Lazaro Vega

Did an half hour radio program with interviews (phoners) by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman about the soundtrack to Naked Lunch. 1992.

Geez, I couldn't get that on to my desk top to drop it in I-tunes to burn it. It just loads on a page. Any suggestions from MAC users? LV

http://www.bigozine2.com/archive/ARraritie...ARjctemple.html

The Wess Anderson Trio performance will be re-broadcast this Saturday morning, December 30th, between 7 and 10 a.m. est over Blue Lake Public Radio. The first hour and a half of the program will casually review jazz recordings from 2006, with Anderson's live hour with us kicking off about 8:45 a.m. We'll feature more from "The Best of 2006" Sunday evening from 7 to 10 p.m.

"It seems odd that no one has recorded the newly rediscorvered late works by Jelly, it would seem a natural for Wynton/JLC, et al." Randy Sandke recorded "Ganjam" and issued two versions of it last year...can't recall the CD right now....

http://www.wyntonmarsalis.org/2006/12/01/w...e-penitentiary/

Thanks for that clarification, Simon. Was leaning towards understanding it as the mythology of jazz itself, that when you step on stage you're stepping into the story of jazz up to that point and are extending, repeating, or reworking that story according to who you are and what you know about music, what you're trying to express. That was an interesting comment, Jim: self consciousness and over examination in such a spontaneous art form being a determent. Newk went through that, famously, with Schuller's review of "Blue 7."

Sure, Simon. And asking, what does that really mean? Performing music is stepping across a border into a cultural narrative, or is the narrative happening all the time and stepping on to stage is just one place where it receives stylized attention? As far as the Bird book goes, yes, I’ll give it a spin. Not always wise to dismiss something out of hand.

Vernacular meaning "spoken as one's mother tongue; not learned or imposed as a second language"? And "Domestic, native." So all jazz musicians are Horatio Alger? What is the American myth other than that pragmatic, capitalist based, mechanized economic one? Jazz musicians are asserting their manifest destiny over Latin American music? (Sarcasm intended). So jazz musicians are the myth makers. Well, the hero quest and all that. Man vs. man, though it's hard to hear only social conflict in music. When you enter the realm of myth you go much further back into "man's" collective unconscious than Wagner.

Hi Ghost, This Sunday Blue Lake will be broadcasting the Night Light's Chirstmas program as on Christmas Eve our jazz programming is bumped for holiday specials. LV

Love that. Played it the other night while doing a program on Tony Williams. Also the Paul Motian Band this year. No guitar recording on the list...well, there you are. It's hard to keep it to 10. I've added some comments on the rationale for the choices. Was hoping other people would post their top ten lists here, too.

Best of 2006 Ornette Coleman, "Sound Grammar," Sound Grammar Sonny Rollins, "Sonny, Please," Doxy Dr. Lonnie Smith, "Jungle Soul," Palmetto Keith Jarrett, "Carnegie Hall Concert," ECM Muhal Richard Abrams/George Lewis/Roscoe Mitchell, "Streaming," PI Records Randy Weston African Rhythms Trio, "Zep Tepi," Random Chance Bud Shank, "The Bud Shank Big Band: Taking the Long Way Home," Jazzed Media Rashied Ali, "Judgment Day," Survival Records Bill Henderson, "Live at the Kennedy Center," Web Only Jazz Fred Hersch, "In Amsterdam," Palmetto Re-Issue of the Year: Charles Mingus, "At UCLA 1965," Sunnyside 2006 was a year of reminders. Ornette Coleman’s first record in a decade, Keith Jarrett’s first solo concert on American soil in nearly a decade, Sonny Rollins first studio recording since the passing of his wife and manager Lucille, as well as the establishment of his own web site and label, the return to the recording studio of pianist Muhal Richards Abrams in a trio originally recorded in the 1970’s, and Bill Henderson’s first recording as a leader in far too long. There were many recommendable jazz vocal albums this year, from the widely heard Diana Krall meeting with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra “From This Moment On” (Verve Records), to the lush Gladys Knight tribute album “Before Me” (Verve Records), to the debuts of Roberta Gambarini, “Easy to Love” on Groovin’ High Records, and Robin McKelle with a West Coast big band (Blue Lake played her “Night And Day” all summer) on “Introducing Robin McKelle” from Cheap Lullaby Records. Patricia Barber’s album of originals, “Mythology” (Blue Note), shows lyrically through several character’s voices that the interpersonal travails of people in the post modern world have archetypal antecedents in mythology, and that classical mythological stories overlay in interesting ways the lives of musicians such as Nina Simone. Karrin Allyson’s bop and post bop songbook “Footprints” (Concord Music) with the improvising voices of Nancy King and “Scatman Like No Others” John Hendricks was probably the most played vocal album on radio this year. Yet Bill Henderson’s “Live at the Kennedy Center” is our pick for vocal album of the year because of it’s historical significance, his first as a leader in ages and his first concert recording in our library since he was captured with the Basie Band, the repertoire (even “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” but especially “That Old Black Magic”), the ageless quality of his voice and an unmatched stage presence. Drummer Rashied Ali is remembered historically for his unique approach to drums developed with John Coltrane’s last performing bands. “Judgment Day” finds Ali bringing along mature young-ish musicians from New York including trumpeter Jumaane Smith and tenor saxophonist Lawrence Clark as well as an under the radar Chicago to New York pianist Greg Murphy and bassist Joris Teepe. The music is straight ahead, including Jaco Pastorius composition “Dania” providing the album’s burner, yet it is the unforced lyricism and musicality of Ali’s drumming, coming out of Max Roach in approach to timbre, that is the revelation available to the world outside of New York with this recording. Runners up include Jimmy Cobb’s recording on Marsalis Music, as well as Branford Marsalis’s Quartet recording “Braggtown” (Marsalis Music) which he debuted in part at St. Cecilia Music Society in 2006. An amazing number of big band recordings were issued this year. In Spring The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra’s “Sacred Music of Duke Ellington” (a double CD from Origin Records) was a favorite, especially for the “It’s Freedom (The Freedom Suite).” The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra’s “Up From the Skies (The Music of Jim McNeely)” (Planet Arts Records) was a reminder that playing Jim McNeely’s arrangements is best left to a band that’s been doing it for a couple of decades. From California came The Chris Walden Big Band album “No Bounds” (Origin Records) with guest vocalist Tierney Sutton and Berlin-based trumpeter Till Bronner; and drummer Phil Kelly and The SW Santa Ana Winds “My Museum,” a project loaded with great soloists. The Dizzy Gillespie All Start Big Band, “Dizzy’s Business” (Manchester Craftsman Guild Jazz) caught Jon Faddis, Slide Hampton, James Moody and Jimmy Heath all celebrating Gillespie’s wide ranging big band repertoire (with vocalist Roberta Gambarini). And now at the end of the year comes Jimmy Heath’s “Turn Up the Heath” (Planet Arts) which showcases his body of memorable compositions with updated arrangements and a great combination of young and veteran to play them. In the midst of all that The Bud Shank Big Band recorded at LAX Four Points Sheridan Hotel, Los Angeles, on Jazzed Media Records from Littleton, Colorado, is a broad view of Shank’s invention in response to Artie Shaw, Swing, the music of Bob Florence and the Great American Song Book. Lazaro Vega Blue Lake Public Radio 300 East Crystal Lake Road Twin Lake MI 49457 www.bluelake.org WBLV FM 90.3/WBLU FM 88.9, Grand Rapids

John Norris is the man behind Sackville, but it takes a village: thank you Mr. O'Reilly for those great sessions. Love that date with Claude Williams, too. There was a tenor player here in West Michigan, Curt Purnell, who came out of St. Louis and idolized Jimmy Forrest. Curt talked about hearing the McShann band when the sax section included Bird as well as Jimmy Forrest. One of his greatest musical memories. With the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor drawing so few of the veterans who where there when it happened, and most of them saying they probably won't make it back next year, we're seeing a generation pass from our midst. McShann was a key part of that generation, leading the last of the Kansas City big bands to barnstorm out of the mid-west, the "last of the whore-house piano players," the last of the Blue Devils. "Baby here I stand before you with my heart in my hand..."

The AACM school in Chicago taught jazz for ages. The educational component is part of their charter as a non-profit. From what I remember (as an outsider) they teach musical fundementals, the history of the music, and encourage bands to form in unique instrumental combinations. The "allow" the musicians to find their own voices, or encourage that. There was no mandate to play free or die.

Thanks Ghost, The rule of thumb for interviews is: if you tuned in to hear music how far can you drive in your car before being fed up with hearing talk? I give that about 5 minutes. So if we do a phone interview that goes on for an hour and a half, as recently with author Peter J. Levinson about his Tommy Dorsey book, then we'll post- produce it into little bits. Wednesday's interview "highlights" were Roy Campbell's passionate advocacy of the music of Albert Ayler: "He's the alpha and the omega" was how he summarized Ayler's musical world because of the folk element, marches and the blues combining in free improv. Henry's answer to the sort of floundering question about making the "switch" from playing in a more conventional song-form approach and then jumping into the world of Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, and how that's influenced his music today, was perfect: "You're either getting better or getting worse." Many musicians joined the broadcast. Dennis Gonzalez in Texas, Steve Swell and Tony Malaby in NYC (who've both played Live From Blue Lake), and drummer's Tim Froncek and Randy Marsh on the FM. They are the one's who responded. Presenting free form improv for an hour at the start of the program is a risk (to maintaining a large general audience) that must be taken because, at heart, we need the cultural capital the musicians in our audience provide, and the word of mouth they will spread about artistic integrity in the media we hopefully represent, not to mention the energizing effect such brilliant risk taking music will have on their own efforts, be they song form related or not. And, of course, the music was a gift. That Grimes appeared in duet with Marshall Allen on Blue Lake in 2005 and now in 2006 with Roy Campbell would make a nice two fer: The Blue Lake Duets. I'm thinking we will rebroadcast Henry and Roy again next Wednesday at midnight "Out On Blue Lake." It was recorded hi-res and needs to be transferred to CD. We'll see if Steve has had a chance to do that yet. The next "Live From Blue Lake" will be December 14th at 10 p.m. when Wess Anderson's Trio kicks off a 5 broadcast series (one a month until April) that will emphasize Michigan-based artists (Anderson and bassist Rodney Whitaker are on the faculty at Michigan State University, my alma mater). Thanks again for listening. Henry Grimes is a living legend . P.S. Margaret Davis reports the Detroit performance was attended by a very good listening audience, an art for art's sake crowd who came for the music, and that, thankfully, they had no trouble with this snow as they drove into Chicago. That they're in Chi safely and looking forward to two nights at The Velvet Lounge with Fred Anderson joining Roy in the front line and Chad Taylor on drums. We really want to get Fred up hear to play live with Henry in the future. Hopefully in a quartet. Maybe next time. I'm certainly working on it.

Ah, Love Cry is one I've managed to never own. Thanks for tuning in guys. That was wild. Art for art's sake.

The Nation This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061211/leonard Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind by JOHN LEONARD [from the December 11, 2006 issue] What were they doing out here this late in history? --Thomas Pynchon Against the Day From, roughly, the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 to, roughly, the silent movies and the Palmer Raids of the early postwar 1920s, nobody in this novel is ever home. Instead--flyboys and magicians, anarchists and Pinkertons, alchemists and pilgrims, mathematicians and spies, fugitives, refugees, nomads, bandits, ghosts--they are on the road and on the lam. Or up in a hot-air balloon, looking down on volcanoes and the Paris Commune. Or burrowing underground like a Frank Herbert sandworm, in search of Shambhala, the earthly paradise of Tibetan Buddhism, or Aztlan, the mythical home of the original Mexicans. And no matter how hard they run in Outer Europe, Inner Asia, Deep Germany or the wild American West, something sinister keeps gaining on them--"polar darkness," "ancient purpose," "mad disorder," "ruin and sorrow," "the stripped and dismal metonymies of the dead" and/or a fourth dimension. "Gravity pulls along the third dimension, up to down," says one of the many mad scientists we meet in these feverish pages; "time pulls along the fourth, birth to death." We hear a lot about the fourth dimension in Against the Day, as well as double refraction, bilocation, perfect mirrors, imaginary numbers and lateral world-sets. We hear equally about US labor history, including Haymarket, Homestead, Coeur d'Alene, Cripple Creek, Ludlow and Mother Jones; and the Mexican Un-Revolution, that strut-and-fret of Diaz, Madero, Huerta, Carranza, Obregón, Villa and Zapata; and ethnic seething in the Balkans, before Rebecca West, Marshal Tito or Richard Holbrooke got a chance to do their fiddles; and turn-of-the-century parapsychology, with its mountain-misted tommyknockers and dreamworld Tenochtitlans. But because Against the Day is a full-blown and full-fledged Pynchon novel--and thus not only an occasion of joy in every nook of American culture except The New Republic but also a phantasmagoria whose only conceivable analogue is another Pynchon novel, Gravity's Rainbow--we hear almost as much about mayonnaise, Futurism, landmines, poison gas and the ancient Albanian honor code of Kanuni Lekë Dukagjinit. "Inspect your shoes, Mrs. Kindred, it's gettin deep around here." As usual, there are dozens of characters with silly names (Mia Culpepper, an astrologist, is my favorite, but Pleiade Lafrisee's hard to beat). And dozens of words we have to look up (absquatulated, fulgurescence, xanthocroid, cataplexy). And geography-drops to shame Bruce Chatwin (Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, Domodossola). And snacks to sate velociraptors (brain tacos, Meat Olaf). And, though nothing is quite as addictive as a blood vendetta, enough mind-altering substances to kill the White Rabbit (opium beer, cactus peyote, chloral hydrate, cigarettes soaked in absinthe, "cocainized brain tonics" and somewhere on the Silk Road between Turfan and Novosibirsk a flowering hemp twelve feet tall and fungomaniacs who drink each other's urine). Plus a speaking in tongues that ranges, according to its narrative needs and whimsies, from Gulliver's Travels and The Book of Urizen to The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Tin Drum; from Herman Melville to Nathanael West to John Dos Passos to Joseph Heller to Carlos Castaneda, by way of extreme Kerouac; from Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dashiell Hammett to S.J. Perelman, P.G. Wodehouse, Umberto Eco and Monty Python; from such boys' adventure books as Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice to such '40s radio serials as Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons to such '40s flicks as Casablanca and The Third Man. (And yet, and yet--always the jaunty, cheeky, demotic, katzenjammer Tom, joshing us through what Don DeLillo calls the "whispers and apparitions at the edge of modern awareness," as if Huck Finn surfed a Mississippi wave of dread.) As in Rainbow and Vineland, vampire capitalism and the Western death wish are alive and kicking. As in Mason & Dixon, the earth is hollow and a geometry of violence "more permissive than Euclid" wrings profit from oppression. As always, a Bodine appears, here an American stoker on an Austrian battleship. If entropy and the second law of thermodynamics aren't mentioned until a thousand pages in, we feel their shadow presence and tidal pull from the first mention of electromagnetism. (Anyhow, this time around, Newton's third law of motion is more important.) The biggest surprise, not counting the space devoted to Lake Baikal, white slavery, Tamerlane's tomb and Jonah and the whale, is an astonishing excess of ukuleles. I mean, they show up more often than doggerel and puns. There is even a ukulele version of Chopin's Nocturne in E minor. "It isn't only the difficult terrain," says a Kashgar prophet to an American student about the Chinese desert; "the vipers and sandstorms and raiding parties. The journey itself is a kind of conscious being, a living deity who does not wish to engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you. It insists on the furthest degree of respect." He might be talking about this grand, unruly novel in which, by a sort of reverse ghostliness, the future will "trespass" on the past: Indiana Tom Beyond the Speed of Light. Within the mirror, within the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim's guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist. --Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day * "Your mother's a Pinkerton!" --Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day It's a Perils of Pauline plot as pulpy and fibrous, as gnarly and pantophagic, as a thicket of bamboo. Everything ends up polarized, because we are working our way through ideas of light as thickening as they are wavy; and everybody ends up paired, as if for Noah's Ark. Meanwhile, under these covers, in what may be a narrative riff on William Rowan Hamilton's quaternion-based algebra of vector and tensor spaces, four different stories compete for our attention: 1. The Chums of Chance. These are the balloon boys, the Tom Swifts, Frank Merriwells and Dink Stovers in the gondola of the hydrogen ship Inconvenience, "ascensionaries" into the blue yonder and characters in their own series of adventure books, pure of heart and brave of bone, with their "dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian and the ghostly" and their loyal sky-dog, Pugnax. Ordered about by authorities they never see, the balloon boys spy from above on World's Fair riffraff, looking for bomb-throwers; monitor the man-made lightning experiments of Nikola Tesla in Colorado in 1900 from a volcano in the Indian Ocean; witness the disinterring from Arctic ice of a sacred, serpent-figured odalisque, an incendiary "consciousness" that burns down a city much like New York; scour the "ancient sepia" of Venice in search of "the fabled Sfinciuno Itinerary, a map or chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself"; confound their shadowy enemies by disguising themselves as a harmonica band at Candlebrow University in Iowa, among "Russian nihilists with peculiar notions about the laws of history and reversible processes, Indian swamis concerned with the effect of time travel on the laws of Karma, [and] Sicilians with equal apprehensions for the principle of vendetta"; float their gassy boat all the way to Bukhara, where it turns out the people in charge are more interested in oil than in Shambhala; and somehow sense, in the sky above Flanders, on the road from Ypres, a tearing open of Time's fabric, and themselves "swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles" who find they will do what they must, "however shameful, to get from end to end of each corroded day." Although the Charter of the Chums of Chance, like the Federation's Prime Directive to the starship Enterprise, prohibits interference with the legal customs of any locality they touch down upon, of course they step in it. Think of them as America, meaning well with a boyish grin. It is the business of history and Pynchon to debauch their innocence. That such Peter Pans wind up pairing off with Tinkerbells--a Sodality of Aetheronauts "like a flock of February chaffinch," with metallic wings, machined feathers, black kidskin and nickel plating--is a Neverland of dime-novel wishful thinking. 2. Mathematicians, Magicians and Parapsychologists. These children of Hamilton, Tesla, Houdini and Blavatsky are all over the novel's world, from Cleveland, Colorado, Iowa and Yale to London, Iceland, Göttingen and Sarajevo. "Water falls, electricity flows--one flow becomes another, and thence into light," whose "revealed mysteries" drive mathematicians as mad as the Venetian mirror-makers. ("I want to know light," says one; "I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul, take some in my hands.") They imagine a map, somewhere in Riemann space-time, in which a linear axis becomes curvilinear, linear time thus becomes circular and eternal return is achieved. In the same way, the parapsychologists of T.W.I.T. (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys) seek in Orphic and Pythagorean mysticism, in Tarot cards, magic crystals and nut cutlets, a Golden Dawn of telekinesis and "a gateway to the Ulterior." Whereas magicians like Luca Zombini, with his "perfect mirrors" and Nicol prisms, wish merely to trick us into a disappearing cabinet. Where Quaternion meets Tetractys and Zombini is at the nexus of Iceland spar, a doubly refracting crystal that multiplies images so exactly as to unleash twinship and "the mysterious shamanic power known as bilocation" on an already schizzy situation. For mathematicians, magicians and mystagogues alike, not to mention double agents in all the information ministries, this refraction is a portal into an icy elsewhere--"pulses of color, dense sheets and billows and colonnades of light and current, in transfiguration unceasing"; "induced paramorphism," "ever-more-polycrystalline luminosities of meaning" and a "doubling of Creation." But also, much less cheerfully--"sinister unknowability," "unholy radiance," "nocturnal ghostways," "axes of sorrow and loss" and "a lethal impedance in the air, as if something malevolent were making every exertion to take form and be released upon the world in long, dry, cracking percussions, as if jarring the fabric of four-space itself." I will not pretend to grasp all this. In a Richard Powers novel, I am almost persuaded that I could crack the genetic code myself, given his elegant instructions. In a Pynchon, I just go with the metaphoric flow, which turns out to be a long way. At least none of it is contradicted by the latest string theories, with their "extra" dimensions and "supersymmetry." It is suggested here that such fraught light, converted maybe into lasers, was somehow responsible for the Tunguska Event in Siberia in June 1908, where an explosion in the nuclear range, equivalent to ten to twenty megatons of TNT, felled 60 million trees over 830 square miles. Instead of comets, asteroids, earthquakes or ball lightning, why not Chernobyl--"the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation," after which, for a while, reindeer flew, clocks ran backward and wolves walked into churches to quote Scripture. But "we of the futurity" are not required to take this suggestion seriously. We know what really happened when atomic physicists went into the Los Alamos desert, took light in their hands and broke it like a pencil. And a lot of good it did us to quote Sanskrit. 3. Anarchists and Those Who Love Them. Instead of up in the air or abstractions, they are down in caves, tunneling for railroads, mining metals. Our hero here is Webb Traverse, who, as a hoistman, singlejacker and even assistant foreman in the Colorado silver mines, "never saw a minute that didn't belong to somebody else"; whose membership card in the Western Federation of Miners reads, as if auditioning for a part in the nostalgia craze, "Labor produces all the wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof"; whose clandestine identity is the Kieselguhr Kid, a dynamiter of anything owned by those "Plutonic powers" who "daily sent their legions of gnomes underground to hollow out as much of that broken domain as they could before the overburden collapsed, often as not on top of their heads"; who is murdered by thugs in the employ of the railroad tycoon Scarsdale Vibe; who must be avenged by his three sons, who are likewise stalked by assassins--Reef, a gambling man who leaves the country when the heat turns up, to tunnel in the Alps; Kit, a mathematician who goes first to Yale, then Göttingen and finally Tibet; and Frank, who spends most of this book fighting on the losing side in the Mexican Revolution. As Vineland reminded us of a lost history of radical politics on the West Coast; of union organizing in mines, logging camps and canneries; of strikes against San Joaquin cotton, Ventura beets and Venice lettuce; of Tom Mooney, Harry Bridges and the '50s blacklists, so Against the Day gives us a remarkable sense of a working-class culture with "a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be," under permanent siege; of stockmen, gunsmiths, drovers, barkeeps, remittance men and pharmacy drummers "with giant sample valises full of nerve tonics and mange pills"; meat-packing scars, needlework squints, drift, squat, fatigue, foreclosure, unemployment and dispossession; scabs, militias, vigilantes, the National Guard and the Ku Klux Klan; bullpens and bayonets, Bakunin and Kropotkin, Joe Hill and Viva Zapata. All that needs to be said of Yashmeen Halfcourt, girl mathematician; Wren Provenance, girl anthropologist; Dahlia Rideout, girl stage personality; and Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, girl trampoline, is that women get in the way of vengeance. Already, from Gravity's Rainbow, you should know about Pynchon and kinky sex. What happens here belongs more to the sociology of Weimar Republic fetish clubs than to the political science of class war. 4. Bad Guys. They are capitalists, Pinkertons, diplomats and double agents. "Smite early and often," says Scarsdale Vibe. Since they have hollowed out the earth with their technologies of desire, we root for a hard fall and reciprocal sucking. But they almost always get away with it, so why give them any more time of day? Instead, I hold out a forlorn hope for the Tatzelwurm we meet in the tunnels between Switzerland and Italy, a snake with paws, a serpent of resentment, a "primordial plasm of hate and punishment at the center of the Earth." If Reef, Kit and Frank fail to avenge their father, maybe the Tatzelwurm will. But as if, too, there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from the sea-lanes to be of use as a coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fuel deposits, desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left forever immune to the bad luck and worse judgment infesting the politics of the Continents--a place promised them, not by God, which'd be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next. --Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day Pynchon actually imagines an Anarchist spa, Yz-Les-Bains, a Big Rock Candy Mountain for resting-up Wobblies, hidden in the foothills of the Pyrenees. To which he adds sprinkles--an Anarchist golf game, like croquet with flamingos in Alice in Wonderland, like the Mad Hatter's high tea. Another mirror heard from. I mentioned Newton's third law of motion, which assures us that for every force acting on a body, the body exerts a force of equal magnitude in the opposite direction along the same line as the original. It would be comforting to think that something so straightforward applied as well to human behavior; that we could count on a balancing of the ethical books at the end of every bloody day; that there was some sort of entropic jurisprudence, according to which a pissed-off moral universe insisted on recovering its equilibrium; that the return of the repressed is a sure thing. On the one hand, as Ruperta explains to her London friends: "I can never claim forgiveness from anyone. Somehow, I alone, for every single wrong act in my life, must find a right one to balance it. I may not have that much time left." On the other, the Red Reverend Moss Gatlin can't be clearer: "If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? It must be negotiated with the day, from those absolute terms." Pynchon himself suggests that somewhere below ground, or buried at either pole, or waiting in ambush on the other side of a portal, a membrane or a looking glass, invisible forces mass to motion like an angry Wormwood, for payback time. In his Mexico, the gringos can't sleep at night in their grand villas for fear of the bolero and fandango to come. There were tunnels, channels, sewers, trollfolk and a polar redoubt in V as well. In The Crying of Lot 49 there was Tristero, a subterranean signal system for the dispossessed in "a separate, silent, unsuspected world" of squatters "living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication." Underground in Gravity's Rainbow there was Dora, the prison camp and Mittelkwerke city of rockets and salt; and "the invisible kingdom" of crematoria ghosts on the other side of Pökler's vacuums; and the Schwarzkommandos who believed that the unappeased souls of their dead were waiting in the Arctic. In Vineland, besides Thanatoids and Indian spirits, there were the dolphinlike woge who hid beneath the ocean to see what we did with their world. In Mason & Dixon, to avenge the shadow-land shapes of the shamefully martyred and nameless dead against such puppet masters as the Royal Society and the British East India Company, there were dream-bodies, ghost-fish, black dogs, werewolves and Gnostic remnants. Remember the "luminous Phantoms" Mason saw, carrying bowls, bones, drums and incense, "flowing by thick as Eels," "ever and implacably cruel, hiding, haunting, waiting,--known only to the blood-scented deserts of the Night." Now consult again the wonderful quotation in Vineland from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience: Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. Except that in Vineland, just as the People's Republic of Rock and Roll failed to survive government repression in the '60s, so Zoyd Wheeler's "harbor of refuge" in the California redwoods fell in the '80s to narcs, RICOs, Reaganauts, tree-killers, earth-rapers, television anchorfaces, yuppie greedheads and the death-loving Wasteland thought police, in spite of the best efforts of kickass woman warrior DL Chastain, whose martial artistry included the Vibrating Palm, the Hidden Foot, the Enraged Sparrow and the "truly unspeakable" Gojira no Chimopira. And in our own brave new twenty-first century it's not only hard to find a spare Wobbly, but where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police the words in our mouths and the behaviors in our bed while sorehead cable blabbercasters rant them on. Blood lust, wet dreams, collateral damage and extraordinary rendition; Halliburton and Abu Ghraib; an erotics of property, a theology of greed and a holy war on the poor, the old, the sick, the odd and the other--when oh when will the Tatzelwurm turn? None of this, of course, is news to Pynchon, which is why we're left with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a plaintive ukulele.

Was listening last night to Dennis Gonzalez's "Nile River Suite" where Campbell and Grimes have several sections of duo improv. The performance tonight was to have included Chad Taylor on drums, too, who backed out to meet up with the band in Detroit and go on to Chicago. I asked if they might consider using a local drummer and Campbell declined saying he is looking forward to playing duo with Henry. Hearing Roy in such an exposed setting for an hour is rare in these parts. The duo of Marshall Allen and Grimes played on the air here, you may recall, and in that Allen played alto, clarinet and EWI, giving the "duo" a great deal of range. It will be interesting to hear Grimes with "just" trumpet or flugelhorn for the best part of an hour.

Wednesday, November 29th from 10 - 11 p.m. est: Henry Grimes & Roy Campbell, Jr. broadcast live from the studios of Blue Lake Public Radio over WBLV FM 90.3/WBLU FM 88.9, Grand Rapids, MI, and stream live over the Internet from www.bluelake.org/radio.html . This performance is underwritten by Family Budget Service of Grand Rapids. Host, Lazaro Vega; engineer, Steve Albert. Blue Lake Public Radio is the broadcast service of Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, Twin Lake, MI. http://bluelake.ncats.net For more information about bassist Henry Grimes please see www.henrygrimes.com. Mr. Grimes reports he'll play violin as well as bass on this tour. The biography of trumpeter Roy Campbell takes the reader to his roots in the music of Lee Morgan and Booker Little: www.roycampbellmusic.com/Roybio.html . Thanks to www.theweathervaneinn.net * Thursday, November 3Oth: Henry Grimes Trio w/ Roy Campbell, Jr. & Chad Taylor, Bohemian National Home, 3OO9 Tillman St. Detroit, (street map http://tinyurl.com/ts25w), doors at 8 p.m., music from 8:3O, 313-737-66O6, www.myspace.com/bohemiannationalhome, newdetroitsounds@hotmail.com. * Friday & Saturday, December 1st and 2nd: Henry Grimes Trio w/ Roy Campbell, Jr. & Chad Taylor + special guest Fred Anderson, the new Velvet Lounge, 67 East Cermak Rd. betw. Michigan & Wabash, Chicago, music from 9 p.m., 312-791-9O5O, www.velvetlounge.net, http://tinyurl.com/yhjteo (directions). Lazaro Vega, Jazz Director Blue Lake Public Radio 300 E. Crystal Lake Road Twin Lake MI 49457 www.bluelake.org radio@bluelake.org (231) 894-5656

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Looking forward to a day in Flint, Michigan, with 40 relatives from my wife's side. Friday my sisters and their families will come out to the lake and we'll have white chili and hang out. Much to be thankful for here.

November 21, 2006 Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81 By RICK LYMAN Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than half a century but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one decade, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed today by a friend, the singer Annie Ross. The cause was not announced. Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony. A risk-taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman is perhaps best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in 1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary. They were free-wheeling, genre-bending films that captured the jaded disillusionment of the 70s. The best known was “MASH,” the 1970 comedy set in a field hospital during the Korean war but clearly aimed at antiwar sentiments engendered by Vietnam. Its success, both critically and at the box office, opened the way for Mr. Altman to pursue his ambitions. In 1971 he took on the Western, making “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. In 1972, he dramatized a woman’s psychological disintegration in “Images,” starring Susannah York. In 1973, he tackled the private-eye genre with a somewhat loopy adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye,” with the laid-back Elliott Gould playing Philip Marlowe as a 70s retro-hipster. And in 1974 he released two films, exploring gambling addiction in “California Split” and riffing on the Dust Bowl gangster saga with “Thieves Like Us.” Unlike most directors whose flames burned brightest in the early 1970s — and frequently flickered out — Mr. Altman did not come to Hollywood from critical journals and newfangled film schools. He had had a long career in industrial films and television. In an era that celebrated fresh voices steeped in film history — young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese — Mr. Altman was like their bohemian uncle, matching the young rebels in their skeptical disdain for the staid conventions of mainstream filmmaking and the establishment that supported it. Most of his actors adored him and praised his improvisational style. But Mr. Altman was also famous in Hollywood for his battles with everyone from studio executives to his collaborators, leaving more burned bridges than the Luftwaffe. He also suffered through periods of bad reviews and empty seats. But if there were fallow times, there were as many comebacks, including most recently in 2001 with “Gosford Park,” a multiple-Oscar nominee for which he received his seventh Academy Award nomination, including five for directing. Many younger filmmakers continued to admire him as an uncompromising artist who held to his vision in the face of business pressures and who was unjustly overlooked by a film establishment grown fat on special effects and feel-good movies. In his prime, Mr. Altman was celebrated for his ground-breaking use of multilayer soundtracks. An Altman film might offer a babble of voices competing for attention in crowded, smoky scenes. It was a kind of improvisation that offered a fresh verisimilitude to tired, stagey Hollywood genres. He was often referred to as a cult director, and it rankled him. “What is a cult?” Mr. Altman said. “It just means not enough people to make a minority.” The Breakthrough The storyline had to do with a group of oversexed, booze-soaked Army doctors in a front-line hospital, specifically a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Fifteen directors had already turned the job down. But at 45, Mr. Altman signed on, and the movie, “MASH,” became his breakthrough. Audiences particularly connected with the authority-bashing attitude of the film’s irreverent doctors, Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Mr. Gould). “The heroes are always on the side of decency and sanity; that’s why they’re contemptuous of the bureaucracy,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “They are heroes because they are competent and sane and gallant, and in this insane situation their gallantry takes the form of scabrous comedy.” The villains were not the Communist enemy but the marble-hearted military bureaucrats, personified by the pious Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and the hypocritical Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for best picture and one for Mr. Altman’s direction, and it won the Golden Palm, or Palme d’Or, the top award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and the best picture of the year award of the National Society of Film Critics. But it was denied the best-picture Oscar; that award went to “Patton.” Mr. Altman went on to receive four more Academy Award nominations for best director, and two more of producing two best picture nominees, “Nashville” and “Gosford Park.” The only Oscar he received, however, was an honorary one, in 2006. Mr. Altman was angry that the lone Oscar given to “MASH” went to Ring Lardner Jr., who got sole screen credit for the script. Mr. Altman openly disparaged Mr. Lardner’s work, touching off one of his many feuds. Later, when Mr. Altman seemed unable to duplicate the mix of critical and box-office success that “MASH” had achieved, he grew almost disdainful of the film. “ ‘MASH’ was a pretty good movie,” Mr. Altman said in an interview. “It wasn’t what 20th Century- Fox thought it was going to be. They almost, when they saw it, cut all the blood out. I fought with my life for that. The picture speaks for itself. It became popular because of the timing. Consequently, it’s considered important, but it’s no better or more important than any of the other films I’ve made.” Mr. Altman’s interest in film genres was candidly subversive. He wanted to explode them to expose what he saw as their phoniness. He decided to make “McCabe and Mr. Miller” for just that reason. “I got interested in the project because I don’t like Westerns,” Mr. Altman said. “So I pictured a story with every Western cliché in it.” His intention, he said, was to drain the glamour from the West and show it as it really was — filthy, vermin-infested, whisky-soaked and ruled by thugs with guns. His hero, McCabe (Mr. Beatty), was a dim-witted dreamer who let his cockiness and his love for a drug-addicted prostitute (Ms. Christie) undo him. “These events took place,” Mr. Altman said, of Westerns in general, “But not in the way you’ve been told. I wanted to look at it through a different window, you might say, but I still wanted to keep the poetry in the ballad.” The critic Terrence Rafferty regarded “McCabe” as “among the greatest movies of its time.” “Nashville” interweaved the stories of 24 characters — country-western stars, housewives, boozers, political operators, oddball drifters — who move in and out of one another’s lives in the closing days of a fictional presidential primary. Mr. Altman returned to this panoramic, multicharacter approach several times (in “A Wedding,” “Health,” “Short Cuts,” “Prêt-à-Porter” and “Kansas City”), but never again to such devastating effect. “ ‘Nashville’ is a radical, evolutionary leap,” Ms. Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “Altman has already accustomed us to actors who don’t look as if they’re acting; he’s attuned us to the comic subtleties of a multiple-track sound system that makes the sound more live than it ever was before; and he’s evolved an organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot. Now he dissolves the frame, so that we feel the continuity between what’s on the screen and life off-camera.” Mr. Altman’s career stalled after “Nashville,” although he continued to attract top actors. Paul Newman starred in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” in 1976, Sissy Spacek in “Three Women” in 1977 and Mr. Newman again in “Quintet” in 1979. But critical opinion turned against Mr. Altman in the late 70s, and his films fared worse and worse at the box office. The crushing blow came in 1980, when Mr. Altman directed Robin Williams in a lavish musical based on the “Popeye” cartoon. Though it eventually achieved modest commercial success, the movie was considered a dud because it made less money than had been expected and drew almost universal scorn from the critics. It was Mr. Altman’s last big-budget studio picture. Mr. Altman retained his critical champions, including Ms. Kael and Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who in 1982 called Mr. Altman one of “our greatest living directors.” But the tide had turned against him. In “Fore My Eyes,” a 1980 collection of film essays, Stanley Kauffmann spoke for many critics when he derided what he saw as the director’s middle-brow pretensions. “He’s the film equivalent of the advertising-agency art director who haunts the galleries to keep his eye fresh,” Mr. Kauffmann wrote. If Mr. Altman never fully regained his critical pre-eminence, he came close, recapturing much of his luster in the final years of his life. And he always kept in the game. He remade his career in the early 80s with a string of films based on stage dramas: Ed Graczyk’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” in 1982, David Rabe’s “Streamers” in 1983 and Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” in 1985. He also did some fresh work for television, a medium he had reviled when he left it two decades earlier. In 1988, he directed a strong television adaptation of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” restoring the class conflict and anti-Semitism that had been excised from the 1954 Hollywood version starring Humphrey Bogart. In the early 90s he had a pair of critical successes with “The Player,” an acerbic satire based on the Michael Tolkin novel about a ruthless Hollywood executive, and “Short Cuts,” an episodic, character-filled drama based on the short stories of Raymond Carver. The films earned him his third and fourth Oscar nominations for best director. Then, in 2001, came “Gosford Park,” an elaborate murder mystery with an ensemble cast that capped his comeback and tied him with Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Clarence Brown and King Vidor as the directors who had received the most Oscar nominations, five, without winning one. His last film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” based on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, was released in June. Writing in The Times, A.O. Scott called it a minor Altman work “but a treasure all the same.” “I seem to have become like one of those old standards, in musical terms,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “Always around. Lauren Bacall said to me, ‘You just don’t quit, do you?’ Guess not.” Son of a Salesman Robert Bernard Altman was born on Feb. 20, 1925, in Kansas City, Mo., to Helen and B.C. Altman , a prosperous insurance salesman for the Kansas City Life Insurance Company. Mr. Altman’s grandfather, the developer Frank G. Altman, had built the Altman Building, a five-story retail mecca in downtown Kansas City. (It was razed in 1974.) Young Robert attended Catholic schools and the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., before enlisting in the Air Force in 1945, eventually becoming a co-pilot on a B-24. It was during this period that he invented what he called “Identi-code,” a method for tattooing numbers on household pets to help identify them if they were lost or stolen; he even talked President Harry S. Truman into having one of his dogs tattooed. After the Air Force, Mr. Altman went to work with the Calvin Company, a film company in Kansas City, making training films, advertisements and documentaries for industrial clients. In 1947 he married LaVonne Elmer, but they divorced two years later after they had had a daughter, Christine. He married Lotus Corelli in 1950, and they divorced in 1955, having had two sons, Michael, who wrote lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless,” the “MASH” theme song, when he was just 14, and Stephen, a film production designer who worked frequently with his father. Mr. Altman began to set his sights on Hollywood while still working in Kansas City. His first screen credit came for co-writing “Bodyguard,” a 1948 B-picture about a hard-boiled detective. It was not until 1955 that he actually headed for Hollywood; he had received a call offering him a job directing an episode of the television series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Over the next decade, he directed dozens of episodes of “Maverick,” “Lawman,” “Peter Gunn,” “Bonanza,” “Hawaiian Eye,” “Route 66,” “Combat!” and “Kraft Suspense Theater.” It was while on the set of “The Whirlybirds” that Mr. Altman met his third wife, Kathryn Reed, and they married in 1957. They had two sons, Robert and Matthew. Connie Altman was a stepdaughter from Ms. Reed’s previous marriage. Information on Mr. Altman’s survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Altman got his first crack at feature filmmaking in 1968. The film, “Countdown,” starring James Caan and Robert Duvall and shot on a shoestring, was a critically praised drama about the first flight to the moon. He followed that up in 1969 with “That Cold Day in the Park,” a psychological thriller starring Sandy Dennis as a woman driven mad by her sex urges. In 1970, he made what is perhaps his strangest film, “Brewster McCloud,” about a nerdish youth who wants to build his own flying machine and whiz around the Houston Astrodome. Then came “MASH.” In later ears he gathered around him a company of favored performers, among them Mr. Gould, Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen and Keith Carradine. Many of his sets were celebrated for their party atmosphere, which often came through on the screen. He thought that creating a casual mood helped him expand the boundaries of filmmaking. To achieve his vision, Mr. Altman was willing to battle studio executives over the financing of his films and his ultimate creative control. “Robert Altman is an artist and a gambler,” his longtime assistant director, Alan Rudolph, wrote in a 1994 tribute in Film Comment. “Pursuing artistic vision on film in America can sometimes put everything you own at risk.” When a studio refused to distribute Mr. Rudolph’s first film, “Welcome to L.A.,” Mr. Altman responded by forming his own independent distribution company, Lion’s Gate, for the sole purpose of releasing the film. It was a harbinger of the independent film companies of the 80s and 90s. “There’s a big resistance to me,” Mr. Altman told The Washington Post in 1990. “They say, ‘Oh, he’s going to double-cross us somewhere.’ When I explain what I want to do, they can’t see it, because I’m trying to deliver something that they haven’t seen before. And they don’t realize that that’s the very reason they should buy it.” Mr. Altman acknowledged that his career had suffered as a consequence of his own behavior — his hard-drinking, procrastination and irascibility, his problem with authority. He also had a long history of bitter relations with screenwriters. Many complained that he injected himself into the rewriting process and took credit for work he did not do. But many actors said they loved working with Mr. Altman because of the leeway he gave them in interpreting the script and in improvising in their scenes. “For somebody like me who likes to hang out with my pals and goof off and take the path of least resistance,” said Sally Kellerman, “he’s wonderful that way.” Mr. Altman said giving actors freedom could draw things out of them that they did not know were there. “I look for actors where there’s something going on there, behind that mask,” Mr. Altman said. “Tim Robbins fascinated me. This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there and I don’t know what it is.” He never mellowed in his view of the movie business. “The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for, they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie. There’s no overview. No one says, ‘Forty years from now, who’s going to want to see this?’ No visionaries.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

November 17, 2006 Listening With | Maria Schneider Keeping the Notes Dancing and Flying By BEN RATLIFF Clipped to the music desk of Maria Schneider’s upright piano is a picture of the ballerina Sylvie Guillem. Spread out all over it a few weeks ago were sketches for a new composition, “Cerulean Skies,” for a festival in Vienna programmed by Peter Sellars, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. It is a piece about the migration of birds, and Ms. Schneider has been struggling with it, trying to get the right quality of motion. When she composes, she often plays a sequence into a tape recorder, then gets up to play it back, and moves around the room to the phrases of the music, seeing how it feels when danced. “It helps me figure out where things are, and what needs to be longer,” she said. Much of Maria Schneider’s large- ensemble jazz of the last six years has been nearly a figurative description of long-flow movement, particularly dancing or flying. And even when that’s not what it’s really about — as it is in her piece “Hang Gliding” or the various dances represented in her suite “Three Romances” — that’s still, in a sense, what it’s really about. In her Upper West Side apartment Ms. Schneider, 45, composes at the piano; onstage she stands and conducts her band, which ranges from 17 to 20 musicians, and which will take up residence at Jazz Standard next week. Judging herself a mediocre pianist, she doesn’t play the instrument onstage; she is one of the few well-known jazz composers who do not perform with their own ensembles. It is extremely unlikely in these times for a jazz composer who isn’t also an instrumental star to keep a 17-piece band more or less intact for 13 years. But she has managed it, through grants and ambitious touring and, recently, an innovative system of releasing recordings through the online label ArtistShare, which treats customers as “members,” allowing them not only to preorder her new music at standard CD prices but, for a little more, to see how its various parts are coming together, via streaming-video updates. Both the open, flowing sound of Ms. Schneider’s music and its hopeful, nearly naïve sense of possibility make some sense when laid against the details of her life. Ms. Schneider and her two sisters grew up in rural southwest Minnesota, in an agricultural town called Windom, 150 miles from Minneapolis. “We had all these big picture windows,” she said recently, “and you’d look out the window and you’d see nothin’.” She smiled. Ms. Schneider is blond and slim, with large, deep-set eyes. When she talks about her art, or about music that she likes, her dry voice flushes and cracks, and she straightens her body and moves her limbs to express something. “When your entertainment isn’t provided for you,” she continued, “your life is full of fantasy.” As a girl Ms. Schneider would play the piano and imagine that New York talent scouts might be driving nearby in cars with radio antennae that could pick up her music and discover her. “So I was always on, prepared for one of these talent scouts.” Her father designed machinery for processing flax, and his company required him to get a pilot’s license so he could fly to flax fields in Canada and North Dakota. He kept his plane in a hangar behind the family garage, and he would often take Ms. Schneider flying with him. “When you’re in a small plane, and it banks — when the plane goes like this?” She turned her flat palm to a 90-degree angle. “The earth looked perpendicular to the wing, and I used to look at the earth and think that we were straight. I didn’t think that we were tilted.” Ms. Schneider learned something about musical motion with Gil Evans, the great composer and arranger, who died in 1988. After attending the Eastman School of Music, She moved to New York and worked as his assistant, copying scores, transcribing things, helping Evans with arrangements. He never helped her directly with her music — she didn’t presume to ask — but she has since become, in a sense, his best-known contemporary student. And her work has been frequently compared to his, which, she says, suggests that people don’t understand his work much. But it is an almost inescapable conclusion: He is the precedent for her, the Impressionism-influenced jazz composer who recused himself as a pianist from some of his greatest work, created his own sound colors and didn’t make typical “big band” jazz. She put on “Concierto de Aranjuez,” from “Sketches of Spain,” one of Evans’s collaborations with Miles Davis. It starts with castanets and harp; then soft orchestral lines move in for the theme, before Davis enters, a minute into the piece. “Check this out,” she said. Davis enters with a soft flourish, and the orchestra goes into a kind of slow motion. “You know how Armani knows how to dress a woman up and make her look just incredible?” she asked. “Gil knew how to dress a soloist and make that soloist so beautiful, you know? So there’s all this fluttering — this movement, the tuba’s playing these melodies, there’s all these things going on — and when Miles enters, everything stops.” As if stirring to life again, more lines form after a minute, with curious crisscrossing momentum; it sounds improvised, but it was all was precisely composed. Ms. Schneider once conducted the piece from a transcription; then she did it again after Evans’s original scores were found. She was amazed by the difference. “I saw everything in them, and that’s when I realized: It’s like a watch, where every little gear attaches to something else. The music and the soloist are an inseparable entity.” What’s important to Ms. Schneider isn’t just standing in front of a band and having it play her music, but setting up structures for the improvisers so that their phrasing becomes part of the music, which then becomes part of her, so that it changes her subsequent writing. (The bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie evolved in much the same way.) Certainly a similarly trusting approach applies to her unusual new method of making records. With a movie camera, or a digital audio recorder, Ms. Schneider documents each stage of a new piece of music, including recording sessions, even problematic recording sessions. The video can be streamed from her Web site, mariaschneider.com. This is quite an act of transparency for someone who comes across as extremely anxious about the creative process. But it seems to have worked: “Concert in the Garden,” her latest record and her first with ArtistShare, won a Grammy last year. She says the process proves that a good piece can result from unpromising beginnings. And she needs regular access to that proof. The turnaround moment for her band was her album “Allegresse,” from 2000. Around that time her music lost some of its academic stuffiness and its obsession with vertical harmony. Part of this, she explains, was a result of her having spent time in Brazil in 1998. “I was going through tough times in my life,” she said. “When we landed in Rio and I saw the landscape, I knew my life was going to change.” She put on a track called “A Maldade Não Tem Fim,” from an album by Velha Guarda da Portela, the dynastic group formed by the elders of the Portela samba school, which competes annually in Rio’s carnival. It’s a lovely song, typical of its kind: trombone over the mandolinlike cavaquinho and the tambourinelike pandeiros; a male voice singing the verses scratchily, a thunder of voices coming in on the chorus. “What I love in Brazilian music,” Ms. Schneider said, “is that the way they’re singing is sustenance. It’s not about making music either for entertainment or for the conservatory — you know, music is here” — she spread her hands apart — “and your life is here. Life and music are one. The music I love is necessary for life, for survival. “Flamenco: it makes living possible. Blues, and early jazz: it made living possible. Samba is like alchemy. It turns pain into joy, into magic. My music was very intense and serious and very jazz, even though it was influenced by classical music.” But after the trip to Brazil, “my priorities changed,” she said. “I really didn’t care if my music impressed anybody anymore, or if it was complex.” When she got home, she didn’t immediately start writing in the style of samba. She began borrowing rhythm, loosely, from the more jazz-influenced choro style of Brazilian music. Later she moved toward flamenco, with its 12/8 buleria rhythm. She has since become obsessed with the accordion as a new voice in her ensemble; to several pieces she has added a cajon, the percussive wooden box of Peruvian music, and she hasn’t written with swing rhythm since. She is still a jazz composer, by self-identification, working with jazz improvisers. But the music is pulling further away from any sort of conventional jazz. “Sometimes I feel like, in the world of jazz, people think that more chromaticism all the time is going to make their music hipper,” she said disappointedly. “It’s like, no. Music is a time-oriented art. So it’s how you play a person’s attention through time. “I mean, here and there you’ll capture an experience in jazz that just makes you go ....” She opened her eyes wide and gasped. “But to me it happens less and less, and I think that’s because musicians think they have to keep playing more and more. Sometimes I leave those clubs and come home and listen to Bach cello suites. One line. Some space around one note. Or nothing. Nothing for weeks on end.” Finally she wanted — really wanted — to hear “Up — Up and Away,” the hit by the Fifth Dimension, written by Jimmy Webb. It entered her bloodstream when she was a girl, she said. During the first lyric line (“Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?”), Ms. Schneider cocked a finger. “Now check this out,” she said. ”Modulation, up a minor fifth. That’s the flying modulation. It’s all over my new music.” She mentioned a few of her songs that contained similar modulations: “Hang Gliding,” “Coming About.” “And now: up another minor third.” (The Fifth Dimension was singing, “For we can flyyy ...”) “Now it’s going down—let’s see — a major third. And you hear the flutes?” (They appeared after the line “It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon.”) “That’s Gil Evans, I’m sorry.” (The influence is entirely possible: the arrangements were by Marty Paich, a West Coast jazz arranger and a contemporary of Evans.) She seemed self-conscious that she was praising an AM radio tune from her childhood in terms that should be reservied for Major Works of Art. But she raved: “Jimmy Webb is a genius, I’m sorry. That tune modulates six times, if not more. Ah. I get chills. Am I crazy? Who could dare to write that? It modulates as much as ‘Giant Steps’ does.” (She was referring to the John Coltrane composition, of which she has written her own inventive arrangement.) Motion, flying, nostalgia: it seems important, this thing about flying in your father’s plane, I said, a little embarrassed by the obviousness of the psychology. To my surprise, she grew excited. “Maybe because of the motion, the openness and the motion,” she said. “I never thought about it.” The Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra will appear Tuesday and Wednesday, and Nov. 24 and 26, at Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.net; cover, $30. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/arts/mus...&oref=login

I'm working on it. Good reading so far. Her marriage to Alfred Lion and then Max Gordon put her in the thick of it. There's a little passage in there where she talks about somebody trying to get into a club for free, it may have been Alfred, and says because of that experience she doesn't make anyone dance at the door of the Vanguard. And it dawned on me the last time I was there, heard Lou Donaldson, I paid but then later mentioned working in jazz radio and she refunded the cover charge and wouldn't hear about it any other way.

Sounds good to me Jim.

Yes, I have heard the 80th Birthday concert and enjoy it -- the electric guitar is a strong solo voice on the album, there's a live version of "The African Game" and "Electric Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature" (the 3rd version of it now on record?), and a wispy, eerie vehicle for Palle Mikelborg (sp) in "Listen to the Silence." Russell is an important enough artist to investigate for his infrequent releases. Yes, some of the music on the 80th Birthday Concert goes on a bit too long, and some folks aren't tolerant of electronic textures in jazz, but this music is fine by me. If you want to hear it I can play it on the radio for you. Be sure to read the reviews in the page you linked above.