Nate Dorward

Incidentally I don't suppose anyone's got any opinions on Feldman's Three Voices for Joan LaBarbara? I got it largely because of the unusual (for Feldman) instrumentation (one live voice, two overdubbed) & because of its setting of a Frank O'Hara poem, "Wind". Not quite sure what I make of it--it's mostly endless repetitions of a single phrase from the poem ("who'd have thought that snow falls": the allusion is surely to O'Hara's early death), & it just kind of stops after a while. Even one hardcore Feldmanite I talked seemed a little nonplussed by the disc.

Oh, don't worry, there's plenty of fascinating, idiosyncratic music being made out there by each generation, even if it rarely gets any more attention than Hewitt did during his lifetime. But in the meantime: enjoy the oldtime guys who are still around! The Hewitt disc seems to me better & better each time I hear it.

Aebi is overdubbed on at least one other recent Lacy disc, The Holy La.

Thanks for the link--hadn't been following the Wilen thread. There's actually a label feature on In Situ by Dan Warburton here, if you're curious (& it has a bit on Tusques' Free Jazz 1965): http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/features/000463.html Look at the great comments below on that page from Dennis Gonzalez too...... If you go to the main Bagatellen page, incidentally, you'll see a very nice photo of me in Ireland with my hair just-rained-on.

Is! Most recent In Situ releases the Benoit/Agnel Rip-Stop (austere e.a.i./AMMish improv) & the excellent Andreu/Tusques Arc Voltaic. They also reissued a Francois Tusques disc from the 1960s which Dan Warburton urges me to get a hold of--I gather it's a foundation document of French improv, as important as Free Form, Machine Gun or Karyobin were. Anyone heard that? It's got Portal on it too. For Courtois try Atem on Splasc(h) with Battaglia, Courtois, Rabbia, Godard & Pifarely. A couple compositions & a lot of little miniimprovs. Really nice disc--in sound/feel somewhere between some of the more adventurous/improvish ECM discs & some of the output of the Intakt label.

Mmnnhnnn, I think Chant's bass clarinet is fine but only one of the two tracks with it really does a lot for me, the other kind of gets stuck in a rut. I think his tenor playing is very good--surprisingly little residue of Evan Parker in there, more Ayler + Sam Rivers. FWIW the current ish of The Wire contains a review of recent Matchless discs where the review seems keener on the bass clarinet than tenor on this album so what do I know. (The reviewer lets slip some unenthusiastic remarks about both The Blackbird's Whistle & Imponderable Evidence. In the context of The Wire which is generally boosterish about UK improv by veterans like Prevost that verges on a pan...) Haven't heard Supersession--keep meaning to get it....... AMM? I'm no expert--I only know, let's see... The Crypt, The Nameless Uncarved Block, Newfoundland, The Inexhaustible Document, Live in Allentown. All of them close to essential, though I'd shoot for Newfoundland or The Inexhaustible Document first for rec's for newcomers. The Crypt (1968) is nice'n'ugly, not much to do with the later Tilbury incarnation of the group. When Eddie complains in his new book about improvisers playing too loud or using too much electronics & amplification he's clearly no longer the guy making a racket in the 1968 version of the band! -- The Nameless Uncarved Block is terrific if you don't mind the crummy sound-balance (Lou Gare's sax is virtually swallowed up). The title comes from the Tao Te Ching & I'm reminded of lines by a good friend of Eddie's, the poet Allen Fisher: (Allen is also a terrific painter & has contributed a cover to a few Matchless releases--Band on the Wall for instance). -- Live in Allentown is good but somehow doesn't quite grab me in the same way as the others. It's a little brisker than others of that period. There's a long fire-alarm section at one point which is rather exciting, & is good for driving my wife nuts. -- I'm told Fine, one of the last AMM discs documenting the Tilbury/Rowe/Prevost formation, is one of their best.

Re: Avant magazine: I forget where--Jazz Corner I think--but there was a very irate thread started by someone who had had the magazine eat his subscription & not send him copies. Prevost--the duo with Crispell Band on the Wall is wonderful if you don't mind a minor flaw in the recording (tiny crackle on peak moments). Chant seems to have laid off on the soprano lately--the new one by that trio, The Blackbird's Whistle, has him on tenor & bass clarinet. It's an OK album, though a bit patchy. Avoid the new duo disc with Evan Parker (Imponderable Evidence) but the earlier Most Materiall is indeed pretty excellent.

It's nice--some people really seem to like it a lot but it's never really grabbed me strongly. But it's worth picking up if you like any of the musicians' playing--Frisell's quite strong on it. The Beatles tune on it is done well.

Just got my copy this morning (thanks PJ for replacing my broken copy)--haven't followed this thread so I'll post this & then rewind to the start of the thread & see what's been going on. * 1) Um.... not my kind of thing! 2) The tune & the sax sound familiar: ugh, I’m annoyed I can’t place the tune in particular... The sax is in-yer-face, especially as his develops his solo I wish he’d ease off a bit. Drums mixed loud. The piano is nice, low-key, less-is-more: good. Nice bass solo. Chords remind me of “The End of a Love Affair” but that’s the wrong tune. 3) Nice opening & a curious sax sound: very Konitz-influenced, though much busier than latterday Konitz, & the use of a complex line over familiar changes (“What Is This Thing/Subconscious-Lee”) also points in a Tristanoite direction. Hm, I would have guessed Gary Foster, but I don’t quite think it’s him? Pity there’s no piano solo, would have liked to hear him, judging by the spare but alert comping. The track’s a bit too short. The last note suggests there was a 2nd horn on the date too. 4) Strange, slightly awkward acoustic, surely not a session originally intended for commercial release? Oh, this is EARLY Dolphy, sounding like an OK but not-quite-together Bird disciple. But, hm, I can’t think of any Dolphy date that would match this. Not one of those Chico Hamilton dates? Or one of Dolphy freelance European dates (if I have the dating wrong)? Ugh, this really is NOT a good track but I guess is here for interest’s sake. Not sure who the other players are though the trombone sounds familiar. 5) Sounds vaguely familiar. Jeez, that outwardbound tenor sax sounds a bit out of place in the Blue Note/Horace Silver vibe! Maybe one of John Gilmore’s freelance appearances? I don’t know. The quiet coda is a nice touch, in fact I like it better than the main theme. 6) Oh I forget the name of this tune, it’s on Art Pepper + 11 I remember. “Four Brothers.” The vibist not really my thing: I should recognize him of course... oh well. Old-school Prez-ish tenor though I’m not sure it’s actually an old player. 7) Weird combo of the oldfashioned piano & the, ahem, groovy accompaniment. I don’t get this one. 8) OK groove at the start though the tune is kind of your generic 6/8 modal thang, though the long episode in a different mode gives it a bit of a tweak. Weak opening to the tenor solo, & then he starts to go ballistic. Chris Potter? Ick. There are two saxophones on the ensembles but I guess one of them doesn’t get a solo, unless I missed the break between solos or unless one of the saxes is overdubbed. 9) A lot more fun than the last track! Not wild about the studio sound on ANY of the instruments (the gummy bass & scrappy drums especially), but the music’s excellent. I should know these musicians, the bassist & drummer’s moves in particular sound familiar, but the pianist remains elusive to me. Nice track, pity about the sound. 10) Just bass+drums, eh? Well, for what it is it’s well done: a little too long maybe. Is this a whole album of this duo? 11) There’s a lot of what sounds like skipping on this: just my copy? (in fact everything after this point has the odd skip, so I guess it must just be my flawed copy). Though the track does have a few metrical skips in the tune. This is a bit too pacific for me, & when they finally get to doubletiming it I get a lot more interested. The tune reminds me a little of Ran Blake’s fondness for Catalan folksongs or the tune “Vradizi” (sp?). But I have no idea who this is: pretty enough but not my speed. 12) Lute, eh? Somewhere around here I have an LP of Renaissance improv.... Frederic Hand, Musica Antiqua, I think was the name. Nah, this can’t be it, it didn’t have guitar & string section. The pianist sounds oddly familiar. Well, not much to say about this except that it’s not a musical match made in heaven. But I guess if Coltrane can make something out of “Greensleeves” were shouldn’t rule out this kind of thing.... 13) This reminds me of “What Lola Wants”, though I’m not sure if they’re playing that tune. & otherwise I have nothing to say about it. 14) Not much going on here. I notice a lot of tracks on this compilation with minimal harmonic movement. The syrup quotient is very high here. 15) Nice opening from the piano; oh here’s a vocalist. She sounds familiar. Drippy “be a good person” advice in the verse. Oh, “Someone to Light Up My Life” (is that really the verse to it?). Lotsa syrup here too. But that piano solo has some edge to it. All of these tracks are OK but I can’t say any of them exactly do a lot for me except for #9 & maybe #3.

Speaking of which I don't suppose anyone's heard the band Emergency!, which has a couple discs on Studio Wee? I haven't heard them, but the lineup (with Yoshihide in it) & the tracklistings for their two discs (Loveman Plays Psychedelic Swing and Loveman Prays for Psychic Sing) look enticing: http://www.studiowee.com/StudioWeeE.html The idea of Otomo doing "Sing Sing Sing", "The Inflated Tear" or "Creole Love Call" is very appealing.... I don't know anything about FMR, but I notice they publish Avant magazine, about which I've heard veeery bad things. But the catalogue does look very good doesn't it? Well, report back on them if you order some FMR discs, I'd be curious to hear reports on some of those titles.

Coryell's recent disc The Power Trio, Live in Chicago was superb.

It's Mark Helias on the new one. Truthfully I don't much like Nothing Ever Was Anyway or Storyteller; I've only briefly heard Amaryllis but it seemed by far the best of the bunch. Hmmmm.... if Crispell were just doing it for the money I think she'd be more productive than she is...? It's striking how little she's recorded since the late 1990s, compared to the huge stacks of discs she accumulated before then. She'd already been moving in the direction of the ECMs before then--witness the Bill Evans stuff on Live at Yoshi's.

It's a pretty remarkable disc I think, though I suppose it could indeed seem pretty opaque. In a peculiar flight of fancy the Penguin Gudie suggests that No Waiting has a passing resemble to the work of Bill Evans. WTF?

The sound on the Mosaic is not all that "bright". I haven't done a direct comparison to the RVGs though. There's about 4-5 tracks between Heaven & Earth & Contrasts that are worth having but it looks like all the really good stuff on it is now available or will be shortly.

Thanks--I'd be very curious to know. It's a setup not so different from the Lacy/Waldron Sempre Amore....

Got it but it's cracked in half, I'm afraid.

The Heward's OK but not ALL that good. Good opening track & last track, though.

I used to have that Oliveros--I liekd the first five minutes & then the rest of it was a slog. Don't know what I'd think of it nowadays.

Peck's mix of one-liners & sneers isn't worth engaging with--it's knockabout entertainment pure & simple, relatively well-turned (the piece on David Foster Wallace was pretty good on those terms, though it basically was an occasion for unearned sneers at Pynchon using Wallace as a punching bag) but nothing close to sustained argument. If you want serious, sometimes damaging criticism of contemporary fiction that's worth engaging with you have to go to someone like James Wood.

Yeah, I'd considered putting some of the nastier stuff on it (& I have some really nasty stuff around here, some of which is simply horrible & some of which is actually pretty wonderful if you're in the mood: e.g. the brutal Stephane Rives solo disc I got a few months back)..... but I couldn't see mixing the nice & the nasty stuff on a single disc, & I wanted to avoid a 2CD BFT (which would have been the 3rd such in a row). Maybe I'll sign up for BFT number 40 or whatever it's reached & next time round, no more Mr Nice Guy.... Actually my main regret is not including older things but my lack of an LP-to-CDR burning facility would have hampered that.

Noj--thanks for the thoughts on the disc. Mal Waldron's great but if you knew his work you've never mistake him for the pianist on #2! Waldron's piano technique was pretty functional & cut-to-the-bone. He's amazing in his own way--the discs with Lacy are the place to start.

Yes, do! He was one of the most exciting pianists of that generation--a really personal sound despite the Monk/Weston lineage--& I really regret his long sabbatical from recording "straight" jazz. Glad to hear people enjoyed the BFT, even if it was mostly left-field stuff!

It's actually called Full Metal Quartet, & it's under Eric Watson's name. It's on Owl (has it been therefore reissued in the recent Sunnyside series of Owl reissues?). Whoops, I see it's Mark Dresser on bass not Lindberg. Four stars in the Penguin Guide!

I think Anderson's quite possibly the most deeply Ellingtonian musician now working. Try "Star-Crossed Lovers" on Bonemeal for instance. Incidentally when Anderson played a concert a while back he announced "Azurety" as "Platelets"--I asked him about it & if I remember rightly he said he changed the title to avoid confusion with someone else's tune or album-title. I assume that just as "Azurety" alludes to "Azure", "Platelets" alludes to Strayhorn's "Blood Count".

Ah yes, I keep regretting I didn't grab The Art of the Saxophone before it went o/p. It's actually a tough slog being a Wallace collector as most of his work between the early Enja period & the most recent discs got deleted. You'd have thought that Blue Note would have at least kept the album with Stevie Ray Vaughan & Dr John on it in print, as I imagine there are enough SRV freaks out there to sell a few extra copies..... I haven't heard Wallace's recent stuff--the most intriguing-looking one was that disc with John Lindberg, Eric Watson & Ed Thigpen (I forget the title--Full Metal Jacket or something like that?). The most recent one has atrociously smoochy artwork & an all-ballad agenda but the lineup looks very appealing nonetheless. Incidentally if anyone's got Solomon Burke's recent Grammy-winning album Wallace is in the band there & takes one or two solos, though the weird shadowy production on it makes Wallace's sound almost unrecognizable. The disc with Yamashita is indeed worth tracking down. It's got a stack of Monk covers (including a "Brilliant Corners" where they not only doubletime it but at one point quadrupletime it!), some Ellington (worth comparing to Yamashita's solo disc from the same period, It Don't Mean a Thing, on DIW), & a nice Bennie Wallace original which is basically "Stella by Starlight" done as an off-kilter waltz. -- It's a small pity Yamashita hasn't done more with Wallace. He tends to work a lot with Joe Lovano, actually--a good series of albums like Dazzling Days, Kurdish Dance & Ways of Time, all of them worth getting. I'm afraid nowadays I only read The Wire on the stands (it's about $12 Cdn nowadays & only a tiny amount of it is usually of much interest) so can't consult it--the Luescher review appeared in one of those one-page roundups of jazz/improv that Hamilton usually is responsible for. Yes, there are many really good Japanese players out there--besides Yamashita & Katayama, I'd considered putting tracks by Masabumi Kikuchi & Aki Takase on the BFT. (Warning: Kikuchi has a groan/growl that rivals Keith Jarrett's which can annoy some listeners.... Actually I find it a lot more bearable than Jarrett's though--it's funny & quirky rather than self-pleased.) Satoko Fujii is excellent but I've so far been unfortunate as a reviewer--I keep getting stuck with her bombastic Japnoise experiments (e.g. the ghastly Hada-Hada). She does sound pretty good on the recent Orkestrova disc which I was reviewing yesterday, though.