stop the play and watch the audience

redirect

2007-09-05T08:47:00.001-07:00

woody lives!

2007-09-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

WOW - an unheard live album by Woody Guthrie comes out in a few days, and here's a great NYT article to boot, focusing on Woody's ever-growing legacy. The article judiciously quotes Guthrie's daughter Nora, who is responsible for the estate (and some 2,400 lyrics that were never set to music):

"...I could put these lyrics behind glass cases, but I think it’s truer to Woody’s spirit to bring them to life as new songs.
“Some people thought it was blasphemous to have other people write music to these lyrics. I said it would be blasphemous to have the lyrics sit there where no one would hear them.
“I’m trying to bring the most unusual suspects into these projects,” she said. “I’m not doing it to be cute but because these people write to me or get word to me that they’ve always loved Woody’s songs. Pete Seeger sings an old gospel song called ‘Twelve Gates to the City,’ and I’ve always thought of the city as a place of great art. Some purists will tell you that there’s only one way into that city, but I don’t believe it. My job is to keep the gates open.”

I don't know what it is with folk singers lately, but it's been kind of an obsession for me. I like the radical kind, the kind that actually live the way they talk about in their music, which pretty much limits it to Guthrie, Leadbelly, Bob Dylan and a few others. I never could understand why the hard-core folkies in the '60s could be so ready for revolutionary change in just about every other aspect of society, but they couldn't see that Dylan was about to bring a radical and much-needed change to popular music, far from selling out to become a rock star.

I like to think that Woody Guthrie would have done the same thing. He had, after all, a knack for speaking in the vernacular of his own time. There was really nothing traditional or conservative about him - he's been called the first real punk musician, the first alternative musician, etc. So it's fitting that, in these copyright-crazy times, his lyrics are being made available to artists who will further extend that legacy and spread his message.

time out

2007-08-26T01:07:00.000-07:00

This weekend I've been at the Montalvo Arts Center up in Saratoga, serving on a panel to select their residency participants for next year. So nice to get away and enjoy some peaceful time in such a serene, idyllic place.

Here are some photos from the location and from the drive, without comment.

today's moment of truth

2007-08-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

...is brought to you by Joseph Hughes (and the New York Times), proving that clarity is not as elusive as you might think.

MeTube

2007-08-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit more lax than some of my colleagues in harnessing the brobdingnagian (look it up) power of YouTube as a musical marketing tool... and frankly why should I, when this stuff practically sells itself, right?

Anyway, I've created a YouTube channel for the Empty Cage Quartet. Up there now, beside a couple of pitifully short clips from our recent San Francisco performance, is this brilliant three-minute film by our friend Tony Datillo called Trouble With Modern Painters, which features one of our tunes as the background music to a very bizarre chase scene (sped up, of course, because we all know that's a sure-fire recipe for comedy):

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Datillo is the one who is making a new film around our recent recording of The Mactavish Rag, and that will be on YouTube the minute it's finished. It's going to be big... very, very big.

I also got around to adding a few things to my own YouTube space, like this clip from a 2005 performance with Vinny Golia:

Finally, here's a guy who's got the right idea. Nate Hubbard has made a video collage of clips from his recent tour up the West Coast, and if you watch closely you'll see a brief cameo by me and Braxton the Wonder Dog:

all shook up

2007-08-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

Andrew Durkin links to an article in the Guardian declaiming against the status of Elvis Presley as the so-called King of Rock & Roll. I was going to leave a comment, but didn't feel that was appropriate given that the bulk of Andrew's post was a right-on-the money assessment of Max Roach's role as a jazz artist and the meaning of Money Jungle. It's a masterful post; you should read it.

It was Wadada Leo Smith who first hipped me to Elvis. No, really, it was. I'll never forget coming into Leo's Creative Orchestra class one day when I was a student at CalArts as Leo was showing off his new conducting move. It was pretty fantastic - a two-handed sideways cue complete with hip-twisting and knee-rocking action. He told us he stole it from the King. "King of what?" we asked, by that point completely disoriented. "The KING! King of music! King of Rock & Roll, don't you know who that is?!", he chided us. Of course he meant Elvis, but that was the last thing on our minds. I figured after that rehearsal that I'd better seriously check this Elvis guy out.

I tend to think of Elvis (and others like him; the article mentions white heroes Clapton, Astaire and Sinatra) in terms of being a great synthesizer. He wasn't much of a creator but he was able, mainly by studying the performances of others, to put together styles that were popular and relevant at the time in order to fashion something that was novel and extremely marketable. Laying aside the fact that Elvis wouldn't have accomplished any of this without the guidance of people like Sam Phillips, I think it's proper to look at those early white rock & roll stars like Elvis, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, etc. as having been able to borrow just enough from black music so as to make their inborn country thing sound new and fresh, if not completely original. Thematically, white rock & roll was scandalous enough to appeal to teenagers looking for a way to rebel against their parents but not so over-the-top (as Big Mama Thornton, Joe Turner and other black rock & roll prototypes could often be) as to prevent their music from hitting up the mainstream airwaves and the popular charts.

To be fair, folks like Chuck Berry did the same thing, only in reverse. Berry would probably have been known only as a mediocre blues performer had he not happened upon the novelty of singing and playing country tunes in a rhythm and blues style. His innovation begins with the fact that he was one of the few black musicians willing (or able to discover the means) to "cross over" to areas of popular culture and venues that were traditionally reserved for whites only. His superlative skills as a songwriter and his idiosyncrasies as a front man and guitarist sealed the deal. It's sad that plenty of black musicians like Little Richard, who were generally sticking to a more pure form of rhythm and blues, got cut off on the way to success by white singers (businessmen, actually) like Pat Boone and Bill Haley who were quick to appropriate and "clean up" black material to suit the tastes of popular (white) audiences.

So by the time Elvis got there, the groundwork had already been laid, and the game was ripe for somebody to come along and take the whole pot. Historically we see Paul Whiteman in a similar situation by the late 20s with the increasing popularity of jazz, Benny Goodman (or Glenn Miller or any number of white bandleaders) with swing music in the 30s, and the Beatles in the early 60s when the relatively static rock & roll scene had people just waiting for something new. But with Elvis, again, it wasn't so much about creativity as it was the fact that he was in the right place at the right time, and he pretty much did what he had to do.

As disgusting a self-caricature that Elvis eventually became, some of those early records are really smoking (Andrew seems to agree). Take a performance like "Heartbreak Hotel" - he's able, in the course of just one line, to fashion a decrescendo from all-out rhythm and blues shouting ("Oh since my baby left me...") to Bing Crosby-esque crooning, to just the faintest whisper ("...so lo-honely I could die."). This guy embodied the clean-cut, white image of celebrity sexiness, with all the unabashed musical libido of rhythm and blues bubbling underneath. What's not to love?

Of course I'm speaking in gross generalizations and musical stereotypes, but take into account that there was nothing much else operating in 1950s American popular culture. People weren't concerned with authenticity, they were obsessed with sensation. This goes back perhaps to the virtuoso performers of eighteenth-century Europe, to the overnight success of groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band at the beginning of the Jazz Age in America, through rock, disco, hip hop, you name it... and it is probably even more so today.

Americans want to embrace superstars that reinforce their own value systems and their images of themselves, whether real or imagined. Elvis was every white teenager's fantasy in the 1950s - the girls wanted to have him and the boys wanted to be him. As these kids grew up and faced reality, so did their hero for better or worse, and in a way, he became an image of all the false comforts of the whitewashed 1950s as our social fabric began to unravel in the succeeding decades.

So how is it that a fairly talented kid who laid down some pretty good records is now, 30 years after his ignominious death, remembered (and imitated) more for the laughable character he became than the innovative, irresistible performer he started out being? In other words, why in God's name is this even thinkable, let alone acceptable:

No, I don't consider Elvis the King of Rock & Roll (that's Bo Diddley's title if you ask me). I'm not even that much of a fan, really. But come on, it's been 30 years, let's give the man some respect...

today's listening

2007-08-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

One of the first jazz records I ever owned was At Basin Street. That quintet with Max on drums, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, and Richie Powell just knocked me out. Here were five guys in total support of one another, navigating the most burning of tempos with total, conversational ease. Especially when Clifford solos, the rapport between his inexhaustible flow of ideas and Max's rhythmic fluidity was so tangible you could almost see it; these guys weren't just playing a session, they were exploring a musical relationship with one another on stage, right there in the moment.

A lot of things I used to be into I can't listen to anymore, but there's something timeless about everything that Max Roach ever laid sticks on. Today, for me, it's the Roach/Braxton duo, Birth and Rebirth that's still knocking me out. This is probably one of my all-time favorite Braxton records. As much as I love the earlier quartets with Altschul and the later ones with Hemingway, we rarely get to hear a drummer pushing Braxton (the improviser, as opposed to Braxton the composer or Braxton the theorist) with such intensity. And yet that unwavering support is always there; it never becomes a clash of egos or a conflict of artistic concepts. This is my favorite kind of jazz, you can't call it bebop, hard bop, free jazz or whatever - it's really about personalities in communication, in continuous, tandem motion.

Darcy has the complete roundup, so I'll refrain from any further eulogizing here about what a tremendous jazz icon Roach was. I will, however, add my voice to the chorus of folks like Darcy, Taylor, D:O and others in pushing further recognition of the fact that Max was not only an innovator in bebop; he continued to create new music, seek out forward-thinking collaborators, and take up some of the most pressing social themes of his day. As Darcy points out:

Many of the obits so far have focused on Max Roach's well-deserved place in the pantheon of the greatest drummers of all time. There is no question that he deserves every last one of those accolades. Hell, he deserves them for the first five years of his career alone. But Max Roach was so much more than "just" a brilliant, innovative, prolific, sensitive, massively influential, swing-your-ass-off jazz drummer. He was an artist — a great one, and, paradoxically, an underrated one, despite all the accolades. His most personal and creative works aren't widely known, even amongst jazz musicians and aficionados.

This is a guy who could have easily just reified his status as a legend of jazz (especially given the conservative cultural climate of the past couple decades), but instead he chose to advocate for some of the most controversial innovators and stylistic developments in the music. There are many who simply "push boundaries," but very few who do so with such a powerful, visionary spirit and with such consistently joyous creativity.

This fragment from a 1999 interview with Max Roach came through the Braxton list yesterday (via Jason Guthartz). I think it pretty much cuts to the chase:

[Max Roach] proceeded to horrify the sort of people who hold on to the past for dear life when he recorded duos with the avant-garde musicians Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton.
"You used to play with Charlie Parker. How can you work with those guys?" he was asked by those who should know better.
"I answered this way," Roach said. "A person like an Anthony Braxton is more like Charlie Parker than a person who plays *like* Charlie Parker. Bird was creative and different and looked inside himself. He knew what Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter and the rest of them had laid down. That was the foundation. Bird built on that foundation.
"Now you have people like Phil Woods who preserve the tradition. And then there are people who push forward, who perpetuate the continuum by trying out things. Cecil Taylor is more like Art Tatum than a guy who plays like Tatum. It may not always come off, but that's what creativity's about."

If only so many of those who will be lauding Roach from the lofty edifice of jazz education would recognize that he didn't just help to create a style, but that he continued to push the music, and continued to recognize and support others who were pushing the music, far past the crystallization point of bebop in the 1950s.

oh, the irony

2007-08-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

My wife used our Angry Vegan mug to drain the grease from our taco meat last night... and she says I have a weird sense of humor.

updates

2007-08-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

Nice to finally have some vacation time this weekend to get a few computer projects done...

I just updated the mp3 Archive on my site to make it a little bit more current. The two 2003 MTKJ Quartet self-releases (Who Knows the Wicker Man and Live) are gone, as in no longer available, so if you're holding a copy of one of those you are now one of the elite few. To compensate, I've made available our entire set from the gig at 1510 Performance Space in Oakland last week, no doubt the high point of our recent tour.

The Tiner/Baggetta/Filiano/Ligeti Brooklyn gig from last January is still up there, as is the final set ever performed by my collegiate ensemble The Big Red Peaches Coalition. And of course, the demo recording by the ill-fated electric Miles tribute band Evil/Live rounds out the collection, and I've finally properly edited those six tunes into two suites as they were performed.

Once you're done taking in all the free music (and before you start thinking about all the better ways you could be spending your time), hop over to my CDs page and you'll discover that most of my recent releases on the pfMENTUM and Nine Winds labels are now available via iTunes, and are linked as such.

Of course not everybody's a fan of the digital revolution, but I'm doing the best I can...

back in the city of angels

2007-08-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

These Cafe Metropol shows always seem like the best kind of homecoming for us. This is the third one we've done in conjunction with visual art shown by our friends Allen Glass, Kio Griffith and Misato Nagare (collectively known as Lick the Beaters). Allen and Kio have both contributed art to our album covers, and Misato is the mastermind behind our famous series of T-shirt designs. Rocco Somazzi books the music at Cafe Metropol these days, and as I've mentioned already, it was at his previous space in Hollywood that we made our performance debut almost five years ago. Plus, it's a thrill to play our new music for all our friends that come out for these very special gigs - even more so after we've developed it for several nights on tour.

With three-quarters of the band now living outside of Los Angeles, it's not without irony that we still consider this town our home base. I think it's more a sentimental than a geographical consideration at this point. So it may be that there's a bit more pressure when we're playing for our own people - Jason and I were talking this afternoon about how it actually makes us a bit nervous to play here. But most of all it's just fun to share this music with a friendly audience, and I think both sets tonight were notable for the sense of variety that we brought, going way back to play some of our earliest tunes as well as some of the very latest; touching on styles from mellow modal funk to a circus march and from lowercase electronic explorations to high-strung bebop.

I recorded everything but the Bakersfield show this week, so one of my projects before summer ends is to work on this audio and post a couple of these sets to the mp3 archive on my site. We had several photographers there tonight also, so real pictures are coming (we haven't had an actual group photo taken in three years), but here are some of the better digital shots we got right away...

more catching up

2007-08-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning Jason and I had a nice breakfast and a healthy walk around downtown San Diego with Kaiser before we drove up to meet Paul and Ivan in Long Beach. The Long Beach gig was at a killer coffeehouse/performance space called Portfolio, and it was set up by Chris Schlarb, a very creative guitarist who runs the Sounds Are Active record label out of Long Beach. I played on an album on that label a few years back called A Prospect of Freedom, with Lynn Johnston, Ray Raposa (from the Castanets), and the members of Chris's other band, Create (!). Chris and I have been trying to set up a double bill with one of his groups for a while now, so it was good to finally do it. He played the first set with drummer Tom Steck in a duo they call I Heart Lung:

Their hypno-meditative improvisations set up a nice contrast to our set, which was strong coming off that good energy of the San Diego show the night before:

I like coffee. And I like playing in coffeehouses, at least once each tour. The staff at Portfolio hooked us up, too, so we were all properly caffeinated before this one...

catching up

2007-08-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

After the customary breakfast with Greenlief at Lois the Pie Queen in Oakland, we set off back down the I-5 for Bakersfield. That evening's gig was at the weekly Bakersfield Jazz Workshop that's been going on at the Nile Theater downtown. It's a very hip, newly remodeled space, although the acoustics there are more typical of an airplane hangar than a jazz club. We hosted a workshop with some of the student musicians who come down for the early jam session. This was one of the more positive things that has come out of the tour - all of the students were very open and excited about the kind of modular cueing ideas we were demonstrating with a couple of our charts.

After the workshop we played a set on our own, and while the crowd was enthusiastic this was probably the musical low point of the tour thus far. It must have been some combination of not being able to figure out the room, not being able to get a vibe with each other on stage, and being pretty much rinsed from the loooong schlep down the I-5 earlier that day. No pictures or audio from this one, which is probably for the best...

As we moved on down to San Diego the next day we were expecting even more hassles. The gig was originally booked at a place called Desi'N'Friends, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, there was a last minute scheduling mishap with that venue. Apparently the club owner had double-booked that night, and when it came down to it the San Diego Parrot Head association (or something like that; it's the local Jimmy Buffett fan club) won out with their karaoke night over our program of avant-jazz music. Too bad, too, because our pal Nathan Hubbard had busted his hide getting us press and radio promotion for the gig. But thanks to the intervention of SD/NY bassist James Ilgenfritz, the concert was moved to a black box space at CRCA (Center for Research in Computing and the Arts) at UC San Diego. As it turns out, we had a decent audience that stayed put through three sets - first was Ilgenfritz with NY saxophonist Jonathan Moritz:

Next was a new Nathan Hubbard project with saxophonist Gabriel Sundy and electric bassist Harley Magsino:

I took a few moments at the beginning of our set to speak about the passing of Paul Rutherford, and in recognition of the fact that on our very first gig with this band we opened for Paul, we dedicated our set that evening to the great trombonist...

Despite all the crap that went down in order just to make this gig happen in the first place, it ended up being one of the best of the tour. All the music that evening was inspired, there was a good feeling among the audience (with esteemed attendees including pfMENTUM boss Jeff Kaiser and SD jazz DJ Miff Mole), and the hang afterward with Kaiser, Moritz, and Ilgenfritz was a much needed break from the rather hectic schedule of the last several days.

rip paul rutherford

2007-08-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

Just got word that British trombonist Paul Rutherford passed away. That's Paul on the far right, after a gig at the old Rocco on Santa Monica Blvd in Hollywood. It was the first MTKJ Quartet performance; we opened for Rutherford's duo with bassist Torsten Mueller (second from the left).

What a sweet guy Paul was. I never got to play with him other than sharing the bill that night. I did organize a concert at CalArts a few days later for those guys, with the help of Chris Heenan (far left), who had brought them to town in the first place. I never met a musician more grateful to be playing than Paul was at that moment.

Think I'll go listen to Trombolenium as I have my coffee this morning...

east bay round up

2007-08-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

For the past two days we've been lamenting the fact that every time we bring this band to the Bay Area we're so rushed for time we don't get to really take advantage of some of the best cuisine, local culture, and scenic beauty you'll ever find on the West Coast. This is really one of my favorite parts of the world, but that's probably also due to the overwhelming support we get from the creative music community every time we come up here.

At noon we were at the KFJC studios in Los Altos Hills for a live on-air set and interview. Dale Self (the head on the left) is our connection up there. Dale was there for our very first gig in San Francisco at the SIMM (Static Illusion Methodical Madness) Series back in 2003. Dale is now one of the DJs at KFJC; he and his wife always hook us up with good company and good food when we're in the area.

After the radio show we headed over to West Oakland for a gig at the aptly named 1510 8th St Performance Space. They have a soulful little scene happening down there. Phillip Greenlief has been booking most of his Evander Presents shows at 1510 and we shared the bill with his new trio project Citta di Vitti, which features PG's compositions based on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Their set was absolutely wonderful, probably my favorite thing I've ever heard Phillip do (check them out this week if you're in SoCal). Our set was one of the best and most satisfying that we've ever played. Good room, good crowd, and a good hang, somehow justifying all the insanity of trying to get up to the Bay Area and back for three shows in two days.

san francisco speed session

2007-08-06T09:07:00.001-07:00

Drive drive drive drive drive drive drive...

Play.

Hang with an OLD, OLD friend I haven't seen in years...

stratostrophically speaking...

2007-08-04T23:36:00.000-07:00

As we get ready to head out tomorrow, a bit of good news to report: it looks like the next Empty Cage Quartet album (we're calling it Stratostrophic) will be released on Portugal's Clean Feed Records in 2008.

This is something of a breakthrough for this band, as we'll be joining an exciting and ever-growing roster of creative music heroes that includes Anthony Braxton, Ken Vandermark, Elliot Sharp, Mark Dresser, Evan Parker, Charles Gayle, Rob Brown and others.

But for now, let the tour blogging commence...

reinterviewed

2007-08-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

It's almost Empty Cage time again, and tomorrow night I'll be talking to Vince Outlaw, host of The New Jazz Thing on KSDS Jazz 88.3, about our San Diego show next Wednesday with the Nathan Hubbard Trio. The program streams from Vince's site at TNJT.com and from the KSDS website, for those of you who can't get enough of my uber-dynamic on-air charisma.

A full schedule of next week's activities is posted on the Empty Cage Page at MySpace. We have a warm-up gig at the Academy of Creative Education summer music program in Los Angeles tomorrow, and then we hit the road on Sunday. I'll try to check in here as much as possible.

UPDATE: Due to some unfortunate next-to-last minute rescheduling on that San Diego gig, the KSDS interview has been postponed. Props to Vince for playing some of our tunes on the show anyway...

UPDATE #2: Thanks to some crafty maneuvering by Hubbard and co-conspirator James Ilgenfritz, the San Diego gig has been relocated to the black box theater at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UC San Diego (directions here). Same time/bands/price.

interviewed

2007-07-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

Had an enjoyable (and long! 45+ minutes!) interview with Taran Singh of Taran's Free Jazz Hour yesterday. We talked about several of my current projects and he spun a few tracks from my recent CDs on pfMENTUM and Evander Music.

The show broadcasts live from Radio G in Angers, France on Saturdays and repeats throughout the week on Euradio in Nantes. If you don't happen to be in France this week, it's also archived as a mp3 podcast.

hello, hello, hello

2007-07-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Nice review of Hello the Damage! (posted here) by Nicholas Hunt at Stride Magazine. My favorite part of the review is where he describes his favorite part of the album (near the end of the first track on disc one):

This builds to the moment that really sold me on this group, despite my limited experience of free jazz; 22 minutes into the track it creeps into what I assume is the third and last movement, 'The Mactavish Rag'. This is, plain and simple, fun. A nursery-like, jaunty tune, it shows quite ably that these are musicians who are in it for enjoyment, not some highbrow standard of 'appreciation', and that's all to the good.

I've been waiting for someone to pick up on that. "The Mactavish Rag" is indeed "fun" music; it's a pseudo-ragtime that I wrote for my dog (who was named Peter Mactavish by his first owners, orphaned at three months old, then we got him and named him Braxton), at the request of my wife. I was studying some of James Reese Europe's early recordings at the time; the conjunction of syncopated dance music and hyperactive terrier just seemed to make sense somehow.

The brief recording linked above was made during the sessions for our upcoming release Stratostrophic but won't be included on the album (the other guys decided it just didn't fit... ouch...). Supposedly there's a Tony Datillo short film in the works based on this recording as a soundtrack. Hello, viral video!

coming back

2007-07-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Gradually creeping into a more normal level of activity around here. Last weekend was an eventful one due to a couple of looong rehearsals with the band in preparation for a string of upcoming gigs. I think we may have set a new record not only for the most new compositions at the start of one of these tours, but for the most rehearsal time as well (above was the scene following a marathon session at Bakersfield College on Saturday). Exciting stuff to come...

: : :

On Friday evening I organized a Company-style show at the downtown LA artspace Dangerous Curve. I wish I had recorded it, because the results were fantastic, and this despite a smallish turnout due to the fact we were going up against about a hundred really good things going on in LA that night. I've tended to move away from free improvisation projects in the last couple years, perhaps because it's so rare that these things turn out to be very memorable experiences. But when spontaneity meets unpredictability meets a general atmosphere of cheerful quirkiness like it did on Friday, well yeah, that can become something quite memorable. The unlikely combinations and recombinations of participants (myself, Jason Mears on woodwinds, Eric Clark on violin, Paul Kikuchi on amplified snare drum, Cory Beers on tabla, Kraig Grady on his meta-slendro tuned pump organ and various mouth-effects, Motoko Honda on electric keyboards and effected toy piano, and Tom McNalley on electric guitar) into changing duos, trios, quartets and quintets was determined by an (almost) random process of selection. My vote for the most interesting (and ear-bending) combination has to go to Jason Mears playing a Japanese flute in a microtonal duo with Kraig's pump organ.

: : :

This weekend I'll be interviewed on Taran's Free Jazz Hour about some upcoming projects. The show broadcasts in France but it also streams on Taran's site. Taran is a great supporter of the music, and he plays a nice variety of new creative music releases on his show. I recommend checking out his interview with an unusually sedate Anthony Braxton from December '05.

: : :

In preparation for a performance of some of my Sun Ra arrangements at Café Metropol in October I've been going through my old Sun Ra records looking to fill in some holes here and there. In doing so, I've come across two CDs of interviews and audio clips that have been compiled by the Hinds Brothers (of Sun Ra Research fame). A lot of the spoken material has appeared in previous issues of their fanzine, but trust me, if you're a Sun Ra enthusiast at all, the recordings are priceless. It's really something else to hear Ra holding forth about being gypped on royalties, musicians showing up late, hippies, synthesizers, religion, politics, and nearly everything in between. They're selling the CDs along with other Ra propaganda on eBay. They've also been posting video from some of these interviews on their YouTube channel.

: : :

You know what's cool? Not this.

taking it easy

2007-07-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the absence. I didn't really mean to make you ponder old Hans Groiner for so long... but nevertheless, it's been nice to turn things off for a while. My first couple weeks of summer fun were productive enough; I finished a number of composition projects and knocked about six books off my reading list. But then we took the little one to Morro Bay for a few days (there she is relaxing in our hotel room in the pic above) and it's been a bit difficult to come off of vacation mode ever since.

"How can you just sit and watch that crazy survival guy all day long?" my wife asks...

But things seem to be swinging back to busy now. I'm rehearsing some new and old projects in the next few days, and there are a couple of mini-tours on the horizon. And I'm excited, because if the tour van breaks down in the middle of a desert or a rain forest or something, I'll know exactly what to do...

monk for the masses

2007-06-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

Played a gig with my buddy Dan Schnelle (a.k.a. Dan the drummer for the IJG) last night and he told me about this hilarious take on Thelonious Monk's music (and apparently some people haven't realized yet that it's actually Larry Goldings):

After you watch that, go to Hans' MySpace and listen to the samples from his CD, which is supposed to be out soon. Let's hope so - I'm pretty sure I'd pay good money to hear the rest of "Think of One"!

tofu-riffic

2007-06-17T22:02:00.001-07:00

This is quite possibly the spiciest tofu dish I've ever concocted:

I'll confess I don't really know anything about cooking... my philosophy is basically to improvise until it looks good, and if it looks good, hopefully it will taste good too. I just figured out yesterday that scrambled eggs come out much better when you don't cook them on high heat.

So this evening it's a brick of extra firm tofu, sliced white onions and chopped garlic cloves cooked in olive oil, black and red pepper, and Burn, Baby, Burn! Hot Sauce (that's right, the one marketed by the Black Panthers!) over steamed brown rice. Oh, and a very tall glass of water...

: : :

By the way, blogging about things of, umm, substance (like music) will return, hopefully this week. Been putting all my creative energy into finishing several large compositions for projects later this summer, but I'm excited to begin writing here about some of those new trajectories...

reviewed

2007-06-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Troy Collins turns in a nice review (the first one, in fact) of our new CD And Begin Again over at All About Jazz. Click here to read it (as if you had nothing better to do...).

kind of blue annoying

2007-06-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

So Miles Davis is sending me spam now:

Doesn't he have anything better to do in the afterlife than harass me about OEM software? C'mon, man, I always thought you were the epitome of cool; now I'm seriously going to have to reconsider that...

: : :

sirius music

2007-06-10T23:06:00.000-07:00

Surfing around YouTube (again) and I stumbled upon this recent-ish interview with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen:

Kind of a kitschy piece, sure, but I find this statement (part of his answer to a somewhat inane question having to do with whether he "hate(s) the tradition") to be particularly revealing:

"I didn't break anything, I just left it as it is. But I added a lot of new works... and there is enough to study now for centuries, to add this to the traditional music. So there's never something like that among artists, that they break each other's work. That is respectless and I don't like that at all."

He's usually framed as an iconoclast, a revolutionary, so maybe people don't quite realize what a congenial guy KS really is - congenial to his predecessors at least (Mozart in this case). Seems he could care less about that TV interviewer:

"Could you tell me what the most beautiful sound, or the most interesting sound, that you've ever heard is?"
"No."

Then dig the look on that guy's face, like he can't decide whether to cry or puke! And that's just the first question! As they say, watch what happens...

a former spelling bee champ myself, i can relate

2007-06-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

...of course I was just the local champion. I took second place at the regional contest after misspelling 'mozzarella' (still can't spell it; had to look it up just now) - there's no way I could have held a candle to this kid:

photo by Mark Bowen/Scripps National Spelling Bee

Via Catalysts & Connections (via Musical Perceptions), here's a quote from champion speller Evan O’Dorney upon winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee:

“My favorite things to do were math and music, and with the math I really like the way the numbers fit together,”….. “And with the music I like to let out ideas by composing notes and the spelling is just a bunch of memorization.”

Brilliant! As Spiegelberg states so eloquently here, this ought to be a real rallying cry for music (and arts) education - not only that it assists students in learning other aspects of the curriculum, but that it gives them an opportunity to "let out ideas." That context for self-expression is crucial if we expect students to ultimately be successful human beings, and not simply good at passing tests or adding numbers or whatnot.

from davinci to picasso

2007-05-31T14:32:00.000-07:00

...in less than three minutes:

Here's a gem of a YouTube creation, 500 years of female portraiture morphed together to create a single fixed, dreamy stare. It leaves me with one lasting impression - that styles may come and go but other things change very, very slowly, like the archetypal ideal image of the Western woman interpreted through the mind of the Western male artist.

I'm waiting for part two, where he morphs the work of Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, maybe end up with one of Paula Rego's Dog Women, or something by Cindy Sherman or Barbara Kruger. I'm sure that video will be much less cute, even as it makes pretty much the same point. Or maybe that's a different point entirely. What was my point again?

saxophones-a-plenty

2007-05-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

First MySpace and now this... Vinny Golia finally got a website together.

He's got lots of music samples posted, including a full sextet session we recorded back in October that I haven't heard until now. And while you're there check the videos page - there's a clip from a Jazz for Models performance at the Bakersfield Jazz Festival in '05. Dig the sustained note that starts off that clip - this was actually about halfway through the midday performance, it was extremely hot out there, long story short - I nearly passed out after that one! Who can hang with VG's legendary circular breathing technique? Certainly not me, the next time that note came around I bowed out rather respectfully...

you just roll with it baby

2007-05-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

...and that will be the only Steve Winwood reference you will ever see here at STPAWTA.

Finally got around to cleaning up and updating the blogroll to the right. No surprises really, I just included some links to people with good music blogs who have been showing up around here, either in the comment sections or linked within my posts. And I've ditched all of the links to left-leaning political blogs because let's face it, who the ?%#! really knows what the government is doing anymore, anyway?

trombones, clones, and microtones

2007-05-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

Went to check out Harry Connick Jr. while he was in town last week (cuz my wife is a big fan, and we haven't gotten out of the house together in a while). Say what you will, I think he's a pretty phenomenal pianist in that Jelly Roll Morton/Professor Longhair/Fats Domino/Dr. John tradition, and he's become quite an inventive orchestrator as well. His new project centers on New Orleans music, and not just jazz, as he's reinvented several New Orleans rhythm and blues numbers from the 1970s with big band arrangements that sound as if they're informed as much by Thelonious Monk as by Allen Toussaint. It inspired me to go back and connect with some of that music again via this compilation on Soul Jazz Records (Durkin, if you don't know this one, you oughta). Pretty much anything that's put out by Soul Jazz is worth hearing, but this one is exceptionally good...

It's good to see a "popular" musician examining and re-examining his influences so closely. Besides the R&B stuff, Harry's band can swing like a mother, and he deserves credit for bringing a very sophisticated and true-to-its-roots sensibility into a mainstream genre usually dominated these days by much tawdrier fare. The band set up a long, low-down rendition of "St. James Infirmary" that had the entire crowd (several thousand) hollering and cheering for every sustained dissonance, every trumpet growl and trombone smear (courtesy of t-bonist Lucien Barbarin, whose grandstanding I didn't much care for actually) - people were really listening for what kind of instrumental trick technique would come next. Bubber Miley (or Lester Bowie, for that matter!) could have walked into that house and made out like a rock star. I've never seen anything like it.

So it was a pretty entertaining show, and underneath the whole showbiz facade there was some real music happening. Credit where credit's due - this is no studio band, Harry backs himself up with some of the most accomplished players from New Orleans...

Part of the draw for me, anyway, was Harry's longtime trumpet soloist Leroy Jones, who can absolutely tear it up in that style with one of the sweetest trumpet sounds I've ever heard. New Orleans trumpet players always have such a bright sound - it's the Louis Armstrong influence filtered through generations of parade band trumpeters no doubt - but Leroy sounds as if he's coming more from a King Oliver thing (by way of Lee Morgan perhaps) with that velvety daaark, blues-drenched tone. Such a nice guy too - I sought him out when I was in New Orleans about ten years ago to ask for a lesson. And while he politely let me know that he didn't usually do that, he invited me to be his guest at his hit with the Preservation Hall band that evening. I delightfully accepted, of course.

Sunday evening I checked out quite a different kind of show, Kraig Grady's new shadow play called "The Follies of Dr. Placebo" at the Folly Bowl in Altadena. I've said it before on this blog and I'll say it again - Kraig is possibly the most under-appreciated and uncategorizable composer making music on this side of the planet.

I've had the pleasure of working with him a bit and I've seen him perform with his orchestra of handmade microtonal instruments before, but never in the context of one of these shadow plays. Loving Kraig's music as much as I do, and knowing his personality well enough, I figured I wouldn't be disappointed in hearing it applied to the theatrical dimension (I can be rather picky on that count - I enjoy listening to opera but not so much watching it; I love Harry Partch's music but don't have much of a taste for the dramatic productions). So I knew I would enjoy it, but I was surprised at how much I really enjoyed it. The moonlit, intimate outdoor location was perfect, the imagery was sublime, and the story - which revolved around issues of cloning, incest, and murder - somehow managed to be laugh-out-loud funny at times. Maybe chalk it up to Kraig's wittily calculated histrionics or his proclivity for the unexpected; "Placebo" was a fascinating peek into the workings of an extraordinarily unique mind. I haven't been so moved by an art work for quite a long time.

ockodektetting

2007-05-29T14:24:00.000-07:00

A few images here from Jeff Kaiser's "Farewell, Ventura!" concert at the lovely Ventura City Hall Atrium on Saturday, my fourth performance with Jeff's Ockodektet in as many years... always a good time, always a raucous and riotous mix of personalities from across the SoCal improvised music scene. Dig:

Basses: Jim Connolly, Hal Onserud, Steuart Liebig
Tpts: Kris Tiner, Dan Clucas, Brad Henkel
Bones: Michael Vlatkovich, George McMullen
Tuba: William Roper
Woodwinds: Vinny Golia, Andrew Pask, Jason Robinson, Nathaniel Morgan, Emily Hay, Lynn Johnston
Electric Guitar: G.E. Stinson
Percussion: Richie West, Brad Dutz
Conductor/compositions: Jeff Kaiser

We played Kaiser's "13 Themes for a Triskaidekaphobic" which was released on a pfMENTUM CD a couple years ago.

My what a big horn you have, Mr. Roper...

Me and Dan Clucas in the trumpet section, trying not to piss off Father Serra

Subtext: "Good concert... now get lost, Kaiser!"

Jeff got a bunch of press in the local papers over this (collected at his blog) and a fantastic audience showing. If I didn't know better (and I don't), I'd think people were happy to see him go...

smiley smile

2007-05-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

Started out this week a little bummed that I wasn't going to Europe with the IJG, a gig (or four gigs, actually) that I turned down back in February because it was just too soon to know if it would be prudent to leave mamma and baby alone for so many days. Things are going much, much better around here now and they probably would have been fine, but I would have never forgiven myself if I'd missed this:

That's right... it's been six weeks but we finally have a happy baby!

rod poole

2007-05-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

I just got the news that microtonal guitarist Rod Poole was murdered. The story is being recounted here as it unfolds; the whole thing is just too tragic and too senseless for me to get into.

I can say that I first met Rod after a gig at the Okiro series I used to curate with Jason Mears back at the old Rocco space on Santa Monica Blvd. It might even have been the very first performance by the MTKJ Quartet - my memory fails me. I do remember that Rod was there to record the other group on the bill, and he graciously offered to record our set as well. He was so enthusiastic about our music after we played, and actually showed up at a couple more of my gigs after that to say hello. Totally humble and such a genuine and friendly guy - it was only later that I found out what an incredibly heavy musician he actually was. And now, what a loss...

I did some Googling and found a couple things: first, Nels Cline's remembrance, as well as an mp3 sample of music they made together with Jim McAuley as the Acoustic Guitar Trio. And I don't know who this guy is, but at the bottom of that post he's linked to a ZIP file (still active) on SendSpace which contains Rod's entire solo guitar CD, The Death Adder. There's also one track by Rod on iTunes, from a guitar compilation called 156 Strings. Please, go listen.

jazz in bakersfield? what?

2007-05-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yes, there is a jazz scene over here, and I don't know why people are always so surprised about it. The 21st annual Bakersfield Jazz Festival was going on Friday night and all day Saturday, and as usual it was a stellar lineup and a first-class show all the way. CSUB music professor Doug Davis started this event way back in 1987, and two decades later the guest list reads like a veritable who's who of jazz legends and contemporary superstars (you know what I mean).

The real genius idea behind an event like this, as far as I'm concerned, is that year after year Doug mixes up the bill to present emerging and established local talent, challenging and creative new groups (like the IJG), and the big audience draws like this year's headliners Lee Ritenour and Poncho Sanchez. To heck with purism, it's that "something for everyone" approach which turns out to be such a great exposure for the younger and less mainstream groups as well as a chance to expand most audience members' perception of what jazz is.

This festival always gets me to thinking about just how rewarding (and important) it is to be involved in a small, local music community rather than go join up with the legions of big city jazzers. Actually, this is something that's been on my mind since the recent Metro Galleries show I blogged about. Maybe I'll get into this idea more in some upcoming post...

Anyway, yesterday was a delightful day getting to hang for an afternoon with IJG mastermind Andrew Durkin and the IJG's Delawarian Diva Jill Knapp while we waited for the rest of the group to show up. Got to introduce them to little Alina and the precocious puppy at home, and then Andrew and I spent a moment backstage musing over the difficulties and joys of fatherhood:

Here are a couple cell phone shots I took onstage before our set, dig the crowd out there - they have no idea what's coming!!!

Brian Walsh in the hard hat, fearing an angry retaliation by the audience perhaps?

Me and Cowboy Dan...

It looks like Durkin's got a big recap post coming on his blog, and Jill has posted hers already, so I'll just post a couple of pictures my sister took from the audience and keep my comments to these two very general observations I made:

1. This being the largest audience I've ever played to as part of the IJG, it really became apparent (even more than after the last NYC gig) that the music works much, much better in a fun, open, festival environment when people figure out that they're actually allowed to laugh at what we're doing. And once that idea caught on, it caught on in a big way. It's rare that any of the daytime acts get a standing ovation at this festival, but we sure did (see the third picture below).
2. With an audience like this, at a festival like this, it seems there is always a mix of people who are there to get drunk and party, people who are there to smoke cigars and drink wine and look good, and a small but loyal group of people who are there to really listen to the music (as if it were a concert, imagine that?). Most of the time the acts on the bill appeal to one or the other of these crowds, but in that rare instance when a band comes on that can make you laugh and make you think, the result can be pretty electrifying. I think yesterday's set really achieved that.

And without further ado, here are the pictures (click on these to open up bigger ones):

UPDATE: I just posted all the pictures as a set at my Flickr page.

iTunation

2007-05-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

And Begin Again is now available on iTunes to listen to and/or buy. Click here and go knock yourself out...

pop culture shock

2007-05-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

Via BeepGlitch Blog and WFMU, here's a priceless video of John Cage appearing on the I've Got a Secret TV game show in 1960.

Why priceless? For such an unlikely collision between TV pop culture and perhaps the most radical musical thinking of the time, Cage's good humor is almost surprising:

"Inevitably, Mr. Cage, these are nice people, but some of them are going to laugh. Is that all right?"
"Of course, I consider laughter preferable to tears."

And he got plenty of laughter indeed. Of course it's hard not to laugh at a man in a suit on a game show squeezing a rubber duckie in precise timing to the second hand of his stopwatch (btw, what's with the rubber duckie theme on this blog lately?).

Kudos to the announcer Garry Moore for keeping things freakishly entertaining enough for the TV audience while remaining suitably respectful to the composer (and for ditching the game show format in order to allow Cage a full performance of his composition).

And how about that segue:

"He takes it seriously, I think it's interesting, if you are amused you may laugh, if you like it you may buy the recording..."

Damn, I want to hire this guy to MC at my shows from now on!

Q: what do pee wee herman, wynton marsalis, mookie wilson, celia cruz, pete seeger, danny devito and the 1988 new york giants have in common?

2007-05-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

A: They all know, of course, that you gotta put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone!

recent doings and thinkings

2007-04-29T00:52:00.000-07:00

My recent lapse in blogging activity hasn't been entirely due to my being on baby patrol... I have been doing a bit of playing too - probably more than I should have been doing considering the last three weeks have also been the busiest of the semester with my teaching gig up at Bakersfield College. Our annual Spring Concert with my Jazz Ensemble class was last Saturday, and I usually try to assemble the program loosely around some sort of theme. This time it was to feature works by innovative jazz composers that are rarely played by large ensembles, and the centerpiece of the program was a couple of tunes by Sun Ra (whose music is almost never played by any ensemble). For quite a while I've been wanting to feature Sun Ra's music up there (sans space costumes and cosmic theatrics of course), because I have a particular axe to grind when it comes to our friendly neighborhood Saturnian...

...or maybe not so friendly.

I also teach Appreciation of Jazz at BC, and in that class for the most part I'm usually able to overcome the students' apprehensions about "appreciating" much of the post-1960 jazz avant-garde. Ornette, Trane, Cecil, Ayler, Dolphy, Braxton... most of those guys fit seamlessly enough into the linear development of jazz history - at least they look like jazz musicians. But whenever I get into Sun Ra, hoo-boy do the skeptics come out. I've tried it all different ways, introducing the music alone, showing scenes from A Joyful Noise or Space is the Place, even talking them through it before playing anything. Once they see the costumes and hear ten seconds of Ra's cosmic philosophy there are very few that will accept this as anything other than 1960s drug-induced psychedelia, or in other words, completely irrelevant.

Maybe it's that we just need to have something to hate, or that our competitive nature compels us to always find something to rank as the worst as well as the best, or maybe in order to begin to comprehend the scope of any new field of inquiry we need to find a least favorite as well as a favorite. I don't know quite why it is, but hardly any one in my class ever finds that they actually like Sun Ra's music. So being that most of the musicians in my ensemble and most of the audience members that turn out for these concerts are current and former members of that Jazz Appreciation class, it behooves me to try to hip people to the fact that Ra's music was so strongly rooted in the tradition on one hand and such a profound and timely statement of independence and modernity on the other. It wasn't simply a function of "weird exotica" - these days there is such a disconnect from both the political reality and the activism of Ra's world it seems that all people see is the weirdness. And as attractive as that aspect alone may be to some people, I tend to think that if Ra was still on the planet today he'd have as much to say about the current political scene as he had to say about social justice during the 50s/60s/70s.

It's hard to see those guys - click to enlarge.

So there we are performing Sun Ra's music in nice slacks and dress shirts, onstage in a very austere (read: academic), standard big band setup (except perhaps for the Fender Rhodes keyboard and the complement of African and Afro-Cuban percussion along the back row), trying to make a point, I guess, about just how much fun and accessible this music can be when it's temporarily divorced from its political, social, ritual, cosmic consequences. And getting back to the idea of musical fun, I'm beginning to think that, at least with Ra's music (he famously thought that most avant-garde musicians took themselves way too seriously) a bit of deconstruction for the sake of fun may be the first step in teaching people how to put it all back together. So maybe we'll do a full-scale cosmic drama next year...

On a side note, I once tried to completely eliminate the word 'weird' from my vocabulary for about a year. Really forced me to think carefully through some of my very gut-level reactions to a lot of music. Try it sometime!

The day after the BC concert I jetted down the I-5 for a quick hit at this year's Trummerflora Spring Reverb Festival at UC San Diego with a new trio I've been working with called Traveling Light (James Ilgenfritz, bass and Isaac Schankler, accordion). I got there in time to hear a Trummerflora panel discussion on the state of creative music in the academy, in which this slanted public perception of "weirdness" came up again thanks to some pointed observations by Trummerfloran Marcos Fernandes. Props to Marcos for speaking against the media's use of the word 'weird' in describing the music of his colleagues - too often there is a "we'll take what we can get" attitude adopted by fringe art communities when it comes to dealing with the media, but at some point it's up to the artist to take some responsibility for how their art is described to and perceived by the public. And if we can't all be as prolific about it as this guy, at least blogging about one's own music once in a while is a good start. How's that for a little self-justification?

Those San Diego guys are to be commended for pulling together a real kick-ass festival for the seventh year going. And while I didn't feel so hot about my own contribution (and here I could rattle off a number of excuses about being way over-tired last weekend, worried about things at home, driving seven hours round trip to make the gig, playing in a pretty acoustically unfavorable black-box space, feeling our music was under-rehearsed, etc.) it was a real honor to be invited. No pictures, no recording, no proof that it ever happened other than the nice T-shirt I got to take home. But here's a picture from our hit on Thursday night up here in Bakersfield at the new Metro Galleries:

Traveling Light is an interesting project. Interesting - I shouldn't use that word - too vague and non-committal. Let me put it this way: the group is very challenging, for a number of reasons. One, it's a curious instrumentation, trumpet/accordion/contrabass. The instruments blend just well enough to make the lyrical and textural stuff sound very lush and shimmery, but at the same time there are enough subliminal or subtextual connotations with these sounds that sometimes it's hard to convey the right amount of seriousness (seriousness!) for some of the compositions we're attempting. And that's the next thing, the compositions. Each of us has contributed an original tune or two by this point and those all seem to complement each other very well. But the main reason James and I wanted to try a project like this was to explore material from a number of unlikely sources with the intention of making it not feel ironic or juxtaposed... so far that's only amounted to my arrangement of Brian Wilson's "Wonderful" alongside readings of several Anthony Braxton compositions. There has been talk of looking at some Jimmy Giuffre (our namesake), Nick Drake, Erik Satie, Olivier Messiaen and others but as I said, we've been a little indigent as far as rehearsal goes. And that would be the third thing - with James in SD, Isaac in LA and me up here in Bako (and life being complicated as it is right now for each of us) getting together has been a challenge. Seems James is moving back to New York this summer to boot, so we'll have to wait and see if anything else unfolds from this so-far stunted project.

Thursday night's show was fun though, I have to admit. Though our set had a few bumps and collisions, it was great to play with this group in such a resonant space. Local arts patron Don Martin recently moved his gallery around the corner to a much bigger, multilevel space on 19th Street. I curated a show at the old space back in November (with Jeff Kaiser, Dottie Grossman and Michael Vlatkovich, and a local electronic music group called Ragamuffin) and we had a great turnout for that. Thursday night was even more special, and for the first time in many years of booking shows in this town I felt like we really had a community of people who were there to appreciate the music - not just a collection of a few enthusiasts and some mostly uninterested students and passers-by, but a really warm, familial kind of thing. Big thanks to Tommy Simmons and Nick Minton who spun Sun Ra (!) records and projected film on the walls of the gallery during the intermissions (thanks also to Alex and Chelsea from Dagny's for lending a hand with things) as well as to Bay Area saxophonist and Evander record label honcho Phillip Greenlief who played the closing set.

L-R: Cory Wright (woodwinds), David Kendall (electronics),
Bill Hutson (electronics) and Phillip Greenlief (woodwinds).

I think a big reason the night was so successful was that easily half of the audience were students from my classes at BC who had attended a workshop with Phillip and his group earlier that afternoon. Usually these kids come to these shows just to write reports and rack up the extra credit points, but it seemed like after several hours of learning about Phillip's take on improvised music in class and after feeling the good vibes that were going around that night, most of them were ready to join in the fun (there's that word again!) and try to really experience something that was way out of their cultural comfort zone.

PG and the gang at Bakersfield College.

I don't know if you could find a more effectively charismatic poster boy for improvised music than Phillip. There was a real transformation that happened during his three-hour workshop on Thursday afternoon. Anyone in the room still thinking malevolent thoughts after their initial this-is-what-we-sound-like improvisation was instantly won over by Phillip's good humor and charm as soon as he began to explain why the music works and sounds like it does.

Finally, I must mention good friend Harris Eisenstadt, who spent a long day at the college earlier this week working with my student musicians and presenting his videos and findings from his recent musical study in West Africa (most of which can be found at his blog):

Harris plays for an appreciative Jazz Appreciation class.

I think it's important to expose these guys to some of the down-to-earth people who are responsible for making innovative, expansive art today. Most of them think that making music is all about having sexy bodies, making millions of dollars and being on the covers of magazines. It's good for them to get another perspective on things. Several of my students were talking about starting up an improvised music group the other night.

It's been a good week.

at home with alina

2007-04-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

Back to real-time blogging - as best I can anyway, considering life is much, much different now. And OK, I know that not everyone cares about your baby pictures, so I promise I won't turn this blog into a bragging ball for this new parent. Still, I can't resist just one more...

The one thing that's really struck me is coming to realize the power of sound in an infant's life. Her eyes are just now beginning to focus on things but her response to sound has been very dynamic, even from the very beginning. During those three days we spent in the recovery room at the hospital none of us got very much rest; Alina was startled and woken up by just about any sound coming from the hallway, nurses and doctors entering and leaving the room and so on. But once we got her settled at home she was like a different kid altogether. The humdrum sounds of our house - doors opening and closing, washing machines washing, the dog barking and howling like he does when he gets excited - none of that bothers her at all. Even the sound of our voices and those of people who are over here quite often - we can carry on a conversation at a regular volume and she sleeps through all of it. Of course these are the sounds she's been hearing for nine months. It's only the unfamiliar sounds - those that aren't part of her normal environment - that startle her.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to play much trumpet for her (practicing! what a luxury!) but she's heard a lot of music already. I made a big project of organizing various "chill-out" playlists on the iPod before Alina was born so I'm fairly well stocked with smoove, relaxing stuff to calm her down, though I've been trying to expose her to quite a variety of music when she's awake too. It's funny how immediately she will respond to certain tones; Ben Webster or Lester Young will knock her out right away. Charlie Rouse? not so much. She absolutely hates South African mbira music. Her favorite so far seems to be Glenn Gould's Well Tempered Clavier (maybe it's a Bach thing, she also seems to dig the recording of the Orchestral Suites I've been playing). She likes to hear anything Bob Dylan but Hank Williams makes her mad (apparently she didn't inherit the hillbilly gene from me). Some of these same patterns we noticed while she was still in the womb, others have been a bit more surprising. You would think that it would be the softer, more soothing tones and slower tempos that would lull the baby to sleep but that's not always the case - she seems to like Gould's faster performances and some of Dylan's screechier vocals as much as she does a sleepy Lester Young ballad.

So even though the prevailing scientific view seems to be that an infant's perception of sound begins at a very underdeveloped level, I have to think that many of our preferences for certain qualities of sound really begin much, much earlier than that. I was recently recommended to read this book on that very topic and I probably will, given that its author seems to be doing some groundbreaking research (groundbreaking in the sense that he's using contemporary forms of music rather than basing yet another study on the centuries-old "classical" models).

This is all fairly new to me though, so I'm open to suggestions...

czech it out

2007-04-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the title, couldn't resist...

My good friend and musical cohort Mike Baggetta is touring in the Czech Republic right now and posting some stunning pictures on his blog.

Okay man - I'm thinking TIN/BAG Czech Tour 2008 - make it happen!

talking new cd blues

2007-04-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

TIN/BAG: And Begin Again
Evander Music Em 044

KRIS TINER trumpet
MIKE BAGGETTA guitar
with
BRIAN WALSH clarinet
HARRIS EISENSTADT percussion

1. And Begin Again (6:07)
2. Bienvenue (3:05)
3. Recourse to Unison (23:41)
4. For Wadada (4:18)
5. The In-Between (3:50)
6-8. Half-Life:
I. One Brief Moment (4:07)
II. A Slight Shift (4:41)
III. Prize (4:28)
9. Back from the Eternity (4:20)
10. Fishers of the Star (6:23)

Total Time: 65:26

Tracks 1, 3, 4, 9 and 10 are compositions by Kris Tiner
Tracks 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are compositions by Mike Baggetta
Brian Walsh and Harris Eisenstadt perform on tracks 3, 6, 7 and 8

: : :

And Begin Again is here – my new disc with New York guitarist Mike Baggetta, with whom I’ve shared a rewarding musical friendship for several years now. While it features compositions by both Mike and myself, and great playing by our comrades Harris Eisenstadt (percussion) and Brian Walsh (clarinet) on a couple of extended pieces, for me this record is also a very personal statement, one that I’ve been intending (or perhaps attempting) to make for some time. So I thought I'd come up with a post here to riff on that. Mike is doing the same on his blog, from his own perspective of course.

I began writing the following shortly after Mike went back to New York following our string of gigs and recordings out here last summer. It’s written in the manner of liner notes for the session, although I never really intended for any of this to be released with the album. For that purpose, New Mexico poet/jazz historian/radio DJ Mark Weber has written a beautifully luminescent poem that he so generously laid on us (ah, but you’ll have to buy the album to read it!). Mark’s a wonderful guy and a good friend; his offer to appear on the Thursday jazz show at KUNM was one of the reasons we went out to the Southwest in the first place.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s the story of how this album came about...

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July 2, 2006. Mike and I rolled into Wayne Peet’s studio on a Sunday evening intending to record two new extended quartet compositions with Harris and Brian and if time, lay down a few of the duo pieces we’d be looking at during our weeklong tour of the Southwest. We had already played three gigs, including an in-store show at Poo-Bah Record Shop earlier that afternoon to work out the quartet material, so my lip was all but shot. To make matters worse, I had painfully injured the index finger on my playing hand picking up the guitar amp the day before, and Mike was coming down with some kind of nasty bug which eventually developed into pneumonia and bronchitis. By the time we got down to it neither of us felt much like playing any more. We later admitted to each other that during the recording we had both been thinking about when we might schedule another session...

Harris and Mike taking a break at the recording session

Brian and I outside the studio

The quartet music went great however, Harris and Brian played just beautifully, we said goodbye, and then went back in to record our duos. We’d been happy with the new material – mostly new versions of ballads that I’ve written over the past several years and some recent tunes by Mike that were much more harmonically involved than the music we’d been playing together since our first album. For this tour Mike had ditched the experimental plastic, duct-taped, bolted-together prepared guitar he’d been using previously in favor of his regular jazz guitar. Our performances had been well-received but it seemed like we both felt the need to further simplify the material and stop attempting to obscure the fact that we were playing trumpet/guitar duets...

What resulted from our recording that night surprised both of us. We had recorded one take of each of the new compositions and unhappily went home. But listening back a day or two later we realized the simple, spare, fragile beauty we had been going for all along was right there - so apparently we had to be sick, tired, out of our minds to finally achieve that sound - and after a couple days off we headed out to New Mexico refreshed, creatively charged, and played a very successful series of duo concerts concluding with a beautiful, candlelit all-acoustic show at High Mayhem on a rainy night in Santa Fe:

Incidentally, the photos that comprise the artwork for this CD were taken from the car on our way to New Mexico two days after the recording. Somewhere near the Continental Divide, as we came out of a torrential rainstorm, this amazing double rainbow appeared in the sky, looking like it ended just near the side of the road. Mike and I scrambled to get a few pictures of it without wrecking the car in the process:

We’re both quite proud of the music on this CD – for us it represents both a summation of previous periods in our individual musical development as well as the genesis of a new approach to this duo.

So now a word about the compositions I wrote for the recording...

“Recourse to Unison” was written in February 2006 and was an attempt to fuse Baroque formal and contrapuntal precision (I had been studying the Bach Inventions for several months and wanted something to show for it) with an expansive method of notating indefinite-pitch material for improvisers. The music is through-composed except for the insertion of four brief episodes of free improvisation in this quartet arrangement. The notation indicates to performers the elements of melodic contour, approximate pitch and duration, and coordination of simultaneous happenings within a web of very tightly-woven thematic variations. Here are links to the composition notes and score if you're interested.

“For Wadada” was written in 2000 as a dedication to my teacher, friend, and favorite musician in the world, Wadada Leo Smith. It was recorded by my trio (trumpet/bass/drums) in late 2000. I had originally written just the melody, which reminded me of something that Leo might play, and the chord changes were added much later. This piece has turned out to be a nice vehicle for our duo, though, and this version explores more of the harmonic aspect of the music.

With “Back from the Eternity” I tried to write a piece that could potentially have no beginning and no end. The melody is written in a circular fashion with multiple built-in repeat structures, and the accompaniment part reads continuously from a matrix of 24 pitches with each vertical and horizontal line spelling out a four-note chord. The title has to do with a dream I had that involved several people I’ve known who have departed, and the sadness I felt about that religious impulse which tells us to separate ourselves in time from those who have entered into “eternity,” or at least our inherently limited concept of it. As I woke up from this dream, these words repeated over and over in my mind: “to bring them back from the eternity we’ve banished them to...”

The title “Fishers of the Star” is a reference to a passage from Sleepers Awake, a novel by the American writer Kenneth Patchen. It's one of my favorites - fantastic and terrifying all at once. You should find this book. I wrote "Fishers" and the melody to “And Begin Again” on the same day in 2002, and the latter was titled after a line from a Patchen poem called What Is the Beautiful?. Both compositions were originally intended for solo trumpet and have since been performed in different settings, but this I consider their definitive interpretations. Bookending the album as they do, the two performances seem to tie everything together within this idea of a “fragile lyricism” that Mike and I have developed. “And Begin Again” is dedicated to my wife Kim. I’ve always told her I wouldn’t write a piece for her until I could come up with something beautiful enough. I still don't know if I've done it, but she loves this tune so this one is now for her.

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If you're still reading (and still interested), you can purchase the album HERE.

the haps in blogsville

2007-04-11T01:30:00.000-07:00

Being that I've been a little, um, busy for the last week or so there are a few pre-baby posts I was working on that I never got around to finishing. Here's the first...

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If you haven't yet been to Harris Eisenstadt's blog, get thee over there. Harris has been liveblogging his extended visit to Gambia and Senegal, and the videos he's posting are fantastic.

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Scott Spiegelberg over at Musical Perceptions gives his take on music education, a topic I've complained about on this blog and am now researching again, given that we'll shortly have fresh new ears to feed around here. I've always thought the Mozart Effect people had an iniquitously limited view on the benefits of music listening (how better to sell their books?), but he brings up a worthy point: why isn't it enough to teach music for music's sake? And not only "beneficial" music (you know, like Mozart and stuff), but all music?!

Because I'll take creativity over spatial awareness any day...

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On the topic of all music, Andrew Durkin has begun a blogging project he calls Art of the Mix Tape. It's worth checking out - especially if you've never been the beneficiary of one of Durkin's gleefully eclectic CD-R compilations. He has that rare ability to discover some of the greatest music you've never heard. He also manages to dig up some of the weirdest shit on YouTube.

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Finally, Boing Boing links to this video and this article about inventor Troy Hurtubise's homemade armor suits. I used to dream about building this kind of stuff when I was a kid. Geez, I'm glad I didn't turn out like that guy...

prodigy!

2007-04-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

More pictures and stories coming, but I had to post this... the girl has got her trumpet pose together already!

she's here!

2007-04-04T17:44:00.000-07:00

Busy day in the hospital yesterday... we were scheduled for a C-section at 12:30 p.m. and didn't actually get in until 7 p.m. - but we made it through safe and sound and Alina Rose is now a BIG part of our lives - all 21 inches, 10 pounds and 3 ounces of her!!!

More soon...

Alina says everything is A-OK!

ken wilber stops his brain waves

2007-03-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

Something tells me a little of this would do me good right about now...

baby news

2007-03-29T19:53:00.000-07:00

No, it's not the news you're thinking of... although we do have a definite date!

Those of you who I've spoken with recently know that we've been a bit concerned that Kim is now full-term and the baby hasn't yet dropped. She saw the doctor today and he seems to think that because of her (Kim's) bone structure the baby actually is not able to drop, and if we were to go ahead with natural labor it wouldn't be without tremendous complications. So in the interest of keeping mother and daughter as healthy as possible we've scheduled a C-section for next Tuesday, April 3 at 12:30 p.m.

I hope you'll remember to keep us in your thoughts on Tuesday. Needless to say we're very excited around here.

Have to admit though, it felt pretty weird to enter the baby's birth date in my calendar for next week...

still waiting

2007-03-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

...although by all indications we're getting very, very close.

In the meantime, here's some "hold music" for you. Dig Malachi Favors on electric bass!

everybody must get stn'ed

2007-03-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

Almost four years waiting and I finally get a review in this magazine. Double review, actually... thanks to Nate Dorward, who penned this paean (so to speak) on our last two Empty Cage/MTKJ records:

Empty Cage Quartet
Hello the Damage!
pfMentum CD040 CD x 2
MTKJ Quartet
Day of the Race
Nine Winds NWCD0258
This hardworking freebop outfit from the West Coast – Jason Mears (alto sax, clarinet, wood flute), Kris Tiner (trumpet, flugelhorn), Ivan Johnson (bass) and Paul Kikuchi (drums) – used to have a Scrabble-player’s nightmare for a band-name, but in the gap between these two albums they have rechristened themselves the Empty Cage Quartet. Day of the Race, a studio album, focuses on short self-contained tracks, but the greater concentration and sharp-focus sound work to the benefit of the music. Aside from the spacious “Not Finding Anything/The Beast Wheel’s Revenge,” the pieces gravitate toward brisk freebop and nagging funk, the grooves pulled so taut that the music has a compulsive, locked-in feel that builds up considerable tension over the course of a track. This music is a sinuous dance, but one where every move, every exit and entry, every bob and weave, is made with razor-sharp precision; at times the players even get into a delirious high-stepping polyphony recalling Braxton’s earlier preoccupation with marches. But Johnson and Kikuchi are inventive and supple enough to keep the music from relentlessness, and the bass player’s contributions in particular draw the ear as often as the soloists. The front line works off the contrast between Mears’ mordant angularity and Tiner’s supercharged mix of old-school jazz trumpet and the radical self-questioning of the avant-garde. His feature on “Attack of the Eye People” is evidence of his rare ability to use effects in a way that is fully expressive at a melodic and rhythmic level.
The two-CD set Hello the Damage! received its cheery title from a Babelfish translation of a French reviewer’s pan of the previous disc. There's something of a lost-in-translation quality to the album, unfortunately, since the concert recording is far from satisfactory – the poor audio quality is particularly hard on Johnson and Kikuchi. Aside from that major caveat, this is a welcome complement to Day of the Race and a good example of the group’s different approach to live gigs. The quartet uses pre-composed materials sparingly and flexibly, treating them as navigation points within long, open-ended improvisations. Tiner is again extraordinarily inventive: his solo on “Swan-Neck Deformity” is a stunner, suggesting still-untapped potentials in Miles Davis’s legacy – it’s as if Tiner has plumbed the most daring, piercing moments in Davis’s music to propose a boldface musical language utterly different from the usual stylized fragility of Miles disciples. The greater emphasis on long-form improv risks the odd musical dead spot (and shows up Mears’s tendency to filibuster), but also gives the musicians the chance to explore colour and mood at length in a way largely ruled out by the jump-or-die linearity of Day of the Race.
Alongside Shot x Shot and Exploding Customer, the Empty Cage Quartet finds a new way forward for the modern-day free jazz quartet.
-Nate Dorward

Not that I think any of this warrants a response here (I'm mostly just flattered by the benevolence of his comparisons, and by the fact that someone finally noticed the influence of Miles's more probing music on my own playing, being that Miles Davis is one of the few trumpet players I'll actually admit that I still care about), where was I... but as far as the sound on Hello the Damage! - it's been funny to see which reviewers have been bugged by that and which ones apparently never noticed at all. Sure it's a live gig recorded direct to laptop with a stereo mic, but I tend to think the ear adjusts to that "room" sound after a minute or two. I take it that Nate is among a number of reviewers who realized that we felt strongly that this recording was a releasable document of a watershed moment in our music and a turning point as far as our approach to performing these compositions. I'd go so far as to say it was probably the funnest gig I can ever remember playing, with that band or any band. When you get something like that on tape, you do something with it, right?

Anyways, big thanks to Mr. Dorward. I think the next Empty Cage record (now in the works, due out later this year) will finally strike that balance we've been looking for between the shorter "radio cuts" (always makes me laugh!) of DOTR and the extended live play of HTD.

at home with pajamas, dog, and pregnant wife

2007-03-11T19:01:00.000-07:00

I'm increasingly being reprimanded by CERTAIN readers of this blog who feel that I haven't dedicated enough bandwidth to discussing my impending fatherhood (and maybe too much to discussing my own musical activities, hmm?). Well, part of me wants to say that here we are in the final weeks of the phase of my life in which I don't have to worry about having any dependents as such, and so how better to spend that time than in totally self-indulgent musical self-analysis. Of course that's not really the case (I really am quite a sentimental guy) but part of me wants to say it. The other part (I'm not sure exactly which part this is) wants to say, well, I know a thing or two about music, now what the crap do I know about fatherhood? Won't there be time enough to figure all of that out later?

And that may be closer to the truth. Up until now neither Kim nor I have really had the liberty to sit down together and think on what a big change this is going to be for both of us. Kim, amazingly, has continued to work full time right up until last week and my teaching/performing schedule has been as busy as ever until just a few days ago. So as we're here in the last few weeks before the big arrival, making our final preparations, we've had more opportunities to explore together just how wonderfully strange this whole experience is.

Here are some things I already know about my daughter:

She loves funk music. Especially the James Brown variety. But really, she can deal with just about anything that has a solid bass line. You can feel her (and see her) dancing around in there, right with the beat. I thought initially it was just Soul music, as she also responds quite well to mid-70s Stevie Wonder, but last night she was digging on some Thomas Mapfumo as well. Her favorite, though, has got to be the Godfather's version of "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag", with big band arrangement, from Soul on Top. To heck with the nice, relaxing music they tell you to bring with you to the delivery room - we already know what music we're bringing. I just hope the doctor doesn't get weird when we ask him to put this purple velvet cape on her as soon as she comes out. She'll probably just throw it off, of course, so then he'll have to put it right back on again.
As excited as she gets when she hears music, she calms right down when I read to her. I've been reading some of Patchen's poetry to her at night and she always seems to recognize my voice right away. Looks like my role as the disciplinarian in this family has already been well established.
She will never, ever be in need of clothes, so long as the grandparents have anything to do with it.
She will never, ever be able to keep her own stuffed toys, so long as our dog Braxton has anything to do with it. Thief.

Here are some things I'm hoping for:

I hope she likes coffee, Indian food, and nachos, so that we can spend lots of quality time together.
I hope she continues to enjoy listening to music, because she's going to hear a lot of it. And I hope she's ok with sitting there in her swing while I practice. Of course she'll have all manner of rattles, shakers and sound makers so that she can play right along.
I hope she doesn't realize that there are "channels" on the TV set until she's at least old enough to appreciate C-SPAN.
I hope she doesn't grow up to resent that everyone calls our dog "the big brother."
I'm hoping that someday she'll appreciate the fact that I passed up a gig with the IJG at the Hague Jazz Festival in order to stay home with my wife and newborn daughter. Ah, but let's keep away from the subject of music for now...

more ilk or alley ya

2007-03-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts here on what will probably turn out to be my last gig for awhile as I'll be taking a little hiatus to prepare for the arrival of our daughter. Seems that we're just a few weeks away at this point - expect pictures and fatherly observations in due course, though at the moment I find myself still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing. Uh, more to come...

Anyway, it was another enjoyable (late) night at the Il Corral last night, thanks to expert curator/expert electronic musician David Kendall, who played in the first set with Johnny Chang (violin) and Bill Hutson (electronics). Next up, Justin Shay (shruti box), Julia Holter (harmonium) and Isaac Schankler (accordion) explored a very quiet, very sustained tone world, setting up some good vibes for the third set, which was myself on trumpet and flugelhorn with the great Los Angeles composer and musical theorist Kraig Grady playing a pump organ tuned to the Meta Slendro scale (which, as I understand it, is based on the five-tone Indonesian Slendro scale expanded to form a cycle at 12 tones), and Cory Beers playing tabla.

This was the second time we've performed, the first being our "rehearsal" set at the Il Corral Amp Benefit last Saturday, and already I've realized that this is certainly one of the most challenging musical projects I've been involved with in quite a long time. I've been trying to deal with the realities of microtonal inflection on the unaltered trumpet for years, but playing with Kraig's tuning has given me an opportunity to explore this outside of the world of equal temperament, where any departure from the instrument's natural intonation always necessitates a return to "proper pitch." In Meta Slendro every deviation from my natural intonation becomes a point of new possibility - every pitch, in other words, seems to suggest a thousand new melodic connections that would never make sense in equal temperament. Alternately, this ensemble is a perfect context in which to explore the kind of sliding, "vocal style" I've been up to lately, involving the studied use of minute variations of half-valve and embouchure effects, again without any alterations to the instrument or the use of mutes, etc. Exciting...

The final set was the debut of another new project I've begun with San Diego bassist James Ilgenfritz and the aforementioned Isaac Schankler on accordion. Nothing like starting a bunch of new bands right before becoming a dad for the first time... but James and I have been talking about doing something like this almost since we met last year at the Spring Reverb Festival in SD. Realizing we shared a fondness for the music of both Anthony Braxton and Jimmy Giuffre, we thought it would be interesting to pursue a small ensemble project where we could deal with some of their compositions as well as music from other unlikely sources - so last night we used a couple of our original tunes to segue between Braxton's "Composition No. 40(O)" and Brian Wilson's "Wonderful". Given that we'd only had one rather rushed rehearsal last weekend the set was not without its hitches, but for the most part things flowed in and out of some very interesting spaces and the textural blend of these three instruments seems to suggest some very nice possibilities. We're scheduled to play again (post-hiatus) at this year's Spring Reverb Festival on April 22, and then at Metro Galleries in Bakersfield on April 26.

PS: Thanks to Debbie Lewis for the killer photos...

lunch with sammy

2007-03-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

The great Sammy Nestico is in town today for a concert with the student Jazz Ensemble at CSUB, and my old teacher Doug Davis invited me out to lunch with Sammy and some of the area composers. What a gracious, warm old soul he is - a spry 83 years and such a tremendous repository of musical knowledge and jazz history.

Very humble about his achievements, he talks casually about Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Quincy Jones as if they're right there in the room with us, and keeps making the point that his long career has been all about the keen understanding that "preparation meets opportunity" - now there's a phrase to remember.

Dr. Doug Davis with Sammy Nestico

What a thrill and a pleasure to spend a moment with this guy - especially considering my earliest memories of playing jazz music are working out some of those swinging Nestico jazz band arrangements as a freshman in high school.

Another thing he said, now that I think about it, in speaking about how he borrowed from the Impressionist composers (meaning Ravel in particular but also Debussy, etc.) is that it's impossible to write anything new, that everything has already been done. And then, almost as an aside he added: unless you're talking about using formulas. Formulas! Wow - I wanted to pounce on that and ask him exactly what he meant, who he was talking about, but the conversation immediately shifted.

Because I tend to agree, at least if he means what I think he means. And maybe I'm glad I didn't ask him to elaborate, because my take on it is that by looking at the existing musical system in terms of formulas it becomes possible to uncover the intention behind the effect, to get beneath that surface and discover how to maybe propose new solutions (new surfaces) for new intentions, or "new bottles for new wine" as it were. Here I'm thinking of late Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Braxton... ostensibly not Sammy Nestico, but hey, who the hell knows? He discovered one of the most influential arranging styles in twentieth-century popular music by taking apart the intro to Daphnis and Chloé, what else is the man capable of???

i was hoping they would

2007-02-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

Destination: Out posts some rare Leroy Jenkins tracks here, and their previous post on the Revolutionary Ensemble is live again.

Ben Ratliff's obit in the New York Times is now online.

Darcy posts a group of links to bloggers remembering Leroy.

And here is an interview with Leroy from NewMusicBox.

Somebody commented that when you were around Leroy you forgot that there was ever any difference between jazz and classical music. I'd agree; he certainly had a gift for seeing all music as belonging to one big happy family. I was always surprised that he never had any problem placing indications like "Allegro Moderato" and "Indeterminate Amount of Time" next to each other on the same musical score.

Rarely do such radical tendencies inhabit such genial souls...

so long leroy

2007-02-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

Word is (here and here) that Leroy Jenkins has passed away.

Leroy was one of my composition teachers at CalArts back in 2002 - it was my second semester in Wadada Leo Smith's grad program and Leroy came on to take Leo's classes while he was on sabbatical. I ended up having two seminar classes, two ensembles, and an hour-a-week private composition lesson with Leroy. There were only four students in the program at that time, and CalArts being the proverbial citadel-on-the-hill that it is we each had the chance to get very close with him, enough to realize what a sweet, giving, friendly guy he was.

With Leroy at CalArts, Spring 2002

Probably my favorite memory from CalArts is the reception after my mid-residence recital, looking over and seeing Leo, Leroy, Joseph Jarman and Myra Melford (who were at school to rehearse that afternoon with Leroy) talking it over and enjoying my grandma's peach cobbler. It was one of those unique moments where you understand that something very, very cool has just happened in your life.

Rehearsing with Leroy, Motoko Honda is at the piano

Leroy gave a solo violin concert at the old Line Space Line series while he was in residence. The air conditioner in the theater wasn't working, and the tiny room was completely packed, it must have been over a hundred degrees in there. Leroy was stunning, sweat dripping from his face, digging in to his music hard. I've never seen a musician so immersed in instant creativity. Seems like each time I had contact with Leroy my respect grew for his tremendous self-discipline and dedication to the musician's path. Toward the end of the semester he began to lament about going back to New York, which for him meant "back to hustling." Seventy years old, he was still at it, pushing his music with the tenacity of a twenty year old.

I tried to get ahold of him when I was in Brooklyn recently but no luck. Last contact I had with him was an email from 2004 - I had sent him a happy birthday wish along with an update on some projects I was working on. Here's part of his response:

Hey Kris
It's a gas that you're still in there.... Make it happen...
Keep in touch.
All the best
Leroy

Sure thing, man...

i always thought HTML wasn't funny

2007-02-24T00:17:00.000-08:00

But haha.nu offers this set of photo jokes illustrating HTML tags, a bit of inside computer geek humor some of you blogheads will no doubt enjoy. I have to admit I laughed out loud at a couple of them.

The full collection is posted here.

the belly and the beast

2007-02-23T11:20:00.001-08:00

Finished teaching and headed up to Oakland around 6 p.m. Tuesday night. I had been looking forward to playing on Phillip Greenlief and Jon Raskin's 2+2 series - this one (which took place on Wednesday night) was two saxophones and two trumpets, Darren Johnston being the other trumpet.

The drive from my house to Phillip's should normally take about four hours. I found out it can be significantly longer than that if you listen to a recording of Mahler 6 (well, probably any Mahler symphony really) during that third hour. Talk about zoning out, next thing I knew I was heading over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, an unnecessary $4 detour. Note to self: no more Mahler on road trips!

Anyway, had a nice hang with Philly G., hit up some soul breakfast at Lois the Pie Queen the next morning and wandered around Berkeley much of the day trying not to spend too much money. The gig at 21 Grand was fantastic. I always covet the opportunity to play with Phillip in any setting. He's one of those players that has so much information in his sound - which is to say he doesn't just explore abstract or technical parameters on his instrument - his work is much more a continuous commentary on his surroundings: the ensemble and the audience, the neighborhood, culture, literature, politics... He's also a notorious reader, and after any hang with Phillip I come home wanting to open more books (which is what I'll be doing all weekend).

Raskin's playing is centered on a lyricism that is as muscular as it is effusive. And what a pleasure to play a couple of Jon's compositions - one a graphic score with prints of different types of leaves as its connecting feature, another a mixture of graphic elements (self-composing was his term I think) and traditional notation (including a heart-wrenching ballad figure I wish I could remember).

It was nice to play with Darren Johnston in a small group. I had met him at 21 Grand last Fall when we were two-thirds of the trumpet section for Vinny Golia's Bay Area Large Ensemble performance. Not only are we both members of the same trumpet mouthpiece cult, we both play Bach Stradivarius instruments. So our sound concept is very similar, although our approaches to improvising are quite different. It became kind of an unspoken game to play off of these connections and contrasts - and I must say a couple of our trumpet duos were among my favorite moments on this gig. Darren has an upcoming CD on Evander Music with his group The United Brassworkers Front; I'd get it for that title alone...

contempt-orary jazz

2007-02-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

Good news (I think) for the jazz world as Mosaic Records plans to begin reissuing "contemporary jazz" albums from the '70s and '80s. Says co-founder Michael Cuscuna:

"The void major labels create opens up opportunities for indies to do the right thing, all in the service of the music."

Solid. But let's hope that (for the benefit of the Behearers out there who have recently brought attention to the lack of appropriate critical assessment of that period in the music) they'll dig a little deeper than David Sanborn and Earl Klugh and let a few real gems slip through.

At 30 albums per year you'd think the chances of that would be pretty good...

indignant musical quote of the day

2007-02-17T00:32:00.000-08:00

"Music is what someone listens to
with the intention of listening to music"
– Luciano Berio

You can even get it on a T-shirt.

Of course I'm reading into this somewhat (hard not to) - I'd be interested to know the context (Google didn't return anything). Does he mean only that which is intended to be listened to intently is music, or does he mean that anything can potentially be understood as music?

Because if the latter is true, what does that mean for our friend Whistling Jack Smith?

speaking of funny

2007-02-12T17:53:00.000-08:00

OK - so is this more about the music, or more about the humor?

Because it's not all that funny - and not all that musical either.

I think it's more about his dance moves...

il corralia

2007-02-08T00:51:00.000-08:00

Well, turns out there's no recording... so you'll have to take my word for it that the Il Corral was rocking last night. Personnel issues notwithstanding - after being on the road for 20 minutes I received a call from drummer Corey Fogel who had broken down (twice!) on the I-5 en route to the gig. He was stranded just outside of Bakersfield so I turned around to pick him up. We got to Los Angeles by about 10 (not so bad considering things usually run late at the IC), and after a bit of lineup-shuffling I went first, followed by Mitch Brown's solo set, French Family Fun (Bryan Eubanks & JP Jenkins), and Jeremy Drake's guitar/drums/drums trio with Corey and TJ Troy.

Props to David Kendall for putting together another fantastic bill. For such a low-key guy David seems to consistently assemble some remarkably dynamic improvised music shows. This was really a wide-ranging evening, from Mitchell's playfully subdued electro-acoustic explorations to Bryan and JP's expertly fine control of some seriously amped mixer feedback. Especially worthy of attention was Jeremy's trio, which quickly found a musical space to work in and then proceeded to exploit that music with uncanny focus and intensity. Jeremy sounded great amidst Corey and TJ's manipulation of opposite poles of the drum spectrum.

As for my set, I don't know if anyone present knew or cared who Shooby Taylor was but a few people heard the Hank Williams references - again, not really specific song fragments but explorations of some of the more unique aspects of each singer's approach to melody, tone, pitch, dynamics, etc. I played for about 20 minutes, developing melodic constructions based on first Skip James, then Shooby, then Hank, followed by a quick recapitulation in reverse order. What's the use in explaining or writing about this? I don't know... perhaps to clarify what I've been experimenting with lately, but more likely to bring closure to this specific line of thinking in order to open the way to what's coming next.

One of those things I'm looking to explore (and this is something I've been thinking about since the New York performances) is the inclusion of humor in music, particularly in improvised music. I inevitably think about this each time the Industrial Jazz Group gets together (humor has become more and more essential to that music, see here), but I've been thinking specifically about why so much creative music so often takes itself so seriously. Corey and I had a great discussion about this on the ride back to Bakersfield last night, which is what got me thinking about it again. Perhaps this is also the source of my recent Shooby Taylor fascination, for which I've already taken a verbal beating from more than a couple readers of this blog. Whatever you think, I stand by my belief that Shooby was all about his music. Sure the comedy is there, but it doesn't come first...

Really, how many musicians can you name who use humor in jazz or improvised music for the benefit of the music, rather than for the benefit of the joke? Durkin cites the Breuker Kollektief, Lester Bowie, Monk and Ornette. Off the top of my head: Roscoe Mitchell, Han Bennink, Steven Bernstein, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, Mingus...

shooby and skip and hank

2007-02-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

I used to loathe pop music. It wasn't too long ago that I counted myself among the rank and file of jazz purists, and it didn't help that much of my higher education only seemed to reinforce the snobbery and elitism that comes with such territory.

Sure I listened to pop music when I was a kid - my earliest musical memories involve connecting with my father's Hendrix records, my mom's Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin, and my own early infatuation with the Beach Boys, Billy Joel and Huey Lewis, among many others I'm now too embarrassed to mention. But when I became old enough to actually make decisions about the music I listened to (and not just float along with whatever pop culture drifted my way), somewhere around age 12, I began listening to jazz music. Louis Armstrong really, he was my first favorite. I connected with the spirit in that music and it wasn't just because he played the trumpet in a way I'd never imagined possible - it was because I heard something fundamental in that expression which to my ears didn't exist in any of the music I'd been spoon-fed up to that point.

Somewhere along the way, though, I absorbed this awful "jazz ideology" that forcefully declared any and all other music inferior. I'm not talking about the cultural conservatism of the J@LC crew, mind you. But for much of my teenage years popular or commercial forms of music (and for a while even all that dusty, dead old classical music) were completely banned from my consciousness. I just didn't want to bother with it. For the life of me I still don't know exactly where this idea came from. I often suspect my subscription to Down Beat magazine (long since cancelled) had something to do with it.

My aversion to classical music was finally overcome by a cathartic moment playing 5th trumpet on a performance of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. That's perhaps a subject for another post (along with my feelings on Gielen's provocative new recording of it). For years though, there was precious little vocal, pop or commercial music I'd allow myself to listen to; some Beatles here, some Hendrix there, some Bob Marley maybe. Thankfully, since my academic days ended my listening has seemed to gradually even out. Occupying the general area of my CD player right now are albums by Paul Desmond, James Brown, Townes Van Zandt, a couple Mahler symphonies, some Dylan, Billie Holiday, Neil Young, Toumani Diabate, some Beethoven. The realization, I guess, has been that the only ideology that ultimately ends up being useful in the real world is the ideology that guides one's own listening towards music that's good in the Ellingtonian sense (you know, that there are only two kinds of music: the good kind and the other kind).

So what has really knocked me out in the past several years as a result of my reconnection with popular music is the ability of certain singers to perform on a level of immediate, honest, personal expression. As an instrumentalist the goal is always the disappearance of the instrument, the immediacy of transmission from conception to the actual sound. Singers, if they haven't deceived themselves into thinking that their singing voice is different from their actual voice (hello, Britney Spears and most of the contestants on American Idol), naturally have the benefit of this immediate connection between their thought and their instrument.

Above I mentioned three singers who have influenced me most in this regard - Shooby Taylor, Skip James and Hank Williams. Although I could name a host of others (Billie Holiday and Howlin' Wolf would easily round out the top five), it's these three that I have paid particular attention to lately; each of their musics have contributed something specific to my study of improvisation and to my study of melody in general. And although neither Shooby or Skip would rightly be considered "commercial" or even too far outside of the jazz canon, it's what the three of them have in common as melodists and as creative musicians that interests me more than any considerations of genre or style.

My observations on Shooby's music were addressed in a recent post, but mostly have to do with rhythm and intervallic expansion. My experience with Skip James has been about exploring the idea of a kind of “fractured melody” - strings, shards of melody, drifting fragments, picking up and leaving off here and there, floating, bending, sliding about, slithering almost… Hank? I guess there's a very understated power that attracts me to his music. He was able to conjure so much hurt and loneliness, at the same time there's something in his tone that reveals an inner presence, a persistence, a force to be reckoned with. Hank deals with his problems with the same graceful yet forceful strength that he deals with his tunes - you can hear it in his tone, in the way he bends the notes, uses dynamics in his line, sets up the contours of his phrases and so on.

My solo set at the Il Corral on Tuesday night will explore these three specific areas as I've been developing them in my music. As I said in the Shooby post, not in tribute or homage, but in respectful study, combination, extension and elaboration. The show will be recorded and if all goes well I plan to post the audio and use the blog to demonstrate and further clarify some of these ideas.

shooby and dolphy

2007-02-02T14:33:00.000-08:00

Shooby Taylor's complete, post-rediscovery interview at WFMU in 2002 is archived here.

Why should you drop whatever you're doing right now to go listen to it? Two reasons: to hear Shooby scat over Miles Davis' funky "U'n'I" (from the 1983 album Star People), and for Shooby's story about meeting Eric Dolphy at Birdland just as he was being thrown out of the club for trying to scat over the house pianist's solo...

By the way, aren't those the same eyeglasses he was wearing at the Apollo in 1983?

soo-da-li-doo-ton-plee-blah

2007-01-31T16:07:00.000-08:00

Spent the better part of the morning trying to fight off the last of this nasty cold... and what better way to do that than lying in bed finally reading through all of Irwin Chusid's chronicle of his 2002-03 meetings with Shooby Taylor. That's right - Shooby Taylor, The Human Horn, the scat-singing marvel and under-appreciated genius, a sadly neglected talent who toiled away for years in the service of the USPS and suffered from gradually declining health, eventually to be discovered in a New Jersey nursing home and finally made aware of his cult following, thanks largely to Chusid, in 2002.

I discovered Shooby myself sometime in 2002 when I received a copy of the 15 or so songs that had been circulating around on cassette tape for years under the title "The Human Horn" (thanks, Mike Richardson). At the time I was very interested in exploring a sort of octave-displacement, off-key freebop swing idea that was kind of a mixture of various approaches (Eric Dolphy, Bennie Wallace, Monk, Lester Bowie...) but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was that I was hearing. After finally getting down to listen to this mysterious CD-R that Richardson handed me (all it said was "SHOOBY" in big capital letters scrawled with a green marker across the front), well, I'd like to say that I realized right away what extraordinary artistry I beheld, that the very sound I was after was right there amid all the "shraws" and the "boppy boppy boppies" but unfortunately it took a few more intrepidly curious listens before any of that would sink in.

At some point, probably while listening to the aptly titled masterpiece "Stout-Hearted Men," I finally was able to get past the humorous, satirical-seeming exterior and hear the pure joy behind Shooby's idiosyncratic musical invention. By the way, it seems this is the biggest obstacle to overcome when listening to Shooby - either one hates it outright or one can't get past the apparent silliness of what he's doing... but I dig now that beyond my initial reaction I could really begin to feel that there was some serious music going down. By serious I mean of course there's that amazing rhythmic sophistication - but there's also a sort of cockeyed harmonic cleverness which is clearly systematic, obviously not just some random, comic grabbing at pitches (listen to him get all over Johnny Cash's melody to "Folsom Prison Blues"), not to mention his famously distinctive scat-man parlance (check out these transcriptions and just try to sing along).

So far everything I've said is par for the course when it comes to eulogizing Shooby... and a lot of this I've realized for some time. What I never really appreciated until just now reading through Chusid's writings was Shooby's tenacity, his absolute belief that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do in this world. Consider these excerpts:

"I used to stay at the Robert Treat Hotel [in downtown Newark] under the name 'William H. Taylor.' I gave the proprietor a sample of my music, and he was intrigued. He said, 'What kind of language is that?' I said, 'It's scat! Something I feel, something I can do'."

"Hey listen, I got a gift to give to the world -- my music. Not to you, but to the world! That's why I call myself 'Shooby Taylor, the Human Horn.'"

And then Chusid:

He tried writing music in school, but didn't stick with it. His thing was scatting. One time after work, he was walking up the front steps of the school. "Climbing the stairs, I could feel it. Those guys were wailing, man! I went into the room where the guys were jamming. I started scatting." His voice teacher heard him, and warned her charge that singing like that would "ruin your voice." But Shooby realized he could express himself better by scatting than by singing. "It was the right decision," he pointed out. "You have the evidence."

Amazing that he would say "You have the evidence." Amazing also that he never seemed to have doubted the tenability of those little scat-treasures that were magnetized onto so many dirty, beat up old cassette tapes strewn about his apartment. Chusid again:

He tried to perform at the Apollo, but was booed offstage. He attended countless jam sessions at NYC clubs, but was rarely given the chance to wail. He was not taken seriously, was scorned, and made to feel unwelcome. But he would not quit. He financed his recordings to prove his artistry. In addition to vocalizing over the Ink Spots, the Harmonicats, and country gospel singer Christy Lane, he dubbed his "Shoobology" over Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Shirley Caesar, Errol Garner, and Elvis -- among others. Mozart, for God's sake! Shooby Taylor, scatted over Mozart's Rondeau Allegretto.

So now you'll understand why, all things considered, this brief clip of Shooby at Amateur Night at the Apollo (the only known video of Shooby performing) is all the more heartbreaking:

Anyway, I have a solo set at the Il Corral this coming Tuesday night and I think at least one of the pieces will be based on Shooby's singing. Not really a tribute, not really an homage, more an exploration of an aspect of my playing that I feel has been enhanced by knowing Shooby's music.

Shraw, man... shraw.

super starlings

2007-01-24T21:49:00.000-08:00

This is spectacular.

another couple more things

2007-01-23T20:21:00.000-08:00

Back home, recovering, back to work, trying not to be sick, watching SOTU on C-SPAN (why does this all sound so familar?), and working on a couple of Sun Ra arrangements for my student ensemble at BC. Specifically, the version of Kohoutek Theme they play from the roof of that Philly building in A Joyful Noise. Check it out at 6:20 into this clip. Joyful noise, indeed...

Anyway, finally got around to dealing with the recording of our set at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn two Thursdays ago - myself on trumpet along with Mike Baggetta on guitar and effects, Ken Filiano on bass, Lukas Ligeti on drum set. What a pleasure it was to work with these dudes. We played two improvisations, each clocking in (strangely enough) around 22 minutes. Following are two high-quality mp3s:

Part One

Part Two

I'll get to some of the other recordings shortly...

one more thing

2007-01-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

If Mike and I ever get invited to be the musical guests on Saturday Night Live, we've already got the shot for the opening credits:

Another more thing: if anyone's really that interested, I set up a Flickr page with all of the photos from last week.

east coasting...

2007-01-15T23:54:00.000-08:00

Scroll down for the play-by-play, because this schedule will remain up top for awhile.

TIN/BAG QUARTET
Kris Tiner - trumpet
Mike Baggetta - guitar
Brian Walsh - clarinet
Harris Eisenstadt - percussion

Jan. 7 - The Lucky Cat, Brooklyn, NY, 7:30 p.m.
(with Taylor Ho Bynum Quartet and Josh Sinton's Ideal Bread)

Jan. 8 - Bar 4, Brooklyn, NY, 8 p.m.
(with Tim Ziesmer's Snafu)

Jan. 9 - Bowery Poetry Club, New York City, 10 p.m.
(TIN/BAG Duo and Quartet)

THE INDUSTRIAL JAZZ GROUP
(more info here or here)

Jan. 10 - Chris's Jazz Café, Philadelphia, PA, 8 p.m.
(with Hoppin' John Orchestra)

Jan. 11 - IAJE Conference, New York City, 12 p.m.
(In the Sheraton Hotel's Empire Ballroom)

Jan. 11 - Goodbye Blue Monday, Brooklyn, NY, 8 p.m.
(with Kris Tiner/Mike Baggetta/Ken Filiano/Lukas Ligeti Quartet)

Jan. 12 - Java Hut, Worcester, MA, 8 p.m.
(with Tom Lubelczyk's AmericanMusicRevolution.com)

Jan. 13 - Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, Pittsfield, MA, 2 p.m.

Jan. 14 - Bowery Poetry Club, New York City, 8 p.m.
(with Darcy James Argue's Secret Society)

new york part nine

2007-01-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

Sorry my posts for the last couple of days have been so brief and tourist-ish. I'm currently sitting in the terminal at La Guardia trying to finish all of these so I can zap them up to the server when I make my connection in Kansas City (KC airport = free internet!). That way I'll meet my goal of blogging the entire tour from the road.

But at some point in the next week or so I plan to begin a new series of posts having to do with the direction my thoughts have been pointed this week concerning creative music, improvisation, performance, the road, etc. So more to come. As for the final day in New York City:

After a morning hang in Chelsea with Ivan, Jake, Harris Eisenstadt (now a blogger too), Cory Wright and Lucy Liu (I'm not kidding), Harris and I set off for the Strand Bookstore. Looking around the poetry section on the 1st floor I thought I was going to have to continue with the blogging business as to the absence of Kenneth Patchen editions on the bookshelves of New York City. Not so. I went up to the top floor, rare modern editions collection, where thanks to the gracious help of an employee who was also a Patchen admirer I found my way to these two gems:

I've been looking for these for years and years...

After stopping for coffee Harris and I ran into Nate Wooley, a great trumpet player living out here who I was hoping to meet at some point. The three of us had a nice conversation over matzo ball soup...

Later on I stopped in to Nate's gig at Downtown Music Gallery. I'm not totally sure of the personnel but the group sounded great and Nate took a blazing solo just before I had to step out and check in at the Bowery Poetry Club.

It was only Cory and I there so we popped down the street for a quick meal before the show. It was at this point that I decided to start smiling in my photographs:

The audience at the BPC was likely our best of the tour, a nice mix of friends, fellow musicians and complete strangers...

I'm interested to read what Durkin will blog about the whole thing, but I'll go ahead and venture to say that this was probably the strongest and most fun IJG gig I've ever played on. Playing this music night after night with more or less the same people is really something else. Tonight it just seemed to coalesce and flow together and fly by effortlessly. Here, without comment, are a few choice images from the stage:

Here's Andrew, Cory and I talking it over after the show. Well, not actually talking; you're looking at three severely understated dudes. Moments like these are why I'm glad Andrew has a blog...

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society took the stage after us, and this music completely blew me away. I had a few conversations with Darcy throughout the week and in addition to being an expert blogger he's also a real nice, down to earth guy. And an amazing composer of uncharted harmonies, sick grooves, and instrumental textures that make a big band sound nothing like a big band. Well done, guys. I'm now a big fan.

Nice of Baggetta to stop by to check out the proceedings.

After all that, into a cab with a drunken Ivan and back to Chelsea to get my stuff, and then up, up, and away...

That's it for the play-by-play; deeper layers shall be unraveled shortly...

new york part eight: pittsfield!

2007-01-15T08:26:00.000-08:00

My roommate at the Travel Lodge Damon Zick was up and chipper at the crack of 9:30...

Andrew dubbed this tour "Industrial Jazz On Ice" - this here turned out to be the only ice we encountered... and I was so looking forward to seeing snow in the East...

Saturday's drive took us out to Pittsfield in Western Massachusetts for a show at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts. I forgot to ask what the connection to Roy Lichtenstein was (or if there was one). What a treasure this gallery was, a beautiful space with excellent acoustics and a friendly staff.

If Worcester was our youngest crowd, Pittsfield was certainly our oldest - ahem - most sophisticated. Actually there were several very young kids in attendance which was great, and it's hard to tell in this photo (which was pretty much my point of view during the whole show: Cory's Yellow Jumpsuit) but the audience wound around the gallery down a long hallway and every seat was full.

Leonard Bernstein watched over the proceedings with typical Bernsteinian drama... much to the amusement of Andrew and I, as we've had a lively exchange over on his blog regarding the late maestro.

Here's a weird photo:

After the show we were invited to a local pub for dinner (that's how to treat a group of starving itinerant musicians, Pittsfield! Thanks!). The fresh-squeezed lemonade was killer.

We were all so proud of Phil Rodriguez for finding a girlfriend on this trip:

Another weird photo here, getting coffee (again with the coffee!) before the long drive back to NYC:

On the way back we had a little scare when we were in the middle of nowhere, the gas light came on, and the GPS system Andrew brought which claimed to be leading us to a convenience store 15 miles off the highway actually led us here:

That's right, totally lost, almost out of gas, and the GPS had forsaken us. Luckily Andrew found a police station, and they were able to give us directions to gas in the next town. So after this unexpected detour which we all feared would lead to some kind of freaky Blair Witch scenario we got pointed towards Manhattan again. I stopped off back at the IAJE conference just in time to catch Charlie Haden's set with his Liberation Music Orchestra:

It's also here where I learned of the passing of both Alice Coltrane and Michael Brecker earlier in the day. Charlie gave a touching speech dedicating the concert to both of them, and what a great concert it was. Although there were only a few knockout soloists (Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Chris Cheek on tenor and of course Charlie were exceptional), the band made nice work of Carla Bley's arrangements - rousing, moving, sentimental, lyrical, powerful... like Charlie himself. Bravo, Jackson!

I hooked up again with Ivan Johnson and Jake DeVito at the conference and we headed back downtown to the Chelsea place for a short hang before turning in.

new york part seven: worcester!

2007-01-15T08:25:00.000-08:00

Woke up Friday morning to this superb view of the Chelsea skyline:

Took a walk from there over to Union Square to enjoy a cup of coffee and hang out with the trees and pigeons and squirrels for a while:

Friday night's gig was at the Java Hut in Worcester, Massachusetts, a coffeehouse with a nice big room and a friendly clientele that welcomed us warmly:

Their wireless internet was utilized right away by the IJG blogheads:

Java Hut serves up the most heartattackalicious, death wish of a caffeine drink this side of, well, anywhere. No, I didn't try one... I like coffee but I'm not crazy:

Only in Worcester, huh? Or as the locals say it: Wistah... don't go up there calling it "Worchester" (Brian Walsh) unless you're looking to start a fight.

The group that opened for us was The Low Anthem, a folk/blues trio from Providence, Rhode Island that played a set of original songs heavy on inspired melody. Check these guys out - I got a copy of their latest CD and am looking forward to hearing it. Sure, there tends to be a lot of this kind of stuff to go around, and maybe it sounded so great because the bands IJG usually shares the bill with veer to the weird jazz side of things, but the music these guys played really seemed to "hit the spot" after a long day of traveling.

IJG took the stage, and also took the other stage across the room, and the entryway - transforming the Java Hut into a veritable three-ring circus of musical madness:

Worcester was probably one of the youngest and most enthusiastic audiences we've played to, although that could have been partly due to the various caffeinated joys that were in close proximity. Notice a theme, anyone? Industrial Jazz and coffee go together perfectly, and this trip proved it once and for all...

new york part six point five: bushwick!

2007-01-13T00:51:00.000-08:00

That's right, a separate post just for Thursday night, which was simultaneously the most exciting and exhausting hit thus far. This one was at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The space is a tight, funky junk store of a performance venue:

How very Bay Area of Brooklyn... it was a great vibe though, and great people hanging out and helping out.

Anyway, I wasn't as surprised by the appearance of the club itself as I was by the fact that David Amram was about to show up with about 35 of his students to read poetry they had just composed while on a tour of the locations Kerouac visited while writing On the Road. That was the first set, interesting, but kind of a free-for-all that turned out to be a somewhat milder replay of the "poetry slam" experience from earlier in the week when all 35 of Amram's students took off en masse once the reading was done.

The first set of music was an ad hoc group that Baggetta and I put together especially for this gig - the two of us were joined by Ken Filiano on bass and Lukas Ligeti on drum set. We got a killer recording of this set - I don't have mp3s now but will likely post something soon.

Lukas and I played together in another quartet in Los Angeles a few months ago and I remember that I really enjoyed our communication - he's a great improviser with a very dynamic sense of the drum kit, as well as a shifty rhythmic sensibility that was both very playful and challenging to work around.

What a thrill to finally play with Ken Filiano in a small group. Previously I think we've only played together in Vinny Golia's Large Ensemble, and I can't even be sure because it was a long, long way to see across that orchestra. Ken's a real sweet guy but a terror on the bass, he's capable of tearing the bottom out of anything that comes along in the music.

And watch out for those eyebrows...

Industrial Jazz Group took the stage (and much of the floor) next, and while I was pretty much blown out for playing anything else, the band got a great energy going and turned out one of the funnest IJG shows in recent memory. Oliver Newell's dance moves atop his bass amp stole the show:

...and the sultry/spunky vocalist Jill Knapp (the Queen Bee of the ensemble) was electrifying, as always:

Props to Mike Baggetta for putting this bill together as well as our Brooklyn gigs with the quartet earlier in the week, which were a whole other kind of fun. Mike's a great friend as well as a great musician and much of what's going on this week wouldn't have been possible without his efforts.

new york part six: iaje!

2007-01-12T23:41:00.000-08:00

Thursday was the day I’d been looking forward to, the centerpiece of this tour as far as I’m concerned. I woke up early (by recent standards) to get to the Sheraton in Midtown for our 12 p.m. hit at the International Association for Jazz Education conference. If you don't know what this is about, DJA provides a pretty accurate summary here. The immensity of this thing (encompassing several floors on both the Sheraton and Hilton hotels in Manhattan) can be overwhelming. I think we were fortunate to play so early in the conference, because as it goes on people seem to turn into jazz zombies or something - a person could really go nuts trying to see everything.

Just before we went on I ran into my old teacher and mentor from CSUB, Dr. Doug Davis…

Doug, who knows next to nothing about blogs but whose prowess with a camera is all but legendary, graciously agreed to take a few shots of the band during our performance.

IJG played in one of the larger ballrooms at the Sheraton to an appreciative audience – quite possibly the first time we’ve played to a crowd that actually got all of the "inside" musical jokes in the set. Here’s another trumpet section shot, looking a little tired but nonetheless ready for action…

Walking upstairs after the set Doug and I happened to run into his alter ego, trumpeter Dave Douglas. Dave and his quartet came out to CSUB years ago when I was a student there, and the whole Doug Davis/Dave Douglas thing was a source of endless amusement. Dave and I hung out over a few beers in downtown Bako way back then, and I was surprised he remembered me and even claims to read this blog. Well Dave, I'm honored, and by the way, nice coat:

Dave’s blog over at the Greenleaf music site has initiated something of a stir in the jazz world recently. I’d go so far as to say that he's brought the idea of a “jazz blog" to legitimacy as a vital form of discourse - which is important in many ways, not the least of which being the recent re-examination of many neglected post-Vietnam era jazz musicians that's now underway.

On the way out I ran into my friend and bandmate Ivan Johnson, who was at the conference valiantly representing his students at Oakwood School in Los Angeles.

Hanging with Ivan for a moment I mentioned that I had gotten booted out of the room I was staying in (apparently the guy who was loaning me his couch had also promised it to someone else in town for IAJE) and so I was looking for a place to crash. A quick phone call later and Mr. Ivan, the Infamous Man of Many Connections, worked out a deal that would make just about anybody salivate with envy - let's just say I'll be enjoying some very luxurious accomodations for the next couple days. More later...

new york part five: philly!

2007-01-11T15:22:00.000-08:00

Things are really picking up now... just a brief moment here in between gigs to catch up on some blogging and tell the tale of our trek into Philadelphia last night.

First of all, while waiting for the rest of the band to show up at the rental car place yesterday morning I slipped into this "Used and Rare Bookstore" somewhere near Union Square (yeah, I know Strand was just around the corner). This is a thing I do in every city I go to - scan the poetry sections of bookstores like this looking for old Kenneth Patchen editions. So far the only one ever to come through with anything has been Black Oak Books in Berkeley. Well, one more disappointment here in New York City:

Nothing. Damn.

For some reason since I've been out here I've been the first to arrive at nearly every gig and appointment I've had - weird - maybe my biology works better in the Eastern Standard Time. Or maybe I'm still on California time and I've actually been 2 1/2 hours late... no, wait, that doesn't work... anyway, people eventually showed up. Here's Damon Zick on the phone coordinating directions with someone (standard protocol for band members before each and every IJG gathering):

We got on the road to Philly thanks to noble bandleader Andrew Durkin (with a little help from Lady Liberty, in the background):

...but ran into miles and miles of traffic in Jersey, which we eventually found out was due to a pretty nasty looking accident down the line.

We rolled into the City of Brotherly Love just in time to catch a bite to eat at Fergie's Pub. Great vegetarian chili. I never thought mushrooms in chili could be so wonderful.

Nice to see old Cory Wright, who recently moved to the Bay Area, so that I have to travel across the country to actually hang out...

Had a fantastic gig at Chris' Jazz Café - the house was packed, the people were warm and very into the music, the trumpet section was a little wonky from all that driving:

...but all in all a nice, if brief, visit.

Exciting things to report as far as today's adventure at IAJE, etc. but that'll have to wait for now. I have to go pick up my laundry.

new york part four

2007-01-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Interesting day yesterday - full of the kind of juxtapositions and contrasts that embody the NYC experience in general...

After cruising into the city to make a visit to Downtown Music Gallery for some penuriously cautious record shopping Mike and I took the subway down to the WTC site. I hadn't been there since my first trip to Manhattan, years ago when the buildings were still standing. Mostly out of curiousity I wanted to see what was going on - I've seen pictures of the construction, but the area down there is so vast it's hard to gain a perspective on it unless you're standing right in front of it.

We circumambulated the pit, proceeding from what at first is a very austere, respectful memorial kind of facade. But as we kept walking, and before we knew it, we had ambulated into a shopping mall and couldn't find our way out. Wasn't quite ready for that one. Commerce will get you every time. At least there were no 9/11 souvenir stands anywhere (which was how I'd pictured it in my mind), only a hustler or two trying to sell us an album of photos of the planes crashing into the buildings. No thanks.

So last night was a double set at the Bowery Poetry Club - duo and quartet. I must say, although the performance was probably the best so far, the audience turnout was a bit disappointing. When Mike and I arrived there was a pretty rowdy poetry slam going on and the house was packed, but I knew right away the place was going to clear out once this thing was finished. I was almost right - as we got set up and ready to play at 10 p.m. there were still a few hangers-on talking excitedly about whatever had happened during the previous several hours, in the middle of the room, even as we began to play. Eventually we cleared them out too so that Mike and I played a duo set for a small group of less-rambunctious patrons and fellow musicians. And it turns out we got a nice recording from it. Here's an mp3 of my tune "And Begin Again." During the quartet set (again, probably the best of the week) the software crapped out on me, which was a bummer, but sometimes you want to just remember those great performances as being great and not necessarily have that perception altered by actually going back and listening to yourself.

After us on the bill was the Matt Wrobel Trio. Matt and his bassist Kevin Farrell are both old cohorts from my CalArts days - so eventually the evening turned in to a good hang, and a jam session of sorts. Baggetta and I got up and played "Stella By Starlight" - which, as we later realized, might have been the first time we'd ever actually played jazz together.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), no photos exist from the performance. But here's Mike and I at the BPC after our set...

Today - onward to Philadelphia with the Industrial Jazz Group... I'd better get moving.

new york part three

2007-01-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

Can you spot the New York City Subway Rat?

Trust me, he's there, saw him myself. Big deal about the strange smell in Manhattan, as it turns out... I'd be way more worried about these monsters running around everywhere.

Just a brief post tonight as I'm about ready to turn in. The week is getting busier and busier and I'm going to have to be more realistic about this "experiment in daily liveblogging" at some point.

Lots of running around today - first to Park Slope in Brooklyn to hook up with my old CalArts friend Beth Schenck before we got on the subway to find our way to the Industrial Jazz Group rehearsal up in Greenpoint.

Got turned around a few times but we made it. It was good to see Andrew and everyone in the band getting to town for the IJG shows later in the week.

Yeah, ten people in a very very small room - and that's only 2/3 of the group! Lots of people and lots of notes...

...but that's the way we roll in the old IJG.

After that it was back down to Park Slope for gig number two with the quartet, at the small but very hip Bar 4.

No audio from the show tonight, sorry. Tomorrow night's concert at the Bowery Poetry Club should be more amenable to live recording.

Have you found the Subway Rat yet? When you're done with that little mystery maybe you can tell us where Brian Walsh went...

new york part two

2007-01-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

Mission accomplished...

It's the shoe shot, I know it's cliché. I went straight to the Clarks store on Madison Avenue for these since I didn't want to spend the day shopping in Midtown (of course). In an emergency situation like this, it's important to stick with what you know! Thanks, Google!

After getting the shoes I wandered around town for a while in search of decent coffee. For crying out loud, it seems like each time I come to New York it's harder and harder to find coffee that's not Starbucks. It was Sunday afternoon too and most places were closed so eventually finding food became the primary concern. And because I'm now doing the gluten-free thing the ever-abundant New York City hot dogs, pizza and bagels were all out of the question. Finally I found a Europa Café open near the Empire State Building, which was perfect. Great coffee and a salad. Perfect.

Later on while waiting for Mike to get off work at MoMA I hung out at Rockefeller Center for a bit and saw the big tree, which as it turns out, is only slightly larger than my face:

I've only ever been out here in the middle of the summer, so I have to admit it's fun to see this stuff. Also nice to not have to deal with opressive humidity, just a little rain later in the evening.

So enough sightseeing, finally the music part of the tour got started tonight with an impressive lineup at the Lucky Cat in Brooklyn. The show got a nice blurb in Time Out New York:

Great to finally meet and hear Taylor Ho Bynum in person (his blog is worth checking out, by the way).

Taylor and Co. ("THPT" is the name of the band, apparently you're supposed to pronounce it rather than spell it out) played a couple Hendrix tunes, a Sun Ra tune and a couple of originals. I must say, there aren't many contemporary trumpet players who are very interesting to me, but Taylor's work (especially on the recent Braxton stuff) is just fantastic; he's really got a firm grasp on the tradition while navigating the more extended aspects of the instrument with tremendous control. After THPT, Josh Sinton's Ideal Bread played a brilliant set of Steve Lacy tunes (see DJA's post on Ideal Bread), and then us.

Here's a brief mp3 of the last tune in our set, one of my compositions, "Back from the Eternity." The music tends to be quiet, and apparently there was some chatter near the microphone, and the door to the bathroom squeaks pretty loudly, and it's right next to the stage, but you get the idea. Nice room, nice crowd, nice first gig altogether. And a nice greasy gluten-free diner omelette to cap off the evening...

new york part one

2007-01-06T22:27:00.000-08:00

Mike resisted having his picture taken in Times Square. Wasn't my fault that's where he told me to meet him.

First things first - as for the flight...

Item: The Eroica symphony is all the more heroic in the air, especially looking out over the snow-covered Southwest. Durkin, you'll be happy to know it was Bernstein's version.

Item: $100 for those Shure Sound Isolating headphones was a Guitar Center gift card well spent.

Item: I still really like Midwest Airlines, even though I wasted $10 on a too-rare beef (yuck) and gorgonzola cheese salad on which the lettuce was turning pink, and like any other airline there’s never any guarantee you won’t get seated next to some old, overly perfumed woman with dandruff and apparent bowel trouble. I still like Midwest because their coach seats are huge, and the extra leg room for me makes it worth all the trouble. Besides, I would have ordered the sandwich, but I can't eat bread anymore. At least their coffee was good.

Item: Why pay for wireless Internet at LAX when you can wait until the 20-minute stopover in Kansas City and use the free Internet there. MCI has got to be the most chill major airport in the country - one more reason to fly Midwest.

Anyway, made it to LaGuardia after a beautiful cruise over Manhattan just as the sun was setting. But because it was rush hour the bus into Manhattan took a long time, then the subway at 103rd St. was closed so I hoofed it downtown carrying a shitload of gear, split my shoe, etc. Altogether not quite the ideal arrival. But eventually I met up with Mike and Brian Walsh and we found a nice place to throw our bags down and stuff our bellies.

Much happier after dinner:

Another brisk walk and up lots of stairs to Michiko Studios for a rehearsal of the quartet music with Harris Eisenstadt. Nice to see the hometown boy...

Tomorrow's mission: sleep in, find coffee, buy a new pair of shoes.

i (don't) feel (so) good

2006-12-25T14:16:00.000-08:00

So long, Godfather...

How's this for a bummer of a Christmas gift -- Kim's grandparents got us tickets to see James Brown at the Fox... on February 6!!!

I guess this is as good a time as any to revisit my two favorite YouTube clips of all time, Prince and Michael Jackson sitting in with James Brown, and the classic James Brown Interview.

neighbor wars

2006-12-23T10:29:00.000-08:00

Seems that I may have found a better solution to the neighbor problem I talked about in a previous post. For my birthday I bought myself a kidi drum, this one:

This morning about five minutes of practicing seemed to shut them up pretty good.

i've lost all hope for mankind

2006-12-23T01:05:00.000-08:00

...if this is what passes for popular music now. I was scanning the radio last night, which I shouldn't have been doing in the first place, when I heard just a few seconds of this new song:

There ain't nothing that can't be done
By me and God
Ain't nobody come in between me and God
One day we'll live together
Where the angels trod
Me and God

Early in the morning talking it over
Me and God
Late at night talking it over
Me and God
You could say we're like two peas in a pod
Me and God

He's my Father
He's my friend
The beginning
And the end
He rules the world
With a staff and rod
We're a team
Me and God

You and God are like two peas in a pod?! OK, so the thing is, even if this is intended to be silly or tongue-in-cheek, I just don't buy it... and I haven't bothered to listen to the other songs on his website, but I did do a little research, and from all accounts this guy really thinks of himself as a serious artist. Via his bio: "I like music that makes you think.”

This song really makes me think, man - about how you've given us just one more example of how trivialized and cutesy and hyper-commercial not only music and (what used to be) culture in this country have become but spirituality as well - how religion is so bound up in stylized appearance, how such a cliché image of piety has unfortunately become the norm, because as much as I hate to think it, the fact that this is on FM radio reveals that there is actually a market for the kind of saccharine pandering to this smug and complacent notion of spirituality that you represent. The last four lines of the chorus just reek of this "everything's great and God's in charge" attitude that more or less belies and betrays the fact that there's more to living responsibly in this world than just resting on the idea that you'n God are a team and that a-makes everythin' all-right...

Am I wrong? Sure, old-time religion has always been a subtext of country music - but why is it that I can listen to Hank Williams sing about something like: "She read me the Bible like she used to do / I dreamed about mama last night..." and his music never seems to loose its depth, never becomes indulgent? Of course Hank also had the whole cute guy-teen idol-sex symbol thing going on, but marketability aside, what exactly is that elusive quality that's absent from most of today's popular music?

dear sir

2006-12-21T00:16:00.000-08:00

More on the subject of spam (and thanks but no thanks to Andrew Durkin for alerting me to the fact that spam poetry is nothing new... doh!).

I have to admit I was nearly fooled the first time I got a mysterious email from a West African friend who had recently come upon a large sum of money he was looking to discreetly deposit in a foreign bank account. It was late 2002 and I had just returned from a trip to Ghana, where it had taken me a few days to realize it probably wasn't the smartest thing to give my name and address out to every nice person I met who wanted to be a "pen pal." So I get this email, and I'm trying to remember if the name was familiar, going through my photos, my journal, stupidly thinking this must have been someone I had run into somewhere. I thought about it and read the email over and over for several days before finally realizing this is too good to be true. So I did a little research and figured out it was an advance fee fraud that went way back to the days of postal mail and faxes. Thanks to the popularity of email this has become one of the five largest industries in Nigeria (!).

Of course, nowadays the Nigerian email scam is so common it's almost funny - here and here are a couple of great parodies.

spam verse

2006-12-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

This morning I discovered that compiling the subject lines from emails in my spam folder can yield a certain kind of poetry... if you exclude all the obvious references to pharmaceuticals, cheap software, pornography and penis enlargement, of course:

You tusk he wag
At xenophobia on usurp
Or unicorn by varistor
Was wyner a weary
Be macho!
Your neighbors lost their alarm-clock.

Here's another:

Tell me your thoughts
You're looking
Like contribute list please
And the land of Esau,
Thy word runneth upon him blessed be overpast.
But I'm sure we'll get it right some decade.

The first one has a very abstract words-in-isolation yet free flowing, Clark Coolidge or E. E. Cummings kind of thing. The second one sounds a lot like Patchen to me, directly addressing the reader with a mixture of surreal imagery, grave consternation and King James English.

I'm open to critiques...

that's just saron

2006-12-19T01:26:00.001-08:00

Just found this photo of Our Dear Leader getting his gamelan on during a recent visit to Indonesia. Here's a video, although the picture pretty much tells the whole story. Saron was the instrument I usually played in the gamelan ensemble at CalArts, so I can at least verify that 1) his technique is not even close, and 2) the Javanese are very, very polite. Good enough for another cross-cultural photo op!

i'm in

2006-12-18T22:49:00.000-08:00

So Do the Math posed this series of questions to the jazzoblogosphere and Andrew Durkin, who seems just as reticent as I am about getting involved with such things - but at the same time just as prone to making lists of favorite songs and CDs and musicians etc. (why? is this another Saggitarian thing or do you think it might be a side effect of the over-caffeination?), anyways, Andrew Durkin's response got me to thinking about it, and you know how it goes, the more you think about something like this, the more inevitable it is you're going to participate. Plus, it inspired me to dust off some old records, which is good, so here goes...

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:

1. Movie score.

Planet of the Apes, the original one by Jerry Goldsmith (1968). Way ahead of its time. His theme music for Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) is good in a totally different way - it sounds like Industrial Jazz to me...

2. TV theme.

"Angela's Theme," which is the Theme from Taxi by Bob James. Reminds me of being a kid, staying up much later than I was allowed to, watching TV in my bedroom. I knew Taxi was supposed to be a funny show, but I could never figure out why the theme song sounded so sad. I'm not supposed to be explaining my choices like this, am I?

3. Melody.

"Selim” by Miles Davis, first track on the second disc from Live-Evil. "Ramblin' Man" by Hank Williams/Luke the Drifter. Not really for the melody itself (it's only three notes), but for the way Hank sings it. Unbelievable.

4. Harmonic language.

Everything on Pet Sounds. Schumann's Dichterliebe, particularly the first, "In the Marvellous Month of May." Mingus's "Duke Ellington's Sound of Love."

5. Rhythmic feel.

Any Thelonious Monk solo. Louis Armstrong on "Hotter than That." Waza trumpet music from Sudan. The Tennessee Two.

6. Hip-hop track.

"The Rain," by Oran 'Juice' Jones. Does that count? It was stuck in my head all weekend long.

7. Classical piece.

Recently: Xenakis' Tetras for string quartet, and Hardenberger's performance of HK Gruber's Aerial, concerto for trumpet and orchestra - whoooooooooooh, yeah...

8. Smash hit.

"The Tears of a Clown," by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Stevie Wonder wrote the music and Smokey thought it sounded like a circus. I think everything about this song kicks ass.

9. Jazz album.

Coleman Hawkins and His Confreres (with Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, and the Oscar Peterson Trio). It's perfect.

10. Non-American folkloric group.

Jaipur Kawa Brass Band from India.

11. Book on music.

Essays Before a Sonata, Charles Ives.

BONUS QUESTIONS:

A) Name a surprising album (or albums) you loved when you were developing as a musician: something that really informs your sound but that we would never guess in a million years:

Margo Timmins's voice on the Cowboy Junkies album Black Eyed Man just stuns me... I used to fall asleep every night listening to that record. Loved everything about her sound, her timing, just the straight-forwardness of it. Wow.

B) Name a practitioner (or a few) who play your instrument that you think is underrated:

George Mitchell, who was Jelly Roll Morton's trumpet player. After making all those great records he left jazz music to work for a bank. And I don't think Richard Williams gets enough credit for his work with Mingus.

C) Name a rock or pop album that you wish had been a smash commercial hit (but wasn’t, not really):

Neil Young's Living With War, for reasons I shouldn't have to explain.

D) Name a favorite drummer, and an album to hear why you love that drummer:

Rufus Jones, tearing it up like nobody's business on Ellington's The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.

* * * * *

Can't resist this last one, which Andrew added...

Name some Christmas music you can actually stand to listen to:

My pal from New Mexico, poet/musician/jazz historian Mark Weber's Brother Can You Spare A Dime I Need A Christmas Tree. He sent it to me last Christmas and it was on constant rotation around here. It's time I start playing it again. It starts off sweet and kooky enough, which you'd expect from Mark, but really becomes interesting about six tracks in when he starts into a narration about getting arrested on Christmas Eve.

Q: what's geekier than a trumpet duet?

2006-12-18T00:16:00.000-08:00

A: when they bring along their laptops, too...

Had a nice set tonight at Dangerous Curve, a fantastic art space in downtown Los Angeles, playing duo trumpets + electronics with Jeff Kaiser. 2006 has been an unusually exploratory year with regards to my previously documented flirtation with electronic music. I'm still not totally convinced that this is an area where I have much to contribute - but it seems at least that if the environment and the circumstances are right the music can often turn out to be quite interesting. With Jeff it sure is, because although we haven't played duo much and our playing styles are so different, as trumpet players we share many of the same tendencies and "ways of hearing" the balance of orchestration in an improvised context so there's a certain amount of predictability that we can rely on.

It's just too bad he didn't bring any of those ladies from his game show...

prone to pugnacious elation, am i?

2006-12-15T20:40:00.000-08:00

Had a pretty quiet birthday today, just the way I like it. I was able to steal a few hours this morning to practice, drink a pot of coffee and make a nice tofu scramble, and I made it through the rest of the day without too much hoolabaloo... Highlight of my day? receiving this excellent review of our new live album by Troy Collins for Cadence Magazine. Troy has been a solid supporter since our first record - ever poetic, his review of Day of the Race is available over at One Final Note.

It's been interesting to see the reviews come in for this latest one because this is the first CD we've done that has included liner notes (written by the great LA poet Dottie Grossman), and I've been surprised to find that more than a few reviewers will just paraphrase (or quote directly!) the liners, throw in a few song titles, and then sign their name to it... so it's almost a shock when somebody digs the music enough to really listen and engage with it and write creatively about it. Thanks, Troy. Now we're just waiting for the next Signal to Noise to come around so we can have the pleasure of thanking Mr. Dorward...

hard times

2006-12-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

The saddest thing about Ahmet Ertegun passing away is that it is symbolic of the end of a golden era of American music, one in which a person could start a record label on sheer force of will and an unflinching, genuine love of music, present a tremendous variety of young talent in a completely raw and uncompromising way, and change the face of American culture without needing a billion dollars to do so. What the Erteguns achieved in their time would simply not be repeatable today - just look at some of the the names: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Neil Young, Otis Redding, Joe Turner, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the MJQ, Jimmy Giuffre, Eddie Harris, Yusef Lateef, Lennie Tristano, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Art Ensemble of Chicago... would any of them have a chance in today's homogenizing music industry?

a good stern talking to

2006-12-13T00:38:00.000-08:00

Some powerfully shrewd words here courtesy of the great American poet, novelist and painter Kenneth Patchen, who would have been 95 today. I was scanning a few of his books this evening looking for something relevant to some of the recent blogging about under-appreciated artists and this excerpt from his novel Sleepers Awake popped out at me (for better or worse). Certainly Patchen experienced the life of the forsaken and forgotten artist as profoundly as anyone could have, and what he had to say about it is just as apposite to our time if not more so:

I never looked at anything beautiful without thinking the only way I can understand this is to forget everything they have tried to drum into my head about beauty.
'Culture' has become a property. People want to take music and painting and sculpture and poetry and stuff them into their pockets until they can "get a free moment" when they will "really sit down and enjoy them." You cute little punks! turn the filth and the envy and the greed, the hatred and the ignorance and the murder out first! What right have you to think you can bury yourselves away in the stinkholes of money - and position - and 'respectability' - grubbing during your "practical moments," and then have the artist trot out his little show for your 'enjoyment' - What do you think art is, some damn smorgasbord for shoeclerks!
The artist - and I am speaking very carefully now - is always the spokesman of God. You have beaten him, starved him, driven him mad; but always something in him was turned to a greater torturer, eaten by a greater hunger, beset by a greater calamity than any you could put in his path; because the things of God are always wondrous in a terrible way.
I believe that we are at a turning - one road leads into the dark, another into the light; and whichever man takes, be sure that the artist will have proceeded him there - his face scarred with poverty and suffering and fear.
So that you may "enjoy" -
So that a lot of pretty toys may please you with their quaint and frantic antics -
So that you may get "what you pay your good money for" -
So that the teachings of Christ may be translated into good, sound "Business English" -
What a nasty, vicious, evil, cheap fraud - this Century of the Cornered Man -
I think I hear a rat squealing in a monstrous trap.
And I think your eyes are looking out of that rat.
Tears of blood scar the face of Christ.

obruni ga la fo, ga la di nguto

2006-12-10T23:25:00.000-08:00

To respond to several of your comments, yes I am on break. Here was my stupid project for today: I finally figured out how to convert analog video to digital in iMovie HD and upload it to YouTube.

So I posted this brief clip from my trip to Ghana in 2002, sitting in with an Ewe drum and dance group that was performing at a restaurant we visited on our last day. I happened to strike up a conversation with one of the musicians (the guy standing there playing the bell with me), and when I told him I studied Ewe music in the States he pulled me up to play with them. What a thrill. He eventually left me alone and I played gankogui for most of their set. Lucky that Kim made it over there with the camcorder. She didn't see me at first because my shirt blended in with their outfits. Of course, tall white guy that I am, it didn't take her that long...

so what, ethio-jelly?

2006-12-09T09:31:00.000-08:00

Photo by Marilyn Whipkey

Speaking of little known jazz composers of the 1970s, my students in the Bakersfield College Jazz Program put on a small groups concert last week which included two selections by the "Father of Ethio-Jazz," Mulatu Astatke. I usually try to slip some rather obscure tunes into the curriculum for the semester (last year it was music by Anthony Braxton and Fela Kuti).

Anyway, on an eclectic program that also included music by Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Jelly Roll Morton (click here for the particularly raucous, if a bit slow reading of "Black Bottom Stomp"), it was the Mulatu tunes that received the most attention and the most enthusiastic response from the musicians. Maybe it's because the grooves, which tend closer to funk than straight-ahead jazz, were more up their alley - but I tend to think that because the compositions themselves are not yet affected with the august reputation of some of the other jazz standards the students feel freer to interpret them. Case in point, we also played Miles's "So What," and while I think they did an admirable job (and this is an important composition to be able to play), they're all so familiar with the original recording it seems there's always that concern to play something that measures up to what Miles did, however silly that sounds.

So this seems to be an often-overlooked area of jazz education also - the use of under-recorded or under-appreciated material in a way that gives students the opportunity to make creative decisions about a performance rather than continuing to rely on what they know from versions of classic performances that they've already heard. Of course this doesn't mean abandoning the historical material, but giving them license to take liberties with the tradition at the same time that they're exploring and appreciating the tradition, hence the Jelly Roll readings I mentioned above...

beyond freedom

2006-12-08T23:29:00.000-08:00

More on the subject of Miles's electric period here from my teacher and mentor Wadada Leo Smith, who offers a rare understanding of the structural advances that Miles was making in the 1970s, particularly on the excerpt titled The Electric Band:

...it went way beyond the free improvisers because it took a notion of form and unity as being the primary base as opposed to this kind of way-outness and this kind of notion of freedom. He had freedom but the freedom was very much systemically controlled, that is, by his system and his knowledge of how you'd utilize an ensemble in the same way that an African master would use a drum orchestra, and the reason I use the word drum orchestra is because I'm referring to like eight and ten people, see - a larger context where form and unity has to be applied in order for it to come out.

It's been the prevailing opinion that avant-garde jazz in the 1960s was all about taking more and more liberty with the music, and that this, along with Miles's inclusion of electric instruments, is what eventually "killed jazz." While freedom was certainly an important part of the equation in the 1960s, there were more than a few who discovered that total free improvisation, as Anthony Braxton points out in Forces in Motion, was "not the highest context." Miles, members of the AACM like Braxton and Leo Smith and a number of others who contributed in their own way to the development of creative music up to and through the post-Vietnam years have never been given proper recognition in the historical accounts for figuring out so many new ways of harnessing the creative energy of free improvisation.

So it's exciting that a reassessment of that period in the music is now underway, and even The New York Times is taking note. This is certainly a theme I'll be exploring in upcoming posts. I'm particularly interested right now (as mentioned below and above) in looking at the structural changes in Miles's music during that time, but hell, I may have to eventually come up with my own list of overlooked albums as well, beginning with every record Leo Smith made between 1971 and 1981.

miles runs the video down

2006-12-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

Wonder of wonders... I just recently got a hold of this DVD of the Miles Davis Quintet in 1967 courtesy of those excellent folks at The Jazz Loft. Put out by the relatively obscure French label Impro-Jazz, it was only available for about a week on Jazz Loft before the Sony bigwigs (who STILL own everything Miles Davis) demanded they quit selling it, although it looks like they're still advertising a CD version of the same concerts and you can easily find clips of this stuff on YouTube.

Why this hasn't been commercially released is beyond me - this is pretty much the holy grail for fans of the mid-60s Miles Davis Quintet, which I most definitely am. I remember taping the documentary Miles Ahead on PBS when I was about 16 years old and being so knocked out by the copious excerpts from these Stockholm performances that I transferred the soundtrack to audio cassette so I could listen to them over and over in my car (which didn't turn out to work so well for picking up girls). That excellent documentary is another one that should be released on DVD - it's something like ten years old now and a new copy of the VHS will run you close to (yikes!) $300 on Amazon. As earnest as Sony/Columbia has been in putting out the unreleased Miles sessions these last few years, it's disappointing that the only video they've let sneak out has been the total-waste-of-time of a documentary The Miles Davis Story, originally a British TV special that's more a collection of irrelevant and uninteresting anecdotes than actual performance footage.

But as for these 1967 performances, the video footage is significant in that it represents the only filmed document of this quintet in concert. Musically this represents the culmination of Miles's dealings with the popular song tradition on one hand (“I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “Walkin’”), and his embrace of open improvisation and free structure on the other. Form and formlessness are traversed with such attention to nuance, texture, color… it's as if no detail in the music has been taken for granted and every single sound is given its own meaningful place. There's not another group in the history of jazz that I hold in higher regard - I'm always left with the impression that the music could go anywhere, and yet it doesn't, it remains so tightly focused and there's never any waste of energy.

Forty years later this music is just as powerful, and I was never much for believing Miles's assertion that the music was only relevant in the 1960s, that it had somehow "gone flat." I also never understood why a lot of writers seem to contextualize this period as a transitional moment - the bridge between his earlier acoustic work and the coming electric period, as if all Miles had to do was plug in the rhythm section and suddenly, there's Bitches Brew. This point of view doesn't take into account all of the drastic changes that happened in the deeper structure of the music when Miles began adding electric instruments - from 1968 on he was dealing with very different kinds of bass lines (rock-like ostinati and vamps), a polyphonic textural approach to harmony (three or four chordal instruments as opposed to one pianist), a more focused use of both groove and melody, and sectional forms with cued transitions as opposed to strophic song structures. From In A Silent Way on the music was so radically different than anything he had done before (except for maybe certain moments in Kind of Blue).

So Miles Davis in 1967 was at the peak of the second broad swing in his music, the first being his orchestral or Third Stream explorations with Gil Evans beginning with Birth of the Cool and ending with Sketches of Spain and the unfortunate Quiet Nights. The 1960s quintet was the logical extension and the conclusion of everything he had done in the 1950s quintets onward. You might say, then, that the music on Filles de Kilimanjaro or In A Silent Way marked the beginning of a third, entirely new approach to rhythm, melody, texture, harmony and form that would take him at least through the 1970s.

Now it is debatable whether Miles was able to develop his electric music between 1968-91 to the same level that his acoustic music reached between 1950-68. Albums like Live/Evil, Big Fun, and Star People are among my favorites, but while I'm obviously no purist, I'll admit I have no palette for much of his post-retirement synthesizer-drenched music of 1981-91 (or the "smooth jazz" era it ushered in), or even the 1974-75 Dark Magus/Agharta/Pangaea stuff when it seemed Miles was bent on confronting his personal demons on stage in an aggressive wash of electrified noise, dissonant stonewalling on the organ, and stop/start grooves that seemed to obscure and betray his previous concern with the gradual development of texture and melody.

Miles, quintessential modernist that he was, I think sometimes was unable (or just refused) to see that what is newest or most contemporary is not necessarily the most musically valid... which is perhaps why certain of his periods don't hold up to the scrutiny of hindsight and reflection as well as others. I can't get with most of his 1980s music for exactly this reason - he forsook quality for modernity, timeless art for immediate relevance. Of course it sometimes seems that he felt the need to move ahead at the expense of continuing to play the music he loved (Herbie makes the point during the Miles Ahead documentary that Miles had to quit playing ballads because he loved playing ballads so much). Is this conundrum part of the essential drama in his music? Sure, and it's the inherent tragedy of it as well. He had to move on, even when moving on wasn't the most creative thing to do.

So here is Miles in 1967, the modernist at perhaps his most postmodern moment - simultaneously embracing and expanding upon everything that had come before in his music, he transcends that brief moment in 1967 and leaves us with an altogether timeless vision... it's a pinnacle that he reached several times in his music but never with such magical precision, and part of the wonder is the knowing that he was about to tear it all down and start again.

the secret's out

2006-12-04T22:39:00.000-08:00

Kim and I were watching Deal or No Deal (again) tonight, and Kim (again) remarked on how much the show's host, Howie Mandel:

...looks just like our good friend Jeff Kaiser:

In fact, neither of us have ever seen the two of them together in the same place at the same time (have you?), which would lead one to the quite logical conclusion that they must actually be one and the same person!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Jowie Kaidel!

Jeff is gonna kill me...

slow poke

2006-12-04T22:09:00.000-08:00

I was driving over the hill to Valencia this afternoon to pick up my just-overhauled flugelhorn at Cambrass (those guys are amazing, by the way) when suddenly the Southbound I-5 became totally congested with traffic - which was very strange because it had been wide open up to that point. After nearly fifteen minutes of cursing I was almost through it, and as I finally made it to the front of the pack I saw that it was two rather large baby blue buses driving too slow in the fast lane that were clogging everything up. When I passed them I saw who it was: André Rieu!

And then I thought to myself - great, that's exactly what I need today, another reason to hate André friggin' Rieu.

first picture

2006-11-29T21:50:00.000-08:00

Finally settling down for a little sleep now after a pretty intense 24+ hours...

After finishing my afternoon classes yesterday I got a call from Kim, she had been in a car accident - not serious, she was stopped at a red light and was rear-ended by some bozo in a big Yukon going about 35 mph. So I cancelled my evening class and went to meet her. She felt fine but we were advised by her doctor's office that for insurance purposes, with her being 22 weeks pregnant, we'd best go to Urgent Care and get everything checked out. Not wanting to take any chances, of course, we checked in at 7 p.m. last night thinking it would be a couple hours in the waiting room and we'd be out of there. Not so. From the waiting room to triage, back to the waiting room and then into the ER, and then finally upstairs to the birthing center where they took blood tests and monitored the baby's heartbeat for several hours. Everything eventually checked out perfectly and we came home just after 4 a.m. this morning. I got a couple hours of sleep before giving a final at CSUB, and then at 3 p.m. we had our first ultrasound appointment which fortuitously had already been scheduled. So we were able to put our minds at ease knowing (and seeing) that everything is in place and working properly... we have a beautiful, VERY active baby girl on the way!

i'm thankful for coffee

2006-11-23T22:48:00.000-08:00

...because without four cups of it I wouldn't have been able to build this crib the other day in less than 45 minutes, with only my bare hands (uh, and that stuff on the table there):

Yes, reality is beginning to sink in... and I can't help thinking that in a year from now the family dynamic around the holidays is going to be so much different.

On Wednesday we do the ultrasound - expect pictures...

john cage would love this...

2006-11-23T00:23:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting recap of the commodification of music via the popular entertainment industry during the last 100 years, leading to what may indeed be the next development: the emerging market for cell phone ring tones. While I have to admit that I'm one of those who has paid upwards of three bucks to download a ring tone (actually more than once - Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 was great initially, but the B section to Monk's Ugly Beauty is what I'm currently digging when someone calls) - it's worth exploring the idea that the public seems to be willing to pay more for a tiny "sketch" of their favorite song that is actually functional, as if the utilitarian value of a ring tone makes it fundamentally more desirable and/or marketable than the original song itself... And while .99 songs are great, I for one don't understand the fundamental usefulness of walking around all day with an iPod (or an iPod shuffle for that matter) plugged into my head, unless we're talking about the functionality of disengagement. People do it, of course, but that's probably a topic for another post.

But to reduce the recent history of popular music into little tiny fragments, smaller than songs - little sound bytes that are capable of reminding us of moments, people, places - this is that power of music which advertising has been trying to harness for decades and it has seemed as if that power was being taken completely from the public's possession, only to be sold back to them over and over. It's only recently that music listeners have been encouraged to enact any control over this sort of thing, and as minimal and obscure as that control seems, I think it is by first controlling the sounds around us (what Tignor finally calls "isolated found sounds") that we may actually begin to be able to both understand and better utilize our environment. The implications could be as global as you want to make them. And I think in some warped way, Cage would agree.

I'm fascinated by the concept behind the iPod Shuffle although I don't own one and I rarely use the iPod Mini that I do have, except for listening to podcasts of Democracy Now! on those long trips over the mountains to Los Angeles. But I have used the shuffle function on my CD changer at home for years as a way of forcing myself to listen to tracks that I wouldn't otherwise get to by listening sequentially to my CDs. Just this morning I practiced for several hours while I had on a constantly shuffling rotation of Japanese shamisen music, court music from Uganda, harp and vocal music from Burma, Dagomba drummers, and Miles Davis's In A Silent Way sessions. I think the interest in randomization has to do with that classic dichotomy of attempting to control the unknown, or alternately to release one's control over a fixed set of variables. This to me is the essence of what creating music is about, and so any technology that has the effect of bringing music listening closer to the act of musical creating is worth taking very, very seriously. It is the marketplace that has categorically tried to separate creators from consumers and maintain the illusion that musical creativity is not something that can be accessed by the broad public. I think we are beginning to witness a reversal of that process, which may or may not yield such positive results in the short term, but eventually the dissemination of creativity to the masses is inevitable. Kandinsky was talking about this a hundred years ago, and really since the role of "artist" began to differentiate in the late Middle Ages from what previously were just tradesmen and craftsmen, both artists and audiences have been attempting to bridge that divide - integrate, if you will. Eventually, people catch up.

driving green

2006-11-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Drake just sent me a link to this:

DrivingGreen.com calculates the amount of harmful greenhouse gases that vehicles, flights and events emit, allowing you to provide the equivalent dollar amount to an agricultural project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by converting animal waste into the renewable energy that powers the entire farm and sometimes the surrounding area, just like solar or wind power, but much more effectively...

Talk about a great gift idea. I think I'm going to sign myself up, if only to clear my conscience after seeing the result of my own carbon footprint (yikes!).

Plus, having that much less pig poo in the world ought to be reason enough for anybody.

signs

2006-11-20T20:54:00.000-08:00

From Reuters, here's what Our Dear Leader had to say about widespread protests during his visit to Indonesia:

"People protest -- that's a good sign. It's a sign of a healthy society..."

How about, it's a sign that your foreign policy is detested by most of the rest of the world, and not just Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country... 75% of British voters think Bush is a danger to world peace, as well as a majority in Canada, Mexico and Israel. Keep it up, we won't have any allies left.

i wish this was not real, part II

2006-11-19T10:31:00.000-08:00

John Kerry is considering another run for president, as is Newt Gingrich who thinks "voters are yearning for a clearer conservative voice."

Geez.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said "If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates." Sure enough.