Nate Dorward

Can you give the context? -- I suspect whoever wrote that knew nothing about atonality. Roughly: Atonality = not having a key centre, literally, but usually implying the kinds of dissonant chromaticism in post-Schoenberg music. (I suppose you could call something like a whole-tone composition "atonal" as it may imply no tonic, but I think on the whole it's music that is highly dissonant, drawing equally on all 12 tones of the scale, that's called "atonal".) Chromaticism = drawing on tones outside the basic scale implied by a key centre or a chord. Or just: drawing on the chromatic scale (i.e. all twelve tones). So the phrase, while not nonsensical, seems a bit redundant.

Allen--mnh, yeah, but it doesn't make the point as well as an analogous example.

Forgot to say: One Too Many... is the same band as the New Worlds. I just got it, & truthfully I like the studio albums better even though One Too Many seems to be a favourite among C.T. fans.

Actually my advice is to try Taylor's larger-group stuff--the two discs on New World (Cecil Taylor Unit & 3 Phasis) are excellent places to start with 1970s C.T.

What's the last example have to do with the preceding ones? We despise Hitler's actions in the wider public realm & don't care whether he was in private a decent family man, liked classical music, &c. This is exactly the opposite from cases where one admires someone's public achievements (e.g. notable musical documents) but is queasy about their private actions.

& forgot to say--he resurfaced briefly on the Funny Rat thread relatively recently (6 months ago maybe?) to invite people to listen to MP3s of his piano playing online.

He got a rough ride initially, yes, but he later on was invited to start an "Album of the Week" thread, did so (the Komeda) but never returned to actually post his response to the album.

Re: Henderson & Tyner: Tyner's in the rhythm section on many of Henderson's own Blue Note dates, too (In'n'Out, Page One, Inner Urge). Plus Grant Green's Solid.

Speaking from my own experience, you could find it on the newstands easily in Halifax in the 1990s, & in Toronto it's on most Chapters/Indigo newstands. Though I'm not sure how many of those sell--I notice that the stacks tend to sit there for a couple months without shrinking too much......

Canadian content--it's a sticky subject. Part of the reason the magazine went downhill & got sold in the past year is because in the past year they lost their funding from the Canadian Magazine Fund, which has a minimum CanCon requirement (roughly 80%, if I'm not mistaken). That's 80% Canadian contributors, mind you, not the artists reviewed/features. (Stuart, when I talked to him, was exasperated at this because Warwick had failed to tell him that he needed to keep to a minimum CanCon quotient until after the funding had been lost.) -- He had always been careful to include a certain amount of Canadian content in terms of artists featured (even on the cover--e.g. Mike Murley, Brad Turner), though I get the impression his heart was most strongly in the European coverage. The absence of a website, the impossibility of subscribing without making an enormous effort, & the general lack of correspondence have been massively frustrating. I stopped writing more than the occasional piece for the magazine in the past couple of years because it was such an enormous effort to get review copies (often 3-4 months would go by till you got them....), & then once you had them in hand Stuart often virtually requested you not to turn anything in anytime soon ("I already have enough for the next 6 months") & then if you sent it in you never got an acknowledgment of receipt or a "Thanks!"........ I enormously admire Stuart as a person & as a writer (I never think he gets enough of his due as one of the smartest jazz critics on the scene: a collected-reviews volume is LONG overdue), & I know that the editorship of the magazine came at a period of great difficulty for him (& that he often found Warwick exasperating to work with), but I did find it often frustrating writing for the magazine.

Dan's got a little more on Tusques here-- http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/features/000463.html & there's a short clip of him playing here-- http://www.dunoisjazz.info/TRESOR1.htm though he's hidden behind his floppy hair!

The Tusques piece appeared a while back-- it's here: http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine...07jul_text.html

The Thornton just popped up in the mailslot at Exclaim--hadn't heard Thornton before, but it's a really good one, not least because of the glimpse of folks like Francois Tusques & Beb Guerin. (As it happens I recently reviewed Arc Voltaic, a fine new disc by Tusques on the In Situ label.) I gotta grab a few other discs from the series....

Incidentally, re: Giorgio Occhipinti, his new band Less of Five is really worth checking out--they have one disc, Acrobati folli e innamorati, on Nine Winds.

Yeah those were great times--but jeez, that feels like ancient history. You really won't find anything like that here anymore: the Toronto jazz festival is more & more perfunctory, & the Onion's long gone. Sigh.

Oh, that rings a faint bell...... but (1) I'm not a Toronto native (was here in the early 1990s, then moved here permanently in 1997) & (2) I'm pretty sure that the venues you speak of are no more. But maybe older hands than I can give a better answer.

It's a very nice one, called Bick's Bag. Neil Swainson & Terry Clarke for the rhythm section. It's on Triplet Records, a Toronto record label. The title track's an homage to Ed Bickert (who's retired from public performance), there's a Neil Swainson original too, & the rest is a thoughtful trawl of mostly lesser-played tunes: "Hallucinations", "Laura", "Bean & the Boys", "Blue Daniel" (Frank Rosolino's tune, featured on Manne's Blackhawk albums), "I Do It for Your Love" & an arrangement of Frede Grofe's "On the Trail". The only downside of the disc is as I said the somewhat bizarre production--very loud club announcement from Lothar at the start & the loud (& possibly canned) applause. But the music's great, as you'd expect from Mays & his partners.

Can they? I always thought the crowds were pretty nonraucous. Though you might get the wrong impression if you listen to Bill Mays' new live album (taped in the Montreal Bistro), which has extremely loud club noise. A little birdie tells me that actually this is the result of the producer dubbing in the crowd noise.

I seem to recall that on another board, a bunch of interested members pooled their pennies to buy the Trillum opera & share it around. I don't think any of them liked it. Thanks again for the kind words on the piece.... I wish I got discs more often that deserved that kind of close & lengthy attention. (Part of the reason I could write at length on it is that I had the original issue & so knew it well even before writing the piece.) Kinda sad/funny to think that Braxton would be so unused to strangers recognizing him in the street!

Forgot to say: yes you can reserve a table for the evening at both the Montreal Bistro & Senator, I believe. Neither tends to be extremely packed unelss it's a big name like Kenny Barron on a Thurs/Fri/Sat night. Arrive about 30-45 mins early if you want a decent seat, though, or you might be left at the back. The Senator in particular puts a lot of gigs on on the 2nd floor stage which is a very long narrow room, so if it's packed you could be some distance from the stage. Cover charge is pretty modest, usually $10-$20 (Cdn) for even the big names, if memory serves.

Etiquette? Nothing out of the ordinary. Both are restaurant/bars, you can get plenty of food there (been a while since I ordered anything from them but my recollection was the food was OK). As long as you turn off your cellphone & don't chatter on top of the music (both are listening clubs, the music's not just there for background noise to chatter) you'll be fine. There's also the Rex on Queen Street, usually a focus on local musicians & jams & student ensembles. It's more raucous in atmosphere than the other two.

Actually there was one on 482 Music, wasn't there? It was called Document Chicago (482-1015). Haven't heard it tho'.

Tony's very much worth checking out. First heard him on Bigshots on Incus--terrible balance on the record (sounds like the sax is in another room sometimes) but jeez is it good music--Steve Noble in particular. Later on I reviewed a few discs of his from Foghorn, all recommendable. Here's one piece-- http://www.ndorward.com/music/bevan_nothing.htm & here's the other-- http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine...sep_text.html#8

Frankly I've always avoided Hall's music after seeing just a bit of him. But I haven't heard that particular disc.

Might as well post the piece here. It's about the worst piece of Ratliff's I've seen, actually, just in the proportion of cant to content. I hate reading this kind of stuff because it then makes me wonder about Moran..... & while I'm not 100% sold on Moran, I think he's better than this, anyway. --N * Tangling Up the Blues in Long Tendrils of Jazz By BEN RATLIFF In five years as a bandleader, the jazz pianist Jason Moran has developed such an aptitude for the curious juxtaposition of idioms - jostling jazz against opera, stride piano, film music, pop, the music of human speech patterns - that he was starting to need a challenge. He chose a good one: blues. Jazz and blues are so obviously related in black American culture, musically and socially, that it might require a different mindset to thoughtfully combine them. Perhaps a mindset that's less restless and arch, more ready to buckle down and deal with the genealogy of jazz as it has been most reliably laid out. If that's what you're thinking, Mr. Moran has made an end-run around you. Many jazz musicians regard blues as a harmonic structure in which to fit swing rhythm and jazz-group interaction - as, for example, John Coltrane did on one of his best records, "Coltrane Plays the Blues." But when Mr. Moran thought blues, he also thought of shuffle beats and Texas guitar players; blues-as-blues style, not jazz-as-blues or merely blues form. To that end he hired the guitarist Marvin Sewell as a fourth member of his band, Bandwagon. That's the premise, anyway, but Mr. Moran doesn't let premises dictate very much. "Same Mother" (Blue Note), Mr. Moran's blues record, is not as much about the blues as it is about his memory and imagination and, inevitably, his compositional style, equally full of tumultuous group interaction and serious, gentle Ellington-ballad harmonies. A bit like Cassandra Wilson's "Belly of the Sun," it's a generalized and creative evocation of the sound and feel of Southern blues and manners. The album reaches the stores next week, but Mr. Sewell has been playing live with the trio (Mr. Moran, the bassist Tarus Mateen and the drummer Nasheet Waits) for long enough that he has absorbed its springiness, its raw, abrupt shifts in tempo and mood and volume. Playing amped-up slide-guitar lines on electric guitar, and unusual harmonies on acoustic with a special tuning, he is a necessary part of the band's new music. Aside from plenty of blues scales, blue notes and shuffle rhythms, the set at the Jazz Standard on Wednesday night included an actual piece of blues-guitar repertory: "I'll Play the Blues for You," recorded in 1972 by Albert King. Yet at the same time the quartet did what the best jazz groups do: render material neutral, if not irrelevant. The set also included a version of "Joga," which Mr. Moran identified as having been written by "the blues artist Bjork," and a tape of a complex African drum chant over which Mr. Moran fitted a version of the jazz war horse "Lover." It didn't quite caramelize, but it was done with great confidence. I can imagine coming away from the show impressed with Mr. Moran's ideas but frustrated with him as a jazz pianist per se. In performance he doesn't spend much time evenly working out variations through successive choruses, and he isn't that concerned with speed and touch. But he makes a case for himself through other devices: dynamics, repetition, aggression, ways of making a tune's momentum crumple and then reconstitute. And anyway, with Mr. Moran, it always comes down to the band - a formidable thing.