Rabshakeh

I'm still inspired by my recording shopping in Singapore, another city that supposedly has no record shops but which turns out to have some good ones. It remains the best way to really see a city. Supposedly there is at least one very good one in Beijing, although it is quite far out and I suspect I won't be able to get there. This list seems pretty good: https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2024/01/19/six-beijing-record-shops-are-worth-visit-browsing-listening

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Certain Blacks

Not exactly. Princess G is meeting me there.

It could not be a less exciting work travel reason if it tried to be. Let's just pretend I will be wearing sunglasses playing rocking saxophone on a skateboard as I do 180°s on a half pipe and leave it at that.

I mean, it is work. It's definitely work in this case.

RIP. Sad to hear.

Even Dusty Groove's copywriters seem to be struggling with this one: "the approach of the album really sets them in territory that makes it difficult for them to take any wrong moves" I'm not sure praise could get higher.

Is this a record. I can't see anything about it on the internet.

Okay. This might be a hard one: what about record shops in Hong Kong and Beijing? I'll be in those cities briefly over the coming weeks and may get an afternoon or so off.

What I tend to project onto Pepper more is that Arthur Rimbaud / Poete Maudit thing. I listen to e.g. Blues for the Fishermen and I hear a self-conscious aesthetics of descent to the depths in the pursuit of art. That record in particular has aspects that are clearly designed as signals de profundis. Prison and heroin were part of it, and in that sense I can hear prison. Lots of jazz critics and writers try to project the same thing onto Charlie Parker, but it washes off because the Charlie Parker who spoke for himself never seems to have been into that look all, whereas from what I have read of Pepper he was more the type.

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Nice Guys

Don't expect anything mind blowing as I said. But good. The violin adds some fresh texture and it doesn't run into the rhythmic and harmonic problems that affects a lot of failed retro attempts. There is even a touch of very non-Coltrane groove on a few tracks. Who would have thought that all it took for prices to be north of £200 in a week was to put the words "Japanese" and "spiritual jazz" next to each other in a sentence.

Jemeel Moondoc Sextet – Konstanze's Delight Sinsuke Fujieda Group – Fukushima Much hyped but actually pretty great overall to my ears. Obviously not ground breaking: it sounds like John Coltrane. But it is really good. What isn't great is those prices.

Anthony Braxton - Solo (NYC) 2002 Not my favourite Braxton record. Revisiting it out of interest. El-P Featuring The Blue Series Continuum – High Water Now returning to another one that I owned back in the day and found disappointing. It is not that amazing, I guess, but I like it more than I did as a 20 year old. It is basically an acid jazz record. One track even has "hey hey hey" club vocals! Maybe at the time I expected more from the producer of Company Flow and Cannibal Ox collaborating with Matthew Shipp, with whom I was then a little fixated. One real issue with pre-Kanye hip hop was that producers were so used to very restrictive bars of rhythm, and you can hear that here. It sounded modern then but very old fashioned now. El-P Featuring The Blue Series Continuum – High Water Now returning to another one that I owned back in the day and found disappointing. It is not that amazing, I guess, but I like it more than I did as a 20 year old. It is basically an acid jazz record. One track even has "hey hey hey" club vocals! Maybe at the time I expected more from the producer of Company Flow and Cannibal Ox collaborating with Matthew Shipp, with whom I was then a little fixated. One real issue with pre-Kanye hip hop was that producers were so used to very restrictive bars of rhythm, and you can hear that here. It sounded modern then but very old fashioned now.

Julius Eastman, I know, at least.

Gyldene Trion (Jonas Kullhammar; Torbjorn Zetterberg; Daniel Fredriksson) - Live At Glenn Miller Cafe Listening to this after a couple of beers and really enjoying it.

I hear a lot of Zappa but also Zorn, plus some classic big band arrangement flourishes but definitely in a compositional context. It seems new and fresh at least? Not all great but new and fresh. I'm really impressed by it so than you for introducing.

Horace Tapscott, Everett Brown Jr. – At The Crossroads

YouTubeable in this case.

Lester Bowie - Ropeadope

New to me but listening briefly to the start of Delicious it seems very exciting. Something that is actual new. In the old days this would have been played on Radio 3.

Wadada Leo Smith & Louis Moholo-Moholo – Ancestors

Badal Roy, Geoff Warren and Marcello Sebastiani - Frammenti D'Anima

Jah Wobble & Evan Parker – Passage To Hades