Wildflowers: Loft Jazz New York 1976

[Hot Ptah]

"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).

I listened to the Hemphill Big Band album just last week. It is an impressive album, in my opinion, with some compelling soloing as well as Hemphill's writing to recommend it.

My college buddies who were into jazz in the 1970s all thought that Wildflowers was interesting, but inconsistent and not the best recorded work of the artists. We did not view Wildflowers as essential, compared to other albums by the same artists.

[AllenLowe]

just as an aside, Vinny Golia once told me he regarded Hemphill as "the Duke Ellington of the avant garde."

[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.

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

Nothing new. The editing is the same.

[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?

Nothing new. The editing is the same.

Thanks Chuck.

[ep1str0phy]

I guess it took someone really pointing it out to get me to do it, but I really, really listened to the Hemphill big band album today--I've had it since I was like 15, haven't thought too much about it since--and it is a motherfucker. I can understand where you're coming from, Allen, in terms of seeing this album as a potential "solution" after energy freedom--

It grapples with issues of instrumentation, ensemble inter/independence, and improvisational liberty with the postmodern flair of the AACM generation--the kind of "kitchen sink" sense of anything possible that doesn't get annoying or draw attention to itself. It's almost how "in" the album sounds while being drastically, rule-breakingly out. There are chord changes all over the place without ever sounding like a conventional post-bop record, and I think a lot of this has to do with how detailed--freely detailed--the ensemble is:

-a perfectly balanced use of twin guitars, oftentimes simultaneously comping--this degree of harmonic complexity, which would usually cause a trainwreck in a jazz ensemble of any size, is elided by the timbral freedom exercised by the guitarists. Oh yeah--no piano, and there's electric bass.

-Solos that both ride the changes and sound apeshit out--my impression is that part of the reason this works is that, although many of the central melodies are consonant in an almost square way, and though the basic harmonic foundation of most of the pieces is pretty simple, the group harmonies are packed with dissonant extensions/superimpositions. Sometimes the band sounds like a series of moving clusters.

-Speaking to the quote about Hemphill being the "Ellington of the avant-garde," what would in other hands sound like tightly-packed, crowded ensembles come across as surprisingly light--part of this has to do with the mix, to be sure, but the band isn't trying to achieve a homogeneous blend--it's individuals playing at together.

-Some of Hemphill's arrangement choices are just fucking weird--and this definitely happens on a dime. Moving in and out of swung time at the drop of a hat--and just when it sounds like it was something the drummer felt like doing on the fly, *bam*--the ensemble drops right back into something else. I was listening to "Bordertown" on the way back from the grocery, and shit pops up out of nowhere in the rightest way possible--there's this WSQ-esque ensemble sax passage toward the end that sounds totally dropped in, but instead of disrupting the flow, it ratchets the energy up in a really exhilarating fashion.

--and the facility with which Hemphill and the band accomplish this almost insults logic--the same sort of feeling I get when listening to early Art Ensemble, right when Moye joined the band, and he's already anticipating and doubling everything the soloists do. I mean, shit--I'm so high on this album right now, having attempted to listen with new ears--thanks for pointing this one out, Allen.

Edited October 23, 2009 by ep1str0phy

[JETman]

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).

Definitely earlier. How many 1970s jazz albums have you heard that seem to be lacking the "real" meat on the bones? Not only poorly (and cheaply) recorded, but poorly conceived as well. This seems to be true, I believe, more in the area of the avant-garde, where people are especially quick to heap the word "genius" onto music that sometimes is too difficult for the music consuming public to understand. "If we don't get it, it must be great".

[Clunky]

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"!

The sound quality of Saga is also much better. I've not listened to these sessions for ages but I was underwhelmed by them. Expectations were not met which is always a pity. I'll stick to Saga I think but must revisit the Rosco track mentioned above.

[ep1str0phy]

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).

Definitely earlier. How many 1970s jazz albums have you heard that seem to be lacking the "real" meat on the bones? Not only poorly (and cheaply) recorded, but poorly conceived as well. This seems to be true, I believe, more in the area of the avant-garde, where people are especially quick to heap the word "genius" onto music that sometimes is too difficult for the music consuming public to understand. "If we don't get it, it must be great".

I hear this often, and while I do agree that criticism is often more slack when it comes to the avant-garde, I only rarely hear people use the word "genius" or connotations thereof in reference to a musician or work that isn't elsewhere, and with some frequency, appreciated and/or dissected with some degree of critical aptitude. In other words, I don't usually hear people go, "genius!" when it comes to some marginal India Navigation album--almost always this goes in reference to something that is either part of an established critical canon or, by its own internal logic, undeniably well-realized (like Nonaah, which seems to get that a lot, a 70's Cecil Taylor solo album, or Braxton's Arista stuff).

On the other hand, especially on this board, for example, people are pretty quick to call out bullshit on controversial--or, if you want to call it that way, "marginal" and harder to quantify--genius. I remember some shit going down about Arthur Doyle a while back, and the camp was divided in a heated way. I think folks are quicker to recognize when the genius nomenclature is bandied about more liberally, so that can't be a threat-

Now, in terms of people quick to heap the word "genius" onto music that is difficult for the music consuming public to understand--well, hell yes. Charlie Parker is hard to understand, and I don't know how many people on this board wouldn't call him a genius. Same with Coltrane and, to another extreme, Hemphill. And there doesn't need to be a discussion, I think, about whether genius is a function of mass recognition.

...I certainly hope that most critical appraisals by the allegedly well-informed don't follow the logic of "If we don't get it, it must be great"--I mean, the devices of the avant-garde are digestible to such a degree at this historical juncture that I'd be pretty surprised if everyone who does dig this often less palatable strain didn't have some sort of coherent criteria to go by. You'll hear it again and again by a lot of the AACM guys, who have the scope and purview to call out the prior wave's excesses for what they are/were--"No such thing as free," or some permutation of that. All music must by nature follow some organizing principles--or, at least, I am 100% confident that a lot of the most celebrated "out" jazz does.

[AllenLowe]

I have no doubt that a great deal of it is composed and improvised according to some system - problem for me is that so many musicians have learned to talk the talk that it obscures how empty so much of the music is - just read Wire for a year or so and than try one of their sampler, Wiretapper, CDs - some of the worst music I have heard, real poseurs -

Edited October 23, 2009 by AllenLowe

[ep1str0phy]

I think at this point it may just be easier to evaluate the avant-garde strain on the merits of lucid and very obvious systems--the same way someone might say person A or B isn't making the changes to a chord sequence of bebop convention--than it is to simply praise or write something off on the basis of it being some unknowable, wonderful or awful thing.

Something that I do find at least marginally comforting is that I find that a lot of younger players won't make big technical allowances for free playing these days--but then won't really prejudice those styles, either. A lot of "avant-garde" technique has become a part of the technical repertoire/arsenal--I'm often surprised that this stuff is understood and employed as well as, say, funk ideas or bebop--but, then, not written off mindlessly or easily, either. The bad edge of the sword is that when everything gets reduced technically, you lose a lot of what made that music interesting in the first place...