Rolling Jazz Thread 2022

Don't think so---will check local listings, thx

This guy! Bout time for collected works.

Phil Ranelin was born in Indianapolis in 1939, made a lot of creative music in Detroit (John McEntire remastered some of it), then relocated to Los Angeles in 1977, where he currently lives. Turned 83 in May.

Respect to the indie labels that have documented him over the years. pic.twitter.com/AmvdpcGwOQ

— jeff (@jazyjef) September 3, 2022

Correction: Phil Ranelin moved back to Indianapolis.

— jeff (@jazyjef) September 4, 2022

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZ3e08BZ8YNWN-5BqyKXVggX69k9QfJHvQ-ke9stbnFVUBUi0f6rMkPav8KryVpbUohJt5VoftkUVvt3_iSJAZWtrCJs9c_r1hyVw-8yPxit11aQt9moVtyvG1FG2cxvxG5GsFDrwuFl1Kg6_BGhqRUOSysICx5cmxoUgf3vFEf43kEfr-nv5C03q5w/w400-h400/R-3806338-1392135791-9081.jpg
Survival Themes: Reggie Lucas solo album, w Mtume input, in the wake of Miles, but I like that the poster cautions us against expecting too much, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, Description lays out Milesian-enough perimeters. anyway (but no they don't have a guy playing trumpet, wisely enough). Link is in comments:
https://zensurfingarcher.blogspot.com/2022/09/reggie-lucas-1975-survival-themes.html
And here's 23:12 of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5a6n9DJRoA

Remembering double bass master Wilbur Ware, who was born on this day in 1923. You could pick highlights with Thelonious, Sonny, Clifford, and others, but let’s hear it for ace The Chicago Sound, the only album he released as a leader during his lifetime. pic.twitter.com/vShI0alLXX

— Chris Monsen (@chris_monsen) September 8, 2022

It's finally here! Check out my new interactive discography at https://t.co/nEoSpeSI6W.
Listen to nearly 1,000 albums and get behind-the-scenes stories from yours truly. It's called the Ron Carter Universe - where Planet Elegance resides! #roncarterbassist #planetelegance pic.twitter.com/VUQZK5HK9i

— Ron Carter (@RonCarterBass) September 8, 2022

Listening a fair bit to the Jamaladeen Tacuma/Mary Halvorson collab; they connect p well:
https://jamaaladeentacuma.bandcamp.com/album/jamaaladeen-tacuma-mary-halvorson-strings-things

Have you heard the Young Philadelphians? Halvorson, Tacuma, Marc Ribot, and G. Calvin Weston on drums:

https://marcribot.bandcamp.com/album/the-young-philadelphians-live-in-tokyo

I hadn't! Hm, songs with Ribot singing (or vocalizing)? Might try it.

So that Titan to Tachyons album mentioned upthread comes out in... (checks notes)... three days, and I'll be damned if I can find a way to order it. It's not on the artist's bandcamp page, it's mentioned on the band's website but without a single link to where to buy it and the banner ad at the top of the page that looks like it will lead you to that simply routes you back to the exact page you were already on. It's mentioned at the bottom of the home page of Tzadik's website but, again, not a single link to where it can be ordered.

Can't say I've sought out a lot of Tzadik stuff, so maybe this is just par for the course, but this seems... less than optimal. I'd be pretty annoyed if I had a new album coming out in not only one single physical format, but without a place from which it could be ordered.

incl download and youtube

50 years ago tonight, Miles debuts a new 9-piece band with a scorched-earth closing set at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.

With On the Corner still unreleased, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the crowd was remotely prepared for this music.https://t.co/FPyAp404sc

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) September 11, 2022

Jeremy Erwin@theheatwarps
·
Sep 10
Replying to @theheatwarps
This is also the date on which Miles first encountered Pete Cosey, who helped engineer the previous day’s set from Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The complete interview with Cosey is a must-read. https://t.co/gpbqKB4lGl https://t.co/yAJoxVSP6z

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 15, 2022

The amazing French label RogueArt is starting to put its catalog on Bandcamp. Only two titles so far; I hope they get the rest up soon.

https://rogueart1.bandcamp.com/

Fantastic interview. Zigaboo was going to play with Miles! Can't believe he (Cosey) was in Chicago this whole time.

https://www.halleonard.com/product/369515/new-standards-101-lead-sheets-by-women-composers

Interviewed Terri Lyne Carrington about that book for my next Stereogum column, which should be out next week.

Cool!

New Jeff Parker quartet live record from Eremite next month sounds really good atm— sample track here :

https://eremite.com/album/mte-76-77

Khan Jamal's "drum dance to the motherland" is being reissued (again). don't sleep on it. for US folks, i know it's available via stranded

https://www.aguirrerecords.com/products/khan-jamals-creative-arts-ensemble-drum-dance-to-the-motherland-lp

I'm interested in that Jeff Parker album for having Jay Bellerose on drums (if people don't know, he's a great studio drummer who's into minimalism, texture, and old weird drums), very 'west coast quartet'.

Yeah, and he was on Parker's International Anthem album The New Breed in 2016, also Allen Toussaint's remarkable jazz venture The Bright Mississippi in 2009---but hadn't taken in that he's also worked with allll these singers---what a discography:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bellerose

Also Anna Butterss on bass on that new Parker record, which is cool

For this week's BA email, I wrote about the V.S.O.P. quintet (Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams) and the late 70s phenomenon of "stadium jazz":

The group was seemingly determined to prove that they were not there to rehash their achievements as the Miles Davis Quintet. The album contains only one relatively less-well-known piece from the Davis repertoire, “Dolores” from Miles Smiles. The rest of the set consisted of two pieces from Third Plane, the title track and the Williams composition “Lawra”; “Jessica,” from Hancock’s Fat Albert Rotunda; Hubbard’s “Byrdlike” (from 1962’s Ready For Freddie) and a new piece, “One of a Kind”; and another Carter composition, “Little Waltz,” from his Piccolo album, also released in 1977. The performances are explosive, a million miles from the abstract free bop they had been delivering a decade earlier. It’s not just their style of playing, either; it’s the sound. Carter’s bass has that gross ’70s rubber-band boing, and Williams sounds like he’s playing on Billy Cobham’s kit, just demolishing the audience with thunderous cannonades. Hancock is sweeping across the keys at breakneck speed, and the horns are going off like Roman candles, one squealing, screaming climax after another. I first encountered the term “stadium jazz” on Ethan Iverson’s site; on Twitter, he said he heard it from bassist Larry Grenadier. I can’t think of a better description of V.S.O.P.’s music than that. This is music meant to be heard in a crowd of thousands, preferably outdoors on a summer night. Within the intimate confines of a jazz club, it would be somewhere between simply overpowering and terrifying.

That’s not to suggest that it’s bad music; it’s just big, garish music. V.S.O.P. made two more live albums, Tempest In The Colosseum (recorded just a week after the California concerts, on July 23, 1977 in Tokyo) and Live Under The Sky, from the Japanese festival of the same name in July 1979. The group played on two consecutive days that year, July 26 and 27, and only the first night’s performances were released at first; the second set was appended to a CD reissue in 2004. All of it is well worth your time, as long as you’re in the mood to get blown back in your chair like that old Maxell advertisement.

Fabulous description, thanks! Will check.

Fowler/Perelman/Shipp/Amba/Parker/Hirsh Sextet To Release new CD Alien Skin November 11 Via Mahakala Music

ABOUT THE ALBUM

On the last afternoon of Arts for Arts’ iconic Vision Festival in 2021, I found myself standing next to pianist Matthew Shipp and drummer Andrew Cyrille as William Parker’s closing group took the stage. Matthew and I were casually chatting as the stage filled with what would ultimately be the largest group of the festival that year. The music started and the bandstand spouted fire from beneath as it lifted off toward the stars. Every person in the venue floated in space together through almost an hour of spiritual, emotional, cathartic joy. It was music so raw and frenetic that, had I had a horn with me, It would have been difficult to fight the urge to join them uninvited.

Steve and I had already been planning a couple of studio dates later that year in Brooklyn at Jim Clouse’s Park West Studios. After hearing this music, I wanted to recreate the feeling I got from listening to it. The visceral experience. Not the sound. I can’t remember what it sounded like. That wasn’t the point. So as Steve and I started planning for our upcoming session, we set out to put together a group to generate that same kind of energy: The group: Zoh Amba (who had played on William’s Vision set), Ivo Perelman (who we asked at the last minute to come by for a day and he ended up on both days of the recording), Matthew Shipp, William, Steve, and me.

This was the first and probably last time this group of musicians will have ever come together in this configuration. As is our custom, we didn’t discuss much about what the music would be before Jim Clouse started recording. This record documents our second full day together, presented in order. From soulful balladry to demented rock music to an otherworldly march, the musical tension is palpable throughout. As is, I think, the pure joy of creation that animated our time together.

-Chad Fowler
SINGLES & RELEASE CALENDAR

October 12 - "Sentient Settlement" Video + Album Announcement

It's rock and roll. It's rhythm and blues. It's a march to the ends of the stratosphere. It starts chaotic and falls apart from there. And it will make you smile and dance and be glad you woke up that morning.

November 11 - Full Album

LINKS
Chad Fowler: Website || Instagram
Steve Hirsh: Website || Instagram
William Parker: Website || Instagram
Matthew Shipp: Website
Zoh Amba: Instagram
Mahakala Records: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram || Bandcamp

ALBUM CREDITS

Chad Fowler - stritch, saxello
Zoh Amba - tenor saxophone, flute
Ivo Perelman - tenor saxophone
Matthew Shipp - piano
William Parker - bass
Steve Hirsh - drums
Press: Gabriel Birnbaum, Gabe at clandestinepr.com

Cosey interview is really interesting. It sounds like there was more music happening sometimes in Miles 'retirement' than usually known.

Speaking of Jeff Parker and RogueArt, I'm digging his new one for them, Eastside Romp, with Eric Revis and Nasheet Waits. Has that Chicago-earthy, psych-tinged, excursionary tautness I look for from Parker projects, the title track and others not taking themselves too seriously, but seriously enough, even a bit mysterioso when it's time for some Spanish-associated harmonics x slight distortion-distention in some passing guitar comments, with appropriately harsh fluidity on "Drunkard's Lullaby," which does not match its Tom Waits-y title, or not like Tom would. I pick "Wait"(written by Parker, not drummer Waits alas) as the first single, despite its being longer than several others: strong theme, they're on it, vice-versa: https://rogueart1.bandcamp.com/track/wait

Also, good room ambience: smokey, midrange-to-bass-inclined, though treble comes through clearly and vividly.

Yeah, that's a good one; I just reviewed it for the NYC Jazz Record. And I might write it up for Stereogum next month alongside the Enfield Tennis Academy album, now that RogueArt is putting their releases on Bandcamp.

They are? Finally

Yeah, that one, and I'm just now finishing first listen to the aforementioned Myra Melford Fire and Water Quintet's For The Love of Fire and Music, also on Bandcamp. Given name and title, was expecting something more upfront elemental---and it did seem more emphatic when I finally turned the volume up way past Jeff Parker level, will have to try that for whole thing when I have more time. But even before that, was especially smitten with Tomeka Reid's cello (Melford's left hand and Ibarra's kick drum filling my per se bass needs), and most of all, while still at lower volume, with track 4, "IV," where Halvorson's v. selective guitar notes fit into Ibarra's percussion and Reid's bow like so, but not cut-and-dry---also: drums & cello (new subgenre, check it out) on "VIII," full-band intensity of "IX," equally intense, subtle, piano-led ballad statement of "X"---Melford is not one of your more imposing, track-defining-to dominating Jazz Piano Stylists, which is fine with me: https://rogueart1.bandcamp.com/album/for-the-love-of-fire-and-music

Parker's also on a lot of drummer-DJ Daniel Villareal's Panama 77, which is like it says here:

a vibrant and verdant suite of multi-textural, jazz-laced psychedelic instrumental folk-funk –

as in Chicago, with the most per se "folk"-taggable being "Patria," in which a benevolent or benign trad tune of ghostly charm bobbles over a couple of turns on the floating dance floor, dissolved into the most obviously "urban," dedicated to DV's favored turf:

The decadent track “18th & Morgan” is an homage to that strip, with its lowrider meets Roy Ayers vibe, vividly depicting Villarreal’s daily life driving to a gig in his classic baby-blue Mercedes sedan, wearing a beaver-skin Stetson and tinted aviators.)

"Cali Colors" is the epic, at just over five minutes: the double bass of first-listed co-composer Ann Butterss leads DV, Parker, and omg Marta Sofia Honer (violin and viola) through dark musty curtains, where the instruments mesh (she does that on a couple of faster ones later).
12 tracks total, about the same number of players, but never more than three or four on any track, each of which I can tell apart right away (not to be taken for granted!), while overall v. cohesive.
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/panam-77

Checking out In Search Of Our Father's Gardens, by RA Washington & Jah Nada leading a 14-member ensemble. It's kinda spiritual jazz meets avant-drone, so as indebted to Sunn O)))'s "Alice" as to Coltrane's "Ascension" if that makes sense. One really cool thing about it is it's a double LP where you can play each side separately, but if you have two turntables you can play sides B & C simultaneously, and if you have the digital edition as I do there's a bonus track called "Side E" that mixes them.

http://astralrajah.bandcamp.com/album/in-search-of-our-fathers-gardens

The Villareal album is a vibe (also with Butterss on bass, she gets around a lot!) but I feel a little uneven as a record— sags in the middle and picks up, for me at least.

I need to download the record you just mentioned, unperson— i saw that it was released and subscribe to Astral Spirits, but haven’t spent time on bandcamp in fear of spending more money i don’t have at the moment.

Gonna have to come back to "SIDE E - aka SIDE B & C played together": so far, hearing those tracks together more than sequentially seems relatively anti-climatic, esp. w female lead vocals now in background. But! As a listener more material than spiritual (while getting that materials can have different properties), I nevertheless was immediately drawn to the bluesy (in the sense that even or especially some of Sun Ra's more idealistic ventures can also be bluesy) intensity x humility of vocals w bass earth in opening tracks, along with spare notes from other sources--which then introduce a gamelan effect, heard along the way through much of the rest---startling words, narrative of "Keter"--then drumkit & drum machines (sic) on "Planting Seeds," the aforementioned lead vocals on "Planting Seeds," and I *think* "Where The Angels Sing" is where horns start alternating (and then singing) with the human vox--- so far, it's a little hard to keep up with all the changes, however steady and measured---appropriately ominous drone introduced on "My Father The Butcher," maybe going on a little too long, but I tend to think that of dominant drones---in any case, it becomes a sinister team player on "Wrath of Dawn," as voices slowly go over a cliff while singing "While the angels sing"---"Bobby Lynn" finds its way into a clearing of extended soloing x call-and-response, close listening---and we can at least take "SIDE E" as a bonus track---omg what an album (if this looks like too many spoilers, be assured it's all about the actual hearing, w many more details moment to moment tick-tick-tick-tick)

One thing I will say is that back in 2017, Mourning (A) Blakstar came to Philly— my friend in Cleveland had set up the show for them and I was supposed to meet them at the venue, show them some love, etc. Well, the venue didn't have a PA, and then unbeknownst to the band or the friend who set up the show, demanded that the band PAY to play there— even tho there was no PA, no nothing. There wasn't hype around them yet, and so what ended up happening was that I overdrafted my bank account so that the band could get paid, argued with the venue owner (the disgusting G4be T1ber1no), and then watched the band perform a quiet, nearly acoustic set that was *absolutely mindblowing.* It was a nightmare that was worth it in the end. RA is a good guy.

What an album, and what a story, and thank you for saving the night. What the hell, venue dudes? Maybe he was used to shaking down musos, pay-for-play-wise, but at the last minute? Sure, why not. Reminding me of Jones-era Baraka's mention of a venuer who wouldn't hire Cecil, and was pissed that others would.

special radio broadcast this sunday from blank forms, related to the (baraka/spellman-fronted) CRICKET anthology they've just released (and which i just received in the mail):

https://www.blankforms.org/events/the-publics-not-ready-for-you-yet-a-cricket-radio-show

The debut album by The Bad Plus Version III (the pianoless Chris Speed/Ben Monder version) comes out today. I'm listening now and, yeah, I don't hate this at all. Still think they should have changed the name though.

Sounds fantastic, everything an album from this band should be (ie based on seeing them live).

It's so great to hear Chris Speed play so much melody and long tones, it's a beautiful sound.

The RA Washington/Jah Nada record is indeed like a strange admixture of spiritual jazz and metallic drone. Really into it, perfect vibes for this endless rain we’re having here in Philly.

Yeah Bad Plus album sounding beautiful. The sample tracks from the new Thumbscrew on Bandcamp sound brain-smearingly fantastic, even better than the last album.

Speaking of Thumbscrew, really liking the new Nate Wooley, which also features Halvorson, among others.

The new John Coltrane mural in his hometown Hamlet, NC. pic.twitter.com/NS9GWgBtUR

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) October 3, 2022

How did they do that?? Best mural ever, and not only because Trane.

And that's not even the whole thing.

Had a chance to visit in person, this past July. It it absolutely magnificent. pic.twitter.com/eDbtjlfyZ3

— Curt Davenport (@curtjazz) October 4, 2022

Another shot of the whole thing, straight up:

Spectacular mural in Hamlet, NC. If you’re ever passing through check it out! pic.twitter.com/sGbAxLlgxm

— Sheet Music Library (PDF) (@LibrarySheet) October 3, 2022

Well, close enough--formidable!

This should do it, for all of that full-length last shot:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeLS43LXEAAVXQy?format=jpg&name=small

They are planning on doing one near the house in Philly where he lived from 1962-1966, too.