7/4

Cool!

Ian Anderson?

Yep. Hundreds. The latest duo with Leo Smith has composition 316. And then, there are pieces like this: he counts as one - Composition 23. ...so the amount far more than 316!

Anthony Braxton - Composition N.96 (Leo) For 37 piece orchestra! More classical, but it still sounds like Braxton with that repeating forward motion...

B-)

October 14, 2004 New Work by Rothko: A Book of Writings By PHOEBE HOBAN Christopher Rothko was only 6 when his famous father, the painter Mark Rothko, committed suicide in 1970. "I have a number of memories, but I can count them on my various fingers and toes, and strangely enough it's his voice that sticks with me," he said. Now Mr. Rothko has found a way to channel his father's voice not only for himself but also for the public, in the process resurrecting a long-lost manuscript by Mark Rothko that helps illuminate the philosophical underpinnings of Color Field paintings, the artist's greatest breakthrough. This month Yale University Press will publish those writings in a deceptively slender volume titled "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art," the only book by Mark Rothko. In it, he muses on the history of art and the artist's place and function in the world. He also begins to explore the use of color, light and space in search of "an ultimate unity." "I'm doing a talk on the book called 'Mark Rothko's Crystal Ball,' because it's uncanny and almost unnerving the degree to which he presages the work to come," said Christopher Rothko, who refers to passages in the book as the "abstractionist's manifesto." "For art is always the final generalization," the artist wrote. "It must provide the implications of infinity to any situation. And if our own environment is too diverse to allow a philosophical unity, it must find some symbol to express at least the desire for one." His son explained over lunch in Manhattan last week, "He's seeking this confluence of religion and philosophy and poetry, which isn't necessarily only what his later paintings are about, but it's certainly a rich, meaningful understanding of them." The sometimes stilted book provides insights into Rothko's thoughts on ancient and primitive art, the Renaissance and Surrealism, among other topics. It reflects the author's intense intellectual curiosity and ambition, as well as a polemical streak. Though Rothko never directly refers to his own art, or even acknowledges that he is a painter, the book reveals something of his life at the time. In its dismissive discussion of the decorative arts, for example, it hints at the stress of his marriage to his first wife, Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer who at one point put him to work for her. The story of how the book came to light, which Christopher Rothko describes in his introduction, is a convoluted one. Just six months after the artist ended his life at age 66, his wife, Mell, 48, died of a heart attack. Their children, Christopher and his sister, Kate, then 19, were almost immediately plunged into more than a decade of Dickensian legal battles involving the executors of the Rothko estate and the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan, which were ultimately fined millions for their roles in the scandal. (Christopher was brought up by his maternal aunt and uncle in Columbus, Ohio, until age 12, when he moved in with his sister, a pathologist, and her husband in Baltimore.) Although Christopher and Kate Rothko had heard that their father's personal effects included an unfinished manuscript, it was not until 1988 that the pages surfaced, discovered by the estate's registrar in a warehouse, in an accordion folder marked simply "Miscellaneous Papers." "It was sloppily typed, with numerous hand-marked additions and deletions - and more numerous typos - and it betrayed no obvious order or narrative direction," Christopher Rothko writes in the introduction. "If there was something of interest - and at first glance there really wasn't - to make something of it truly would have been a nuisance." Then there were the manuscript's negative associations with the litigation. "Because of my experience with large reams of paper involving my father, it was the last thing I wanted to look at," Mr. Rothko said. "The legacy of the horrible legal thing interfered with my really taking it seriously." Once the legal battles were over, there were years of wrangling with the Internal Revenue Service over the value of the paintings, which had greatly appreciated since the artist's death, before the heirs finally gained access to their father's artwork in the early 80's. "It wasn't until I was in college, in 1986, that I ever hung a work of my father's in my apartment," Mr. Rothko said. He has a childhood memory of "the paintings all around me, and there were specific paintings that were very near and dear to my heart." " 'Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea' seems like the most notable," Mr. Rothko said, referring to a 1944 painting. "It hung over our couch. It was always there. It was painted for my mother." Today at least half a dozen of his father's works hang in the Upper West Side home he shares with his wife, Lori Cohen, and two sons and a daughter. About 10 years ago, Christopher, now 41, became involved with his father's art, eventually giving up a practice as a psychotherapist to devote himself to it full time. "I've been very instrumental in putting together a lot of exhibitions," he said, "and I'm hands-on with the paintings pretty much every day, so I've gotten to know them very well. And through the paintings, I've gotten to know my father - there's a type of understanding and knowledge that comes from that.". His training as a therapist (he has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan) has also helped him come to terms with his father's suicide. "I was never told a candy-coated story of how he died - I was told directly, and at that age, it doesn't mean what it means to you later," he said. "He died, and that's it. What I usually feel is sadness for him. I feel how utterly despairing he must have been to just throw everything away." It took Christopher Rothko the better part of a year to edit the battered 226-page manuscript, believed to have been written in 1940 and 1941, when Rothko suffered a depression and put down his brushes for a year, delving into books on philosophy and myth. (One page is dated 1941, although Rothko referred to the manuscript in letters to the painter Milton Avery as early as 1936.) One particularly difficult problem was the sequence of chapters, which, although suggested by some of his father's notations, was not always clear. Another problem was that the artist wrote numerous drafts of each chapter and did not complete some of them. Still, the son was unprepared for how intimate the process became. "I found myself having this strangely personal, sort of collegial relationship with my father that I hadn't anticipated," Mr. Rothko said. "It's like having a conversation with him." He added, "I think that underneath, I must have known that here was a way to have a relationship with my father that was unique." He also discovered he was much more his father's son than he had realized. "Here I was getting inside his head and seeing glimpses of a man I thought I knew and also seeing these strange glimpses of myself," he said. "I find myself sharing opinions about art with him - we both are pretty critical of Michelangelo. Who else doesn't like Michelangelo?" Jeffrey Weiss, head of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art and curator of a 1998 Rothko retrospective, said: "It's a ponderous text, but it's a big deal because it belongs to his formative period and shows the working process of the artist's mind as he grapples with big ideas about the history of color and space in art, which are key themes for his later work." For Christopher Rothko, the work also functions as a metaphorical family album. "I think the most concrete thing about my father in my life is his absence," he said. "You know, I've got a few Polaroids that are fading and that's kind of it. "There are these paintings that speak so much - and yet so abstractly," Mr. Rothko said. "This is still a philosophical text, this ain't no kiss and tell, but I hear his voice, I see the manuscript page, and his handwriting, and the cross-outs and the rethinking and the sketching in. It was a fascinating process. In rediscovering the book, I rediscovered my father." Indeed, for the first time since he was a young child, Christopher suddenly found himself calling his father dad. "I'd be trying to sort through something," he said, "and he'd just have written the most convoluted sentence known to mankind, and it's like, 'Oh Dad, come on.' Believe me, it shocked me - I'd never had a second-person utterance in his direction since I was 6 years old, but here I was addressing a ghost. But it wasn't a ghost, because he was in my hands in some strange way." And what would his father think of the finished book? "I think he would have felt like 'Yes, this is basically me, let me tell you all the ways in which I'm different now,' " Mr. Rothko said. "I think he'd recognize himself, but he'd want to do about 10 more drafts."

4 x 11

which is, of course, my destiny...

and stroke my beard...

So that's why I wear a black turtleneck sweater, shades, and a beret to all my jazz concerts (and talk loudly throughout the performances). do you snap your fingers repeatedly and say "cool, man...dig?" yeah, daddy o!

Who could have thought you wold mention Braxton. Great clarinet player, for sure. After alto, clarinet is my favorite Braxton's instrumnet - it's a chame he does nto play it that often. Also, Vinny Golia is a mean clarinet pleyer. Tony Scott too!

Thanks B3er!

Anthony Braxton!

up

October 10th - festival at wkcr.com all day today.

yes.

The Magic City is a real mind**** of an album. I remember putting it (I'd already heard Atlantis and Space is the Place) on for the first time while driving to a student council meeting in college. Upon hearing that wheezy organ, I was hooked. But that collective improv section still cracks my head open like a walnut sometimes. In a good way, of course. The shorter pieces on the album are also excellent if not as mindblowing as the title suite. They're similar to what he was doing on both volumes of Heliocentric Worlds. Guy Ah yes. The Tuned percussion: tymps & marimba w/ some picciolo too.

Instead of starting a new thread, I think I'll continue this one. Cecil Taylor - It Is In The Brewing Luminous (Hatology) Wow, what an intense disk!

Anthony Braxton - For Two Pianos (Arista) w/Frederic Rzewski and Ursula Oppens (p, zither, melodica) Classical, but with an avant edge.

Discography here. Someone put a lot of work into this.

The Arista deserves a Mosaic box. for the Hat discs. Composition No 174 is like that too. I heard it a few days ago but while I feel I should closer listen, I can understnad why it's only the 2nd time I've heard it.

One I don't have.....must buy, must buy....

I hope so!

October 9, 2004 MOVIE REVIEW | 'MILES ELECTRIC' Jamming With Miles on Isle of Wight By STEPHEN HOLDEN NY Times The 38-minute jam that Miles Davis and an electric sextet played at the Isle of Wight Festival in the summer of 1970 is like a pungent, musky, musical soup. The sounds floating through the rock-funk murk evoke the Three Witches' incantation from "Macbeth": "eye of newt, and toe of frog/wool of bat, and tongue of dog." That jam, titled "Call It Anythin' " after Davis's retort when asked to name it, is resurrected in impeccable sound by "Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue," Murray Lerner's film of the event, which introduced Davis to a screaming outdoor rock audience of 600,000. (Bizarrely, he followed Tiny Tim on the bill.) The camera remains onstage for much of a jam that one musician remembers as a "microhistory of jazz." The musicians joining Davis included Gary Bartz on soprano sax, Chick Corea on electric piano, Keith Jarrett on organ, Dave Holland on electric bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Airto Moreira on percussion. The stock in which those newt eyes and frog toes simmer is a floating blues groove that changes key only gradually while hovering between major and minor. Its dominant note is Davis's instantly recognizable signature: a fractured, sputtering sweet-and-sour trumpet that hints at tunes but never draws them out. "Miles Electric" is more than a concert movie. A few months earlier, Davis and a different crew of sidemen revolutionized music with the landmark album "Bitches Brew," which stands as the jazz equivalent of Bob Dylan's "going electric." At the Isle of Wight, Davis and his fellow musicians created improvisatory sounds, incorporating rock rhythm and electric funk inspired by Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly Stone. During the first half of the film, the original Isle of Wight sidemen and other musicians look back three decades to recall Davis's historic transition into electric instrumentation. That leap, which brought Davis to a mass audience for the first time, infuriated the orthodox jazz establishment. The articulate jazz critic Stanley Crouch recalls trying and failing to like "Bitches Brew," which he studied repeatedly (sometimes in chemically altered states). He accuses Davis of contemptuously selling out and calls the music "formless." Davis's embrace of electric music was part of a personal revolution that saw him exchange his fancy Italian suits for flashy street clothes. His embrace of rock sound was heavily influenced by Betty Mabry, the flamboyant funk diva he wed in 1968 and divorced a year later. His jabbing solos also reflected his fascination with boxing, which he expressed directly in his soundtrack album, "A Tribute to Jack Johnson," released around the time of "Bitches Brew." Musicians differ from critics in their descriptions of the experience of music. Carlos Santana, the film's most enthusiastic talking head, exalts the "spiritual orgasms" produced by jazz-fusion. Herbie Hancock remembers approaching the Fender Rhodes as a toy and learning to love its sound. Keith Jarrett, though a bit more guarded, recalls being in a trancelike state at the Isle of Wight concert. "Miles Electric" is an exceptionally concise, well-organized concert documentary. There's none of the padding you often find in concert movies, and once the jam begins, there are no distractions. Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue Produced and directed by Murray Lerner; edited by Einar Westerlund and Edward Goldberg. Running time: 87 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 7:30 and 10:15 at the Walter Reade Theater, at Lincoln Center, as part of the 42nd New York Film Festival. WITH: Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchell, Stanley Crouch, Bob Belden, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira, Dave Holland, Gary Bartz, Herbie Hancock, James Mtume, Paul Buckmaster, Marcus Miller, Pete Cosey and Jimi Hendrix.

Oh yes, the Magic City is very nice. It's too bad I didn't pick up some vinyl when I saw them 88-92.