Rabshakeh

Keith Jarrett - Whisper Not (ECM, 2000) Sat in bed with the lurgy on New Year's Day, this one is probably a bit over my level.

I think that what you just said has to be the right approach. I find it frustrating when staff on generally excellent newspapers like the NYT can't be bothered to even Wikipedia the subject that they are writing on.

Oh no!

The Wikipedia page for Disco (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco) has a rather different version of events to Wikipedia's Demolition page. It points out that the anti disco movement had a heavy presence on the left wing and in the black community, concentrating on disco's vacuousness, lack of political critique, and corporate-seeped mediocrity. It does also point to the right wing fellow travellers, but does not suggest that they led or characterised the opposition to disco. Somewhere along the line the left wing critiques of disco have been erased and there's grown up this view that because some right wing people were among those who hated disco, opposition to disco in the late 1970s was therefore a racist thing. The idea that someone would be racist for disliking the Bee Gees in favour of Little Richard is surely wrong, absent some clear statement or action to that effect. Exhibit 1, after less than 20 seconds' googling: an article by Richard Dyer from 1979 arguing, from a gay socialist perspective, that disco really shouldn't be considered a red line for a socialist. https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/texts/in-defence-of-disco

I think it's just easy / lazy journalism. Helps to raise the drama. Doesn't need to be true because hardly anyone will check.

I know three names from this mix: Chadbourne, Baker and Kaiser. Are there any records of theirs that stand out to you? Yeah. Even retrospectively, those two scenes shine out - the Coleman/Ulmer connection. Great stuff. At least those guys are fairly well known though. The more free improv artists from this era seem to be never mentioned. It's like there's the early era of Derek Bailey and Masayuki Takayanagi, then a gap, and then people start to pay attention again from the mid-80s. The Beresfords and Chadbournes are mostly still with us, and it's weird how noone talks about them.

I love this one.

Steps - Paradox (Columbia, 1982)

That's probably it, isn't it? There's an awful lot of Chopin in the musical bloodstream of every artist mentioned upthread.

Jason Moran - Presents the Bandwagon (Blue Note, 2003). A superb record, which still sounds great. I apologise for forgetting it and grouping him in with the recent moody stylists on the basis of his more recent work. What a great record.

This question relates to a very specific era of the jazz / improv avant garde that I think is very under-discussed. I have this year read Teruto Soejima's Free Jazz in Japan and Bill Shoemaker's Jazz in the 1970s. Both books spend a significant amount of time discussing a very specific period of jazz that emerged in the late 1970s and grew out of the developments of the 1960s and early 1970s, but which defined itself against that earlier era by, among other things, taking an irreverent stance and exploring concepts like "play" or aleatoric devices. To me, this appears to be a free improv analogue to punk / new wave that was also ripping through mainstream music at this time. Shoemaker calls this the "Second Generation" of Free Improvisation, and he points to musicians like Steve Beresford and John Russell as examples of the English scene. Soejima for his part talks (in the English translation) about the "Pop Avant Garde" (presumably "pop" here is in the sense of pop art rather than Madonna) that is exemplified for him by the work of musicians like Hiroaki Katayama and Kazutoki Umezu, but also by the work of Cobra-era John Zorn. I do not know much about the work of any of these musicians, save for Zorn's later work, which, before he got sidetracked by staring into his own pupik, appears to develop some of these ideas. Many of the English musicians mentioned by Shoemaker appear on Bailey's Company releases, and show up playing with other artists from a similar time, like Sabu Toyozumi, Fred Frith, Toshinori Kondo and George Lewis. Clearly, they were very present on the New York, Tokyo and London scenes at the time. I would expect that other European scenes would also have had similar groups, particularly since Soejima stresses that the Japanese artists were very popular in Germany. However, given their significant presence in both of these books, I am surprised at how little they, or similar musicians, are discussed generally by fans of avant garde jazz. Possibly this is because aleatoric compositions or concepts like "play" don't make for satisfying records. Alternatively, they might not have had much influence. I also note that many of the album's are released collaboratively, rather than under one me or a stable group, which often reduces retrospective visibility in jazz. Anyway, I would be interested in hearing from anyone who lived through this time or knows about these artists or similar artists, both with their views and with any records that they think stand out.

Matthew Shipp - 4D (Thirsty Ear, 2010)

Guillermo Gregorio - Approximately (HatArt, 1995).

"Hooch" was famous enough still as a term in 1990s Britain to be used as the brand name for a dubious sweetened alcoholic drink that was definitely not aimed at schoolchildren. As a schoolchild myself in 1990s Britain, I was of course unaware of this drink at the time, and so could not have drunk it. In terms of wider slang, I think there are always gaps. When I was a kid, the slang of the 1940s/50s was still commonly used (whether hip/beat slang like "cool" or palyari like "naff"); despite being decades out of date, everyone knew what it meant. But slang from the 1930s like getting "tight" or 1970s like "to make" someone was unintelligible. I guess that the whole concept of hooch is now pretty antiquated and old timey.

The Comet Is Coming - Prophecy (2016)

Branford Marsalis - The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1991) Some sad stuff on here. Kenny Kirkland badly missed even at this point.

Fred Ho and The Green Monster Big Band - The Sweet Science Suite: A Scientific Soul Music Honoring of Muhammad Ali (Mutable, 2011).

Sam Fribush Organ Trio

Spanish Wave by L. Subramaniam (1983) A bit of fusion on a Thursday morning. It's my first listen to this one. It is like a combination of everything early 1970s.

Jane Ira Bloom - Art and Aviation (Arabesque, 1992)

Marco Minnemann ‎– Broken Orange I haven't revisited this modern day fusion record for a while. I think it's aged pretty well. 2002 was a tough era for badly dated studio trickery and immediately passe musical references (pointless breakbeats? always), but this swerved the worst pits. Except for the dire cover art.

Good start. I think that the Shepp and AEC are clear choices. I was surprised to realise how early Nice Guys was: I'd always thought of it as an 80s album, presumably because to my mind it starts their 1980s period. Either way, I think Full Force is probably my favourite of the ECMs. Remind me how it works: does your Mirror Mirror count as the only Henderson choice, or could co-writer Dan pick e.g. State of?

Some of my favourite reed solos in a while. I have That Devlin’ Tune open in front of me as I write this.

How do they know? These are pretty obscure areas, which you presumably have well covered. My family won’t even buy me things from an Amazon wish list for fear of getting it wrong.

Are you buying these for yourself or are you getting them separately from various niche Christmas gatherings?