Dr. Rat

ON MUSIC The Body Eclectic by David Hajdu Post date: 02.03.04 Issue date: 02.09.04 Dave Douglas Strange Liberation (RCA) If this paragraph were a piece of music by Dave Douglas, it would make a summing-up statement here at the beginning, then proceed in reverse motion until it ended with an introduction of its main theme. Or it would start with a core idea and build through accretion, amassing in layers instead of progressing conventionally in any direction. Phrases would be planned exactingly to sound spontaneous, and improvised parts would take off on subtle compositional elements such as timbre. The vernacular and the formal would conjoin. You would recognize the musical vocabulary as jazz, but in averting conventions it would seem like a strange new language. And if this paragraph were a second piece by Douglas, it would sound very little like the last one. It would differ in style as well as form, and the piece to follow it would be wholly unlike both its predecessors. Not long ago Douglas performed for a week at the Village Vanguard with a jazz group modeled on one of Miles Davis's classic quintets (trumpet, saxophone, Rhodes electric piano, bass, and drums). Less than a month later he was at Carnegie Hall, playing lyrical obbligato trumpet with the jazz singer and pianist Patricia Barber. Within two weeks of that, he was at Tonic, the artsy club on the Lower East Side, where he experimented with electronic music--one member of his band was doing record scratches on a turntable, another was generating digital samples with a PowerBook. Nine days later Douglas showed up at CBGBs to do a "free-jazz" session, improvising without prepared music. It is difficult to imagine any other person working in all of those settings, even if he or she were doing the sound or the lights. A record store could stock Dave Douglas CDs in at least seven different categories: jazz, avant-garde, chamber music, electronic music, world, folk, and (perhaps most accurately) miscellaneous. One of his albums is a tribute to the big-band composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, its music played by a traditional jazz combo; another features variations on "Vanitas Vanitatum" by Robert Schumann, arranged for trumpet, guitar, and drums; another has an adaptation of a folk tune from Burma, scored for violin and cello; another includes a re-write of the Goldfinger movie theme for trumpet, violin, accordion, and bass; another is a modern-dance score with Japanese drums. Douglas's last CD, Freak-in, was an all-electronic recording, his first in that element, an amalgam of processed sounds and digital samples with a couple of traditional jazz instruments (Douglas's trumpet, a saxophone, others) mixed in; and his latest release, Strange Liberation, is a vintage-style album of small-band jazz with the guitarist Bill Frisell joining Douglas's working quintet. While others in the music business grouse about the fragmentation of the marketplace, Douglas is a step ahead: he has himself fragmented his own career. Jazz is going through a new phase, and Dave Douglas seems to embody it neatly. For most of the previous two decades, a period anticipating the centennial of jazz's origins around the turn of the last century, the jazz world had seemed fixated on its history. A generation of young musicians, led by the gifted and charismatic Wynton Marsalis, challenged its immediate predecessors (as every musical generation tends to do, one way or another) by charging that the electronic experimentation and rock-oriented "fusion" of the 1960s and '70s had not advanced the music through innovation, but had debased it by forfeiting the musical elements that had made earlier styles of jazz feel jazzy--and also black: that is, the blues and the syncopated rhythm of swing. In the name of restoring jazz to its past greatness, honoring the legacy of its iconic masters, and preserving its identity as a mode of African American expression, Marsalis and his acolytes institutionalized a canonical approach to jazz, a jazz like subscription concert music, and as in all canons the music began to harden in that mold. More recently, jazz has been refreshed and rejuvenated by many of the same external influences--pop and rock, world music, the Western classical tradition, the avant-garde--that classicists were disclaiming as corruptive just a few years ago. Cassandra Wilson is singing Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson songs; Bill Frisell has made a bluegrass-style CD; the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano has recorded an homage to Enrico Caruso, arranged in the vein of an Italian street band; the alto saxophonist Greg Osby is composing for jazz instruments and string quartet; and the pianist Danilo Perez has composed a suite inspired by the music of his native Panama. "The world is scattered--I think it's just the way things work now," Douglas has remarked. He speaks and comports himself as he plays his trumpet, with seemingly effortless vigor. He is equally adroit at cooking up musical experiments and articulating their intent. "Everyone's looking for where is jazz going, where is music going?" he told me. "It's going up and down and in every direction at once. Everybody's doing a million different things. It used to be that you look at Coltrane's career or at Miles's career and they went from this to this to this and then to this, and it was kind of a progression. There's no logical reason other than me learning that I've gone from one group to a different one and then another different one. Having all the different bands and writing different kinds of music is me trying to not be in a trap. How differently can I play? How different can I make a new project? Without the pressure, what are you really doing?" While every coffee bar in gentrified Brooklyn may be full of smart, bespectacled white men who can talk up the dernier cri, Douglas's sort has not been at the center of the jazz world since the 1950s, when Dave Brubeck took the music northeasterly to the realm of "third-stream" intellectualism. Douglas has become one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the day, winning the major jazz awards for composition and performance, playing concerts around the world. Among jazzheads as pedigreed as the historian and conductor Gunther Schuller, he has been praised as not only an important contemporary jazz voice but as a primary creator whose innovations may have the capacity to influence a new generation of musicians. "In my pantheon of composers," Schuller says, "are those who not only write masterpieces and all of that, but who also write music which presents a new modus vivendi, a new way of going forward in music--composers who create something that is bigger than themselves even, so that others can feed on that contribution for decades, and [Douglas] has that already, not in the magnitude of a Beethoven or an Ellington--yet--but he's certainly, in my view, in that league, on that level of creativity." Like Brubeck, Douglas has garnered acclaim in part for transplanting some ideas from Western concert music to jazz-oriented situations, in course raising questions about the authenticity of his work as jazz. More significantly and originally, Douglas has drawn from a range of other, less conventional influences such as Balkan folk music, Japanese drumming, electronica, and the American pop radio of his suburban youth. Douglas's music, in its quirky globalist eclecticism and unorthodoxy, is an overt challenge to the primacy of the tenets of swing and the blues in the jazz aesthetic. Douglas himself prefers not to call his music jazz. "I hesitate to use the word jazz now," Douglas explains, "because it's so fraught with tension. I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that a lot of people feel that some of what I do is not jazz, and if I can grow into something that's beyond a jazz musician, I would be perfectly proud of that. However, when I hear people use the word jazz in a way that I disagree with, I get this really angry and proprietary feeling of wanting to protect the word, so on some level it means something to me. When I see that someone is trying to limit what jazz can be and shut certain people out of the house, I feel that they're cutting an avenue of exploration and ingenuity, and I feel that it's bad for the genre, because the genre dies if it can't change. There's no artistic need to put a door on genres and styles, absolutely none." He does not see tradition and innovation as mutually exclusive in jazz or whatever you call it. To the contrary, Douglas considers innovation the essence of the jazz tradition. A former honors student at Exeter who was nearly expelled for breaking into a locked hall to play the piano, he listens to Duke Ellington and reads Ezra Pound; like Ellington he rejects generic labels as restrictive and thinks "beyond category," like Pound he pursues creative invention as an artistic imperative, as "the necessity of making it new." "I think that the music that we now think of as traditional was incredibly innovative in its time, and music that's innovative now will be traditional in another fifty years. I think the music that I'm making comes out of that tradition, and that's why I get upset when I hear people saying things about jazz that I feel are putting it in the grave." Those things are not only that jazz is inextricable from the African American experience but also that the music's best days ended four or five decades ago, propositions that were rising to prominence in the early 1980s, just as Douglas was trying to start a career in New York. Watching Ken Burns's documentary series Jazz, which devoted twenty hours to an exploration of these themes, Douglas resisted the urge to throw a hard object at his television set. Like Wynton Marsalis, Dave Douglas is an artist of unyielding determination. After a year at Berklee, where he was told that the trumpet was probably not for him, Douglas tried the New England Conservatory, and left it in 1983 to move to New York, where he got his undergraduate degree at NYU's Gallatin School for independent study. His trumpet style was still forming but already unorthodox; he was teaching himself how to produce unexpected, almost extra-musical tones on the trumpet, and his improvisations already incorporated ideas from pop radio and classical music, as well as jazz. Too odd-sounding to get hired for the workaday gigs in hotel bands and theater orchestras wherein New York musicians traditionally serve their apprenticeships (Marsalis had been in the pit band of Sweeney Todd a few years earlier), Douglas organized a group, bought a sound system and a gasoline generator, and set up shop on the sidewalk at Astor Place. "He will not be denied," declares the saxophonist Joshua Roseman, who has played with Douglas for ten years. Programmed for a positively Hegelian response to negativity, Douglas has always seemed focused not so much on proving what he can do, but on disproving what anyone says he cannot do. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, contrarians interested in jazz gravitated to Lower Manhattan and the experimental music scene centered in and around the Knitting Factory, then a musty little hostel for outré and Bohemian elitism on the perimeter of SoHo. Jazz was entering one of its schismatic phases, with polar phenomena developing contemporaneously, largely in reaction to each other. One group of young musicians--most visibly Marsalis, as well as Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove, Cyrus Chestnut, and others, the majority (but not all) of them African American--were leading a much publicized movement into classicism, reviving the music's traditional elements (especially swing and the blues) and the canonical works of its past masters (particularly Armstrong and Ellington); while a mirror group of musicians roughly the same age--John Zorn, Don Bryon, Bill Frisell, and their peers, most (but not all) of them white--were pursuing an equally rigorous nonconformity, avoiding the standard jazz texts, drawing from the musics of far-flung cultures, and essentially making lots of noise. The neat geography of their home bases, the Knitting Factory on Houston Street and Marsalis's jazz program at Lincoln Center, led critics to call the phenomena "downtown" jazz and "uptown" jazz. Both were fortresses of orthodoxy. For all its ambition and daring, Douglas's early music was susceptible to the usual criticisms of the avant-garde. It could be cold and overly cerebral. As the pianist and composer Fred Hersch, who has played with Douglas and considers him his friend, has remarked, "Dave and some of the guys around him, they had a way of playing a kind of jazz in quotes. They played it sort of like, Now we're going to play ... jazz. Sometimes, it seemed like some of the players in that particular axis might kind of look down a little bit at people who play things that sound more like straight-ahead jazz. I respect what they're doing, but I also think that playing jazz on its terms from a deep place is such a wonderful and difficult thing to do." After a stint co-leading the probative band New and Used with the saxophonist Andy Laster, Douglas formed a group to play his own music in 1992 and recorded the first album of his own compositions the following year. He already had a distinctive trumpet style. He used a splash palette of startling tonal colors and textures, and he showed a knack for crafting witty, elliptical, oddly structured improvisations, although his compositional voice was just forming. Struggling to develop mastery of his instrument, Douglas studied technique with the classical trumpeter Carmine Caruso and still takes lessons from the late teacher's protégé, Laurie Frink. Before every gig at the Knitting Factory, he would arrive two to three hours early and practice in an empty office. As the jazz-classicism movement began to wane in the late 1990s and the jazz press's interminable arguing about Wynton Marsalis lost currency, critics needed a new New Thing, and Dave Douglas was ideally equipped: forward-thinking, "downtown," soft-spoken, and white. At the Village Vanguard recently, Douglas proved the value of his effort. His band, configured like a Miles Davis group that had been considered wildly adventurous in its day, was a wink at jazz history. Douglas was playing on the music's sacred ground, in tribute to the jazz musician whom he reveres for his obdurate unpredictability. Douglas used the old Davis ensemble as a launching pad, then zipped to uncharted points. One of the first pieces that he played on the opening night, his original "Deluge" (from his album The Infinite), set the mode. It started with some dissonant electric-piano chords playing off a jagged, halting beat. Douglas, in crumbled green khakis and a black short-sleeve shirt tucked out of his trousers and opened to the third button on the top, closed his eyes, lowered his head, and put his trumpet to his mouth. He raised his head slowly as he played, at full force from the first note, his eyes piercing ahead. Douglas's solo, typical of his mature playing, was a rush of unexpected musical ideas--a passage of staccato notes toying with the piece's zigzag time, followed by a long melodic line, and then a sudden flurry of offbeat phrases that would have seemed like a spontaneous eruption if Douglas's bandmates had not jumped in, playing the intricate phrases in tight harmony. Listening, no matter how closely, you could rarely tell what was improvised and what was composed and tightly rehearsed. I do not remember ever hearing Dave Douglas play a musical cliché, and he rarely repeats himself. In both respects, he is among the rarest of jazz creatures. For all his eclecticism, moreover, he retains his own musical identity. Few musicians other than Wynton Marsalis draw so freely from so many sources, and no one sounds at all like him. David Hajdu is TNR's music critic.

I think Redman has been doing some great work of late. I really enjoyed Elastic and the group cd . . . name is escaping me . . . was very interesting as well, I thought. I think of Potter as more at home on alto. James Carter's latest has its moments. He is very, very dexterous. Occasionally I get glimmers of something bigger than sound and dexterity. Hopefully he'll get there for a more extended stay at some point. --eric

OK. I can see I'm not going to win many buttermilk converts here, but back to organic yogurt: The big national brand I tried was Stonyfield Farms, not Sunnyland. Here's an article from the Atlantic that talks about them a bit: Click here This is a bit food-snobby, but the basic point about organic yogurt being better than Dannon is right on, I'd say. And at my store the price difference is small enough I can indulge myself. --eric

I drink buttermilk on occasion. I live in what may be the least diverse place in America (no pluralism here, dammit!), but, oddly enough, the grocery down the street from me stocks a whole bunch of eastern european delicacies and staples. One of which appears to be buttermilk. There's an organic dairy hereabouts that supplies the need. It's good if you like things like yogurt, Belgian beer and interesting cheese. It's alive and its good! It's also good for you: the bacteria are nutritious and supposedly help balance out your intestinal flora. On a similar topic: I just tried the big national organic yogurt, Sunnyland Farms or something like. It kicks ass! It's unhomogonized, and the cream is heavenly--though you really ought to be a good boy/girl and mix it in. Yogurt makes a good marinate as well, especially for Indian-style recipes. God I'm hungry. --eric

Thanks, I'll check out some Berlin, -eric

As a relative outsider: DEEP's posts are garbage. The entire DEEP thread is garbage. I can only marvel that people put forth the proposition that there is anything there of even the least merit. I've gone through the thread: it's a bore. It's an embarrassment. DEEP is kind of like a derelict masturbating in the street. It isn't fascinating. It isn't art. It's striking, but one's reaction really ought to be to turn quickly and walk away. Change the medium from street scene to Internet, and now the derelict becomes the center of a willing and supportive crowd. We were comparing the different jazz forums earlier. One of the discouraging things about this forum is that the most open public forum is dominated is dominated, is centered upon, this tiresome, juvenile, degrading thread. This isn't a free speech issue: just like neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan and supporters of Al Qaida, DEEP ought to have every right to write what he pleases. Doesn't mean he gets to do it on my radio station, and it oughtn't mean he automatically gets to do it here, either. In our age there are infinite fora for this kind of shit. Keeping it out of one is not tyrrany. It's called editing. That DEEP gets cut so much slack for being a musician is a pretty sad statement. I am sure this has all been written before, but Bev is certainly not alone in her dismay at the sycophantic attitude displayed by many toward DEEP. And it doesn't matter what he "means" by what he writes, what matters is what it is (you can read Mein Kampf as an elaborate satire, if you want). DEEP's postings are shit. Anyhow, I realize that there's more than one way of looking at this stuff. --eric

You could put something up at the station site site if you like. Shouldn't be too much trouble to set up and we could give it an easy to remember url. --eric

Below I quote pretty extensively from an exchange between myself and Simon Weil from a week or so ago. (He's the primary quotee, but he quotes me within the passages he writes, so the quotes within quote are me-- I hope this all makes sense). But, anyhow, I had been on about Albert Murray, his disciples and how we might learn something from them if we are careful (as opposed to the old Bill Cosby show, where you only learned if you weren't careful). My interlocutor pointed out a number of sources for the Murray line of thinking, and I've been reading some of them--Nietzche's attacks on Wagner, some Murray aside from Stompin' the Blues, and some Herder, and some Lewis Mumford and Greil Marcus (who, like Constance Rourke mentioned below, are/were big into the idea of an "American vernacular" in the arts). Now Herder had some scary moments for me--on the subject of minoroty cultures and purity, for instance. But am not finding the other folks--Murray, Mumford, Marcus--to be nearly as scary, mostly because they all embrace, either explicitly or implicitly, the idea of America as a pluralistic culture. Certainly they seem to think the arts to be of critical importance, worth fighting about, and even that it is linked in some inexorable way to what I'll loosely call "the national experience," but I'm not terribly put off by this stuff. So, Simon and/or anyone: as I continue this little incomplete reading project, what sorts of things ought I be looking for? What ought to be sending up flags. If culture isn't what these guys seem to think, what better way do we have of thinking about it? I'll hopefully have time to put up some primary quotations (from Murray, et al.) in the near future. Here's the rundown of where we've been: It's very intense. That's the main difference between guys like Murray and Wagner, to lump them together, and your more average "culture is at the heart of society" guys. They really think everything is at stake if their form of art does not win through. It's quite scary just how intense they are. There is also a parallel to do with degeneration, which is not really present in a lot of your standard preservation movements. The conception of this evil, dreadful, horrible culture-destroying degenerate fake-art is really quite central to both the Lincoln Center view and Wagner (to take one example). This is why Wynton would get so aggressive about avant-garde Jazz/fusion. He felt that it was rotting away at the core of American identity - by pretending to be Jazz when it was not. You get exactly the same stuff in Wagner - except it's German identity. The importance of this "negative ideal" in both the Lincoln Center conception - and Wagner - is one of the most striking parallels between the two. On the other hand, one of Murray's big influences is Malraux - and Malraux was minister of Culture in France when they were doing their Frenchness is to be found in culture thing. So it's pretty likely that Murray was influenced by the French approach. I'm not going to deny that one can make parallels with other guys like that. They both come out of Herder. That's one thing. Murray gets it via Constance Rourke, but probably directly as well. Also he's mad keen on Thomas Mann, who was a Wagner obsessive in his formation. And actually, there's probably some getting in there via Malraux as well. It is difficult to absoutely pin it down, because Murray's not about to destroy his mystique as an heroic elder by going into the nuts and bolts of his sources. But my personal feeling is that the guy hasn't got enough critical distance from whatever sources he's used. Well I'm an English Jew, so what I'm doing talking to you about this I don't know. But, anyway... I do absolutely agree that America has a problem with cultural identity. But, to me, it has more to do with the youth of the nation than anything else. I mean the nation goes through experiences - and the way it reacts to those experiences define and deepen and change its cultural identity. So I mean Big Mac and Coke and stuff like that, archetypally about American consumption, are indeed central to American identity - at least as conceived from this side of the pond. But so are things like optimism, size, dynamism. I think American culture does lack a depth, that's true. But then I don't know it well. But, to me, the main way a culture is going to develop that depth is not by creating great artworks per se. It's, to repeat myself, by dealing with the problems the culture throws up in the course of its development. It may be that art helps in that, by dealing with cultural problems that otherwise elude definition or solution - maybe they can get worked out, to some degree, in art. But I don't think that, say providing images of what it's like to be a great American (as conceived by the artist) helps a great deal unless these images are dealing with the actual underlying problems. The fact the art deals with the problems is what's going to give the art resonance and lead to it being absorbed by society (if you're lucky). The thing about the Lincoln Center is I don't think they give a damn about the underlying problems (social, historical, whatever). They just think that if you create an image of an archetypal existential hero, then society will graciously accept it and get better. Blaaaghh. But I do think society (and society) needs unifying images and symbols and personalities. And, indeed, can't do without them. But they're produced by society as a whole, not one guy or one institution. Simon Weil Simon Weil Posted: Feb 4 2004, 03:55 PM I have gone over Wynton/Murray's stuff about the black condition, and, honestly, I find it hard to work out. They seem conflicted. I have a correspondant who was at one of Murray's lectures and asked him about blacks in the ghetto. And, to paraphrase, Murray said it was their own fault and they should work harder to get out. On the other hand all the Lincoln Center guys are clearly intensely concerned about the delibitating effects race has on society and on black society in particular. My personal feeling is that they're not entirely clear what their role is vis a vis black society. It seems like they feel that, if they can convince white Americans to be more democratic (through the music, unbelievable as it may be), then problems for black Americans will work out. But Wynton is really a kind of cocooned guy. Going round in his bubble of gigs and educational events in which he's the great man and people gather round. I don't know, he seems pretty cut off from the average black person (or the average person come to that). But he doesn't think so, I guess. Simon Weil

As to the sound point: You definitely miss a lot without the sound of the words and the sound of the voice. Joyce wouldn't be much of an Irish writer if this weren't true (by which I mean the Irish wouldn't have embraced him otherwise, as they have now he's safely dead). The distinction I make between sound and voice is this: Joyce obviously reveled in the sensuousness of sound so it's important to "hear," either literally or mentally the words he writes. In addition, though, there are deep complexities to the relationships between the narrative and the characters and events in the books, and often the inflection and cadence of how one reads him can be very critical in what one takes away from him (this more so with Joyce than is true of most writers, I'd argue). Now the fact that there is something in Finnegan's Wake is beyond dispute. Of course there are all kinds of jokes and wordplay and allusions. I should imagine it is increadibly rich in these--never having spent much time trying to figure it all out myself. So it does represent an accomplishment of a sort. Of the same sort as a cryptic crossword, I'd argue.

I think Pee Wee was the best of the clarinettists who worked with Condon, but by the time they recorded for Columbia, I think his mind was elsewhere: on some of his own projects, on expanding his horizons beyond Chicago style, on his resentment of Condon (by no means the only aspect of their relationship). Hall was a very capable musician, of course, always professional and occasionally hitting on something really interesting, but he wasn't the adventurer Russell was, for good & ill. But the good thing about Russell is, we don't have to listen to the ill! --eric

I still have the same problem at 10.30am EST: Can't access the forum home page, but can sneak in through member profiles. --eric

I studied English, and had to read a fair deal of Joyce. (Disclosure: I'm also of Irish extraction). I've been up and down on him. I refuse to beleive anyone really thinks its a good use of their time to try to puzzle out Finnegans Wake. Don't worry, there's nothing you can do to change my mind. His short stories, I thought, were quite good. Ulysses I've read in such bits and pieces, I can't make a good judgement (grad school forces this on you). So, I have a Bloomsday Resolution: I'm going to do my damnedest to read the whole thing before the great day comes. --eric

Pretty much my impression as a listener: Gil Evans sounds difficult. Belabored in his worser moments. I've always thought of him as a musician's musician in the bad sense (one of those things we non-musicians say to each other with an arch look while flashing the secret cryptic hand sign). Sorry, couldn't resist. Is that the right emoticon for mischievous pleasure? Oliver Nelson on the other hand sounds rich. At least when he's not sounding schmaltzy. Sometimes even then. So, Nelson by three falls and a decision.

I got this one, too. Very, very nice. There's also a cd of Bebo's 50s big band stuff which I didn't like as much. Con Poco Coco is the wildest-sounding piece on here. There are a few of other true descarga pieces, a few (pretty good) jazz numbers, and some short pieces that sound composed (in both senses of the word). I don't come back to this one as often as I do to the Cachao stuff, but I play it quite a bit still. --eric

A lot of Infocom games are available online here. --eric

As a relative newcomer here (just graduated to Gruper or something else edible), thought I might put a few things down: I wasn't on the Blue Note board, but this is a pretty cool place you've got here. I think we ought to concentrate attention on this forum or others like it. There is no advantage to that I can see in participating on the Blue Note board. Take it from me, they don't run the board to get feedback from people like us. They don't give a shit about what record freaks think is right and good. Period. If you think whining about copy protection or about the latest BN signings on the BN forum is going to have the least effect . . . well, in that case you don't have a very good grasp of how folks in big record companies think. Not that I'm totally against what BN has been doing of late, I think Lundvall seems to know what he's doing and it's not completely idiotic or anything. It isn't like the label hasn't changed before--it's changing again, perhaps for the good, in my view. But as far as the corporately sponsored forum goes . . . Why, when you've got this? On the "outside looking in theme" that occasionally rears its ugly head here (full disclosure: it was once applied to me): it's stupid and kind of pathetic. I know a lot of musicians, and I know they've got the secret handshake and they've got all their esoteric knowledge that I'm sure folks like me are incapable of comprehending, and I know they've been secretly controlling the progress of world history for more than 2000 years, but the musicians I know have the good taste not to flaunt it. So no more "bow down before me," OK. It doesn't reflect well on the not-so-secret society. --eric

Thanks for all the great pictures, JSngry. My cds are comparitively lacking. Here's an log entry I found on Cachao and his musical activities and on the Panart Sessions: (this is from http://www.musicweb.uk.net/, an interesting resource.)

I went on over to descarga and saw that Caney has another collection of 50s sessions out, so I guess some are there. I think I heard this "missing" material on a couple of releases on Maype, which descarga also seems to have. Good version of Tres Lindas Cubanas I remember particularly. I didn't get much of a chance with them: they were brought by a guest I was interviewing about the embargo--he'd bought them in Cuba. --eric

Why do I have a feeling that's akin to my claiming "technical difficulties" whenever I fall asleep for a minute when I'm doing 5am air? Because it is. That's right. After you wake up, drool pooling on the board, you just turn on the mic and apologize for the last song having been "garbled in editing." Then continue on as normal (go back to sleep). --eric

The Havana to NY, I think is on Caney. This contains a lot of the jam session material originally issued on Panart. The "More legendary Descarga sessions" would give you more, but there is more, different material on the "Jam Sessions in miniature" cd currently available, and more material that I've heard that isn't on any of these records, some with Cachao or Orestes Lopez leading, some of near or equal quality with other folks leading. The whole discography is messy, which is why I am wishing for someone to come along and reissue the material in an organized fashion. --eric

I emailed Thom Jurek about the strange reference in the review -- apparently it was garbled in the editing. He'd originally written something about this being the first time Eddie and Charlie co-led a band, or something, but I guess we'll see: they're supposed to fix it straightaway, --eric

These are the ones I've got as well. They're very good reissues. The "More Legendary Descarga Sessions" has a softer, more melodic feel to it that I always relate to the presence and influence of Orestes Lopez (Cachao's brother) on piano (he's there, I think, though he's not credited above). There are more pieces similar to the "Orestes" pieces that the Caney collections don't pick up that I've heard on other European knockoffs. Hopefully someone will get these wonderful 1950s sessions together properly at some point (there's also some material with Julio Guitierrez or Fajardo at the helm, I think). --eric

Something happened. I lost it for a couple of hours there and only now am able to get the site again. Last time I think there was some sort of DNS problem. Is there a way we can circumvent this problem by enetering the DNS number directly or something? --eric

I am a Cachao nut: I have most fo this material already: it's great. If you don't have it and have any inclination toward cuban music and/or afro-cuban jazz, consider it seriously. Great, great stuff. --eric

I can third this rec. A couple of tracks were collected on an old english cd from soul jazz: excellent stuff. I'm buying. --eric