Larry Kart

Stanely Turrentine "That Is Where It Is"

John Coltrane -- Blue Choo-Choo

Jackie McLean "Swing, Swung, Having Been Swunged"

Lee Morgan "Search For The New Gland"

Hank Mobley "Another Lockup"

Geographically, McKusick's Jazz Workshop is a wholly east coast record, though it's certainly not a hard bop blowing date. BTW, if you're curious about about McKusick would sound in a less-arranged setting, check out his "Triple Exposure (OJC), where the rhythm section is Eddie Costa, Paul Chambers, and Charlie Persip. Especially interesting for Chambers fans; he's captured with exceptional clarity.

Horace Silver "Filthy McNicey"

That's what keeps it sharp.

Clem -- When I referred a while back to an Eduard Steuermann recording of Skalkottas's Piano Concerto No. 2 on Arkadia, I was mistaken. The pianist is Georg Hadjinikos. Steuermann plays the Schoenberg Concerto on that disc, and Paul Jacobs and Wolgang Marschner do the Berg Chamber Concerto -- all concert performances from the 1950s, all conducted by Hermann Scherchen.

The best of the "Harpur and Iles" novels are amazing. Iles is one of the great comic monsters of all time. On the other hand, it seems to me that James kind of ran things into the ground after a very good and long stretch. I'm trying to read the new one, "Wolves of Memory," and find as I did in other recent ones that Iles's mad public outbursts are becoming so broad and absurd that surrounding more realistic, or less stylized, passages threaten to become meaningless. As I recall, things really get rolling with "The Lolita Man," where Harpur collaborates and to some extent bonds with the man who then becomes the new Chief on Harpur's turf. Then Iles crops up (in the next book?) and the slow-motion destruction of the dreamy, decent Chief begins, though I don't recall how many books that takes. When I read "Roses, Roses" (the one narrated entirely or in part by Harpur's wife), I had the feeling that it was the climax of what James had in mind when he set out. My favorite, as I recall, is "Astride a Grave."

Clem -- I vaguely recall enjoying Higgins' "The Friends of Eddie Coyle." What I recall much more clearly was an episode I had with him in 1989, when I was in second in command of the Chicago Tribune books section. John Le Carre's "The Russia House" was about to come out, and it was a so-called "embargoed" book -- which meant that only one copy per newspaper would be sent out to the reviewer you had designated, and this would be done at the last minute. Higgins was our man, the book would get to him from Random House on Friday, he'd read it over the weekend and fax us a copy of his review (things weren't fully computerized and wired-up then) on Monday morning so we could get it into the paper the following Sunday, on the cover of the book section. The review comes in on time, I read it, and see that it's rather short and oddly circulaqr and inconclusive -- as though Higgins were merely stating and re-stating what seems to me like it might be like the initial premise of the book (that the Soviet missile defense system is a sham, and that a noble Soviet scientist wants to relay this news to the West in the hopes that a lessening of tensions and eventual peace might follow). Now I have no way to be sure about this, because we don't yet have a copy of the book (our only copy is in Higgins' hands), but my gut tells me that something's wrong here -- that Higgins probably has read only the first 50 or 100 pages of "The Russia House," then stopped or was stopped for some reason (booze? drugs? fear?), and is trying to fake his way through this. (In fact, it eventually became quite clear that Higgins hadn't read the whole book, because his review didn't even mention the book's main male character, Barley Blair, the guy Sean Connery plays in the film version, or the main female character either.) So I called Higgins on Monday, without yet knowing for sure what he had done or failed to do, and tried to talk around this -- saying that the review was a bit short and we'd like another page or so, hoping that he might have finished the book in the meantime, if that's what the problem was. He agreed to write more, rather testily, and what arrived in a hour or two was just more of the same, and even more lame. I tried one more time, saying that the Random House catalogue implied that the book was about something more and a good bit other than what he was saying in the review At this Higgins became furious, saying that he had read the book and I hadn't, that I was mortally insulting him, etc. So the book editor and I put our heads together and decided that by this point (our literal deadline for sending copy down the hopper now just a short time away) we had no choice but to run the review as written. As I said, it was our cover review that week, with a nice piece of art locked in place there, which made the deadline tighter and our eventual embarrassment greater, because Higgins had in fact read only a bit of the book -- with the review and the book in hand, you could see on what page he'd stopped. As to why this happened, I'm pretty sure it was personal craziness amplified or in league with booze or drugs. "The Russia House" is not a long book, and it would have been just as easy -- if you weren't loco or blotto -- to keep reading and then write the review, even if that tightened your own deadline, rather than to stop and try to fake the damn thing. On the other hand, now that I think of it, in the realm of personal goofiness there are some people who are drawn to the idea of faking things -- that there's a sick thrill for them in it when it works and another kind of sick thrill when it doesn't.

If that Borges story seems like it's not your cup, don't miss the part about the "hronir."

Here's that Borges story: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges...is_Tertius.html

I think (or at least hope) that it's still possible for original geniuses to burst forth, but if there's anything to the jazz as language game stuff I talked about above, where and when and how one enters that game (i.e. accident of date and place of birth and subsequent social/economic surroundings, etc.), may well have something to do with the extent to which person X's genius will burst forth and how it will be or will not be nurtured, furthered, squelched, etc. You might want to check out art historian's George Kubler's brief, shrewd book "The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things." Here is a passage from the book's final chapter: "Radical artistic innovations may perhaps not continue to appear with the frequency we have come to expect in the past century. It is possibly true that the potentialities of form and meaning in human society have all been sketched out at one time and place or another, in more or less complete projections..... Some portions of the diagram are more completely known than others, and some places in it are sketchy, or they are known only by deduction.... Were this hypothesis to be verified. it would radically affect our conception of the history of art. Instead of our occupying an expanding universe of forms, which is the contemprary artist's happy but premature assumption, we would be seen to inhabit a finite world of limited possibilities [yet one] still largely unexplored, still open to adventure and discovery.... Should the ratio between discovered postions and undiscovered ones in human affairs greatly favor the former, then the relation of the future to the past would alter radically. Instead of regarding the past as a microscopic annex to a future of astronomical magnitudes, we would have to envisage a future with limited room for changes, and these of types to which the past already yields the key." Also worth a look in this vein is Borges's great story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which kind of takes what Kubler is saying (though Borges was writing almost 20 years earlier) and turns it upside-down and inside-out. It's a very funny story, too. Finally, looking at jazz from a Kubler-ish point of view, I've wondered at times whether the accident (if you want to think of it that way) of jazz's emergence on the stage of human affairs as a belated but arguably full-blown and more or less self-determined, integral art might be thought of as kind of relatively observable gift/example to humanity of what it is that arts are, do, and can be. After all, though my mind starts to melt down when I think about it, can there be any doubt that however you wish to define jazz and however far back and to wherever you want to trace its origins and contributory streams, it wasn't that long ago that there was no such thing, no such art, nor any guarantee that it would ever take shape? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the only other major arts of which that could be said are photography and motion pictures, and both of those had a novel technological basis, while jazz took shape out of nothing but human soul stuff being applied to already existing musical instruments. In that, I like to think, jazz had a more than whiff of the primary to it -- akin to the way and the why of people beginning to draw, paint, and form three-dimensional images for reasons that extended beyond what was practical or basically ritualistic.

Hot Ptah -- I took a good crack at some of these questions in the chapter I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz" on the avant-garde up to 1967 or so. At 5,000 words, it's too long to post here, and I don't think Oxford would like it if I did that anyhow. Also, that chapter was written six or seven years ago, and I don't think I still believe everything that I thought back then -- not that I've gone back on any of the points I made there, as far as I can tell; I've just had further thoughts based in part on further experiences. One thing I tried hard to do there was stay focused on what I thought the musical issues were in the jazz A-G -- why they arose in the ways that they did and how they worked themselves out -- and leave it to others to plug in the social/political stuff that's often talked about as though it determined everything else. Alluding perhaps to some of the things that are in Chuck's mind, it might well be the case (I now sometimes think) that jazz is a kind of perhapscontradictory (eventually, over the course of time) "language game." That is, its initial habits (I don't want to say "rules," but go that way if you want to) have given rise over time to all sorts of fruitful new habits (and some that some mightr feel aren't so fruitful) -- with all this taking place in the context of jazz's awareness of/reaction to/use of a good many other musics, all this in the name of simple, or not so simple, musical freedom and curiosity, if nothing else, which makes this process difficult if not impossible to control or restrict, should anyone want to do that. But jazz's habits, while fluid and subject to great variation, are also fairly "thingy" in that language game sense I mentioned before (no, don't ask me to define what a language game is -- as Fats Waller said to me at the Onyx Club one night, "If you have to ask...") and while one can quite fruitfully continue to live at or just beyond one or more of the very edges of that game, and get IMO a quite genuine and long-lastingly meaningful A-G rush going from being at or near that edge of the game and its habits, it is from such vantage points that one can sense that jazz's language game may not be "progressively" limitless, either in time or in terms of materials (as, by comparison, the language games of the visual arts or literature certainly seem to be). For instance, there is IMO jazz, great jazz, that doesn't swing by some reasonable definitions of what swing is. But jazz that doesn't allude to, isn't aware of (at least historically) the existence of swing, with all that that phenomenon brings in its wake? I may be wrong, but I don't think so. (For instance -- if one "for instance" is enough -- I would say that Cecil Taylor's music certainly alludes and is aware of what swing is.) Likewise, though this may be a trickier matter because less openly thought about/pored over, jazz's to my mind multiple crucial discoveries about timbre, in particular about how timbre can become rhythm and vice versa. A jazz in which such details of timbre (personality of, personal nature of, stimulating mutability of, etc.) is of little or no matter? Again, I don't think so. There's obviously much more here; and better minds than mine, not to mention minds of actual musicians who can do something about this, will be chewing it over in our lifetimes. But to me all this is at once anxiety provoking and exciting, though I know it's also not impossible that I'll finally be looking at a mess of broken eggs without an omelette or a souffle to be seen, expect those plastic ones they keep in the jazz museum.

By this standard -- and I'm being serious here, though the words no doubt will fail us -- does dancing in your head count? I do a lot of that I believe, to almost any music that makes sense to me, and do it well (if there's any way or reason to judge something like that). But dancing outside my head has never worked for me very well, both in terms of how I feel when I do it and how other people tell me I look (and they're right).

Clem -- I've been a Skalkottas fan since 1965, when the LP of his Octet, Third String Quartet, and Eight Variations on a Greek Folk Tune came out on EMI (reissued a decade later on Argo). It was the Octet especially that blew me away -- talk about a language sense! I've got most of the BIS discs but for some reason haven't been listening to them the way I should; they're like accumulating Mosaic boxes. There is or was a 1953 Eduard Steuermann concert recording of Skalkottas's Piano Concerto No. 2 on Arkadia that should be compared to whatever hash Geoffrey Madge makes of the piece when he gets around to it on BIS, if he hasn't already. Allen -- Lots to think about there. Thanks.

Don't recall when and how Dusapin crossed my path, but I like most everything I've heard. Debussy meets Sibelius is what Saariaho's Oltra Mar is like, but we've already got Debussy and Sibelius. Also, some of her wave music there seems close to movie wave music. I've yet to detect much of a language sense in Lindberg's grimmer stuff, and I've tried and tried. (Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto does have a language sense, but so does Rhapsody In Blue.) Carter's no problem for me, if it's a good performance and I pay attention. That recent Bridge disc with the piano and chamber orchestra work Carter wrote for Nicholas Hodges is a gem. If you like Rautavaara -- I admit backing off quick from my only attempt to sample -- have you tried Tviett?

Whew. Found my copy of that fine Jason Ajemian disc: http://www.luckykitchen.com/spark2/lk025.html Don't know if it's still available. The Jazz Record Mart might have a few copies left. Here Ajemian's My Space site, if you want to ask him directly: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea...iendid=50309593

Jim -- In case that wasn't clear, that's my on the thought of puking at "Af-Am." Sorry if that made you do it.

Clem -- I've listened over and over to a fair amount of Saariaho and Lindberg, in the hope that ... but, no. Seems to me that in the former there's almost no "there" there, and that in the latter one moves, over time, from a near-programmatic ugliness (like the score for a movie about a huge nasty alien space ship, e.g. the aptly titled "Engine") to candy sweetness (e.g. the Clarinet Concerto -- not a bad ear there, but SO sweet). I've got my money on Helmut Lachenmann, Pascal Dusapin, Salvatore Sciarrino, and a few others.

Hope my post wasn't one of those, but just in case, none of the players I mentioned there seems to me to be a parasite "mining the past for a 'style' on which to build a career." I don't like that shit either, agree that it doesn't work anyway, and don't think I'm likely to be fooled. (If I am self-deluded here, our friend John L. is in the same boat on several of these guys FWIW.)

Not yet. From what I've seen of it, George Lewis's forthcoming tome on the AACM will be chewy in spots but often brilliant and as close to comprehensive as could be possible. The non-AACM Chicago AG scene has not found its Boswell (don't look at me -- I couldn't get past the Vandermark barrier, for one thing), nor has it been continuous, as far as I know, in the way the AACM has been since its inception. Probably the key figure of continuity there was, as Chuck pointed out on that thread from 2005 I linked to, the late Hal Russell. (Chuck recorded Russell as well as Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Leo Smith et al.) Also, when I say the "non-AACM Chicago AG scene," I don't mean to suggest that there's any sense of opposition at work here; in fact, there's a good deal of friendly, open-eared contact, sharing of bandstands, interactions among players, etc.

At the risk of being tedious, a fair amount was said (by me and others) about today’s Chicago AG/semi-AG scene during the back and forth on this thread from Jan. 2005: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...helton&st=0 To that I’ll add way down below the liner notes I wrote for tenor saxophonist/composer Keefe Jackson’s new Delmark album “Ready Everyday” (which represents several aspects of the scene quite well IMO). Other notable Chicago AG or semi-AG figures who come to mind (most all under age 35 I think) -- other than the ones mentioned in the above thread or in the liner notes below -- are clarinetist James Falzone, guitarist Matt Schneider, bassist Josh Abrams, bassist Jason Ajemian, bassist Jason Roebke, vibist Jason Adasiewicz (we got your Jasons), tenorman Geoff Bradfield, cellist Kevin Davis, drummer Tim Daisy, drummer Dylan Ryan, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, trumpeter Patrick Newberry, drummer Mike Reed, trombonist Nick Broste, drummer Tim Mulveena, drummer Nori Tanaka, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of people. Albums I can recommend, in addition to “Ready Everyday” and the other album mentioned there, “Several Lights,” and the ones mentioned in the above thread, are these from reedman Dave Rempis (Circular Logic, Triage “Twenty Minute Cliff,” Triage “American Mythology,” “Out of Season”); Geoff Bradfield’s “Rule of Three”; 774th Street Quartet’s (reedmen Jackson, Guillermo Gregorio, Shelton, Thomas Mejer) “A Rare Thing”; Herculaneum’s “Orange Blossom”; a terrific one from a Jason Ajemian-led ensemble that I seem to have misplaced, damn it, and again I must be forgetting a good many e.g. Josh Abram's Delmark album whose title I've forgotten, guitarist Jeff Parker's "Like-Coping" and a yet-to-be-released one from Falzone. I should add that the stylistic range of this scene is quite broad, but there seems to me to be a definite core to it, the nature of which I try to touch upon below. It's not the same as the AACM at its peak (for one thing, this scene's best musicians are not the towering figures that Mitchell, Bowie, Abrams, et al. were or are), but it's yeasty, genuine, full of communal spirit, and, so it seems from where I sit, remarkably self-sustaining. So here are those liner notes: One good way to grasp how rich and diverse the Chicago jazz scene has become over the last ten years or so would be to place the album at hand, tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson's “Fast Citizens,” alongside the music on another Delmark album, “Several Lights,” that three of these musicians (Jackson, cornetist Josh Berman, and drummer Frank Rosaly) made in 2004 with Swiss tubaist Marc Unternährer under the name Chicago Luzern Exchange. All of the music on “Several Lights” is, as we have learned to say, “free” -- improvised from scratch, more or less measureless, and without pre-determined harmonic and structural frameworks. By contrast, the music on “Fast Citizens” swings very hard when it wants to (which is often), and the album's seven pieces -- five by Jackson, one each by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and alto saxophonist Aram Shelton (the remaining Fast Citizen is bassist Anton Hatwich) -- present both players and listeners with relatively songlike frameworks that tend to stay in place, harmonically, metrically, and structurally. But I wouldn't say -- and this touches upon what may be the core identity of this Chicago scene -- that the music on “Fast Citizens” is one bit less “free,” in effect, practice, or intent, than the music on “Several Lights” or any of the other widely varied sounds to which this scene keeps giving birth. The common thread here, that core identity, is genuine compositional thinking -- a practical, unpretentious drive to make music in which every part has a significant structural and expressive role to play. And in the music on “Fast Citizens,” who plays what role and when does seem to be determined quite freely (whether on paper, in rehearsals, or on the run) -- by unusually acute, friendly-competitive ears and sensibilities, not through executive fiat or mere habit. (These are, by the way, the ears and sensibilities of musicians who know both their Ornette Coleman and their Sidney Bechet, their Morton Feldman and their Ruby Braff, and so forth and so on; one of the best things about this Chicago scene is how naturally -- and, again, how freely -- the pasts of jazz and related musics are being played with/sorted out in the present.) Jackson formed this band in 2003; it played frequently in 2004 at the aptly named (because it's hard to find) Chicago club The Hideout. With the exception of Lonberg-Holm, who is 44, all of these musicians are in their late 20s or early 30s; and all of them, with the exception of Berman, are not Chicago-area natives but arrived here from elsewhere -- Arkansas (Jackson), New York City (Lonberg-Holm), Florida (Shelton), Iowa (Hatwich), (Arizona) Rosaly -- from 1995 on. This flow into town of remarkable, like-minded players and their subsequent further flowering is something one has come to expect. Some examples, now, of that aforementioned compositional drive in action. Notice during Shelton's solo on “Blackout” (his own piece) how he proposes a fluttering, tremolo-like figure at about the 5:25 mark, which is swiftly echoed by Lonberg-Holm's bowed cello -- with alto and bass then discussing and remolding what might be said to lie under their fingers until Shelton's solo line rises in pitch and emotional heat to a near explosive level of intensity … and then out. In effect, that initial moment of mutual invention/recognition/response has become the basis of the entire second half of the piece. And much the same tremolo impulse resurfaces more briefly and in a rather different guise on Lonberg-Holm's “Pax Urbanum” -- the cello now pizzicato, while Shelton's side of the duet is fittingly cool, delicate, and precise. In fact, and he can laugh at the likely incongruity of this, throughout “Fast Citizens” Lonberg-Holm seems to me to be playing a kind of Django Reinhardt meets D'Artagnan role -- sweeping in over balustrades to add fantasy, fire, and wit. Berman is a virtual composer in himself; as much any brass player of his age, he has his own sound and personality, with one of his key traits being the way his lines typically seem to think again about what they've just said, in a wry “Did I mean that?/Yes I meant that” manner. But on Jackson's “Signs,” with Rosaly and Hatwich cooking behind him, it would be hard to think of the climactic passages of Berman's brilliant solo as a solo per se -- what we have here, by about the 3:20 mark, is a virtual cornet-bass-drums trio; that it was arrived at spontaneously makes it no less concrete. Speaking of Hatwich and Rosaly, while they aren’t the only gifted bassist and drummer on the Chicago scene, it would be hard to think what things would be like without them. A virtuoso who never thrusts his virtuosity at you, Hatwich has great time, a rich, woody tone; a marvelous, “abstract” ear; and is – that phrase again – always thinking compositionally. And the at once calm and effervescent Rosaly – let’s just say that he’s my favorite drummer since Joe Chambers and leave it at that. As for Jackson, as soloist and principal composer, I was struck at first by the habañera-tango feel of “Signs” and “Saying Yes.” But no deliberate Latin or Spanish strains are at work here. Instead, Jackson explains, the gliding, brooding moodiness of these pieces may be an oblique, accidental offshoot of his onetime interest in Eastern European music in general and Klezmer in particular. “I was pretty intense about Klezmer for a while,” Jackson says, “playing the clarinet and transcribing all of those tunes, listening in particular to [clarinet virtuosi] Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras. Years later, I suppose, melodies with those intervals we associate with the East [must be] floating around in my head.” Jackson modestly solos on only four of the album's seven tracks, but each one is a gem. The first three (on “Ready Everyday,” “Saying Yes,” and “Pax Urbanum”) all come from one side of Jackson's musical spectrum, I think -- these nearly unbroken lines, absolute in their linear logic, also seem to outline in their sober rise and fall other “shadow” melodies, as though the changes Jackson plays over or implies were, in effect, ghosts. From another side comes Jackson's solo on “Course” -- steaming and expressionistic, it virtually glories in its ability to weld disparate voices and parts into a whole. The first time I heard Jackson's music, some four years ago, I felt sure that he was someone special; the only question was whether a certain diffidence of temperament would prevent all that he had to give from getting out. Jackson is still the same thoughtful, soft-spoken individual, but the music on “Fast Citizens” speaks loud and clear. In the course of the back and forth on this thread from Jan. 2005: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...helton&st=0 a fair amount was said (by me and others) about today’s Chicago AG/semi-AG scene. To that I’ll add the following liner notes, which I wrote a month or so ago for tenor saxophonist/composer Keefe Jackson’s new Delmark album “Ready Everyday.” Other notable Chicago AG or semi-AG figures who come to mind (most all under age 35 I think) -- other than the ones mentioned in the above thread or in the liner notes below -- are clarinetist James Falzone, guitarist Matt Schneider, bassist Josh Abrams, bassist Jason Ajemian, bassist Jason Roebke, vibist Jason Adasiewicz (we got Jasons), tenorman Geoff Bradfield, cellist Kevin Davis, drummer Tim Daisy, drummer Dylan Ryan, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, trumpeter Patrick Newberry, drummer Mike Reed, trombonist Nick Broste, bassist Anton Hatwich, drummer Frank Rosaly, drummer Tim Mulveena, drummer Nori Tanaka, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of people. Albums I can recommend, in addition to “Ready Everyday” and the other album mentioned there, “Several Lights,” and the ones mentioned in the above thread, are these from reedman Dave Rempis (Circular Logic, Triage “Twenty Minute Cliff,” Triage “American Mythology,” “Out of Season”); Geoff Bradfield’s “Rule of Three”; 774th Street Quartet’s “A Rare Thing”; Herculaneum’s “Orange Blossom”; a terrific one from a Jason Ajemian-led ensemble that I seem to have misplaced, damn it. I should add that the stylistic range of this scene is quite broad, but there seems to me to be a definite core to it, which I try to touch upon below. So here are those liner notes: One good way to grasp how rich and diverse the Chicago jazz scene has become over the last ten years or so would be to place the album at hand, tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson's “Fast Citizens,” alongside the music on another Delmark album, “Several Lights,” that three of these musicians (Jackson, cornetist Josh Berman, and drummer Frank Rosaly) made in 2004 with Swiss tubaist Marc Unternährer under the name Chicago Luzern Exchange. All of the music on “Several Lights” is, as we have learned to say, “free” -- improvised from scratch, more or less measureless, and without pre-determined harmonic and structural frameworks. By contrast, the music on “Fast Citizens” swings very hard when it wants to (which is often), and the album's seven pieces -- five by Jackson, one each by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and alto saxophonist Aram Shelton (the remaining Fast Citizen is bassist Anton Hatwich) -- present both players and listeners with relatively songlike frameworks that tend to stay in place, harmonically, metrically, and structurally. But I wouldn't say -- and this touches upon what may be the core identity of this Chicago scene -- that the music on “Fast Citizens” is one bit less “free,” in effect, practice, or intent, than the music on “Several Lights” or any of the other widely varied sounds to which this scene keeps giving birth. The common thread here, that core identity, is genuine compositional thinking -- a practical, unpretentious drive to make music in which every part has a significant structural and expressive role to play. And in the music on “Fast Citizens,” who plays what role and when does seem to be determined quite freely (whether on paper, in rehearsals, or on the run) -- by unusually acute, friendly-competitive ears and sensibilities, not through executive fiat or mere habit. (These are, by the way, the ears and sensibilities of musicians who know both their Ornette Coleman and their Sidney Bechet, their Morton Feldman and their Ruby Braff, and so forth and so on; one of the best things about this Chicago scene is how naturally -- and, again, how freely -- the pasts of jazz and related musics are being played with/sorted out in the present.) Jackson formed this band in 2003; it played frequently in 2004 at the aptly named (because it's hard to find) Chicago club The Hideout. With the exception of Lonberg-Holm, who is 44, all of these musicians are in their late 20s or early 30s; and all of them, with the exception of Berman, are not Chicago-area natives but arrived here from elsewhere -- Arkansas (Jackson), New York City (Lonberg-Holm), Florida (Shelton), Iowa (Hatwich), (Arizona) Rosaly -- from 1995 on. This flow into town of remarkable, like-minded players and their subsequent further flowering is something one has come to expect. Some examples, now, of that aforementioned compositional drive in action. Notice during Shelton's solo on “Blackout” (his own piece) how he proposes a fluttering, tremolo-like figure at about the 5:25 mark, which is swiftly echoed by Lonberg-Holm's bowed cello -- with alto and bass then discussing and remolding what might be said to lie under their fingers until Shelton's solo line rises in pitch and emotional heat to a near explosive level of intensity … and then out. In effect, that initial moment of mutual invention/recognition/response has become the basis of the entire second half of the piece. And much the same tremolo impulse resurfaces more briefly and in a rather different guise on Lonberg-Holm's “Pax Urbanum” -- the cello now pizzicato, while Shelton's side of the duet is fittingly cool, delicate, and precise. In fact, and he can laugh at the likely incongruity of this, throughout “Fast Citizens” Lonberg-Holm seems to me to be playing a kind of Django Reinhardt meets D'Artagnan role -- sweeping in over balustrades to add fantasy, fire, and wit. Berman is a virtual composer in himself; as much any brass player of his age, he has his own sound and personality, with one of his key traits being the way his lines typically seem to think again about what they've just said, in a wry “Did I mean that?/Yes I meant that” manner. But on Jackson's “Signs,” with Rosaly and Hatwich cooking behind him, it would be hard to think of the climactic passages of Berman's brilliant solo as a solo per se -- what we have here, by about the 3:20 mark, is a virtual cornet-bass-drums trio; that it was arrived at spontaneously makes it no less concrete. Speaking of Hatwich and Rosaly, while they aren’t the only gifted bassist and drummer on the Chicago scene, it would be hard to think what things would be like without them. A virtuoso who never thrusts his virtuosity at you, Hatwich has great time, a rich, woody tone; a marvelous, “abstract” ear; and is – that phrase again – always thinking compositionally. And the at once calm and effervescent Rosaly – let’s just say that he’s my favorite drummer since Joe Chambers and leave it at that. As for Jackson, as soloist and principal composer, I was struck at first by the habañera-tango feel of “Signs” and “Saying Yes.” But no deliberate Latin or Spanish strains are at work here. Instead, Jackson explains, the gliding, brooding moodiness of these pieces may be an oblique, accidental offshoot of his onetime interest in Eastern European music in general and Klezmer in particular. “I was pretty intense about Klezmer for a while,” Jackson says, “playing the clarinet and transcribing all of those tunes, listening in particular to [clarinet virtuosi] Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras. Years later, I suppose, melodies with those intervals we associate with the East [must be] floating around in my head.” Jackson modestly solos on only four of the album's seven tracks, but each one is a gem. The first three (on “Ready Everyday,” “Saying Yes,” and “Pax Urbanum”) all come from one side of Jackson's musical spectrum, I think -- these nearly unbroken lines, absolute in their linear logic, also seem to outline in their sober rise and fall other “shadow” melodies, as though the changes Jackson plays over or implies were, in effect, ghosts. From another side comes Jackson's solo on “Course” -- steaming and expressionistic, it virtually glories in its ability to weld disparate voices and parts into a whole. The first time I heard Jackson's music, some four years ago, I felt sure that he was someone special; the only question was whether a certain diffidence of temperament would prevent all that he had to give from getting out. Jackson is still the same thoughtful, soft-spoken individual, but the music on “Fast Citizens” speaks loud and clear.

Thanks, Tom. MG, I'll weigh in a bit on the zesty Chicago AG (or semi AG) scene of recent years later on today or maybe tomorrow. Will be gone from the computer until mid-afternoon..