Wildflowers: Loft Jazz New York 1976

[B. Goren.]

The JAZZLOFT offers this 3 CDs set for a very attractive price. The music is beautiful and I really recommend this set. Don’t miss it.

[papsrus]

I saw that. Used to have it on iTunes, which long since overflowed and is no longer useful, except for the occasional BFT's.

Interesting.

[ghost of miles]

Legendary stuff--I have a 3-CD reissue that came out a few years ago. BTW, I didn't realize till a few nights ago that Charles Tyler's SAGA OF THE OUTLAWS was originally done for the Wildflowers session...finally got to the Nessa reissue in my giant stack o' new jazz CDs and read that in the liner notes. SAGA a great record as well...man, those dueling bass lines! (Not to mention Tyler's playing.)

[Chuck Nessa]

Legendary stuff--I have a 3-CD reissue that came out a few years ago. BTW, I didn't realize till a few nights ago that Charles Tyler's SAGA OF THE OUTLAWS was originally done for the Wildflowers session...finally got to the Nessa reissue in my giant stack o' new jazz CDs and read that in the liner notes. SAGA a great record as well...man, those dueling bass lines! (Not to mention Tyler's playing.)

Don't you wish the other stuff sounded as good a Saga.

[mjzee]

Chuck, what do you think of Roscoe Mitchell's "Chant" on Wildflowers?

[JohnS]

Good to see this great set available again. I still have the vinyl.

[clifford_thornton]

Chuck, what do you think of Roscoe Mitchell's "Chant" on Wildflowers?

That volume is particularly good. Sunny's side is very nice as well.

Saga sounds fantastic, yes...

[sonnymax]

This 3CD set is being reissued by Douglas on Sept. 8. It appears to have new packaging/notes, but I don't see any indication of whether or not it's been remastered as well.

[JSngry]

These Wildflowers were so beautiful...who knew then that a massive dose of herbicide was just a few years up the road?

[brownie]

This 3CD set is being reissued by Douglas on Sept. 8. It appears to have new packaging/notes, but I don't see any indication of whether or not it's been remastered as well.

The 3CD set was first issued in France three years ago. It has the full content of the five LPs that came out in 1976. No remastering involved.

[mjzee]

This 3CD set is being reissued by Douglas on Sept. 8. It appears to have new packaging/notes, but I don't see any indication of whether or not it's been remastered as well.

Huh...I guess free jazz sells.

[B. Clugston]

Chuck, what do you think of Roscoe Mitchell's "Chant" on Wildflowers?

I ain't Chuck, but to me "Chant" is the highlight of the set.

[sonnymax]

The 3CD set was first issued in France three years ago. It has the full content of the five LPs that came out in 1976. No remastering involved.

A 3CD box set called Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions - Complete was issued on the Knitting Factory label back in 2000. It featured full versions of some tracks that were edited for the original vinyl releases.

[marcello]

[Chuck Nessa]

The 3CD set was first issued in France three years ago. It has the full content of the five LPs that came out in 1976. No remastering involved.

A 3CD box set called Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions - Complete was issued on the Knitting Factory label back in 2000. It featured full versions of some tracks that were edited for the original vinyl releases.

I don't think there is anything in that set not included on the lps.

[ep1str0phy]

A little late to the party since I just obtained a copy/first heard these sessions today, but man am I surprised at how variable the quality of these sessions is. Saga really was an outstanding moment at the festival. Some moments are very, very good, maybe only a couple truly superlative, and just as much of what works, IMO, falls flat. All this raises a series of perceptual questions--most notable among these being whether quick absorption of materials hinders one's enjoyment of the recordings, whether the ensuing decades of recapitulation/recycling of certain among Wildflowers' musical practices will negatively affect one's perception of the music that existed at the time, and whether it's really fair to evaluate these excerpts, shorn of context, alongside often similar-sounding, but otherwise largely unrelated, recordings.

For my sakes, I'm going to say that listening with modern ears is about all I can do--and, granted this--

(1) I'm surprised by how much of this music sounds homogenous/similar--a criticism/observation that could be leveled at bebop or hard bop or burnout or whatever--let alone "contemporary" free jazz that follows in this lineage--but not quite what I was expecting. Much of this may have to do with duplicated personnel. I think it's more on the level that none of these sides are quite as distinguished/fully realized (due to the limitations of the compilation medium) as the artists' contemporaneous full-length albums; it's a lot of cut-and-burn excerpts, oftentimes a common breed of intense, detailed, but at the same time breathless free-time/fast melody improvisation.

(2) Alan Douglas mentions in the liners that (paraphrasing) the loft jazz period was the last time anything new was developed in jazz, and I'm slowly, more and more, inclined to agree. I think that much of this has to do with my frustration at how much of the jazz left has, as of late, come to observe the "cutting edge" of the music (the jazz right often doesn't give a shit)... when we're celebrating hard-grooves and cyclical lines, observe how these overtures to hip-hop/mainstream popular music conceits were already being activated/celebrated by musicians of the Wildflowers vintage--obvious debts held to Julius Hemphill and the BAG constituency, the AACM, and--hell--Randy Weston, Dave Burrell. Also--talk about future of electric guitar this, etc., etc., etc.--not knocking anyone, but the now anonymous Michael Gregory Jackson was doing this in Braxton's band in the 70's. There is nothing contemporary jazz guitar heralds are doing, save for sheer advancements in hardware, that gets substantially more complex than what Jackson accomplishes on Wildflowers. Which is, again paraphrasing Douglas, not to say that there aren't any good albums or artists these days, just that the whole concept of "new" or "future" (versus tangential) directions is sort of ridiculous now.

(3) There is very, very little A game on these sessions, and this with more than a passing familiarity with these very A game musicians.

-Sam Rivers's feature is great, on par with many of his sessions from this vintage.

-Air's "USO Dance" sounds like a fine set closer, but extracted from a full concert, it doesn't articulate just how creatively this band dealt with structure, both composed and improvised, and hierarchical rhythm/front-line relationships--the piece could just as easily suit the approach of Rivers's band.

-Ken McIntyre, a favorite of mine, would sound almost entirely out of place were it not for his ensemble's atypical instrumentation; as it is, he does a fine bit with conventional jazz form and brings a little authority and seniority to the environs.

-New Dalta Akhri starts out fucking strong, but the piece seems to lose focus about midway; the group is heard to better effect, in a much better formation, on Wadada's Kabell recordings.

-Sunny Murray's band actually kicks ass. I'm not overly fond of this rendition of "Over the Rainbow"--I think it's been more completely realized, in this idiom, elsewhere--but "Something's Cookin'" is maybe the strongest, ballsiest sheer "blowing" piece of all the Wildflowers recordings.

-Perhaps I'm too partial to Roscoe, but "Chant" is for me the out-and-out strongest thing on Wildflowers. Virtually all of the preceding <3 hrs sounds immediately obsolete once Roscoe gets down. It's not flawless, and there appears to be some sloppiness transitioning between sections. But it is ambitious. This piece blew me away on the reissue of Nonaah, and it loses none of its balls--it maybe gains a pair--in the trio context, where the tension of the melody line gets magnified by virtue of rhythmic contrast (the drummers are in full gear). The performance pretty clearly employs sonata form, and the formal strictness of it is really piquant, in light of the preceding few hours of explode. Roscoe's focus on discreet musical ideas and techniques concentrates the energy of the performance, expends it much more efficiently, than even the most exhilaratingly bashy music elsewhere on the compilation. Also, and this is supposedly the AACM's marker of individuality (not really evident elsewhere on Wildflowers), but "Chant" makes extensive use of space and silence--shuffled off to the end of the compilation, as if to inform the listener, "oh shit, you can do that?"

-Elsewhere there are a lot of noble experiments, but I think almost everyone on the set can be heard to better effect elsewhere. Julius Hemphill kills it on the earlier, ragged but beautiful and innovative Dogon A.D., but it's hard to get a sense of his genius approach to arrangement or orchestration here. Braxton and Cyrille's pieces, in particular, don't pack much punch out of context (very surprised at how relatively lackluster Braxton's piece is here). I don't know if even "Chant" is an essential piece in the oeuvre of the artist--not when Nonaah exists, or even something as early as Sound, or his very ambitious, less clearly jazz-related compositions these days.

Rambling again, but there's little great, some good, a lot of OK, and a hell of a lot of "interesting, but so-so" on this legendary set. Which, if you're documenting a milieu versus a musical concept or outlook, makes sense--but I might recommend before Wildflowers any one of these artists' prime solo works to someone trying to figure out what made 70's jazz so great.

Edited October 21, 2009 by ep1str0phy

[king ubu]

Thanks for that great write-up - makes me wanna dig out my Knit edition of this set and play that stuff again!

And yes Chuck: sure would be great if all of this sounded even half as great as "Saga"!

[PHILLYQ]

...and you get to hear Stanley Crouch on drums

[king ubu]

Yeah, and Michael Jackson on guitar

[Chuck Nessa]

Nice review.

[AllenLowe]

makes me want to listen again, as I haven't heard the loft stuff in some time - to beat a dead horse, that was a period of time when that second generation of free jazzers was dealing with important structural issues and questions of open form -

this era was also pretty much airbrushed out of the PBS jazz documantary, as I recall -

[Stefan Wood]

Not so much airbrushed -- more like Photoshopped!

What free jazz? I don't see no free jazz.........

[ep1str0phy]

makes me want to listen again, as I haven't heard the loft stuff in some time - to beat a dead horse, that was a period of time when that second generation of free jazzers was dealing with important structural issues and questions of open form -

this era was also pretty much airbrushed out of the PBS jazz documantary, as I recall -

Something really startling to me, living with these recordings the past couple of days, is that the most cohesive tracks--compositionally, in terms of group dynamics/responsiveness, and improvisational fluidity--are by and large waxed by musicians whose approaches weren't exactly challenging the status quo. Sam Rivers had been working in his idiom since the early/mid 60's, the same with Sunny Murray (who rides the wave of energy improv on Wildflowers truer and more directly than anyone else, IMO). Ken McIntyre, who, listening more closely, kicks maybe the most ass out of any of the traditional "solo" voices on these sides (his spotlight on "New Times" is blisteringly forceful), recorded opposite Dolphy, for chrissakes.

On the other hand, many of the musicians here who might elsewhere be understood as the most innovative and fresh exponents of post-energy formalism--and a lot of them are present--don't shine so bright. To be fair, Wildflowers doesn't supoort the notion that avant-garde jazz is (from the liners) "incohate bleating," but it doesn't really challenge the norms of energy/modal free jazz, by '76 themselves cliches, very successfully, either. (The comp does illustrate a sense I've had of late that all the chaotic juju just sort of drained out of energy music somewhere in the early/mid 70's; there's all of the bluster, but none of the baptismal scariness, of Ayler on these recordings.)

I think that's why I like "Chant" so much--it's maybe the only side on Wildflowers that actively challenges what were then still-prevailing forms and works as a cohesive performance. You could even argue that it challenges the artists' norms, as well; although Roscoe and the Art Ensemble had been operating in an idiomatically dialogic, silence-based music of contrasts for yeeeears before the late 70's, I think the degree of exactitude and brutal logic found in compositions like "Chant" or "Nonaah" was really unheralded at that time. The other pieces that do take serious formal risks on these recordings, like the Braxton piece, the Dalta Akhri piece, and Hemphill's, are just way too sloppy to get across the point that something new was going on.

I kept thinking, listening to Wildflowers, that if something both as idiomatically complete and fresh as the Braxton Arista small group sides, something off of Air Time (especially as ascetic as "Subtraction"), Afternoon of A Georgia Faun, or a piece from Wadada's Kabell box were to show up, it would stop me dead in my tracks. There's a knifelike precision to a lot of that music that even now, I think, poses issues for composers and improvisers (and composer-improvisers) to grapple with. While I feel many of the skronkiest abstractions of 60's free jazz have been digested into the mainstream, there is a very large reluctance, or maybe inhibitedness, among even many young radicals to come to grips with the sonic innovations of 70's improv--and many who try to do this don't play in the cultural area of "jazz" at all. (I'll be happily proven wrong when I hear an Ayler tribute as ballsily sober as the second half of the AEoC's Phase One.)

[JohnS]

The 3CD set was first issued in France three years ago. It has the full content of the five LPs that came out in 1976. No remastering involved.

A 3CD box set called Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions - Complete was issued on the Knitting Factory label back in 2000. It featured full versions of some tracks that were edited for the original vinyl releases.

As the owner of the original vinyl I'm intruiged that the KF issue included unedited tracks. Can anyone say which tracks these are?

[AllenLowe]

"there's all of the bluster, but none of the baptismal scariness, of Ayler on these recordings."

thank you for saying that; I love Ayler and, though I don't want to saddle you with my opinions on all of this (see that other thread) I think there are various ways of solving the inherent post-modernist jazz problems (whatever they are ).

I have been grappling with this since the 1990s, though the best solutions I ever heard were Hemphill's arrangements for his sextet and his Nonesuch big band record of the 1990s (which, if anyone missed it, has the best large group writing in the post war - as in Vietnam - era). I will tell you that a large part of solving this problem is finding musicians who can turn, musically, on a dime. Right now I know where those musicians are, but getting them in the same room at the same time is a (near financially impossible) challenge.

The other problem is that in the post-publishing world everyone is a composer, and so I hear CD after CD of great musicians playing mediocre music, poorly constructed and organized (this has been a problem, I think, since the 1980s and maybe even earlier).

Edited October 22, 2009 by AllenLowe