with both of the Frank Wright releases, although after "correctness" is achieved something a little more thoroughgoing would be nice (for example--and this goes for the Sonny Simmons album, too--some--even brief--commentary on the interview sections would be appreciated). I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the wellspring of new ESP stuff--just that a lot of this is fine music and in its own way deserves as thorough treatment as your much-ballyhooed BNs, Prestiges, etc. Anyway, I'm sure there are a lot of fans and connoisseurs who would be more than willing to fact/grammar check the ESP liners for free, if only so that is what goes down for posterity.

Always a fan of Lee's more "progressive" dates, and I've been spinning The Last Album a lot recently. A lot of that has to do with Billy Harper, who can do the "extended" tenor thing like a madman. Grachan Moncur III, Freddie Waits, Reggie Workman (etc.) don't hurt, either.

I just picked up a copy of Burn Baby Burn at my local B&M--the new Don Cherry ESP and the reissue of Here and Now (also new, apparently) were also there, but I didn't have the guts to pull the trigger on all of it at once. Anyhow, Albums of this nature and histories this convoluted run the risk of getting fetishized, but Burn turns out to be an energetic and forceful--if rough--take on the Ayler habitus. I'm extremely impressed by just how forceful and directed this generally "unheard" ensemble comes across as. Informative and articulate liners as always, Clifford, but I have to take issue with ESP's general jacket layout. These ESP reissues have been really mixed, sometimes extremely lacking, in the way of clarity and general "user friendliness". I didn't know what the hell was going on with the interior essay until the last two or three pages. Some essay signposting (separating the very dense "first half" from the "The Fire On the Cuyahoga" part, the latter of which--based on readability and penchant for sense--seems to comprise Clifford's contribution), some annotation--even brief--explaining how the first couple "interview" statements were taken from a Joe Phillips interview, would have been very helpful. Very poor editing, I'll note. The grammatic continuity in these liners (barring, again, the apparent Clifford section) is just bewilderingly off. A lot of this stuff reads like an off-hand forum post, rather than liners for commercial use. Now, for the ESP guys that will inevitably read this: I understand that the whole mystery and mythology thing is crucial to the ESP ethos, and I appreciate the label's attempts to maintain some sort of aesthetic continuity with the past, but for heaven's sake--is it so difficult to list composer credits, personnel, and session dates somewhere outside of passing mention in the liner essays? I know I'm bitching here, but this music has awaited release for decades and it would be nice for this stuff to see the light of day in some intelligible manner. I mean, Jesus, the ZYX reissues did better with sessionography stats. -Altogether different note, related to the matter of obscure 60's trumpet players: I just picked up Jacques Coursil's Clameurs--a strangely effective electronica/spoken word/creative music hybrid that's really difficult to describe. As it's only now seen release, I'll probably write something up about it--but, considering what I know of Coursil, it's both very much of a piece with history (the sound-based, AACM-esque BYG sessions) and really, really weird (shades of European film music, Zorn, and even the Michael Mantler/Jack Bruce collaborations).

Excellent, excellent news.

Afternoon... was a part of that "text over drab, pictureless earth tones" CD reissue series a while back (the same one that included Drum Ode, but then I've never seen a CD issue of Drum Ode...)--that's the copy I have. Regardless, the LP reissue--moody B&W cover art and all--is very readily accessible, and can be found cheap ($8.99 in CA) at your local music superstore (Amoeba, etc.).

To qualify the last statement--Ayler's earliest recordings as leader date to around '62, although the Ayler box and discogs have brought some newer material to light from far "stricter" environments... dealing with Ayler's military recordings is a whole other task that complicates things even further (especially as many of the apparent "influences" on those dates seem to lessen in importance as AA comes into his own).

Fascinating read, and I'd sure like to know whether or not someone has followed up on Ed's listening "suggestions"--or, really, if there is really any more thoroughgoing analysis to this effect. Contextualizing Ayler in this historical sequence is a somewhat complicated task as his first appearance on record, while probably not so dramatically "different" as close listening might suggest, is sufficiently radical to denote an evolutionary step a little divergent from the at least intermittently overlapping techniques of Gilmore and Trane. Ayler of course came out of the Rollins tradition--but throw in a strong number of X factors (from Don Byas to Bechet, etc.), in addition to what certainly does come across as a sui generis degree of tonal and rhythmic flexibility, and it's a lot more difficult to trace the influence of Trane and/or Gilmore there. If Ayler's earliest recordings date to '62, and Gilmore's work might still qualify as proto-Ayler in '64 (a scant couple months before the recording of Spiritual Unity, which is more an innovation in ensemble interaction than anything else), and Trane's work didn't really jump off the tonal deep end until somewhere toward '65, then it might even make sense to problematize Ayler as an evolutionary "dark horse" that, somewhere upon his eruption onto the NY scene, catalyzed the development of some of the already motile innovators in the movement. Can't really speak to Pharoah, but he's at least conventional enough on his earliest recording to trace him to an axis similar to that Gilmore and Coltrane orbited on. I like the idea of "slippage and play" between the post-bop innovators of the tenor, but I think it's also important to remember that at that time the vocabulary was just coming into its own. I think the issue of "influence" is a lot more complicated for players of the last two or three decades, after ideas got a little more scarce.

(Last night) went to go hear a free concert by the Michael Session Sextet--an all-star ensemble with a number of Pan African People's Arkestra alums: Steve Smith (tp), Phil Ranelin (tb), Nate Morgan (p), Jeff Littleton (b), Sunship Theus (dms). Performance was marred by a poor balance between the rhythm section and the horns and some wacky acoustic choices by the sound crew (a lot of reverb), but the playing was terrific and the ensemble took off with a typically interesting repertoire (many originals, some Jazz Messenger Tunes, an Ornette tune--"Turnaround"). Session might be my favorite LA-area sax player--a post-Trane, post-Dolphian vocabulary than moves facilely between inside/outside extremes. Some good news--Phil Ranelin said that he's done some reunion stuff with the Detroit crew (Marcus Belgrave, etc.), and that an album should be released soon. I'm looking forward to hearing what that "sound" would sound like after all these years, considering how many of the Detroit scene's innovations and idiosyncrasies have sort of fueled parts of modern beat/sample culture. I think all the remnants of Ranelin's crowd still have something interesting to say.

I have the Spirits Rejoice Get Back LP--decent transfer, suffering from the typically lo-fi ESP sound. I haven't had time to sit down with another version, so I can't compare--but, outside of some distant Call Cobbs harpsichord on one cut, it sounds OK.

High praise from a a big man in this music, that Braxton quote. Though, like clem, I'm interested in the deal with the Lethem quote.

Ruin a lot of pants that way?

Thanks for the review, Cliff.

You're kidding? The Olatunji stuff is SO badly recorded it is virtually unlistenable. Too bad, it's smoking hot stuff, but really - how many times will anyone listen to it? Well, personally, I've listened to it a bunch of times. I know I'm not the only one. Guy In about an hour I'm stepping in the car. I'm going to play Olatunji and hope for the best...

Re: the "idea" v. "technical" matter--I'm not sure about the notion that there's an inverse proportionality between the two (i.e., one will go up when the other goes down), but then you'd have to wonder just what "staleness" means to the listener. The ideational element of Monk's music was so wrapped up in performance--perhaps increased facility in the latter variable just concretized the Monkian "concept", and from there the music just got a little less dangerous. Or maybe it's a matter of the nature of Monk's ideas evolving. I hear a strong degree of invention on many of the Columbia recordings (Underground, the solo stuff), but it's because of and not in spite of an increasing technical facility--remember, Monk didn't stop playing like Monk (e.g., un-straightening his fingers on the piano)--though I wouldn't necessarily say that he learned how to play Monk better. But--there's some value in those later recordings, as you can hear a musician whose ideas have adapted to different environmental stresses--constant performance, regular recording--though not in the most creatively "adventurous" way. But that's all the documentation we have of a musician of Monk's personality and intellect struggling "into" complacency, and I think it's arguable that he didn't stop trying to play interestingly the minute his technique got "better"--if easier to predict.

Wow--I didn't think I'd hear someone else say "Locomotive". As Chuck noted, a lot of it is a performance/composition thing, and I have an affection for the whole of Underground, anyway. I'll also list "Well You Needn't", "Monk's Mood"... you keep going long enough you list everything.

Lord knows we've been back and forth on the merits of Olatunj, but I'm not sure that either the Coltrane legacy or the world are worse off for its release... if we're going to "plunder" the Coltrane archives, I'd rather they hew toward the Olatunji stratosphere.

Always a favorite! I was just spinning Blue Notes: In Concert, Vol. 1 this afternoon.