Rolling Jazz Thread 2020

My interview with Luke Stewart is up now. I was really fascinated by this quote (which is why I made it the closer):

To Stewart, the point is to break away from the hierarchy—still prevalent even in supposedly free music—of the composer and the musicians who execute his vision. “When you listen to a field recording of a pygmy ensemble in the Congo, the question’s never ‘Whose song is that?’ or ‘Who is that?’,” he explains. “It’s more ‘What is that?’, which I think is a better question to ask when it comes to music and doing this work of breaking down hierarchies. Because when you’re asking who, you’re placing it in an individual zone, where even if there’s an ensemble of five, nine, eighteen, up to a full orchestra of music, the question is always, who wrote this music? And even if they did write it, is that music still theirs if someone else is playing that music and putting themselves into that music? How much of it can you say is yours? The band is improvised, and it’s a group. It’s not just me, it’s this band, and it’s me versus the collective legacies of these four titans of music, so it’s like, the concept of instilling your will upon a musician, upon a person’s imagination, upon a person’s creativity and then calling it yours. That’s sort of the concept that I’m thinking about and trying to fight against…to highlight the non-hierarchical nature of free improvisational music ensembles and also in essence [challenge] the concept of the capital-C composer and how it affects our perceptions of music, for better or for worse.”

“When you listen to a field recording of a pygmy ensemble in the Congo, the question’s never ‘Whose song is that?’ or ‘Who is that?’,

Maybe it should be though?

Wasn't going to get into it but yeah, that example would be a lot stronger if he were referring to how Pygmies in the Congo think about their musicians.

P cool Gioia-recommended out jazz trio from Toronto: https://ovalwindowrecords.bandcamp.com/album/clich-s-vol-i-trio-music . Clarinet, bass, percussion, no chordal instrument. They do an Ornette tune and a Lacy tune in addition to some originals. I like Houle's clarinet sound a lot; he and bassist Meger sound like they're in different keys at times but I think it's pretty strong melodically and mostly stays rhythmically grounded.

new joel ross album is good

The next volume of the Spiritual Jazz compilation series is called Now! and it's all new tracks: not exclusives, but tracks from the past few years. Includes stuff from Angel Bat Dawid, Shabaka & the Ancestors, Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids, Black Flower, Damon Locks, Makaya McCraven, Steve Reid, Jamie Saft, etc., etc. 24 tracks in all across two CDs or however many LPs. Out in January.

another decent Kahil El’Zabar album out (America The Beautiful) and possibly featuring one of the last appearances of Hamiet Bluiett.

Any of yall heard the new Thumbscrew?? Looking good here:

https://downbeat.com/reviews/detail/the-anthony-braxton-project

That Thumbscrew Braxton album's a good 'un.

In other news, I just got this seemingly obscure email:

Creatures of Earth,

It is impossible to transform a creature of gross animal nature into a perfected spirit by some mysterious act of creative magic. When the Creators desire to produce perfect beings, they do so by direct and original creation. The creators never undertake to convert animal-origin and material creatures into beings of perfection in a single step. In a certain sense, all fifty-six of the encircling worlds of Jerusem are devoted to the transitional culture of ascending mortals. The seven satellites of world number one are more specifically known as the “Mansion Worlds”. I am writing to tell you all that I have been to these Mansion Worlds. I have seen and learned of the knowledge. I have yet to divulge to the mortal space-time creatures of (Earth).

I am RED | eleven.thirteen.twenty

The Planetary Prince

I take this to mean that pianist Cameron Graves is releasing an album next Friday. If it's the record that was sent to me late last year under the title Seven, it rules. It's got Stanley Clarke and Kamasi Washington on it, among others, and it sounds like if Chick Corea played a Steinway with Return To Forever, and covered Meshuggah songs.

Just recorded a 75-minute interview with Tim Berne for the next Burning Ambulance podcast. It's gonna be a good one.

RIP Andrew White-Howard U grad, sax player w/ his own band, & 5th Dimension, Julius Hemphill, & many more. John Coltrane solo transcriber, independent label owner, performer @ dc space, Kennedy Center and elsewhere, author,

Looking at an old Jazz Times article on Andrew White— guy was eccentric but skilled

My latest podcast went up today - it's a long (75 minutes or so) interview with Tim Berne. Links to listen are below.
Osiris: https://bit.ly/3kq9B0r
Apple: https://apple.co/3nme99Z
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3pn4zp3

In recent ECM news, I really wish Elina Duni would stick to reworkings of (mostly Albanian) folk songs and give up on trying to be an urbane songstress – she just sounds superficial in that role.

anyone listened to the new sprawling Nels Cline lp? I was busy doing things while it was playing but caught some nice dubby/edm stylings.

Oh wow, I didn't know there was one. Thanks, listening now.

Which one? Bow Shoulder?

Share The Wealth

DC guitarist Anthony Pirog who has listened to some Nels Cline has a new trio effort out called Pocket Poem

Thx, calz. Just added it to my list.

First couple tracks are very good and psychedelic and free of EDM elements, somewhat to my relief tbh.

There are parts that are reminiscent of electric Miles/Macero. Acc to this, though, even a lot of these were the product of live improv, not studio prost-production: https://www.jazzhalo.be/articles/new-the-nels-cline-singers-share-the-wealth/

Petition to cancel critics who describe things as "atonal" when they clearly don't know what that means. Language is a virus, y'all: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-nels-cline-singers-share-the-wealth/

Petition to cancel critics who describe things as "atonal" when they clearly don't know what that means.

Here:
http://chng.it/HmCJwzPPwM

Haha someone signed.

Just added my voice to the chorus.

Together we can do it.

More inside than most contemporary jazz I listen to but the textura review tipped me off to this Rebecca Hennessy album that I just listened to and found really pleasant. Softer vocal songs for the most part but they branch out quite a bit. Kevin Breit, whom I like a lot with the Stretch Orchestra, does a great job on guitar/mandolin/banjo.

https://rebeccahennessy.bandcamp.com/album/all-the-little-things-you-do

That Cameron Graves record you mentioned upthread, unperson, is completely nuts. I kind of love it, though given my hangover at the moment, I'm going to save a more intent listen for another time.

Really incredible new solo piano album from Jamael Dean:

https://jamaeldean.bandcamp.com/album/ished-tree

Excited to hear that. The EP he put out earlier in the year is fantastic

Presumably she's been this way for a while, but singer Cassandra Wilson unfurled her MAGA flag on Twitter yesterday in a big way. So much so that I saw someone refer to her as "Qassandra Wilson" and laughed before I did the search and saw that...yep, she's got the brain worms all right.

what I don't get about that kind of thing, is why, after these four years, would you reveal that NOW?

As with Sidney Powell, now is when the legit crazies are coming out of the woodwork.

https://jazz.fm/grammy-awards-2021-jazz-nominees-list/

Some good nominees there. I would like to see Ambrose Akinmusire take it. That album is really something.

Yeah, I really love that record, it's a balm. (See, unperson? Not negative or despairing at all).

My new Stereogum column is up. The Sonny Rollins set is really amazing - the vinyl will be out on Friday as an RSD thing, but the CD version won't be out until early December.

ESP is reissuing ronnie boykins's 1975 LP:

http://www.espdisk.com/3026.html

I've never been one to enjoy much vocal jazz, but I'm really digging the Kurt Elling + Danilo Perez

And I'm reminded how much I like that Jon Baptiste Vanguard record, which has the rarely captured Cannonball Adderley Live at "The Club" vibe.

The Corea/McBride/Blade one is nice too.

I like the very dramatic and moody movie soundtrack qualities on the new Ingrid Laubrock album, quite unexpected but good.

xp Bracing column, unperson. Amazing news all through, incl. Mayor Baraka of Newark! I think it was Nick Tosches who cited pre-Baraka LeRoi Jones as crucial inspiration-barsetter for the first rock critics, also for the best young jazz critics. He was certainly my gateway to jazz, which I otherwise found intimidating to read about, sitting in the high school band room, looking at my teacher's copies of Downbeat, which may have still been coming out biweekly? Seemed like an onslaught, with all those Bob Thiele Trane albums in particular, all the raves, and pontifications, and some push-back etc.---but Jones's "Scrapple From The Apple" cut right through it all, via concisely compelling imagery, crisply delivered data, straight-ahead declarations and sidewise, corkscrew rips-thus appealing to all aspects of the high school mind, incl. v. assholes who will never get it and don't want to and for inst the cafe potentate who refused to hire Cecil Taylor and was so pissed at those who did; also, when somebody else offered mea culpa (he was blind but now he sees the new thing), LJ sneers, "That's a noble confession and all)". Collected in Black Music (1968) with relatively longer, still concise show and album reviews, profiles (Roy Haynes sets him straight about earning success w/o selling out). Billie Holiday as "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets," and much else, all this ranged as deep and wide in an eyewitness to history/music nut experience sense as the one I got to later did as adventures in contextualization, Blues People (1963), well-covered here, in its 5oth Anniversary year:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/07/26/205541225/black-history-meets-black-music-blues-people-at-50
Baraka wrote that Blues People was a "theoretical endeavor" that "proposes more questions than it will answer" about how descendants of enslaved Africans created a new American musical genre and turned "Negroes" into "African Americans" in the process. That message still resonates deeply with many scholars, including Ingrid Monson, a professor of African-American music at Harvard University and author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa.

"I assign portions of this book in virtually every course I teach," Monson wrote in Blues People: Amiri Baraka As a Social Theorist, a speech she delivered in 2004, "to remind my students that cultural studies and critical race theory didn't begin in the academy, but in 20th-century African-American thought and intellectual practice from DuBois to Garvey, Locke, Ellington, Ellison and Baraka."
...Today's scholars might take issue with the exact nature of Baraka's argument. Ingrid Monson's paper points out the author's "tendency toward social determinism [that] is particularly obvious in Baraka's discussion of class — which, to me, is where his argument is most undermined by essentialism. Here, middle-classness is the ultimate marker of cultural inauthenticity, because the black middle class, according to Baraka, dedicated itself to assimilation."

But Monson offers praise for the book in general. "Blues People is a brilliant and path-breaking book, not because all of its factual information is correct, or because all of its interpretive perspectives are unassailable, but because of the sheer audacity, scope and originality of its interpretive perspective," she wrote.
The audacity could get out of hand later, but made him even more of an exciting performer.

i've been meaning to read "blues people" for some time now. going to get on that.

would love to hear ingrid monson elaborate on duke ellington's role in the development of critical race theory tbh !

I'm not familiar with Monson's work, but there is a chapter on 'The Literary Ellington' in Brent Hayes Edwards' wonderful book Epistrophies that could serve as a good springboard for that discussion.

...okay now I'm reading the Edwards chapter and it doesn't say too much about race (at least not directly). Love hearing Ellington on Shakespeare, though – the trumpet in "Up and Down, Up and Down" reciting "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" is a nice touch.

yes, and the trombone solo written in iambic pentameter on "sonnet for hank cinq" ! will have to track down the edwards book, thanks for the tip.

there is lot going on in this latest sprawling Ingrid Laubrock album, but it has some elusive quality that keeps bringing me back to it and it feels like a different experience every time I listen to it. Best one she's done yet I reckon.

Great to read about the new Dave Douglas album in the Stereogum column. I bought 3 DD albums yesterday for $3 each through Bandcamp, as well as a Linda Oh album.