JSngry

Oh, it wasn't the band playing while this happend - it was unaccompanied viola, played by the composer. We can be forgiven for expecting a "classical" performance to be smooth, calm, quiet, all that. But the fact is, this was a road gig, and on road gigs, shit happens. Last minute subs (I still remember talking with John McNeal and him telling about how he got called for a Horace Silver tour less than 48 hours before the hit, and how Horace had a hard and fast rule of no music stands on the stage, so John learned the book (mostly then-new 70s things) in one giant cram session). And the squeaky floor thing was made even funnier by the small size of the room, this was not a "stage" proper, this was one of those modularly assembled carpet covered boxes things and the squeaks were louder than the viola...and once the guy found the neutral zone in his space, almost immediately there was a loud shuffling of chairs about halfway back..this being Dallas and "new music", I dared not look back for fear of seeing some boorish drunk guy trying to get comfortable or something. That, and the piece was in a spot of soft yet intense activity, I had come this far, nether drunk nor death was going to distract me from finishing, if the player was going to keep going, so was I. And Mr. Dean did indeed look up and out into the audience at one point, but kept playing through it all and finally got back into his zone. Hell, if he was going to keep going, so was I. Old school! But when the piece finished *at what must have been at least a pppppp volume, the host immediately stepped up and announced to everybody that the gentlemen was indeed ok (or at least got out of the room ok, who knows what happened after that, although a few minutes into the next piece you could hear sirens outside), and not to impose on Brett, but I think it's very important that we hear his piece, was there any point at which he felt comfortable resuming to play to conclusion, to which Brett (a rather large, balding lumberjack looking guy) smiled a warm smile and in a heavy Australian access said, "Sure! I'll play the last page", which as it turned out was a perfect place to resume and to play to conclusion. Slice of life, real life, real music in real time, shit happening, asses played off, just, indeed, a wonderful evening, a real gig, if you know what I mean. LOVED it! Brett Dean and while we're at it, Tiffany DuMouchelle and here, starting ar 10:50 There's a comfort level, both vocal and visually, to her that I couldn't help but be drawn to, like, immediately..seems like one of those rare creatures who was born to do this and neer had any thoughts or doubts otherwise.

More than a month ago. Anybody heard from him since?

Heard last night at the Nasher Soundings series: Madness and Betrayal Apart from the superficial pairing of two like ensembles, these are works that both wrestle with the most difficult of human circumstance—betrayal, madness, and suicide. Dean’s examination of the plight of Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Schoenberg’s expression of his own very painful biography in the composition of his 2nd string quartet introduce the elements of objectivity and subjectivity in how we create and experience art. Tiffany DuMouchelle, soprano; Anthony Marwood and Magnus Johnston, violins; Brett Dean, viola; Fernando Arias, cello; Seth Knopp, piano Dean: Intimate Decisions for solo viola Schumann: Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, from Dichterliebe for violin and piano Dean: “And once I played Ophelia” for string quartet and soprano -Intermission- Schumann: Märchenbilder for viola and piano Schoenberg: String Quatet No. 2 for string quartet and soprano The Dean SQ was premiered less that a year ago, the soprano was replacement who didn't get the part until the Saturday before last night, Marwood had landed at the airport @ 6 PM for a 7:30 downbeat, the floor was audibly creaking during the solo viola piece, and when the creaking stopped, some guy had a heart attack or stroke and was being removed from the room all during an extended ppp section. An yet, or maybe because of of it, the music soared, Dean's SQ is a totally invigoration piece, and these players embraced it fearless. Full speed ahead. Not easy" music in any way, but so confidently played (and in the case of DuMouchelle, inhabited), I felt that straight to the gut punch (the welcome kind) for pretty much the duration, New music, truly new music, the challenge still in it, the players knowing it well enough to to get into it and not yet complacent enough to dare coast for even a split secong, yeah, more of THIS, everywhere, please! No idea if a recording would capture the full grip of the live experience, but there is no recording. Hell the piece isn't eve a year old yet. And either way, seeing and DuMouchelle simultaneously, is...intense. As for the Schoenberg, I have never fully appreciated how melodic his pieces could be until hearing them played like this, live. I been fostering a theory that part of the reason that so much serial and post-serial music had had a tendency to sounds a little "stiff" is that they players were still coming to grips with it, at least as much as the audiences. But I've also noticed that younger players and ensembles are able to take advantage of familiarity, and can now start with the music as something other than "new" and/or "difficult". This music is still a bitch, but as perfumed last night, a familiar on, not a foreign one. Again, the exhilaration of throwing themselves in to the music with no fear and coming out successful. As a result, I, the listen, was able to refocus away from the math and instead heard the music, the gorgeous melodies with harmonies moving at the speed of light, metaphorically speaking. Whether it was the intimacy resulting from sitting less 20 feet from the players, or the genuine skill of everybody involved or the added dimension of clarity afforded by hearing the music live in what is basically a small lecture room or it just being an example of the synergy a great band playing the shit out of a great piece of all of the above, I don;'t know, but what I do know is that I left out of the gig charged, inspired, not just appreciative or satisfied or even inspired, bu electrified, like some kind of...JOLT had found into was into and through my nervous system. Great night. And keep an eye open for Tiffany DuMouchelle. From what I can gather on the internet, she's got the chops and the rep to do all kinds of things, but positions herself as a "new music specialist", and from what I heard last night, I would go see here anywhere, any time, and in a perfect world, I would be able to. As for Brett Dean, he's a new name to me, and of course, it's not impossible to get a rush out of a new composition that perhaps doesn't have staying power once recorded. But there was meat aplenty, almost like Elliot Carter and McCoy Tyner coming together, that kind of thing. With post-Berberian soprano on top, of course. Of course, I really don't have a grounded enough background in any of this type of music to offer anything than "personal impressions", but...I've heard enough music of other types to know, on a basic human level, when shit is coasting, or being played "well enough", or when everybody is getting in the zone. Those are qualities that transcend genre, I think, and these cats last night were definitely in the zone.

Do we know that he's still alive?

Back to Monk's comping, maybe the evidence won't bear this out, but my "first reaction" when thinking about it is that he tended to have a distinctly different way of comping when the object was to play a tune than he did when the object was to play one of his compositions. When doing the former, he pretty much fed the changes to the soloist, and in a remarkably consistent way, no - or very few - bottoms pulled out from you, no falling down the elevator shaft, just changes, fed to you for you to do your thing to. Example (and a favorite): I can see why Miles felt like that was "no support", Miles (and a lot of other people) like a comp that kicked things along, a very true continuation of the big band thing, we got you, just ride us, we're all in this together. Monk about all that is more like Sonny Murray was about time, what do you need me to play it for you, don't you already know where it is?, just changes to play over, you know what you're going to do, I know what you're going to do, you're going to play the tune, make the changes, here they are, we got a bass player for time and a drummer for kick, you got the show, I got the changes, let's go. Now when his solo comes, whoa, then he goes to his zone, but as soon as its over, it's back to straight changes. I think it's beautiful, pure music, objective as hell, "classical" even, in the truer sense. Compare that notion of function to what he does on his own compositions: Totally different imperative here, it's not about feeding the changes (or perhaps more to the point, laying them down), it's about shaping the performance, being very proactive about direction, it's not just a blues, it's his composition, and by god, that means something different than blowing on a tune. Different task, if you will. It may or may not be "obvious", but the "Mysterioso" on Rollins' Vol. 2 side, the one where Monk trades out with Horace Silver so Silver can comp for J.J./Jay Jay is about as blunt a hit upside the head as there can be about how unique Monk's creation of a place of his own as there is, Horace references the notes of the melody in his comp., but like it's a basic, intuitive lick, it could be one of many, and that's cool, that drives home one point, but geez, Monk's comp behind Sonny is NOT about it possibly being one of (m)any blues, it's about it being one blues, and only one, "Mysterioso", and let's not forget it, ok? It's amazing how differently two players can comp on the same tune, even use some of the same voicings and spacings, yet have a completely different focus and direction, amazing. And yet, would you not think that Monk can have such a fundamental gravitational pull on his own music precisely because he can be so objective about other people's music? Or the other way around? Either way, bottom line, I think, Monk knew music, period. It's not the long-dispelled notion that he was just banging or sacrificing "technique" for "effect" (if he was "sacrificing" anything, it was bullshit that he was shedding, hardly a sacrifice, except in a world predicated n the cultivation & feeding of an appetite for bullshit) or anything touchy-feely like that (Monk from another world - not. this world motherfuckers, fully and completely. THIS WORLD!), it's that this guy knew music, knew what would happen if you do this, what would happen if you do this, and if you want this, it's as much about not doing this as it is doing this, he knew everything that made music, not "style" but music. Knew the options and plaed them accordingly. Cause and effect driven by purpose, driven by the certainty of clarity that comes from knowing. Or so it seems to me. Hell, I don't know, not like that. But in my dreams and in my waking moments, I can't imagine anybody knowing truer. Differently and equally true, sure, but not truer. Monk's stuff is like Bach's - you can spend a lifetime looking for loopholes, some kind of way to convert it to "your terms", but sooner or later it is revealed that a loophole is where your head goes when it's placed in a noose. That is where the bar is set, Dear Friends, getting to that level of incontrovertibly. "Style" has nothing to do with it. "Style" is just...

It suddenly appears to me that the same question is relevant when dealing with any "episodic" medium. I mean, there's 80 episodes of the original Star trek series, and it took, what, three years to get it all out in real time? Now, if I got really pumped, I could compress that all down to about three days, or, using the once a day, five days a week syndication model, 16 weeks, about four months. What is that, a 975% compression of experience time, just doing it once a day, five days a week, is that math correct? Or at least close enough for illustrative purposes? So yeah, apples and oranges, but only up to the point where it's time to make fruit salad. If the claim is to be made that both experiences are not equally vaild, even if possibly polar opposite ways, I'll not be the one brave enough to make it!

Or maybe I'm confusing "successful" with "pleasing" or "satisfying"...or maybe in the end none of that is really relevant, all of it coming after the (f)act, which itself - the (f)act - is what ultimately counts. I mean, hopefully, we all get better at all of it, creating, delivering, and receiving, as we go, it's a fool that doesn't look for that, but how that's supposed to work, hell, wars have been fought over that and we still haven't gotten anything like a final answer, so...as much as we all love "objectivity", at some point you just have to make a decision, process all the input, and then just fucking do it, whatever it is. Worry Later, as the man said.

afaic "successful" ha no meaning 0utside of "expectation", and we all have those. It's just a question of whose get prioritized with who and when (and all the other "w"s, and that is never going to be totally clear as to right vs wrong, success vs failure. So I'm kinda like, fuck it, just do it, and stay ready. Fail to do any of that, and it's on you. Past that, hey, you've done all you can do, what happens happens, then it starts over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Whoever it is firing that cannon needs to get their own ass blown out of here...post THAT paradigm, there is the Dancing In Your Head paradigm, which works pretty damn well, then the Tone Dialing paradigm, which is still getting caught up to (sloooowly), and now, the New Vocabulary paradigm, which continues to sound to me like it's the/a real deal. These musics all have the same physics. What they don't all have is the same bodies (literally and metaphorically). But the flow of the music, the rhythmic impetus, the inflectional dialect, the shape(s) of the space(s) the sound(s) occupy once released, just the way the music is, this does not change, even when everything else does. This is what I was talking about in that other thread - true understanding, popular or otherwise, is a joke more often than not because people look to define everything in terms of what they already know and like rather than what they can learn, whether you "like" something or not is a personal decision, but dammit, learn what it is before you make that decision, or if your decision is to be lazy or otherwise not learn ("not enough time for that" is a valid out, imo, and that's just one), own the fact that your opinion is not necessarily an informed one. Just be honest about it, ok?. I used to tell people please don't do that, not the way to a happy ending, but I guess I was wrong, plenty happy, and most certainly plenty endings. But SO much wrong.... This Haden/Higgins-Blackwell thing, how much of that is because, hey, it sounds like 4/4, there's a walking base and a ride cymbal, and, uh, to be honest, I don't now a C from a D, so as I understand taht technical stuff, that's just for musicians, and all that kind of mess. FAMILIARITY defining "successful", keep "the continuum" within boundaries which I can remain comfortably inside. I'll call bullshit on that, and suggest that you do as well! How the fuck do "open" and "successful" and "performance approach" exist in the same sentence to get to the same end without SOMEBODY telling a lie, or at least fudging just a little bit? All those original Ornette band are dead, except for Ornette, and he's pretty damn old right now. People need to look past what's there to live in a body and what's there to be lived in the renewable world. It sure ain't about one man in his body, that's for sure. Don't ever think that it is. Otherwise you're just fishing in a stock pond. "Popular understanding"? We're not too far removed from pulling for a team because we like their uniforms when it comes to that.

Live music of at least some kind of "jazz" tangenality 7 nights a week at The Balcony Club, although the lease situation has been kinda unstable from what I hear. Website is sketchy, and talent can be variable, but nothing ever outright sucks, and the manager Teddy is actually a nice guy! http://www.balconyclubdallas.com/index.html Sandaga used to be old-school jazz, now it's mostly new-school neo-soul/jazz. Someplace to go if you think you might be curious as to what's happening with all that, and/or if you want to witness the local outgrowth of the local Erykah Badu thing, of which jazz is in the mix at some level. http://sandaga813.com/ Last I heard, Shelley still has the Monday night Amsterdam gig, and has for the last 75-80 years. If he doesn't, somebody will, and the odds that it will suck are slim to none. http://theamsterdambar.com/thanks.html

Paradiso ws1969, the clip with Brodie was 1985. Not surpriesed that the earlier clip ismore together chops-wise. I don't really hear any "forgetting" the changes on GDS...I do note that they're playing it in Eb, sounds like he was (or had gotten) used to playing it in C, sometimes your muscle memory reverts to instinct rather than the moment. That and there's definitely rust in the mix. But I don't hear any outright forgetting, he always lands where he needs to when he needs to. Maybe it was just a brain fart caused by who knows what...I don't consider that "forgetting", though. But perhaps that's just semantics. For me, "forgetting" involves not just where you are, but where you need to land, everything, you just draw a blank. Not hearing that here. Perhaps I'm being too generous.

Yeah, most of his work a Paris on MI is realy fine. Just finished Season 1 of ST last night, and a noted elsewhere, Spock is my newest hero. And - as great as Barbara Bain's eyebrow-acting was on MI, Nimoy's on ST has it beat, I do believe. RIP

Willie The Wailer Popeye The Sailor Sam "The Man" Taylor

The only passing to be done here will involve things of a flatulent nature. One of those good news/bad news things.

I've come to accept Monk as neither traditionalist nor futurist, but instead as an eternalist. Truths not created (although exposed) or destroyable (at best/worst chosen to be ignored). Always know, indeed.

Try setting up a Pandora channel for her, if you do that type of thing. She comes up on my Astrud Gilberto channel all the time, and I was like you, hello, who is THIS?

True, and in such a way that they were the same thing, which is different than the qualities being layered together. One of the biggest traps in Monk (which is not to say that he is a Trappist Monk, although if that works, so be it) is coming to terms with him at face value. You can go start looking for dissections, but unlike many musics where dissection leads to clarity, in Monk it ultimately leads to diffusion. There are no further explanations - what you hear is exactly what you're getting. It's a very rare type of genius, that is. To bring it down to an exponentially lower plane, I watched a standup special the other night by this comedian named Earthquake (apparently well known, but hell, I stay home a lot, so I wouldn't know) called These Ain't Jokes. Well, they were, but a lot of times, they weren't, even when they were. The worst part of it was when they were jokes but weren't funny, but I don't think that was how he meant it.. But yeah, not a joke/still funny, "both" at once, not "and" playing peek-a-boo with each other. But anyway, Earthquake = interesting(enough) comedic POV, Monk = master of musical physics.

True, but/and that's pretty much the case with anything/everything creational that is not popnomically generated, or, at least, sustained (and even then, was Miles' 1966 music ever more popularly understood than, in, say 1996? Or Bird's music of 1949 than in 1969?). First musicians catch up, then hipsters catch up, and then, finally, if at all, popular understanding catches up. And by then...yeah, by then. On my darker days (which are sometimes many) "popular understanding" is not as much understanding as it a basic familiarity, a commonality of reaction, people finding things no longer offputting, maybe even beautiful. But attraction, comfort, even enchantment, or even love, these are not understanding. Understanding means the ability to replicate, not just appreciate. Because if everybody really understood all these things, it would blow up the world or something. I understand enough to know that I don't understand it that well. I can blow myself up sometimes, but that's on a good day, and that's only as far as it goes. Placeholder removed, replacement provided immediately. That ain't blowing up the world or anything, not even. That's just having a good day. These seeds of true understanding when/as planted are too strong, too real, too true to die, but the gestation period to the full bloom of anything approaching a general awareness takes longer than we would like to think and/or see, and one can well make the case that the genuine life of these musics was before their popular understandings, not after them, that popular understanding is as much a signal of death as it is life. For all the faster that time moves now, I swear to god that the net result of that is an increase in density that makes everything move faster, but connect slower. Like, when was the last time that popular understanding formed a really healthy (in both content and aftermath) stool? If it's happening now, well, it's about time. Past time, really. The beauty of popnomically generated culture is that it lives to serve and then dies when service is no longer needed, its fire is there as long as it has fuel upon which to feed. Commodity offered, commodity used, In, out, over, and done with, here when you need it, gone when you don't. Out of mind, out of sight, ut of business, out of everything. The beauty - and the danger - of this music, this creational music, is that it will live no matter what. It might go away and become invisible, and when it becomes visible again, people might need to make up what they think they're seeing in order to actually see it, it might well go unperceived for half an eternity or three, but by god, it stays alive, It's always there, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, but are the physics of Bird, Trane, Ayler, etc/you name them, are those physics, hell were those physics, ever not there? Were they ever not here? "Out" is not out, out is IN! There is HERE! Where has everybody gone? Out to the movies, out to lunch, out of gas, out to everyplace but here, If out is where most folks are, then out is no place to go to, its someplace to get OUT of! Get IN! Get in HERE! But if everybody was in here, could here hold it all? Or is all that is here already here, and that will be how it must be? No room at the in, no room for squares, can't square the circle, shouldn't circle the wagons, way out west, out there, in here, here, there, everywhere a quack-quack, duck AND cover, and then what, wrapped up. in too far. UH-oh. I'm telling you, if there was ever a true "popular understanding" of these things, these physics and the ability to truly replicate them, we would not be living on the plane we now live on. People talk "transformational" and shit, yeah, I can dig that on an individual level, perhaps even on a community level. But on a "popular" level? Shit, here we are. We might have "progressed" but have we "transformed" We? Ok, that's bullshit, this is all bullshit I'm talking, but only for as long as it is.

Who owned Blue Rock Studio? I notice that Cuscuna used it a fair amount, including for these two.

That HLP shit is nuts! (and don't ask me how nuts differs from weird...hell if I know! )

Produced by Lowe himself. Alan Bates was "Executive Producer" which could mean anything from putting up the money to serving as the conduit by which Lowe got his session released, I don't know. That term has never had a specific meaning to me. What strikes me most immediately about that record today (and to some extent then) is how much of a "St. Louis" (that is to say, BAG) record it is in terms of personnel. So I guess the question is what was Lowe doing in that circle at that time that precipitated that being the band, because let's face it, making a record, especially a self-produced record, is as much about social connections as it is business ones. The answer lies in the liners, that Lowe had recently formed a group with Joseph Bowie. It's been my assumption that this was the group that appears on Fresh, or at least the nucleus of it did. Now if you want to get really speculative, you can ask why THESE guys? Obvious answer is that Memphis is a lot closer to St. Louis than it is to New York, and that New York is full of lonely people, a tough town to really get a solid footing in, so kindred spirits and all that. Not that Lowe wasn't shunned by the harder core NY scene, I don't see any readily available indicator of that, just that he no doubt felt equally at home in either circle. And finally, here's where it gets real (not cynical, just real) - both Bates through (Arista) Freedom and Cuscuna through Muse were giving a relatively big push to the Mid-Western players. If I've got any survival instincts at all, I'm seeing all this action going on in records if not necessarily in gigs, and hell, I'm wanting to be positioned where the action is if I have any choice at all. All things being equal, everybody can play, so, shit, who's getting the breaks, right? Nothing dishonorable about that at all, that's just being smart about your business. So there's that, fwiw.

Have you guys read/seen the Lowe DB article? It's reprinted as the liner notes on the AF LP, but I have no idea what's on any CD versions. If not, I can dig it out, scan, and post it. I don't think "weird" is a negative either, it's just that hearing that record as I did when I did, it didn't seem in any way weird, it just seemed, like I said, frisky. And I was used to frisky music at that time. So it just seemed to me, like cool, more frisky music from more frisky people, that's a good thing. And to be honest, I found The Flam a little less frisky than Fresh. More energetic, but not as frisky. Frisky, I guess, entails a specific assertion rather than simply an energy of expression. To that end, Decisions In Paradise remains a favorite. And really, I discovered pretty much all jazz in the 1970s, so I understand how a retro-discovery differs from a real-time one. You can't do anything about that, right? But when people who are older tell you that they feel betrayed by Miles & Wayne & Sonny Rollins & all like that, even now, hey I have to accept it as true to them, even though I can put together a different story about it than they can. I have the luxury of having that distance, they have the luxury of having been there. Either way, life is good.

Just curious, Jim--had you followed Lowe up to that point (live or on record)? No. Fresh was the first Lowe I had ever heard. It was 1975 when the record came out, I had recently turned 20, and still was proud of having over 100 LPs. Those few earlier Lowe performances were not on records that were particularly available (ESP at the time was not exactly a powerhouse in terms of releases or distribution) where I lived. I do remember a Downbeat feature on him from around that time, maybe around the time of Fresh, but other than that, Frank Lowe was a new player on the \scene as far as I could tell. The closest thing to an "accessible" (as in can I get this in the stores?) was the Alice Coltrane side, and Alice Coltrane was not...uh...a priority to me at that time. I did not see a Survial side in a store until Peaches opened in..1976? 1977? And where the hell did anybody buy the Intercord label in my part of the country? I don't think that even Peaches carried that. What I'm saying is that hearing an artist's work in retrospect, with the more or less completeness of it more or less "easily" available in some form. can understandably give you a different perception than does getting to it in real time under real time considerations of what records had already been made and how available they were or weren't. Hell, when Brown Ric hit, i was thinking, oh, SHIT, Fran Lowe's about to be a star now, slickass A&M record, this is some high profile shit here, look out, here comes Frank Lowe! That was that old-school Blue Note/Prestige syndrome at work, right? Get the buzz, make a dieman appearance on a tar's side, get your own date within that organization, there you go, career made. Well, that was then... But even in retrospect, with the advantage of hindsight and easier access to all periods, Fresh still doesn't at all sound "weird" to me, nor do the Bowie Muse sides, which I also heard in real time (and yes, I had been following the AEC as best I could). It just sounds like guys playing in (and moving through) their moment at that time, seizing that moment, actually, taking it and running with it. When you heard it then, you had no idea what the next 5, 10, 20 years are going to bring, so you hear it like what it is right now. And like I said, what it was right now was just damn good playing that was indeed, pardon the pun, fresh.

I heard Fresh in real time, the first Frank Lowe I had heard (thank you Arista-Freedom, easy-enough-ish accessability), and "weird" was not at all what came to mind then. Sounded like some frisky guys really playing, still does.

Bluto Pluto Scutaro