Rabshakeh

Allen Lowe – In The Dark

What are your first thoughts?

Very strong anti-IPA bias over in Rabshakeh corner too. They've effectively crowded out bitter and lager in large parts of the London pub scene (although this trend seems to be reversing now). Cheaper to make and easier to market. I liked the Anchor brewery. Nice crisp taste and one of the few US beers that I used to chose if given the choice, so it will be missed. But I had found that it had declined in the last ten years or so. I am not sure whether that was due to an attempt to chase the IPA market or some recipe change after a buy out or something. Hopefully I'll be corrected if I am wrong. Ha!

The two main things I really want from a good professional critic are: (1) clear direction as to whether he/she thinks the new release stands out and is actually worth listening to (saving me the time), and (2), and this is my ideal, a range of references and background knowledge that adds a wider context to the work that I may not know, and also references to important records / bands I might have missed.

Flower-Corsano Duo – Four Aims (2009) I am generally quite cynical on Chris Corsano. I have seen him wreck performances sometimes. But this is a good record.

I don't know that any Shipp solo record really captures him live.

He was on everything. Sad to see him go.

Big fan of late Weather Report and equivalent era Zawinul. I find it helps to think of that music not so much as jazz fusion but as part of what other musicians like Brian Eno, the Talking Heads and Jon Hassell were doing at the same time: world rhythms with primitive / futuristic synths that just weren't advanced enough to handle it yet. Aim for bewilderment. Proto-Jungle, in a sense, but with a cheesy grin, wind in the hair, and colourful shirt. Sportin' Life is right up there for me. Love it. These are great.

I do hope that the surge of interest continues to roll on. The 80s and 90s could do with nice glossy reissue campaigns.

John Law – Extremely Quartet (HatArt 1997)

The other Brits will tell me if I am wrong (I am much too young to have heard this music at the time and may have just missed the critical discussion when I was younger), but until reasonably recently I don't remember much reference to any of the late 60s / early 70s non-avant scene. I knew of Tubby Hayes / Ronnie Scott (who I think were regarded as a little shopworn) and I certainly knew Courtney Pine (who was in critical high regard then). I was vaguely aware that in between these two lay other periods of flowering of British non-avant jazz. But I don't remember anything being much discussed other than Stan Tracey's Under Milk Wood (which I think was taken as emblematic of the late 60s flowering) and snide references to Nucleus and the perceived decline of Soft Machine. I think that the current run of reissues has really pushed the late 60s and 70s period back into the spotlight for Brits too. At least it has done for me. Probably it is the same story everywhere. 70s US jazz is certainly better known everywhere since the Strata East and Black Jazz reissues began.

A lot of those 60s/70s artists are not particularly well known in the UK either. It took me years to find out about the scene. These reissues have been valuable as history writing, in themselves.

RIP. Selbdritt is a classic.

I can relate to this a lot. It isn't just a jazz thing. The "blues feeling" - that pulse and phrasing, or the presence of "soul" - is one of the key things I hope for in music. That cuts right across a lot of the music that I do listen to most, but not necessarily by genre. Within jazz, I generally miss it the most. In the Avant Garde world, I sometimes think of music that lacks this feel as being in the lineage of Jimmy Giuffre, thinking in particular of the Stuttgart and Bremen live records on Hat - the sort of exploratory but rather colourless music can be found any given Tuesday evening at Cafe OTO or other similar dedicated avant garde spaces. But my worst is the moody, rhythm-free, academically-minded pianists and/or educators in mainstream jazz (e.g. Mehldau and latter day Iyer in particular). Outside of jazz, I find that a lot of modern instrumental hip hop lacks soul. There are plenty of po-faced beat tapes, which have rhythms that are every bit as metronomic as the worst of non-African American music. An even worse offender is home-listening electronica music, nearly rhythm free, and designed for intense, and intensely tedious (it seems to me), headphone listening. Increasingly, I feel a little isolated in my dislike of this kind of music. Clearly, a lot of people who really love music actually do want this sort of serious-mindedness, and see precisely the studious quality that repels me as being appealing. Where I disagree though is with the idea that the "blues feeling" is determinative. There are other keys: lyrics (Hank Williams), purity of melody line (Lee Konitz), close harmonies (the Mighty Diamonds) or raw, dumb, sweaty, excitement (Minor Threat or the Stanley Brothers). There are lots of ways to make satisfying music, and a lack of blues feeling, rhythm and phraseology needn't prevent the music from being thrilling. That goes for jazz as much as any kind of music.

TTK with Bongos In Hi-FI !!!!!!!!! (Liberty, 1961)

It's a really good one.

Gerd Dudek / Buschi Niebergall / Edward Vesala – Open

Art of the Improvisers and Twins for Atlantic Quartet records, and Broken Shadows for Science Fiction. They're as good as the canonical records they match, in my opinion.

My mistake! The Golden Circle records are excellent. I meant Foxhole and the two Redman records. I completely forgot Golden Circle was BN. Worth checking out the B sides comps. There are a couple of them, including for the Atlantic era and for the Science Fiction session. They're as good as the albums from which the sessions derive. Much better in my opinion than the official releases from Coleman's middle period.

The Blue Notes: messing around with instruments he couldn't play. Writing not so strong. Over-reliance on the same licks. Either failure to synch with the Coltrane rhythm section or a mix of Denardo on drums and Haden being wilfully ignored. There's still gems there but they're not great albums in my opinion. Same goes for many of the surrounding records and canonical boots from the period. I don't think that's a maverick view, either. Ornette Coleman's career is often seen as having dipped. You'd be on better ground with Cecil Taylor here, but only because he was extremely consistent.

John Handy's Quintet featuring Barry Martyn – John Handy's Quintet Featuring Barry Martyn Trad altoist Cap'n John Handy, rather than the late 60s alto player John Handy III. This record's great. I don't know why it took me so long to uncover Handy's music. Right on the border between trad, swing and R&B. Super tight and full of juice. Trumpeter Cuff Billett is great on this one too.

I do not think this is right, and I struggle to identify what you are referencing. Clearly there are critiques of musicians, some extremely well known (Amiri Baraka on Burton Greene?). I wrote a response to this thread only a few above this where I said what I thought of two of the masters: Zorn and Shepp. The former is frequently criticised on this forum. There obviously is a hierarchy too: Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman are the first names almost everyone hears when they move into this music. That's a well trodden path, in the same way as you'd encounter Basie and Ellington and Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster in swing. There is a tendancy within jazz to label everyone a genius, and to refer to their music in uncritical purple terms. It does get pretty sickly after a while, but I don't think that is any more pronounced for Avant Garde jazz than for bop.

Comforting words.

But all artistic (and institutional) movements run their course, not just avant-garde ones. Free jazz is no more of a "scam" than Philip Glass or ska punk. I do agree that it is a bit weird that "avant-garde" arts of all sorts have such institutional acceptance as at 2023. This is good for the artists but maybe not healthy for the art, which can possibly be seen as being made to please teacher. Perhaps one result is that some styles continue to exist long after they should have done. But I don't really think that is much to do with "free" or "avantgarde" art. There are plenty of examples of institutional perpetuation of exhausted artistic forms that have nothing to do with a vanguard approach, from ancient scribal cultures to cycle 3,827 of the Marvel Cinematic Extended Universe.

I sometimes do wonder with Shepp. There are a few free-side A listers who have sometimes struck me as either having comparatively weaker abilities or a small bag of tricks. Shepp is one of them (God knows that John Zorn certainly is). Obviously, ability on the saxophone is not everything, and Shepp makes up for it in other ways. There is an early 80s Canadian film (I forget the name) in which Shepp, Paul Bley, Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon talk about their music. Everyone other than CT looks like hell and is at the nadir of their careers (although Dixon at least is wearing a cool leather hat and is quite a fun interviewee, albeit clearly a few cocktails deep). Shepp in particular seems on the verge of tears. By that point he had already moved into his neo-swing stage, and he is filmed playing in a hesitant way that really reminds me of Coleman Hawkins' performance on Sirius. Shorn of all the fire of the earlier Impulse! and BYG records, and the huge canvass projects of the later Impulse! period, he struck me as a limited player, but, unusually, one who was both aware of and almost panicked by his limitations. That said, I know several on this board treasure the Steeplechase period of Shepp most of all, so maybe it is a purely personal thing.