Nate Dorward

This has got to be one of the most ridiculous articles I've read in a while: Ken Vandermark as a sadly neglected figure?!?

Well, the evil thing about the Gabler Ulysses was that it was prompted largely by the Joyce estate's attempt to produce a version of the text different enough to be freshly copyrighted, & that the Gabler edition at one point completely displaced the 1922 text (which was permitted to fall out of print). But unless I'm mistaken, the reedited Touch of Evil didn't proceed from dubious motives, at least has a grounding in Welle's own list of demanded changes to the film, & both the original & reedited versions are still available. What can I say, I like flawed masterpieces. People always talk about the opening tracking shot, but I find the most impressive thing is that weird swooping back & forth in the rooms of the house as the cops descend on it & the evidence gets planted in the bathroom. Getting back to Wise the thing that always strikes me as odd is that The Day the Earth Stood Still is described sometimes as "pacifist", which is a strange way to describe a film which ends with the citizens of Earth being handed an ultimatum: shape up or we'll waste you.

Wasted? I dunno, despite the flaws, films like Touch of Evil & the butchered The Magnificent Ambersons are still major achievements.

Except for Steve Lacy.

Yeah, it's a really, really fine disc. I just did a little feature on the label for Coda (in the Sept issue)--caught Neal & Ned while they were in town & interviewed them a little & so the piece has a brief snippet from the interview.

I think part of the problem is that the album's been o/p for years..... I've never heard it for instance.

Jsut a footnote to say that if you like the Spring Heel Jack/improv discs, it's worth checking out the excellent Bruised by Tony Bevan, Orphy Robinson, Ashley Wales (of SHJ), John Edwards & Mark Sanders. It's not on Thirsty Ear but on Foghorn. I haven't heard much of this series--I think I had bad luck as the first one I got was David S Ware's clunking Threads, & I've been very cautious since that. But I do have Berne's Sublime And which is excellent.

Ran Blake, The Short Life of Barbara Monk is another excellent one. & Lacy/Waldron's Sempre Amore is a classic.

Yeah Bert sounds great on what little I've heard--with Mingus & Melle. Incidentally another underrated trombonist worth checking out: Willie Dennis. He's on a few Mingus albums but barely gets a solo on those I've heard; the one spot I've heard him solo at length is on Ronnie Ball's All About Ronnie, another obscure Savoy worth picking up (it was cut out about 5 years ago & maybe copies are still floating around).

I haven't heard that one as it's not been reissued: here's the entry on the EFI site: John Stevens - Spontaneous Music Ensemble (aka "Oliv") Kenny Wheeler (fh), Trevor Watts (as), Johnny Dyani (b), John Stevens (perc), Maggie Nicols (voc), Pepi Lemer (voc), Carolann Nicholls (voc). Rec. by Eddie Offord at Advision Studio, London, February 7th, 1969. Waiting for Giorgio 14:02 unissued add Derek Bailey (g), Peter Lemer (p) Waiting for Giorgio 22:50 - Oliv I (Stevens/Nicols) 19:33 Marmalade 608008/Polydor 2384 009 (lp) all out except Watts, Dyani, Stevens, Nicols Oliv II (Stevens/Nicols) 16:02 Marmalade 608008/Polydor 2384 009 (lp) 7.5ips mono copy of Waiting for Giorgio (short take) + Oliv II: C577/111, 7.5ips st. copy of Waiting for Giorgio (long take): C577/112. The two (very different) versions of Waiting for Giorgio were recorded by the ensemble whilst waiting for producer Giorgio Gomelsky to arrive at the studio but they are partly composed. The tapes held at the NSA suffer from distortion in places but the masters may be unaffected. PolyGram may have one or more unissued takes of Oliv as the issued Oliv II was actually the third take of this piece. Brief notes by John Stevens, Giorgio Gomelsky and Eddie Offord. Reviewed in Jazz Monthly 09/69, by Graham Boatfield in Jazz Journal (8/70) p32, by Richard Williams (briefly) in MM 27/6/70 p26 & MM 2/8/69 p18. Jak Kilby took photographs at this session. --- It's likely to be free-improv but quite orderly, along the lines of other SME records from the time; SME was generally Stevens' project for free improvisation, whereas other groups of his could be straight jazz or jazz-rock. It wouldn't be a "blow-out" probably as Stevens' music was often very quiet and detailed, even chamberish at times. -- If you saw it at a low price then by all means pick it up as I'm sure if you don't like it you can sell it for a good price to Stevens fans.

DD: there are a few late-2004 releases there, yes, since they wouldn't have had a chance to get in my lists last year. Coda asks for the list in October; Cadence permits you to send it in much later (first week of December I think it was) but the catch is that it may only contain discs that have already been reviewed in Cadence, so in fact the Cadence list will contain stuff from about August or September at the latest (since it's usually about 3-6 months between submitting a review to them & its appearance). Anyway, this is one reason I keep track of things--so I don't forget the stuff from late 2004 & early 2005 in the rush at year's end. Actually I think most labels would be smart, like car companies, to advance-date discs that are released in October through December, so that magazines & music fans don't treat them as if they're old news in the new year. For instance just a month ago I received Ezra Weiss's new disc, Persephone (very nice mainstream jazz date, by the way); it's dated 2004 but clearly it only entered any kind of circulation in mid-2005, to judge by the absence of reviews & the fact that no-one else I know has heard of it. It should have been dated 2005.

Greg Kelley is a very fine trumpeter who works in both a free jazz idiom (cf work with Paul Flaherty &c) & also the more rarefied minimalist end of things, plus I gather there's some limited-edition electronics stuff I haven't heard.

Just a quick note to say that my formal writeup of this + another Stevens disc is now posted here: http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine...sep_text.html#8

Hm, where'd the typo come from? It's 2004 needless to say. Have it, but only listened to half of it so far (so far, quite strong). I like the Tracey/Parker a lot, though I haven't heard the 1st one (& people who'd heard it seem to like the 1st one a bit better). There will be a piece I did on it on the Paris Transatlantic site on Sep. 1st.

At least two: Equation with local Toronto players Mike Hansen and Tomas Krakowiak, & Shooters & Bowlers with Gerry Hemingway. Everything else I've heard by him--about a dozen or so albums--has been superb, though. I like Intentions with Peggy Lee & Phil Durrant, which I don't think gets mooted a lot. & the trio with Russell & Durrant (three discs strong now--WHEN will Conceits & Concert Moves be reissued??) is a classic.

There's a quote in a book I read ages ago, Zen and the Art of the Macintosh, from Ornette Coleman: "Jazz is just riffing on your mistakes". No citation there, so I don't know if this is an accurate quote (the only well-documented qt from Ornette I've seen on the topic is rather different, something like "I realized that I was onto something when I realized that in playing free you could make mistakes.")

Gokhan--no need to bother with the elaborate writeup! It's mostly just taking notes for myself--I have to do a "formal" writeup for the end of the month & figured I might as well post the notes here to get things going. Glad you like Growing Pains. I really like Braam a lot. Next time I have a little dough I think I'll be picking up his intriguingly titled Foamy Wife Hum.

OK, here goes. Discographical info & personnel are given at the start of the thread. This was recorded live at the Crawley Jazz Festival in 1992. I don’t know anything about the 3 young players here: I’m sure some of the British residents on the board can fill me in. The liner notes have stills from a video: tantalizing, as I’d love to see the band in performance. I don’t think that the stills are from the same performance, as they look like they’re on a set. In the tray behind the CD is a snap of what looks like the actual Crawley gig, though. 1. “Dudu’s Gone,” a memorial to Dudu Pukwana in the line of Ornette’s rhythm-changes tunes--the band’s signature tune, as Stevens announces at the end of the track. This wasn’t on the original disc because the engineer was still adjusting levels; Martin Davidson of Emanem has fiddled the sound on this to even it out, & it’s perfectly acceptable, though acoustically variable. A cool, slightly bent trumpet solo form Wallen that seems to shake the bebop out of itself with a snatch of “Parisian Thoroughfare” & then gets more into a squirting-from-between-your fingers Don Cherry fragility/quizzicalness: as it heats up you can hear Crosby try a brief snatch of Coltrane movement in thirds, & Stevens’ cries of pleasure are quite audible here. When Jones comes in Crosby seems to settle on the Traneish chord substitutions for a while; Jones has a fluid approach that seems to virtually ignore any notional barlines & you can hear the music getting more intense & opening up, leaving behind the changes and 4/4 feel. This is the passage in the track that really makes this outtake a valuable recovery (it's quite different from the version at the end of the set). 2. “Do Be Up”, which the liner notes reveal is Stevens’ take on Ornette’s faster (“up”) pieces like “Ramblin’”, though it’s got a minor feel rather than Ornette’s majorkey feeling. It’s worth quoting Steve Beresford’s excellent liner notes to get an idea of what’s going on here: “What John calls ‘rhythmelodics’ – a quality he hears in the music of Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Chet Baker – can bring out hidden qualities in an individual’s playing. ‘Rhythmelodic players are ones who get cloest to a speech-like approach as opposed to an arpeggios type of playing. Any rhythm has an innate melodic content.’ And vice versa. Listen to Gary Crosby’s repeated figure under Byron in that section of ‘Do Be Up’ – singable, danceable bass lines you thought had been lost with Wilbur Ware. Rhythmelodics can involve musicians dedicated to playing within the tradition but put them in places they have never been before. And do that without sacrificing grace or flow. That’s a rare thing to do, especially in Great Britain, in a culture that insistently devalues spontaneity and innovation.” Anyway: A little jump-up tune with a quirky told-you-so bassline (Stevens's tunes always give the bassist something simple but interesting to chew on). A little three-way collective soloing & then it’s Jones’s turn, over a rhythm which as so often with Ornette’s music seems to be harking back to a springy two-beat feel. I’m struck, listening to this, how Stevens, compared to say Blakey or Blackwell, has a rather “suspended” feeling & rarely seems to be breathing down the soloists’ neck: he responds to them (usually with blistering-hot cymbals) rather than forcing them to interact with him. A hot tenor solo, then Stevens drops out as Wallen comes in, pushing it into more of a Cherry + Chet Baker bag, playing off earlier forms: the blues, and (notably) an extended sequence where they work through a few choruses of “Softly As In a Morning Sunrise,” which flips into “You & the Night & the Music” briefly. After the melting trumpet (actually I think flugel?) solo, the harshness of Stevens’ cymbal attack at the start of his solo feature is startling; it turns out to be mostly snares, rather military-sounding actually (made me remember that Stevens & Trevor Watts met while in the military). 3. “You’re Life”. This is also “modelled upon” (sez Beresford) Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament”. A bluesy little bass solo with Garrisonian double stops, to a softly jingling free-time Stevens accompaniment on just cymbals & hi-hat, almost an SME thing. A simple elegaic tune for the horns, almost amorphous in its melancholy; Stevens gradually opens up into his version of an Elvin triplet feel, though it has a suspended feel rather than the racing danger of Elvin. (Stevens can be volatile too but it’s in the unpredictable slashes and sudden heightenings of activity & volume rather than a continuous feeling.) A two-horn improv passage of elegaic fragments, coalescing into a darker, more intent passage for Wallen, his high notes functioning like little rhythmic jabs, his runs whisking upwards. Stevens doesn’t tend to construct performances as “gradually intensifying”: the changes of mood jump out at you, like the big cymbal smashes that intrude 8 or 9 minutes in. The edges get blurry at the end of Wallen’s solo, hinting at freespace, but as Jones takes centrestage the music centres itself again tonally. Inevitably there’s a Coltrane flavour to Jones’ solo & Stevens to respond to this moves into close-quarters dialogue with the horn, often violent interjections that at one point near the end tip over into a heavy blues/rock pattern. There’s a short bass solo & then a free section culminating in a seagull-cry passage for both horns before the head returns. 4. “2 Free 1” – which is, according to Beresford, about freeing up the relation to the “one” in meter, about “people imprisoned”, and “the spaciousness of the sky and quality of light in Norway”. It starts with Stevens solo, on brushes, playing very ambiguously to suggest all sorts of flavours of triple meter, duple meter, freetime, of various sorts. The theme is a drooping little phrase, with a nudging bassline. A little creepy, actually: I could imagine this done as scary-movie music, & Stevens’ drumming here builds a lot of tension just through being so slippery & unpredictable. Wallen’s solo is sharp little fragments, upwards-lifting whoops & flares, & disconsolate seesawing figures. Jones is on soprano, & it’s as if he’s feeding off the elegaic mood of “You’re Life”, a strong contrast with Stevens’ shimmering rush of percussion, & the drummer steps aside for a soft-sad lyrical sax/bass passage that could be John Surman & Dave Holland in duet. Stevens comes in with a soft but still dangerous waltztime. All the ambiguousness gets a temporary respite with a straight swinging passage, rather “cool”, so it’s something of a shock when the droopy theme turns up again as a stinging-bee conclusion with a smeared, distorted coda. A rather mysterious piece, I find. 5. “Dudu’s Gone” again, to end the set, a little shorter & taken faster than before. A fun piece (it’s not an elegy, it’s township freebop). Wallen is one of those cheeky sidekick bebop trumpeters here, full of quotes – a little “Rhythm-ning”, a bit of Ferde Grofe via “All the Things”, some Charlie Parker, “Parisian Thoroughfare” again, &c. The bassist takes a rather Monkish tack compared to the first version. Jones is on soprano, & this gives the tracks a bright upbeat feeling – and there’s a surprise in store, a rocking blues that gives the thing a rather wistful sendoff. I think this is a really fine release: in its own way this is as fresh & as revelatory as Stevens' SME work. It was recorded two years before his death, and it's hard not to regret his too-early passing, & that he didn't record more in the 1980s & 1990s.

I gave it a whirl & came to a standstill at level 8.

Yeah Thirteen Friendly Numbers is great--I have the original Acta release, which I think is the first Butcher disc I got--I saw News from the Shed live, talked a little to the musicians, & then started ordering some of the albums. Which reminds me, it's high time someone reissued Conceits with Butcher, Durrant & Russell.

Yeah, those are great tunes. Rest in peace Mr Zindars.

Yeah, Burrell's worth catching! The duo album with David Murray on Victo actually is really good.

I have the 1st volume. I like it a lot, though it's definitely not for everyone. The duet with Mulligan, by the way, is freely improvised--starts fairly abstract & eventually settles on a pedal point, if I remember rightly. There are also fascinating very long tracks here by Konitz + the Giuffre trio (with Peacock in for Swallow) & Konitz + the Paul Motian Trio. Mostly solos & duos by each bandmember though they join in at the end.

Glad you liked it, & glad you liked the review too. I seem to recall someone here (was it ubu or D.D.?) wasn't so keen on this brand of European jazz, in the comments on the BFT thread..... but yeah, most people liked this track a lot even if they thought my other choices were out to lunch! Have you heard Joost Buis's Astronotes? It's also got Pallesen on it, & it's a terrific disc.

Thank Barber for the Beatles and Stones If not for Chris Barber and his brand of jazz, MARK MILLER writes, Britain's rock 'n' roll invasion might never have happened By MARK MILLER Globe and Mail, Wednesday, August 17, 2005 Every jazz musician has his or her own story, each one a little different from the next. Chris Barber's story comes rattling across the Atlantic Ocean in a telephone interview from his home in Hungerford, west of London -- a flurry of asides, digressions, insights and, along the way, biographical details. The veteran trombonist is making four Ontario appearances over the next few days with singer, guitarist and trumpeter Jeff Healey and his Toronto band, the Jazz Wizards. At 75, Barber arrives as a central figure from the British "trad revival" of the 1950s and a formative influence on both the British blues "boom" and rock "invasion" of the 1960s. As he recalls it so exuberantly, he came to jazz by "sheer chance." The boy Barber liked the classics, although tellingly it was a "very, very acerbic, very acrid-sounding, double-stopped and crunchy" interpretation of a Bach violin solo recorded by Fritz Kreisler that really caught his ear at the age of seven -- "normally not something a child would like." Three years later, while at boarding school, he heard a recording on the BBC of Eric Winstone's English dance band playing Oasis, a piece of Sahara-inspired exotica borrowed freely from the Duke Ellington hit Caravan, all "trumpet growls and bluesy saxophone sounds." Barber was suitably impressed. "I wrote my father a letter -- I only wrote him once in three years at boarding school; this was the one time -- and said, 'I've heard some jazz on the radio, will you send me some?' " Advertisements His father, a classical musician, consulted Gramophone magazine, and forwarded a recording that had just received a glowing review, Coleman Hawkins's landmark 1939 ballad version of Body and Soul. Barber still seems to marvel at the serendipity of his father's choice. "If you need to explain to somebody what you can, should and maybe should not do to a ballad," he says of the tenor saxophonist's rendition, "that's the perfect example." The next revelation came in the form of the book Really the Blues, an idiosyncratic autobiography of the white Chicago clarinetist Milton (Mezz) Mezzrow, who had championed the racial integration of jazz in the 1920s and indeed seemed to want nothing more than to be black himself. "For a young boy, brought up in a moderately left-wing household," Barber explains, "and knowing about slavery and what happened and what shouldn't have happened, that book was like a blue rag to a bull -- to make a pun out of it. Within days of reading it, I was totally hypnotized as a jazz, blues, African-American music enthusiast. That was it. Gone. And I have been ever since." Barber formed his first band in the traditional New Orleans style in 1949, but it was his second, a sextet dating to 1954 with trumpeter Pat Halcox, clarinetist Monty Sunshine and others, that would become the focus of his career -- a career that by British jazz standards has been highly successful. Indeed, the band remains a force today, its evolution to its current, 11-strong lineup documented by CD reissues on the Lake label of its early LPs and new releases on Timeless of recent recordings. If it's no coincidence that the trombonist has been rather less doctrinaire than many of the musicians affiliated with the "trad" movement, he still contends, "I'm an enormous purist, but pure jazz to me is not what some people think it is. It's a philosophical concept, a purity of feeling, of genuine expression. That's the point about it, it seems to me." That philosophical concept saw the Barber band, and its singer and banjo player Lonnie Donegan in particular, popularize "skiffle" music during the early 1950s, setting the stage for the many younger British musicians, the Beatles among them, who would play in skiffle groups of their own before turning to rock 'n' roll in the early 1960s. It also found the Barber band presenting a dozen or more leading African-American blues and gospel artists as it guests during the same general period, similarly inspiring a younger generation of British R&B musicians who formed such bands as the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds. "I think there's a good chance they'd never have heard the blues otherwise," Barber suggests. "It was only because we had the financial strength -- with tours and so on -- that we could bring Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the others in." Indeed, Waters, Terry, McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, James Cotton, Louis Jordan and their compatriots were so insufficiently known in Britain that the country's promoters, seeing little financial advantage to their presence on a bill, refused to pay extra for their services. Barber was told, " 'You pay for them if you want them.' So we did. "We wanted to play with them. We recognized that if there were a certain lack in the British traditional jazz, it was that it wasn't black enough -- to be brutally frank. We didn't have the blues background, or the gospel background." How better to acquire firsthand familiarity with both than to stand on-stage beside some of each idiom's greatest proponents? And then, naturally enough, to travel to America in person -- which the Barber band soon did, visiting New Orleans and stopping by Muddy Waters's club in Chicago in 1958 during the first of several tours stateside. Of course, Barber's willingness to depart from the rigid tenets of traditional jazz, together with the commercial success that allowed him to do it, stood him in poor stead with the most faithful of the faithful. "In Europe," he notes, "most people who were serious about jazz wouldn't accept bands like mine, largely because the bands were popular." But the last laugh would be his, even as he has expanded his circle of associates and associations further over the years to include Dr. John, the London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble and, as recently as a concert last month in Liverpool, Van Morrison. Never mind those unnamed critics whose words more than 50 years ago still seem to rankle. "All I know is when we got to America and began to meet real jazz musicians of real quality, of real experience and knowledge, all of them were very encouraging to us. They'd say, 'We like your band. It's very good music. You're doing it the right way. Come and sit in with us.' Which was somehow unexpected. We had been led to believe that we weren't any good, so to be accepted totally in that sort of way was a shock." Sure, he admits, his British band sounded a little different than its American counterparts. Distance will have that effect. "If you can tell the difference between a blues singer from Louisiana and one from Mississippi," he proposes, with just a hint of defiance ringing down through the years and across the Atlantic, "then what's wrong with telling the difference between a jazz band from London and one from New Orleans?" Chris Barber appears with Jeff Healey's Jazz Wizards in the Old Town Hall at Hilton Beach, Ont., tonight, Hugh's Room in Toronto on Friday, the Regent Theatre in Picton, Ont., on Aug. 21 as part of the Prince Edward County Jazz Festival and Hugh's Room again on the 23rd.