Rabshakeh

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

Oh okay. That explains it. I knew that you did a show but I didn't realise that was what these were. I assumed because of the name and the fact that you posted it here that it was some sort of algorithmically generated playlist to which you were listening, designed to showcase great eclectic music. This one wasn't as eclectic as they normally and had quite a strong core theme, hence why I asked. I hadn't realised you had put them together.

Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith – Defiant Life Certainly better than anticipated from the conjunction of Iyer, Smith and ECM. There are sections that I enjoy a lot and it helps that there is some 00s EAI DNA in there (and that it is Iyer taking his hands off the piano in order to supply it for so much of the record). Do you have to enter a prompt for these or something? This one seems to be quite tightly connected.

Leo Smith – Creative Music: 1 (Six Solo Improvisations) Streaming via the Tzadik box set, and enjoying. All of these look worth investigation. I'll get in there and get working.

I'm listening now and enjoying more than when I first approached it. It is perhaps one that I went to too early in my AACM forays and then haven't returned to since. At the risk of completely derailing this thread, I'll pick up elsewhere later in the day.

I was trying to remember what my favourites were and I think this one is up there. I really do like this one. Again, there's the comparatively powerful rhythmic element.

Wadada Leo Smith And Ed Blackwell – The Blue Mountain's Sun Drummer

The discussion almost seems to be as much about our respective responses to perceived social cues rather than musical ones. (Academic / Institutional Vs Natural / Organic). Interesting that we hear the same musicians so differently. I would love to connect with Smith! I always thought I would like his music and have never understood why I don't connect with it. I do feel it is a deficiency in my musical listening, so I look forward to the lesson plan. Strangely, given my dislike of large box sets, Ten Freedom Summers and Sacred Ceremonies are my favourite Smith I have heard so far. Maybe they have a bit more role for rhythm than most Smith or maybe it is the compositional space? I don't know.

As I say, I liked that Ganavya overall. Clever idea and well executed, I thought. It is interesting that, outside of some rather auterish Alice Coltrane records, that particular mix of devotional carnatic chant and jazz has not yet been tried. (Or if it has I don't know it or I have forgotten it.) It really is "spiritual jazz". I didn't find it "organic" though - in fact that Don Cherry "organic music" ingredient is precisely what I thought the record most missed: to my ears it had a self-aware institutional feel in place of the free-spirited hippy one I wanted. But as I write that comment I see that it represents a reaction so subjective as to be basically irrelevant. Where I really didn't like the record was the multi-part covers towards the end, and that was to what the "overly studious" comment was meant to apply. I thought those were weak, and that was largely because I thought that they were so considered. The rest of the album was good and I might have included it in my list above were it not for those closing tracks, which to me cost the record its A grade. I'll be looking out for more of her releases though. On Aftab, Love In Exile was for me the actual nadir, and is the Iyer record that really did make me ready to give up. I may be guilty of moaning about Iyer a bit much since it came out, for which I apologise. Listening to it felt like attending a lecture. There was also something about how bad I thought the record was combined with the eulogies it triggered in the jazz press (and the vicious smack downs of the few dissenting voices) which really flicked a nerve. I perhaps wrongly see latter day Iyer as a scenemaker in a sinister position of (comparative) institutional power, who is taking the genre as a whole in the wrong direction, like a modern day Crouch / Marsalis. That is why I keep wibbling on about him. I do actually like Night Rain by Aftab though. Night Rain is far too mature for its own good and has Iyer in a prominent role but to my ears it works as a mature album in the manner of 1990s ECMs. I also don't want to suggest that I don't rate earlier Iyer. Historicity is obviously enthroned as one of the great classics for a reason. I have not listened to Defiant Life yet. The combo of ECM, Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith (who I respect greatly but rarely connect with) made me assume that I would not like it but given your recommendation I shall definitely give it a listen.

Clifford Thornton - Ketchaoua This is an underrated album. I have a real thing for it.

Anthony Braxton, Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski – Composition No. 95 For Two Pianos

The whole Indo-Jazz concept is an interesting one. My personal view is that Indian rhythm instruments + jazz improvisation is an absolutely winning combination, one that perhaps works even better than Afro-Cuban or samba rhythms in jazz. I don't know why it should be because there is no meaningful link of which I am aware between jazz rhythms and Indian rhythms. But then it all comes down to what is exciting and Indian rhythmic development so often is. However "Indo-Jazz" to my mind more often refers to jazz using Indian stringed instruments in lead or harmonic roles or the use of Indian scales and classical Indian improvisational techniques in a jazz context. I don't really find that either of those has a particularly high hit rate when combined with jazz or used in a jazz context. Again, I don't know why that should be, and it is just a matter of personal taste. Obviously India is home to two of the world's preeminent improvising classical traditions, so you would think it would be natural, but perhaps the strength of the Indian traditions means that a working combination is harder to achieve. It is interesting and perhaps telling that "Indo-Jazz" so often gets dubbed a "fusion" music, whereas Latin jazz or jazz samba are subgenres of jazz. Either way, it rarely works for me as a mix, although when it does, it does. One major problem for me with more recent attempts at "indo-jazz fusion" has been that in the last decade or so it has often taken place in an institutionalised context. In particular, the dominance of Harvard Professor Vijay Iyer who plays on so many such records. Amancio D'Silva's and John Mayer's music was so pulse-raising; Latter-day Vijay Iyer's many many records make me wonder whether jazz has any future at all. Unsmiling academics playing unsmiling academic music. Even records that I have quite enjoyed like Ganavya Doraiswamy's Daughter Of A Temple or Arooj Aftab's Night Reign have suffered from being overly studious. Anyway, I'd be interested in any other members' views and recommendations.

Terrible name for a really interesting record.

Mine would be: Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda Amancio D'Silva - Konkan Dance Andrew Cyrille - To Hear The World In A Grain Of Sand (World Music: Live At The Donaueschingen Festival) Braz Gonsalves 7 with Pam Crain - Raga Rock Don Cherry and Latif Khan - Music / Sangam Emil Richards and the Microtonal Blues Band - Journey to Bliss Indo-British Ensemble (Victor Graham) - Curried Jazz Joe Harriott / John Mayer Double Quintet - Indo-Jazz Suite Joe Harriott / Amancio D'Silva Quartet - Hum Dono Rudresh Mahanthappa - Kinsmen Shakti with John McLaughlin - Shakti with John McLaughlin Whether all of these are technically "Indo-Jazz" is another question. Some are more serious that others. The Braz Gonzalez one is perhaps Indian jazz rather than Indo-Jazz but it is a good record.