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First off, RIP Misha. I have a deep love for the Dutch innovators even if I came to much of that music through other channels (particularly South African and German music with which the ICP folks shared so much interstitial material). The latter day orchestra was largely responsible for acclimating my family to the notion that their son would be playing music for a living, my mother accompanying me to (first) a handful of colorful performances at the Guelph festival and (second) a pretty daring night at Yoshi's in Oakland. I'm not sure if you could call either Misha's absurdist impulses or his penchant for sideways revivalism "populist" in any way, but I do think that these tendencies went and still go a long way toward normalizing the sometimes extremist practices of EFI. I used to play with a bass player who (in turn) used to play with Bennink, and said bass player scoffed when I used the word "virtuoso" to describe Bennink. I see where my bass player friend was coming from, but at the same time I do think that the ICP's inclination toward swing era grotesquerie and surreal showmanship does have a bit of virtuosity to it (in much the same way that Rahsaan Roland Kirk did). Again, the superimposition of hard abstraction over overt idiomatic performance does huge work reframing Dutch free improvisation and experimentalism in a way that just isn't present in, say, the contemporary English or even German music--and, in Misha's case, it does a tremendous job of making both the more "inside" and more roving moments seem weirdly (and I use that word carefully) earnest. Who's Bridge is successful in a way that a lot of other idiomatic records waxed by free improv masters are not. As for the Dolphy connection--the hookup with the Dutch guys went only so far as the shared surrealist tendencies and the extreme stretching of swing and bebop vernacular. I think the big difference is that Dolphy never really sounds comical (or, rather, that Dolphy seems extraordinarily devoid of irony), whereas the Dutch guys always sound like they have a degree of self-awareness. I do think that Dolphy's level of self-seriousness is the reason that he could record something like Out to Lunch and make it sound truly, incontrovertibly valid, but it's also the thing that fosters this tremendous divide on Last Date. When they play "Epistrophy," Dolphy is playing the distorted image of a continuum that he had some active participation in; the Dutch guys are more "talking about" that continuum, and they never really intersect so much as subsume their respective personalities into some weird compromise (e.g., "You Don't Know What Love Is"). Compare with Mingus's European recordings and the tonal distinction is remarkable--Dolphy is actually something close to humorous in Mingus's music, and I think it's because both Dolphy and Mingus are able to engage with a degree of anger and caustic wit that probably had something to do with, well, being a Black American of a certain era.

I agree that it's a bit of a false equivalency to the degree that the investment in recording inputs isn't quite the same thing as spending on recording output, but I do hear what Chuck is saying, at least in a private press/self-release sense. A digital only release where the musicians are the initial investors (i.e., you're not paying session fees because the artists are fronting the bread) can be done for pennies on the dime today. You can get professional level 2 track recording + digital mastering for under $600. After that, straight to bandcamp. If you're using bandcamp pro ($10/mo) you can even send out digital review copies without having to pay postage. The only unaccounted for expenses in this scenario are (1) time (including rehearsal/practice time and/or facility rental, though many working musicians will have already invested in one or the other) and (2) any possible design work. As a longtime fan of classic free jazz/improvised music/creative music--and as an active participant in contemporary music that shares a lot of interstitial material with the classic stuff in question--I think that it's important to consider the degree to which things like press and historical fetishization alter our perspective on what constitutes a successful recording. I hear a lot of terrible improvised music these days but also a lot of truly extraordinary stuff that virtually no one--by virtue of geography, listener interest or initiative, and (again) press--will ever get to hear. I know that it's sort of stock-in-trade for musicians to champion their regional communities, but I've been in and out of love with the practice of this music for decades now and I will gladly throw relatively untouted WC artists like Wiener Kids, Black Spirituals, Bad Luck, Beep!, Francis Wong and the like up against absolutely anything recorded in the past several decades barring the upper tier of material by acknowledged masters. Records like Nonaah or Derek Bailey's Aida are still pretty untouchable in their genres, but it's (again) important to consider that new musicians are trying and have been trying to generate new genres every day for the past, I don't know, eternity.

I've been spending less and less time with archival and historical releases these days, and this record is most certainly one for niche interests (i.e., for those interested in South African/Euro free jazz and/or the extended Ogun roster of musicians, there are like a dozen or so records that I'd recommend before this one). That being said, this is a good one--more satisfying than volume one and maybe even better than a lot of the "canon" material that has been available since the 70's and 80s. The sound quality is superb and a lot of the content here is unique to this set--unusual personnel, as many as three unique compositions (I need cross check the three tunes from '78), and sessions that I haven't seen pop up elsewhere. There's one tune from '77 that has been in circulation for a while (the band with Miller, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Trevor Watts, Alan Wakeman, and Bernie Holland), but the others seem more or less new--three tunes from '78 with Miller, Moholo-Moholo, Watts and Wakeman again, and Keith Tippett and three tunes from '82 with Miller, Moholo-Moholo, Watts again, Alan Tomlinson, and Dave Holdsworth. For obscure Euro free improv nerds, the '78 session is special because it was recorded pretty close to both Moholo's Spirits Rejoice and Miller's In Conference, and the rhythm section is the same (i.e., Miller/Moholo/Tippett). This is in some regards my favorite rhythm section of all time in any medium (especially on the '78 dates), and the playing here is of a pretty high caliber. Everyone is in terrific shape, but Moholo-Moholo was an absolute beast at this vintage--this perfect blend of pocket jazz drumming, blustery free jazz, and impossible funkiness. There's a special kind of beauty to Moholo's cymbal work in the late 70's (a particular timbre to his crash or ride, I haven't seen too many pictures documenting it) that is absolutely unique in the canon; when I interviewed him years ago, he spoke about the lack of cymbal work on typical urban mbaqanga recordings, and a lot of his playing in the 70's is almost obsessively cymbal centric. The only thing in the canon akin to this level of textural fanaticism is later Sunny Murray, but Moholo in the 70's had a degree of versatility and unstoppable technical power that just shades many of his American counterparts. This is a thing that is often ignored in conversations about the divide between "high" post-bop/early free jazz drumming and full blown European free improvisation--only a handful of drummers had both the chops and the psychology to bridge the two, and Moholo was one of them--a technically adept straight ahead drummer with an ear for timbral exploration. As sort of a Blue Notes stan for many years, I admit that I've been disappointed by a lot of the archival releases from this stable subsequent the explosion of Cuneiform stuff several years back. The Reel Recordings stuff is kind of all over the place and much of the sound quality is lacking. The "new" Oguns--especially the Moholo combos with board member Alexander Hawkins--have been pretty good, but a lot of the old stuff has been kind of redundant (the first volume in this series was like the umpteenth set of the same Isipingo compositions). Not this one--based on its pedigree and the rarity of the material, I might even call it a "sub-classic," better than a lot of the other new music released this year (alongside a slew of "contemporary" stuff--A Tribe Called Quest's We Got It From Here..., Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition, Kendrick Lamar's Untitled Unmastered, etc.). For the five people who are interested, this is about as good as it gets for music of this kind.

Two recollections come to mind--(1) Roscoe Mitchell said that Ayler was the loudest saxophonist he'd ever heard, apropos of a conversation he and a friend of mine were having about Coltrane, and (2) an old friend of mine saw Ayler in person in NY in the early 60's--when I quizzed him about which album best captured Ayler's sound, my friend said (almost instantly) "Spiritual Unity."

I think it's worth considering that the ideas of documentation, the presentation of art as product, and the act of producing art are not (necessarily) mutually exclusive. I don't think that there's any singular, comprehensive praxis for how music is created in a given social, cultural, or economic context. There's no news there--but in terms of the notion that "all art is commerce"--well yes, but by levels and degrees. Not all commercial music is made with strictly commercial considerations. Not all--or even any--non-commercial (or outsider, or experimental, or avant-garde, or what have you) art is created in a vacuum devoid of monetary considerations. One of the chief arguments in the ongoing debate about musicians v. promoters/clubs/etc. is that performance comprises services rendered and that this should (in and of itself) guarantee pay of some kind. The rub here is that not all music operates under the same social and commercial pretenses. If you're running a low/mid-sized commercial establishment, you're often guaranteed more patrons for hosting a touring band rather than a local band. For any number of reasons, you can often (but not always) expect a larger audience for electronic dance music than free jazz. So is it fair and economically sound under profit-driven conditions to treat free jazz the same way you would EDM, or a local musician the same as a touring band? If you book these musicians under the pretense that you will make money, is it fair to expect a free jazz musician to promote the show effectively enough to bring in numbers that equate to that of a DJ? Trade is a two way street. The degree to which working musicians are conscious participants in the broader art and entertainment economies is pretty debatable, but often (admittedly not always) you, as a performer, must make some decision about the content and value of your musical practices. As Serious As Your Life is not just a sad story about a bunch of great guys who never got paid for their work--it's (also) a narrative about musicians who made hard, often deliberate choices about their relationship(s) to commerce and audiences.

YUP. In a crowded field of convergent jazz/hip-hop, I've been a little less impressed by hip-hop inflected jazz than I have been jazz inflected hip-hop. In its best self, self-conscious fusion music (i.e., music that is a fusion of genres--I don't mean 70's jazz-rock in a specific sense) elucidates the things that make its source material so exciting. Listening to Yesterday's New Quintet is like the closest thing a jazz musician will ever come to hearing what jazz music sounds like to an untrained/unschooled ear--which is not to say that Madlib's music is illiterate or anything (far from it), only that the things that it places value in tend to be grounded in a musical sensibility that emanates from outside of jazz. For example--I love the Reuben Wilson version of "Stormy," but Madlib's version is the one that teases out this mammoth, growling beast, the rhythm foregrounded and the melodic content scurrying around the stereo field like ants. I would never have gotten that out of that, which is why listening to YNQ is a really enriching experience for me.

It's very possible that the same people who feel threatened by the likes of Chief Keef and Young Chop today are the same folks who will happily listen to N.W.A. without regard to or remembrance of the circumstances of the latter's ascension. The paradox of Straight Outta Compton (the movie) is that it presents an unreal, valorized account of music that was about reality and ugliness. That film was like 50% legacy building and 50% an indication of the fact that N.W.A. had suddenly become either (or both) and institution and/or a cultural artifact--despite the fact that social, political, and racial trends had not and have not kept pace with the ensuing 25+ years of music. The propagation of trap music is in part the world's way of filling a social role that the likes of N.W.A. (and later Tupac, or maybe Nas, or early Jay-Z, or whatever) had vacated, even though said role had never really lost its broader relevance. If there's anything about the vinyl resurgence that has stuck with me, it's that music has an uncanny ability to invent itself over and over and over again. I say "invent" carefully, rather than "reinvent." It's like the stuff my friend said about Madlib (above)--music isn't innovative until suddenly it is, after the necessary time has passed since the last iteration and the social need has arisen again. Another friend of mine, drummer Dave Mihaly, uses the phrase "so old it's new." Willis "Gatortail" Jackson v. Albert Ayler--seriously only years apart and context aside (prior to New Grass, anyway). Hendrix and Buddy Guy. Afrika Bambaataa and P-Funk and Sun Ra. Hell, P-Funk and G-Funk. I once had a champion of the "great white canon" preaching to me that jazz was absolutely nothing new or impressive, and that baroque organ was the provenance of improvisation. I'm sure there's a caveman who would argue differently. On the other hand--and in a very real sense--I think that by the time a lot of socially relevant music reaches the masses (ala N.W.A. or radio-read hip-hop), it has already lost a lot of its immediate danger. Reality will have warped again in the meantime.

Re: "documentary genres"--sloppy/best fit wording on my part that I thought got the point across, but I guess not. I use it to mean genres where the principal goal is the recording of the performance rather than (for lack of a better phrase) the "performative" creation of a sonic work. There's obviously a lot of slippage and play. Recordings of DIY punk, ESP free jazz, and some early no wave are pretty raw, uninflected recordings, but then lo-fi is an aesthetic that people both recognize and try to emulate. Apropos of the conversation here, the mid-60's RVG stuff is on one hand an attempt to capture live performance but on the other a pretty sophisticated and (apparently) arcane convergence of recording technique and well-rehearsed playing by often great musicians. This is now getting into a broader (tangential issue)- it's a major sticking point of mine, though one my knowledge of is incomplete at best, but I've often wondered why there is an (often silent, but present) taboo against the studio inflection of recorded jazz performance. One size definitely does not fit all and I can't imagine how overdubs or excessive panning would benefit 50's Miles or the Jazz Messengers, but when the oft-parroted argument that jazz has lost touch with mainstream audiences rears its head, I imagine a lot of it has to do with the music's broader reluctance to keep pace with trends in production techniques and studio experimentation. The question then becomes spontaneity and performance v. stylistic breadth and the idea of a "finalized" work of art, and I don't think that there's a better or worse option here--rather, it becomes a matter of whether jazz musicians, patrons, producers and the like wish to have a broader or narrower range of possibilities for the music. Too much premium on spontaneity and you have the very dry and underpowered CIMP aesthetic. Too much importance placed on the sound of innovation rather than the approach and you have DIY bass, Roy Haynes playing an oversized drum kit, and synths appearing on random straight ahead jazz albums. A lot has happened in the world and culture since the 1960's, and fetishizing classic Blue Note records as a model for 21st century music ignores the degree of artifice involved--from the RVG piano sound to the sound of Rudy scrambling to pull down the fader as Tony Williams goes balls out on Out to Lunch. And to further qualify the notion of jazz as a genre that is more interested in documentation than experimentation--there's plenty of classic music that undermines this premise: Teo's production work with Miles and Mingus, Creed Taylor stuff, Ornette's post-Science Fiction career, jazz's long history of solo/overdub albums (from Keith's Restoration Ruin to Hutch's Solo/Quartet and so on), bass overdubs on Jazz at Massey Hall, and so on. There are overdubs on A Love Supreme for heaven's sake. So maybe documentation v. production is an illusion, but in my narrow experience this division does exist--if only in the minds and hearts of people rather than history. As for the trap music thing--the long story short is that it's a genre of ultraviolent rap that originated in the 90's but only really flourished in the last decade or so. There's a thematic underpinning to a lot of it--drugs, crime, poverty, violence, etc.--but the notion of "trap music" has also come to serve as a marker for certain now-widespread production techniques: archaic drum machine sounds, swooning strings and synth sounds, and double time hi-hats. It's an interesting case of a series of anachronisms getting remade into something with renewed cultural cache. IIRC, it started in the south and kind of exploded into the mainstream with guys like T.I. and Rick Ross, but it's taken on importance as actual social music in places like Chicago (where the convergence between hip-hop, poverty, and crime are still very real and less the stuff of valorization).

I think it's worth mentioning that while I very much agree with Jim's fundamental reading of RVG's thesis--i.e., that the notion of an "attribute free" digital is largely a statement about the opportunity for fidelity and not necessarily about the product--I think it's impossible to read digitally recorded music as intrinsically value-less. To put things another way, in much the same manner that the pops, clicks, and hiss of analog media have come to be understood as "desirable" under a certain rubric of fidelity, things like excessive compression and digital artifacts have become a part of the broader cultural landscape. This ties a bit into what MG says above, in that genre and studio technology are often developed hand-in-hand. The process is deeply recursive--less so in genres where more value is placed in documentation and more in stuff like EDM or hip-hop, where the music is more receptive to engaging with and disassembling degrees of separation between performance and product. The near-bleeding edge of hip-hop production for the past decade or so--trap music, certain exponents of IDM, self-consciously avant/industrial stuff like Death Grips, etc.--often edges into a territory where the falseness of the medium sort of becomes the medium. Once you infect the musical mainstream, as much of this music has done--both explicitly through tastemakers like Kanye West and insidiously through, say, a jazz band covering Radiohead (essentially) covering Flying Lotus--it's no longer strictly a macro question of analog v. digital but rather a matter of fidelity v. style. Again, this is neither here nor there when it comes to most documentary genres, but then you get into micro stuff like file conversion for itunes and mid-level stuff like remasterings of albums that were already recorded in the digital era. I've had the Axiom issue of Ask the Ages on my ipod for years, and I recently traded up to the Laswell remastering from (I think) last year--to my ears, the compression is significantly more noticeable, and we've entered a realm where both the cold sheen of early CDs and the roughness of analog have been replaced by a weird, dull digital warmth. So again, fidelity v. style. To put things in another another way, I heard a musician in DC say that Yesterday's New Quintet was Madlib's way of trying to play jazz--now everyone is trying to play jazz like Madlib. We've come full circle away from drum machines to digital sampling to performative sampling (ala Dilla and Madlib) to basically just performing again, but trying to sound like drum machines. --and on a completely different note, I'd always read the RVG reverb as being the product of some calculated room miking. With what marginal production knowledge I have, I've always read the RVG sound to be a weird convergence of smallness (e.g., the cloistered, mid-rangy piano and clear stereo separation between instruments, drums included) and bigness (e.g., booming reverb). I've always understood this to be one of the reasons why RVG's music still sounds so vivid and performative--it's the illusion of people in a room (rather than a "recording" of people who happen to be playing close to a microphone).

Yes, please elaborate. Laswell the bassist? Laswell the producer? The curator? etc. etc. Your mileage will vary based on what project or approach you're addressing, but there's such a wide breadth to the music he's traded in that I find blanket condemnations kind of curious. The bass contributions to Last Exit are contentious, and that I kind of get--he's playing this sort of mannered anchor to three of the most incendiary soloists of their epoch, and I don't think even he would argue that the's in the same weight class. He's the one who really edges that band into a metal/pseudo-dub territory, with all of the positives and negatives that that entails. I like it, but only because it means that that band was/is a conceptual monster rather than "just another" raging free jazz ensemble. If you're talking about curation--he is (again) punching at a lower weight class as an instrumentalist or composer than many of the people drawn into Material's orbit, but I don't think that this diminishes the importance or power of something like Memory Serves (which had the foresight to bridge a lot of the gaps between various Downtown NY factions of the 1980's--and the self-awareness to get out of the way when colliding players of the caliber of Sharrock, Fred Frith, George Lewis, Threadgill, Billy Bang, etc.) Killing Time was collaborative, although I know for a fact that a lot of the conceptual underpinning for that was Frith--either way, that part of his oeuvre is fucking unimpeachable and I will rep for that music until the end of my days. That is paradigmatic Downtown/post-no wave/industrial improv. That is absolutely genre defining and the best of its kind, regardless of how you feel about the very different, sort of This Heat-inflected later stuff with Charles Hayward in place of Fred Maher. Add to that stuff like Baselines, The Golden Palominos, Painkiller, the Arcanas (both the bizarre trio album with Derek Bailey and Tony Williams and the more traditional post-Lifetime shredfest), etc. Regardless of how you feel about this music, and especially the later stuff (which subsumes the free improv/Downtown textures and elevates the dub inflection), it is in its own way as definitive as a lot of the much more aggressive and iconoclastic Zorn records of the same era. And lest we lapse into "geniuses are geniuses regardless"-type talking, you can't understate the value of both resurrecting Sharrock's career and editorializing his later music. Listen to Dance With Me Montana and then listen to Guitar. Listen to the live bootlegs of the Ask the Ages Band (with Pheeroan akLaff in place of Elvin) and compare Sharrock's tone and attack with that on the record. We're talking a different caliber of production/curation/shepherding--like 60's post-bop with Van Gelder/Lion and without. Without Laswell, no Last Exit, no Guitar, no Ask the Ages. Lastly, the production stuff is, of course, highly contentious and this I hugely get. Panthalassa is cool but unessential. There's a signature sound that suffuses the Sharrocks, the Materials, Album, Herbie's 80's records, and miscellaneous music by the likes of Ginger Baker, Akira Sakata, James "Blood" Ulmer, etc. that some may find sterile and synthetic (and which, by virtue of it's dominance in a certain era, does actually sound kind of dated now). But I challenge anyone to listen to the unreleased (circulating) remix of Tony Williams's Turn It Over or the John McLaughlin/Santana stuff and tell me that Laswell doesn't understand that early fusion/jazz-rock music on a deep and fundamentally creative level. To this degree (at least), Laswell is lightyears ahead of many of his peers--able to listen past the facile divisions between genres and confront the music on its own (deeply historical, when necessary) terms. The Turn It Over remix is one of my favorite records, period--and it's because Laswell picks up on so many things that others have kind of glossed over in the process of evaluating that music--namely, he subsumes the soloistic stuff (with certain important exceptions) in favor of the broader textural extremes (Young's atonal keyboards, the proto-prog/metal intensity of the rhythm section). He understood, like few people have, that that music was both deeply conservative (groove-based, like an organ trio) and wildly futuristic (percussion and texture-heavy, like Sun Ra rather than, like, Grand Funk or something). For me, that's a tremendous caliber of insight.

Yes, yes, yes--exactly. It's the greatness of pursuit v. the pursuit of greatness. (And Jeff, I appreciate you parsing my screed and getting to the heart of this, too.) The not-so-secret secret of the gigging musician is that a tremendous portion of life is spent on stage, in practice, or in rehearsal--again with this phrase, but records only capture part of the story. Part of what is so remarkable about Bobby to me is that he attained the remarkable so often in a life less about the grandiose and more about the sheer practice of it. That's a big part of why albums like Choma or San Francisco--or even way later music like Acoustic Masters II--still have a spark, if less touched by chimerical greatness. My FB feed has been inundated by stories of one-offs or unheralded gigs that were just as memorable in their own ways to any number of folks as Out to Lunch is to the sub-popular consciousness. When McCoy used the phrase "As Serious As Your Life"--this was the "Life" he was talking about.

I've had trouble processing Bobby's passing, because he hadn't been very (physically) present in the music as of late. So much of the music he made is tied to a particular moment in jazz, although I'd imagine that the years he registered specializing in fairly centrist post-bop are far greater in number than those he spent at the vanguard of the music. It's a lesson to me that contemporary musicians, fans, and critics will be quick to engage with hagiography when it comes to this caliber of musician, because the truth of the music is both much more complex and much more mundane. Bobby was in many ways "just" a diehard gigging musician who "just" so happened to play innovative vibraphone on some of the most important and adventurous albums in the music. I also think it's worthwhile to articulate the degree to which Bobby's embodied work sort of undermines the heroic narrative of the jazz innovator. Unlike an Ayler or an Ornette, Bobby's sound wasn't outright heretic and he didn't emerge more or less fully realized--Hutcherson is (more like Dolphy, for example) a testament to how the gradual work of gigging and rehearsing music will often foster its own revolutionaries. Hutcherson did so much work in the trenches, some of it even on record, that I think it's sort of easy to miss that (A) there was no Bobby Hutcherson before Bobby Hutcherson and (B) there were tons of Bobby Hutchersons only after Bobby Hutcherson. The subsequent arc of jazz and free improv vibraphone is way more complex than I'm suggesting here, but it seems apparent to me that we would not have had Gunter Hampel with Marion Brown, Bobby Naughton with Wadada, Steve Nelson with Dave Holland, Bryan Carrott with Threadgill or Osby, or Chris Dingman with Steve Lehman without Bobby's influence. Appropos of a different conversation, I think Larry Young is a useful point of comparison. Like Larry (who was styled early on as a kind of secondary Jimmy Smith), a lot of Bobby's first music on record sounds like it could have been played by someone else--the vibraphone contributions to This Is Billy Mitchell are kind of sub-Milt Jackson-type stuff. That being said, like Young, Bobby discovered a kind of impressionistic softening and abstraction of earlier stylists that signaled a new way forward for both his instrument and jazz ensemble dynamics in general. Bobby's playing on the really epochal abstract stuff--like Out to Lunch, Evolution, or Dialogue--teeters between diamond hard and sustained, resonant, and pulsing. Other people were working in parallel compositional and conceptual veins--great players like Gary Burton, Walt Dickerson, or even Roy Ayers--but Bobby inhabited this duality of tonal precision and utter abstraction that is just mind-boggling. In this way, he was a perfect match for a certain school of inside-outside player that was both tonally literate and conceptually free (e.g., Dolphy, Moncur, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, etc.)--but with these elastic chops that could either dive hard into the pocket (Let 'Em Roll, Idle Moments) or way out (the stuff with Archie Shepp). Hutcherson could play a little or a lot, but he always seemed to play what was exactly appropriate for a given context. One of the two times I met Hutcherson was backstage at this ridiculous all-star benefit that I somehow found my way onto. In-between my five minutes of stage time and taking photos for Steve Turre, I found Bobby backstage and began to wax prolific about Out to Lunch (i.e., "You changed the way I see music," "It's one of my favorite records," etc. etc.). Bobby echoed something he had said in the press a while back (at the Blue Note sort-of reunion thing a while back, where Hutcherson played "Hat and Beard" in a Dolphian quartet with James Newton), which is that he couldn't believe he played so much on that record. It's weird--Out to Lunch is absolutely a maximalist album, but it has moments of tenderness and sublime rhythmic hookup that a lesser chordal improviser would have completely disfigured. Hutcherson was clearly still proud of that music, and it must have felt like a lifetime ago for someone who had left the sound of the 60's somewhere in the dust. That being said, anyone who heard Hutcherson in the last couple decades of his life could hear that he hadn't lost the soft impressionism of his youth (even though he often engaged with a virtuosic prolixity that was probably closer to Lionel Hampton than the stuff on Street of Dreams). The entirety of that man's work--"early" and "late"--stands as a monument to the power of the practice of music--or, rather, Bobby's music serves as a reminder that the very act of making music will both reward and renew itself.

Thanks for sharing, man--my first thoughts being (and my fault for reading this past midnight) (1) I feel gladdened that the Paris release has engendered some measure of press coverage and critical (re)assessment, and (2) I feel compelled to complain about this article (also my fault). There's a bit of narrative construction at work in Morris's article that I find questionable. I take no issue with a critic and/or theorist articulating some sort of conceptual bias when discussing music--I think this sort of thing can actually color and enliven the writing--so despite my feelings to the contrary, editorializing the playing of Grant Green is absolutely within rights. That being said, if a writer is going to introduce this sort of critical angle, I'd hope that amounts to something more substantial than avant-garde > soul jazz. That is the stuff of banality. Maybe I'm being harsh on Morris because I've been guilty of this sort of thing in my own writing, but as someone who loves both the "early" (and, in some regards, more mannered) Young recordings and the more ballistic Lifetime-era stuff, it seems evident to me that inside and outside are equal parts of Young's continuum. Young was not some sui generis genius that emerged Aylerlike upon the sub-popular consciousness--he was a kind of technical gradualist, and a big part of his magic resides in the fact that he was able to both absorb and reconfigure convention in ways that were compatible with a wide variety of contexts. The dude basically translated Trane onto soul jazz organ--reverse engineered Ayler, Stockhausen, and Hendrix into the "anachronism" of the organ trio. To put it another way--I challenge anyone to find a single full album where Young plays without either (a) some kind of harmonic form or (b) some kind of tempo or rhythmic feel. (Really--if this exists, I want to hear it.) Morris points to Unity as some kind of drastic overture to the dramatic tendencies of both energy music and Dolphy-an modernism, but that record operates within harmonic conventions that were already kind of old hat for Trane in '66, encompassing this spectrum from Monk to Giant Steps to Impressions but only barely nodding at the extreme textural freedoms of the '64-65 Impulse stuff. Yes, Of Love and Peace is crazier, but even that has a standard on it ("Seven Steps to Heaven")--even if the intent was to deconstruct and destroy "Seven Steps" (and I'd venture to say that it wasn't), the inclusion of a standard is only remarkable so much as it implies that Young cared enough in '66 to even question the utility of the harmonic form. That is very center of the aisle thinking in a year when Ayler was playing marching band music, Ornette was recording with his 10 year old son, and Coltrane was playing with Pharoah. (Incidentally, I've worked with Eddie Gale, and if you think that even that most radical wing of the avant-garde family tree was interested in completely dispensing with jazz convention, I can confirm that you are dead wrong.) I think a bigger and much more important thesis than "Larry Young changed the music forever!"--which yes, he did, but how and why--is "not only did Larry Young alter the mechanics of the Hammond organ for all time, but he also made some very timely and still widely unheralded statements about the nature of innovation v. populism in jazz." For real. I love Lawrence of Newark. That album is my shit--we listened to it on a loop on tour. But that album is hardly an "expansive summation of Young's free-form brilliance." It is technical and structured in a manner akin to the heaviest of 70's Miles and Mwandishi, drawing (too) from both afrocentric kosmigroov and Gypsy Sun and Rainbows-era Hendrix in liberal fashion. The record engages with psychedelic rock and presages hip-hop in both its textural complexity and commitment to rhythmic stasis. I'm no organ player and someone else can speak to Young's specific technical brilliance, but it's worth noting that Newark is (again) very modal in construction--and even as a keyboard player (here and elsewhere, like on the Woody Shaw session mentioned above) Young eschews Tynerian bombast and localizes his dynamism in the electricity of his instrument. Like Tyner, Young leans on pentatonic phrases and quartal harmonies, but they're remixed in real time by Young's insane drawbar facility. Lifetime is also my shit, and though I am deeply fond of Emergency, Turn It Over is absolute top of the heap stuff for me. The original mix is an absolute swamp, but it's beautiful for that in a There's A Riot Goin' On kind of way. Laswell's remix is another matter altogether--and were one inclined to dig deep enough into that, it might help both (a) validate the addition of Jack Bruce and (b) recontextualize the music as less free jazz or even proto-punk and more a hybridization of psych rock and more traditional organ trio conceits. For one thing, a lot of stuff got left on the floor that is waaaay closer in character to live Cream than either MC5 or Sun Ra. Bruce isn't there to play basslines--he's there to thicken the percussive texture of the band (in typical early 70's Bruce-ian fashion, the attack is overdriven and very hard). What is "Vuelta Abajo" if not a Tony Williams-ized, odd-metered take on the "Sunshine of Your Love"/"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" lineage of sludgy, semi-chromatic rock riffs? When Bruce is extracted, it's telling that the band lightens up and plays (as on the solo sections of "Allah Be Praised" or "Big Nick") these lithe, often swinging basslines--not so far removed from (*gasp*) the stuff Young was doing on Unity or Talkin' About! This is Jazz 101--"ancient to the future" stuff. (As an aside, I've often read Turn It Over as something akin to Muddy Waters's Electric Mud--a record yes, but also a sort of concept album whereby the musicians are both playing "at" genre as much as "with" genre. Lifetime has their screwed up, asynchronous bossa moment with "Once I Loved," their pithy Trane paean with "Big Nick," their self-consciously greasy and actually kind of ironic organ feature with "Allah Be Praised"--all funneled through this overloud psych rock bag.) The last and maybe most important note is something that gets brought up on this board time and time again, and that's that recordings don't tell the full story. Money doesn't either. The idea that a musician will go conservative --> avant-garde --> conservative again (but because of money this time) is a convenient narrative that is, while often right, also kind of incomplete. I'm a tremendous supporter of and participant in so-called "experimental" aesthetics, and I can't abide by the notion that an ineluctable shift toward progressivism is the logical outcome for all intelligent musicians, all things being equal. The supposedly regressive/passive/populist organ trio stuff was always a part of Larry Young's music--as was the exploratory--and it was arguably the synthesis of and interaction between these two poles that fostered his most exciting work.

Hey folks- I'm emerging from a period of relative inactivity out here to share some wild news: my art rock project Grex is touring the American West Coast for the entirety of June. I've (happily) met and encountered some of you at Grex jaunts in the past. This one is a little different--for the first time in something like five years, we're touring with the duo iteration of the band. We've expanded our arsenal from keys and guitar to a pretty strange multi-percussion setup--it's a "two man band" in the vein of Skeleton Crew, and we're excited to be tapping into that tradition of hybridized songs, psychedelic filigree, noise, and free jazz. More information here: http://www.grexsounds.com The dates: June 4, Joshua Tree, CA, 7pm at Beatnik Lounge (w/Ahead Change & Hive Minds) June 5, Long Beach, CA, 9pm at Que Sera (w/Celik Brothers & DJ Dank Steak) June 6, Los Angeles, CA, 8pm at The Mint (w/featuring Joe Berardi, w/Beyond Rare & The HiGrounds) June 8, Los Angeles, CA, 10pm at Hyperion Tavern June 9, San Diego, CA, 9pm at The Merrow (w/Nexus 4000 & Whelmer) June 10, Pasadena, CA, 8pm at Battery Books (featuring Dan Clucas) June 11, Long Beach, CA, 8pm at Rebel Bite (w/Nathanael and Frankie) June 14, Eugene, OR, 9pm at Old Nicks (w/Mood Area 52) June 16, Portland, OR, 9:30pm at Kenton Club (w/Alto!, Noah Bernstein) June 17, Seattle, WA, 7:30pm at Good Shepherd Center (Wayward Music Series w/Citizens Band) June 18, Portland, OR, 8:30pm at Turn Turn Turn (w/Toyboat Toyboat Toyboat, Bubble Cats) June 20, Seattle, WA, 7:30pm at The Royal Room (part of Father Daughter) June 23, Quincy, CA, at Main Street Sports Bar June 24, Sacramento, CA, at Gold Lion Arts (part of Gold Lion Festival) June 25, Berkeley, CA, 9pm, at The Starry Plough (w/3 Leafs, Dire Wolves) I'm especially excited to be playing with a couple of remarkable guests: ace journeyman Joe Berardi on percussion (6/6) and the remarkable LA trumpeter Dan Clucas (6/10). Also of possible (particular) interest to Organissimo people: we're sharing the bill with some of Seattle's best young improvisers at the longstanding Wayward Music Series (6/17), and with a murderers' row of creative musicians in Sacramento (6/24--featuring the great Stuart Liebig, bassist on Julius Hemphill's Georgia Blue). Lastly, a couple of samples: the first (Stump F***ers) is from the band's first run as a duo, the second (Mango Mango) from our current book. We can't wait to share this bizarre new version of the band with everyone.

This is a huge loss. I didn't know Marco very well, and even given a large volume of mutual friends, I only ever exchanged a handful of words with him. He seemed to be in the mode of "itinerant musician" by the time I got into playing music full time, so I only really heard and heard about him in passing--glowing, awed remarks from colleagues and echoes of his laser-focused alto in the interstices of the Bay Area scene. I fully admit that he was the kind of talent that I neither had the opportunity nor insight to truly appreciate in his time, which is positively gutting today (with so many friends--many of them my "seniors"--offering tributes and condolences on FB). In a more general sense, despite Marco's epochal work with the likes of Cecil Taylor, Peter Kowald, William Parker, Bill DIxon, and the legendary American Jungle Orchestra, he was somewhat unheralded outside of musician and hardcore improv circles. Part of this is regional--he spent so much time in the Bay Area, a perpetual press vacuum--part of this is the nature of playing uncompromising music in a fundamentally compromised epoch, itself saturated in compromised culture. Folks like Marco--the diehards, the warriors--may not be your heroes (or, rather, you may not know that they are your heroes), but they live heroic lives, surviving and thriving through sheer willpower, conviction, and--in defiance of every bullshit stereotype you might imagine regarding jazz and/or creative musicians--fundamental decency and staggering focus. If you want to celebrate folks like Marco, listen to his music, go see a live show, and spend some time digging into the unseen and unheard. The music is there--and I mean deeply, profoundly there--if you're willing to look.

To what Chuck said, I'll never stop being astounded by the degree to which some of "the cats" will go out of their way to make neophytes feel welcome. Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith, Myra Melford, Muhal Richard Abrams, Bobby Bradford, Andrew Hill, Oliver Lake, Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Lewis Jordan, Vinny Golia, Alex Cline, and a handful of others whom I've very irresponsibly "forgot" at the moment were all making valuable music decades (some roughly a half century) ago and must rank as some of the most decent professionals I've ever met. These were guys I grew up listening to, and they're all amazing folks now that I've passed onto the other side of the river. A special shoutout/tribute to guys like Roscoe, Fred, and Myra, with whom I was fortunate enough to study at length--I feel like it's important for artists who exist on the fringes to communicate not only practical skills but also a degree of philosophy. Those three--and folks like Francis, since we work together pretty frequently--were/are exceptional leaders for the fact that they make the people they are working with feel like their contributions are both necessary and important. For all the talk I hear about musicians haranguing/shaming their underlings into "greatness"--and we fetishize this in jazz culture, to a degree--it's really important to consider that you can achieve similar goals just by teaching your students both a measure of responsibility and the value of hard work.

Popular v. unpopular debate aside, one of the chief reasons that the showmanship v. non-showmanship thing sticks in my craw is because the whole "just sit down and play" thing doesn't apply with equal meaning to all kinds of music. Physical animation will not mean the same thing if you are playing a Paganini Concerto, a barwalking saxophone solo, or Hendrixian histrionics, respectively--and that's twofold. On the one hand, certain gestures have certain coded meanings inside of certain contexts. Yes, if Bill Evans got up in the middle of a piano solo and started thumping on the keys with his foot, it would be absolutely asynchronous with his art--not to mention a breach of conduct within his likely performance context. The Ruby Braff quote Ted offers a couple of posts up is pretty pointed, however--there are plenty of great musicians who might not be considered great performers, but modes of performance are greatly variable. Even many of the folks we might consider "austere" or "formal" engaged with codes and practices that carried a lot of weight in certain areas: for example, Coltrane was pretty serious about the whole band wearing suits and ties for a time--a way, in part, to tie his nascent art music into respectability practices more closely tied to the concert hall. (There are other sociopolitical things tied into that, too, and maybe someone else here is better equipped to deal with all that than I--maybe even a whiff of post-Nation of Islam code of public conduct, but that may be pretty specious.) On the other hand, watch virtually any video of mature/late Trane--he absorbed plenty of the exaggerated physical mannerisms of the Texas barwalking/freak-out tenor tradition. He did not stand still. Hell, find the extant videos of Ayler--he's literally jumping up and down half of the time. Finally, returning to the clothing thing, when the Miles band eschewed the suit and tie thing, it was most certainly and overtly to tap into the performance psychology of what was then youth music--and whether or not these practices actually negatively or positively affected his music has to be tied, in part, to your appreciation of electric Miles and/or the phenomenon of electricity in jazz in general. Here's the part two of the twofold thing, and it's way more important for me as a performer or musician--the execution of a lot of these coded practices often has very deliberate musical effects. The obvious example is Hendrix. There is this perplexing (to me) psychology that, if you're performing guitar stagecraft with maximum efficiency, it should not leave any sonic artifacts. This suggests a physical/sonic divide that is just not present in the continuum of black music--or, rather, not present in the same way. It's a hop, skip, and a jump away between screaming so hard that you're chording (e.g., JB) and playing guitar with your teeth. If any of y'all are practicing singers, you know that screaming is a physical and potentially harmful phenomenon--it can be done dozens of different ways and to varying degrees of practicality and safety. All the same, each of these methods have different sounds and inflections--a spectrum that encompasses, yes, Prince, the Pixies' Black Francis, and Diamanda Galas. Similarly, the process of playing guitar with your teeth is so chaotic and circumstantial in character (just A/B the fifty legal versions of Hendrix's "Hey Joe" for perspective) that it can't help but leave sonic artifacts--it's tied to the kind of guitar you're using, the shape of your teeth, your relative volume, your effects chain (if any), etc. etc. The point is, not only do many of these physical gestures have sonic effects, but (1) sometimes the fundamental chaoticism of these effects is desired, if not imperative, and (2) you can learn how to control these effects with some level of practice and consistency. Study your Hendrix, if so inclined--watch an arch performance like the one at Monterey or even something slightly tireder like the Berkeley stuff from 1970. It's not just bullshit stagecraft. Playing with your teeth, behind your head, behind your back, grazing the strings with your elbow, masturbatory glissandi, showy divebombs with the tremolo bar, etc. etc.--every single one of those gestures produces a sound (whether it means just rearranging your body or actually striking the strings), and when you're cranked up to volume levels where the feedback is absolutely explosive, every one of those sounds is magnified tenfold. If you're good enough (like a Prince, or Buddy Guy), you learn how to incorporate these songs into your vocabulary--if you're great at it (like I'd argue Hendrix was), they become such a seamless part of your sonic universe that people think you're just fooling around. Anyway, people tend to shit all over showmanship and stagecraft because--and they're often right--they sometimes have nothing to do with how the music is produced. This is not unilaterally correct, and (there's a deeper debate/discussion to be had about this) I get the sense that a lot of the debate has to do with instances of severe culture clash, misapprehension, and (in the worst cases, of which I'd assume absolutely no one here is guilty) stuff like racism and cultural erasure.

This is funny but it's also very, very real. If you really want to talk negative energy, I used to work with a musician who would engender confrontation with the audience--just set out to play the loudest, most irascible shit possible with zero regard for audience accessibility. Like you say, there's a whole ethos of outsiders who operate under these pretenses, and it's rooted in these cases in a paradoxical sense of belonging. The guy I'm talking about, however, would play in this way in a preemptive attempt to rationalize the disdain of the audience--i.e., "They're going to hate me anyway, so I'm going to hate them first." The thing is, working in and around both jazz and experimental music(s), I run into a lot of folks like this and I would struggle to name anyone who didn't get hurt by the prospect of audience apathy. The simplified version of this is that no one really wants to be disliked, let alone hated. Unfaltering devotion to high-minded aesthetic ideals and a deep-rooted desire to be loved are sometimes compatible, sometimes mutually exclusive. Negotiating the tension between "compatible" and "incompatible" is treacherous. I have actually seen this drive people mad. I find it fascinating that late 20th century jazz has this intense preoccupation with the dynamic between musicians and critics when I've always felt that this relationship was fundamentally solipsistic. Does anyone actually sit on stage and say, "Man, the critics will love this"--or rather, "History is going to evaluate my contributions so generously." (Actually, yes, but only so long as we're talking about madmen.) "Art music" and "pop music" are only really different things insofar as the strategies for communication (or lack thereof) differ. While I'm the last person who will vouch for the notion that more audience = better, I definitely disagree with the argument that less audience = best. I mean, do whatever you're going to do and hope for whatever you want to hope for, but take your lumps if you made your bed in them. If you want to be unabashedly crass, don't complain when you have millions of fans but no one takes you seriously. If you want to play music for both yourself and only a handful of dedicated colleagues and listeners, steel yourself for the inevitability that you may very well just get what you want.

I mean, I will say this--this is the only recent context within which I've heard people having a critical discussion of Prince as a looming musical figure (whatever your personal stance on what he does), which has to count for something. Shit gets heated but it definitely isn't and shouldn't be personal. In terms of the everything v. nothing discussion a little ways above, I think I'm happiest interfacing with art that engenders strong reactions--because, more often than not, these reactions are rooted in the love of something. In terms of the "insipid ballads" and "funk/dance" song thing--maybe this is just a party line issue, but I've seen this crop up a lot in and among discussions among both musicians and aficionados. Without presuming anything about anyone else's listening habits, sometimes it's a question of quality, sometimes it's a question of the fundamental viability (or, in an opposite sense, disposability) of a given genre. Sometimes we're asked to listen past the idiomatic and temporal trappings of a given work--like how electric Ornette is still Ornette, even at Prime Time's most anonymous or insipid, or how the classic rock iconography of early Hendrix sort of obfuscates a degree of spontaneity and improvisational freshness that is a lot closer to Coltrane than, say, Eric Clapton. It's not always possible, but I wonder if we shouldn't listen to all music like this. Sometimes surface is just surface, but sometimes the codes therein are just so complex that they look like absolutely nothing. For example: the phrase "it's time for jazz to die" on "All the Critics Love U in New York." That song feels surface-y to me in a way that some of the others don't--it's kind of ironic/mock-spiteful but also aspirational but also kind of self-inflating, etc.--sort of like an unecstatic "Are You Experienced." That being said, there is a lot of text there. Prince is talking about critical reception to his music, addressing the baby boomer fallout, and even/sort-of winking at the burgeoning jazz wars of the 80's. The vocal's monotonous self-cheerleading overlays some cutting-edge experimentalism, from the post-Hendrixian/Ray Russell-esque guitar to the Laswellian industrial funk. I'm not even sure that Prince knew who Ray Russell was--I mean, probably not, all things considered--but this is part of the kaleidoscopic appeal of his music--it can seem numbing and facile, but it's so deft that somehow manages to suggest things that aren't even there. Also, how many major pop stars of the past few decades have cared enough about jazz to adjudicate over its life and death? You don't throw a phrase like that into a song that detailed and dense without having it mean something. On the one hand, it's the obvious: let's move onto something else, let's revise the revolution, etc. On the other hand, Prince is interfacing with a vast lineage of composers and improvisers who have rejected both jazz as a term and method of categorization--a group that includes, hey, Duke Ellington. You can read, say, Albert Ayler similarly. On the one hand, it's a lot of freaking noise. On the other hand, we're talking about a profound dimension of spontaneous interplay, textural control, and technical ingenuity overlaying a compressed simultaneity of gospel music, rural blues, R&B saxophone, bebop, and so on. Obviously Ayler does not equal Prince--they're doing very different things--but if we are (again) evaluating music on the merits and preferences of mass consumption or a lack thereof, is that on Ayler and Prince, or is it on us? Moreover, I'd hasten to consider whether or not Prince as an inherently postmodern (or maybe post-postmodern) artist didn't ask the same questions of himself, his peers, and his forebears. Yes, it's a lot of insipid funk--but Ayler was a lot of freaking noise, Hendrix was a lot of drugged out BS, and Ornette was "jiving." Or maybe it's just down to taste and the biology of the ear, in which case--hey, do what you like.

America and/or the world can be wrong about one thing and right about something else. The dereliction of the masses with regard to the proper or expected treatment of any number of artistic masters more or less "is what it is." JJ is dead. Bird is dead. Ornette is dead. Ayler is dead. Horace Tapscott, John Carter, Dudu Pukwana, Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, Albert King, dead--also: David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Easy-E, and now Prince. The only thing that all of these guys had in common was creative impetus. Categorization is down to us. I do call unequivocal bullshit--and will likely continue to do so until the day I die--on the whole undervalued = better/overvalued = worse continuum of thought. The converse is also not necessarily true. Fame chasing is an ouroboric endeavor that can consume and diminish absolutely anyone. I don't think, however, that accessibility and/or a concerted bid for mainstream appreciation and credibility equates to artistic bullshit. If we're weighing the value of "past giants" by how much they mean and to whom, then there is a universe where JJ Johnson and Prince are both worthwhile and in very different ways. If we're saying that we as musicians or experts or critics somehow have a greater access to what does or doesn't make something worthwhile, then I call bullshit. I also call unequivocal bullshit on the whole austerity = prestige/animation = simple tricks and nonsense thing. I don't know where the fuck this comes from, other than a dilapidated and anachronistic sense of artistic integrity that is rooted in Western concert music and white collar aesthetics. So suddenly Prince (or Jimi Hendrix, or Buddy Guy, or, say, Rahsaan Roland Kirk) is suddenly < Wes Montgomery because the latter sat still while he played? Did I miss the class in music school on how real musicians are supposed to sit still, keep their heads down, and avoid theatrics, or is this another one of those bygone virtues that the kids can leave behind when they get off the proverbial lawn? Must we look sharp and austere? Or should Ornette, Miles, and Don Cherry have left their wardrobes at home? Let me put this another way--let's live in a universe where Prince did whatever he did out of aphroditic necessity--for free, to no acclaim, and zero recognition. Everything else, save of course the savvy and extreme live shows (which are $$$), is more or less the same. Is this still bullshit? If Sonic Youth and JJ Johnson get put on postage stamps and Prince vaporizes into nothingness, are we living in the best possible universe? Have we blown up the Death Star? Did we stop Hitler before he happened? Or are we just trading one shit sandwich for another?

You're right--that was a flip, offhand example on my part, and it doesn't hold water. That being said (and this is probably obvious), but getting reviewed in Pitchfork isn't really my point. Kamasi is playing Coachella and (less exciting but still remarkable in Bay Area terms) Noise Pop. It would be an unbelievable and improbable coup for Matthew Shipp to play a festival like that. (And I'd be very pleased if I'm wrong about this and somehow someone like Shipp has made it onto this circuit.) Let me pose an earnest question, since I'm really curious what informed, diehard jazz fans and musicians have to say about it (and not for the purposes of drinking the Kool-Aid one way or another): what would it take for Kamasi to be ok? I get it--the press and acclaim are disproportionate to his contribution to the canon. So to expand on the question above: who would be an "ok" alternative to Kamasi? Is the issue that this prefab messiah isn't "good enough," or that we neither need nor want one? Would it allay our collective internal frustration if we were talking about Meltframe or Break Stuff in lieu of The Epic? For my part, I would love to see critical and musical consensus crown a "next Coltrane"--in part because of the obvious musical considerations, in part because I've grown increasingly weary of contemptuousness. Every time someone like Kamasi spills into mainstream consciousness (The Bad Plus, Badbadnotgood, VIjay Iyer, etc. etc.), the jazz community will be quick to say, "This has been done before, but better." At the same time--and like clockwork--we see articles, blog posts, Facebook rants, etc. about jazz's dwindling audience and economic unviability. Jazz culture is protective of its past in a way that is depressingly compatible with its own ossification and obsolescence. It's "ok" to hold the opinion that the Bad Plus are hacks for playing pop tunes, but it's completely self-defeating to then complain when Ethan Iverson attempts to engage with Billy Hart in a straightahead context. I've seen people herald obviously talented folks like Mary Halvorson or Tyshawn Sorey as next generation masters, but a big part of this has to do with deep and apparent connections to folks like Braxton, Roscoe, and Steve Coleman. Kamasi's music emanates from the same community that fostered the UGMAA's music. We complain when Kamasi plays Tapscott-ian jazz, but not when Halvorson engages with Braxtonian conceits? So I ask again--not in a rhetorical sense, but because I want to learn--what would it take for Kamasi to be ok? What are we waiting for, and is there a way that we can expedite the future for the art form/music that we want? Or have we (even more depressing, especially for young musicians) just a reached a point where we're circling the drain and someone uses the wrong plug?

I think it's important to note that the real estate that Kamasi presently occupies has almost nothing to do with the press (or lack thereof) given to the likes of Roscoe, Evan Parker, etc. Discussion of The Epic is often accompanied by intra-community hand-wringing about the economic, social, and cultural viability of jazz as an art form, when the marketing and performance of Kamasi's recent music has happened largely outside of traditional "jazz" channels. I don't think this is an instance of crossover success so much as it is a presentation of jazz tropes and ideas within the context of pop music infrastructure. I mean, he's on Brainfeeder (Flying Lotus's label). I imagine the marketing of this record isn't so different from something like FlyLo's "You're Dead!"--a legacy musician engaging with decades old mechanics, imbuing said mechanics with a modern sheen and nods to the zeitgeist. Actual crossover success--like getting an earnest Pitchfork review of a new Matthew Shipp album or something like that--is something else entirely, and it is absolutely beyond the scope of most of jazz's deeply insular promotional schema. As others have noted, interpenetration is virtually impossible without some external stimulus. Consider the notion that few people in the mainstream knew about Nels Cline before he joined Wilco. I trust that similarly few would have had impetus to listen to Kamasi prior to To Pimp A Butterfly. Putting this another way: it's arguable that the success of Star Wars did little to affect the mainstream popularity of Akira Kurosawa's movies outside of film students and hardcore fans. As someone who loves both Star Wars and Kurosawa, I recognize that the monumental success of the former in the West doesn't have anything to do with the lack of recognition for, say, Ikiru or Stray Dog. There's some mutual exclusivity at play--but, more importantly, we're talking about two different (but parallel) "things" made in different ways by different people for totally different audiences. "We" can still have our Sonny Rollins Village Gate boxed sets, and it's probably true that the existence of The Epic will neither negate nor reinforce this.

Well, again--I agree it's fruitless to compare folks who have attained this sort of "master seniority" status with the younger people in the trenches, but then (and I feel like this is implicit in both your statement and Clifford's) I feel like the methods of evaluating contemporary free jazz and free improvisation have very little to do with "traditional" jazz criticism or listening. If you can't use Roscoe or Braxton (or, for that matter, Boulez, or Luigi Nono, or Bach, etc.) as some sort of "objective" criteria, according to what standard are we even receiving this music right now? Speaking to what you said (i.e., "and which is shaped to address the very kinds of questions you raise")--I feel like this in some way applies to all contemporary experimental music insofar as that music participates in this lineage that can be traced back to early free jazz and 20th century new music (whether that be the New York School, Darmstadt, or whatever). We're officially living in a "post" era, and this is evident in not only explicitly postmodern improvised music (from the likes of Zorn or Eugene Chadbourne--going on like four decades worth, at this point) but also with folks like Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Vijay Iyer, etc. etc. So in a way, it's unfair to compare this music to the undiluted restructuralism of an Ornette (or, for that matter, a Braxton or Roscoe). At the same time, this is what I meant (above) about stuff like the burden of history. Like Clifford (very acutely) says, being a thirty year old jazz musician in 2015 is nothing like it was in the 60's or 70's. We're not only confronted with the burden of creating anything new, but we're also struggling with the responsibility of accumulated knowledge. Improvisers coming up now are forced to deal with a glut of sorted information that is easy to access. The challenge is in digesting, reconstituting, and re-creating. So yes, it's absolutely unfair to compare Laubrock with Braxton, because the social and cultural inputs are very different. At the same time, there is no explicit model for the music of the 21st century. It is either/both being created or has not been created yet. It is somehow "not enough" to be a Braxton clone, but I'm hard pressed to identify many new creative modalities in the lineage of jazz improvisation since the 1980's--and, moreover, thirtysomethings don't have a Bird, Coltrane, Braxton, or even Steve Coleman to rally around. Kamasi Washington is 34 and (by reputation--on these boards) is adding nothing new to the Coltrane continuum. Vijay Iyer is 44 years old and an icon of sorts, but even he is often preoccupied with digesting the repertoire and rhythmic mechanics of much older music. This plays more directly into what Allen says (and thank you for the kind words, Allen)--I think it really is up to contemporary improvisers to create their own frame(s) of reference. In a self-critical and peer-critical sense, however, I feel like the possibilities therein are absolutely endless, and I also hear so few people who are willing to push their own boundaries in really exciting--maybe stupid, maybe unsuccessful, but also creative--ways. I think that the jazz continuum (in a historical sense, if not a technical sense) is still alive and densely populated with very talented players and composers--but I also think that it hasn't pushed itself hard and wild enough in the 21st century for it to have had any big, "boundary breaking" moments.

Actually, I'm saying that she does use climaxes in that way--or at least she did in this video. In the examples I cited, the multiphonics/skronk happen at the literal climax of the piece(s)--they both end shortly thereafter. I agree, though, that it's fruitless to be setting up Laubrock as some sort of straw person to rage against--she's too good of a player doing work that is much too interesting. The issue to me is more the broad strokes, as you mention--the nature of repetition, its place in improvised music, and the role of composition and tradition in offsetting (or possibly reinforcing) predictability. I agree that Messrs. Frith, Mitchell, and Braxton all repeat themselves a lot, but the nature of this repetition is fluid. To paraphrase Ornette, it's ok to repeat yourself, but you have to mean something different every time. Part of the nature of improvisation in the advent of the AACM and EFI is the organization and (sort of) codification of technical knowledge--there's a little bit of this in Forces in Motion, and it's a little more thorough in the Tri-Axium Writings (I know about this firsthand from Frith and Mitchell because, as I can't seem to shut up about, I studied under both of them). Guys of this caliber are hardly the only purveyors of "good" applied technical knowledge, but the difference I see is a degree of consistency, facility, and surprise in their ability to apply a set of recurrent tools to different contexts. For example--there's a pretty fixed shape to most versions of Nonaah--it's a loose sonata form that tends to get organized into statement/subdued improvisation/explosive improvisation. The tools that Roscoe has used have surely varied over time, and even the motivic material is different from performance to performance (the infamous solo Nonaah on Nessa doesn't really sound like the Art Ensemble version, and the chamber, guitar, and sax quartets all sound different). I think this is kind of the point. Even though the macro processes are sort of fixed, the actual content is widely variable. When I listen to an iteration of Nonaah, I'm hearing the gradations of difference within the nexus of two entities (i.e., Roscoe and the composition "Nonaah.") In other words, the same information "means" something different every time. As you note, there's something fundamentally hazardous about improvising in general, and even those who avoid rote forms of "technical application" will have to take other creative risks. I rage against the "aggressive climax" thing discussed above because it's easy and a little manipulative, and this really comes from the part of me who strives for creative spontaneity but sometimes/often succumbs to the lure of easy gestures. This plays into a broader conversation that I've had with a few folks on this board in the past few years, which is something like, "If you can't say it your own way, what is the point of saying it?" This is most definitely where composition comes in for many folks, and I think this is also what makes a guy like Roscoe tick: the improvisation is predicated on either explicit compositional organization or a compositional sensibility. On an extremist/personal level, I don't think there is any point to composing for an improviser other than to provide information that will help shape or reframe said improviser's playing. Returning to my aimless rant above, this is why I love Out to Lunch so much--it's the only one of Dolphy's recordings to sound like that, and (as such) it's maybe our only window into a very particular aspect of Dolphy's genius. Out There, Last Date, The Illinois stuff, the Five Spot stuff, etc. are all excellent--but on Out to Lunch, Dolphy sounds less like a piquant iconoclast and more like an extraordinary harmonic voice (suddenly) in command of his element.

I want to preface this by saying that (1) I'm multitasking like an idiot and arranging the Star Wars theme for a guitar quartet, so this may come out addled, and (2) I actually have no issue with Laubrock's playing--my sentiments above were largely just addressing what (as Allen notes) seems to be some (possibly vague) causal relationship between the vestiges of jazz showmanship and an undercurrent of predictability in energy saxophone. I also want to preface these sentiments by saying that I have nothing but respect for Rainey and Laubrock as both improvisers and technicians, and there's a ton of nuance, ebb and flow to the video I link to above. I actually saw this duo at a local series in Oakland not too long ago, and it was quite strong. Also, I have admittedly mixed feelings about dissecting an improvisation as a "finished" work of art, since--while I acknowledge that this is kind of a necessary practice for anyone who improvises these days--too much of this is what led me to work and think in alternate idioms for the bulk of my adult life. Also, I'm too young and fresh to be an expert at this, but I am "in the shit"--so: That being said, if you identify the aspects of this (live, not for the record) duo performance that stand out as particularly unique or conceptually enticing, you (the universal "you," not David or Allen or anyone in particular) will probably argue for the interstitial material at around 5:00 or the beginning of the second improv. As far as I'm concerned, this is because it disabuses itself of any sort of thanatal urge to "complete" itself--it's exploratory and fundamentally textural in nature, and the sorts of effects that these cats are getting (I'm thinking of the really articulate cymbal work at the beginning of improv #2, paired with the really pithy melodic abstractions--around 12 mins or so) can ride for hours. As a free improviser, this is meat. You know how you sometimes go to three deep concerts--excellent bills--but the headliner is just in another universe? That's akin to the feeling I get when listening to someone like Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, or Braxton--eminent patience, control, and comprehension of both short game details and long form organization. If you listen to Roscoe's less frequently discussed solo work--like the vaporous and seemingly incessant The Flow of Things, or his actual "solo" records--there's a striking obliviousness to the sort of "overt" signaling you can identify in, say, an Eric Clapton solo. You know when Clapton (even/especially early Clapton--of the still very good Cream vintage) is going for the kill shot. Roscoe may be playing a lot of stuff for a long period of time, but he is 99% of the time absolutely unpredictable--or when he is (like on the epic Ohnedaruth solo on Phase One), it's so immaculately and unconventionally paced that it doesn't matter that you could see the end coming from a mile away. Contrast this with Laubrock at around 8:30 or around 24 minutes. The build up is very obviously telegraphed. There's a lot of motivic and melodic information flying by really fast, and this type of playing is not easy to do--but it is arguably predictable, and anyone who listens to a ton of this music can detect this phenomenon when it's happening. Keep in mind that the improvs/pieces end not long after the markers I noted--it's just a hair away from "the end is near, guys--big finish!" (I will say that Rainey is obviating this with some really crazy shit in that second example in particular--most guys would probably just go into full barrel Rashied Ali mode at that point--but Rainey is a fucking pro.) Again, these are just my impressions, and Rainey and Laubrock are top drawer technicians as far as this sort of thing is concerned--so who am I to talk? I will, however, note that sitting through hour after hour after hour of free music that follows parameters of predictability--the same endings, the same interstitial textures, the same cymbal harmonics, the same episodes of altissimo ecstasy--can be absolutely numbing. It's just as whack as listening to lame straightahead jazz, and the music is (arguably) just as conventional. At this point in my life, I'd rather listen to either total chaos or someone who just refuses to play by the basic rules--i.e., masters in this form (like Roscoe, or guys like Weasel, whose music is fucking nuts and very cognizant of the sort of ennui that I mention.)