Hip Genres & Musical Styles: Which Is The Worst??

xp isn't that power electronics?

AMM who I prefer to, say, Coltrane's "Ascension"

Me at an AMM show: "Stop dusting the instruments and fucking play them!"

ascension actually sounds like it was made by people which is a plus in my book

― your original display name is still visible (Left), Friday, 26 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

No rockism on the thread

xxp well it's not an unplugged session for sure

AMM at their most delicate > RLW's "When Freezing Air Stings Like Ice" >>>>> any free jazz blowout ever

:D

Rather listen to AMM "dusting" their improvements than Ascension (I love Coltrane's later groups btw)

the four sider is the one u gotta watch out for

the four sider is the one u gotta watch out for

Ascension is both a) not the brick wall of screaming people claim it is and b) not all that great, actually. Meditations is much better late Coltrane, and for the truly hardcore face-melting experience you gotta go with the 4CD Live in Japan set.

Yeah Live in Japan is incredible. It's an amazing group and must've been incredible for those lucky enough to witness it.

I do dig Meditations

ascension actually sounds like it was made by people which is a plus in my book

So does AMM.

... they did actually have a sax player at various points!

Meditations is indeed great — one of my favorite records ever — and Ascension has great moments, but doesn’t quite cohere. It’s something of a missed opportunity, as Rashied Ali was asked to join Elvin for the date, but Ali turned down the offer. And as Bill Dixon said, “Freddie Hubbard had no business being on Ascension!”

As large-scale works in this music go, Alan Silva’s gargantuan Seasons (3LP BYG/Actuel dealie, 1970), and Cecil Taylor’s Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) (FMP, 1988) are much fuller realizations than Asdension, showing what can be accomplished in that kind of format. And the recently-issued Göttingen (1990) by the Cecil Taylor Ensemble — with nary a “name” musician in the lineup — is near the equal of the 1988 set, one of my favorite albums of his, or anyone’s.

Yeah, my go-tos for big blaring Sixties blowouts are, in order:

The Jazz Composers Orchestra, s/t (the one from 1968 with Pharoah Sanders, Larry Coryell, and Cecil Taylor)
Don Cherry, Eternal Rhythm
Alan Silva and the Celestrial Communications Orchestra, Seasons
The Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra, Gittin' To Know Y'all (conducted by Lester Bowie)

I liked the AMM album with the guitarist who sounded like a guitarist. I guess I'm glad they existed

I really love that don cherry album though

and meditations is definitely better than ascension (free jazz is also one of my least favourite ornette albums) and frankly so is om

"I liked the AMM album with the guitarist who sounded like a guitarist. I guess I'm glad they existed"

Was not expecting Keith Rowe's guitar playing to get a conservative mindset out of you lol.

I feel like Free Jazz is as much of a missed opportunity as Ascension in terms of the potential of that grouping of musicians. But both feel like necessary missed opportunities, if that makes any sense. They were in relatively uncharted waters.

The Bill Dixon Orchestra’s Intents and Purposes is not often talked about with those other records, but it should be because of how much more fully realized it is as a large-ensemble work, and how strikingly it avoids the typical theme-plus-solos format. And there are tapes of Bill’s 30-piece ensembles from the mid-‘70s (students, but they don’t sound like students) that are far beyond what we would normally associate with this music, with guests like Jimmy Lyons playing against purposely-distorted recorded telephone conversations and a rhythm section with four Fender bassists and three drummers. If those recordings had been released at the time, the overall curve of the music may well have changed direction.

Intents and Purposes

#onethread

I've heard a lot of these records apart from Dixon and that Cherry which has been on my radar and now I should check out. I should add Sun Ra. Guess they are not as big, and maybe not the same idea, and there's that big personality on top of it all, but you really get to see a large grouping developing over a long period on those records. You get a sense of how large numbers can be organised to improvise.

Ra’s The Magic City is all-time. That’s the great thing about Sun Ra: he kept a fairly large organization together for so long that, at any given performance, something more fully realized than Ascension could (and often did) break out at any moment.

"space chords"

Alan Silva and the Celestrial Communications Orchestra, Seasons

this one is real good but for me the canonical blowout is dave burrell's "echo"

both conveniently included on the jazzactuel 3cd set from 2000, which was my entry point to "real free jazz"

at that point i was already into stuff like "thembi" and "cosmic tones for mental therapy" but the jazzactuel set was my entry point to music by dudes who built their careers around free music (vs ppl like ra and sanders who made it part of their careers but also did lots of stuff in other modes)

my gateway into "real" free jazz was the free america reissues from 2004. i was working at tower and got them all on employee discount. all i knew going in was ascension and clifford thornton's the panther and the lash blew my mind. by the time i got that jazzactuel set, i was intermediate and it was very satisfying.

The JazzActuel box was amazing. When they reissued the individual albums, I bought almost all of them, and a bunch of the Free America ones, too.

I prefer illusionary free jazz tbh

The Free America CD reissues are ironically now very expensive. Good liner notes.

I used to own the Cecil Taylor In Berlin box set and loves the music but never read the book that came with it. If anyone has a line on a pdf of it I’d be grateful.

I have it - write to burningambulance at gmail dot com and I'll send it to you.

xp yeah I was wondering if you thought stuff like the Erstwhile/Sachiko M/nu-Keith Rowe stuff fit in here, and yes I would generally classify that as noise and not improv to the five people who care lol

― broken breakbeat (sleeve), Friday, May 26, 2023 12:22 PM (six hours ago)

i would classify that as improv because it's erstwhile and that's the lineage and the branding/culture. stuff like members of Sonic Youth doing an improv/experimental record with musicians that are on improv records and other things, I would categorize as "noise" ... like, noise, to me, (how heavy is this "to me" lifting, you tell me) is often coming from a "rock" background but minus a lot of the idioms associated with rock, in a somewhat similar way that improv did with jazz, and in some cases, classical music.

Me at an AMM show: "Stop dusting the instruments and fucking play them!"

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, May 26, 2023 12:24 PM (six hours ago)

wease1 walter referred to this aesthetic as "ashtray rattling"

idk rattling an ashtray seems a little loud compared to what I prefer

a main reason for that tangent itt was xyz's contention that noise doesn't engage with silence, which compelled me to bring up some fave examples of what is now called "lower case music" i.e. very quiet noise

i get it, i just felt like contributing my opinion ... which is that the output is often similar enough that the categorization is less about what the music sounds like and mostly about who made it, what other music they made, what label it's on, and where they play gigs and who else is on the bill

idk rattling an ashtray seems a little loud compared to what I prefer

to be clear, the ashtray is not amplified, and the rattling is intermittent without an obvious rhythm

Take it to the cultural studies seminar folks

yes, the external signifiers and not the actual content'

lol xp sorry ian

obv I am fascinated with the (somewhat arbitrary imo) delineations between noise, improv, and free jazz

It’s a Venn diagram of sorts

also sarahell is otm regarding external signifiers like label etc, it comes down to association/chosen branding to a degree

thank you sleeve! I've seen the back and forth quite a bit over the years -- the code-switching, appropriation, wanting to be seen as serious and intellectual, wanting to be less stuffy, etc.

This discussion reminded me of Steve Lake's liner notes to Last Exit's Iron Path:

self-expressionists with no background honed in on the music. "Free" drummers adopted an ambiguous shifting sands approach on which nothing of substance could be built, and gestured more than they played, flicking cymbals with towels, rattling spare change on drum heads, shuffling around in heaps of metal junk. The sound of surprise at a barely diverting level, it lost its appeal over twenty years.

Ultimately it could be a small confusion between five people on a thing that about five thousand people in the world think about so no sweat. If it's a big confusion the numbers thinking about it are still small.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, May 26, 2023 12:18 PM (six hours ago)

idk if i should feel good or bad about the fact i know at least 15% of them?

Good!

Good for you that you know people, Sarah. Bad for you it means you choose to do less listening.

You’re listening all the time, even in a coma iirc

Does anyone want to talk about how to organize my British folk records. I got done with the traditional global folk music section but others in that rock&pop section and since a number of artists worked in both milieus I am conflicted at times. Looking at u Shirl.

Feel like even the rockier end of British Folk Rock fits in the Folk section no problem.

Ok but my sticking point is that into, if you’re writing your own songs, it changes from folk music into something else. I realize this is a hardline position.

Sorry I’m typing on my phone but you get the drift I hope

Just have one very big folk section and one relatively small horse singing a song section

The animal sounds section is not the issue