Signal to Noise #56 - winter 2010

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC

matthew shipp sufjan stevens van dyke parks “mail order music” issue #56 winter 2010 $4.95 us / $5.95 can

talibam! vic chesnutt bobby beausoleil

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SIGNAL TO NOISE

THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ISSUE #56 : WINTER 2010 CONTACT 1128 Waverly Street, Houston Texas 77008 operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org PUBLISHER pete gershon COPY EDITOR nate dorward CONTRIBUTORS clifford allen ✹ bill barton ✹ caroline bell ✹ darren bergstein ✹ jason bivins ✹ marcus boon ✹ shawn brackbill ✹ stuart broomer ✹ pat buzby ✹ joel calahan ✹ christian carey ✹ john chacona ✹ mike chamberlain ✹ andrew choate ✹ fred cisterna ✹ jay collins ✹ larry cosentino ✹ david cotner ✹ ethan covey ✹ julian cowley ✹ raymond cummings ✹ jonathan dale ✹ christopher delaurenti ✹ tom djll ✹ nate dorward ✹ lawrence english ✹ phil freeman ✹ gerard futrick ✹ andrew gaerig ✹ michael galinsky ✹ david greenberger ✹ kurt gottschalk ✹ spencer grady ✹ jason gross ✹ kory grow ✹ james hale ✹ jennifer hale ✹ carl hanni ✹ ed hazell ✹ andrey henkin ✹ jesse jarnow ✹ chris kelsey ✹ mark keresman ✹ steve kobak ✹ robert loerzel ✹ howard mandel ✹ peter margasak ✹ brian marley ✹ marc masters ✹ libby mclinn ✹ marc medwin ✹ bill meyer ✹ sean molnar ✹ richard moule ✹ larry nai ✹ kyle oddson ✹ chad radford ✹ casey rae-hunter ✹ gino robair ✹ michael rosenstein ✹ elise ryerson ✹ ron schepper ✹ steve smith ✹ thomas stanley ✹ adam strohm ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth

CONTENTS 56 vic chesnutt 6 talibam! 8 bobby beausoleil 10

matthew shipp 12 music by mail 22 van dyke parks 28 sufjan stevens 34 live reviews 42 book reviews 50 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 52 crossword 89 graphic novella 90 Sufjan Stevens in New York City by Shawn Brackbill, October 2009.

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ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS! STN is mailed at the 4th class bulk rate. This keeps subscription costs down, but if you move, the USPS won’t forward your magazine ... they just throw it out. Please apprise us of any address changes to avoid the inconvenience and extra expense of lost issues! Send your new information as far in advance as possible to: operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org MORE FINE PRINT The publisher accepts no responsibility for any opinions expressed by the writers or subjects of SIGNAL to NOISE. All contents are © 2009 STN Publishing LLC and/or its individual contributors. No portion of this document may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of SIGNAL to NOISE. 4 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

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Acclaimed songwriter wins the hearts and minds of Montreal's creative music scene.

By Vish Khanna

Sandlin Gaither

VIC CHESNUTT Like others who’ve worked closely with Vic Chesnutt, Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto cannot say enough about the respected songwriter from Athens, Georgia. “Vic’s one of the most funny and profane people I’ve ever been around,” he exclaims. “You can’t imagine the things that come out of his mouth on the road; it’s really high-spirited and funny when we’re in the van. And I felt like Fugazi had a hard ethic about touring; Vic completely eclipses everyone I’ve ever been around, period. He’s tough, he’s about playing the show, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The man’s in a wheelchair and he works hard as shit. He’s fucking gigging and writing constantly—the man lives music. And as a person, he’s the sweetest, most generous ever.”

Indeed, Chesnutt’s ability to overcome a severe disability and write his wondrous songs has inspired legions of fans and musicians over the past 20 years. He’s composed critically-acclaimed records, collaborating with the likes of Lambchop, Bill Frisell, Emmylou Harris, and more recently, Elf Power and Jonathan Richman. After urging from his friend, filmmaker Jem Cohen, Chesnutt visited Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio in 2007 and made a rejuvenating record called North Star Deserter. Upon its release on Constellation Records, he toured the world with Picciotto and members of Silver Mt. Zion. The core group recently reconvened to create another astounding album, At the Cut. “I wanted to make a carbon copy of North Star Deserter; that was my intention when we went in to make this album,”

Chesnutt reveals. “It didn’t happen at all; it’s a totally different album. I think the main reason for that is because of our familiarity.

The rest of the musicians understood the subtleties of my music and were very quick to join in on this sort of stuff.”

In order to determine what material best suited this collaboration, Chesnutt did something unusual. He arrived at the Hotel and, with his band and studio staff gathered around, proceeded to play through unreleased segments of his songbook, all on his own.

“It was horrible,” Chesnutt recalls. “I was so nervous and scared and embarrassed.

But the reason I did it was because we needed to pick which songs to do; simple as that. Some of these songs are very new and so I didn’t have the perspective that I sometimes do. I had no idea if they were good or not. But it was funny; everyone agreed on every song so it was very easy.

Some songs, they’d be like, ‘No, no. Wait, that one, yes—we’re keeping it.’ And I’d be like, ‘I dunno about that one,’ and they’d say ‘We’re keeping it!’”

“Vic is hilarious in that he always thinks he’s wrong,” Hotel engineer Howard Bilerman chuckles. “He’ll come in with an opinion and say, ‘I love it, but I’m always wrong.’

Or, everyone will like something and he’ll be like, ‘I don’t like it, but I’m always wrong.’

I assumed that this new record would be all new songs and, sure enough, ‘Vic, when’d you write that song?’ ‘Oh, 13 years ago.’ It’s like, ‘What?! How does a gem not come to light until now?’ So he’s incredibly prolific and he just has this huge backlog of stuff

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he’s never recorded and he’s pretty amazing that way.”

In some respects, At the Cut is superior to its predecessor. While North Star Deserter possessed a stupefying intensity, the new record is equally vibrant but somewhat more dynamic. “I think the first record maybe had a bit more of people stepping on each other’s toes musically, so there was more of a cacophony,” Bilerman agrees.

“Whereas this one, people made choices to say, ‘Well, this song doesn’t need me.’”

“I don’t know if it’s a product of the songs that Vic brought in this time, but this stuff sounds more like some country-rock record made in the mid-’70s or something,” suggests Silver Mt. Zion guitarist Efrim Menuck.

“That was sort of surprising to all of us— that we were making those sorts of sounds with our instruments but the songs lent themselves to that treatment. We were all keenly aware of it and kind of making fun of ourselves while that was happening.”

Chesnutt’s work in Montreal thus far has happened quickly, over relatively short recording sessions. The sudden creative spark this process requires has energized Chesnutt immensely, and he seems committed to continued collaboration. “I knew I was going to record a new album with Jonathan Richman producing and I wrote 15 songs in that week from the moment I got home from Montreal,” he says proudly. “I was so inspired by the whole experience—really, my heart and brain completely open up when I’m around these people.”✹

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Matt Mottel, left, and Kevin Shea

The music of this Brooklyn trash-rock improv duo ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.

By Clifford Allen

Wilbert Thomas

Marzena Abrahamik

TALIBAM!

On a fall evening in Brooklyn, a small but dedicated crowd of onlookers has congregated at Monster Island to witness the CSC Funk Band, one of Talibam! keyboardist Matthew Mottel’s numerous projects. He has been back from touring with Talibam! for only a day and a half, a rare separation from drummer/co-conspirator Kevin Shea (People, Mostly Other People Do the Killing). They canvassed Italy, Turkey, Greece, Germany and France on their latest jaunt in support of their new full-length Boogie in the Breeze Blocks (ESP-Disk). Indeed, Talibam! is one of the most relentless touring groups you’re likely to meet, and they’ve honed a relationship with the audience that makes everyone in the room active participants in a convulsive cycle of multi-media destruction and rebirth.

Mottel notes that “our live concerts range [from] absurdity to serious tone, as a matter of our attitude favoring the non-linear opposed to the bland carboncopy rock’n’roll phoned-in stage banter that passes for entertainment. We want to entertain both in our music and in our stage presence, and humor is a very effective way to connect.” In live performance, Talibam! makes up in irreverence and unpredictability what they lack in personnel (though on recordings, the group is often expanded by the inclusion of luminaries like Peter Evans, John Irabagon, Cooper-Moore and Mike Pride). “We data-mine our concerts for moments that we like and flesh them out to make proper studio recordings; we then relearn the tunes to play live. For our albums we are making not just a representation of what our band does, but a deeper narration of our creative mental states.”

New York-born Mottel has been part of the city’s creative scene since he was a teenager, playing with multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore, drummers Tom Bruno and Chris Corsano, and reedman Daniel Carter very early on. He and Shea (b. St. Paul, Minn.) were separately looking for a regular outlet that would allow circumvention of

traditional aesthetics. After they met on a gig with tenorman Ras Moshe, Talibam! was born in 2003. The name, which comes from a New York Post headline on the war in Afghanistan, is probably the first thing that gets them noticed. Mottel was using the phrase as a sort of collegiate joke while at SUNY New Paltz. During their first tour, the pair was without a moniker, and the suggestion stuck. Their first proper release on Evolving Ear (2005) was anything but— CDRs slipped into sleeves cobbled from trashed LP jackets. Since then, Talibam! has appeared on over a dozen compilations, splits and complete releases.

Recorded over 48 hours, Boogie in the Breeze Blocks is the closest thing Talibam! has yet come to a bona-fide record for the (art-damaged) kids, without sacrificing their scuzzy improv/noise whorl. The record almost seems like a major-label debut compared to their beginnings—the noise/ junk aesthetic, keyboard gloop and fuzz, and Shea’s ADD-afflicted Han Bennink barrage have been cleaned up a bit towards something vaguely radio-friendly. Mottel’s keyboard lines aren’t so buried in noise, becoming discernible particles that bubble up in a Motorik-like stew. Where genres before collided, now they meld—Latin-rock flourishes appear in “Schroeder Meets Jagger,” and the vocal/horn chants are strikingly reminiscent of Sun Ra (with Danielle Kuhlmann as Talibam!’s June Tyson).

Indeed, a skewed pop sensibility is often evident in their music—they’ve previously collaborated with members of TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear and Battles.

One might not think of Talibam! as a political outfit, considering the musical aesthetic they’re working with (i.e., trashrock), but they are nonetheless keenly aware of the politics of language. For Shea, “Talibam! is not a creative band name, not for the sake of having a band name, not a product of leisure time—the name is a summary of life in this decade and it instigates specific questions regarding this epoch.

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Talibam! is the conclusion and you don’t have to waste precious time interpreting some abstract meaning. The specifics are in the name.” Mottel says “the initial idea of the word Talibam! is to de-contextualize language and its usual roots of power and control, which come from an authoritarian perspective, and to retake language for our own creative and ultimately positive use.”

Titles like “Ordination of the Globetrotting Conscripts,” “Organist Dick Hyman, Whose Art Tatum Studies Crowdsorcerers Swallow the Cornucopian Logic Of...” and “Mao Mix” are part of that linguistic estrangement, as are the nonsense syllables that surface on “Slap Yr Boots On! Oysters Await.” Aside from their engagement with the politics of language, politics enters their work in other ways. Boogie in the Breeze Blocks is (among other things) a protest against the condofication of New York, for breeze blocks are the cinder blocks that make up much contemporary urban architecture. When Mottel and Kuhlmann recite “I don’t want to see no new towers / I don’t want to see no new construction” on “Herodiade,” it’s a plea for the grit of individuality that pulsed through the New York of yore.

In March 2009, they accompanied the dance-theatre workshop of choreographer Karole Armitage in New York, performing “The Watteau Duets,” a piece by David Linton. “Working with Karole has allowed for us to create a high art version of the chaos and pranks that dominated our early concerts, where we played very little music and destroyed our instruments,” Mottel says. “Karole removes her ego as a choreographer by letting us create energy as a backdrop for her dance sequences, which happen simultaneously to our destruction and vaudevillian humor.” It’s hard to imagine this manic duo following a score, but the lovers’ war-dance that inspired the piece turns out to be the perfect setting for Shea and Mottel’s frantic but knowing rapport. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 9

Pioneering improvising guitarist reissues epic Lucifer Rising box and continues to make music from behind bars. By Jay Somerset

Don Snyder

BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL “This call is from Oregon State Penitentiary,” begins the message on the other end of the telephone line. “This is a prepaid call. This call is from Bobby. This call will be monitored and recorded. To accept this call, dial 5 now.”

It’s taken nearly three months to set up this interview, and now, with nearly 2,000 miles separating us, he’s on the line. Bobby BeauSoleil: guitarist, improviser, composer.

Convicted murderer. Prisoner. Lucifer. I wipe my brow and before I have time to gather my thoughts, we’re deep in discussion about what matters most: music. Specifically, his two newly released anthologies on the Mexican Summer and Ajna Offensive labels, the latter of which put out a definitive, four-LP box set called the Lucifer Rising Suite.

“This time we went all-out,” says BeauSoleil, referring to the double-LP Orkustra anthology released this fall on Mexican Summer.

The music, recorded in the mid- to late-1960s, was retrieved from a dusty box of tapes stored by onetime Orkustra violinist David LaFlamme. “These aren’t studio recordings, but the performances give you a sense of the band in its raw state.” The anthology, which includes a hand-drawn image of the band, done by BeauSoleil from memory, showcases a youthful improvising ensemble attempting something outside of the tie-dyed, standardrock format of 1960s San Francisco.

“I wanted to create something that would convey the spirit of the city’s multiculturalism and counterculture, so I conceived of an ‘Electric Symphony Orchestra.’ I had no idea what it would sound like, but from that seed, that germ, came the Orkustra.”

The Orkustra was founded in 1966, when BeauSoleil, who turned 62 in November, was just 18 and dabbling in modal music, or what LaFlamme dubbed “raga rock.” Taking cues from Ravi Shankar and Eastern-tinged improvisers such as Sandy Bull and Robbie Basho, the band—typically consisting of stand-up bass, drums, violin and oboe, with Bobby on guitar and “my beloved bouzouki”—sounded nothing like the blues-based, vocalized rock of the Haight-Ashbury scene. “We were improvising, but within a mode, so it was

challenging work,” says BeauSoleil. “Now modal music is more common, but back then, in California at least, only the jazz players were doing it. And us.”

In February 1967, the Orkustra played as part of the Invisible Circus, a weekend-long arts event that included a printing press, poetry readings, lectures, and music. Unbeknownst to BeauSoleil, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger was amongst the crowd. Anger was casting a new film, Lucifer Rising, and when he saw BeauSoleil—then known as “Cupid” because of his striking, handsome appearance—Anger saw another angel, his star, Lucifer. BeauSoleil agreed to play the part so long as he could compose the music.

Dissolving the Orkustra, BeauSoleil devoted himself to the Lucifer project, forming a new band, called The Magic Powerhouse of Oz. BeauSoleil shared a house with Anger. “We called it the Russian Embassy but it was actually an old brothel,” says BeauSoleil.

“It looked like the Munster house.” Soon enough, their relationship soured after Anger accused BeauSoleil of stealing a film print.

Meanwhile, the Haight’s halcyon days were over. “It was the end of the Summer of Love.

Things were intense and criminal elements started coming into the Haight. At that point I left.” Lucifer was on hold.

Leaving San Fran for Hollywood, BeauSoleil soon met a charismatic songwriter with ties to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Living on a ranch surrounded by young, beautiful women, Charles Manson allured many, including BeauSoleil. Not yet 22, BeauSoleil made a misstep that would change it all: acting under Manson’s direction, but certainly according to his free will, BeauSoleil stabbed a drug-dealing schoolteacher named Gary Hinman. This single, horribly botched act landed BeauSoleil in prison. Soon thereafter, Manson and his followers painted Los Angeles blood red in a series of savage, unprovoked attacks, forever bonding BeauSoleil with the Manson name.

“There are people that wish I would just die,” he says, pauses, and finishes, “but they’re in the minority now.”

Originally sentenced to death (death

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became life in 1972), BeauSoleil survived the chaos (commonly referred to as “gladiator school”) that was Deuel Vocational Institute.

Meanwhile, Anger was still working on the film, hiring Led Zeppelin’s heroin-addled Jimmy Page to compose and perform the music. When BeauSoleil heard about Page’s inability to produce, he wrote Anger asking for another shot. Anger agreed, and with the permission of the warden plus $3,000 Anger sent to BeauSoleil through a teacher inside the prison, he began composing and recording the soundtrack.

Playing instruments, mainly electronic and most built by BeauSoleil through parts purchased at the prison hobby shop—grab bags of loose electronic parts and toys were transformed into synthesizers and guitar processors and controllers—plus a battered trumpet he found under the prison gym’s bleachers, BeauSoleil formed a band. With members making parole, transferring to other prisons or being sent “down in the hole,” recording and splicing was especially arduous. Finally, after three years, a recording was sent to Anger, and in 1980, the film was released.

“My interpretation for LR...extends the story told in Paradise Lost,” writes BeauSoleil in the extensive liner notes included in Ajna’s Lucifer Rising Suite set. “The essential premise is that Milton did not give his epic a very satisfying ending... For some of us, there is a distinct lack of moral sensibility in a conclusion that consigns the protagonist to perpetual disgrace and despair.”

The man on the line is not dead, nor is he destroyed. “I have a good set of headphones and a radio,” he says. “They don’t allow CDs and I can’t get online, so hearing new music is a challenge.” And while the prison shut down the band program after a 2003 homicide in the practice room, BeauSoleil still has his guitar. “I’m really enjoying singing these days.

My voice is seasoned enough that I’m happy with it. I’ve been playing an extended version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’ unlike anything you’ve heard.”

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GETTING ON THE FRONT FOOT Pianist Matthew Shipp’s theoretical approach to music making yields a new solo album which may also be his definitive artistic statement.

Story by Shaun Brady.

Photos by Michael Galinsky.

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Matthew Shipp in New York City, October 2009

Every week on the professional wrestling TV program Monday Night Raw, the arrival of the World Wrestling Entertainment’s current top villain Randy Orton is heralded by the Rev Theory song “Voices”: “I hear voices in my head / they counsel me, they understand / they talk to me.”

“That could be my theme song, too,” laughs Matthew Shipp as we reemerge into a rainy afternoon from a coffee shop blocks from his East Village home.

Well known as a boxing fanatic, who has spoken and written on the common instincts to be found in pugilism and jazz, Shipp is also a lifelong fan of professional wrestling. (“Other than my father, Vince McMahon is the longest-lasting male figure in my life,” he says of the owner of the WWE, immediately acknowledging what a disturbing prospect that was.) So the reference to Orton’s entrance music was merely a tossed-off joke, closing a lengthy digression into the squared circle.

But earlier in the conversation, Shipp had shrugged off questions about his intentions for the future, saying, “I get up every morning, sit at the piano and push down the notes that the voices in my head tell me to play. Maybe one day, after I push down enough notes, I’m going to drop dead and be done with this planet. But I have no idea where I’m headed.”

There’s a thin line between inspiration and insanity, and hearing voices can land someone on either side of it. For all the nefarious deeds he’s perpetrated—which range from handcuffing opponents to the ring ropes inside a steel cage to attacking a rival’s wife to delivering a concussioninducing kick to the head of his boss—the cold and calculating Randy Orton is not crazy. Neither is Matthew Shipp, though at times it seems he aspires to be. He cites the examples of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, ascribing their gifts, at least in part, to their struggles with mental illness.

“On one level,” Shipp says, “if you’re crazy enough, you can go so deep into yourself that there’s no need to look outside.

Monk criticized Coltrane once, asking why he was always exploring, looking at Indian music and this and that—why couldn’t he just be himself? I would say that’s true, deep in yourself is everything, but Monk was listening to the radio eight or ten hours a day sometimes. His central nervous system was an open reception station to everything, mainly because he was crazy.”

Shipp refers to Powell as the “purest stream of light” that’s been able to exist in our world—primarily, he says, “because he really was fucking crazy.

“There’s nothing contrived about his craziness. I think it takes an openness, however that openness is created. It could be when you’re a kid and your mom tells you there’s spirits in the woods and you believe it. Or it could be created by the time you get hit over the head by a rock when you’re twelve.

I know somebody that got hit by a bolt

of lightning and lived through it and was transformed. Everybody is a configuration of energy, and in some people the energy field gets closed and you get stuck in the culture’s body of knowledge. And other people operate outside of that somehow.

That’s why certain people, Bud Powell or Monk, are in the world but not quite of it.”

Shipp may not yet feel that he’s transcended the material world, but on his latest album, 4D, he aims to show that he is, at least, existing in it at a more oblique angle than the rest of us. “I wanted to revisit some of the songs I had recorded before,” he says, “but show that I’m in a completely different place. I’m now in the fourth dimension of the piano.”

As did his last solo CD, One (2006), 4D finds Shipp making an individual statement which marks a transition in his recording career. One followed the pianist’s excursion into electronic music and hip-hop, and, although wholly acoustic, was marked by the loops, insistent recursions, and deeply resonant sounds of that world. The new disc immediately follows a period where Shipp has been concentrating on his group with guitarist-turned-bassist Joe Morris and drummer Whit Dickey, which offered a skewed, cubist take on the traditional piano trio.

The influence of that concentration is all over 4D, a far more lyrical set, albeit in the context of Shipp’s obsessive deconstruction of melody. His is a harsh lyricism, if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron; a familiar elegance remains in time-worn standards like “Autumn Leaves” and “Prelude to a Kiss,” although treated with an abrasive touch, as if the gilding has been scoured away.

Most of the standards are tunes that Shipp has recorded before, along with some of his own compositions. He offers a version of “Equilibrium,” from the 2003 CD of the same name. In its original quintet form, the piece seemed to ebb and flow, its tempo washing tidally from hesitant to ecstatic. Alone at the piano, Shipp takes the tune at a steadier pace, spiraling into the music methodically, exploring it from the inside out.

“I actually see this as the culmination of my whole recording history,” Shipp says.

“I’m not saying this just because it’s my new CD, but I really see it as the coming together of everything I’ve worked on over the years. Of course, you go into it not knowing what’s going to come out, but I think I had an epic blueprint in the back of my head. I thought I could gather the whole world in my range and manifest all the disparate elements together in a solo piano CD. That type of epic psychosis.”

More practically, the disc follows the dissolution of his trio with Morris and Dickey.

Shipp refuses to discuss the reasons behind the break-up, but the implication is clearly personality clashes among his bandmates— both of whom he continues to work with,

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just not together. (“Joe doesn’t want me to talk about it,” he says with a rueful laugh, shaking his head.)

There is a trace of disappointment in Shipp’s tone when he says that he decided to go the solo route because, “I felt I could probably trust myself. I’m coming off of an emotional high with my trio, where I felt like we had really built up to a certain thing and then broke up. I felt so good about what the trio was developing and when I realized that it wasn’t going to be a recording entity anymore, I felt like, ‘Who can I trust the most?’ and I thought, ‘Myself.’”

The concept behind the title, Shipp says, is “a play on the idea that behind any surface phenomenon, there’s a deeper reality that it comes out of where everything is merged. Everything grows out of a creative matrix which is non-local, so it can’t be explained in terms of matter or the physical realm, a creative blueprint that’s beyond space and time. I’m hinting at the fact that in my mind, I’ve discovered the matrix that my piano playing comes from and can therefore generate a whole structure that’s in space and time but comes from this other realm.”

In his song titles, Shipp has long evinced an interest in the collision between the astrophysical and the metaphysical.

4D is no different, with pieces titled “Dark Matter,” “Jazz Paradox” and “Blue Web in Space.”

“I’m more interested in mysticism than any scientific thing,” he explains. “What activates us, what motivates us, is electrical impulses. I don’t mean to sound clinical, but we’re all language. And to me, language is a particular equation of energy, so therefore music is a language. The study of mysticism is the study of the genesis of any structure. When you get back to the beginnings, you’re getting to the basic state of the energy, and to me that’s what the music is about.”

Shipp’s concepts place him on an obvious theoretical continuum with Sun Ra, who similarly fused ideas about jazz, race and the cosmos. Tracing his own lineage, Shipp sees himself as part of two separate but intertwined threads—the jazz piano lineage that leads through Ellington, Monk and Powell, and a mystically inclined tradition that includes John and Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. “Coltrane comes from the black church, but the actual spiritual impulse in his music is more Hinduism or universal consciousness transferred through the prism of the black church. There’s none of the doctrinaire Christian ethos involved. The same with Sun Ra—he merges Greek figures like Pythagoras or Heraclitus with Egyptian mythology through the prism of the black American experience. Coltrane and Sun Ra had two wholly different ways of going about having a mythological premise for the generation of a jazz universe. So I see WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 15

myself belonging to that mysticism branch, and on the branch of the regular jazz piano tradition.”

He is quick to divorce this mysticism from a dogmatically religious spiritualism, stressing that the inclusion of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on the new album was purely based on its prevalence in American culture, not on any proselytizing instinct. Raised in the Episcopal church, Shipp states vehemently that he does not consider himself an orthodox Christian today.

“It’s not spirituality in the sense that I go to a New Age bookstore and sit around burning incense and meditating,” he continues. “Spirituality has been a part of music ever since the world began. It’s what all Indian music comes out of, it’s what Bach comes out of, it’s what any music that’s been played in any church in the history of the world comes out of. To me, what mysticism is ultimately about is the quest to understand existence, which is energy, which is language. So from the time the first caveman banged a bone against a tree, on some level music is about everything. One aspect of that is the quest to understand yourself and what you come out of.”

On the most prosaic level, Shipp came out of a middle-class household in Wilmington, Delaware, born on December 7, 1960. His mother was a nurse, his father a police captain who became a professor of criminology after his retirement.

“My parents were jazz enthusiasts when they were younger,” he recalls. “They were the type of people who in the ’50s and early ’60s read Esquire and had all the hip albums, whether it was Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis. My mother went to high school with Clifford Brown; my father worked as a police officer with Lem Winchester, a vibist who played with Ramsey Lewis. So there was constantly jazz mythology around the house.”

Shipp began playing the piano at five years old, and caught the jazz bug at twelve when he saw Ahmad Jamal and Nina Simone on the local public television station. As a teenager, his goal—and his mother’s—was to join Grover Washington, Jr.’s band. They crossed paths once, when Washington encouraged the young Shipp to call for an audition, which might have led to a very different history.

The extreme self-confidence, some have said prickliness (or worse), for which he has become (in)famous was present from the beginning. Asked by frustrated high school teachers why he refused to apply his obvious intelligence to his classwork, Shipp would retort, “Why should I pass your test?

I’m going to be a famous jazz musician.”

During high school Shipp was gigging in Wilmington and Pennsylvania in both

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rock and jazz bands. After an unsatisfactory year at the University of Delaware, he studied with Dennis Sandole, the famed Philadelphia-based educator whose students included John Coltrane and Pat Martino. “What I got from him,” Shipp says, “which I understood before but he really crystallized, was the understanding that a human being has a language encoded within their own brain, and the development of the musician is the extrapolation of that out of your own energy field. It grows of its own accord given the proper nutrients to unlock that garden.”

Whether it was Sandole’s guidance or simply his own drive, Shipp says that his own concept formed suddenly, a few months after his term with Sandole ended and shortly before moving to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory.

“One day I just had this whole thing I could do,” he says. “Literally, bam, eureka, it happened. I had these headaches, then I went to sleep one night and had all these dreams of mathematical equations, and I woke up and had it. There were hints of it before, but now it was an effortless thing that was always there after that point.”

The story sounds like self-mythologizing, but by the time of Shipp’s first recordings in the late 1980s, his sound is fully-formed and recognizably, wholly his own. Joe Morris encountered Shipp even earlier, becoming aware of him during the year Shipp spent at NEC, and getting to know him once he arrived in New York in 1984.

That individuality, Morris says, was already present.

“I was impressed that he was a free player with great technique and a superstrong and intense personal style that was not out of Cecil Taylor. It was obviously different and I noticed that instantly. He really believed in himself and he wasn’t expecting the old-guard jazz scene to support him. He just figured that he would work on building a new scene for himself out of the alternative music scene—and he was very clear about what that meant and how to do it.”

Another trait that was already in place, Morris says, was the outspokenness that would come to characterize Shipp as strongly as his music.

“He had guts and wasn’t afraid to criticize writers who knocked him for reasons that were obviously irrelevant to what he was doing. Most other musicians in New York seemed scared to express their contempt for these guys—not all of whom were bad or bad to all of us—who seemed to be disregarding what we thought was important.”

Shipp continues to protest the way in which the jazz media represents the music, citing what he feels to be an overdue reverence paid to established performers.

“The jazz industry has become a huge funeral parlor,” he says. “Within jazz, the historical weight is so oppressive. If you look at a jazz magazine, eight or nine months of the year they’ll have the same covers you could have seen in 1972. Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock. At least if Spin Magazine has an article about the Eagles, they’ll hide it in the back. And if the Eagles go on tour the rock industry treats it as a nostalgia act, but in the jazz industry, if Keith Jarrett or Herbie Hancock go on tour they treat it like it’s real music and it’s important. We’ve heard enough of them—they’re millionaires, they should just go somewhere and stop playing.”

Of course, Shipp may be overestimating rock’s willingness to let go of its past, and readily admits that he is “just venting my frustration, so people should take it for what it is.” But he is also notable as a rare exception to jazz’s apprenticeship rule. His career has been marked by two notable sideman gigs with older musicians—in Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory and in the David S. Ware Quartet—but in both cases he played an integral part in shaping the music, rather than playing a subservient role to the bandleaders.

“When I was growing up, I wanted to play with everybody,” Shipp says. “I’ve driven fifty miles in my car and knocked on an old pianist’s door and given them a hundred dollars just to show me some chord voicings I heard them do on a gig. I remember chasing around itinerant gospel pianists who can’t read a note of music, who were perplexed as to why I wanted to sit around for an afternoon and learn what they did. In other words, I sought out every musical experience I could prior to when people know me on albums. So at this point in my life, I’m not interested in doing the sideman thing. Why would I want to?

So what if I played with Wayne Shorter?

How would that improve me? I have my own language that’s well-developed, so what about his language would make me better at what I do? All the people that now exist who played with Miles Davis— say Kenny Garrett or Marcus Miller—their language is not any stronger than mine, so what is there to learn from playing with a famous jazz icon? That whole trajectory means nothing. It does mean something to play with stronger musicians when you’re younger and get your ass kicked, because that’s a learning experience. But as far as translating to playing with people who have iconic names within the jazz industry, it’s meaningless. It’s absolutely a myth of history and it has no meaning whatsoever.”

He suddenly stops, noticing “Suffragette City” playing in the coffee shop. “Who did David Bowie play with? Nobody. And his music is stronger than a lot of people’s who played with Miles Davis.”

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top: William Parker, David S. Ware, Guillermo Brown and Shipp in December, 2004. bottom left: Shipp with Rob Brown at the time of their first recording session, circa 1987. bottom right: young Matthew Shipp at home in Wilmington in the mid '60s.

Shipp’s own experiences with his older peers were undertaken in the completely opposite spirit. He arrived in New York along with saxophonist Rob Brown, with whom he made his earliest recordings.

The two were seeking out a select few mentors who they felt they could enter into a dialogue with—chief among them,

bassist William Parker, who has gone on to become the most dominant collaborator in Shipp’s career.

Shipp first heard Parker playing with Cecil Taylor on the pianist’s 1986 album Calling It the Eighth. “I don’t know what I heard,” Shipp says, “but his voice struck me as something that could simultaneously exist in the old school—meaning Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry, who I knew he’d played with—but also simultaneously spark a new school. It just seemed to me that it could coexist in both worlds equally.

I thought that if we got in with this guy, he could take us somewhere and we could take him somewhere.”

“When I first met and played with Matthew he was not afraid to play himself,” Parker recalls about his initial meeting with Shipp. “He was very confident in talking about his music. When I agreed to play with him, what attracted to me to Matthew was his vibration—he was vibrating at a very high level, and his presence was very illuminated.”

The two have long seemed inseparable, forming a profound musical partnership.

“I’ve had a spiritual connection with every profound musician I’ve played with that goes back further than Africa,” Parker says.

“It goes back to the cosmos. Matthew’s strongest quality is that he is totally honest and committed to life in its highest manifestation. Behind the philosophy and science is his belief in the unbelievable. Matthew is a preacher, and his church is music.

When we play together, bass and piano are equal, never accompanying the other but independent, moving on two tracks that are really one. We’re two organisms that bond, building a third organism called music which evolves into light, movement and energy.”

By the end of the decade, Shipp and Parker had taken up what would end up as an almost two-decade-long residency in the David S. Ware Quartet. Although the drum chair changed several times, the unit was remarkably long-lasting and influential—to many ears, the most important jazz group since the classic Coltrane quartet.

“I love David and I love his music,” Shipp says. “It was really great to be involved with it, and it’s really great now to not be involved with it. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean that he’s a very strong personality and I’m a very strong personality, and when you get two strong personalities together there can be some bumping of heads. But we actually coexisted. What was great about it was that he was of an older generation, but he really allowed me to have a big part in the music. He had the maturity and the belief in himself that he could accept a younger person into the band and just give me free rein to be myself, as Miles did with Herbie and Wayne and Tony Williams. He wasn’t threatened by younger people who had

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their own identity and their own strength.

I consider us kindred spirits, but David has his own vision that’s very strong—I was given free rein, but I had to do it within the framework of that vision.”

Unlike the Ware gig, which came about organically through the circle of musicians he was involved with at the time, Shipp actively sought out Roscoe Mitchell. “I really consider him a searching mind that’s always trying to incorporate new things into his music,” Shipp says. “He seems to be truly fascinated by the younger people that join his band and feels welcoming that they’re a new source of energy.”

During a recording career that spans more than twenty years, Shipp has worked with an unusually small but vital core group of collaborators. “I’m interested in establishing dialogue on a deep level,” he explains, “which can’t be done if you’re skip-hopping around. You really need to spend time together on the bandstand and in the studio to get to that deep level that I’m looking for.”

In choosing his own sidemen, Shipp says, “I give them complete freedom.

But for that to happen, somebody has to really understand you. So what I look for is someone who really respects where I’m coming from, but also isn’t afraid to fuck with your head. I don’t want anybody to be docile. I get stuck in being me sometimes, so I need somebody to say ‘You ain’t shit, motherfucker, take this.’”

“Matt sets a loose agenda and I do my best to support him,” Morris says. “I get total freedom to play what I want to play, but I like to stay with the sequence of events that Matt makes and work freely within that. I think Matt and I have a completely telepathic connection when we play, but I know I base that on understanding what he is doing musically and understanding how he thinks. Matt has a very idiosyncratic sense of sequence. It’s like a very complex narrative that is stream of consciousness, recursive, random and ultimately logical and resolute, but always reaching for the place of pure invention.

Matt plays like someone throwing a ball at a moving object. He has to rely on impulse to feel how to hit the object but he trains that impulse with hours of practice, and the object is always moving really fast, so it seems like he sees it like a hawk watches his prey. Time slows down and then he make his move. So his playing is intense all the time but the motion in relation to that intensity is often slowed down.

That combination of practice, exactitude, impulse and reaching to touch the elusive is what is happening in Matt’s music.”

Throughout the 1990s, Shipp recorded for a variety of labels, most prominently hatOLOGY, but in 2000 he found a home via the long-running alternative rock label Thirsty Ear. He was introduced to the label

Ware Quartet: Michael Galinsky | others courtesy Matthew Shipp

Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, unsurprisingly, come in for especial condemnation for their restrictive views. Shipp draws a distinction between “jazz,” which he seems to associate with a worldview mired in the past, and “universal music,” an access to something beyond oneself that, in the proper circumstances, can manifest itself as something that most of us would refer to as “jazz.”

“Monk contacted his creative imagination and just happened to grow up in an environment where people play what we call jazz, so he took on the furniture of the room, but he wasn’t sitting around like Wynton saying [in a low growl], ‘My music be the blues an’ shit.’ Wynton Marsalis could never create anything worthwhile because his mind is closed. It’s sick. But I can see Alice Coltrane existing even if Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker never existed.”

Beyond simply castigating the jazz community for its more conservative tendencies—a fact of life in any human endeavor—he sees the end result as being harmful to the music’s evolution. The oppressiveness of history, in his eyes, actually alters listeners’ perceptions of the new. “There’s a sadistic aspect to a lot of jazz listeners where you can never measure up to history in their minds,” he says. “There’s no ability for them to look at you for what you are.

“The mistake a lot of young jazz musicians make is that they think there’s something more authentic in the past. But the same currents of electricity that animate the universe exist now that existed in 1940, so why should something be more authentic because some fucking niggers went into the studio in 1940 and did it? Unless you’re trying to ape what they did, it’s just as authentic if some stoned motherfuckers go into the studio now and turn the tape recorder on and try something out.”

At that moment, he stops again—this time, it’s Neil Young’s “Southern Man” that he’s heard. He listens intently to Young’s guitar solo.

“This is a great example. What I love about Neil Young’s music is that it’s truly emergent from his own nervous system.

If you listen to the way Neil Young plays guitar and his idiosyncrasies—only he could make that music. The same as Monk. So it’s not about bowing to history. My central nervous system emerges from the universe, so anything I could create has just as much authenticity as Charlie Parker or Bud Powell or anything else.”

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through punk legend Henry Rollins, who invited Shipp to record for his 2.13.61 imprint, which was distributed through Thirsty Ear. “Henry has really catholic tastes in music, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous,” says Peter Gordon, president of Thirsty Ear. “He was one of the first to see that free jazz, particularly what was coming out of New York, had tremendous sympathetic roots to the punk movement. It was very much from the gut and emotional, and they shared that common charge into the market devoid of commercial considerations. It made me see that jazz actually has a place in contemporary music, which was kind of shocking to me. I just thought it was meant to be neatly packed in the corner, respected, where you could look at all of the greats against smoky backgrounds on stage in coffee table books.”

When Rollins’ label folded, Gordon approached Shipp about curating a jazz label that would expand upon that vision and call upon Thirsty Ear’s experience in alternative music. In its early stages, the Blue Series allowed Shipp to gather musicians together for projects that he conceptualized, “as opposed to gathering free jazz musicians together and just having them do their thing.” The concept has since widened, to become more of a home for forward-thinking jazz artists of various stripes.

Besides Shipp and his usual collaborators, the Blue Series has released albums by Tim Berne, Steven Bernstein’s Sex Mob, Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone, and Vernon Reid and DJ Logic’s Yohimbe Brothers.

The label also hosted Shipp’s explorations into electronic music, which saw him partnering with the underground rap duo Anti-Pop Consortium (a new collaboration with the recently-reunited Anti-Pop is due next year), DJ Spooky, and British trip-hop producers Spring Heel Jack.

“Matt’s vision is like seeing music through a kaleidoscope,” Gordon says.

“I’ve never seen an artist who can go from Bach to Debussy to Jelly Roll Morton through Thelonious Monk within two phrases. He completely breaks down all the notion of segregation of styles and thought and merges them all together simultaneously. It’s almost scary to hear him play, because of his ability to absorb that information and present it in such a novel way, without preconceived notions. I don’t often see people put themselves at risk like that, but unless you’re willing to risk it all to be either an innovator or a fool, you can’t break through the barriers.”

Shipp traces the impulse to fuse his own sound with electronics to his early days in New York. “In the early nineties I used to hang out every night, both at jazz clubs and discos—for the obvious reasons that

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people hang out socially—and I was drinking a lot. Coming out of discos at night and being wasted as shit, I would have these hypnagogic images. I remember one night coming out of a club and hearing my own sound superimposed over Run DMC and thinking, ‘Wow, that could work.’”

He didn’t follow up on the concept until years later, when Spring Heel Jack found themselves without a label and expressed an interest with fusing avant-garde jazz and ambient music. The duo released several albums through the Blue Series in which they worked with a variety of musicians in New York and Europe, including Shipp, Berne, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Mat Maneri, and Han Bennink. The concept worked so well that Shipp continued experimenting with the combination on his own releases, beginning with 2002’s Nu Bop. “Sometimes you just need a break,” Shipp says of those experiments. “I’ve been doing the acoustic jazz thing for my whole life and I wanted to try something else. Another thing, my wife is really a trip-hop fan. She loves Massive Attack and Tricky, and in fact when I started working with Spring Heel Jack, she saw me in a different light. So it made me look better in my wife’s eyes.”

The recording of One and the trio with Morris and Dickey marked a return to acoustic music in force, situating Shipp’s unique vocabulary in perhaps the most traditional-seeming jazz setting of his career.

“Think of Ahmad Jamal—there’s a really nice, elegant thing you can get with a trio, especially if it’s really jazz-based,” he says, “even with somebody with my particular musical personality. I can masquerade as a jazz musician with a trio. We can always resort to that jazz sound, even if the actual language is something completely different.”

It was also a chance to perform with Morris as a bassist, something that the latter had been suggesting for some time.

With Parker increasingly busy with his own projects, the time had come to introduce a new bass voice into the mix.

“Playing bass with Matt means that I have to be prepared to maintain a grand scheme that is made up of an exponential array of complex smaller schemes that shift in presentation and purpose on a whim and a blink,” Morris says. “Each time there is a recurring reference it is a changed— morphed, actually—version of the previous version. So I have to be ready to re-read things in their new rendition each time and expect that the sequence will be altered because of what just happened. So playing bass with Matt is a great challenge and a really rewarding one.”

The two are working regularly as a duo

now, and Shipp has a new trio with Dickey and bassist Michael Bisio. But for the immediate future he intends to concentrate on his solo performances, the most direct form of access to those inner voices.

“When I sit down to play I try to empty my mind of everything,” he says. “When I sit down to play I don’t give a fuck about anything. I don’t give a fuck if the concert works, if it doesn’t, I don’t give a fuck if you like it or don’t. What’s important is the honesty of the communication that I’m trying to have with my own inner self and then relating that to the audience. So I have to be completely open to the moment, which means being empty.”

I ask if that means that his music is thus the manifestation of some inner struggle, which Shipp denies, but then goes on to say that struggle cannot be divorced from any part of daily existence.

“There’s an inner struggle going through all of us all the time. Thought is not mellow.

Behind the most laid-back, cooled-out person, there are all kinds of conflicting emotions. This planet is based on non-equilibrium, complete dysfunction. If you define an angel as a photon or a pure stream of light, Bud Powell is the purest stream and Monk is close, but if they actually became that pure stream, they would disappear. You can’t have a pure stream of beauty exist in a cesspool, which this planet is. It’s going to get contaminated by the shit.”

An undoubtedly dour view of the world, but coming from Shipp it doesn’t necessarily sound as ugly as it may seem on the page. His point seems to be that music is the means by which the components of the so-called cesspool can become something transcendent.

“Anything you can eat, you can get nutrients out of,” he says. “If you ate cardboard, your body could get nutrients out of it somehow. So my own creative imagination can take in anything and come up with some abstract concept that I can use. I might not even be able to put it into words, but I can look at manure and learn something about the structure of the universe that I could extrapolate in my own way. Every one of us is our own unique take on the universe, and the idea as a musician is to have your language really scream out this unique take. As no two snowflakes are alike, no two people have the same fingerprints, if you put my album on it’s my own unique take on this horrendously crazy stupid worthless universe—albeit a beautiful universe.” ✹ Shaun Brady is a Philadelphia-based writer and filmmaker, blogging at shaunbrady. blogspot.com. This is his first feature for Signal to Noise.

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MAIL ORDER MUSIC Small, independent labels turn to limited edition releases available only by mail-order to achieve their goals in an unpredictable industry. Story by Jay Somerset.

courtesy Not Not Fun / Three Lobed

top: various limited-edition offerings from the Not Not Fun label bottom: CDs and LPs with Lorna and Edgar at the Three Lobed headquarters in High Point, NC

I’m twenty feet away but I can already make it out: a one-inch flat, perfectly square cardboard box marked “fragile” poking out of my mailbox. I’ve got at least three dozen of these mailers stacked in my closet, each etched with esoteric-sounding stamps that must puzzle the mailman—Time-Lag, Fusetron Sound, Not Not Fun, Three Lobed. But like a gift-wrapped tennis racquet, the box’s content seems obvious to me, a vinyl record. Which one, I can never guess.

Beaming with excitement, I race up the stairs, cut open the box and pull out a seven-inch. The cover shows a blissedout longhair strumming an acoustic guitar. Wearing ’70s-style jeans and cowboy shirt, complete with a leather thingy tied around his neck, it’s an arresting photo— pure psych—of Bobb Trimble. Never heard of him. Titled 2 Sides Of, the two-song single is numbered 275 from a limited run of 300. I place the record on the turntable and, for the first time, hear Trimble’s high-tenor voice sing Side A’s “One Mile from Heaven,” a lush slice of sunny folk that could have been slipped onto a Comus record. OK, so this is Trimble. I flip it over and Side B’s “Selling Me Short While Stringing Me Along” shatters the gentleness; wrapped around fuzzed guitar and a weeping, effeminate drawl, the song gradually builds into damaged-

guitar territory, his now-menacing voice approaching a scream.

Melodic yet disquieting, the beguiling Trimble single—an unannounced gift sent to Mexican Summer’s vinyl subscription club members—is an unexpected treat by an artist I might otherwise have overlooked. (Within a month I’ll have placed an order for Trimble’s two LPs: Iron Curtain Innocence, from 1980; and Harvest of Dreams, from 1982, both reissued on the Secretly Canadian label.)

“We want people to feel like they’re part of something special,” says Keith Abrahamsson, A&R rep at New York– based Kemado Records and curator of its Mexican Summer offshoot, a vinyl and digital-download label specializing in the loosely defined world of both contemporary and lost-in-time psychedelic music.

Since launching in fall 2008, the label has put out more than 20 albums by the likes of Kurt Vile, Wooden Shjips, Marissa Nadler, Farmer Dave Scher, and Bobby BeauSoleil.

Abrahamsson wanted to create “something you can’t just download or find in a store,” he says, which is why, at first, the label ran on a subscriber-only basis, with digital downloads also available for purchase. And while Mexican Summer is no longer operating this way (“It just became too difficult with all the

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records we put out,” says Abrahamsson, who will continue the label through mailorder and select retailers), this year has seen a large crop of subscription series sprout up, including HoZac Hookup Klub, which has included singles by Dum Dum Girls, Idle Times and Woven Bones; and Columbus Discount Records Singles Club (seven-inchers by Little Claw, Pink Reason, Psychedelic Horseshit and others). On the full-length front, Light In The Attic has created a series, as have the Numero Group and the aforementioned Thrill Jockey, with LPs by Tortoise, Pontiak, and more. Meanwhile, German label Vinyl On Demand offered a 21-LP Industrial subscription, which included three Nurse With Wound LPs and five from Smegma, all for 229 Euros; or the Wave/ Minimal series of 19 records, for 199.

While vinyl clubs and mail-order music seem to be a throwback to another era, it’s really the only game in town these days. Unless you’re living in a large metro area, the chances of finding smallpress vinyl in a record store is virtually nil, especially obscure contemporary “psych” (and I use that term loosely). But while the internet has allowed mail-order labels to thrive, the manner in which the music arrives—weeks or months later, at your door, on a bulky, non-digitized format—forces a slowdown of our neverWWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 23

The Not Not Fun stock room in Los Angeles, CA

satiated consumption of music. After all, in an afternoon you can fill your hard drive with hundreds of albums. But then what?

“There’s something about the speed at which we download music that devalues it,” says Ben Chasny, sage behind Six Organs of Admittance. In a recent interview with The Quietus magazine, Chasny tells a story about coming across a long-out-of-print Sun City Girls record.

Knowing he’d never see it in a store or for an affordable sum on eBay, he was left with a clear conscience to download it for free. “But, really, how much pleasure would I get from it anyway?

Why download it? Just to say I have it, that I have heard it?” Showing Herculean strength, he refrained from downloading the LP, deciding instead to wait until someone plays it for him. “Until then, it’s just information.” Plus, adds Chasny, “There’s something magickal about receiving something in the mail.”

“It’s like getting a present,” says Honey Owens, of Valet and Jackie-O Motherfucker. “It arrives one day, unannounced, in the mail, and there’s the whole ritual of opening it up, looking to see if there’s an insert or an engraving.” In June, Mexican Summer released Valet’s False Face Society LP, a stoned, meandering mindfuck full of drones and echo-laden jams, the type of record you put on and immediately drift away from, until the final number—a cover of Boris’s languid “Rainbow”—wakes you up. “We were going to do a Soundgarden cover but it was too hard to sing like Chris Cornell,” says Owens, referring to Cornell’s, um, “accent”. The album, says Owens, is an aural snapshot of a summer spent opening a used clothing/record store, doing handstands on mushrooms, performing on a beach during a thunderstorm and playing with friends. “Valet became a collaborative art project; sometimes I wouldn’t even play. I wish we could have made a documentary about that summer and given that to Keith to release.”

That such a sprawling effort was committed to wax is testament to the adventurous spirit of the label. Unlike traditional artist-label relationships, where careers are cultivated or albums are marketed, here the artist is free to roam without constraint; sometimes the result feels frail or uncut; other times, the results are stunning, such as Kurt Vile’s God Is Saying This to You, an emotional sojourn that tosses Vile’s Tom Petty inclinations with a heady dose of Spaceman 3 to create an overwhelmingly sad record.

This fall, Abrahamsson put out Fraction’s long-out-of-print album from 1971 called Moon Blood. Originally released in a private pressing of 200 copies, the band, like Wooden Shjips, strikes a bit 24 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

of a Doors chord—in a good way—with some Stooges and even a little Nicholas Greenwood thrown in. “I’ve seen originals go for $3,500,” says Abrahamsson, who also runs Anthology Recordings, an online-only digital music store. After contacting Fraction singer Jim Beach through a family friend he found online, Abrahamsson convinced Beach to allow him to reissue the LP, the first legitimate repress amidst a sea of bootlegs; likewise, he’s also released Bobby BeauSoleil’s Orkustra material, some of which has also been bootlegged or otherwise available. “I know you can grab a lot of this stuff on blogs, but it’s important, I think, to do it in a legal channel that puts money back in the artists’ pockets or get them touring again.”

Thanks mainly to Abramsson, Trimble—not unlike other reborn artists (Simon Finn and Gary Higgins come to mind)—is not only back in print, but also touring, this time with his Flying Spiders band, which includes Ariel Pink alumnus Gary War. “We just set up his first-ever New York show,” says Abrahamsson.

In November 1988 Seattle label SubPop released “Love Buzz,” the debut single by then-unknowns Nirvana. Dirty, rough and yet fresh-sounding, it fit the bill and launched what became known as SubPop’s Singles Club, a monthly service that, at its peak, in 1990, had 2,000 subscribers. Like all clubs, membership created a feeling of exclusivity, like you were privy to something special.

“You felt like you were part of it somehow,” says Owens who, around this time, was volunteering at Epicenter Records in San Francisco. Other labels and smallpress magazines had a similar mindset revolving around the mail. “In the back [of the store] there was a mail-order distro called Blacklist that shipped out tons of small, indie-print punk records and fanzines. It was such a killer zone.”

Back then, of course, the Internet was still largely sci-fi. Listeners on the fringe turned to the mailman for new music; cassette clubs, privately pressed vinyl and zines scribbled with muddied band biographies lit the pathway to DIY enlightenment, a path that “neither snow nor rain nor heat of day nor gloom of night,” to borrow a phrase from Laurie Anderson, can stop. Mail-order was, and is, a fantasyland populated by fringe artists. For example, there was, and still is, the largely unattainable Nurse With Wound List. A treasure map for the musical adventurer, it lists 294 bands that influenced NWW’s Steven Stapleton.

Nowadays all it takes is a quick Google search to reveal and download the List (not counting the fictionalized entries, of course), but back then, it took digging,

or reading zines like Forced Exposure.

Most of us wouldn’t have heard of artists such as Jandek or Sun City Girls if it weren’t for the scrawling prose of Byron Coley and other diggers.

“When I was first getting into new music the only way to get it was through mail-order,” says Chasny. “I remember days of waiting and waiting and being so stoked when a package finally came,” he says, enthusiastically pointing me in the direction of “Moorish Mail-Order Mysticism,” by American writer Hakim Bey. The disjointed article —a joy to read, I should note—speaks of “do-it-yourself enlightenment” through the postal service. Of course, Chasny doesn’t just open the mail, he creates it, too.

Back in 2001, Chasny received a call from a young law student in North Carolina. The student, Cory Rayborn, had recently released a 10-inch by Philadelphia magic-eye band Bardo Pond on his then-infant Three Lobed Recordings label. Rayborn pitched Chasny on his idea for a subscriber series in the vein of SubPop, but on CD with a focus on EP-length psych jams. “Chasny had just released a one-sided record, called Manifestation, so I figured he would be open to the idea,” says Rayborn, calling from his office in High Point, N.C., where he now practices general law.

Six Organs, along with Bardo Pond, Mick Turner and five others, each contributed music to the first Three Lobed series, released between 2002 and 2005.

The following collection, 2006’s Modern Containment, included a who’s who of the American psych underground, with recordings by Hush Arbors, Wooden Wand, MV & EE, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Sun City Girls, Thurston Moore’s Mirror/Dash and Bardo Pond, whose John Gibbons silkscreened handmade cardboard slips, each one different, “so the 550 subscribers could have something to hold together the collection.”

As the roster suggests, Modern Containment was no throwaway series designed to cash in on rabid collectors more interested in owning music than listening to it. The music, almost all of which was recorded specifically for the series, includes Hush Arbors’ Landscape of Bone, clearly one of his best albums; as well as equally inspired jams such as James Toth’s Wooden Wand and the Omen Blues Band’s Horus of the Horizon, dedicated to Bobby BeauSoleil, which has an under-produced, demo-like quality brimming with emotion.

“I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars and weeks in fancy studios meticulously crafting albums,” says Toth. And yet, he says, it’s always releases like Horus, recorded “with mistakes intact,” that remain his best, most sought-after

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work. “The immediacy makes it fun; fewer options, fewer failures. Like David Briggs said, ‘the more you think, the more you stink.’”

That some of Toth’s best work is released on small labels, in limited quantities and, in the case of Three Lobed, only available to subscribers, raises a question: why save the best for the fewest? Countrified Born Bad, for example, released by People In A Position To Know and only available online, with no advertising (I happened upon the label by chance), stands up to the best of Toth’s catalogue. And yet, if you didn’t also happen to come across a link, you’d have missed out.

“That was a painful album to make,” says Toth, referring to his band breakup following the slick self-titled James Jackson Toth LP he’d put out on Rykodisc.

Life was shit, and this was the capsule he’d egested. “You remember the end of Superman 2?” he asks, referring, I think, to the Man of Steel’s abandonment of his duty to protect the world from harm, or, in Toth’s case, his artistic sabbatical.

“Over time I’ve grown more fond of that album and would like to see a wider release,” he says, adding: “But if you’re busy ‘reissuing,’ you ain’t busy ‘issuing,’ ya know?”

Unlike labels that tend to cultivate artists throughout their careers, labels such as Mexican Summer and Three Lobed are more like curators putting together solo or grouped exhibitions. “I don’t have ongoing relationships with bands, other than a few,” says Rayborn. “The bands seem to enjoy the one-offness of the label; that we work on a specific project. Plus, like many of us, they also like to get new music in the mail.” That bands are grouped together in subscriber series creates a sense of friendship among listener and artist and label.

“I like being grouped together because we get to meet some likeminded folks and be presented together,” says John Maloney of Sunburned Hand of the Man. For Modern Containment, Sunburned turned in a 26-minute reworked soundtrack to Ira Cohen’s film Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, called The Mylar Tantrum. SHOTM, which recently released the double-LP Grand Tour of Tunisia on Three Lobed, has released more than 30 recordings on more than 15 labels. “We look at labels the way an artist might look at a gallery or museum.

It puts our artwork in a place where it can be observed and listened to that is a bit different from the other places we’ve been seen, so to speak.”

Because there’s no sense of entitlement outside of the series or individual releases, the label-as-curator isn’t shackled trying to cultivate careers. Likewise, the artist can come to the label with music that seems tailor-made for the imprint. “Look at my Qbico releases,” chimes in Matt “MV” Valentine, poly-

math behind MV & EE. “[Qbico] mainly deals in abstract music with an emphasis on free jazz.” Both of Valentine’s Qbico releases, Creek to Creation and Pulsations, were, says Valentine, “seemingly tailor-made for the imprint.”

But while the collaboration between label and artist seems to work in tandem here, it’s a strain, says Valentine, to say he’s creating music with the label in mind. “I make notes (mentally/spiritually/musically) for the pieces that I feel have merit,” he says in his codified, almost private language. “How these compositions/songs/fragments stand up over time dictates where they ultimately will be harvested.” In Valentine’s sonic garden, “harvested” is no mere metaphor. “Our work ethic is more akin to a small farm or garden. We produce music that isn’t really geared toward a homogenized market, so in a sense we never really have any restrictions levied on us, just our own limitations. People who dig records with more than a casual fever usually cross paths with us in some form at some point.”

For his 2008 subscriber series Oscillation III, Rayborn put together another stellar roster in a similar psych vein: Michael Flower Band, Vanishing Voice, Jack Rose, Tom Carter, GHQ, Howlin’ Rain, Magik Markers, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore’s Bark Haze came together for the nine-CD set. “It’s a snapshot of my label,” says Rayborn, pausing for a second to deal with someone at the law firm. “The series covers psych music’s many incarnations: there’s long-form drone, skronky noise, a psych take on folk music; and then there’s the psychpunk of the [Magik] Markers.”

That “psychedelic” music is such a broadly defined, polygon-like term—that James Ferraro and the god-damn Grateful Dead are both “psych” is testament— makes for challenging, not always enjoyable but ultimately rewarding listening.

“You might have people who hate the formless drum thing, or the punkier stuff,” says Britt Brown who, along with his wife, Amanda (of Pocahaunted fame), started the Not Not Fun label in 2006.

Like Three Lobed, NNF, in addition to regular releases, has a subscriber club, Bored Fortress, inspired in part by Kill Rock Stars’ Singles Club. Each seveninch is split by two bands, with Britt and Amanda often pairing disparate sounds.

Working out of their apartment, the couple do all the silkscreening, label-making and special touches that go into NNF releases. In Bored Fortress’s first year, this meant making and mailing 150 records on a monthly basis; the next year, the total shot up to 250, then 350 in 2008, distributing new music by bands including Charalambides, Skullflower, Axolotl, Inca Ore and Ignatz. Not everyone is so keen on such a broad range of music; some focus in on a particular artist, sopping up every recording—the more limited,

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the better. “They can’t fathom having to pay for a split, let alone a series,” says Brown. “But the whole point is the club is to showcase the broad range of contemporary underground music.”

For those obsessed with a particular artist, missing out on a recording can be too painful to bear, with frustrated fanatics trolling the internet for out-of-print records. “After we sold out of our first [Bored Fortress] series, we got a call from a guy who just had to have the Hospitals/ Afrirampo split,” says Brown. “He asked me, ‘Do you enjoy making these fucking disgusting eBay items nobody can ever get?’ It’s not about ‘keeping up’ with records. I can’t keep up either. I miss a ton of records. But why worry about it?”

Still, like anything limited, be it stamps or records or magazines, once people get fixated on something, denying their lust is no easy task. “I’ve gotten some strange requests,” says Rayborn. “People have favourite or lucky numbers— ‘Oh my god, wouldn’t it be so great if I had No. 42 of the new Bardo album—so when I get the pre-order I just write on the sheet, ‘Send this dude No. 42.’”

That such an extreme approach to collecting exists boggles Brown, Rayborn and Abramson alike. “What matters most is the music, not that it’s limited,” says Abramson. As his words travel through the telephone, I find myself shaking my head in agreement while knowing it’s not the case. Because no matter how much I enjoy the music, I can’t, like Brown suggests, just let it wash over me.

Soon after joining the Mexican Summer subscriber series, I took a closer look at the label’s past releases and noticed a Kurt Vile record. Hmm, haven’t seen that one around, I thought. Suddenly I was hit with a completist’s urge. Without hearing it, I had to have that record, so I emailed the label—“Sorry, sold out,” I was told.

Midhaven Mailorder wasn’t carrying it, and when I contacted Fusetron Sound’s Chris Freeman, purveyor of all things limited, he wrote back, “Sorry, missed that one.” Finally, like a pathetic troll, I scoured eBay. For $200 the record was mine, a hefty price not worth considering. Or was it? I was torn.

Luckily, I tracked down a sole, reasonably priced copy online at Piccadilly Records in Manchester, U.K. A month later the album arrives. I put the record on the turntable and sprawl in a chair. I fondle the sleeve, No. 276/500. It sounds good.

Yes...and then I notice it, the cardboard box torn apart and lying in a heap on the floor. Suddenly I feel slightly sick, like I just can’t help myself; that my consumption has surpassed my appreciation. That I just had to have it. And then I recalled something Chasny said: “I download jams all the time, but it’s good to have something to touch.” ✹ Jay Somerset is a writer based in Toronto whose website is doyouconcur.com. This is his first feature for Signal to Noise.

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THE ENTERTAINER Jon Dale's brush with pianist, songwriter, arranger and producer Van Dyke Parks in Australia inspires a reassessment of his classic releases. Photos by Eden Batki

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Van Dyke Parks at home in Los Angeles, CA, October 2009

“Do you have to use the power of quotation?

Do they insist on that?” Van Dyke Parks leans forward at the table and looks at me, his eyes smiling, his brow slightly ruffled. We’ve just met after half an hour of toing and froing between music business PR consultants, everyone’s ears chained to their mobiles during the Big Sound music business shindig that has brought Parks to Brisbane, Australia in September 2009.

Now that I’ve chased him down, thanks to the slightly confused efforts of the festival’s micromanagement team, Parks is on a roll. “Why can’t you just make up an article after countless lies have been told? That to me would be perfectly legitimate.”

In conversation, Parks is erudite, garrulous, his words whizzing by and his brain moving even faster, caught on wordplay, alliteration, and the pure joy of language, and gracious to a fault. In the Belltower Room of the Judith Wright Centre—one of the many facades that gives tourists to sun-locked Brisbane the impression, however true or false, that they’ve set down in a cultural hyper-station—Parks’ voice booms out, resonating in the cavernous space, while his wife Sally politely looks on, now reading, now listening in, occasionally interrupting to correct her husband.

We’ve caught Parks in a ruminative mood.

Maybe he’s reflecting on a life’s work, given he’ll be performing songs from across that career at the Brisbane Powerhouse the following evening, but our conversation skips across years, genres and faultlines, rather than methodically plotting a chronology. Key texts are his legendary Song Cycle (1968) and Discover America (1972) albums—but bubbling underneath the conversation are references to other records: the third in his ’60s/’70s trilogy, Clang of the Yankee Reaper; Jump! from the ’80s, which deals with the Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit stories from the deep South, enacting what critic Timothy White called a “peculiarly wonderful reclamation project: a modern recasting of the popular entertainment in the United States between 1845 and 1900—the minstrelsy”; or 1989’s Tokyo Rose, which addresses Japanese-American interaction.

Or there’s Orange Crate Art, from the early ’90s, which reconciled Parks with perhaps his most famous collaborator, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Or his arrangements (quick checklist: U2, Linda Ronstadt, Jennifer Warnes, Joanna Newsom, Inara George, Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, and on), musical accompaniment, music for theatre, film and television, or the Jump! series of children’s books. But all of this burns away in the infra zone, the bed upon with Parks bases his almost aleatory drift across the whys and wherefores of his relationship with music. And we’re off…

“I excelled as an extemporaneous talent at the keyboards from a very early age; to be

sure, I astonished people. Because it wasn’t so far from the head to the hands. As a matter of fact I like to say, the older I get, the better I was. I went to New Orleans to produce, and I met a fellow by the name of Nocentelli.

Leo Nocentelli’s father, he was of the Meters.

Leo’s father Jack Nocentelli was the eminence grise, the guy behind the guy on the throne at New Orleans with Marshall Sehorn and Allen Touissant. Allen Touissant was to me one of the greatest pianists of my life. I also liked Lincoln Majorca. But Allen Touissant, I’m talking about the lingo. I played for Allen, he remembers that: he credits me for insisting he write ‘Southern Nights,’ some pentatonic path… Beautiful, beautiful piece. Allen Touissant, a rhapsodist of the highest order, and a man of great economy and power.

“Dear Jack Nocentelli took me aside and discussed jazz. Of course I was interested in things like Bix Beiderbecke, W.C. Handy, the people who have followed him like Willard Robison, who I commend to any interest you may have in street cred orchestration… (I spoke) to the man who touched the hand of the prophet.

This great illumination from this old music. He insisted that he and Satchmo were old friends in their youth, etcetera, and so forth. And he talked about the word ‘jazz.’ Because I wanted to get to the bottom of this thing. And his theory, it was not his opinion really but he thought it was possible that jazz is ‘short on charity.’ Don’t be short on charity with me, don’t jazz me. But who knows what it means, or what it can mean, or whence it has sprung.

“Now, I see you have some notes. The hell with my yipping!”

Parks was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1943, and his early years were marked by myriad endeavor: a stint as a child actor alongside Grace Kelly, time as a member of the Greenwood County Singers, two brilliant early singles for MGM (“Number Nine”/“Do What You Wanta,” “Come to the Sunshine”/“Farther Along,” both 1966) which start advancing his cause for vernacular American art, and most notoriously, his collaboration with, and eventual estrangement from the Beach Boys, during the recording of their legendary, unreleased SMiLE. He was also, and remains, in demand as a session player and arranger—in the late 1960s, he worked on Randy Newman’s debut album, played moog on Biff Rose’s Children of Light, keyboards for the Beau Brummels, Gene Clark and Tim Buckley, and so on. Tracing Parks’ complex history of arrangement, session playing, production and writing would require a book-length discographical disquisition. But the legend of his recording career rests on two beautifully quixotic albums from the late sixties and early seventies—Song Cycle and Discover America.

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Song Cycle is an album often overshadowed by its legend within the industry—talk of its prodigious expense (though it recouped its costs), the label’s decidedly insensitive promotional tactics (virtually selling the album as a loss leader), and the confusion around the contents of the record all serves to obscure the artistry and address of personal and vernacular art at its beating heart. One example: “[when] I brought Song Cycle to Warner Bros,” Parks recalls, “the president of the company looked at it and, after hearing it, he looked at me and said, ‘Song Cycle’? And I said, yes. He said, ‘so where are the songs?’”

Song Cycle indeed has many songs— fragmentary, elliptical things, bustling with life, teeming with vertiginous arrangements that map the topographic and psychological territory traced by the artist’s expression, making jump-cuts between historical and hyper-personal registers, using the orchestra as a screen upon which Parks’ fantasias are projected in rich, vivid, burnished colours. The articulate obstinacy of the arrangements also manages to half-obscure (deliberately, I suspect) the deeply personal matter that’s at Song Cycle’s core. An example: “The Attic” deals with Parks finding his father’s war chest—as he recalled in an interview with Ed Pinsent published in The Sound Projector, “My father was in the first medical team, he headed the psychiatric medical team that liberated Dachau. A very dedicated man… he found a lot of people with a lot of problems, following the German atrocities. So—Song Cycle was touched by that idea, that I was in a generation that had a debt of honour to the generation before.”

This is the terrain often less explored even

by Song Cycle’s most fervent supporters—that a record of such sumptuousness and formal rigor captures the angst of its period, both at micro and macro levels. Talking about it now, Parks doesn’t go into specifics, rather dollying out in perspective. Continuing on from his discussion of the industry’s response to the album, he says, “It didn’t occur to me that I should have songs or have anything else. It just occurred to me that I have to be faithful to myself and find myself in this effort. And quite frankly I wasn’t comfortable with any example that was close at hand.”

What was close to hand? Parks cocks a metaphoric eyebrow: “When I was being considered as an artist, as a brunette, for records, a lot of my peers were dressing like the Marlboro man, with a chaff of straw in the mouth and the boots up on the rail by the saloon. They were putting these on the covers of albums. I knew better. I came from a family of farmers.

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not adopting fashions. In the 1960s, I was counter-counterculture. My first record is clear evidence.”

My own interpretation of Song Cycle suggests it deals with ideas of America, though Parks foreshadows this when discussing his studies with Aaron Copland: “he was being very nice showing up, and one of the guys asks him, ‘what is American music?’ He said, ‘American music is simply music that was written in America.’” So when I suggest to Parks that Song Cycle is singular in its address of the USA, he agrees in passing, but quickly continues, “I was looking for some reverberative confirmation after those things. Because to do a record under your own name: try it sometime if you think it’s easy, try it and see what happens to you. The first thing you must expect is to be humiliated publicly. Do that first, get over it, get that over with as soon as possible. So that you can collect yourself again to be upright for the next challenge. So to do something open like that, and to keep yourself naked, bleeding, stripped, totally wounded, that’s necessary. It must be a complete sacrifice of self.

“I want to do it again, but the thing is it’s just an amazingly sacrificial process. And if it is going to yield more than an average of zero, it needs to be allowed to have a mind of its own. And the record becomes that thing.

Sometimes a persona, sometimes it’s not a persona, sometimes it’s a collection of them, like a novella. I’m from that world because of my age, I’m from the world that wants side one to be followed quickly by side two. That’s just part of my bifurcated reality, that’s who I am, that’s the totem of my life, that’s how I kind of bifurcate a project. And also in doing so, seek an expositionary force that is something that feels like things are moving along to new events, and then maybe suspending and even resolving correctly. I like to do that, to land it on its feet. I try to do that and I do it more and more, make a greater and greater effort that is, to have things resolve.”

This reminds me of a comment Jim O’Rourke once made, placing Parks alongside Scott Walker as an artist who deflects from ‘the self’ in their art. O’Rourke also once stated in an interview with Brian Duguid, “The things I like most, like Van Dyke Parks, work within a context and have the appearance of that, but if you look past the appearance, you find that it’s actually dealing with how it achieves that appearance.” When I prod Parks as to how he views his own work, he continues, “Now you know, when I look at my work, I would like to see something, I would like it to be mural size, and I’d like it to be in oil, in a strong building somewhere.

“But the more I look at my 40-year dalliance in music, as some kind of self-professed populist of the migrating idioms of music that are peculiar to America, and have hit me and impressed me, I don’t see the portrait, the mural that I want so much to see. I see this cartoon consciousness of the power of anecdote, musical anecdote. It’s not a broad canvas. It’s a miniaturist’s study. But that doesn’t bother me.

It’s not what I expected, it’s not what I hoped for, but I think I get good results because I work harder than anybody on Earth. And I always find myself the least talented member of the ensemble.”

Great ensemble playing is at the heart of Van Dyke Parks’ 1972 album, Discover America.

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vernacular American music head-on, is Parks at his most playful, but also his most politically canny—his version of “FDR in Trinidad” drips with sarcasm; the swoon and croon of “Bing Crosby” seems to conceal its own deconstruction; book-ended by Mighty Sparrow’s “Jack Palance” and a steel-band version of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” it traces the complex routes of communication between America and Trinidad, with a not uncritical eye. Or ear.

Discover America is an album that’s long mystified and thrilled this listener, in equal measures. It still feels like Parks’ most immediate album, but also his most outrageous. It’s cynical and celebratory, and it lets the listener in on both of those emotional responses, while also letting you hear how the musicians themselves took to the task—at several junctures we hear the backing singers chuckling to themselves, or sounding distinctly confused by the songs they’re exploring. But it’s that calypso swing that keeps your ears turning back. Calypso being an art of inveigling quotidian politics into the common parlance, of rich, sumptuous arrangements with natural chutzpah, I wondered about how Parks rated figures like the great Mighty Sparrow, whom he produced, or Lord Kitchener. I’d always remembered Parks saying he thought Kitchener was a peerless composer, and Parks confirms, “Well, he was as great as Schubert, to me.

“But the thing that’s interesting and this has to do with, as you know, things like voice leading in music. Voice leading is everything.

Being able to develop a whole bunch of subplots and have them happen and let them go somewhere. Too often people have been, they’re soft-ball on information, they’re softball on music, they’re soft-ball on journalism.

That’s why the world is run by tyrants, because people are tolerating too little, too long. And that is the case in popular music as well. But in fact, for a person who has seen that good music is designed, that durable goods is what’s important, that’s all there is to life, okay? That’s all that calls beyond the grave.

“I don’t know why it is that anyone should want anything more than the blessings of anonymity. It’s a place where I spend some of my time, the greater part of life. And I’ve seen its blessings as I’ve cursed fame and fortune and people who are plagued by it. But I live in that unsure category that is despised by the truly intolerant. Both classicists and those who would think that they have some particular however temporary street cred. The person who is the jazz aficionado who can’t tolerate what seems like a pre-meditated event. For some reason it must be suspect. And that’s been hard for me.

Not to be a real musician, but then not really to be a musician. Both of those things.”

While albums like Song Cycle and Discover America are legendary documents—music at its most elevated—perhaps the key to Parks’ solo career, the record that actually defines what Parks is all about, is 1997’s live album, Moonlighting. Bustling with febrile energy, with rich orchestration, gorgeous playing and Parks’ vocals singing out over the top with joie de vivre, it’s an astounding live set that distils plenty of what’s been going on in Parks’ musical brain. There are snippets from Song Cycle and Discover America, but only snippets—the latter gives us “F.D.R. in Trinidad,” the former a brief “All Golden.” But there are other touches that signpost what keeps Parks firing—several songs from Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a gor-

geous run through John Hartford’s “Delta Queen Waltz,” and a rendition of the second cut from Discover America, an incredibly low-lit, soulful tumble through Little Feat’s “Sailin’ Shoes.”

Moonlighting signals two central facets of Parks’ music. Firstly, that it is an ever-mutable beast. The versions here are faithful to a degree, but take on lives of their own, given flight by performances from simpatico players and the ‘extempo’ freedoms that Parks injects into his performances. And secondly, it displays an ongoing reconciliation and recuperation of American art forms, and an outreach that moves way beyond simplistic criticisms of colonialism, which really deals in a fundamental way with the interactions between art forms across the globe. Hence the Trinidadian focus of Discover America; hence Tokyo Rose; hence the way, in live performance, he moves between blues, folk, minstrelsy, Hollywood movie music, calypso, and so on.

It’s an absolute blast to hear. Parks’ performance in Brisbane was modelled on the same song cycle as Moonlighting, with a few extra flourishes—a stripped-back version of Randy Newman’s “Vine Street,” from Song Cycle, at the request of gig organizer (and sometime Signal to Noise contributor) Lawrence English, was sumptuous. Parks’ performance was immaculate, his humor leapt between simple puns, campy innuendo and long-winding tales, and his political broadsides were razor-sharp, a reminder of the savvy social conscience behind the songs. It was also an exceptionally humble performance. “It’s a battle, to do a good job,” he admits, “And it’s a confounding experience too because there are so many people who want to be important rather than find importance in their work. It invites immodesty.

“I would like to wear that mantle of modesty, if I could. And because I have so many constant reminders that there are so many that don’t get the same opportunity. So basically to me, the music as an endeavor, as a learned occupation, it really is the Rosetta of being. It’s why we’re here. It’ll tell you why. Music does that. It’s the highest math, we know all that. The mode I use is Pythagorean in origin. He hung around in the marble columns with his students and found the fundamental tone of each structure that would create music for the gods. Architecture and music were totally symbiotic in those days anyway. This is what I use. And it only looks easy.”

After 25 minutes, our conversation is cut short, with too many avenues still unexplored.

But before I even have the chance to suggest a rematch, Parks is up and bounding around the room, making quick quips with one of the festival co-ordinators. He throws a jovial arm around me and starts talking about one of his latest projects, a “totally extempo” trio with Ry Cooder and Bob Dylan, before spinning off onto his enthusiasm for the Australian and New Zealand artists he’s encountered, then quizzing me on my family background. Before much longer he’s off to another meeting, but before he leaves, he asks if I’ll be at his show the following evening. I say yes, but stop short at telling him it was the reason I flew to Brisbane in the first place. He grins and, while striding off, asks me to sit near the front, “so you can deflect when they start throwing their shoes at me.” ✹ Jon Dale writes regularly for Signal to Noise.

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HIGHWAY TO HEALTH

Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Sufjan Stevens and his eclectic Asthmatic Kitty labelmates pursue their experimental tendencies on the margins of indie rock and roll.

Story by Vish Khanna. Photos by Shawn Brackbill.

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The first day of October is brisk but it’s heating up inside of Toronto’s Lee’s Palace, a mid-sized venue which is packed to capacity and then some. More than just the resulting friction of an audience mashed together, the warmth in the room is a blend of expectant joy and unbridled devotion for Brooklyn’s Sufjan Stevens, one of the most respected and popular artists in underground music, who’s in the middle of a tour of such intimate rooms. As his Asthmatic Kitty labelmates in Cryptacize shuffle offstage after a rousing set, the unassuming Stevens and his relatively small six-piece band arrive to set up their own gear for the night and, just by conducting this routine exercise, are greeted by whoops of delight.

What follows is a majestic yet selfconsciously rickety set, consisting of music Stevens has written over the past decade.

Fan favourites from astonishing albums like Michigan, Seven Swans, Illinois, and The Avalanche are rendered and received well but the night is most notable for the four, sprawling new songs Stevens unveils.

He introduces powerful, realized things like “Impossible Souls” and “All Delighted People” with a kind of sheepish reluctance, practically apologizing for the jarringly strong “Age of Adz,” which he accurately tells us is representative of a recent “weird, Miles Davis-meets-Prince synth-pop” direction he seems to be taking.

Earlier in the day on his tour bus, Stevens is fully engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about his ambitious multimedia project The BQE, the history and condition of Asthmatic Kitty, the label he co-owns with his step-father Lowell Brams, and how all of this fits into the grand scheme of things.

His points are thoughtfully eloquent and he exudes a quiet confidence even as his words convey a conflicted consciousness. “I don’t really have as much faith in my work as I used to,” he admits, after pondering the possible reception and musical content of some of his newest songs. “I don’t feel a certain kind of confidence that I used to.

But I think that’s healthy; I think that’s good because I can’t really rely on it anymore. I don’t trust it anymore. I think it’s allowed me to be less precious about how I work and write. And maybe it’s okay for us to take it less seriously.”

Stevens pauses. “I believe things are gonna change for the better but I think they’ll get a lot worse first,” he says and then chuckles.

Whether he realizes it or not, Sufjan Stevens is a young man who believes that size does matter. Since he emerged as a folk-based multi-instrumentalist/singersongwriter with 1999’s A Sun Came, he’s been drawn to gigantic projects such as 2001’s Enjoy Your Rabbit, an intricate electronic music release inspired by the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, or his infamous “50 State album series,” which, to date, has yielded remarkable concept records

about his birth state of Michigan and also Illinois. His latest effort, The BQE, which consists of a visually stunning film, a stirring orchestral soundtrack, an uncompromising essay ostensibly about New York’s Brooklyn Queens Expressway and hula hoops, and, in its limited edition format, a 40-page comic book about characters known as the Hooper Heroes. Stevens conceived of the whole extravaganza after being commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to stage a new work at the Gilman Opera House in November of 2007.

“My first approach was pretty literal, which was to capture images of the expressway from all different angles, and I wanted to do that with moving pictures instead of photographs,” Stevens explains.

“So I decided to hire a cinematographer [Reuben Kleiner] from Pratt, an art university in Brooklyn. He helped me with all the 16mm footage, which was shot on Bolex.

And I used Super 8 as well, which I’ve been using for years. And we just went around for a couple months and set up all these different shots, different angles, and tried different techniques. Some of it’s stop-animation, some is time-lapse, slowmo, night and day shots. So that was just kind of technical, gathering information.”

The BQE is a stimulating and provocative kind of sensory overload that contains all of the pageantry and curious fascination with human ingenuity that Stevens has infused his work with in the past, but the motion of it all is something new. “Looking at the footage, I would start to write movie soundtrack themes, ideas, and motifs that would accompany the images,” he says. “Because the BQE is such an ugly, concrete form that doesn’t inspire much, I decided to utilize other concepts including principles of Subud, which is a religious group that my parents were in when I was a kid, from which my name Sufjan is derived.”

“So I used that, which was pretty arbitrary, but it felt like a weird kind of conceptual starting point because it’s so abstract.

The group is about spiritual enlightenment and it’s not even a religion; there’s not really a deity. It’s about transcendent spiritual experiences, which they call ‘latihan’.

It comes from meditation that you do in groups. The cosmology and the symbolism of that religious organization started to work its way into the form, musically, of The BQE. There’s seven rings and seven lines in the Subud symbol, so I started to focus on this idea of seven—as a time signature, as a number of movements, and as a theme and religious number. There’s also the lines versus the circle; conceptually it was about circular motion versus linear motion, and the expressway represented lines and the transcendent meditation of Subud represented circles. There’s different rings that relate to different levels of enlightenment. And then the hula hoop

fit into that, conveniently, just because of geometry! So, it was all just gathering for months—all these different, pre-existing conceptual foundations, and then working them together, even if it didn’t make any sense at first.”

For any musician on this planet, The BQE would be an ambitious endeavor, but Stevens in particular gravitates to this scale of artistic expression. Each new venture seems to top the last one in terms of conceptual construction and creative execution, but to hear him tell it, his plans begin modestly enough. “I don’t think I set out to make epic projects. I think the projects themselves become unmanageable in the process, and I end up producing so much for a single project that they end up taking over and becoming much bigger and grander than I’d anticipated. I never intended for this to be so drastic or extensive. In the case of the commission from BAM, I was definitely working within a form. The piece itself had to exist in an opera house seating 2,000 people and fill the space visually, orally, and conceptually. So I knew I had to work within that scale and that’s why I wanted these three images, a miniature orchestra, and live hula hoopers, because I felt like that was what was required! I had the grant so I had the money to see things through. And then after the piece premiered and it came time to condense it into an album, I was really frustrated by the inability to reduce it to an LP. That’s when I started to develop more of the expository parts of the essay, and that’s when the comic book developed.

So, the whole thing was unwarranted of course, but was heedlessly enraptured by this conceptual ideal or grand idea of just venturing beyond what was normal or rational to capture it, and satisfy my creative desire to have a set piece that would represent The BQE.” “I really work on a very microscopic level,” Stevens continues. “I really think in terms of the song or folk song, and I work within a very conservative frame of melody, accompaniment, and narrative. So really basic, simple forms and they just end up becoming hybrids or amended or expanded to form greater, epic, set pieces.”

One of the hallmarks of Stevens’ work is its scale, which is rooted in eclecticism, a drive for variety in even his most focused ideas. That same spirit of inclusiveness and a community of sounds can be found in Asthmatic Kitty. Growing from a literal bedroom operation to a prolific and insistent force documenting oddly alluring music by artists like My Brightest Diamond, Castanets, Rafter, Fol Chen, Shannon Stephens, Half-Handed Cloud, Helado Negro, Jookabox, the Welcome Wagon, Shapes and Sizes, and about a dozen more, Asthmatic Kitty is now principally run

by Lowell Brams in Wyoming, Stevens in

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Brooklyn, and A&R man (though he prefers the term “Midwest Wizard”) Michael Kaufman in Indianapolis.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Stevens was five years old when Brams, an avid music lover, was briefly married to his mother. The two kept in touch over the years and happened to both live in Holland, Michigan when Stevens was attending Hope College and first started experimenting with the folk songs he’s known for today.

“The first music I heard that really impressed with me wasn’t the songs that he started doing later,” Brams recalls. “He would play these keyboard sonatas. He’d just make them up. When he was really little, like five, six, or seven, he wasn’t a prodigy or anything but his family got a piano for one of his siblings taking lessons, and he just started playing it. Later on he had these little keyboards and when he was maybe 13, I heard him playing these incredibly complicated pieces he’d made up on a tiny Casio keyboard. That was amazing; that was when I understood that he had a gift. And then when he was in college, I became more aware of him writing songs.”

While the general perception is that Asthmatic Kitty is Stevens’ label and began as an outlet to release his music, Brams clarifies that there was more to the label’s inception than that. “Sufjan was in two bands, one pretty serious, one like a garage band that was just for fun. Marzuki was the serious folk-rock band that went to New York for a while and played some faraway places in the U.S. And the other band was Con Los Dudes, which was a bunch of guys messing around. Both bands disbanded around the same time because members were graduating from college. We just knew a lot of talented people who’d been in those bands and others, and the idea was to put out music by them, not just Sufjan. He was the first one to make an album, A Sun Came, which came out in the spring of ’99. We were hoping to get distribution and that took a long time. We envisioned nothing like what’s happened—to be in a position to work with some 20 artists and have international distribution. I’m still surprised by it and I think Sufjan is too. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

After befriending him in New York, Stevens was introduced to Kaufman’s now-wife Liz Janes, whose personal songs intrigued Stevens, prompting him to strike up a creative partnership and release her music on Asthmatic Kitty. Kaufman began volunteering his services to the label and eventually parlayed this into full-time work, bringing artists like Bunky, Rafter, and Castanets into the fold. He is now essentially the label’s manager and shares a

musical kinship with Brams and Stevens.

“I was a huge fan of Enjoy Your Rabbit and I still am,” Kaufman says of Stevens’ music. “That’s one of my favorite records of his. He actually played with my noise band Therefore a couple of times and was very supportive of what we were doing.

His musical vocabulary and conceptual approach resonated a lot with mine. Even though our skill sets are light years apart, we share a sensibility towards deconstructing genre and thinking about context.”

The breadth of its leading men’s musical tastes places Asthmatic Kitty in an interesting position. Bound by no particular genre distinctions, it’s impossible to predict what any new release might sound like, even if it’s by a familiar artist. “I think early on it was mostly about songwriting,” Stevens says. “Now it’s really diverse and we’ve been releasing a lot of stuff and some of it is much smaller scale, as a modest enterprise. We’re trying to get away from being so insular and being just one thing. I think there’s a real effort to be open to other kinds of music, whether it’s electronic, instrumental, or programmatic music. Yeah, so it’s been fun working with other people. It’s mostly people we know; it’s very unusual for us to work with anyone we don’t know. It’s still based on relationships and I think a lot of the true, small, independent labels are still based on that.

It’s still really small. I’m still the biggest selling artist on the label but there’s a lot more music, energy, and a lot more going on. I think it’s really healthy.”

There’s a great deal of self-reflexive contemplation going on within Stevens and his partners at Asthmatic Kitty, but it doesn’t seem like wasted concern. This is an enterprise that’s driven by a sense of purpose— one that simultaneously questions the consistency and efficacy of that very purpose.

For his part, Stevens tends to engage with such philosophical quandaries by both addressing and avoiding them.

The score he’s composed for The BQE is uniquely dramatic and, outside of some cool electronic flourishes, generally consists of instrumentation that some might associate with dreamy, pop-oriented orchestral music. With the hula hoops and superhero costumes of the Hooper Heroes, he’s opened up a fantastical comic book world within his music that he’s really only hinted at previously via album artwork and eye-catching stage costumes and props.

It all adds up to an emotive, pointed kind of escapism that Stevens often seems enthralled with.

“You might have a better perspective in assessing my motivation in all that, in creating a fabulous, fabricated environment,” he reasons. “I’m not really sure where it comes from. It’s probably just the fact that

I believe what I do is artificial—that art is artifice and a fabrication. It’s not real; it’s a reflection or representation of reality but it isn’t reality. So, the colors are much more saturated in the artwork and the sounds are much more dramatized. There’s a kind of melodrama inherent in almost everything I do, whereas myself, as an ordinary, everyday human being, I’m extremely normal, ordinary, level-headed, phlegmatic, and I don’t have dramatic outbursts.

Whereas my music is always clamoring for attention, and so I think it’s like an alterego.”

“It’s true for a lot of artists, but my work is really animated; it’s the work of imagination. It’s the language that I use to represent very real, true, ordinary, and tragic events in everyday life. For me, the BQE is a tragic object because of how it’s displaced people, the way it’s an obstacle, the pollution and noise, and the constant upkeep and the traffic and all that. It’s a very real, practical problem in my life every day, and my way of rendering that through art is to transform it into a fabulous object.

Into a transcendent, phenomenal experience that’s completely unreal, completely artificial. The Hooper Heroes come to represent all these issues—environmentalism, urban planning, and the plight of the pedestrian versus the monstrosity of the city.”

As he says, Stevens often delves into fantasy that’s rooted in actual things— states, physical structures, cultural markers, and of course, people—as though hyper-reality is the best refuge from the cold tangibility of life. “Yeah, maybe I have a utopian view,” he offers. “Maybe I’m an idealist in that way. Because I think in regular life, I’m a bit of a pessimist. I don’t necessarily presume the best in life for me.

I expect things will work out, but in my work it’s definitely a heightened idealism.

It’s weird how palatable the music really is. I don’t really make music that’s inaccessible, necessarily. There’s bits of noise and discord here and there but generally, it’s actually very palatable and based on awe and wonder.”

While it’s understandable that, as its most prominent artist, Stevens is often regarded as the face of the label, Kaufman is eager to highlight the label’s community framework and multi-headed composition.

Stevens’ music and opinions may be strong and uncompromising but, in terms of the label, his is one voice of many. “Asthmatic Kitty musicians are approaching their work and life from many different angles, philosophies, and perceptions of reality.

In the early days, because of some of the Christian content in Sufjan’s work and that of the Welcome Wagon and Half-Handed Cloud, I would say that the perception of the label as a whole was extremely limited.

Sufjan Stevens in New York City, October 2009

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bottom: Denny Renshaw | top: courtesy Asthmatic Kitty

Top: Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond Bottom: The BQE stage-show at Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 3, 2007

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I think we’re getting past it, but even the bands who aren’t dealing with ‘Christian themes’ are dealing with heady stuff that gets into questions of the divine and the afterlife. Castanets for instance definitely deal with some very physical, immediate, and also transcendent spiritual concepts and how they intertwine. “‘Spiritual’ is not a horrible description, although that’s such a loaded word! But yeah, we haven’t forced ourselves away from that definition; we just want people to not have that be a filter that they view everything through. I used to be kinda resistant to it but, at this point, who cares; people are gonna respond how they’re gonna respond. Each record is its own thing and people will have hang-ups about different things that shape how they listen to it, but those hang-ups are probably shaping the way they deal with everything.

And we can’t change that.”

Beyond such lifestyle misperceptions, what’s more vexing are musical misinterpretations about a label whose catalog is impossible to pin down stylistically.

“There’s some indie twee-pop perceptions, which, I don’t know where those come from at all,” Kaufman says with a laugh.

“I don’t even know what ‘twee’ means!

There’s this thing about the softness stylistically of what we do, but the thing that frustrates me is that people don’t hear the incredible amount of experimentation that’s going on in the songs, be it the songwriting, the content, or how we do business; I think some people get it but sometimes it’s so subtle, that’s what makes it interesting.”

Because they tend to work with friends and acquaintances and have developed a sustainable business model, Asthmatic Kitty is driven mostly by musical considerations and has avoided marketing jargon about label optics and financial bottom lines. “I would be most excited if, 10, 15 years from now, people are looking at our label and saying, ‘Wow, look at all that great stuff they were putting out over the years,’” Kaufman says. “I’m okay with things coming around a little bit later. The owners might not be, because we may not survive that way! But I’m okay with leaving a legacy, and part of that is continuing to work with our artists, believing in and supporting them, even if their first couple of records don’t sell great. There’s several records we’ve put out where I’ve thought, ‘This record is great but it’s not the pinnacle of this artist’s career.’ I don’t know how many labels think that way; I’m curious. I think some are excited about a record and how ‘it’s gonna sell great.’ The focus is on that release but, for me, the focus has always been on the artist. To the point where we do stuff with some artists

that isn’t necessarily beneficial to the label because, to me, if they grow and develop as artists, that will have reciprocal effects on the label.”

Such an outlook is well-suited to a richly ambitious roster that includes innovative musicians like Shara Worden, who is best known as My Brightest Diamond. Worden began her relationship with Asthmatic Kitty as a back-up singer and instrumentalist in Stevens’ touring bands and has since gone on to become the highest profile musician on the label after her occasional bandleader.

“They’re very hands-off when it comes to the artistic side of things,” Worden says. “There’s no pressure of any kind from them at all when it comes to any of those decisions, and I work really well that way! I know a lot of friends of mine have had their labels get much more involved in the studio process and it works well for some of them. But for me, I really needed to have artistic freedom and they’ve been super supportive of that. If it’s possible to be both hands-off and really encouraging and caring at the same time, I think they strike that balance really well. It’s almost like they’re philanthropists or something!”

While he doesn’t believe his imprint is entirely altruistic, Brams thinks that it’s possible to run Asthmatic Kitty viably while retaining its penchant for artist-driven, adventurous music that people want to hear, though his inspiration might seem unlikely to some. “Elektra Records started out as a folk label in the early ’50s and then, in the ’60s, they started putting out all sorts of stuff,” he explains. “They had a subsidiary called Nonesuch, which put out classical music, what’s now called world music, and electronic music. They released a lot of artists that were ‘rock’ but there was nothing generic about them. People take it for granted now but there was nothing generic about the Doors; they sounded like no one else. Plus the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Love, and others who may not have been all that successful, but it was a lot of interesting stuff. They were just all over the map and I just really enjoyed that label. I may not have been as conscious to model Asthmatic Kitty after them but I think it was in the back of my mind: ‘Let’s do different kinds of things and things we like.’ Both Sufjan and I, we love different kinds of music and the fact that we jump around so much, it’s a reflection of that.”

Even though music’s been the bedrock for Stevens’ artistic expression and success, some cracks have begun to appear in the foundation. In a recent e-mail interview he conducted with former Marzuki bandmate and current label signee Shannon Stephens for asthmatickitty.com’s Sidebar

section, he wrote the following: “For myself, I’m starting to fear that music is far too selfish, self-absorbed, and selfinterested for the ordinary life. When I’m entrenched in a project, for instance, the dishes are left undone, the bills left unpaid, the house is a mess. I become sub-human.

I begin to despise all my bad habits.”

In the same exchange, Stevens wrote, “I’m at a point where I no longer have a deep desire to share my music with anyone, having spent many years imparting my songs to the public. Although I have great respect for the social dynamic of music—that it should be shared with others, that it brings people together—I now feel something personal is irrevocably lost in this process.”

In a startlingly sharp essay accompanying The BQE release, Stevens suggests that car culture and the expressway itself really reveal the self-destructive nature of man. And so it seems as though he feels that anyone stuck in this moment of our cultural trajectory is, from his perspective, enduring a particular kind of existential dilemma. “I can’t speak for the culture at large or anyone else,” he explains. “But for myself, I definitely feel a kind of claustrophobia because of the excess in our culture and the availability of so much.”

Ironically, the aforementioned statements from Stevens went viral, making headlines and fueling speculation that he was subtly announcing his retirement.

“Yeah, no, I didn’t intend to say that. I would never explicitly say something like that,” he scoffs. “But I definitely feel like ‘What is the point? What’s the point of making music anymore?’ I feel that the album no longer has a stronghold or has any real bearing anymore. The physical format itself is obsolete; the CD is obsolete and the LP is kinda nostalgic. So, I think the album is suffering and that’s how I’ve always created—I work with these conceptual albums in the long-form. And I’m wondering, what’s the value of my work once these forms are obsolete and everyone’s just downloading music?

“And I’m starting to get sick of my conceptual ideas. I’m tired of these grand, epic endeavors, and wanting to just make music for the joy of making music and having it be immediate and nothing to do with the industry itself, which, y’know, is suffering right now of course. And I think it has to do with a creative crisis too. I’m wondering, ‘What am I doing?’ What is a song even? I’m questioning, ‘What’s the point of a song?’ Is a song antiquated?

Does it have any power anymore? The format itself—a narrative song with accompaniment—is really beyond me now. Like, I feel that The BQE is not really a song, it’s not really a movie, and it’s not really

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just a soundtrack. It’s so ambiguous and diversified, it seems to lack shape. And the expressway itself lacks shape, so I feel like it’s all related to this existential crisis: Me versus the BQE, or me versus my work, y’know? And I don’t think I can win; I feel like it’s a losing battle.”

It’s really difficult to reconcile the Sufjan Stevens who commands a stage with the one that reflects upon the rationale for how he’s chosen to spend his time. On record and in performance, he’s peerless; there are few living artists with the stirring command of music and songcraft that Stevens possesses. And, unusually, he’s actually adored and celebrated for his abilities by critics and a mass of fans alike.

“It’s a real blessing and a privilege to have an audience and positive critical response,” he admits. “But I don’t measure what I do in those terms, because it’s important to continue looking forward, to remain near-sighted, and to honor the work. The work for me is the most important thing. I have great respect for my audience but I don’t feel any inclination to create for them. My impulse to create is for the work itself. But it’s funny; it seems that positive critical response doesn’t really do much for one’s ego in the end. That’s kind of surprising but I think I just have the disposition to not take any of that seriously any way. I don’t take it for granted and I’m very grateful for it but it doesn’t have any bearing on how I work.”

Indeed, without pretension or cockiness, Stevens’ thoughts reveal an honest resignation with his having perhaps exhausted the conventional song-form for all he sees it being worth. He’s saturated it with bubbling sounds and imagery while plucking banjos, fingering piano keys, or orchestrating sweeping string and horn sections to soar beneath his wholesome, angelic voice. ‘What else do I need to prove?’ he seems to be wondering now, and perhaps rightfully so.

Shara Worden has worked with Stevens firsthand on several tours and projects and suggests that a certain restlessness actually drives his methodology. “He’s a very complicated person in that way. He changes things to the last second of performances.

I think that’s an interesting thing about the way he works. The last tour I did with him was in Australia and Japan and we’d be sound-checking to the end of our allotted time. He would be making adjustments to the last second and he’s always been like that. I think that’s fascinating. It’s maddening to be playing that way because you feel like, ‘Aw man, I’m totally gonna screw this up.’ At the same time, being like that has allowed him to grow, change, and develop material. The arrangements are always evolving and even though it’s challenging as a player, it’s part of his creative process to constantly be tinkering, fixing things, and changing them.”

“It’s not surprising that he questions these things,” Brams explains of his stepson and business partner’s state of mind.

“He’s a person who constantly examines himself and what he’s doing. I don’t think it means he’s gonna stop making music; I know he likes to make music, no question. And my impression is not that there

have been a lot of bad experiences. But when you do what he’s doing and put it out there, sometimes things happen that you don’t particularly want to happen.

You don’t want people to recognize you on the street and you may not be able to get too comfortable with being too wellknown. He’s a quiet, private person and I think that’s more where that’s coming from.

Among the things he’s thinking about is ‘What does all this mean?’ It turned into something we didn’t expect. I had thought, starting from when he was in college, that he had the potential to be a first-rank songwriter, so, in a way, it hasn’t surprised me. But yet, it still surprises me!”

“I don’t believe that the world is going to end,” Stevens says, after making some gloomy pronouncements about what his future as a musician might look like. “I believe in a greater world and that society is just a convening of people and cultures.

The city is a very special, sacred part of society, but it’s impermanent. None of us are eternal. But I think, for me, I can break it down to economics. Music, on record, is so closely aligned to the commodification of art on an album in the culture of rock ’n’ roll. This is all from the ’60s and ’70s and we’re still living in that structure. Those are outdated forms. So, I think it’s really more specific than ‘Society will fail’ or ‘It’s the end of civilization.’”

In his essay about the BQE, Stevens positions the expressway as a representative for a lot of what is wrong about contemporary societies and cultures.

There’s so much rage in this work, though it might be imperceptible to those watching the film and experiencing the score.

But reading his thesis, it’s clear that The BQE, though full of humor and whimsy, is essentially a screed. “I think these forms aren’t sustainable,” Stevens explains. “The expressway, the automobile—it’s obvious now that these things are contributing to our decline; the death and destruction of the natural world. So, that’s no mystery. But I don’t offer any solutions obviously.”

For their part, Asthmatic Kitty and Stevens have resolved to keep on keepin’ on, creating and supporting art they believe in, while hopefully contributing something valuable to an imperfect world that can’t stand long. “I think we’re trying to further expand the variety of voices,” Kaufman says of the label. “I’ve actually been looking at several artists from China.

Sufjan and I have joked that we’re tired of hearing from white males. I mean, that’s easy for two white males to say, but I’m just amazed how white-male-dominated music is and continues to be. And how, when something seems like it’s going to cross over and people are gonna be exposed to something in a new way, it’s often coopted by white males. It’s just imperialism at its worst. Gender-wise, I think we’ve always been very well-balanced. I’d love to continue in that direction of being a diverse community but one that is built off of genuine relationships. It challenges all of us to operate outside of our comfort zones and grow as people. So, I think we’re at maximum capacity for a while and obviously if we get a demo from a white male

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that excites us, we’re gonna do it. But I do think we are trying to be more conscientious about opportunities for new and exciting collaborations and decentralizing those power structures.”

“Because of the economy and changes in the music business, we might slow down a little bit or we might not—I don’t know,” Brams adds. “The economy has affected everyone involved in music but there’s still a future in it. We can’t just stick with the business model that we had, say, five years ago because too much has changed, but we feel we can keep up with it. You have to be willing to try something new at any point. We’ve been very prolific lately and that was very deliberate. In the last year and a half, it was a reaction to the downturn in the music business. We were striving to keep going and I thought a little aggression was called for. I’m personally pleased with everything we’ve put out and I’m proud of it, and the basic philosophy will remain the same.”

As for Stevens, after all of the inner turmoil he’s released into the world lately, he too seems resolved to re-energize and assert himself as a musician. “Well, I’m trying a lot of new material on this tour and they’re kind of long-form songs—meandering, works in progress. I’m hoping that they’ll eventually find themselves on an album.

So I think that all of that negative view of the state of affairs of the music industry and the demise of the LP and all this—it’s a recent crisis for me but one I feel that I’m getting around. I think that a lot of the new material that I’m working on is inspiring enough to get me to record it and maybe have a new record out next year.”

If the reaction from fans at Lee’s Palace and elsewhere (including cyberspace) throughout this tour is any indication, then Stevens’ community of fans needs and desires him to be a part of their circle.

For all his initial misgivings, his new songs add bold new points to the timeline of his career and he’s right to want to see them through. Though he’s less certain about what the exact future of Asthmatic Kitty will look like, Stevens clearly has a focused idea of what makes it tick. “Unfortunately, it’s very clear that the health and well-being of the label is correlated to my releasing music or not. So I think it’s important that I have a healthier view of my work so I can continue writing and recording. But we have a lot of incredible, incredible artists who are making great music right now and are actually reaching an audience.

Like Shara from My Brightest Diamond has been really successful, working, touring, and collaborating a lot. I would like us, as a label, to be much more unified and more collaborative and more interactive instead of just being disparate artists and bands, working all over the States. It’s already inherent in the way that we run our label.

People show up on other people’s records all the time, and we tour together. I’d like to see more of that and that’s gonna be healthy for us.”✹ Vish Khanna wrote about the improv rock of Montreal's Constellation Records in STN#51.

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LIVE REVIEWS

top: Will Oldham below: Espers

Transfigurations Various Venues, Asheville, NC 8/13-15/2009

The Transfigurations festival celebrated the fifth anniversary of Harvest Records, a small but thriving record store in Asheville, North Carolina. They had every reason to celebrate, as in just half a decade owners Mark Capon and Matt Schnable have assembled one of the finest music stores in the Southeast. It’s the kind of shop where you’d want to own just about everything in it, crammed with the usual indie, jazz and experimental necessities, fortified with a healthy stock of world music and old-time blues and folk. Capon and Schnable have also hosted or booked dozens of shows over the years, and even released a couple of records on the Harvest Recordings label.

Aside from the owners’ devotion to music, the store has been a success in large part due to its location in the weird burg that is Asheville. Tucked in the mountains of western NC, it’s a liberal enclave in a red state region, a small city that attracts old hippies and gutter punks and hosts a state college. The air was clean, the weather fine, the downtown easily walkable, and it was a great place to spend a weekend listening to live music.

The diverse lineup reflected the record store’s catholic tastes, though they were definitely of a specific indie-bred late-twentysomething variety: nouveau lo-fi garage, psych, afropop, electronics, ambient, minimalist rock, and folk music of various stripes. The acts were divided between two venues, with the 500-seat Diana Wortham Theatre housing the more subdued acts, and larger club Grey Eagle throwing the parties.

The opening night served as a sort of warm-up, kicking off with locals Floating Action, who, while fine as far as it goes down at the frat house, stuck out a bit in the ensuing company. Atlanta’s The Coathangers’ more chaotic set livened things up, with lots of high-pitched screaming and thrashing around accentuating their sugar-coated garage pop. They’re better served in a house party than an elevated stage, but with a decent sound

system you could actually make out how funny their lyrics can be. Kurt Vile and his Violators closed out the evening with his assured, verbose take on neo-psychedelic rock, the first taste of an oddly Philadelphia-heavy weekend that found bassist Jesse Turbo and drummer Mike Zeng playing every night of the festival.

The following evening, the absence of no-shows Brightblack Morning Light allowed for a probably-more-appropriateanyway set from Meg Baird, who was already there as a member of Philadelphia’s Espers. She played a few of her bucolic folk tunes alone on acoustic guitar before inviting Turbo to add mournful harmonica accompaniment. Steve Gunn turned in the type of Takoma-esque solo guitar set that by now seems obligatory at a festival, but is always welcome when executed this well. Espers turned in a somewhat creaky set with Turbo and Zeng helping out here, too, but everyone seemed a bit cautious and the band never really fully took off.

It probably didn’t help that most in the audience were obviously waiting for the weekend’s main event, a solo appearance

by Will Oldham, who came across as more casually unguarded and chatty than he’s been in years across the course of his 90minute set. He could have played anything with any level of commitment and the crowd would likely have eaten it up, but he delivered a riveting career-spanning set liberally sprinkled with covers. If he was a bit nervous at first, the performance grew more resonant and intimate as he delved further into his catalog, all the way back to his first album.

The early shows on the final day of the festival were the most subdued, starting with the soothing sounds of local ambient artist Ross Gentry performing as Villages. Gentry’s analog drones and washes cleansed the palate for Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie, who performed most of his new album Wind’s Poem as well as a few older songs. Elverum has built up a loyal cult following, who were well-served by a stripped-down performance you could almost imagine him performing in his bedroom. Acousto-electric duo The Books rounded out the chin-scratching portion of the evening, accompanying pre-recorded backing tracks and films with guitars and singing.

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Jonathan Kane livened things up as he went to town on his drum kit, backing a minimalist rock band that learned from the La Monte Young school of blues. They turned in the loudest set of the weekend, closely rivaled by War on Drugs, who brought day three of Phillyfest to a close as Turbo and Zeng played alongside Adam Granduciel’s rambling Springsteen-meetsSpaceman-3 act. Circulatory System offered their version of world-music-informed Southern pop that still owes a debt to the kitchen-sink savant aesthetic of the Elephant 6 collective from which they sprung.

Akron/Family closed the festival, a fitting choice as they share a sort of anniversary with Harvest, having played an in-store gig there during their first tour. They’ve changed quite a bit since then, losing a member and embracing more fully their inner Deadheads, turning in a 90-minute set consisting of a handful of lengthy jams, including a coda to “Ed Is a Portal” that morphed into a tripped-out “Happy Birthday.” The crowd joined in, making full use of the noisemakers and glowsticks the band handed out before the show, as well as a hand drum that punctuated the remainder of the set. A 2 a.m. curfew came too soon for most, but there was time enough for an amped-up encore of traditional tune (and Dead staple) “I Know You Rider.”

The most unique aspect of the festival had to be the panel discussion involving the heads of some of the more interesting curatorial record labels around today. Dustto-Digital, Mississippi Records, Sublime Frequencies and Twos & Fews all release hidden and forgotten sounds from around the world, with an emphasis on raw folk and indigenous music. Each participant showed clips from their label’s forthcoming DVDs, and a spirited discussion of folk music, ecstatic religious music, copyright laws, distribution, royalties and the importance of folk art within a capitalist culture took place. It was a no-brainer to get all these guys in the same room for an afternoon, and that it happened at a record store’s anniversary party in tiny Asheville, NC instead of label hometowns of Portland or Atlanta, or any of the other usual cosmopolitan meeting points, seemed to underscore the spirit of the labels, and the festival itself.

Eric Dawson

lydia see / lydiasee.com

Caught in the act, significant concerts from around the globe.

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top: Janacek Philharmonic in Ostrava below: Sklo

Ostrava Days New Music Festival

Andrew Choate

Ostrava, Czech Republic 8/21-30/2009 Ostrava is a former coal-mining town in the Czech Republic in the process of reinventing itself after its Vitkovice factory— one of the largest industrial complexes in all of Europe—closed in 1998. The Ostrava Days New Music Festival, which takes place every two years and occurred for the fifth

time in 2009, is certainly one of the brightest and most stimulating elements of this reinvention. The festival lasted for nine days and over one hundred compositions were performed.

Fittingly, the opening concert was held in the former Vitkovice factory. Eight compositions by Phill Niblock were accompanied by dual projections of his films, totaling almost five hours of music. An incredible humming roar was audible immediately upon entering the factory, combined with the pervasive smell of iron, steel and heavy machinery gathering dust. Niblock has designed his music to be heard at loud volumes—the better to experience the pulses and beats created by overlapping harmonics—and

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hearing his music in such an enormous space only contributed to the effect of gargantuan physicality. Because most of the pieces involved the combination of recorded samples with live instrumental accompaniment, it was “Tow by Tom,” a piece for two orchestras, that stood out. The swirl of acoustic instruments sounded lush in contrast. But it wasn’t a mellow lushness; it was more threatening, the way a jungle’s teeming vegetation suggests something ominous lurking nearby.

The second day was a marathon of 13 electronic music acts performing in the city’s large contemporary art gallery; it lasted from two in the afternoon until midnight.

Local band Sklo made an impression before

they’d even played a note. Dozens of objects were arranged on the table in front of the performers: an erector set with a rock at the top, pipes, bowls, springs, hoses, etc. Using found objects rescued from the trash, their improvisation drew from the energy and entropy of quotidian materials amplified through effects processors, mixers and a scraped guitar. All three performers were extremely active while playing, moving briskly from Tuvan throat distortion to reverbed spring-shaking and an electrified pepper grinder.

Sklo was followed by a surround-sound electro-acoustic composition by Michal Rataj called “Machine—Hand—Mind— Memory.” Using a hacked Wii controller, Rataj pushed and pulled huge washes of crisp noise-bursts across the field of sound.

These INA-GRM-like spectral breakdowns were layered with samples of graphite writing on wood. Moments of quiet crackling that could have been either graphite or electronics captured the complexity of relations between memories of handwriting on desks and the new kinds of handwriting that technology makes possible. The piece’s intelligent conception and the aesthetic pleasure it gave bespeak volumes about the potential of this 34-year-old composer.

The biggest discovery I made during the festival was Czech violinist Hana Kotkova, during Wolfgang Rihm’s “Gesungen Zeit.”

Her sound was instantly mesmerizing; simultaneously I felt as though I had never heard a violin before, and yet I suddenly understood the instrument’s entire history through her playing. Her tone had a warmth that stood out in relief against the chamber orchestra surrounding her. This play between the violin and the ensemble is also part of the composition, but even in the second movement, when lines are tangled and reflected, Kotkova’s violin was distinct and radiant. She could make the sound huge and galloping or tiny and sharp, as light as a spider itching its leg. It was so exquisite that the music seemed to be even beyond beauty: primal, galactic, entrancing.

When I walked into the hall before the performance by the Amadinda Percussion Group, I was surrounded by percussion instruments. It was like standing in the photograph inside the gatefold of Roscoe Mitchell’s The Maze record… times five.

Oil drums, carved Polynesian log drums, hanging carpets, beercan marimbas—a seemingly infinite array of cymbals and percussive objects. The program for their concert was gleefully ambitious: a first set of two original compositions, a second set of classics by Cage (Imaginary Landscape Nos. 2 and 3; Third Construction) and Ligeti (Síppal, dobbel, nádiheged_vel), and a third set comprising a 72-minute John Cage piece written for this ensemble. The first piece they played set the tone for the night.

Aurél Holló and Zoltán Váczi’s “Traditions— Part One/The Winning Number—beFORe JOHN7” is from a series they’ve written devoted to connecting traditional percussion cultures to prominent twentieth-century movements in music. The members of the quartet played instruments arranged on a mobile metal stand while they spun whistling, whirring tubes overhead and broke out into rhythmic vocalic bursts. Delicate chopsticks on spinning bicycle spokes

marked tempo variations. The composition specifies that the performers should be as close to one another as possible while they play in order for them to share each other’s instruments, a common practice in traditional percussion music made visually alive when they ended the piece by rolling the stand offstage while whistling and still banging away, creating a slow fadeout.

Amadinda’s final set began with a heartfelt dedication to the recently passed Merce Cunningham and a brief description by Zoltán Rácz of the week he spent staying with Cage and Cunningham in 1991 during which Cage wrote “Four4” for this quartet. The hall was completely dark except for four firefly-sized lights, one for each percussionist. This was Cage’s final percussion composition, and while it doesn’t specify which instruments to use, it does require two of the performers to choose five, and two to choose four: with such a vast assortment of instruments for the players to select from, the results were memorably unusual. The enormous carved black Tibetan singing bowl alone had such profound resonance that the entire hall seemed to undulate to its waves of overtones. This transcendent set left me so completely ensorcelled that an usher had to tap me on the shoulder thirty minutes after it ended in order to rouse me.

The festival is the culmination of a threeweek residency wherein students come from around the world to attend workshops with composers and conductors.

Performances of these students’ works are a main component of the festival, and many were extraordinarily refined. Irishman Donal Sarsfield’s “Repeat That, Repeat,” for large choir, possessed a perfect combination of playfulness and investigative intelligence. The world premiere of Canadian Cassandra Miller’s “A Large House,” for string orchestra, was an incredible aural experience: hundreds of strings rocking back and forth like waves across the hall for over twenty minutes. Conductor Peter Rundel did an outstanding job leading the Janácek Philharmonic through this dense, hypnotic piece.

The final concert of the festival featured Roland Kluttig conducting the Philharmonic in Edgard Varèse’s Amériques. Rightly, the percussionists were highlighted by being placed on the stage above and behind the orchestra. A climactic, boisterous piece in its own right, Amériques made for a perfect finale for this bold, discerning festival.

At the very end, when it seemed like the hall was about to fall down out of sheer pummeled exhaustion from the heavy percussive emphasis, the orchestra still had to be pushed harder and further and louder to reach the frenzy that marks the conclusion of this composition. Kluttig clenched the conductor’s baton in his fists and in a single gesture appeared to be both pulling the sword from the stone and committing harakiri; the orchestra responded with a blast that literally shook the audience out of its seats. It was an absolutely stunning, exhilarating climax. By embracing such a visionary festival, the city of Ostrava is demonstrating that investing in cultural risk and imagination reaps rewards that far outshine more conventional cultural initiatives.

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Mulhouse, France 8/13-29/2009

The festival formerly known as Jazz à Mulhouse has evolved from a hard-core free-jazz celebration into Festival Météo, an entity that’s heading somewhere that can’t simply be signposted as jazz. The series of small-scale free concerts in the Chapelle Saint-Jean continued as before. This year, the focus was on stringed instruments: Liu Fang’s finely phrased Chinese traditional tunes on pipa and guzheng, for example, or—rather stretching definitions—Pascal Battus’s pick-up mics, assorted electronics and objects. Dutch lutenist Josef van Wissem offered something approaching elevated elevator music.

A converted warehouse was the venue for the major innovation of this year’s festival: a late-afternoon program with an electronic focus. Berlin-based Australian Clare Cooper combined openness to the discreet electronic offerings of JeanPhilippe Gross with precisely articulated gestures on the strings and body of her guzheng. She brought Gross’s teasingly long fade to an abrupt (and witty) percussive conclusion. Earlier, the French trio of David Chiesa (bass), Jean-Léon Pallandre (field recordings, etc.) and Marc Pichelin (analog synthesizer) had led us on an overlong ramble. It included birdsong; insofar as I could understand them, the ducks appeared to be discussing early Zorn. Alto saxophonist Marc Baron’s otherwise austere and controlled performance—the long pauses outweighing the playing of delicately blown sustained notes—was marred by a five-minute interpolation of recorded bird-song. Like Seymour Wright, he invites reflection on the phenomenon of sound and its production.

Yannis Kyriakides’ Wordless—interviews with the words cut out and other bodily sounds retained—was curiously absorbing.

A highlight of this stream of the festival was offered by sound artist Francisco Lopez.

I happily surrendered (helped by the blindfold that was provided) to a seamless, symphonic flow of sounds—from gentle wind and (fully integrated) birdsong to raging storm. Somehow, as if it had activated a deep center of sensation and imagination, this piece has repeatedly resurfaced in my memory. The duo Inscape (the multitalented Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric La Casa) processed live sounds relayed from an adjacent garage. But live material can be unpredictable: at one point, the entire room jumped at a burst of explosively loud noise.

A hammer had fallen on a microphone, we were later told. An accident?

What of the regular evening concerts, the heart of the festival? The unusual trio of Fred van Hove on piano (and accordion) with two double basses, Barry Guy and Bruno Chevillon, was the main act on opening night. Van Hove swirled and pooled his notes with a light touch. The sometimes flamboyant Chevillon tended to lay down discreet patterns, over or alongside which Guy expressed himself more freely. This was, overall, an airy and 46 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

happily communicative performance, but with a tantalizing glimpse of a darker mode: the deep wheezing of the accordion resonating wonderfully with bowed, lower-register bass.

Vocalist Catherine Jauniaux can flick from stammering frustration to a scream, or from the seductive to the psychotic, in an instant. Hovering, almost dancing, behind his tableful of turntables and electronics, eRikm displayed extraordinarily speedy reflexes and inventiveness, matching and even igniting Jauniaux’s. Das Kapital (Daniel Erdmann (sax), Hasse Poulsen (g) and Edward Perraud (perc.)), accompanying a quirky movie, were less gripping than expected. Phall Fatale also played well within their capacities. Two wellcontrasted, hiphop-rooted female voices (Joy Frempong and Joana Aderi), Fredy Studer’s energetic but somewhat mechanical drumming, John Edwards and Daniel Sailer applying color on double bass, some surprising material (such as a recast “Desolation Row”): everyone was having a good time, but there was no revelation. If there had been a prize for most interesting hair arrangement, the fantastic structure on Frempong’’s head—the perfect snug space for a hedgehog to hibernate in—would only have been rivalled by Peter Brötzmann’’s magnificent moustache.

Brötzmann’s trio was focused on the leader: Marino Pliakas on electric bass and drummer Michael Wertmüller were busy painting the lines on the runway; he was the plane taking off. There were ferociously intense and impressive moments on both saxophone and clarinet, but at times there was a feeling that almost exactly these moments had been heard in other concerts of recent years. Being generally deaf to the delights of guitar, I have little to say about Fred Frith’s performances. His multiphased solo set interested me less than his duo with percussionist Fritz Hauser, who showed that subtle imagination can underlie precision engineering. The guitarist’s trio with Daniella Cativelli (laptop, sampler) and Stevie Wishart (hurdy-gurdy) was sporadically interesting. I wasn’t especially tuned in to American singer and guitarist Carla Bozulich’s duo with cellist Francesco Guerri that night, but could see that, pulling in elements from right across the spectrum of music, these two were creating a passionately articulated language of their own.

The final concert was the Parker/Edwards/Corsano trio. Evan Parker continues to be constructively aware, and appreciative, of his fellow musicians. His own winding, thoughtful lines on tenor were worked into the group texture; when Edwards, who was in great form (his freedom and energy retaining some of the rhythmic ease of 1950s walking bass), hit an extrafertile patch, he was given all the time he needed. Corsano impresses in high-energy contexts, but he can also excite with the sheer musicality and exactness with which he shapes quieter sounds: a stick dragged towards the rim, surfaces stroked, ringing metal bowls. The Mulhouse festival has changed its name and its direction under organizer Adrien Chiquet, but the send-off evoked some of the classic closing nights of earlier years. Barra Ó Séaghdha

left: Wayne Shorter below: Gerald Wilson and big band

Detroit International Jazz Festival Detroit, MI 9/4-9/2009

Richard Cohen

Festival Météo à Mulhouse

Somehow, I managed to sit near the only person who wasn’t enjoying himself at the Detroit Jazz Festival this year. It happened this way: Sunday night, in a below-ground concert bowl near the Detroit River, in the thick of a four-day, 30th anniversary jazz blowout, I was sitting in a green folding chair I had dragged near the stage. About 50 yards away, the Wayne Shorter quartet was tearing up the air with wave after wave of inspired improvisation. Such is the democratic, go-where-you-want vibe of the largest free jazz festival in the world.

The glass cylinders of the Renaissance Center towered above, topped by the logo of recently bankrupt General Motors.

Jazz and Detroit have been tight for a long time. Both have been told they face a shaky future. Maybe so, but if this festival is any indication, jazz in Detroit looks pretty solid for a while.

The crowd grew silent as Shorter sent blue flames of melody into the dark. When the tinder caught, sheets of burning beauty lit up the bowl, spilling onto surrounding Hart Plaza. The communion on stage was so private and raw I felt sheepish about staring. It was pianist Danilo Perez’s first night with the group after three months’ layoff for an Achilles tendon injury. He was bursting with ideas and trading obscenely wide grins with bassist John Patitucci.

More often than not, Perez would roll out a melodic or rhythmic ingot and the others would work away at it in a shower of sparks.

But back to the unhappy man. He stood near me, looking at the stage, alternately

standing on tiptoes and turning away, grumbling. Wayne Shorter, at 76, had moved 30 years ahead of him. “Juju!” he yelled at the top of his voice. He was pissing on the sun. The music continued, without letup, for 80-plus minutes. When the quartet was finished, my brain was red with windburn. The ovation was thunderous.

“You just witnessed magic,” guest host Christian McBride told the audience as he ushered the group from the bandstand.

Shorter’s set was the second punch of an emotional day at the festival. Hours before, on the same stage, 92-year-old bandleader Gerald Wilson premiered a suite he composed in honor of the city and the festival, “Detroit.” The disparity between Detroit’s manifold woes and Wilson’s dynamic, grand sonic picture might have tempted a cynical smirk somewhere in that bowl, but I didn’t see one. Days before, Wilson put his all-star big band, many of whom had their own festival gigs, through eight hours of grueling rehearsal. Sunday afternoon, when the wide harmonies of “Detroit” fanned out into the riverfront plaza, Wilson positioned himself in front of the stage, arms high, long white hair stirring in the breeze. “Detroit is beautiful!” he shouted over the music. “Detroit is magnificent!”

Four years ago, Detroit’s jazz festival was in total disarray after the Ford Motor Co. pulled its sponsorship. Wilson dedicated one movement of his new suite to Gretchen Carhartt Valade, heiress to the Carhartt clothing fortune. Valade bailed out the festival with a quarter million dollar donation in 2005 and set up a $10 million endowment the next year. In an unheardof display of class, she declined naming the festival after Carhartt, or her indie jazz label, Mack Avenue Records. Since then, the Detroit International Jazz Festival has grown and deepened into an astonishing banquet of music, a jewel in a city that’s literally fighting reversion to wilderness.

For the festival opener Friday, a gener-

ous set from 91-year-old piano veteran Hank Jones was followed by an almostcomplete Return to Forever reunion with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. Clarke almost stole the show from Corea by dint of sheer mastery and showmanship. As usual, Corea seemed to surprise himself with the challenging detours he picked, but always made it fun. At one point, he invited the audience to “la-la” the answering half of an obsessive piano phrase, and everybody ate it up.

A family theme ran through the entire weekend: the Clayton Brothers, Dave Brubeck and sons, Larry and Julian Coryell, the Heath Brothers, Pete and Juan Escovedo, and Brian Auger and his family all performed in various combinations. Brubeck was in superb form, stretching out on his trademark classical maneuvers and digging hard in the grooves. Even better than the music was the sight of Brubeck, 89, beaming as he watched his sons perform. In between, there were way too many events to catch—three bands featuring great Detroit pianist Geri Allen; Louis Hayes and his Cannonball Tribute Band; a “Bottoms Up” bass blowout with Rodney Whitaker, John Clayton and Christian McBride; Whitaker’s tribute to Donald Byrd’s A New Perspective with trumpeter Sean Jones. Stefon Harris and Christian McBride each brought their combos. Young artists and student groups filled any remaining gaps on the four stages. The jazz cup threatened to run over and inundate the Great Lakes.

Friday night, I watched the moon rise over Bennie Maupin’s head as he fussed with that crazy floor stand for his bass clarinet, setting up for his “Dolphyana” tribute to Eric Dolphy. Soon I was sitting next to the Detroit River, watch ore boats go by and hearing “Out to Lunch” performed by a live sextet. A constellation of spiky tones on vibes and flute substituted for smogobscured stars, and I thought life couldn’t get any better. Larry Cosentino

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top: Butch Morris conducting the Nublu Orchestra below, left: Peter Evans below, right: George Lewis

Jazz em Agosto

Joaquim Mendes / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Lisbon, Portugal 8/1-9/2009

Of the many jazz festivals I’ve had the pleasure of attending over the years, none is more civilized as Jazz em Agosto, the annual program sponsored by Portugal’s spectacular Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Meticulously programmed by Rui Neves, the event doesn’t force attendees to make choices between concerts since nothing overlaps, and rather than all-day line-ups that tire the ears and exhaust the mind, most days feature only one or two performances, giving each the proper scale and space.

Additionally, Neves has enough freedom that he doesn’t need to pick from the finite number of acts that happen to be on tour during early August. That situation also allows him to program using loose themes, and the 2009 installment of the festival was no exception. This year there was a marked emphasis on trumpet (and cornet) vanguardists, a presence that neatly tied into the other dominant theme—music from America. With European festivals increasingly drawing from their growing pool of talent, American acts aren’t quite as ubiquitous as they once were,

and the US artists that do turn up tend to represent the high-profile New York postbop establishment. Neves digs far deeper than most of his European counterparts to expose the sort of daring and bold American artists who rarely achieve any kind of mainstream attention abroad, let alone at home.

The festival kicked off on August 1 with a set billed as George Lewis Sequel, an international cast that had not performed since 2004. Laptop computers were nearly as prevalent as conventional instruments, and the new piece erased lines between artificial and organic, acoustic and electric anyway. Considering that the ensemble had eight members—including electric guitarists Jeff Parker and Ulrich Müller and turntablist DJ Mutamassik—I was a little surprised how gentle their collective output was, but the ever-shifting soundscapes, sporadic interactive phrases, and veritable library of colors were fascinating if a little drifty. The leader’s trademark humor was in effect; from a previous appearance at the festival he know that the amphitheater was in the nearby airport’s flight path, so he had samples of flying jets that he triggered each time a plane passed over.

The following day Mutamassik joined her partner, the guitarist Morgan Craft, for a set by their project Rough Americana,

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where electric guitar noise collided with a kaleidoscopic range of turntable cut-ups and disjunctions. But there was an exaggeratedly performative element to the set, with members running around the small theater and repeating athletic gestures on stage that went straight over my head. The event’s first weekend closed with a set by Lawrence “Butch” Morris, doing a conduction with New York’s Nublu Orchestra. Although he had a fine line-up at his disposal—including drummer Kenny Wollesen, clarinetist Doug Wieselman, sampler whiz J.A. Deane, trumpeter Fabio Morgera, and San Francisco punk-jazz guitarist Ava Mendoza—Morris didn’t give them much to work with, and ultimately it felt a bit like a jam band, reusing and repurposing a handful of rhythmic ideas that eventually made them seem like they were running in place.

Another thing that makes Jazz em Agosto so civilized is that it takes a break for three days after its opening weekend, so on the following Thursday Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy resumed things and kicked off the trumpet extravaganza. The band stretched out on the repertoire from its 2009 album Spirit Moves, and while another trumpet legend—Lester Bowie—may have been the main inspiration for this combo, Douglas and crew brought a less frenetic, less extroverted

elegance to its performance, focusing on patient lyricism and rippling harmony. The closing set boasted two brass titans, when Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra performed with Bill Dixon, but the epic set-length piece failed to reach its potential.

Much of the material was drawn from the group’s album with Dixon, but Mazurek expanded it with new, like-minded themes.

Although there was some clutter due to twin basses and no less than four percussionists, the band played very well, and there were excellent solos from flutist Nicole Mitchell, tenor saxophonist Matt Bauder, trombonist Jeb Bishop, guitarist Jeff Parker, vibist Jason Adasiewicz, and Mazurek himself. While there’s no denying Dixon’s brilliance as a composer, sound sculptor and conceptualist, I was disappointed by his reliance here on digital effects, which consistently made his puckered blurts and tart smears sound like whale cries. His improvisations functioned fine as overlays, but they never sounded deeply linked to what was churning beneath him.

To these ears the best trumpet playing of the festival came courtesy of Peter Evans, who turned in both a stellar solo set and poised, dynamic performance with his quartet. Two astonishing solo discs for Evan Parker’s psi label have dramatically established the trumpeter’s mad chops, protean power, and uncontained imagination, and the numerous solo sets I’ve caught by him have only reinforced my appreciation of his insane talents. But for his solo set in Lisbon, which masterfully used feedback and amplification, Evans revealed a focused intensity that brilliantly streamlined his usual barrage of ideas with a refined, electric cogency. The fact that he’s only 27 makes it all the more stunning, as he’s still ascending and strengthening.

If his outdoor quartet concert the following evening wasn’t quite as radical, it was nonetheless packed with exquisite detail, nonchalant technique, and a vibrant efficiency in bringing the trumpeter’s elaborate compositions to life. Supported by drummer Kevin Shea (one of his cohorts in the guerilla freebop band Mostly Other People Do the Killing), bassist Tom Blancarte, and the superb Colombian pianist Ricardo Gallo (who’s replaced guitarist Brandon Seabrook as the band’s fourth member), the quartet made a quantum leap from the music captured on its first album. The original tunes meticulously rip apart post-bop aesthetics into stacked and scattered episodes that collide and coalesce while in constant motion. The band played these tunes with stunning grace, belying both their complexity and clashing mechanisms.

The festival also included stunning sets by Buffalo Collision (the quartet of Tim Berne, Ethan Iverson, Hank Roberts, and David King) and the brilliant French reed quartet Propagations (Marc Baron, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Bertrand Denzler, and Stéphane Rives), who breathed and blew improvised sound as a unit. About the only performance that left me cold was the duet by flutist Matthias Ziegler and vocalist Franziska Baumann (whose “sensorlab” glove seemed to arbitrarily translate dramatic arm gestures into abstract sound). That’s a pretty remarkable batting average, but that’s par for the course at Jazz em Agosto. Peter Margasak WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 49

BOOK REVIEWS Turning up the volumes: Looks at books, zines and other printed matters.

Bob Ostertag

Creative Life: Music, Politics, People and Machines Bob Ostertag

Krystof Seraphin

University of Illinois Press

Music and politics get top billing in Bob Ostertag’s new volume of essays, a collection which works as an interestingly roundabout autobiography. Ostertag, a key figure in the early Downtown scene and an avid experimenter in electronics, has spent about as much of his adult life as a political activist and journalist as he has making music. And indeed, he might well consider the division between activism and music-making a false

distinction. A dozen pages into his compelling (if uneven) book, he writes: Insurgent politics is necessarily experimental, unruly, and disruptive.... It always centers on struggle. This is so close to my artistic aesthetic that in this light it is hard for me to even discern the line demarcating art and politics at all. For all of my work is in some sense about struggling with the limits of the social and physical world: testing, examining, expanding, breaking, and restructuring.

This perspective is crucial to approaching Ostertag’s music as well as his book. His politics are both on his sleeve and in your face. Like Keith Haring, the iconographer of queer politics, art and worldview aren’t even as divisible as two sides of the same

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coin. Ostertag has worked with John Zorn, Fred Frith and the Kronos Quartet, and has also been involved in Central American and gay rights struggles. And has written intelligently about both. He lays out that personal landscape in the introductory essay of the book, 23 pages that alone are worth half of the $20 cover price. It’s his politicized mindset that allows him to consider Anthony Braxton’s music in terms of race and to juxtapose it against John Cage’s privileged white upbringing, to quote Frederick Douglass in the defense, and to do so convincingly.

Confrontational politics and confrontational music aren’t to everyone’s taste, but Ostertag isn’t trying to convince. He is simply, at least within these pages, laying out his reasons and methods for doing what he does.

The introductory essay is followed by a

section on revolutionary movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua, mostly written for leftist magazines in the 1990s. Here Ostertag may lose some readers who think politics is not a subject to be discussed, or at least has no place in art. That would be a shame, not just because he’s an articulate writer on liberation struggles, but because he uses it to frame his artistic work. An objection-free reading could treat the arguments as if he were saying he wrote a piano sonata after his mother died, or that a concerto was inspired by a trip to Italy: You don’t have to have known the composer’s mother, or agree that Italy is beautiful, to appreciate elaboration on the creative process.

The political midsection of the book also includes a journal from touring the Balkans in 2000, during which Ostertag was performing (or attempting to, at least) his Yugoslavia Suite. The diary format works well here, shifting the focus from pedagogue to observer.

The final piece of the trifecta concerns queer politics, and includes a fascinating profile of the reclusive Texas visual artist Jim Magee, followed by Ostertag’s thoughts about his own identity politics and some hilarious musings about his Panty Christ project with Otomo Yoshihide and Justin Bond (better known in his cross-dressing role in the hugely popular drag cabaret act Kiki & Herb). From Nicaragua and Yugoslavia to El Paso and homosexuality, the narrative tones change dramatically, making the book feel disjointed enough that it’s not necessarily a cover-to-cover read.

Much of the final chapter (primarily concerning the machines in the title) is also repurposed from previous publications, but it is here that the book strikes into the present day. He covers his own history in building electronic instruments and using computers as compositional tools, and his recent live-electronics work with animator Pierre Hébert. He considers the divisions between electronics and the body in musicmaking, the shortcomings of computer music and the world of digital distribution.

He argues that the only task left for record labels is to try to stop people from listening to music without paying a “listening tax” to the parent corporations. (Nota bene: Ostertag has put all of his recordings up for free download on his website.) With the narrative having moved at last to the 21st century, this becomes the most compelling part of the book (and covers the other half of the cover price, making the middle part the gravy). And while certainly arguments could be made against his claims (he curiously skirts past the idea of paid downloads, for example, and doesn’t distinguish between potential benefits for more and less established artists), he is at all times an intelligent and insightful writer. And one not unafraid to stir controversy; indeed, Ostertag clearly revels in it. Kurt Gottschalk

Terry Riley's In C Robert Carl Oxford University Press

Terry Riley’s landmark In C is a composition of extraordinary simplicity. The 1968 Columbia recording included the whole score as a portion of its fold-out jacket, and composer Robert Carl’s study of the work’s gene-

sis, form, performance history, reception, and legacy repeats the favor. It’s there on page two, in all its brief genius, 53 short motifs to be played by each performer, all in C major with a few f sharps and a couple of b flats thrown in at dramatic junctures (in fact, they are the dramatic junctures), with each motif to be repeated according to the individual performer’s choice, all of it played against a pulsing C drone originally achieved with the top two Cs on a piano hit incessantly.

That very brevity (in contrast to the 43 minutes that first recording actually lasted) makes In C an unlikely subject for Oxford’s series “Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure and Interpretation”: previous titles in the series are devoted to works by Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler and their ilk. But as Carl argues so convincingly, In C is a gamechanger. He goes so far as to call it the “Sacre of minimalism,” comparing its impact to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring nearly a halfcentury before. While that might be a bit hyperbolic (I don’t recall minimalism causing bourgeois riots except for the odd rush for Phillip Glass tickets), In C struck at the heart of the concert music establishment and at the way in which composition was both practiced and institutionalized. And not only in the concert halls devoted to 19th-century repertoire: it also deviated from patterns established by musicians as radical in their own way as Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen.

Carl has done a fine job of tracing the trajectory of Terry Riley’s career, from his work with LaMonte Young and an improvisational trio formed with Pauline Oliveros and Loren Rush at UC Berkeley in 1958 to earning a living as a ragtime pianist in a singalong bar around the same time. There’s detailed analysis of Riley’s early works, and Carl delineates the multiple influences of the classical tradition (particularly in its American tonal form, e.g., Aaron Copland), jazz (there’s a predecessor to In C based on “Autumn Leaves” and another dedicated to Sonny Rollins), Indian music, electronic technology and psychedelic drugs. There’s a particularly vivid image of Riley working with tape loops that extended out his window to pass around wine bottles in the garden.

As entertaining as this sometimes is, Carl may be at his best in his extensive documentation of performances, including interviews with a host of participants in the Columbia recording (including producer David Behrman and musicians Stuart Dempster and David Rosenboom), and in his detailed analysis of the way the modules behave and interact in performance. It’s a brilliant work that fuses elements of traditional modality, improvisation and chance within a strikingly resilient structure that manages to retain its distinct contours.

Carl’s account of the work is supplemented by a description of the 14 different recordings of In C that have appeared in the 41 years since Riley’s original Columbia release appeared, beginning with Walter Boudreau’s 1970 version, by a group that resembled a jazz big band, and including Riley’s own further explorations: a 25thanniversary recording from San Francisco with a larger ensemble than the original and lasting some 73 minutes; and an even longer Russian version by the Terry Riley Repetitition (sic) Orchestra that has sleighbells taking over the original piano part. The

work has assumed myriad forms, including percussion, piano and electric guitar-dominated versions, as well as transformations by the Shanghai Film Orchestra playing traditional Asian instruments, Acid Mothers Temple, and a microtonal music ensemble.

Each attests to the work’s flexibility, its durability, and its on-going ability to embrace, develop and extend radical music-making and its evidently special relationship to consciousness. As Carl ultimately argues, Riley’s In C is a work that bridges and transforms differences. Stuart Broomer

From CBGB to the Roadhouse: Music Venues Through the Years Tim Burrows Marion Boyarss

Tim Burrows makes a statement towards the end of this tome that will resonate with any avid concert-goer: “Music venues by their very nature are mere sites for live music to be played in... They are always secondary to the music itself, their fate dictated by the performances that take place within their walls.

However... the best venues go a long way towards shaping the artists they house.”

The author has used this notion to present an overview of music venues both famous and obscure, large and small, in a variety of far-flung cities and figuring prominently in several genres of music. But Burrows (who is far too young to have attended concerts at many of the places he describes) could have made better choices in framing his narrative.

Lacking any consistent ordering principle— chronological, geographical, stylistic—the book lurches from scene to scene, city to city, era to era, so jarringly as to make gaining a sense of any larger context impossible.

Burrows is a British journalist, and venues in the UK get the most thorough treatment. In fact, it might have made for a better book if he’d focused solely on venues in his native country, of which there seem to be many colorful examples.

That’s not to say that there isn’t gold here.

Live concerts engender vivid memories and the book is full of them: rich descriptions of British reggae clubs, the club scene around Manchester’s Hacienda, and the New York City punk milieu. But once he steps outside his cultural and geographic comfort zone, Burrows retreats into the shell of the haughty music journalist (criticisms of Iron Maiden and the Grateful Dead are unnecessary and predictable). To stick only to the short shrift given to New York: Burrows barely mentions the Village Vanguard, a club that incidentally contradicts his statement that all music venues eventually change decor and/or programming. Madison Square Garden, one of the better large arenas in which to see live music, gets only a single mention. And John Zorn’s artist-curated The Stone, one of New York’s more interesting contemporary venues both in terms of programming and business model, is completely absent. Readers from other cities probably will have their own complaints. Venues may be “secondary to the music itself” but ultimately they deserve better than this scattershot, untidily written book. Andrey Henkin

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John Abercrombie

CD / DVD / LP / DL The season’s key releases and reissues from the world of creative music ...

John Abercrombie Wait Till You See Her ECM CD

John Surman

Brewster's Rooster ECM CD

Chris Tribble

Among the most versatile of improvising guitarists, John Abercrombie manages to sound distinctly like himself whether he is playing raucous electric music or quietly deconstructing a knotted harmonic structure. He also has a knack for finding perfect musical collaborators like longtime duet partner Ralph Towner, organist Dan Wall and, currently, polymathic violinist Mark Feldman. Joined by drummer Joey Baron and bassist Thomas Morgan, Abercrombie and Feldman sound as complementary as an old married couple, finishing phrases for one another and amplifying each other’s thoughts. Following a dark-hued bass intro, “Chic of Araby” is an ideal example of their interaction, their harmonized lead line occasionally following different paths back to the original route. At 4:20, Feldman peels off into his most aggressive playing on the recording, while Abercrombie shadows him on heavily processed guitar.

Elsewhere, the mood is much more subdued; “Sad Song” is so achingly slow and bare-bones, for example, that it threatens to fall apart. “I’ve Overlooked Before” also makes every note count while the quartet subtly builds intensity. Morgan is a new addition to the quartet, replacing the estimable Marc Johnson, and his taut, tension-filled lines are a great fit.

Abercrombie is also present on Brewster's Rooster, saxophonist John Surman’s 18th recording for ECM; bassist Drew Gress and drummer Jack DeJohnette fill out the quartet.

The guitarist employs his full arsenal here, adding spectral tones behind Surman’s grainy baritone on a slow and precise version of “Chelsea Bridge,” a burning electric hum on the title track, and spiraling, dancing lines on the ironically named “No Finesse.” Surman also has enormous versatility, of course: this recording finds him playing things relatively straight, save for a free section at the end of the skittery “Haywain” and a rollicking duet with DeJohnette on the second half of “Kickback.” He switches to soprano on the ballad “Slanted Sky” and the mid-tempo 52 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

“Counter Measures.” While his tone on the instrument is as singular as his baritone voice, it’s not as compelling—as pinched and nasal as the other is expressive and bottomless. While this quartet is a one-time combination, it sounds like it was meant to be, with DeJohnette at his wide-ranging and engaged best, and Gress providing superb restraint when needed, but also tremendous propulsion on the slithery “Hilltop Dancer.”

James Hale

Rodrigo Amado Kent Kessler Paal Nilssen-Love The Abstract Truth

Clean Feed / European Echoes CD

Luis Lopes Adam Lane Igal Foni What Is When Clean Feed CD

Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado has been on a tear lately, and The Abstract Truth is a scorcher which finds the increasingly distinctive player in powerful company. It’s a set characterized not so much by mere displays of power or bravado as by intensity and commitment. As forceful as these players are, there’s always space and texture. Amado himself often sets the tone in this regard, his tenor shifting seamlessly from abstraction to line just as bassist Kent Kessler moves from robust arco (listen to him sizzle in the opening minutes of “The Kiss”) to quicksilver pizz. They lock in marvelously right from the opening “Intro/ The Red Tower,” bouncing from idea to idea like pinballs before arriving at a slow swagger. They’ve got similar range in terms of rhythmic approach too, something that’s all over “Clouds and Shadows,” where delicate plucks, clanging cymbals, and all kinds of pulse information weave together around Amado’s coiling lines. And it extends, too, to the emotional range, as when the slightly dour beginning to “Human Condition” erupts into exultation, or when Amado changes things up at the end of “The Kiss,” with memorably reflective, almost shy upper-register work. All in all, this release is a model of free tenor trio play, a rousing and joyous study on the interplay between energies and restraint.

Portuguese guitarist Luis Lopes came to some listeners’ attention

on last year’s Humanization Quartet release. With a highly quirky style— small squiggly lines, elastic phrasing beyond or behind bar lines, and an occasional mischievous noisiness—he struck me right away as an original.

This powerful trio date confirms that and then some. He’s got a Blood Ulmer thing happening in a big way, specifically the Blood Ulmer of Revealing, as he cuts against the fertile counterlines of bassist Adam Lane and drummer Igal Foni.

But he remains very much his own man, and I love his idiosyncrasies, especially his weird habit of doing little rubbery spasms, like his guitar is spring-loaded. I hear more attention to dynamics on this release, as on the twitchy “Evolution Motive” and the rousing “Spontaneous Combustion.” There’s also considerable sonic range, as when Foni and Lopes trade instruments on the brief, computerysounding hiccup “Eufoni” before the trio roars into the distorted majesty of “The Siege.” More of this with tiny noises from tiny toys on “Street Clown Girl,” which lurches forward, as Lopes moves from delicate picktaps near the pickups to spidery lateral movements. There’s also some serious soulfulness, and I attribute a lot of this to Lane, whose playing on “Melodic 8” recalls the great Fred Hopkins, and who is key to the resolute ballad “Cerejeiras,” where the dark clouds from his distinctive and exquisitely controlled arco set the table wonderfully. Foni is fantastic, varying timbre as often as he does tempo, a trait that works well with Lopes, whose furtive gestures sometimes avoid pulse; elsewhere, as on the exultant reading of Lane’s “ChiChi Rides the Tiger,” the drummer digs in energetically. Jason Bivins

Oren Ambarchi Christian Fennesz Pimmon Peter Rehberg Keith Rowe Afternoon Tea Black Truffle CD

In 2000, in his role as co-curator of the What Is Music? Festival, Oren Ambarchi brought Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg, and Pimmon to Sydney. The five musicians made the most of their time together by recording this studio session, which was originally released on the Ritornell label. The recording has been

long out of print, so it is great that Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label has dug up the original tapes and augmented the two previously released improvisations with additional concert and studio material. The various members would go on to record together in various guises (most notably Rowe, Ambarchi, and Fennesz’s collaboration with Toshimaru Nakamura as Four Gentlemen of the Guitar), but this early meeting has the relaxed feel of five musicians exploring the overlaps between their various strategies.

The five build coursing, active layers of laptop crackle and glitch; hanging resonances of treated guitar harmonics, overtones, and string mangling; cool digital tones; and warm analog hum. The long studio pieces float along like clouds, with constantly morphing timbres and densities. The two live pieces have a more open approach, individual voices playing off each other more identifiably. If the pieces seem at times a bit tentative, that is a natural result of this nascent encounter. Ambarchi has already reissued two of his early solo records on Black Truffle, and this one is a worthy addition to his label. Michael Rosenstein

Martin Archer In Stereo Gravity Discus CDx2

Julie Tippetts & Martin Archer Ghosts of Gold Discus CD

In the era of the demise of albums, it takes courage for Martin Archer to put out an exercise in one of its most archaic permutations: the sprawling studio double-album. He has done so with In Stereo Gravity, and his courage doesn’t end there: sticking an interlude with gloomy King Crimson mellotron into the avant-garde odyssey “A Daredevil in the Forest,” or essaying a brawny baritone-sax take on the Jimmy Giuffre classic “In the Mornings Out There” is the sign of an artist who knows much of recent musical history and isn’t afraid to mix it up in irreverent ways. In his promo material, Archer humorously compares this set to Physical Graffiti, but to me it resembles Get Up With It more strongly—like Miles’s set, it’s a series of aural landscapes, most of them thick with sound and explored at great length. And, like Miles’s set,

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it has a few repetitive tracks which fail to draw in this listener, but there are enough gems (the blunt, spare groove of “Few Hammer,” the combination of Canterbury organ and free jazz rhythm in “Birds Edge,” the eerie samples of “All the Wars Were Lost” and “Yamba of You Wana Use”) to merit continued exploration.

Julie Tippetts is a prominent accomplice on In Stereo Gravity, but she takes more of the spotlight on Ghosts of Gold. Archer takes the role of soundscape artist, offering loops of electronic noises or sax squawks, while Tippetts recites, occasionally breaking into smoky vocals. Her poems are full of whimsical alliteration and quick rhymes, and it adds up to a wintry British landscape of candlelight, ghostly apparitions and bears masquerading as tree stumps. Choice cut: “Run Another Road,” which employs boldly silly, adult nurseryrhyme imagery (“And the windows are wonky / And the frames let the freeze / Wreck the rickety room / With the brackety brass”) in an ode to resilience. Pat Buzby

L to R: Stefan, Dennis and Aaron González

Derek Bailey Steve Noble Out of the Past Ping Pong CD

The Mancini Project Views of Mancini

Dennis González Yells at Eels featuring Rodrigo Amado The Great Bydgoszcz Concert Ayler CD

Dennis González & João Paulo Scape Grace Clean Feed CD

Dennis González Connecticut Quartet Songs of Early Autumn No Business CD

Dennis González A Matter of Blood Furthermore CD

In the second half of the 1980s, during his time with the Silkheart label, trumpeter/cornetist Dennis González was on a roll, issuing a batch of recordings that stand among the best free jazz of that period. Even during the ferocious uptempo blow-outs on Debenge-Debenge (1988), González was a perfect foil for the full-on intensity of Kidd Jordan and Charles Brackeen, his solos lyrical, cooler and more considered— qualities which have stood him in good stead over the years. Since 1999, when he started working with his (then teenaged) sons Stefan

FMR CD

and Aaron in the band Yells at Eels, his endeavors have proved just as fruitful, and the batch of CDs under review gives some indication of the scope and depth of his current music.

Yells at Eels’ Great Bydgoszcz Concert, recorded in March of 2006 on a tour of Poland, is a rather rambunctious affair. González’s sons owe as much to rock music as they do to jazz, so their palette is more colorful and their playing is sometimes a bit foursquare and splashy.

No problem; this admirably suits the nature of the music, which is a well-structured, cleanly recorded, straight-ahead blowing session. They eat up Ornette Coleman’s “Happy House” and spit it out in solos that mirror the fractured nature of the theme. Krzysztof Komeda’s “Litania” is handled with considerable delicacy, and Stefan González’s solo on this track, using brushes, is a highlight of the set. Tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, linchpin of the Lisbon Improvisation Players, with whom González recorded Spiritualized (Clean Feed), has a burly tone and the ability to whip up excitement in just a few notes—two things that he shares with the late George Adams. González comments in his liner note that he had trouble finding a label willing to issue this set. I can’t see why, it’s an excellent piece of work.

The duo recording with Portuguese pianist João Paulo (or João Paulo Esteves da Silva, to give his full name) brings out the more thoughtful aspects of González’s playing—not to the point of introspection, for this is an open-hearted music, and he and Paulo trade ideas freely, but the mostly relaxed tempos give the musicians time in which to consider their ideas and offer each other space to develop them. Paulo is a fluid and inventive jazz pianist, classically trained, running his solo lines into interesting harmonic areas and creating pungent dissonances that are like a whiff of sweaty socks off a ripe camembert.

González’s tunes have the stateliness of anthems and the simple architecture of hymns, which he sets out to complicate, enrich and occasionally

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subvert. Paulo’s compositions veer between fractured bop, the static but atmospheric “Seixal Township,” and a deliciously full-blooded ballad, “Duas Danças Arcaicas.”

Songs of Early Autumn was recorded at Joe Morris’s Riti Studio in Guilford, Connecticut.

Morris also plays double bass on the session, alongside González, drummer Luther Gray and tenor saxophonist Timo Shanko. Shanko is better known as a bass player than a saxophonist, and his strengths and weaknesses on his second instrument set the highs and occasional lows of this recording. His tone isn’t particularly attractive and his sense of pitch sometimes betrays him, but he is, on the other hand and to a much more significant degree, a master of invention, and many of the best things that happen here are of his making. Gray and Morris work solidly and creatively together, and González fits the music like a glove. Three of the eight tracks are González compositions, the others are freely improvised, and it’s the latter that are often the most interesting in the way that forms and structures materialize out of thin air. This is composition on the hoof, and to an extremely high standard, especially on “Acceleration.”

If there’s a single word that could sum up A Matter of Blood, it’s atmosphere—there’s so much of it you could cut it with a knife. And if you want to add another word to that, try brooding. The tempos are slow but the music crackles with energy, largely due to percussionist Michael T. A. Thompson, a player from whom I’d like to hear much more. Curtis Clark (piano) and Reggie Workman (bass) bring gravitas to the music, and their un-showy, superbly musical contributions are vital to its success. Brief interludes, featuring only one or two players, provide moments of respite from the thickness and dark intensity of the group sound. Any of these four recordings would rank high in a jazz musician’s discography, but for sheer class A Matter of Blood has the edge. Brian Marley

Steve Noble John Edwards Alex Ward NEWtoons Bo' Weavil CD

This trio of recent releases is extremely varied but each reveals the fluency and imagination of the oft-overlooked Steve Noble, one of the finest free percussionists out there. The twelve relatively brief tracks Noble laid down with the sorely missed guitarist Derek Bailey in February 1999 are of a decidedly hot sort. Opening with intense feedback swells stretched across busy rolls, it’s the antithesis of the tentative fits and starts that often characterize improv sessions. Deeply empathetic and exuberant, the pair take in a considerable range of music.

“Four for 4” settles into gritty drill-bitting choked chords and brief eddies of drums. It’s a sharp contrast with the howling “Breakaway,” where they sound like they’re clawing their way through the studio roof. Things are even more scabrous and pummeling on “Time Regained.” But elsewhere there’s impressive poise and restraint.

On “Unfiltered” and “Motion” they ease back on the throttle, with Noble alternating hand-manipulated tom heads with frame clicks, and Bailey at his most insectoid. The music is even further scaled back to near silence on “Bright Moments” (a pretty far cry from Rahsaan). Throughout, Noble plays with an incredible level of detail and momentum. To hear him with the lost master is a wonderful thing.

The Mancini Project is a fascinating, enigmatic, and unpredictable reimagination of Henry Mancini tunes.

Noble is credited with “turntables and manipulations” here, and the project also includes pianist Pat Thomas, drummer Han Bennink, and bassist

Simon H. Fell (whose imagination is central here, as he is responsible for both the arrangements and the prerecorded material). Bennink isn’t quite the eruptive force he is on Clusone recordings, but he and Thomas still play some meaningful musical badminton here. From the swirling sound of “The Days of Wine and Roses,” the band plays mischievous tribute to the tunes themselves, cagily moving along with the root harmonies and pulses rather than hacking away amateurishly. “Charade” is wonderful, with Thomas unbowed as he reads the theme, while Fell races around him and Noble creates all manner of squiggles. “Moon River/ Dreamville”—for piano and tape—is wonderfully dissociative, like listening to LPs melt into each other. There’s a rumbling, raucous “Peter Gunn” (for turntables and tape) and then a fantastic improvisation, with a vivid exchange between Fell and Bennink (a later improvisation is more of the creaking door variety). Some plummeting low-end piano and arco groan open “Pink Panther”—you knew they had to do it, but they only hint (almost imperceptibly) at the theme. A nice move, if you ask me. The disc closes with a fairly referential “Shot in the Dark,” smothered in a cloud of noise.

N.E.W. is a hell-wrecking power trio comprising Noble at his most boisterous (channeling Weasel Walter), skronk maven Alex Ward on guitar, and bassist John Edwards. Their third record is a real noisy pleasure. A big wave breaks onto your face right at the outset, receding occasionally with some plinky scratches and tortured bass groans before a big metallic riff suddenly rears up. It’s a pattern that the trio return to frequently but not formulaically. It’s also an unpredictable gas to hear these players dive into this kind of music, the sort of thing that Darin Gray has called “the success and the failure of rock.” Hear this on the wacky Spy vs. Spy surf riff that comes up right at the end of “Crossfire,” and even more emphatically on the brief spasm of “Riptide,” with windup rocket ships courtesy of Ward’s slide ’n’ distortion work.

The opening minutes of the lengthy “All the Way” find them with tongue at least halfway in cheek, trawling through the wreckage of conventional guitar trio mid-tempo swing before prying the roof off with big oscillating guitar sizzle and a brain-drilling tattoo. When they return to a more intense and committed quasi-jazz idiom towards the end of this piece, it’s engaging in an altogether different way. Jason Bivins

Duck Baker

The Roots & Branches of American Music Les Cousins CD

Everything that Rises Must Converge Mighty Quinn CD

The Waltz Lesson Les Cousins CD

The Duck’s Palace Incus CD

Guitarist Duck Baker is a rare musical animal. On one hand he has a significant reputation as a blues and folk guitarist, a master of traditional music ranging from jigs and reels

to blues and ragtime. His taste in jazz is similarly broad. He’s done an admirable job of adapting the compositions of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols to fingerstyle acoustic guitar, combining bass lines, harmony and leads in a music that is essentially pianistic. At the contemporary edge of his work, he’s an intrepid free improviser, happily mixing it up with John Zorn and Derek Bailey and fellow stylistic time travelers like Eugene Chadbourne and Roswell Rudd.

Much of Baker’s recorded output has been devoted to that mastery of traditional repertoire, but since relocating to England from California a few years ago, he’s found more opportunity to document the free and modern jazz sides of his work. Lately he’s released four CDs on three labels, and each documents a different aspect of his rich musical personality.

To hear where Baker is coming from, though he has in no sense left it, you might turn first to The Roots & Branches of American Music, literally a played essay in American roots music that might make you think of Harry Smith’s Folkways anthology, Greil Marcus’s book on Dylan’s Basement Tapes, the historical writings of Allen Lowe (another Rudd associate) or the guitar playing of John Fahey or Robbie Basho. In the 16 tracks here, Baker traverses traditional Irish ballads dedicated to Chicago police, Scott Joplin rags (and rags that have passed through country fiddlers), spirituals (the resonant modality of “Somewhere Around a Throne”), tunes from Western swing (he sings Bob Wills’ “Don’t Be Ashamed of Your Age”), a Jack Teagarden song, a Scottish march, some country blues and songs from American outsiders like Monk and Mother Ann Lee, hymn writer and spiritual leader of the Shakers. Baker does all this with great depth of feeling and an easy humor. There’s nothing forced and it’s a consistent listening pleasure.

Everything That Rises Must Converge is another solo CD, but it’s subtitled “Free Jazz Guitar Solos.” All the compositions are Baker’s except for Ornette Coleman’s “Peace.” He uses a flamenco guitar, getting a crisper attack than is usual with a classical guitar. The choice gives him an original sound, and Baker’s improvising language stretches to erratic half-damped runs at very high speed, sometimes mixed with muffled fragments, sudden fingerboard slaps and interruptions. The technique that brings such warmth and grace to the traditional music has another calling here. “SS-ECDB Blues” likely invokes three influences and/or playing partners— Sonny Sharrock, Chadbourne and Bailey—and there’s something of each in his playing, but it’s Baker’s personality that emerges. His work has emphasized the guitar’s technical language, but he’s also part of a larger musical picture. What unites these two solo CDs is Baker’s sense of melody and form, elements that figure strongly in his best free vehicles, like “Everything That Rises”

and “The Idea of San Francisco,” no matter how diligently he deconstructs them.

There really is no predicting Baker. The Waltz Lesson presents his trio with clarinetist Alex Ward and bassist Joe Williamson, and given the personnel, I expected free improvisation. Hardly. It’s a distinctive idiom of modern jazz, sometimes suggesting folk sources in Baker’s compositions (“Waltz with Mary’s Smile” suggests the late ’50s trio of Jimmy Giuffre) but also bop tunes. Baker’s always authentic, and this band is the real thing—intense, direct and focused, with a special sense of presence.

The Duck’s Palace presents Baker in a compilation of outstanding duos and trios over a period of 11 years. There are two pieces with John Zorn on alto and Cyro Baptista on percussion from 1993, a forceful free-improvising trio that can move from balladic whispers and middle-Eastern tonalities to explosions of energy, the musicians working within one another’s sounds. Three duets with Derek Bailey from 2002 bristle with combative empathy, Bailey abstract and discontinuous as always and Baker sacrificing traditional gestures and line-shapes to the rapid-fire melee.

The two create a continuity that’s not apparent in their individual parts, a guitar music larger than individual guitarists. There are also two wonderful blues with trombonist Roswell Rudd, Baker meeting with a master as versed in bawdy, backwater traditions and avantgarde byways as himself. Their shared idiom resonates with the 1920s collaborations of Blind Blake and Johnny Dodds, who might feel right at home here.

Stuart Broomer

Jon Balke Siwan ECM CD

While some may quibble about what-to-call-it exactly, let’s use the common catchall “world music fusion,” re: combination(s) of traditional/folk music of various cultures with rock, jazz, electronica, free improv, whatever. Noteworthy examples: Claude Debussy inspired

by South Asian gamelan, Dizzy Gillespie and Machito mixing big band swing, bebop, and AfroCuban elements, Yusef Lateef, Paul Winter, David Amram, the list goes on. Add to that illustrious compendium Jon Balke’s ambitious and beautiful disc Siwan. It may be belaboring the obvious, but albums like this illustrate that assorted musics of disparate humans have more commonalities than dissimilarities. For Siwan, keyboardist and conductor Balke draws upon the rich tradition of Arabic and ArabianAndalusian music and related texts circa 857-1591. While based in the sounds of North Africa and the Middle East, the palette is enriched

by Jon Hassell’s Indian-influenced muted/treated trumpet’s wail— which sounds much like a human voice—and the sonorous, rumbling percussion evoking Bill Laswell’s dub voyages to the bottom of the

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Savage Energy: Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut with Michael Ray and Marshall Allen The bricoleur: Sergey Kuryokhin

Sergey Kuryokhin Absolutely Great!

Davis: Pete Gershon

Leo CD x 7

“I love things that appear to be mutually exclusive,” says Sergey Kuryokhin at the beginning of a 2004 documentary bearing his name. Contradiction is at the heart of Kuryokhin’s career; it is one of the hallmarks of his genius. Crudely speaking, these contradictions number among themselves several binaries: constraint/freedom, tradition/progress, affectation/spontaneity, perhaps even East/West. No other musician has so fully embodied the contradictions of the Soviet Union while making music that so gloriously transcends them, making each pair of oppositions fissure in every direction until they explode into pure force. And yet this force eventually settles into a peculiar shape, like a fly dipped in amber. Is it possible to see artistic production today as anything less than a complete sociology, a force field of “numberless collisions of various wills,” as Tolstoy wrote of history itself?

The pianist once spoke of his life-long attempt to “develop my schizophrenia” to the point where there were no less than “sixty people inside me,” all engaged in a ceaselessly unfolding conversation. With his sunglasses, hoop earrings, and abundance of denim, Kuryokhin looks an unlikely candidate for the savior of contemporary Russian music.

But between 1981’s The Ways of Freedom and his untimely death of cancer in 1996, Kuryokhin created music with a breadth and vision appropriate to a country with multiple personality disorder, absorbing and transforming Western styles into a distinctively Russian idiom. His famed Orkestra Pop-Mekanika, the multimedia show which spanned concert performance, drama, film, ballet, the zoo and the circus, must be seen as a tireless effort to keep the state of Soviet culture in a permanent state of carnival. But the Orkestra’s music has aged perhaps less gracefully than Kuryokhin’s solo work, which is given ample display on Leo’s new box set, Absolutely Great! While on a groundbreaking tour of the Soviet bloc in 1983, ROVA’s Andrew Voigt met Kuryokhin

in St. Petersburg, a friendship that would inspire Kuryokhin to return the favor in 1988 by bringing his exuberant personality to Santa Cruz for three nights. Though he played with an extraordinary variety of native talent that weekend, the real treasure remains the lengthy solo performances that begin each concert like an elaborate ritual.

Listening to the recording of October 21st, it becomes immediately apparent that this pianist is wild, careening, go-for-broke, yes, most definitely insane, but at the same time excessively mannered, meticulous, and with a devilish sense of humor. A gentle exposition fools us as the playing becomes progressively robust and insistent, with the same sentimentality that, like Tchaikovsky before him, could easily earn the scorn of more solemn avantgarde personalities. The gradually unfolding repetitions create such a clamor that the listener is easily moved within minutes from a delightful rag to a furious chase, from high drama to languid ballad, from Eastern European folk theme to rollicking boogie-woogie.

What are we listening to as all of these conflicting melodies degenerate and morph into one another? Is it Debussy? Pete Johnson?

Von Schlippenbach? Carl Stalling? One never knows, considering the scope of Kuryokhin’s erudition and his intense thirst for new musical vistas. October 22nd: the Russian plies a classical waltz while repeatedly spiraling off into atonal passages, juxtaposing a mellifluous melody with the abrasive and precise staccato so characteristic of his phraseology. As before, an element of schizophrenia is present in the oscillation between playful whirligig and liturgical uplift. Each transformation is nearspontaneous, a quick flick of the wrist startling us into a new emotional state. And October 23rd: the shortest and most playful. The transitions are less refined, more abrupt, more obviously of-the-moment than on previous nights. He is clearly having fun, as evidenced by cartoon-like vocal ablations. What the set lacks in majesty it makes up for in restlessness; the pianist seems to be revisiting, in short order, the stock of themes and styles labored over on previous evenings.

In spite of his fiercely individual path, Kuryokhin was also a team player. He respect-

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fully places himself in the background for the bombastic, quasi-cinematic Club Foot Orchestra’s exercises in smoky crime jazz and rhythmic cacophony; extended free improvisation with Voight’s ferocious saxophone, Henry Kaiser’s guitar shards, Boris Rayskin’s searing cello and Larry Kassin’s lyrical flute, all of course punctuated by highly structured themes—romantic serenade, Southern hoedown, honking rock’n’roll; and a concluding evening with avant-world outfit Ut Gret, at times touching on the sparseness of preColumbian ritual music, at others moving with the mournful swing characteristic of Jewish folk forms. The five hours of concert music are united in their sprawling diversity by a series of leitmotifs that the pianist introduces at key moments: sudden shifts in style that the listener is no doubt accustomed to at this point.

Generously included is the long out-of-print Kuryokhin/Kaiser LP, Popular Science (Rykodisc, 1989), a loquacious confection of drum machines, electric guitar and synclaviers.

Similar to what Levi-Strauss dubbed the bricoleur, Kuryokhin is “like a card player who, as he takes his place at the table, picks up cards which he has not invented… but… makes [his] interpretation in terms of several systems.” One can only marvel at his ability to grasp a completely pedestrian melody and transform it through sly additions, variegated phrasing, and unpredictable rhythms. We see Kuryokhin shuffling genres like cards in a game of rummy: keeping in mind, at all times, all possible series in which a jack of hearts can be used. One thing remains consistent: Kuryokhin’s breakneck pace, so that even the most innocuous melody gains an edge of militaristic fanfare. The scholar Ekaterina Degot suggests that it is the “emancipatory impulse” of Communism itself to which Russia’s most progressive artists of the 1980s owe their furious, termite-like energy. While American children learn to create art out of tissue paper, dry macaroni and glue-on sparkles, the Soviet student is trained early on in figurative drawing; not only does the prolific Kuryokhin have a thoroughly Communist work ethic, but his style also betrays a maddening need for form. Seth Watter

sub-sonic sea. Throughout, there is a delicate collage of rhythms that’s (curiously) as natural as a heartbeat and breathing. The voice of French-Moroccan Amina Alaoui is a coolly regal alto, vaguely reminiscent (in gentle expressiveness and evenness of tone) of Sandy Denny (Fairport Convention, Fotheringay) and Jacqui McShee (Pentangle). (And call it a personal taste, but Alaoui never overindulges in melisma.) The track “A La Dina Dana” is exquisite—the strands of “folk” and “classical” (i.e., baroque, Renaissance) of the Spanish peninsula and the land(s) of the Celts intertwine gracefully and melodiously, like it’s no big deal. In fact, one of the selling points (if you’ll pardon the ref to commerce) of Siwan is that Balke never (not overtly, anyway) bends over backwards in gee-whiz efforts to dazzle the listener. It’s as if this set is a musical snapshot of a historical period (in North Africa and southernmost Europe) that was swept away by the Spanish Inquisition and assorted jihads. Siwan is impressive in scope, but more importantly, Balke synthesizes splendor from myriad sources with quiet dignity—or more simply put, this is beautiful stuff.

Mark Keresman

Jimmy Bennington Trio

Another Friend: The Music of Herbie Nichols ThatSwan! CD

David Haney Jorge Hernaez H Duo

Noseco CD

Pianist and composer Herbie Nichols was a quirky genius who received little recognition during his brief lifetime (1919-1965) and recorded only four albums as a leader. But lately his music has been celebrated by a new generation of players, and on Another Friend, drummer Jimmy Bennington, bassist Michael Bisio and pianist David Haney do their part to keep Nichols’ legacy alive. Of the six compositions presented here, only “House Party Starting” was actually recorded by Nichols himself. The other five pieces are drawn from Roswell Rudd’s important book, Herbie Nichols: The Unpublished Works (2000). Haney has cited Nichols as a prime influence, and his love of wide-open spaces and salt-and-vinegar harmonies suits this music well. You won’t hear many arpeggios in his spare, emphatic style, and Haney can play with tremendous intensity at relatively subdued volume levels. Bennington and Bisio display a similar knack for creating excitement without resorting to melodrama or fortissimo passages. This trio is a collaborative unit, although one’s ears are inevitably drawn to Haney and his very personal distillation of Nichols’ muse: witty, dry, sometimes sad but not forlorn, brimming with irony and a sort of bemused, questing ethos.

H Duo presents Haney in the company of Argentine bassist

Jorge Hernaez and displays another facet of the pianist’s artistry over the course of eleven free-improv selections, most of them miniatures ranging from 0:43 to 4:24 in length.

“H Duo..?” and “Dial” are longer pieces that develop quite organically; the former finds Haney almost exclusively inside the piano and has lovely, introspective textures; the latter is more aggressive, a giveand-take dialogue between keyboard and plucked and struck bass.

Hernaez is an impressive player with a full, woody tone and spot-on intonation plus creative ideas; at times his approach is reminiscent of Barre Phillips.

You don’t hear Haney’s name often, but these two releases suggest that the Oregon-based pianist’s work is worth a closer look.

Bill Barton

Han Bennink Trio Parken ILK CD

Dutch drummer Han Bennink has been part of the European jazz and free improvisation scene for close to 50 years, yet Parken is his first album as a group leader. As you might guess, it’s not quite your typical “debut” effort. The trio, with the slightly unusual instrumentation of pianist Simon Toldam and clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst, plays several highly unusual Ellington covers as well as idiosyncratic free improvisations and compositions (none by the leader, natch). Bennink is a vital, larger-than-life presence as always, but overall, there’s a bemused Buster Keaton humor to the album, graceful, funny, and a bit sad all at the same time. In his understated way, Badenhorst sets much of the mood. He plays with a dry, lilting Jimmy Hamilton tone and his lines have a preoccupied air about them.

That’s a Lieutenant Columbo ruse of course, because anyone who plays with Bennink has to be aware of what’s happening around them—it’s all likely to change in an instant. On “Music for Camping,” for instance, they play separate, seemingly unrelated, but carefully choreographed, simultaneous improvisations that create a beautiful, if unstable balance. “Flemische March” starts out with short, sharp phrases that sound like a flock of quarreling starlings before Bennink introduces the march beat that sinks and struggles back to the surface repeatedly before the track ends. They play a loving version of Ellington’s “Lady of the Lavender Mist,” gently coaxing it into weird tangents. But “Isfahan” and “Fleurette Africaine” don’t survive nearly as intact.

There’s some balletic mayhem on “Myckewelk” and mournful irony on “Reedeater” and “Parken.” Pianist Toldam is unpredictable in an even-handed sort of way. He plays lovely, dancing filigrees on “Music for Camping” and note-clusters on “Myckewelk,” and screws around with Ellington flourishes on the covers of Duke’s songs. All in all, a delightful and provocative package of boisterous Dutch wit, under the direction of one of its greatest practitioners. Ed Hazell

Borah Bergman Stefano Pastor Live at Tortona Mutable CD

Pianist Borah Bergman’s signature style employs both hands with dizzying ambidexterity. Bergman’s rigorous practice routine creates what he calls ambi-ideation: “each hand can go in its own way when it wants to.” His ambitious improvisations are equally freed from technical and ideological constraints. Although steeped in bebop and post-bop traditional styles, he can also let rip cacophonous free jazz with the best shredders out there. Bergman is joined by violinist Stefano Pastor for a 2007 live date in Tortona, Italy. Three compositions by Bergman, and two duo improvisations, underline the pianist’s division of labor between honeyed bebop and frenetic free playing. Some passages of his composition “Spirit Song” adopt a balladic lyricism imparted with yearning, sostenuto beauty; elsewhere, he prefers dissonant runs and bellicose clusters. “Wellspring” infuses the blindingly fast harmonic changes of bop with a hyperambidexterity that makes the listener apt to do a double take, checking the liner notes to see if this is for piano four-hands. Pastor proves to be a worthy foil for Bergman. Apt to bend a pitch at every available opportunity, he revels in microtones and attacks bravura passages with an acid-toned anti-romanticism. Like the pianist, he is steeped in traditional jazz styles, but is able both to adopt and parody their conventions with equal believability. A baldly triadic passage in “Spirit Song” finds Pastor lampooning simple major-chord arpeggios before setting off on a skittering chromatic solo—one envisions an impish grin on the violinist’s face. On “Wellspring,” he matches Bergman sixteenth note for sixteenth note down the breakneck home stretch of the piece’s climax. His violin keens cantorially on the effervescent setcloser “The Mighty Oak,” providing a sinuous pedal against Bergman’s cadenza-like riffs. One hopes that this is merely the beginning of a series of collaborations for this formidable pair. Christian Carey

Josh Berman Aram Shelton Weasel Walter Last Distractions Singlespeed CD

Last Distractions is the first release by the trio of cornetist Josh Berman, reedist Aram Shelton and drummer Weasel Walter. These nine slices of improv were recorded in the Bay Area, where Shelton and Walter now reside; it’s often fiery music, though the trio also finds time for spacious explorations. Berman is his typically creative self here, while Shelton, best known as an alto saxophonist, proves equally adept on the soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, playing with more edge than usual. On the other hand, Walter’s playing is somewhat restrained relative to his other recent releases. The opening “Straw Men” demonstrates Shelton’s talents on both horns; Berman’s

hard-boiled lines and Walter’s intense kitwork ultimately shift into subdued textural musings. Though this was the musicians’ first performance as a trio, their differing approaches mesh well throughout, whether they’re enjoying a spirited venture on “Ad Hominem II,” rocking out on the torrential “Broadened Issues,” treading through murky waters on “Marginalized” or relishing the prickly confines of “Scapegoats.” Jay Collins

Black Cobra Chronomega Southern Lord CD

By the time Metallica made the move up-coast from LA in the early ’80s, California’s Bay Area was awash in thrash metal bands, many of which soon stormed the US and Europe.

A quarter century later, Black Cobra exist somewhere between thrash’s intricacies and doom’s bloody allegiance to the riff. The San Francisco duo, which features drummer Rafa Martinez (also currently bassist for Acid King) and guitarist/vocalist Jason Landrian, merely drive another bloody stake into whatever life might inhabit Fisherman’s Wharf with this, their third full-length and first for Southern Lord. Landrian’s vocals are so gruff and delivered at such a constant rate of scream that his throat must be rectangular from the punishment. Martinez’s kick-drum thud is the sound of plastic buckets of sludge smacked repeatedly by a hundred hands. The riffs themselves are delivered with lighting-swift precision and coated in a similar layer of all-enveloping slop, not unlike those early Venom LPs from 30 years ago. And as with all good metal bands, the lyrics, with such phrases as “mass wave field surrounds, vertex collapses,” follow typical metal grammar rules by making sure everything is in the simple present.

Such terms as “decay,” “laceration,” and “ruined” find their way into Black Cobra’s utterances as well. But damned if these guys don’t get in a good groove from time to time and lay in it. Since the first wave of ’90s Stoner Metal and the emergence of labels such as Southern Lord, much indie metal has moved closer to its roots, eschewing the glam and the need for speed for its own sake; instead it’s found further kinship with early Black Sabbath, as well as Black Flag’s My War. Black Cobra ups the speed a few notches from these aforementioned bands and albums, but they are certainly beholden to the crunch of blues-drenched heaviosity, which is what gave this music its initial balls. Whether or not they show any real progress in the area of knuckle-biting metal aggression doesn’t matter when they deliver an album as pulverizingly faithful to the music’s intentions as this one is.

Bruce Miller

John Blum

In the Shade of Sun Ecstatic Peace! CD

Who Begat Eye Konnex CD

Pianist John Blum, a New Yorker by way of Vermont’s Bennington College, studied with Bill Dixon,

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Steve Roach

Steve Roach

Destination Beyond Projekt CD

Afterlight Timeroom Editions CD

Immersion: Four Timeroom Editions CD

The few lucky souls astute enough to grab the original versions of these three autumnal slabs of electronic bounty (housed in a limited edition box) snagged quite an audiovisual feast in one fell swoop. Alas, those cases are now consigned to the dustbin of history, but no matter: boxed or unboxed, these discs, across their combined 220-minute lifespan, are testimony to Steve Roach’s singular vision and graceful aural sculpture.

Ambient works encompassing an entire CD’s running time have become commonplace. Constructed out of the seemingly endless evolution of a few chords, patterns, or noises, these pieces emulate the classical masterworks of centuries past in their thematic richness, architecture, and, in many ways, sheer bravado. Roach’s striated texture-mapping strips the soul bare; it has a galvanizing effect on the listener every bit as visceral as noise music but more satisfying, more nourishing. His mu-

sic commands attentive rather than passive listening—subverting Eno’s maxim about the best ambient being music you can simultaneously focus on or ignore. Roach’s sonic body politic is hardly insubstantial— his drones have bones.

Destination Beyond is the most energetic of these three discs, a 71-minute sequencer extravaganza that’s similar in approach to 2007’s Arc of Passion. Roach spends the first three minutes setting the controls for the heart of the sun. Once the first blinking nebula of notes corkscrews out of those blossoming atmospheres, it’s full speed ahead, Roach laying down a busy firmament across which curtains of synth ricochet, oscillate, and collapse. It is joyous, powerful music, nodding to the old Berlin School but devastatingly original.

Cruising along Destination Beyond’s epic axis, these kaleidoscopic pulses and atmospheric skeins collide, burst, and spread out to infinity; if you allow him, Roach finds a way of thrusting you through cracks in his/our space-time continuum.

One volume in this year’s Klaus Schulze reissue series sports a piece ironically titled “Just an Old-Fashioned Schulze Track”; inattentive listeners might similarly pigeonhole Afterlight or Immersion: Four as just another Roach track. Shame on them. On Afterlight’s cover, faint shafts of sunlight yearn to break through the sky’s cinematic overcast; the strata of

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this work similarly combine density and fragility. Roach’s linear narratives ripple like teased air currents, budding sound science coaxed along by the hands of gods.

The silken textures and luminous chords paradoxically suggest stillness and motion, like a string symphony ionized then recast into something barely recognizable, but comforting all the same. Roach tantalizes your olfactory sense aurally, so the wafting chords and their curlicuing entrails conjure all manner of sensations, but more importantly, what seems static does in fact alter, however subtly. Only deep listening will induce Afterlight to unveil its insinuating psychogeography.

Immersion: Four, part of a continuing series from Roach’s Timeroom studio, plays like Structures from Silence’s stylistic reflection. It’s an introspective bathyscape of deep oceanic pitch, a trilling, intertwined loop of low-impact drones that makes for a narcotizing trip into the realm of the senses. Roach seems to insist you let this one simply fill up your sound space, and in many ways this recording is the ideal ambient soma. But let the drifting thermals invade cochlea and frontal lobe, and the disc pays great dividends. Even after the 74-minute running time ceases, the mark these great aquatic tides leave is so pervasive you imagine the thing’s just going on forever. Darren Bergstein

Milford Graves, Cecil Taylor and Borah Bergman, and has been active (if only peripherally visible) on the New York scene since the 1990s. Entering into Blum’s world requires undivided attention; his playing, while volcanic and dense, doesn’t necessarily recall Cecil’s motivic expansions or Bergman’s two-handed independence. At first the masses from Blum’s keyboard seem immobilizing, blocky weights shifting tectonically, pyrotechnic but rarely occupying much of the upper register. It takes a couple of listens until the barrelhouse rolls creep out from his thick impasto and the lower depths become funkier. There’s an odd sort of “swing” here which is partially attributable to his rhythm section, bassist William Parker and drummer Sunny Murray, both tidal waves of empathy and bull-headed propulsion. “Misanthrope’s Dream” features disappearing brushwork and knitting needles (a bit of the “old” Murray) as Parker’s throaty pizzicato states the complementary phrasethought just as Blum’s fingers utter it. “Out of This Nettle” begins with Monkish hunt-and-peck, building into a hyperactive tumble only to return to its initial dance. The trio plays push-pull with circular shuffles and vortices, an exhilarating interactivity begetting flow.

Who Begat Eye is Blum’s second solo disc, following 2002’s Naked Mirror (Drimala). Dedicated to the animal fervor of the late English poet Ted Hughes, it’s naturally a bit harder to contend with because one isn’t carried along by bass and drums. There’s a greater reliance on interdependent movement, left and right hands in dueling commentary on the opening title piece. Crosses between James P. Johnson and Conlon Nancarrow are elicited in “Who begat Fear,” while “Who begat Wing” makes use of light filigree and a rolling undercurrent, not unlike early Cecil (when he was still stretching the tonality of Bud Powell). “Bone,” on the other hand, seems most indebted to Jaki Byard.

Forebears are only approximate reference points, though—as is clear from the titles, Blum’s concerns are elemental. Clifford Allen

Tyondai Braxton Central Market Warp CD

Over the last decade, Tyondai Braxton has shown himself to be capable of small and wonderful surprises.

Through the modern psychedelic glitch of his earlier solo work, thick with looped vocals and guitars, to the out-rock repetitions of the instrumental group Battles, he has been involved in a lot of worthy and deceptively complex music. His lineage is important now not because he is embracing the jazz conceptualism of his father, saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton, but because he has demonstrated on Central Market that he shares with his dad (who has composed a piece to be played simultaneously by orchestras on different planets) a capacity for thinking big. Where his previous work has been built around smaller repetitions (the few minutes that looping pedals

can generally store), here he has a 22-piece ensemble (the commissioning Wordless Music Orchestra and six of his own recruits) at his bidding, with the electronic effects still in play. The result is a ridiculously lush, ebullient, shiny, occasionally even slapstick 43 minutes of music.

Drawing parallels for such sweepingly enigmatic music is a fool’s errand, but if asked such a fool might mention Leonard Bernstein, Brian Wilson, or Bowie and Eno had the drugs been different. But that’s a fool talking, because Central Market is a wholly original work. Braxton shows a remarkable sensibility for orchestral writing, but even through the rich, warmly recorded sounds of the ensemble, his penchant for repetition is evident. The repeating blocks aren’t enough to stifle the progression of the music, and the mix of electronic and orchestral doublings is fairly dizzying. The only weak step on this week-of-straight-sunshine of a record is the one vocal track. While a few tracks here use vocal utterances in a percussive way, the half-buried singing in “J. City” throws the tune into a bit of a new romantic mold. But that’s a good half hour in, and by that time you’ll be too transfixed to care.

Kurt Gottschalk

Heather Woods Broderick From the Ground Preservation CD

Caethua

The Long Afternoon of Earth Preservation CDx2

Aaron Martin Chautauqua Preservation CD

These three discs from Australia’s Preservation label are closest in spirit to the woodsy expanded-ensemble folk coming out of Finland, taking a page or two from the Jeweled Antler Collective’s book for good measure.

Yet the work is far from derivative.

These three recent releases sound as if they’re hewn from rock or wood, with a homespun quality that’s both fascinating and endearing. Much of the material is acoustic or derives from acoustic sources; the field recordings are usually of natural sounds, and are presented essentially unaltered. Heather Woods Broderick and Caethua support their constantly changing soundscapes with words whose imagery suits the airily cinematic music. Broderick’s “Cottonwood Bay” swirls with slowly blooming pastoral strings, which shimmer with moody vibrato, a perfect backdrop to the willows’ weeping. Similarly, “Wounded Bird” is constructed out of countless vocal and instrumental overdubs, sometimes just a throbbing note or two and often courtesy of brother Peter Broderick.

Caethua, the recording project of Clare Adrienne Cameron Hubbard, explores similar territory on her double EP’s first half. The eerie wind-and-water opening of “A Garden Barely Looked At” provides snapshots of decay and destruction viewed from the distance of

memory. Like Broderick she employs a vocal approach which, like Robert Wyatt’s, eschews accepted notions of technique for something closer to human speech. Their music follows suit, pianos and guitars slightly out of tune and all electronics having that homemade Throbbing Gristle, Factrix or early Cabaret Voltaire sound. The second half of The Long Afternoon of Earth is closer in spirit to Aaron Martin’s full-length, blurring rootsy timbres with fractured beats and stuttering electronics. Martin is the most blatantly experimental of the three artists, his “New Madrid” combining delayed vocals and repeating violin figures with crystalline banjo. Yet the slowly morphing stream of sound is always clear, and Martin is also keenly aware of the many subtle sounds generated by a single instrument, as can be heard in the accordion-based “Orange to Eyeball.”

Each artist brings a wealth of sonic possibilities to the table on these releases. Despite their shared vocals, the two halves of Caethua’s project inhabit very different sound worlds.

Her electronic music is much darker and craggier, while Broderick’s exudes light and transparency. Martin’s is somewhere in the middle, shades of Henry Flynt evoked with every down-home cello gesture. These are fascinating and beautiful explorations into sound and word by three talented artists. Marc Medwin

Taylor Ho Bynum & Spidermonkey Strings Madeleine Dreams Firehouse 12 CD

This is the second offering from Taylor Ho Bynum’s Spidermonkey Strings, following Other Stories (2005), the cornetist’s first CD as a leader. Since then, he’s worked in a variety of formats, ranging from several degrees of composition to largely improvised music. In Spidermonkey Strings the emphasis is on Bynum the composer, from its beginnings in 2003 as a string quartet with electric guitar and cornet to the expanded group with tuba, percussion and voice heard here.

While that debut CD was subtitled Three Suites, this CD presents one, Madeleine Dreams, with texts by Bynum’s sister, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, from her novel Madeleine Is Sleeping, set in 19th-century France. Those texts range in matter as well as method, though there’s a certain dream-like unity whatever the subject-matter, whether it’s the pacific “Hush” that opens and closes the suite to the strangely-angled view of “Le Petomane,” whose bizarre career farting melodies in music-halls seems bittersweet here rather than farcical. Bynum’s compositions consistently engage and amplify the texts, and the performances are at a high level.

Vocalist Kyoko Kitamura ranges from pensive dramatic readings to jazz-inflected vocals and creative improvisations, performing admirably in the divergent settings. The group’s improvisational skills come to the fore on pieces by three great composers—Ornette Coleman,

Duke Ellington and Sun Ra—whose works are all subtly complementary.

The richest textures arise on “The Mooche,” with Bynum’s rapid-fire cornet flying through a dense and omni-directional backdrop consisting of the bowed strings, Joseph Daley’s warm tuba, Luther Gray’s snapping cymbals and Kitamora’s take on early jazz vocal styles. That great string section of Jason Kao Hwang, Jessica Pavone and Tomas Ulrich (plus electric guitarist Pete Fitzpatrick) get chances to shine individually on these pieces, as well as contributing substantially to the ensemble power, and the results are driving, focused, expressive performances that make the most of the jazz tradition. Stuart Broomer

Califone

All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

Dead Oceans CD / LPx2 / download

Califone’s new album All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is not the soundtrack to the movie All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, but the members of the Chicago-based band act and play in the movie and snatches of the record’s music show up in it. They’ve also just done a tour on which they played along with the soundtrack they did record while the movie screened. With me so far? Good. The audio portion of this effort will sound quite familiar to anyone who has been checking in with Califone over the past dozen years or so. There’s Tim Rutili’s rough rasp of a voice and his rustic acoustic guitar at the center, surrounded by an electronically warped kaleidoscope of junkyard percussion, country fiddles, echoing pianos, and rude electric blasts. In fact, it’s so familiar-sounding that at first Friends just sounds like just another Califone record. Play it loud, play it on good speakers, but most of all play it several times, for there is something strange and quite lyrical on the other side of familiarity. Manifestly, it is a story about a fortuneteller and her unwilling family of ghosts; truthfully, it’s a dream-like pondering of the power of superstition and the pain of letting go. Some of the songs fairly explicitly externalize the internal dialogues and past histories of the film’s characters: “Buñuel” portrays a broken-down fellow at best tangentially associated with the identically named filmmaker, while “1928” captures a drug-addicted flapper’s dying thoughts. And the others?

They always feel like they’re about something, but exactly what is hard to pin down. The emotions, which oscillate between grief and grace, matter much more than the data.

Bill Meyer

James Carter & John Medeski Heaven on Earth Half Note CD

Heaven on Earth boasts an absolutely hell-wrecking lineup of James Carter on saxophones, John Medeski on Hammond B3, Adam Rogers on guitar, Christian McBride on bass, and Joey Baron on drums. That’s a lot of experience and energy coming from

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different corners of the improvising world, and the common ingredient is grease. With a healthy and unironic embrace of ’60s Blue Note boogaloo, this live set (performed at the Blue Note) has just the right mix of skronk, groove, and sheer joy to please almost anyone. When Carter lays into the big horn, Medeski slathers his stuff, and Rogers squiggles around the periphery of the massive grooves, it’s hard to resist. The set roars to life with a funky reimagining of Django Reinhardt’s “Diminishing,” the group eternally revisiting the sweet turnaround that anchors the tune. Those who wince when Carter lets fly with quotes won’t be happy when he riffs on “I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” and “Birdland,” but I find it very good fun. The followup tune is a sunny and percolating reading of Lucky Thompson’s “Slam’s Mishap.”

Sensibly varied, confident and exuberant, the band goes through its paces and hits all the audience’s buttons. You want it cool? Listen to Carter’s lovely old-school tenor intro to the laconic, slightly melancholy “Street of Dreams,” which he over time raises to an ecstatic squeal and rumble.

(There remain no limits to Carter’s technique.) The traditional composition “Infiniment” is given a reading that reminds me of late-period Larry Young (with gentle comping from the always tasteful Rogers). Speaking of Young, the band takes a joyous romp through his title track, with a NOLA shuffle and Starchild funk that cue up the outrageously enjoyable closer.

Feeling their oats, the band plays “Blue Leo” with an intense, slow-burn gutbucket feeling; Rogers’ snapping, Albert King-ish licks are a particular pleasure. Jason Bivins

Alex Coke Tina Marsh Steve Feld It’s Possible VoxLox CD

Multi-instrumentalist Alex Coke plays flute, bass flute, piccolo, tenor saxophone, toys and kaen (an ancient Laotian free-reed instrument made of bamboo with a brass reed in each tube—it looks a bit like a pan-flute).

Tina Marsh—bandleader, vocalist, composer, founder of the Creative Opportunity Orchestra, catalyst, dreamer and artistic visionary on the Austin creative music scene for over three decades—is featured on voice and toys. Steve Feld plays Ashiwa bass box and toys. The former is a Ghanaian instrument with six pitches; both percussive and melodic, it provides a delightfully woody, resonant bottom for this adventurous and deeply spiritual music. The program includes a remarkable four-part suite of Steve Lacy compositions, a downright chilling interpretation of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” three memorable Coke compositions, a decidedly unconventional interpretation of “Deep River,” Charles Mingus’s “Eclipse” as a rather eerie voice/kaen duo, the standard “Secret Love” sung with enormous passion by Marsh with only bass box in support (Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster in West Africa?), and four free improvisations.

The closing “Peace Prayer” is accompanied by the tolling of the World

Peace Bell; it’s a truly goosebumpraising denouement. This CD serves as a wonderful memorial to Marsh, who died from cancer at age 55 in June 2009. Bill Barton

Chick Corea Gary Burton Crystal Silence ECM CDx4

It’s an affair to envy. Pianist Chick Corea and vibist Gary Burton must have decided a long time ago to skip the mortgage, the chores, and the fights and just slam together every year or so and dig the hell out of one another instead. At least that’s how I picture one of jazz’s most enduring and—if the music doesn’t lie—happy partnerships. It’s hard to believe Corea and Burton have been spinning sugar since 1972, because these four discs of seminal ECM recordings (two studio albums and a double live album) sound as fresh as when they were recorded. Don’t be fooled by the “Crystal Silence” branding. There’s introspection here, but the dominant mood is fun, if not jubilation. Take the ambitious “Duet Suite” from the 1978 Duet album, a dizzying run of split-second modulations, accelerations, penumbras and emanations that never loses its lithe dance spirit. (Some top company ought to choreograph it.) The duo’s telepathy is legendary, but their union goes further than that. Both musicians have the chops, and confidence, to blur roles and get androgynous with their instruments—Corea taps into his percussive id while Burton, the mallet man, luxuriates in a fluid pianism.

The sound combination is inherently light, so it’s no wonder happy tunes like “Radio” and “Señor Mouse” fwee into the air like helium balloons.

When the air gets thin, they bring out the ballast. On “La Fiesta,” four hands (or is it 40?) beat out an “Olé”-style vamp with tireless heel-work and kaleidoscopic embellishment. There are Bud Powell-ish and Bill Evans-y tracks, but more often the music hews closer to classical forms. A long, previously unreleased track, Corea’s solo “Love Palace,” has symphonicscale drama and development out of Aaron Copland or David Diamond.

Corea’s “Crystal Silence” melds John Coltrane’s floating invocations with an introspective stroll on Erik Satie’s street. His Bartok-like children’s songs are tiny grains of perfection, especially with Burton’s enamel finish. But no matter what mood they work up, the energy never sags. Even a drifting track like “Feelings and Things” has an inner hustle, like a sunflower swiveling toward the sun. There may not be much in the way of sparring, dramatic tension or jazz “chasing” here, but that’s not the game. These two kids are hanging on to the same kite, running toward the light. Larry Cosentino

Peter Child Doubles Albany CD

MIT professor Peter Child has logged a number of orchestra residencies and composed plenty for larger ensembles, but his latest disc features more intimate fare: chamber

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works for one and two players. The pieces are compelling and suggest that economy of means has in no way stunted Child’s creativity: quite the contrary! Indeed, the stunner of the disc is a solo violin work: Variations on “Egy Szem Silva,” a Hungarian nonsense song. Daniel Stepner’s rendering adroitly negotiates a number of styles—Bartokian folk adaptation, neoromantic lyricism, and bristly atonal passages—and challenging virtuoso passages to make this an engaging addition to an admittedly already-crowded genre. Soprano Jane Bryden and pianist Sally Pinkas capture the pithy wit of a set of Emily Dickinson songs. Child’s harmonic language demonstrates both tart economy and fleeting poignancy in these aphoristic settings.

Two pieces for piano duo bookend the disc. Played by the HirschPinkas Piano Duo, Duo for Piano, Four Hands is the most modernist of the works here. It includes percussive dampening effects, wonderfully piquant verticals, and a set of variations chock-full of Webernian canons.

Doubles, played by Elaine Chew and David Daveau, has a more playful demeanor. Many of its movements recall dance styles—mazurka, tango, even boogie woogie—while its harmonic language is strongly bitonal, creating saucily humorous moments worthy of Ravel or Poulenc. Child’s preoccupation with duets transcends easy stylistic categorization. Instead, the disc is a varied sampler of disparately hued, vibrant music-making.

Christian Carey

Leonard Cohen

Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 Columbia / CMV / Legacy CD/DVD

By many accounts, the third Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 was a fiasco.

It was the largest festival of its kind anywhere up until that point, and the area of Afton Down on this quiet Channel island was completely overrun with an unruly throng.

There was destruction of property, trash and refuse were everywhere, fires were set—including to the stage itself at one point—and the audience was openly hostile toward some of the performers. The luster and charm of ’60s counterculture by now had faded. A string of largescale music festivals gone wildly out of control—Woodstock, Altamont, Newport—seemed to culminate in this grand moment of shabby desolation. Within a year British Parliament passed the “Isle of Wight Act” which forbade gatherings of more than 5,000 people on the island, and the 1970 event would be the last festival of its kind to be held there for 32 years.

And so it was after 2 a.m. on the fifth and final night of this exhausted gathering, following sets by Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues, when Leonard Cohen was roused from his trailer to take the stage with his Nashville-based string band, The Army (which included Charlie Daniels on bass and fiddle). Cohen, who epitomized the merger of folk music with a literary sensibility at that time, had an immediate calming effect on

the crowd, and he proceeded to deliver a subdued and in some ways eerie set of songs, including “Bird on a Wire,” “The Stranger Song,” “So Long, Marianne” and of course “Suzanne,” which had been famously covered by Judy Collins in 1967. The two strongest numbers are probably the jaunty singalong “Tonight Will Be Fine” and the haunting and brittle French Resistance song “The Partisan.” It has often been said that Cohen is a far better songwriter than he is a performer of his own material, and in this concert he certainly projects a kind of affectless and distant persona which neither enlivens the material nor brings out its full poetic potential. Cohen intones as much as he sings, and he interweaves bits of poetry with his remarks between songs, which adds to the surreal and enigmatic atmosphere.

The concert footage, created by filmmaker Murray Lerner, includes interesting interview clips with Joan Baez and Kris Kristofferson, both of whom also performed at the festival. Devoted followers of Cohen will be thrilled to have this historic performance available at last, but it is probably not the best introduction to this important musician. Still, this release is a compelling document of countercultural burnout, with Cohen center stage, like some kind of shaman in the night, channeling the nothingness that is all around him.

Alan Waters

Stuart Dempster Tom Heasley Eric Glick Rieman Echoes of Syros Full Bleed CD

Bobby Bradford Tom Heasley Ken Rosser Varistar Full Bleed CD

Tubist Tom Heasley utilizes his unwieldy instrument—plus electronics—in a drone-based, ambient way on Echoes of Syros. Particularly on the 35-minute title track, echo, delays and loops create a mesmerizing sonic landscape that is meditative but certainly not sleepy. Heasley has worked with Stuart Dempster before in the Deep Listening Band and the two sound-gatherers are well-matched. Dempster plays trombone, didjeridu, conch, garden hose and an assortment of toys on this recording; Eric Glick Rieman uses a prepared Rhodes electric piano which usually sounds nothing like a piano, electric or otherwise. The tuba is a shapeshifter in Heasley’s hands, and if you didn’t know the instrumentation in advance it wouldn’t be obvious that it was the source of these sounds. Dempster has some lovely solo trombone work on “Celestial.” “Interzone” features witty musical conversations between the instrumentalists, and Heasley and Dempster indulge in overlapping call-and-response patterns on “The Chimera” that lead the listener down exotic pathways, with plenty of levity provided by the latter’s toys as the piece develops.

On Varistar the timbres are a more

traditional and primarily acoustic.

The opening “Delicious Red” uses the tuba’s natural sound in consort with Ken Rosser’s clean-toned electric guitar and the marvelously inventive cornet of Bobby Bradford.

Heasley definitely deserves kudos for recording with Bradford. It is shameful that this master musician has so few documents of his playing in general circulation. On “Ohio” Rosser’s guitar has a slightly warped C&W ambiance, while the brief “Crooked March” is aptly named: it’s flat-out hilarious. On “Not Forgotten” Rosser’s acoustic guitar feints and parries with Bradford, while Heasley makes sparing use of tuba for coloration. “Practically Sensible” has an infectious forward momentum, with Heasley playing an almost-straight walking bass at several points. The title track is the first piece where Rosser uses effects on his electric guitar; it’s a floating, morphing, tempo-less performance with a dreamlike feeling. “Elegy for John Carter” is an emotional remembrance of Bradford’s late colleague and is a ravishingly beautiful performance. Bill Barton

Jean Derome et les Dangereux Zhoms +7 Plates-formes et Traquenards Victo CD

How many Quebecois does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just one, but they’re hard to find; they're all too busy playing in each other’s bands. I think Ambiances Magnétiques and their friends must be some of the hardest-working musicians on the planet; just look at Jean Derome (a notable co-founder)—30 years of recording history, over 70 record appearances, and at least 9 groups to his credit. The only problem being that, with a personality so diffuse, Derome is hardly a household name; and in this sense he shares the fate of so many other Montreal luminaries. Formed in 1992, Les Dangereux Zhoms—“The Dangerous Guyz”—is a prime example of inter-breeding; though guitarist René Lussier, with whom Derome has perhaps collaborated the most in his long career, dropped off after 1998’s Torticolis.

Too bad! Because Plates-formes et Traquenards is probably their best release yet: the core quintet of Derome (flutes, saxes), Tom Walsh (trombone), Guillaume Dostaler (piano), Pierre Cartier (electric bass) and Pierre Tanguay (percussion) is augmented by seven other spectacular—and dangerous—musicians: notably freeform vocalist Joane Hétu, clarinetist Lori Freedman, guitarist Bernard Falaise and turntable whiz Martin Tétreault.

Here they gather to celebrate the 25th annual Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville festival (FIMAV); only fitting, since Derome has been a regular participant since 1985.

Les Dangereux Zhoms put out three LPs between 1994 and 1998, but in 2007 they fired off another crackling petard with To Continue.

The FIMAV appearance is just as stunning, its two lengthy suites casting a typically wide net in terms of genre shuffling. One could compare Derome to John Zorn, though the

analogy is less compelling today than it was just over a decade ago. To be sure, there is still much of the stylistic butterfly in Derome’s work—“more like film editing than regular musical composition,” he admits—but that attitude of wayfaring rascality has given way to a mature, fluid, integrated idiom. Carnets de Voyage, the Zhoms’ first outing, was a blast: all angular melodies, harsh textures, stop-on-a-dime turnarounds in mood, skittish and inconsistent rhythms, a kind of free-improv-noir high energy music. Great stuff! Plates-formes is food for a different occasion; has a different M.O. in any case. Almost instantly one senses that the noisier contingent—particularly Tétreault and Hétu—are not there to disconcert.

Derome wants them to sing; to make ugly sounds, harsh electronic inputs work parallel to the beautiful and simple, lilting melodies of his ensemble. The noise at the heart of Derome’s world makes its presence felt gradually, unconsciously: a little turntable feedback emitted on “Le Rift” sprouting into intermittent percussive exclamation on “Les Synapses”; and the insectoid buzzing of Hétu on said track, quiet and playful, explodes in terrifying growls on “Le Derrick,” like a throaty beast at the center of swelling instrumental immensities! “Tec(hno)tronique” is a real knockout, as one of Tanguay's breakbeat buffers shards of rhythmic ejaculation tossed between voice, saxophone, piano, trombone, violin and back again like the snake biting its own tail. One could write much more—but hopefully an abundance of metaphor is proof enough that the music has soul, and feeds the mind as well as the spirit. Seth Watter

Espers III

Drag City CD

A few years ago, just about any smalllabel act playing acoustic instruments was suddenly called “freak folk,” whether or not there was anything freaky about the music. Espers really lived up to the description, though, and the band still does on this third full-length album. What makes Espers freaky isn’t the fact these Philadelphia musicians look like hippies and pose for photographs in front of gnarly old trees (although they do). Rather, it’s the band’s distinctive combination of medieval melodies and harmonies with contemporary sounds like buzzing electric guitars and synthesizers.

This psychedelic Renaissance fair vibe is not completely new, having been tried in the late ’60s by bands such as Pentangle, but it sounds fresh and, yes, freaky when Espers do it. After creating some dense layers on its second album, II (2006), Espers goes for a slightly lighter mix on III. Greg Weeks’ piercing guitar stands out this time as the lead instrument, drilling away at the melodies. Acoustic guitar arpeggios provide the framework for these songs, while violins and Mellotrons swoop in for dramatic effect. As precise as the musicians are, they almost manage to swing on the faster songs. Weeks and Meg Baird share lead vocals, both of them achieving that floating-in-the-clouds quality of English folk-rock bands like

Fairport Convention. The working title of III was Colony, and the band says the songs were inspired by Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God and other tales of colonial conquest and jungle ceremonies. The connections between the lyrics and this subject matter are unclear, but this album certainly inspires mental images of mysterious rituals.

Robert Loerzel

Excepter

Black Beach Paw Tracks CD+DVD

Watch some surfing footage, sometime: all those deeply tanned, beautific Billabongers are so calm, so happy, so relaxed. Blame it on the waves, the surf, the sun: “don’t worry, be happy,” these elements all urge. At the dawn of this decade, in their own idiosyncratic way, Brooklyn electro-fractalists Excepter embraced this philosophy, too. Ka (Fusetron) and Thrones (Load) celebrated a superficially freeform cyborg drift that drenched ambient in ectoplasmic goo. Then Excepter spent a couple years making music that tried a bit too hard and showed its seams: nowhere beat-ur-beat jams; sparse, hard dance; well-intentioned, B-52s-indebted protest rock. So the arrival of no-real-agenda Black Beach is a relief long in coming, graciously and amiably collaging oceanic samples, triggered effects, reedy wind instruments, shakers, tambourines, and conversational chaff; elements lounge, intersect, dissolve, drown under killer waves. As if recognizing that Beach’s nautical purposelessness might irk some listeners, the band packaged the disc with a DVD of ponderous, communing-with-nature pow-wowing at a nude beach that serves as an apt visual accompaniment. Ah, the delicious tribalism; ah, the subjective juxtaposition of clothed, bearded musicians bearing sound boxes and pale, buck-naked sirens and adonises banging hand drums or noodling on recorders; ah, the narcoleptic serenity.

Raymond Cummings

The Fonda-Stevens Group Memphis Playscape CD

Sorgen-Rust-Stevens Trio A Scent in Motion Konnex CD

Southern Excursion Quartet Trading Post

Artists Recording Collective CD

Long a mainstay of New York City’s creative music scene, pianist Michael Jefry Stevens has been working out of Memphis since 2002. Always prolific—although chronically under many people’s radar—Stevens figures in three current releases, which collectively display the breadth of his talents.

After 20 years of musical partnership, Stevens, bassist Joe Fonda, drummer Harvey Sorgen and trumpeter Herb Robertson have developed a rich chemistry. On Memphis, their 11th recording, the quartet surges with energy—equal parts Stevens’ proclivity

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for aggressive vamps, Robertson’s slippery slalom runs, and a wrecking crew of a rhythm duo. Sorgen pummels his kit on “There Is a Very Fine Line Between Your Life and Mine,” one of two tracks that include a chanted chorus in a display of communal fervor. He drives a shuffle/ march à la Art Blakey on “Memphis Ramble,” and underscores Stevens’ telegraph-key piano on “In the Whitecage.” When the mood turns somber individual members find ways of keeping the tension high, whether it’s Fonda’s abrasive arco on “For My Brother” or the free segments that alternate with Stevens’ pretty theme on “Whale Majesty.”

A Scent in Motion captures a much younger Stevens and Sorgen, performing nine originals in 1994 in the company of bassist Steve Rust. The recording comes from a period when the pianist seemed to be only slightly less productive than his former Mosaic Sextet bandmate, trumpeter Dave Douglas, and his span of interest is well displayed. He comes off as bouncy and melodic as an ardent hard bopper over Rust’s driving bassline on “Sentry,” enters into some rumbling give and take on the group improv “Camco,” and turns rhapsodically free on Rust’s “Starter Set.” Recorded in 2007, Trading Post features four free-leaning Southern improvisers playing highly lyrical music, and the result shows a high level of interactivity and close listening. Beginning with Andrew Hill’s meditative “Ashes” and ending with the soulful Stevens composition “Spiritual,” the session has plenty of emotional power, reaching a peak of fervor with saxophonist Don Aliquo’s Trane-ish “Chant.” Aliquo—who, like Stevens, moved to the South early in the decade—can also play it warm and mellow, sounding as creamy as Johnny Hodges on “Longing,” a ballad that also brings out Stevens’ effusive side. One might expect Stevens’ dedication to Kenny Wheeler to mine that balladic impulse, too, but while capturing the trumpeter’s unique mix of romanticism and melancholy, the quartet comes up swinging. James Hale

Frame Quartet 35mm

Okka Disk CD

Ken Vandermark Barry Guy Mark Sanders Fox Fire Maya CD x 2

Ken Vandermark improvises and composes, leads bands and collaborates, and plays various saxophones and clarinets, but behind it all is a fascination with the creative process itself. Every new band, instrument, or concept is simply another attempt to get at the business of making something. This concern, as much as Vandermark’s presence, is the link between these two methodologically dissimilar ensembles. In the Frame Quartet’s music, notions of pacing and organization taken from film editing—jump cut, dissolve, contrast, focus—supplant the concerns

with genre and rhythm that come to the fore in the Vandermark 5, with which the quartet shares three members. What does that mean for the listener? First that the meaningful contrast of events, not swing or pulse, is the dominant rhythmic concept. Second, that you’ll hear a lot of brief solos and duets in between the ensemble passages, rather like close-ups; Vandermark the cinematographer likes his close-ups. For a director, Vandermark is a pretty trusting collaborator. Drummer Tim Daisy and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm both take turns conducting the band, and everyone influences the dialogic flow. But my favorite thing about this band is the way Lonberg-Holm and bassist Nate McBride span the electric-acoustic divide, calling upon a rich array of textures and attacks that ensure that the album’s five long pieces (ten to eighteen minutes) never lapse into tedium.

Fox Fire finds Vandermark in fresh company, which makes a familiar approach—total improvisation— new again. Drummer Mark Sanders and double bassist Barry Guy have both played in trios with Evan Parker, which has to be enough to make any thinking saxophonist a bit nervous about losing sight of his shoes in the deep prints all around. Guy doesn’t make things any easier by being in exceptionally spectacular form; to play anything simple or retiring in the presence of the astoundingly complex and absorbing soundweb he weaves here would be to consign oneself to invisibility. So Vandermark, who could never match the atomized inventiveness that Guy and Parker have sustained since before his voice broke, comes on strong but sounds nervous. He’s like a boxer in a room of ninjas, throwing quick punches that instigate whirls of motion he can never quite interrupt. But don’t let me suggest that they don’t connect; by the end of the second disc (they were recorded on two successive nights in November 2008) the trio have come up with their own tense, fiery sound, and it’s well worth delving into. The process of players feeling each other out in the moment may be familiar by now, but as long as there is a pool of musicians like these who have the capacity and motivation to make it say something about the group as well as themselves, it’s no more played-out than the notion of conversation.

Bill Meyer

The Fully Celebrated

Drunk on the Blood of the Holy Ones AUM Fidelity CD

Joe Morris Quartet Today on Earth AUM Fidelity CD

Far too often, jazz groups lack a sense of humor. Not so with The Fully Celebrated. On Drunk on the Blood of the Holy Ones, their seventh release, alto saxophonist Jim Hobbs, bassist Timo Shanko and drummer Django Carranza hammer away at eight slices of groove-based music that is peppy, incisive and yes,

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amusing. The Boston trio knocks out a savory funk on the opener “Moose and Grizzly Bear’s Ville,” followed by the vigorous odd-meter humandrum-machine patterns of “Reptoid Alliance” and the manipulated dub of the title track. Everyone gets a chance to shine: the folkish “Enemy of Both Sides” is led by Carranza’s hefty vamp, while Shanko takes charge on “Pearl’s Blues (Your What Hurts?)”; the fiery free jazz of “Conotocarius,” meanwhile, highlights Hobbs’s riveting alto lines.

The album concludes with quiet intensity on “Dew of May.” The Fully Celebrated is a group that doesn’t take themselves too seriously, but the music is of high caliber and a hell of a lot of fun. To top it off, the CD includes a bonus fantasy skateboard video for “Can U Do the Mackie Burnette,” a cut from 2005’s Lapis Exilis that proves to be a trip.

Hobbs and Shanko meet drummer Luther Gray in the quartet of peerless guitarist Joe Morris for Today on Earth. The last of a triptych of recordings for the AUM Fidelity label, this is Morris at his most accessible. His tremendous single-note flurries come to bear immediately on the boppish “Backbone” and the exuberantly swinging “Imaginary Solutions.” The quartet’s keen melodic sense is evident on “Ashes” and the ruminative “Animal,” especially in Hobbs’s earthy, gripping saxophone playing. Hobbs and Morris’s unison lines against the rhythm section’s restless activity are part of the record’s pleasures. Like Drunk on the Blood of the Holy Ones, Today on Earth has it all: smart compositional structures that launch tasty, unpredictable improvisations. Jay Collins

Robert Glasper Double Booked Blue Note CD

Pianist Robert Glasper may well be the ultimate bipolar (tripolar?) creative musician of the present day. In addition to his highly-acclaimed work as a jazz artist, he has served as musical director for Bilal and Mos Def (both of whom make guest appearances on this new CD). Soul and hip-hop are integral parts of his musical personality, and he’s worked with Me’Shell Ndegéocello, Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Jay-Z, J Dilla, Q-Tip, Kanye West and others. Double Booked is his first recording to give equal time to those cross-genre explorations, split down the middle between a live set by his acoustic trio and a second half from his electric band, Experiment.

The trio portion has some remarkable music, although the over-reliance on fade-ins and fade-outs strikes me as a bit off-putting; it’s not really apparent after the opening that this is indeed a “live” set. But the recording is obviously carefully assembled, the tracks linked by bridging interludes lifted amusingly from answering machine messages (the CD title gives a hint as to their content). The threads are all part of the same cloth. Drummer Chris Dave is in both groups and is equally adept at subtle Roachian propulsion and slap-you-upside-thehead fatback grooves. Saxophonist/ multi-instrumentalist Casey Benjamin utilizes the vocoder quite exten-

sively in Experiment. The instrument seemed gimmicky to me when Frampton came alive and it still does.

There’s a curious seesaw between retro and po-mo aesthetics at work here that can be compelling and visceral one moment and rather puzzling the next. That’s part of what makes this music so involving. Leave your preconceptions at the door, boys and girls. When you come down to the nitty-gritty, Glasper’s early experiences with gospel and music of the black church tie it all together. These are praise bands that celebrate diversity.

Bill Barton

Ben Goldberg

Speech Communication Tzadik CD

I remember hearing Bay Area clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s debut CD Masks and Faces when it first came out in the early ’90s on the Nine Winds label. Even before John Zorn made a splash with Masada, Goldberg’s New Klezmer Trio, with bassist Dan Seamens and drummer Kenny Wollesen, took klezmer forms and melodies and pushed them toward freedom, stretching the tradition with directness and immediacy. The three went on to record a few more CDs, but haven’t been heard from in a decade. Almost two decades after their debut, Goldberg and Wollesen join forces with Masada bassist Greg Cohen for a mix of klezmer and free jazz that manages to capture the open melodic invention and freshness of that debut release. Over the course of these 11 originals, the three players use klezmer modalities more as shadings and touchpoints than as literal references. There’s more Jimmy Giuffre here than Naftule Brandwein.

While Goldberg’s lithe lyricism on both clarinet and the dark-hued contra-alto clarinet defines the sound of these pieces, having Wollesen and Cohen on board is integral to the resounding magic. This is a welcome return and should lead listeners to dig up the trio’s previous recordings if they missed them the first time around. Michael Rosenstein

Frank Gratkowski Alexey Lapin Sebastian Gramss Unplugged Mind Leo CD

Reedist Frank Gratkowski is one of the small class of free improvisers

who completely own that music that unfolds at the intersection of contemporary chamber composition and late generation EFI. He’s often at his best in small groups like this one, where he brings his alto, clarinet, and bass clarinet to play with pianist Alexey Lapin and bassist Sebastian Gramss (Helen Bledsoe plays flute on the sixth and final track). While the music is as detailed, contrapuntal, and roiling with ideas as one expects from Gratkowski, the disc also confounds in unexpected ways.

The opening “Unplugged Mind” is sparse and textural, with Lapin in particular manifesting remarkable restraint, sitting out for long periods at a time and only entering with brief percussive embellishments. A similarly meditative feel characterizes “Retain the Aspect,” initially made up of plangent, overlapping lines, which billow into a passage exploring very soft articulation, the notes gently growing and decaying; there’s a busy buzzing section in the middle, and the piece ends with Gramss and Lapin worrying actively alongside an unbowed and lyrical Gratkowski.

It’s really a powerful piece. On “Turn To,” Gramss skulks around the low end, making use of modest preparations; his contributions are framed by the pianist’s scraped wood and metal, and some tortured birdsong (Gratkowski continues to expand his range and vocabulary impressively).

And for those looking for one, there’s a decent free scramble on “Voice Over the…” But I was compelled far more by the gentle and probing “In Harmony,” and especially the closing track “Speak Silent.” While Gratkowski, Gramss, and Bledsoe play quite well here, it’s Lapin who impressed me as one of the most subtle prepared pianists I’ve heard in a while. Jason Bivins

Halflings

Self Esteem RRRecords CD

Ascites

Incisional Drainage and C-6 self-released CD-R + cassette

Fluid Excess

Fonofobi Tapes cassette

In the noise realm, a slow, sleepwalking swell can be just as effective as the right-out-of-the-gate sonic sucker punch. This kind of sequential legerdemain is hardly a trade secret, but it

isn’t why-not default mode, either: if you’re gonna embrace the subliminal fade-to-cataclysm, there’d better be a serious payoff—or a series of payoffs—waiting at the far end of the tunnel.

As two-thirds of NYC powerelectronics trio Yellow Tears, Jeremy Nissan and Ryan Woodhall can take this technique, or leave it; sometimes they come creeping, at other times they go in bull-roaring, primed for battle. But as Halflings, on Self Esteem, stealth is the duo’s watchword.

After opener “Center of Attention” spends its fifty seconds grabbing and seizing your, er, attention— piercing, wiggy tones and distressed screams will do that—Esteem settles in for deception, with rabid, radioactive noise weevils burrowing slowly through the delicate silence that kicks off “Source” and yielding to cross-hatched vocal rage. Then “Holding Your Embarrassment” sets madhouse laughter loops and what sounds like rusty swordblades being sharpened to the kind of single-tone, tinnitus-mimicking drones that Prurient used to employ, and then Nissan and Woodhall get mean. “Trigger Fixation” pulses and pops mercilessly, like shoot’em’up video-game sound effects and snuff-flick voiceovers given a recombinant hardelectro remix. “Burning Ambition” just sounds like the end of the world, or at least the end of an amplifier’s working life, while “Keep Holding Hands” fuses “Fixation”’s joystick nihilism and “Ambition”’s heedless oblivion into pure, unsparing horror.

Though Ascites, a four-piece who hail from Dallas, Texas, generally favor a more scorched-earth approach, self-released debut Incisional Drainage draws listeners in by degrees. The agonizingly gradual squall of “Pukebath” glides forth on echoed bass guitar figures, its scree abacus-sliding from one extreme to another. From this queasy beginning emerge varying shades of discord: the blasted tape-deck S&M lurch of “Forced Entry,” the creeping scanner seethe of “Abdominal Distension,” the metal-tooled, outright maliciousness of “Soft Adult Contemporary.”

Closer “Live at Bike House Dallas, TX 4-24-09” huffs and puffs through 17 uncomfortable minutes that suggest ambient indigestion: troubling rumbles, muffled mumbles, and generative throbs co-exist in a suspended state of improv unease, attacking then retreating from the

sonic frame, before marshaling unfathomable forces and attacking again, swelling into sickly, tempestual conflagration. C-6—a bonus cassette packaged with Incisional Drainage— offers two three-minutes doses of churning, free-falling animus which, while complementing their parent release, feel decidedly supplemental to it. On the other hand, Fluid Excess—issued by Swedish label Fonofobi Tapes—is all full-tilt aggro, thirty minutes of zig-zag-zig blare that gives no quarter, asks none, and makes you wonder whether this foursome managed to tap into and record some interdimensional negative energy wellspring. Seriously, they should bottle this shit and sell it at No Fun Fest. Raymond Cummings

Rufus Harley America Patton Harley Messiah Harley Bagpipes of the World Transparency CDx3

Rufus Harley, a bright spirit and unorthodox talent in the mold of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, made it his mission to bring the highland bagpipes into the ecstasy grooves and post-bop licks of Coltrane-era jazz.

Atlantic recorded him with respect and sensitivity in the late 1960s, but he appeared on disc only spottily after that, although he remained active until his death in 2006. The release of three uneven new discs under his name will make some people happy but disappoint others. Even some of the crestfallen, however, will recover when they come to cherish the rough-hewn treasures in this mixed bag. The first disc alternates jazz tracks with recordings of Harley playing traditional bagpipe music, accompanied by “unknown French bagpipers of different tunings.”

The tracks are as compelling as the sound quality is rough. An accomplished and versatile reedman, Harley sticks to his “baby soprano sax” on the jazz tracks until late in the disc, when this set hits its first layer of pay dirt. A French rhythm section backs Harley for two long improvised tracks that run a hypnotic gamut of hybrid grooves, closing with a joyous “Moon River” that’s reminiscent of his Atlantic work. As always, Harley hits hardest when he transforms a pop tune into transcendent jazz in the Miles-Coltrane tradition.

Disc 2, however, is a strange listen. In the course of an hour-long

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interview with Richard Segan of WHUS, recorded in June of 2006, Harley charms you with stories about why he picked up the bagpipes, then worries you with a rambling, obsessive monologue airing his linguistic-political-musical ideas. “I’m sustaining myself like the pipes,” he tells Segan apologetically, but even Harley’s charm and boundless good will won’t sustain everyone through this whole interview. The end of Disc 2 and part of Disc 3 are devoted to one of Harley’s 16 children, America Patton Harley, a serviceable trumpeter in the mid-career Miles mode, with dad Rufus on baby soprano. Another trumpeter son, Messiah Patton Harley, joins his father for the rest of Disc 3, a live concert in Jamaica, and that’s where the real fun begins. Did you ever think you’d hear a reggae version of “Stormy Weather” with bagpipes? In “The Crack,” Rufus and son play very well together, and there’s also a bluesy “Amazing Grace” and a jazzed-up “Scotland the Brave,” two joints of pure, uncut Rufus Harley joy. Finally, on a brief closing track, Harley breaks your heart with a determined run through “Hava Nagila,” “Ode to Joy,” “We Shall Overcome” and “America the Beautiful” on solo bagpipe.

This loving tribute to one of jazz’s lesser-known originals is not for beginners. To fill your magic bag with Rufus Harley, the jazz bagpiper, first snag a copy of Courage: The Atlantic Recordings. Larry Cosentino

Hell & Bunny with Greg Kelley

Burn It Down for the Nails Brokenresearch CD-R

Psalm Alarm

Like Machine, Like Voice Brokenresearch CD-R

Graveyards

Screwed and Chopped Brokenresearch LP

Mêlée with Joe Morris Cloud Atlas Quartet Brokenresearch LP

Over the last five years, percussionist Ben Hall and cellist Hans Buetow have put out 38 CD-Rs and LPs on their Brokenresearch label, documenting the local Detroit scene as well as a revolving crew of guests.

Hall and Buetow are at the core of most of these recordings, whether as a duo (Death Knell), in partnership with Wolf Eyes’ John Olson (Graveyards), in a trio with Nate Wooley (Mêlée), or in ad hoc groupings.

These four recent recordings provide a good cross-section of what they’ve been up to lately.

Burn It Down for the Nails captures a collaboration between Hall, Buetow, and Boston-based improviser Greg Kelley. Hall and Kelley have crossed musical paths often on their travels and they have complementary sensibilities that span the full range from micro-detailed textural improvisation to full-on assault. In the trio, the lines between burred and scraped percussion, raw-edged string overtones and harmonics, and Kelley’s hissed, breathy trumpet quickly blur. The first improvisation 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

starts with a whisper of bowed metal, quavering strings, and pinched trumpet and slowly builds momentum.

The second, 25-minute piece takes off from there, climaxing with slurred trumpet flurries over sawing cello and crackling percussion. The final piece comes closest to suggesting a series of featured solos, though the shifting ground behind the lead voice is often just as absorbing to listen to.

On Like Machine, Like Voice, the core duo join guitarist Chris Riggs and bassist Zach Wallace for seven trancelike drone pieces driven by the pulsating harmonics and overtones of the stringed instruments and Hall’s bowed and scraped percussion.

Some pieces sound like a darkly amplified harmonium or wheezing organ. Others have an industrial edge, weaving together the metallic groan of Hall’s percussion, Wallace’s shuddering growls, Buetow’s flayed scrapes, and squelched feedback from Riggs’ electric guitar.

Graveyards, Hall and Buetow’s collaboration with saxophonist John Olson, have well over 50 releases by now, most them ridiculously limited editions that have been long out of print. Some would describe this as a free jazz group, but really it’s impossible to describe what a “typical” Graveyards release is like. Even so, this one is a particular oddity.

Screwed and Chopped is a nod to the codeine-infused slow-core mixes from Houston. The core trio plus a guesting Chris Riggs work together to create glacial real-time skronk, throwing up a battery of rattles, howls, mangled reeds, strings, and percussion against a backdrop of prerecorded material from various sources (including outtakes). The two side-long slabs creep along, coming off like a warped soundtrack for a low-fi double-creature-feature. The sonic constructions bellow, echo and slowly decay in the cavernous mix. If there is such a thing as a good starting point to listen to Graveyards, this recording certainly isn’t it. But that is certainly not the point.

With trumpet player Nate Wooley on hand, Hall and Buetow transform into Mêlée. The three have recorded a handful of releases, including one with guest percussionist Aaron Siegel. This time out, they’re joined by guitarist Joe Morris, and the combination is electrifying.

Morris’s prickly playing—full of fleet cascades of notes and percussive clusters—makes a strong match for Wooley’s smears and flutters, and they both play with a sharp focus and a self-assured attack. Hall responds with charged, pointillistic playing, clattering nimbly around his kit, and Buetow buoys the improvisations with looping lines and sawing counterpoint. This one is well worth grabbing before it’s gone.

Michael Rosenstein

century, and his Lifetime band was one of the finest jazz fusion ensembles of the ’70s. It’s the first version of the group, with organist Larry Young and guitarist John McLaughlin, that gets all the attention.

However, Williams’ second band, New Lifetime, released a true fusion classic, 1975’s Believe It, before deteriorating into lame attempts at commercialized disco fusion.

In honor of Williams, two members of that latter group, guitarist Allan Holdsworth and keyboardist Alan Pasqua, reunited in 2006, joined by bassist Jimmy Haslip and drummer Chad Wackerman.

Blues for Tony is a 2-CD compilation of performances from a May 2007 European tour that contains a mix of material from Believe It and newer material by Holdsworth, Pasqua and Wackerman. Their collective chops are considerable, with Holdsworth’s fretwork the obvious focal point. The Holdsworth Mafia will be pleased by the new takes on “Looking Glass” and “Pud Wud,” particularly because his style has evolved so much since those songs were first waxed in the ’80s.

Likewise, Holdsworth’s “Fred” is thrilling, as is the group’s take on Pasqua’s “Proto Cosmos,” always a Holdsworth live favorite. Pasqua’s solo tribute, “To Jaki, George and Thad,” leads into a moving performance of “San Michele,” originally an acoustic piece from his Dedications record. Whether this release will win many new listeners over to progressive electric jazz is doubtful, but those who are sympathetic will it a good example of the best this

genre has to offer. Jay Collins

Jon Irabagon The Observer Concord Jazz CD

Jon Irabagon Mike Pride

I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues Loyal Label CD

Listeners who have followed saxophonist John Irabagon’s work with Mostly Other People Do the Killing or his Outright! group may be caught off guard by his new—and decidedly mainstream—release, The Observer. His tart, juicy alto sax tone is a joy throughout and despite the conventional instrumentation there’s plenty of imagination at work here.

Kenny Barron is on piano, Rufus Reid on bass and Victor Lewis on drums; trumpeter Nicholas Payton appears on two tracks. The CD is a class act all the way, produced by Don Sickler and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. The standout track is “Barfly,” an Elmo Hope composition performed as a sax/piano duet with the sadly underrated pianist’s widow Bertha Hope— absolutely gorgeous! That’s not to discount the stellar work by Barron and colleagues, who are impeccable as usual. The Observer may bring some new fans to Irabagon, being on a major label with decent distribution (if there really still is such a thing as a “major label”). And perhaps those folks will investigate MOPDTK and Outright! as a result. That would be wonderful, as Irabagon has a lot to say in a variety of contexts.

Irabagon sticks strictly to the tenor sax on I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues, a shredding duo with drummer Mike Pride, and I wasn’t prepared for just how ballsy he sounds on that horn. Any record in this format is inevitably compared to Interstellar Space, the classic collaboration between John Coltrane and Rashied Ali. Yet Irabagon and Pride manage to almost completely avoid this reference. Despite the postmodern harmonic vocabulary and high energy level, there are few if any Trane-isms in Irabagon’s approach. His timbre has more in common with Chicago greats Gene Ammons and Johnny Griffin, and there’s a touch of Von Freeman in his idiosyncratic choice of notes and where he places them. This non-stop 48-minute improvisation on—you guessed it—the blues isn’t exactly radio-friendly, but it makes for great driving music. Pop it in the car CD-player, crank up the volume and roll. Bill Barton

Jandek

Portland Thursday Corwood CD x 2

This double-disc live set, the 60th entry in the sprawling, impenetrable catalog of Houston outsider artist Jandek, is the “industry representative’s” fourth release this year; no doubt another will have appeared to demand more shelf space in your collection by the time you read this review. Portland Thursday, the twelfth live release since his first public performance in 2004, continues along the lines of the fractured, suicidal dirges to which this artist has clung like

frayed rope for over three decades, music that repels many while captivating a rabid few. Recorded in Oregon in the spring of 2006 with the support of Grails/Holy Sons/OM drummer Emil Amos and Quasi’s Sam Coomes on bass, the set can’t help but find a sort of rhythmic center that’s at times both patience-breaking and gorgeous (“The Distance Is Gone”) or deliberate and chaotic (“I Asked You Please”). Played with what sounds like absolutely no rehearsal, it’s amazing how focused much of this music is. Jandek’s guitar, surrounded by reverb, jabs at the edges of Coomes and Amos’s roiling grooves, stalking, looking for room. This sparseness serves the music well and certainly shows that Jandek, like Mark E. Smith, is a master at knowing what to leave out. “Come True,” for example, very nearly rocks, setting up something not unlike the kind of bass’n’drum headnodding Amos’s current band, OM, is known for before words find their way into the mix. This is Jandek at his most listenable, taking his time but delivering his own kind of rock and roll punch. Yet if you’ve encountered him before, whether as a keyboard player, an a cappella moaner, a solo acoustic guitarist or the leader of an electric band, you know that he’s not going to be too inviting. To admit to a taste for him might still come with the apprehensive sensation that one is at the butt end of a 31-year-old prank; yet when like-minded musicians such as Liz Harris (Grouper) and Jessica Dennison appear on stage, only to repeat “Whose Mister Is This?” on cue, one gets the sense that an artist who has spent the better part of his career

Allan Holdsworth Alan Pasqua Jimmy Haslip Chad Wackerman Blues for Tony MoonJune CD

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on the outside is finally being beckoned in, even though it’s clearly his show. And with each passing song, the crowd’s applause grows genuinely more enthusiastic. Bruce Miller

Keith Jarrett Testament ECM CD x 3

Let’s say you’re hefting a three-disc set of solo piano improvisations portentously named Testament. The tracks are marked with Roman numerals, but the artist’s essay in the liner notes is titled “Still Crazy After All These Years.”

Now those are some seriously mixed signals. Are you allowed to get fingerprints on this thing or not? There’s no telling, because Keith Jarrett is back at his old high art—chiseling the transitory bumps, bummers and kicks of his life into a massive, pan-musical Statement. And he’s still good at it.

In two late 2008 concerts in Paris and London, Jarrett surveys the piano’s possibilities with a sweep and generosity that takes your breath away. Everything the piano is good at—grunting gospel, soaring Americana, nervous bebop, thrumming tension and swings-at-sunset sentimentality—is here, only supersized. The twinkly track on Disc 2, for example, may be the twinkliest music ever made. The sentimentality is so naked it’s courageous.

But damn it, it’s lovely music. There’s a reason why simple tropes used in films about dying grandfathers affect people so deeply. Pianos are good at them, too. For most of the set, Jarrett is working almost too hard, building massive arches in defiance of physics, hammering away at the leading edge of each mood in mid-air, unsupported.

If he wants to visit the old school and push a rusty swing for a track or two, he’s entitled. In the London concert, he digs a long furrow through earthy gospel-rock soil, harvests a pumpkin of autumnal Americana, runs a bebop figure through a quick series of paces and displacements, drums out a stern work song, then finally eases into something close to a relaxed piano jazz mood. The set’s last track, a valedictory song, begins like a classical exercise, but picks up a gospel inflection, as if the audience were being ushered from church. Ah, those Roman numerals—have I just been to Mass?

The stations of Keith Jarrett, spelled out by the pianist himself on the liner notes, are nailed into his music: the breakdowns and near-breakdowns, the spells of chronic fatigue, his wife’s walkout before Christmas in London, 2008. In the liner notes, Jarrett tells us that two days before the London concert, he closed the curtains in his hotel room because he couldn’t bear to look at the Christmas lights and the couples walking by. But he gets away with kitchen-sink confessions like that because he turns the water into wine.

Larry Cosentino

Darius Jones Trio Mannish Boy AUM Fidelity CD

Digital Primitives Hum Crackle Pop Hopscotch CD

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multi-instrumentalist (and instrument builder) Cooper-Moore. Any project boasting his talents is sure to engender excitement, and these two new releases are brimming with intricacy and raw, soulful invention.

The Darius Jones Trio makes their recorded debut with Mannish Boy, and it’s a barn-burner from note one.

Jones could not have chosen better musicians to enter into his world, with Cooper-Moore and drummer Rakalam Bob Moses enhancing every moan, cry and shriek emanating from his alto. Jones exhorts “Cry Out” into being, Cooper-Moore contributing bluesy free piano; the excitement builds as Jones testifies with “new thing” yawps and shouts, the whole experience conjuring shades of late 1950s Mingus. By contrast, “Forgive Me” is a ballad of aching beauty, again featuring Cooper-Moore on piano; Jones’s wistful vibrato is matched perfectly by Moses’ light and sensitive drumming. Here (and on the similarly inclined “Meekness”) time seems to be suspended while the three musicians breathe slowly as one. The disc veers wildly between these extremes, ending with the rousing and raucous “Chaych,” which features a different rhythm section of Adam Lane on bass and drummer Jason Nazary.

Several of the tracks feature Cooper-Moore’s diddley-bo, and that homemade instrument is also present on the second Digital Primitives album. It features the same trio as on their first release, also for reedman Assif Tsahar’s Hopscotch label, but this time around, technology has become a more integral part of the trio’s sound. The group hardly resembles a trio anymore, especially on the rhythmically intricate “Walkabout,” where transparent but sharp percussion overdubs contrast with CooperMoore’s extraordinarily human-sounding mouth bow and Tsahar’s brooding clarinet. Chad Taylor lays down heavy grooves throughout the CD, many compressed and filtered, as on the politically charged “The People.”

That track also finds Cooper-Moore testifying at fever pitch, exhorting the listener: “Do the people have a right? … You, You, You have a right to know!” It would all come off as a bit of a relic if it weren’t for the entirely contemporary-sounding use of studio technology. Marc Medwin

as Killick was recovering from a lifethreatening duodenal ulcer, the music here leaves notions of the purely musical behind in search of life-affirming noise. “Hosanna” and “Brickbats” are calm, fluid exercises for the horns, with Killick creating volume-knob-controlled electric hums and Dailor adding floortom rolls behind them. Yet, midway through “Grasshopper Escapement,” the horns play linked long notes while Killick boils behind them, driving the pulse into what becomes celebratory, cathartic and ultimately ecstatic before sputtering to a close. The disc contains seven proper tracks, plus seven remixes, though these bear little to no resemblance to what’s come before.

Everything from a solo, echo-chamber drum piece, to shredded white noise, to instrumental hip hop appears on the second half of the disc. The juxtaposition of tinkered and original versions is often confounding, a distorting mirror held up to the live quartet’s organic impulses: it’s like having two albums by two (or three or four) different artists.

Bruce Miller

Matt Lavelle and Morcilla

The Manifestation Drama KMB Jazz CD

Like the Spanish blood sausage from which the name of Matt Lavelle’s band is derived, this Morcilla is also an acquired taste; something hardcore, difficult to digest. Yet with its earnest, loose orchestration (there is no drum kit), the group’s new record The Manifestation Drama also shows a certin vulnerability. The primitive, almost lumbering head of “God

Love Sex”—played in unison by the quartet (Lavelle on bass clarinet; Andre Martinez on conga; Francois Grillot on bass; and Chris Forbes on piano)— yields to collective, freely-improvised explorations, with the leader eventually switching to flugelhorn. The title track starts almost as a lullaby, then unfolds seamlessly into a dissertation on life, love, and death. There’s Forbes’ wistful piano; Martinez’s just-so textures; and Grillot’s arco bass; but there’s also a rare sort of sacrifice as the delineations between soloist and sideman dissolve and each virtuoso wholeheartedly contributes precisely what’s called for, even when laying out. This abstract balladry yields easily to “The Living Desire,” a latinate, celebratory Pharoah-Sanders-like groove that definitively asserts that there is no piano without forte. “Weather Shamanism” is an at-first tentative exploration of the bass clarinet’s upper register, with conga accompaniment. While it may seem a weak way to end the album, it's a reminder of its main strength: the way Lavelle and his cohort create an accommodating space that invites the listener in.. Chris Sampson

Gianni Lenoci Carlos Zingaro Marcello Magliocchi Serendipity Amirani CD

Jorge Lima Barreto Carlos Zingaro KITS 2

Numérica CD

Violinist Carlos Zingaro is arguably the leading figure in Portuguese

free improvisation, the first in his country some four decades ago to seize the new European improv.

And if the idea among at least some of that generation of European improvisers was to link the freedom of 1960s American jazz to their own heritage, Zingaro might be one of the strongest examples of bringing classicism and romantic flourish into spontaneous music. If we’re willing to grant all of that, his trio with the Italian duo of pianist Gianni Lenoci and percussionist Marcello Magliocchi is one of the finer examples of his lyrical voice. Serendipity, recorded live at the 2007 Bari Jazz Festival, is from beginning to end an exercise in good taste. Zingaro’s violin sings throughout, Magliocchi’s playing is light and distinctive, and Lenoci confidently maintains the bass register while accenting the violin’s treble.

It’s a beautifully acoustic trio, the purity of their sound augmented only slightly by Lenoci’s occasional string preparations. It somehow is an excitingly relaxed 45 minutes.

KITS 2 finds Zingaro with a different sort of playing partner but adheres to a similar modality. If Zingaro represents one of the first players of free music in Portugal, pianist Jorge Lima Barreto was one of the first people to cover it: his writings about free jazz, art rock and the avant garde date back to the 1960s.

His association with Zingaro reaches back to 1968, when the two founded the Conceptual Music Association.

Barreto doesn’t have the same formal inclinations as Zingaro—he seems to work more in gestures than phrases—which makes an interesting

challenge for the violinist. There is a constant push-pull here, an endless creating and smoothing of edges, as if Zingaro were charged with forever tidying up Barreto’s octave jumping and string sweeping. It’s a bit more breakneck than Serendipity, but the mix of familiarity and confrontation makes for a dynamic (and beautifully recorded) listen. Kurt Gottschalk

Samara Lubelski Future Slip Ecstatic Peace! CD

The idea of “finely-tuned psychedelia” might seem like something of an oxymoron, especially coming from a musician who has worked in such shambolic “free-folk” ensembles as the Tower Recordings, Hall of Fame, and Matt Valentine’s group. But since 2004’s The Fleeting Skies (De Stijl), Samara Lubelski has brought a delicately compelling approach to blissed-out folk rock. Future Slip is her sixth album as a bandleader/principal songwriter, and her first for Ecstatic Peace. She’s joined by, among others, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums, Tower Recordings’ PG Six on guitar, and Thilo Kuhn, Moritz Finkbeiner and Werner Notzel (keyboards, guitars) from Metabolismus, across ten songs in about thirty minutes.

“Culture King ’66” merges electric piano, ethereal multi-tracked vocals and hollow guitars ringing across modes à la Michael Karoli. In other hands, it would end up decidedly unhinged. But Lubelski’s arrangement is admirably taut, a two-minute nugget gently prodded by galloping percussion and slinky bass (ever hear

Killick's Exsanguinette

“...And the Creek Don't Rise” Solponticello CD

Guitarist Killick (aka Erik Hinds, the h’arpeggione shredder behind a particularly concentrated take on Slayer’s “Reign in Blood”) leads a quartet (featuring drummer Brann Dailor (Mastodon), trumpeter Liz Allbee and Rova Saxophone Quartet tenor player Larry Ochs) through what’s often a high speed chase of instrument assault.

The first two tracks are a much more brutal meeting of hard core and jazz than anything Last Exit came within a mile of, kicking up such a dust storm of whinnying sonic overload that it only makes sense that what follows is an exercise in quiet; this band would have all died of heart attacks had they continued at the opening pace. Recorded WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 67

Samara in Pacer?). Lubelski’s voice is thin and slightly raspy, cottony in the way of a huskier Linda Perhacs. But though they’re certainly atmospheric, the vocals have a punchy clarity, like vivid flecks strewn across the sonic landscape. There is a formula apparent through several of the tunes: Shelley’s double-time drums serve as the engine behind muted guitar counterpoint, which lopes along easily in a fashion halfway between country-rock and krautrock. “Headships Down” is introduced without drums, a chant fleshed out by dissonant guitar and keyboards before teasingly out-of-tempo cymbal work ups the tension. “The Trip Is Out” is a dangerous siren song from Eno-land, though it’s clothed in dense, wiry fabric. Future Slip is a simple pleasure, ten crackling pop-psych koans.

Clifford Allen

Raymond MacDonald Satoko Fujii Neil Davidson Natsuki Tamura Tom Bancroft Cities

Nu-Jazz CD

Aporias Trio Entre Nous Iorram CD

When speaking of locations that foster improvisational ferment, Glasgow, Scotland doesn’t exactly jump to the lips like Berlin or London or Chicago.

But the practice has its adherents there, who have in turn kept a steady stream of likeminded souls from other parts passing through their town. Common to both of these discs are guitarist Neil Davidson and saxophonist Raymond MacDonald, and on each they encounter players who were born in Japan. But there the similarities end.

Cities is a real high point for everyone involved; high quality, high spirits, and high energy. The husbandwife duo of pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura make a lot of records, some of which convey a definite sense that you had to be there. Not this time. They feel engaged, feeding off the other players’ ideas and presenting their own quite forcefully. Drummer Tom Bancroft rounds out the Scottish contingent, and all three Scotsmen sound equally inspired by the Japanese. But this is not some free jazz blowout; rather, it’s a series of textural and motivic explorations of conventional and nonconventional vocabularies that feels eager to get its point across.

Entre Nous is equally charged, but much less weighty. American-based, Japanese-born percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani is the visitor, and the music he makes with MacDonald and Davidson feels rooted in the skittering flurries of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. No one’s copying; Nakatani is much more willing to produce coarse, elongated sounds than John Stevens ever did when he had sticks in his hands, and Davidson’s personal integration of sonic atomization and rock amplification puts him in a very different place than Derek Bailey.

MacDonald knows the history of his instrument, so he could probably play you back a few licks from each SME 68 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

saxophonist, but his personal mix of honey and vinegar is quite differently proportioned than Butcher, Watts, or Parker’s. It’s just that they have a similar lightness on their feet and willingness to let space coexist with quick activity. Bill Meyer

Eyal Moaz Asaf Sirkis

Elementary Dialogues Ayler download

Eyal Moaz’s Edom

Hope and Destruction Tzadik CD

Guitarist Eyal Moaz plays a kind of sharp, trebly jangle, with a Ribotinflected love of the lick and a good feel for the groove (his quirky, behindthe-beat phrasing is just a hint reminiscent of Luis Lopes’). On the duets with drummer Asaf Sirkis, he evinces a wide range of devices in these brief love letters to various genres and improvisational styles. For example, it sounds like he’s using an old Digitech delay pedal on the genre goof “Reggae.” While this is bread and butter for a legion of post-Frisell slingers, Moaz certainly uses these devices effectively, with noise and mischief. And this is the key to the enjoyment of these dialogues, this and the fact that nothing overstays its welcome. They erupt with noisy mania and skronk on “OK” and “Foglah.” They play tight folkish themes on “Duo” and the spring-loaded “Kashmir” (firmly Tiny Bell rather than Led Zep). And they even take time for a sweet ballad (“Miniature”) and spacey monster movie soundtracks like “Sparse” or “Shadows.” It’s a bit unfocused as a program, but it’s certainly an enjoyable listen.

The sophomore release of Moaz’s Edom combo—with keyboardist Brian Marsella, bassist Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, and drummer Yuval Lion— isn’t too far off of Yoshie Fruchter’s rock-driven unit in its love of heavy riffs. Sometimes Marsella’s flavor is of the noisy hip-hop variety, as with the proto-scratching of “Somewhere”; in other places, as on “Tsi,” it’s more like a 1980s goth-rock sound (with themes from the Masada songbook), with propulsive klez-grooves almost passing for bubbly synth-pop percolation (they teeter precariously on this boundary on “Eagle” and the fun-as-hell “Messenger” before the noise freakout comes barreling forth).

This kind of gestural goofing—penny whistle and indie-rock comping on “Rocks,” surf-rock on the organ-driven “Slight Sun,” or the quasi-polka “King”—usually repels me pretty quickly. And while I’m not entirely sold on Edom’s sound, they do this with more aplomb and musicality than a lot of other combos. What’s more, they do have a depth dimension as well, as on the intensities of “Shuki” or the reflective closer “Down.”

Jason Bivins

an apt image for this Vermont duo, whose records feel handmade.

In the past, MV & EE (a.k.a. Matt Valentine and Erika Elder) have painted the covers of individual CDs before selling them at merch tables.

They’ve made a cottage industry out of their music, putting out more than 30 records in the past decade.

They’re a self-sufficient operation from the woods of New England, making whatever music they feel like making and releasing it on their own terms. But however underground they might be, MV & EE are making accessible and impressive rock music that would probably draw legions of fans, if only more people heard it. The influence of Neil Young is obvious, especially Young’s electric music with Crazy Horse, but MV & EE also evoke other bands of the late ’60s and early ’70s, including Canned Heat and the Grateful Dead.

Recorded live at their home studio and other locations, Barn Nova feels like a jam session of loosely played shuffles and guitar duels, but the jamming never wanders too far and the songs are direct, almost concise.

The lyrics often consist of simple phrases repeated several times— lines like “Look way down,” “summer magic is gone,” or “I’m really sorry now.” Profound poetry it isn’t, but Valentine and Elder understand how well a few basic words can work in the context of a rock song. On Barn Nova, which MV & EE are billing as their fourth “major release,” the duo plays with a talented lineup of backing musicians, including regulars Doc Dunn and Mike Smith, plus guest stars Jeremy Earl of Woods,

Justin Pizzoferrato and J. Macsis.

Heavy reverb, high-pitched falsetto vocals and guitar effects pedals give the music an ethereal quality at times. MV & EE have their own name for the sort of stereo movement they create on the fly while playing in the studio, labeling it “Spectrasound.”

It’s hard to know whether there’s anything all that innovative about this recording technique, but whatever MV & EE are doing, they’ve learned how to capture their powerful sound on tape with vivid results.

Robert Loerzel

Sainkho Namchylak Dickson Dee Tea Opera Leo CD

Tuvan vocalist Sainkho Namchylak’s already remarkable career has taken some surprising turns in recent years.

She’s continued to expand on the traditions of her Soviet heritage (check out her interesting work with the Moscow Composers Orchestra) but she’s also met with artists from seemingly incompatible backgrounds, both in terms of genre and geography, with exciting results. Her 2007 release with Roy Carroll was unusual not just as a voice and electronics duo, but in its tying together of Irish and Tuvan heritages. Tea Opera is another unexpected pairing, this time with the Hong Kong DJ and electronicist Dickson Dee, who also works under the names Li Chin Sung, DJ Dee, Khoomi Sound Machine and PNF. Dee has performed in experimental and noise projects with Zbigniew Karkowski, Otomo

Yoshihide, Maja Ratkje, Keiji Haino and others, but he also spends time in dance and world music spheres.

And while Namchylak might be better known for her work with free improvisers like Peter Kowald and Evan Parker, she has also fronted some beat-oriented world music groups. Fortunately this duo recording focuses on the more interesting of their common denominators, with Namchylak’s chirps and growls enveloped in an array of distinct, but never distant, sounds. Dee likes big events, woofer-shaking booms and clear electronic tones, often seeming to indulge in some serious stylus grinding. The recording is at least as big as the duo’s performance, and ends up feeling a bit like a depth perception trick. Dee sounds huge, but never overwhelms the subtle minutiae of Namchylak’s vocals.

Kurt Gottschalk

New Haven Improvisers Collective Interference NHIC CD

Elm City Guitar Quartet + 3 Crash NHIC CD

About fifty musicians make up the New Haven Improvisers Collective, which was founded by guitarist Bob Gorry to encourage and support participation in improvised music around the New Haven, Connecticut area. Though local heroes like Joe Morris, Stephen Haynes and Daniel Levin count themselves as

part of the organization, it also brings together amateur players and those from outside the jazz/free improvisation orbit to participate in workshops and concerts. The history of collectivism in New Haven music goes back at least as far as the 1970s, when Leo Smith and other Yale-associated players founded the Creative Musicians Improvisers Forum (CMIF), which fostered the careers of Mario Pavone, Gerry Hemingway and others. The NHIC are extending this tradition in admirable ways. The collective has also released three CDs of its members music, including these by the Elm City Guitar Quartet and a septet drawn from the NHIC. Interference presents a total of twenty-two tracks, including eight miniatures and one long-form composition, along with two offkilter covers of Monk’s “Straight No Chaser.” Seven musicians from the collective take part: guitarists Gorry and Jeff Cedrone, bassist/clarinetist Carl Testa (a veteran of Anthony Braxton’s ensembles), vocalist Anne Rhodes, violist Gabriel Kastelle, soprano saxophonist Paul McGuire and percussionist Steve Zieminski.

“Quantum Decoherence,” like a number of the pieces here, draws from a number of sources —rock, free improvisation, contemporary composed music—and integrates them quite seamlessly. Zieminski’s whirling pots propel droning strings, soprano, and voice at the outset, then develop into a slinky tango-like rhythm as viola and soprano wheel and drop in folksy lilt that’s almost Balkan. Another signpost and a

MV & EE

Barn Nova

Ecstatic Peace! CD

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straight-time backbeat emerges as lightly distorted guitar and doublestopped viola tug at one another before opening up into a spacious, phrase-and-response sound area.

It’s a wonder that these voices aren’t usually heard outside of New Haven environs; Kastelle’s viola is particularly engaging, a mixture of bluesy and East European inflections able to elide from wail to dance in a very short time-span.

The Elm City Guitar Quartet takes a free-rock approach to improvising, and joins Gorry and Cedrone with fellow electric guitarists Tom Gogola and Christopher Venter. On Crash, their recorded debut, the foursome is joined by Steve Zieminski, as well as reedmen John Venter and Adam Matlock on nine compositions. Immediately apparent is the rawness of the proceedings, which were recorded directly to two-track at bookstore venue Never Ending Books (as opposed to the state-of-the-art Firehouse 12 space represented on the NHIC disc). Matlock’s clarinet is a shrill mix of Perry Robinson and James Chance atop a riotous stew of juggernaut chords and feedback skronk, Zieminski pounding the hell out of his kit before an abrupt halt (it’s safe to assume the music here is culled as sections from a larger, single suite, even if they’re variously credited). There’s a juke-joint jam buried somewhere in “Marching Out,” uncoiled skittering and top-heavy riffs sharing space with baritone saxophone, accordion and Zieminski’s unfurling waves. Rather than the intertwining of complementary personalities one might get in, say, an Acoustic Guitar Trio recording, the emphasis here is on a murky and sometimes maddening process, one which is nevertheless interesting to hear righting itself toward blistering conclusions.

Clifford Allen

Om

God is Good Drag City CD

Live Conference Important LP

Along with Earth (inspiration) and Sleep (previous incarnation), Om is one of the chief proponents of NWOEDHM (New Wave of Experimental Drone Heavy Metal). Om’s strict restraint, though, sets them apart from Earth and Sleep—it’s probably no coincidence that the bandname suggests austere chanting, though the music more directly recalls an earlier time when metal was being borne of psychedelia.

While they make their own unique, long-form music, Om also serve as a reminder that early Pink Floyd and early Black Sabbath were not such distant cousins. Bass-heavy and built out of gradual repetitions, Om’s songs (like Floyd’s and Sabbath’s) are pop songs—dark, heavy, long and universal pop songs.

God Is Good brings some changes to the band. Emil Amos of Grails has replaced Chris Haikus behind the drums, which for a twopiece is a major change in line-up.

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a steady yet fluid foundation. And just as consequential as having a new drummer is the fact that Steve Albini (who recorded their 2007 album Pilgrimage) is back. The four tracks here are huge, full without being busy, warm without being robbed of their essential austerity.

Flute and tambura weave through the downtempo riffs, reinforcing the impression that is a spiritual outing: in a sphere where the sign of the devil is a way to say ‘hello,’ there’s still nothing to suggest that the title is ironic. Just as Sabbath’s view of the universe included both heaven and hell (“They should realize before they criticize / that God is the only way to love”), God Is Good seeks to reflect and embrace the vastness of existence, whatever name it’s given.

Amos also appears on the vinyl-only Live Conference, recorded eight months after Haikus’s departure. Here the duo recreates its 2006 album Conference of the Birds, and it’s great to hear the original album imbued with the energy of a live set and with Amos’s freer drumming. The recording is also beautiful, with warm bass and nice, round vocals. It’s an interesting first step for Amos, who sounds understandably more comfortable with the material (apparently co-written by him) on God Is Good. But it’s a strong record, given lovely treatment by Important (with a dye-cut cover and pressings on clear, white and black vinyl), and it provides a nice bridge between Oms I and II. Kurt Gottschalk

On Fillmore

jections, On Fillmore’s new album is a testament to the fact that longdistance relationships can sometimes flourish. Adam Strohm

Pere Ubu

Long Live Père Ubu Hearthan CD / download

Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi: The Radio Play Hearthan download

Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi was a pitiless attack on all that was proper and respectable in the late 19th century. Even though it was basically a scatological rewrite of Macbeth, it has endured partly because of its notoriety—if its first staging inspired a riot, it must be cool, right?—and because it’s a handy projective device. No matter whom you hate, if you think the object of your hatred is venal and vile, they look just like King Ubu. Singer David Thomas and a small circle of co-conspirators appropriated the name in 1975 to name a project originally conceived as a studio endeavor to record a couple songs left over from Thomas’s previous band Rocket From The Tombs, but they didn’t stop there. In its first seven years, Ubu’s blend of wild electronic noise and potent rock action utterly transformed music. Subsequent iterations have been more song-oriented and reflected Thomas’s concerns of the moment. This latest project began as a dare to finally deal with the band’s namesake, but what brought it to life was Thomas’s discovery of that same thing that every other revivalist has found in the play: the face of what he hates.

Thomas defines the do-gooder on the record’s FAQ page as “a well-meaning but unrealistic or interfering philanthropist or reformer,” which could mean anyone from Jerry Falwell to Barack Obama. But as articulated on Long Live Père Ubu, which he has reconceived as an anti-do-gooder screed, we’re talking about a liberal taxer and a cynical environmentalist who is really just a morally bankrupt opportunist out to extract every possible dime from the populace. In Cook County, where I live, that’s a pretty accurate characterization of the Democratic Party, but across the country it lines up nicely with whatever Rush Limbaugh loves to hate. If this alignment with the slow and bulbous doesn’t bother you enough to get right off the bus, you’ve got your choice of two different LLPUs. One is the album, which features the version of Ubu that has been active since 2002 augmented by second vocalist Sarah Jane Morris.

Her coarse and hectoring presence nags Thomas’s King Ubu into various loathsome acts, all committed with lassitude and irresolution; the only thing the foul king really cares about is the satiation of his appetites. It’s tough going, one lump after another of misanthropic coal weighing down your stocking, set to music that updates some old Ubu sounds but rarely functions as more than a backdrop to the libretto. The radio play is more involving. It works the songs into a sequence of incidental sounds, spoken interludes, and toilet-flushes that aren’t a whole lot more pleasant than the tunes, but are often funnier.

Rather than the dropping of discrete

lumps that makes you want to step aside, it has an inexorable flow that invites the listener to hang on and see where it’s going to go. The CD may sound better, but it’s a Reader’s Indigestion abridgement compared to the radio play. Bill Meyer

Németh’s hanging scrims, tinged with an edge of cracked distortion.

The six pieces unfold in a dream-like suite of engulfing sound. This one is a strong return. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another four years for their next release. Michael Rosenstein

Radian

Maja S.K. Ratkje Lasse Marhaug

Chimeric

Thrill Jockey CD

Hard to believe that it has been four years since Radian put out their last recording, Juxtaposition. On that release, they honed their distinctive, idiosyncratic approach to glitch beats and mercurial timbral striations with a lushly produced sound. In the intervening time, guitarist Stefan Németh has put out his solo release Film along with a recent recording by his group Lokai. Percussionist Martin Brandlmayr has been busy recording with Polwechsel, Autistic Daughters, Kapital Band 1, and a trio with Werner Dafeldecker and Christian Fennesz. But from the first raw, cracked beats of “Git Cut Noise,” the opening cut of this new release, it is evident that Németh, Brandlmayr, and bassist John Norman have been thinking about where to take things.

Not that Chimeric is a radical reworking of their sound. But they’ve let some of the rawness that was there in their first EP and the follow-up, TG11, back in, freely combining heavily processed recordings with sections of acoustic playing. Brandlmayr’s pinpoint touch and constantly morphing sense of pulse and momentum are key throughout as he locks in to Norman’s brooding layers and

Music for Gardening Pica Disk CD

Maja Ratkje and Lasse Marhaug first met in 2000 at a workshop in Oslo led by visiting musician Otomo Yoshihide. Since then, the two have gone on to work together on a periodic basis, recording a series of duos (Music for Shopping, Music for Loving, and Music for Faking) as well as All Men Are Pigs, a collaboration between Marhaug and Fe-Mail (Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord). Music for Gardening is their newest entry and, according to Marhaug’s Pica Disk website, “the seven tracks on this CD are meant to inspire the listener to spend more time in their garden taking care of their plants.”

Well, that may be true in some parallel universe, where gardening time is accompanied by shredded noise collages built from blasts of static and low-end rumble, warped electronics, pummeling beats, and cut-up samples. As on past entries in the series, Ratkje and Marhaug are omnivorous magpies, cobbling together 25 minutes of speed-sprints from a wild array of sources. Anything can get tossed into their sonic blender, from lonesome harmonica to yowling cats and dogs to operatic arias to shreds

Extended Vacation Dead Oceans CD

On Fillmore has never been a fulltime endeavor for rhythm men Darin Gray and Glenn Kotche, but the duo’s various other commitments (the former with Akira Sakata, Chris Corsano and Jim O’Rourke, the latter with Wilco) have made their latest disc together the product of a three-year process. The title reflects the distance in both time and space that marked the album’s creation, and Extended Vacation finds On Fillmore at their moodiest yet. The emphasis remains on rhythm instruments, but the album’s full of mournful melody and atmosphere, and the upright bass and vibraphone that are at the center of nearly every track are far from the album’s only voices. The sound can be bright, but the tone is dark, and Extended Vacation is as much about what’s lurking in the expansive shadows as what’s going on at center stage. Kotche’s vibraphone gives the album a foggy film-noir feel, blanketing it with lush, ringing tones. This isn’t particularly “difficult” music, but it’s still often quite mysterious. Unexpected sounds emerge from origins unknown, like spices that add their own subtle flavors to the music. The title track is the album’s oddest, with auxiliary percussion, busy rhythms, and some surprising distortion towards its end, but nearly each selection on the disc packs a detour or two.

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of bebop, country-and-western waltz, and hard rock. They meld anarchonoise blast with a healthy dose of comic pacing. So pull on those garden gloves, get out the rake and mulch, and blast this out into the garden. Who knows what the tomatoes will think? Michael Rosenstein

Justin Rubin Nostalgia Innova CD

Justin Rubin chairs the composition program at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He’s been fortunate to find advocates for his music among his faculty colleagues at UMD. In particular, bassoonist Jefferson Campbell has commissioned and championed a number of his recent works, which comprise most of the program on Nostalgia.

In this postmodern era, many composers, even the Neoromantic ones, eschew overt nostalgia or sentimentality. One can understand why heart-on-sleeve gestures might be approached with care. But Rubin’s music manages to channel the nostalgic without becoming cloying, a tenuous balance abetted

by Campbell’s sensitive, accurate playing. He strikes just the right tone on the title work, allowing its gentle melodies to be poignant but never overwrought. He performs with incisive flair on the wide-ranging solo piece Recitative Styrienne and with percussionist Gene Koshinski on the elegantly neoclassical “Bagatelles for Bassoon and Marimba.” Un Temps Calme, on the other hand, is in a more contemplative vein, channeling Messiaen and supplying Campbell with long, supple melodies. Also noteworthy is the Hindemith-tinged Variations on “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” based on an old Lutheran chorale.

Clarinetist Patrick O’Keefe and pianist Shannon Wettstein are a nimble pair. Alongside Koshinski, they also provide a sterling rendering of the shimmering, all-too-brief trio Il Momento Iussureggiante per tre musicisti. Christian Carey

Saint Dirt Elementary School

Ice Cream Man Dreams Barnyard CD

Ice cream men must have very strange dreams indeed, or perhaps lap steel player Myk Freedman, the composer of the 14 pieces on Ice Cream Man Dreams, has strange dreams about the inner lives of the ice cream man. These tracks have whimsical titles such as “He Looks Just Like Her (and she thinks he’s beautiful),” “I Am Trapped on a Ship That Has Already Sunk,” and “She’s Not My Girlfriend (my girlfriend’s normal).” The music is obviously inspired by television theme music and cartoon themes, and it contains elements of jazz, blues, and latin with a heavy debt to the British music hall tradition. The orchestra is a nine-piece cohort of Toronto musicians, with the instrumentation— acoustic guitar, analog synthesizer, lap steel, piano, melodica, clarinet, alto sax, drums, glockenspiel, bass— giving Freedman a lot of sonorities

to work with. The music is generally fairly light, not taking itself too seriously. But that is not meant to put it down in any way. We might dismiss the ice cream men among us as mere adjuncts to the more serious business of daily life, but they do serve an important function, and their dreams are just as worthy of consideration as those of any among us. Mike Chamberlain

Fire!

the success of a project.

Akira Sakata was born in Kure, Japan, one of the country’s main naval centers, in 1945. The alto saxophonist is most famous for being part of the mighty Yosuke Yamashita trio of the ‘70s. He has also released a number of records as a leader since the late ‘70s and had a famous encounter with Last Exit in the mid ‘80s. Friendly Pants is a trio recording, a format with which Sakata seems most comfortable, recorded in 2006 (and originally released in Japan) with bassist Darin Gray and drummer Chris Corsano. These players may be a couple of generations removed from their leader but energy flows from all three sides of this triangle. The album is comprised of six pieces of varying length and density, with two of the four tracks duets between Sakata and one of his charges. If there is a template for this type of fiery-yet-spiritual exploration it might be Arthur Jones’ Scorpio (BYG-Actuel, 1969). Sakata is a fervent player, with sharp keen that can be frightening, exultant or heartbreaking. And in Gray and Corsano—with whom Sakata had previous live experience in a group with Jim O’Rourke in 2005—he has the kind of partners who know when to be sympathetic and when to talk back to their elders. Corsano in particular might be one of today's most dynamic free jazz drummers.

This reviewer had the chance to see Sakata’s trio live in March 2009, a highlight of Mats Gustafsson’s excellent Perspectives festival in southern Sweden. Gustafsson (himself now something of a legend within the free jazz community having worked with pretty much everyone who matters) is a big fan of Sakata’s and slivers of his approach can be picked out in Gustafsson’s exhortational style. But though the Swedish saxophonist is called upon most often for his explosive qualities, he has a more introspective side that transforms the nature of his squalls (see his solo albums for proof). Fire! is a cooperative trio with Gustafsson and two players also younger than him: bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin, both burgeoning members of the Scandinavian/international improv scenes. The title of the album might be prophetic; listeners expecting the hyperactivity of The Thing might be disappointed. There is an almost plodding quality to the four tracks contained therein, but this actually creates tension rather than deflates it, via the contrapuntal nature of firm rhythms under extemporaneous saxophone. Gustafsson’s electronics and/or Fender Rhodes adds an ambient touch that makes it a much more mesmerizing, rather than pulverizing, entry into his extensive discography. Andrey Henkin

Rune Grammofon CD

Boris Savoldelli Elliott Sharp

David Sait Glen Hall Gino Robair LaDonna Smith

Postage Paid Duets, Vol. 2 Aprise CD

For volume two in the Postage Paid series, the Canadian guzheng improviser pairs up with the various percussion of California’s Gino Robair, the viola, violin and erhu of Alabama’s LaDonna Smith or the flute and sax of Canada’s Glen Hall for seven lengthy dialogues, all of which retain a certain cautious calm. Sait takes full advantage of his 21-string ancient Chinese zither’s adaptation to various tunings, making it perfect for constant free exploration. As on Volume One, which featured Sait in duet with Eugene Chadbourne, the players don’t actually meet, but instead adapt to, one assumes, a recording of Sait’s basic improvisatory template. Sait, who comes from an improv-based musical family (his father was a jazz bandleader and composer) and who has performed on one instrument or another since age eight, takes particular relish in playing in odd settings, where the music and the place are of equal influence. In this way, even solo, he is truly in duet with his surroundings. All of which makes these musical conversations, where the partner isn’t physically present, that much more interesting. More fascinating still is that he takes the instrument far, far away from whatever ethnic connotations it might otherwise conjure. In his hands, it’s simply an instrument ripe for exploration, whether being plucked as a rhythmic equal to Robair’s bike horn and snare or snaking springy bent notes underneath Hall’s soprano saxophone or Smith’s various bowed string instruments. This, then, is real “world” music, played by musicians in an undefined space, using instruments found around the globe, conjuring a music, in its mystery, subtlety and gentleness, that could be not only from anywhere, but everywhere. Bruce Miller

Akira Sakata & Chikamorachi Friendly Pants Family Vineyard CD

You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago By now, free jazz has a history long enough to include its own elder statesmen. Given the music’s bellicose nature, they are usually saxophonists, but frequently the contributions of younger “rhythm section” players are just as crucial to

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his usual guitars, electronics, and occasional saxophone, while Boris Savoldelli brings his voice (“singer” doesn’t quite cover it, really) and electronic treatments/loops/delays/ etc. to the table. Savoldelli is a vocalist in the bona fide sense, the way Jeanne Lee, Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Cathy Berberian, and Tim Buckley were/are. He uses it as a true instrument and primo noisemaker, and he is about as unpredictable as Sharp, making this a nifty team-up.

Protoplasmic consists of 11 improvised duets (with no overdubbing)—as a whole it’s a maddening (in the best possible way), surreal trip to the center of your/the collective mind. This music would’ve been perfect for the Anthony Hopkins “welcome to my mind” segment of the movie Freejack. (Not a great movie, true, but not awful, either...and jazz saxophonist George Coleman has a cameo, too.) Bluesy acoustic riffs careen off pulsating ink-blot echoes, slabs of steely guitar are delicately welded by laser-like croons and sighs, and choruses of cartoon voices (think Mel Blanc on LSD, or vodka and steroids) are sliced ‘n’ diced by a saxophone blown by a hipster Galactus—it’s all this and more. It’s trippy, but also inspired— there is no plink-plonk meandering. There’s plenty of momentum (abstract though it may seem) here and the sheer, audacious joy of, dare I say, sound —but unlike art school dropouts banging on sheet metal or sound artists recording an open can of soda, these gents

really have the musicality to make it matter. Mark Keresman

Irène Schweizer Barry Guy London Jazz Composers Orchestra Radio Rondo — Schaffhausen Concert Intakt CD

The triple credit here to Irène Schweizer, Barry Guy, and London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO) is required to fully describe this release recorded live at the 2008 Schaffhausen Jazzfestival in Switzerland. The recording captures both a solo piece that Schweizer performed at the festival and a piece that Guy wrote for the LJCO with Schweizer as featured guest. Guy and the LJCO had last recorded 15 years ago and last performed at the 1998 Berlin Jazz Festival. Since then the members have splintered off on their usual busy schedules and Guy has focused his work for ensemble on his New Orchestra, a scaled-back but no less impressive unit. When Guy got the commission to compose a new piece for the LJCO, he decided to create a new composition in the form of a rondo.

But here, the repeated thematic material appears as improvisational clusters for the ensemble, and the intervening episodes are structured around Schweizer as soloist as well as various sub-groupings. The results are less formal than earlier LJCO pieces like Theoria, which also featured Schweizer (indeed, Guy actually wrote the piece after

listening to a number of the pianist’s solo recordings). So it is fitting that the CD starts out with a 15-minute Schweizer solo. Starting with a dark hammered chord, she builds her improvisation out of lissome, balletic flurries and resonant, percussive clusters. As always, she creates a complexly unfolding form with a masterful sense of timing and articulation. “Radio Rondo” starts with the blast of the full ensemble and then opens up in much the same way.

Schweizer’s clusters cascade off of honking reeds, metallic percussion clatter, and smeared brass. Over the course of the thirty-minute piece sections of churning freedom make way for segments of dark melodicism. With five reed players, three trombones, three trumpets, tuba, violin, two basses, and two drummers, Guy has plenty of opportunity to juxtapose the dynamically massed ensemble with various sub-groupings. There are concise solo spots for many of the orchestra’s members, but it’s Schweizer’s piano that runs through and anchors the entire piece. This recording is a welcome return of the LJCO and captures a triumphant collaboration between Guy, Schweizer, and the ensemble.

Michael Rosenstein

Steven R. Smith Cities

Immune LP / download

Ulaan Kohl III

Soft Abuse CD

Given the rate at which Stephen R.

Smith puts out albums—roughly two a year—you might expect the guy to start repeating himself. He does have an instantly identifiable sound, one characterized by heroic, crumbling electric guitars jousting with rasping bowed instruments against a backdrop of murk that seems more temporal or atmospheric than sonic.

But he also maintains enough variety to keep his records from feeling like copies of earlier ones, even when they’re part of a consciously linked series.

One way that Smith changes things up is by adopting guises; as Hala Strana, he sound-mapped an imaginary Eastern Europe, while the name Ulaan Khol is the mantle he dons when he needs to blow out black hunks of noise. So you have to look two years and four disks back from Cities to find another release under his name alone. It feels like a summation of what he’s been doing over the past few years, incorporating his experiments with voice and acoustic guitar, his use of album-long narrative forms, and his reverb-laden guitar figures, but also a departure in his increased used of pianos and organ as well as the unusually careful and spacious arrangements.

And once again Smith has selected packaging that enhances the music; the way the sleeve’s painting fades from gorgeous autumnal colors to coal black imbues themes like “The Paling Day” and “The City Gate” with a certain distance, as though you’re viewing them through filters of memory or legend.

III, on the other hand, is as immediate as a truck with failed brakes

Protoplasmic MoonJune CD

In a way, I wish there weren’t any credits on this disc—I think it’d be more fun trying to guess how these sounds were made, and by whom.

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crashing through your living room wall. The third and final installment of a trilogy entitled Ceremony, its opening moments rage and wail, with distorted guitars pulling out in front of the drums like hellhounds that have slipped their master’s leash. But this isn’t a mono-dimensional freakout. Smith paces himself, pulling back into brooding drones and pensive picking before lashing out once more. As befits a journey that’s taken three discs to unfold, it ends with a grand gesture; the final melody is as epic as Roy Montgomery’s mid-’90s work, and it unfurls over a blasted landscape of wah-wah licks and feedback that somehow reconciles the Stooges and Popol Vuh. If Herzog or Jarmusch need someone to score another existential walkabout, they ought to give Smith a call. Bill Meyer

Jason Stein

In Exchange for a Process Leo CD

Locksmith Isadore

Three Less Than Between Clean Feed CD

Bass clarinetist Jason Stein, Chicagoan by way of Long Island, first came to prominence with Vandermark’s Bridge 61, and has also recorded with saxophonist Keefe Jackson and oboist Kyle Bruckmann, as well as leading his own trio Locksmith Isidore. Stein’s approach is thankfully quite singular, recognizing—but not beholden to— canonic figures like Eric Dolphy and Michel Portal. Indeed, his concentrated circular/horizontal approach,

spacious and microcosmic, recalls (if anyone) the non-linear eddies of Jimmy Giuffre and Michel Pilz.

With only one statement as a leader to date, 2008’s A Calculus of Loss (Clean Feed), it takes some downright chutzpah to follow that with a solo recording of bass clarinet. In Exchange for a Process is just that, eleven pieces that explore the nuances of Stein’s very particular relationship to the instrument. There is a point of comparison here with Giuffre’s solo clarinet pieces, especially as he began to explore tonalities, registers and cadences outside the “proscribed idiom” of jazz. Stein references Dolphy on “Hysterical Eric,” but rather than an approximation of Eric Dolphy’s sound on the instrument, it’s an exploration of the jubilant feeling one gets from listening to the elder statesman let loose.

As Stein subdivides and recombines his phrases, giving gleaming kisses to the reed, fluttering and finely twining closely-valued hues, it isn’t so much about putting an instrument through its paces as it is one artist’s affirmation of his relationship to the brush.

Locksmith Isidore is Stein’s primary group with drummer Mike Pride and bassist Jason Roebke (who replaces cellist Kevin Davis).

“Protection and Provocation” opens with eddying whirrs, but with the support of a rhythm section, the leader’s shuffling grit becomes quite compositional. Roebke and Pride are adept at skittering and clambering over one another, but their meaty off-kilter swing is also an axis for Stein’s inner dialogues. Light, jagged

gestural play characterizes “Laced Up with Air,” a balanced scamper that toys with thinness and mass.

On “Stevenesque,” delicate footfalls soon fall away into hushed areas of reedy harmonics and breathy split tones. As a trio, Locksmith Isidore work collectively to explore an interaction that’s as personal as any one man’s vocabulary. Clifford Allen

David Sylvian Manafon

Samadhi Sound CD

If Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal Pierrot Lunaire is performed without the sung speech that made it so revolutionary, its romantic elements emerge as a series of beautiful posttonal melodies. David Sylvian’s newest album functions in a similar way.

His lush melodies and trademark vocal harmonizations are present, but they are set against a much more astringent background: the results are a stark opposition pitting romanticism versus modernism.

It was a courageous move on Sylvian’s part to gather some of the finest free improvisers of our time for this, his first solo album since 2003’s Blemish. That disc paved the way, Derek Bailey and Christian Fennesz both contributing sterling material to one of Sylvian’s bleakest, most painful but radically personal utterances. Fennesz returns, and his contributions coexist alongside those from Keith Rowe, John Tilbury, Evan Parker, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Marcio Mattos, Burkhard Stangl and Werner Dafeldecker among others. While each musician maintains

individuality, their identities merge enough to create a sense of unity throughout, thanks to Sylvian’s careful editing. The sessions, which took place in London, Tokyo and Vienna, birthed music whose density varies but which is always just a few steps away from silence. “Snow White in Appalachia” slides toward that silence as Sylvian’s voice descends at its conclusion, though the surface is rippled by looping shards of static.

Bursts of full-on noise, like the guitar squall that begins “125 Spheres,” are infrequent but as a consequence quite jarring. Most of the disc is populated with what Sylvian’s accompanying film documentary calls “amplified gestures,” an idiom that will be familiar to those who have followed EAI’s developments but whose appearance here is startlingly fresh.

Lyrically, Manafon also constitutes a step away from Blemish as Sylvian allows himself some detachment and a new degree of secrecy. “It’s the farthest place I’ve ever been, it’s a new frontier for me.” This bold proclamation opens the album mididea, allowing us only a glimpse into the complex thought process behind the lines. “125 Spheres” offers a vision akin to Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: “And when it appeared, it was a flaming book of matches, 125 spheres on a parquet floor.” Sylvian’s haiku-like observations are often rendered in the simplest melodies, repeated and transformed with stunning directness as the music proceeds unpredictably forward.

It’s that juxtaposition, the simple

with the complex, the naked gesture with the myriad contemplations that surround it, that makes Manafon a disturbing and sumptuous experience. The way Yoshihide’s turntable seems to comment on a line of text, or the high-pitched interjections of Sachiko M’s sampler peek out amidst the acoustic guitar and electronics, typifies the many timbral relationships that govern each moment. Like Pierrot Lunaire, the album is a radical statement that sums up Sylvian’s past while pointing the way forward. Marc Medwin

Talk Normal Sugarland

Rare Book Room CD

Like so many of their no wave and nu-no wave ilk, Brooklyn’s Talk Normal exude a tantalizing, gray numbness. They operate in an underground arena where it can be difficult to distinguish between melody and noise, where astringence and turgidity—to say nothing of turbidity—are inarguable virtues.

On their debut release Sugarland, singer/guitarist/bassist Sarah Register and singer/drummer Andrya Ambro hew closer to art rock, crudely cataloging one shambling emotional extreme—mock-misanthropy on dirge-y “Uniforms”; spiraling suicidal tension for “Transmission Lost”; “Hot Song” clanking, rattling, and thundering ramshackle through romantic maybes—after another.

Rutting and ka-thumping, the duo’s serrated, low-rent sonics lock into tight, dry grooves and mine them for all they’re worth—which, happily, is considerably more than one might reasonably expect given the claustrophobic insularity they’ve made their métier. Raymond Cummings

Henry Threadgill's Zooid

This Brings Us To, Vol. 1 Pi CD

It’s been eight years since Henry Threadgill released an album, and characteristically, his way of making music has evolved in the interim.

What’s more, he’s taken the remnants of his group Zooid along with him.

Jose Davila (tuba, trombone) and Liberty Ellman (acoustic guitar) were in the line-up for 2001’s Up Popped the Two Lips; here they’re joined by acoustic bass guitarist Stomu Takeishi (formerly a member of Threadgill’s Make a Move) and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee. The intervallic language that Threadgill has been working on, which operates like a highly flexible variant on serialism, is designed to steer the musicians away from scales, chord changes and the harmonic material they give rise to.

His intention is to thwart the musicians’ habitual responses and oblige them to operate in a new way, constantly challenging themselves and each other. If this suggests that This Brings Us To sounds unlike any other Threadgill recording, well, it’s true to some extent. Interacting melodic cells create a group texture that is constantly in motion, never quite as it was a moment ago but somehow always consistent with itself. It would, in that sense, be wrong to describe 74 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

the work of Takeishi, Kavee and (when playing tuba) Davila as providing rhythmic underpinnings, for the rhythms are carried just as much by the so-called frontline players. In a sense, each musician is responsible for all aspects of the music at all times—there are no predetermined roles to inhabit. If this makes Zooid sound like a tough proposition, not so, though it requires a couple of listens to establish how this light and airy music works. Acoustic guitar and acoustic bass guitar drift in and out of each other’s orbit, Kavee’s kit playing is skittery and buoyant, and when Threadgill plays flute the group really lifts off. A friend who heard a snatch of the first track, “White Wednesday Off the Wall,” asked: “Is that jazz?”

In the formulaic sense, which is true of most jazz nowadays, the answer is no. It’s just very good music.

Brian Marley

Tinariwen

Imidiwan: Companions

Global Circuit CD/DVD / LPx2 / download

Recording in a remote south Saharan town can’t be easy, but doing so has paid off for Tinariwen. The Touareg (or Tamashek, as they prefer to be called) ensemble’s music comes from and is all about community, and the decision to make their fourth album at home brings this point home.

Their lyrics address the challenges of cultural survival in geopolitical climate highly unsympathetic to a non-aligned people whose way of life involves traversing boundaries, not maintaining them. This music shows how they’ve lived, and how they might continue to live — by sticking together. Friends and neighbors sing and play on most cuts, but their presence invigorates rather than distracts from the performances. The marvelous intertwining guitar lines and hand percussion grooves that make this group one of the best rock bands on earth, absence of a conventional drum kit be damned, have the rhythms of a long conversation.

Sometimes one player holds forth at length, sometimes several swap phrases, and sometimes they swell in a natural polyphony. But Imidiwan is not at all insular, unless you just can’t handle hearing anyone sing in any language besides English, nor is it at all amateurish. This is not an exercise in audio crudité like Group Doueh or Group Bombino’s recent releases on Sublime Frequencies. Tinariwen are also professionals who have been touring the world for the better part of a decade, and they know how to make a record that communicates across sonic, linguistic, and cultural barriers. The mix of voices and guitar tones is rich and vivid, and the tunes ring out with an anthemic quality that the bands who are playing for their hometown crowds don’t try to summon. Bill Meyer

Trespass Trio

“...was there to illuminate the night sky...”

Clean Feed CD

When free jazz first got tagged as “fire music,” people weren’t just referring to the scorching tones, but to the music’s association with

revolutionary aspirations. There was a lot happening back in the day that would make a thinking woman or man want to burn something to the ground, but while things can’t really be said to have gotten any better, I’m not sure that destruction is as appealing an option these days. The Trespass Trio play hot, all right, but they also protest against the heat.

The title of this record refers to white phosphorous, the hideously effective incendiary agent that has been part of America’s (and many other nations’) armory since WWI; saxophonist Martin Küchen, bassist Per Zanussi, and percussionist Raymond Strid are not in favor of it. Art has often set itself against humanity’s capacity for inhumanity, sometimes to its own detriment, but the choice to tether their music to political and moral imperatives seems only to have sharpened the three men’s focus.

Their previous release, a downloadonly album on Ayler under the name Martin Küchen Trio, was a sprawling affair, but here the music is much more pithy and pungent, and much better for it. Küchen’s reeds seethe and wail in heaving masses of sound that ripple the way the ground does when lashed by a nuclear shockwave.

Zanussi and Strid are far more than accompanists, stoking the music’s boil with surges of struck metal and plucked gut. Their protest has more anguish than rage, but there’s still enough righteous indignation in the title tune alone that you have to admit they’re fighting the good fight.

Bill Meyer

Tomas Ulrich’s Cargo Cult If You Should Go Cadence Jazz CD

Tomas Ulrich has charted a singular path as an improvising cellist, and he’s been around for so long that it’s pretty amazing that If You Should Go is the first album under his leadership.

This set of four compositions and one free improv was recorded during the public debut of Ulrich’s Cargo Cult, a string trio featuring guitarist Rolf Sturm and bassist Michael Bisio. Ulrich begins his piece “The Last to Know” unaccompanied, and the melodic components emerge slowly; Bisio’s muscular tones contrast nicely with Sturm’s muted but equally potent shadings. Sturm’s “So Do You” thrives on its sense of swing, sparked by Ulrich’s incisive bow scrapings and Bisio’s bubbly pizzicato, while “Rains End” explores introspective balladry, with Ulrich taking the main melody and Sturm accompanying him on acoustic guitar. The lone free piece, “Existential Fragility,” will satisfy listeners hankering for a little improvisational urgency to complement the more structured offerings here, while the title track ends the disc with a gorgeously cinematic farewell. Jay Collins

Various

Ouled Bambara: Portraits of Gnawa Drag City / 2s & Fews CD / DVD

The Gnawa Brotherhood, descendents of sub-Saharan slaves brought north to Morocco, play a

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music that—while it certainly has a kinship with the songs of Malian hunters in terms of bass-driven repetition—is unique to the multiethnic country to which it belongs.

Even a casual listen makes it clear that this is true trance music, played by people who communicate with formless beings, known in Arabic as jinn. Yet its hypnotic effects are absorbing, something that has won the music supporters and fans all over the world and a number of higher-profile releases on labels such as Axiom, Rounder and Accord Croises. It’s also been heralded as one more link to the blues and clawhammer banjo playing found traditionally in the southeastern U.S. But Brooklyn resident Caitlan McNally wasn’t out to make any sort of cross-Atlantic musical connection when she set out for Marrakesh in 2005; she was more interested in the music’s travels over the Sahara and what it meant to its performers. What she ended up with isn’t necessarily the study of an ethnomusicologist, but neither is it the deliberate mystery of the excellent but context-free Sublime Frequencies releases either. The DVD here contains interview footage with performers as well as people close to them and the liner notes are informative about the music’s multiple stages and meanings. Yet, even with this exposure, the Gnawa can’t help but remain shadowy, impossible to penetrate.

Four performers, all from Marrakesh, are featured, and what they play is typical of the form.

Driven by a three-stringed, rectangular-bodied deep bass guinbri, the songs feature call and response, handclaps, and often an increase in tempo and intensity. It’s music that requests complete surrender, yet it is also incredibly easy on the western ear, thanks to its sense of groove. The musicians here sing of saints particular to Marrakesh, though these names change from region to region. It’s not necessary to know anything about the complexities of the religion or the music’s Malian origins to appreciate it. Anyone with even a passing interest in the repetitive foundation at the heart of all music will find something forever contemporary in this disc, which is as good an introduction as any to this spellbinding North African folk form.

Bruce Miller

Various

Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Ghanian Blues 1968-81 Soundway CD x 2

In the Afropop upsurge of the last few decades Ghanaian music has been mostly left on the sidelines.

Other regional styles with more zip and polish—from Senegal, Congo and South Africa—have proven more readily marketable to international audiences. Ghanaian highlife can have some rough edges and an ambience not always easy to penetrate for the uninitiated. But those in the know recognize modern Ghanaian music to be a vast 76 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

reservoir of earthy and compelling styles and grooves, easily the match of styles from elsewhere in the continent.

The 1970s were in many respects the heyday of modern Ghanaian music. The country’s economy had not yet tanked, as it would during the next decade. The stiff, prefab, drum-machine-driven sound of disco highlife had not yet put a stranglehold on popular music production. There was a profusion of bands throughout all regions of the country delving into traditional cultural music while simultaneously absorbing American soul and funk. Afrobeat from neighboring Nigeria wafted everywhere across the region, and the nightlife in Accra, Kumasi and elsewhere was pumping. Ghana Special, the latest reissue compilation on the Soundway label, documents this fertile period of Ghanaian music with 33 tracks by nearly as many bands, including Sweet Talks, Uhuru Dance Band, Dr. K. Gyasi and His Noble Kings, Nana Ampadu and the African Brothers International Band, Uppers International Band, Ebo Taylor, and the Cutlass Dance Band, among numerous others. A couple of selections included here are especially noteworthy. The 1976 track “Dr. Solutsu,” by the Basa Basa Soundz, includes none other than Fela sitting in on sax. There’s a track by the Bokoor Band, a project led by John Collins on guitar and harmonica, who would become an important musicologist, producer, writer and eventually professor at the University of Ghana, Legon.

There are several tracks by the group Hedzoleh Soundz, which was managed by the legendary promoter and organizer Faisal Helwani.

This is the group that collaborated with Hugh Masekela to record the groundbreaking album Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz in 1973.

This collection is a fabulous introduction to the sounds of Ghana at this time. There are a lot of churning 6/8 rhythms, the improvisational percussion breakdowns are lively and propulsive, and the mixture of musical influences woven throughout these tracks is dizzying—undercurrents of traditional ethnic music, snippets of modern jazz, funk riffs joined to clever horn arrangements, singing in Twi, Ga, Fanti, Hausa and Pidgin English.

For the connoisseur of West African music this release will provide a balanced overview of Ghana during this period, making available lots of nearly impossible-to-find tracks.

For the newcomer to Ghanaian music this release gives an excellent introduction, opening many musical doors at once. Alan Waters

a mirror to the world’s styles that is both distorting and, because of the richness and sturdiness of their own traditions, quite unbreakable.

Roll off the voices and there are parts of Siamese Soul that sound like Ethiopian funk, Stax party music, or even MSR song-poem madness. But you won’t want to be without the singing, because those distinctly nasal and winding vocal melodies are where the music’s essential Thai-ness comes through.

The lack of relatively generous movie-budget resources ensures that the musical magpies caged on Siamese Soul never get bloated.

The rhythm sections are crisp, the organ solos marvelously succinct, the horns have the same ragged rightness as your favorite Mahmoud Ahmed track. Moments of sweet what-the-fuckness abound, whether it’s a klezmer-like clarinet twining with lazy wah-wah guitar on Man City Lion’s “Hah Anad” or the parping of ersatz frogs on Roong Petch Laem Sing’s rainy season anthem “Panatibat.”

Shadow Music Of Thailand maintains a more consistent, mostly instrumental sound. Vocalist and businessman Payond Mukda organized most of the compilation’s groups, although he didn’t play with them, and everything betrays the twangy influence of England’s premier guitar combo The Shadows. But as on Thai Pop Spectacular, indigenous elements bend imported ones to their will.

The Son Of P.M.’s “Lum Jow Praya”

puts a lazy tambourine beat and dreamy Martin Denny vibes at the service of a striking, convoluted guitar melody quite like the ones that are sung on the other volume, and P.M.7/Jupiter’s “Susie Wong” will have you suspecting that you’re seeing double — is that waitress wearing a cowboy hat or shimmering silk gown? Or both? This set has already been out once, in one of those high-priced vinyl editions that Sublime Frequencies has gotten so good at selling out. If you have any affection for liquid guitar licks and cross-cultural confusion, you won’t want to miss it twice.

Bill Meyer

Various

Panama! 3: Calypso Panamero, Guajira Jazz and Cumbia Tipica on the Isthmus 1960-75 Soundway CD

Places we sometimes think of as peripheral or remote from the centers of world culture often generate sounds as vital and powerful, or more so, as the music from any of those larger metropolitan locations. Panama is just such a place.

Perched at the meeting point of two continents as well as two oceans, it has long been a crossroads of musical styles from Latin America, the Caribbean and North America. Panama! 3 is the third and final installment in Soundway’s reissue series of tropical rarities from the isthmus during the fertile

era of the 1960s and ’70s, and it amply demonstrates the musical diversity found there. Throughout much of the material collected here there’s a Cuba-meets-Trinidadmeets-Detroit kind of feel. The most intriguing mixture of musical influences comes in the songs that blend the classic vocal cadence of calypso—think Mighty Sparrow or Lord Kitchener—with instrumental accompaniment that’s steeped in cumbia, rumba, bolero and son montuno. There’s something uncanny and fun in this merger of Anglo and Spanish Caribbean musical elements. The names of the performers on this disc will be almost entirely unknown to most listeners—Los Silvertones, Lord Cobra, Soul Apollo, Frederick Clarke, Los Mozambiques, Conjunto Panama, Panaswing, Ralph Weeks with The Telecasters, Los Salvajes del Ritmo, etc.—but the music is easily accessible because it is put together from familiar ingredients, though always in some slightly unique way. For instance, if you think you’ve heard all the clave and bell patterns that are used throughout African and Latin music, listen closely and some of these tracks will surprise you with variations that you couldn’t have imagined. The disc is packaged with a nice booklet of descriptive notes on each song and an essay by compiler Roberto Gyemant describing his adventures in Colon and elsewhere hunting down the original 45rpm recordings. If you have ever wondered where Ruben

Blades got his cosmopolitan vision and eclectic musical sensibility, a recording like Panama! 3 will certainly help with the answer.

Alan Waters

Wolter Wierbos 3 Trombone Solos Dolfijn CD

Deining Dolfijn CD

Wolter Wierbos has been involved in the Dutch jazz community since 1979, and has appeared on over 100 releases, but, to date, his solo catalog remains puzzlingly scant. A self-titled LP was issued by Data in 1984 (and has since been reissued), and X Caliber was released by the ICP imprint in 1995, but the rest of Wierbos’s discography consists of work with the ICP Orchestra, or collaborations with a variety of artists, from Cecil Taylor to the Ex. He’s a consummate collaborator, seemingly able to handle just about any style of music or situation as needed. As with many of his Dutch compatriots, there’s often something special brought out in Wierbos’s playing with others, a conversational style that can lead to delightful results.

3 Trombone Solos compiles solo performances from 2005 and 2006.

Wierbos is all over the map here, moving fluidly between tones, styles, and techniques. As goofy and unpredictable as his music can be, he’s a patient and attentive player, and the gear changes feel

Various

Siamese Soul: Thai Pop Spectacular Vol. 2 1960s-1980s Sublime Frequencies CD / download

Various

Shadow Music of Thailand Sublime Frequencies CD / download

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entirely organic. On “Chicago,” bluesy smears of melody are peppered with breathy expulsions and abstract interludes. On “Portland,” Wierbos plays with longer tones, producing buzzy, extended percolations under which one can hear his stifled voice. At other moments on the album, he snores into his mouthpiece, engages in alien duck calls, and emits avalanches of globular gurgling like viscera spilling from his trombone’s bell. 3 Trombone Solos is an inventory of ways in which to push and pull sounds from the instrument, but it’s no academic exercise. Wierbos plays with verve and feeling, and there’s no shame in the at-home listener joining the applause that caps each of the album’s tracks.

Deining features our hero in a series of performances at De Drie Gebroeders (Wierbos’s houseboat) in 2006, pairing up with several old friends—Wilbert de Joode, Mary Oliver, Han Bennink, Ab Baars, and Franky Douglas—for a collection of wide-ranging duets (and one trio).

The trombonist’s stylistic flexibility is evident throughout: he seems as comfortable with Bennink’s highenergy percussion clatter as he is engaged in smooth ’70s revivalism with guitarist Douglas. The seven cuts with bassist de Joode are some of the richest, heavy on texture and grit, with Wierbos often tending towards minimalism in his jousts with de Joode’s bowing. The Misha Mengelberg composition “Peer’s Counting Song” turns up twice, first during Wierbos’s encounter with Baars and then later in a trio with violist Mary Oliver and Bennink, the latter making a surprise appearance on soprano sax. Adam Strohm

Tony Wilson Sextet The People Look Like Flowers At Last Drip Audio CD

Though its title track is an original piece by Vancouver guitarist and leader Tony Wilson, this recording’s centerpiece is his arrangement of several movements of Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae, composed for viola and piano in 1950 and arranged for viola and string orchestra in 1976 (the year of Britten’s death).

The dirge-like prelude for cello and muted trumpet is succeeded by a funky arrangement of Movement #1, with a punchy horn line by trumpeter Kevin Elaschuk and saxophonist Dave Say and a stinging Wilson solo. Movement #2 follows, sounding very free-improv, Dylan van der Schyff’s clattering drums punctuating cellist Peggy Lee’s bowing and scraping while Wilson noodles quietly in the background. The group performs two variations each of Movements #4 and 7, and it’s fascinating to hear how differently Wilson reimagines the pieces each time. On the first version of Movement #7, for instance, his spare lead line is accompanied by horn and cello accents while van der Schyff plays marchtime; the second is a freeform trio of Say (on soprano), bassist Paul Blaney and van der Schyff. Movement #10 begins with an ostinato guitar line and evolves 78 | SIGNAL to NOISE #56 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

into a free jazz thing, while the ruminative Movement #11 features Wilson and Lee in counterpoint. The album closes with three fine Wilson originals and his arrangement of a Bill Monroe bluegrass tune, “Working on a Building.” The sextet’s members are all skilled, communicative improvisers, but the real focus is on the leader’s excellent composing and arranging. Mike Chamberlain

SOUNDWATCH

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season’s blockbuster video releases.

Robert Wyatt

Radio Experiment Rome, February 1981 Rai Trade CD

There’s an honesty about Robert Wyatt that means he probably couldn’t have resisted making the music on this album. It stems from an invitation from an Italian radio show, to spend a week in the studio recording the process of his work, improvising and exploring without any finished product in mind. Wyatt took them at their word and assembled 45 minutes of music using multi-tracked vocals, keyboards, jew’s harp and percussion. What’s remarkable is how snugly this experiment fits into his oeuvre – resembling most closely his 1970 solo album End of an Ear, recorded while he was still drummer and increasingly marginalised vocalist with psych-Prog pioneers, Soft Machine. It has much of the same loose, free-wheeling roll and wide-eyed experimentalism – and similarly foregrounds his naïf vocal scatting as an instrumental tool.

But you can hear the weight of that intervening decade, during which he was ousted from his own band, sustained the physical disability that has since confined him to a wheelchair, and started out as a solo artist for the first time. It’s there in the defining sadness of his whispy alto tones, and also in his lyrical obsessions. Rather than the psychedelic whimsy of Soft Machine, or the confessional scrutiny of his 70s solo work, here he begins to turn outwards with a serious concern for the machinations of the world at large – the first stirrings of the politicised voice of his 80s Rough Trade recordings . On ‘Opium War’ he delivers a garbled Maoist reading of Chinese history, in sinister whispers and plummy BBC declamation, intertwined with the sung suggestion “you can’t sing about politics.”

But, through tracks like ‘Born Again Cretin’ (an angry attack on Nelson Mandela’s gaolers) and ‘Revolution Without ‘R’’ (a child-like hymn to utopian idealism), he shows that, with enough humane engagement and oblique intelligence, you can do just that. Daniel Spicer

Todd Reynolds of The Splatto Festival Chorus

During his lifetime of musical pursuits, guitarist Derek Bailey developed an aesthetic built on counterbalance. He thrived on the unlikely, the unexpected, taking on such things as rain on a tin roof and the sounds of dance music tapes being sold out the window ... not to mention human improvisers from across the globe. Bailey greeted his diagnosis of the motor-neuron disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in much the same way, as another playing situation.

He boldly documented the new ways he was forced to play from the spring of 2004, when he first started noticing difficulties, until his death in December 2005.

Through the efforts of his wife, Karen Brookman, that intensely honest revelation is carrying on. The “Barcelona Series” on Incus, the label Bailey founded with Evan Parker and Tony Oxley, captures his time in the town he called home the last years of his life. Live at G’s Club (the first Incus DVD release) features Bailey in an hourlong solo performance at a small bar a few months before the onset of his muscle coordination problems. It’s a typically knotty Bailey set, played on a hollowbody through distortion and volume pedals, with quick-witted interjections both spoken and played. The intimate, single-camera shoot is prime Bailey, and there’s too little of that on film. All Thumbs is a brief but lovely performance recorded in July 2004, on a sunny day in a rooftop garden. Following in the model of his “chats,” Bailey talks about his dexterity problems while playing, and delivers a 20-minute performance during which the difficulties might be more noticeable to the eye than the ear. While the diminishing abilities of some aging musicians are taken as sad inevitabilities, the emotive impact of Bailey’s playing never seemed to suffer.

My Twentieth Century is a very different video project by a very different guitarist. Canadian composer Tim Brady’s 70-minute work in four sections is scored for electric guitar, string quartet, piano, saxophone, percussion and electronics in varying configurations and is performed live with synchronized video. The

spin on Anderson’s full-on free jazz. He pulls some distorted leads, but also brings a refreshing bop backing to the group. As with many Delmark DVD releases, Chase is also available as an audio CD, but the DVD includes an additional track from the same night featuring Henry Grimes on bass. It also includes a relaxed, full-length commentary from Anderson, which makes for an enjoyable alternative way to take in the set.

The Sanctuary in Troy, NY, is another home for free jazz, hosting such players as Kahil El’Zabar, Peter Evans, and Taylor Ho Bynum, and it has previously committed a William Hooker performance to DVD-R. Their new release is the debut of The Splatto Festival Chorus, a clash of strings and electronics, jazz and experimental composition, with the fascinating composer and violinist Todd Reynolds (who has played with Bang on a Can and Meredith Monk, among many others), vibraphonist Ed Mann, saxophonist Dave Barrett and bassist Michael Bisio. Reynolds and Mann also employ a swath of electronic augmentation (even occasional heavy beats), making the band’s debut performance a lively and unpredictable set. Excellent groupthink pervades, with mounting sound-sculptures giving way to acoustic solos and inventive riffery (indicative perhaps of Mann’s time in the Frank Zappa band). The tight, multi-camera shoot and colored lights against a screen behind the band give a nice, warm presentation.

Live at The Smell (Cold Hands Video) brings another sense of place entirely. This is Weird LA, and might explain what happens if you live in Los Angeles long enough without getting on television. The ten bands featured here may well all have grown up listening to the Boredoms, but there’s a wild diversity here, from the Foot Village’s screaming drum circle to the amphetamine pop of Abe Vigoda to High Places’ glitchy campfire. High points are the rock ’n’ drone drug song of Gowns and the messianic dancefloor punk of Captain Ahab. And the shirtless, bear-costumed and Viking-horned audiences.

British director Daren Bartlett’s documentary O Zelador: A Story of Capoiera (Bantam Films) takes as its setting the Brazilian barrio and as its hero the dancer and role model Master Russo. The practice of capoiera is a sort of mixture of dance and martial arts, and has come to embody both street and social sensibilities: what started with rivalries between slaves brought from different African tribes, Bartlett’s subjects explain, has grown into a movement that involves community work and home-building as well as songs (often carrying social commentary, and played chiefly on berimbau and drums) and, of course, dance exhibitions. The story is told without voiceover or overdubs, allowing the account of a small neighborhood in a big city to unfold at its own pace.

If the story of capoiera is relatively contained, the cassette underground was, by necessity, wholly decentralized. Grindstone Redux: The Story of the 1980s US Underground Music Network (True Age Media) attempts to tell the story of people swapping their music via mail, before the Internet opened up new worlds for the weirdos. The tale’s been told before, and told better, here getting a fairly monochromatic treatment by focusing on the “Grindstone” series of compilation albums that grew out of one of the many informal postal networks. But at the same time, that is producer Andrew Szava-Kovats’s window into the world, a circle which included Randy Greif and Al Margolis, both of whom are featured in the film. While a broader focus would have made this a more valuable piece of work, it’s still a nice look at a time that was never quite wellknown enough to have been forgotten. ✹

Ambiances Magnétiques release of the project pairs an audio CD with a DVD realization that wisely is just the video, not a live video-behind-the-band shoot.

Brady sees the recently closed century in terms of four artists (composer Dmitri Shostakovich, jazz guitarist Charlie Christian, Beatle John Lennon and painter Jean-Paul Riopelle), and the sections of the piece are as different as their sources. Surprisingly, it’s only in the final piece that the particular inspiration really stands out in the music. Brady gives a signature Shostakovich figure to the string quartet, and puts it against a score for structured improvisation and a nice, cross-fading montage of images of Russia. “Strumming (Hommage à John Lennon)” is more about the electric guitar itself, a building and repeating single chord providing the soundtrack for a video of, yes, multiple blurred images of guitars being strummed. “Traces” is a mystifying piece, pairing letters (not words) in shifting patterns against an electro-jazz arrangement of a Christian solo.

“Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg (Casino Adagio)” is set in a casino where Riopelle’s painting for Luxemburg (a German socialist murdered in 1919) was shown.

These are, in other words, conceptual pieces, and in that respect are fairly perplexing. As pure sound and image, however, they are engaging and enjoyable.

21st Century Chase is a party of a couple sorts. The long set from March 22, 2009, was an 80th birthday party for saxophonist Fred Anderson, a key figure in Chicago jazz. But for those outside the city, it’s also a chance to view the new Velvet Lounge. Anderson’s last Delmark DVD—Timeless, from 2006—was filmed as his old bar was closing, and it’s a beautifully bittersweet document. Chase is set in the posh new Southside club, blue neon replacing the old Kente cloth wallpaper. The band is an unusual one for the tenor man: his kindred saxist Kidd Jordan and longtime bassist Harrison Bankhead are present, but Chad Taylor was a last-minute fill-in for drummer Hamid Drake, giving a very different drive to the music, and guitarist Jeff Parker (Tortoise, New Horizons Ensemble) puts a new WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 79

CONTINENTAL RIFFS

BURNERS AND BACK FLIPS

Guinean saxophonist Mamadou Barry reaped the benefits of the country’s Authenticité movement in the ’60s, forming the state-funded Kaloum Star and joining in the frenzy for Cuban sounds on Africa’s west coast (he even spent time on the island earlier, studying the son). As a reedist Barry has often led from beyond the spotlight’s reach; in addition to directing Kaloum Star, he’s played with Bembeya Jazz National and has been the musical director for Les Amazones de Guinées. Even on his overdue solo album Niyo (World Village) he doesn’t exactly take center stage, though he solos extensively throughout. Other instrumentalists and a variety of singers help him survey a variety of Guinean melodies, as well as some bristling Afrobeat; he does strut his jazz chops on a pleasant Dave Brubeck tweak called “Africa Five.”

Keletigui et Ses Tambourinis were one of the earliest and best products of the Authenticité movement, and the recent double CD The Syliphone Years (Sterns), spanning 1968-76, wraps up a wonderful overview conducted by the label over the last few years. The gentle, percolating grooves are shot through with Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz-informed harmony, but the core of the material drew upon native melodies, stories, instruments, and language. Indeed, the richly soulful griot-style vocals of members like Manfila Kante and the piercing, original sound of guitarist Linke Condé create a wonderful, biting contrast with the son structures—several pieces are covers of Cuban classics by Sexteto Habanero—and the easy-going polyrhythms. Classic material that hasn’t aged a whit.

Also remarkably vital are the sounds captured on Hot in Dar (Buda), the latest installment in the Zanzibara series surveying the music of Swahili East Africa.

This new collection focuses on the Tanzanian muziki wa dansi (dance music) made in 1978-83—nearly all of it sponsored by various state organizations— where medium-sized bands churned out elegant yet propulsive and episodic tunes that featured exquisite call-and-response vocal harmonies, tight horn sections, and wonderfully liquid interplay between as many as three electric guitars. Though the infusion of many Congolese musicians into the region starting in the ’70s had made the Afro-Cuban sound of soukous a big part of the sonic blueprint, more prevalent were native rhythms like the sikinde popularized by the great Mlimani Park Orchestra. With each subsequent volume of this series, curated by Werner Graebner, we’re finally getting a better sense of the deep musical riches of this part of Africa.

On Echoes Hypnotiques, Analog Africa continues digging up the sadly ignored musical legacy of Benin, specifically the prodigious outfit of Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou. The fifteen killer tracks here were all made for the Albarika Store imprint between 1969 and 1979 with a lusty funk attack and scrappy, screaming guitar leads from players like Akadari Elias Moutalabi and Papillon. This is the fourth collection of the band’s music—following titles on Popular Music Africa, Soundway, and another on Analog Africa, each capturing a remarkably different facet of the band’s output—and these are some of the leanest and fiercest sides they ever cut. As usual label-owner Samy Ben Redjeb has not only spent years digging up and researching the tracks, but poured the fruits of extensive interviews into the voluminous, fascinating liner notes which are crammed with stunning photographs spanning the group’s

The provisional nature of the “experiments” of experimental hip-hop isn’t a virtue per se, but should be applauded when it leads to ever-new developments. (Anti-Pop Consortium is that kind of group.) Anticon banner-bearers Themselves aren’t experimenting, then, on CrownsDown, since they’ve locked into a single creative mode: generic minor-key atmospheres over tightly-rolled machine beats and vocal lines. This profile becomes rote on many tracks, a kind of Anticon house style that one finds across the house team productions on 13 & God, Subtle and cLOUDDEAD albums alike. A track like “Oversleeping” never fleshes out more than the formula requires, and so fades into the background. “You Ain’t It,” on the other hand, makes good on the promise of trying new things: a filtered emo vocal sample for the chorus surprises with excellent counterbalance to Doseone’s unintelligible growl. Dose gets reckless on this cut, and takes us with him to a new place, as it should be.

Felt 3: A Tribute to Rosie Perez (Rhymesayers) is the latest in the numbered series of collaborations between Living Legends MC Murs and Atmosphere voice Slug that pays parodic homage to B-list actresses, following tributes to Cristina Ricci and Lisa Bonet. (As if the two needed a break from serious careers to have fun.) Aesop Rock handles production on this joint, toting along his minor-key video game themes and grating vocal-sample repetitions. If the whole affair seems beside the point, it’s because Murs and Slug are so lackadaisical, and rhymes that typically only come across as easy here sag quickly into monotony. Many songs stray toward the fourminute mark, a heat death if you have no inspiration for chorus hooks. Aesop Rock’s brief interlude “Kevin Spacey” may be the shortest track on the album, but its blend of video-game effects and sitar melodies is easily more inventive than half the rest. Felt deserves little more than a finger wag.

Brazilian influence or allusion has held appeal in popular and improvisatory music forms since Jobim—the marriage of rhythm and tone is rarely more complete than we experience it in the bossa nova form, and these regularities of form admit vast opportunity for exploitation and re-arrangement. Hiphop, naturally, has seen its share of Brazilian sampling, from Pete Rock to Beck and plenty in between.

Radio Do Canibal is a project by Rhymesayers house talents BK-One and Benzilla that takes Brazilian infusion as a total aesthetic conceit—and not just bossa nova, but traditional Bahian folk, Tropicalia, samba, and a gallimaufry of influxes in the form of reggae, funk and fado. The pair prove deft at finding sample loops from a music tradition known for its layered complexity—“The True & the Living” (feat. Raekwon and I Self Devine) has a dizzy bass progression;

“Tema Do Canibal” a raw rhythmic sprint; “Philly Boy” a tender guitar motive. The stacked lineup of MCs from Raekwon to Phonte to Scarface to The Grouch only bolsters a production gem.

The first distinction in what proves to be a long list of them on Brother Ali’s long-awaited full-length Us (Rhymesayers) is “House Keys,” a quotidian narrative about changing apartments to save rent: “Moved down gave keys to the landlady / But I kept the spare set that she had gave to me / It’s cheaper but I actually regret / Couldn’t even tell you where the extra money went.” The verses flow like natural speech, with off-rhymes and assonance the only hint that we’re dealing with crafted language. These concealments of the art form provide further evidence that Brother Ali might be the best in the game at hiding the complexity of his verse—no small talent. And, up to the standard, DJ Ant is in rare form, more powerful in the drum than he ever gets with Atmosphere, particularly perfect for slow burns like “The Travelers” and “Babygirl.” It’s been six years since the first major full-length, but time and again, every record they put out is a revelation.

The diction of San Diego’s Sojourn (Future Shock crew) is elevated in comparison to corner store raconteurs like Brother Ali, yet still moves through the syntax patterns of natural speech. Sojournalism: The Summer Articles (HipHop IS Music) is polished oratory as flow. A flair for erudite Latin derivations with uplifting connotations (“emancipation,” “sensibility,” “justification”—even “sojourn”) recalls J-Live and CL Smooth, and within the Christian scene, Bonafide of GRITS and Braille (who guests on “0,000”). Sojourn does get prolix, tumbling over polysyllables in spots (“Expectations”); but there’s never the sense that he’s overreaching his skill or his audience. “All Things Considered,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Get Back” are especially apt discourses.

Blu has been making the rounds as a rapper in various guises: C.R.A.C., Johnson&Jonson, and the apex of his short career so far, Blu & Exile. His latest project sees him standing in behind the mixing table for another up and comer, Brooklyn MC Sene.

ADayLate&ADollarShort (Shaman Work) is a surprise for those of us who have come to prize Blu’s vocal style: as a producer, he is no less sophisticated, welding jazz ballad samples with an unpredictable beat style. Sene too can wield a mic with confidence, but the clear advantage here is the production. This disc: another stop on Blu’s rocket north.

New Jersey MC Tame One (half of classic duo Artifacts) joins Del the Funkee Homosapien for a tentrack romp on Parallel Uni-Verses (Gold Dust Media), produced by journeyman DJ Parallel Thought. PT works library standards for breaks, mostly giallo-style soundtrack cuts. But despite some wonderful scratch

flourishes, the sample loops are predictable and provide few creative flips to the clichéd sources. “Keep It Up” features nice vocal rhythms by both MCs—but PT lets the sample dictate tempo and progression, the sign of an unsure hand on the wheel.

People Under the Stairs foreground fun in their music—like fellow Southern Californians Ugly Duckling, this makes their hits feel-good party jams, and their misses the stuff of bad opening bands who can’t get the crowd to feel the vibe. Happily, Carried Away (Om) has much more of the former—and it’s easily their best album to date. Like similar groups, they revel in cliché: “Come On, Let’s Get High,” “Step Off” and “Check the Vibe” hardly have to be titled; “DMQOT” is a wry barb with lyrics entirely in acronyms (and needless to say, too obscurely clever to be effective parody). It’s likely PUTS will never rise above opening for the Tribe Called Quests of the world—but no indication they’re aiming for more than that.

It’s not difficult to explain why The Bronx’s Camp Lo fell off the East Coast radar: though early singles like “Luchini” were part of what made the golden era glow, Camp Lo took a hiatus in the early part of the century, shunning the ice gangsta era completely. But with time comes new opportunities. Another Heist (Soulfever) reworks the classic soul that made the duo popular in the first place—in the post-Eminem era, we all long for retro nods. Like fellow reborn artists Del and Souls of Mischief, Camp Lo proves on tracks like “Satin Amnesia” and “Uptown” that if you want vintage vinyl, you should turn to those who made it first.

Though product of an industry built on the esoteric capital of hype, the expectations for the sequel to the Wu-Tang classic Only Built for Cuban Linx could hardly be overstated. Nor the inevitable disappointment. Raekwon reputedly sat on many productions, leaving joints by J Dilla, for one, hermetically sealed until the right moment. And so, there are tracks on OB4CL Pt II (Ice H2O) that feel straight out of vintage Wu-Tang; and of course there are tracks that fail to live up to their inclusion on a legendary disc (cold listens can be brutal to the latter, with no varnish of a classic disc’s myth to redeem throwaways). The three awaited J Dilla joints are crystal sharp—and a quintet in the album’s middle including “Black Mozart” and “Surgical Gloves” are street lord narratives that teach with Raekwon’s patented two-word, double stress thought flow: “You know how to dress a lad, get rocked, hundred bags, black doo-rags / ski masks is on, g-rags… / Love Deck, thug buried, drug vest, snub sets, killing the most / nighttime toast.” We haven’t forgotten our love for Raekwon, as prolific as he is on others’ albums: we’ve just been missing the intensity he generates when he stars. ✹

sophistication of his songs, delivering his lyrics with an unswerving exactitude. Most of the tunes maintain a nonchalant concision that leaves the listener in wonderment once they rapidly zip on by.

Traditional music from Korea remains one of the more mysterious sounds in the world to Western ears if only because it’s never been particularly easy to track down. The good folks at Buda Records have done us all a favor with Korea: Music from the Land of the Clear Morning, a stunning 2-disc set

that devotes one CD to instrumental works and another to vocal music (the favor would’ve been even more grand if they bothered to let us know precisely who the musicians were, although the singers are identified). It’s a little tough to describe the full range of sounds in this space, but they serve up some of the most stunning music I’ve heard in ages. Various court and popular styles are represented on the first disc, with various string instruments (the zither-like gayageum, geomungo,

and ajaeng), the haegeum fiddle, the daegeum (a bamboo flute), and the piri (cylindrical oboe) tracing oblique, haunting melodies over complex, funereal percussion. Two related styles emerge on the vocal disc: gagok songs (which comprise five movements, usually at very slow tempos, with lyrics meditating on nature) and the simpler, more visceral sijo style.

The sijo songs here feature some amazingly raw, piercing vocal performances; both feature mostly percussion-only accompaniment. ✹

Peter Margasak travels the world in search of subversive sounds.

history; each release complements the astonishing music with a veritable history lesson.

Over the last couple of years the guerilla ethnographers at Sublime Frequencies have directed much of their attention to deep Saharan grooves—a sound regrettably dubbed (by someone else) desert rock— with an emphasis on its raw, primal immediacy. Treeg Salaam is the second album they’ve released by Mauritania’s Group Doueh (the current CD version follows out-of-print limited edition vinyl). The recordings were chosen by the label’s Hisham Mayet from home recordings made between 1989 and 1996, ranging from merely lo-fi to tonally violent. On some of the tracks, such as the brutally stabbing “Ragsa Jaguar,” you repeatedly hear the audience shouting and whooping in trance-like mayhem. The nasty guitar sound Salmou “Doueh” Baamar wrings from his gear neutralizes any ill effect produced by the cheap drum machines and chintzy synthesizer patterns, and the epic 20-minute “Tazit Kalifa” is a swirl of chanted vocals, flanged electric guitar, organ-like arpeggios, and sporadic beat box, suffused with such murkiness that it sounds genuinely alien in its low-bore intensity.

As the muezzin at the Great Mosque in Aleppo, Syria, Hassan Haffar stands as one of the great hymnodists of our time, and on the monumental 3-CD set The Suites of Aleppo (Institut du Monde Arabe) he brilliantly navigates eleven pieces now found only in his home city. Backed only by spare hand-percussion and a six-strong choir that both responds to his voice and delivers precise unison sections, he’s a model of sobriety and grace, imparting subtle microtonal inflections into each tightly coiled phrase and soaring, melismatic ascent. What distinguishes these suites from other like-minded musical movements is the focus on rhythmic shifts; within each section the tempo is fixed, but the transition from one piece to another is thrilling. The average Western ear, my own included, will probably need to spend a little extra time to adjust to the surface austerity, but it’s worth the effort, as Haffar is a genuine virtuoso.

German DJ and producer Shantel (né Stefan Hantel) created a niche for himself earlier in the decade through his Bucovina Club, a nightclub evening that cranked the engine making Gypsy music the new thing. On his latest album Planet Paprika (Crammed Discs/Essay) he flanks himself with Balkan ringers— including trumpeter Marko Markovic and clarinetist Filip Simeonov—to flesh out electro-driven stompers that brazenly mash-up disco, ska, and funk with Eastern European brass music, Greek rembetika (the voice of Anestis Delias, dead for 65 years, haunts “Sura Ke Mastura”), and turbopop. I don’t mind that Shantel isn’t concerned with stylistic purity (“Absolutely inauthentic / My style is egocentric,” we hear on “Being Authentic”), but too often the throwaway, predominantly English-language vocals torpedo the album with silliness and shallow kitsch.

New York’s Slavic Soul Party! brings an equally mongrel aesthetic to brass band music. Although the group’s fourth album Taketron (Barbès) still keeps the focus on Balkan sounds, the band, led by percussionist Matt Moran, has continued dipping into New Orleans funk (a smoking cover of Rebirth Brass Band’s “Get It How You Live”), and this time out they tackle a Black spiritual (“Canaan Land”) and even a flamenco tune (“Sancti Petri”). But elsewhere they put their spin on traditional Romani songs and modern classics as well as totally convincing original pieces in the same vein. With every album SSP has

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sounded less like earnest devotees and more like a band with its own sound. The group’s love for fat brass and driving rhythms isn’t really affected by this style or that, so long as it moves.

Afro-Peruvian songstress Susana Baca pays homage to one of her greatest influences on her EP Seis Poemas (Luaka Bop), Chabuca Granda. Granda, who died back in 1983 and who had a song on the same mid-’90s Luaka Bop anthology, Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru, that introduced Baca to the world at large, came late to African-influenced song following a successful career as a sophisticated pop singer in her homeland. But her decision to begin incorporating the more propulsive rhythms of Afro-Peruvian folk music exerted a strong impact— another Peruvian singer, Eva Ayllon, is also a major exponent of Granda’s work. Half of the six tracks here are Granda tunes, but all of the performances are stripped-down and beautifully poetic, with Baca’s forceful voice caressing subtle melodic contours in the most delicate, lyric manner.

Dominican singer Puerto Plata (né Jose Cobles) didn’t launch his international career until he was 84, and now, at 86, he’s back with his second album Casita de Campo (IASO). With avuncular charm and restrained soul, if less than precise intonation, he navigates old-fashioned sones, boleros, and early merengue supported only by acoustic guitars and spare percussion. Among the musicians are the great guitarists Edilio Paredes, a master of bachata music, and Joan Soriano, a young practitioner of the same rustic, old-school approach, but here they resort to a simpler, more romantic style. Cobles was popular as a youngster, but dictator Rafael Trujillo’s love of merengue was so strong he virtually banned all other forms, forcing Cobles underground. Thanks to producer and label owner Benjamin de Menil he’s gotten another chance, and while the music is steeped in nostalgia, Cobles is providing a link to a sadly forgotten (and largely undocumented) past.

On his fourth and best album, Certa Manhã Acordei de Sonhos Untranquilos (Nublu), the Brazilian singer Otto moves even further from his Manguebeat roots in favor of an unexpected focus on slow-moving, sentimental material, both in the form of brega and mawkish power balladry. But the killer arrangements—played by a knockout band featuring members of Nação Zumbi and the extraordinary guitarist Fernando Catatau—the remarkably catchy, dynamic songs, and the singer’s lusty exuberance make it work. Brazilian thrush Céu turns up for a duet on “O Leite,” but it’s the Mexican pop singer Julieta Venegas who steals the show on two stunners, especially the sultry “Saudade.” Elsewhere “Janaína” struts along on a sly Jamaican groove, while “Naquela Mesa” harks straight back to the early work of Jovem Guarda icon Roberto Carlos, replete with twangy guitar and subterranean organ lines.

With his fine second album Correnteza (Biscoito Fino) the Rio singer and songwriter Edu Krieger, who first made a name for himself penning tunes for Maria Rita and Roberta Sa, steps further into his own with an accomplished and gripping mixture of pop songcraft and samba grooves. It’s a stripped-down effort that perfectly frames the singer’s gentle, precise voice with an elaborate but unfussy matrix of guitar patterns, brisk percussion, resourceful piano counterpoint, and effective electronic textures that makes it all sound classic and thoroughly modern at once.

His voice emphasizes the preternatural rhythmic

Joel Calahan samples the season’s finest underground hip-hop releases.

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THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD Jason Bivins digs metal, doom and heavy music in all its permutations.

Pelican

Over the years, during his time off from Neurosis, Steve Von Till has snuck out some music via his Harvestman alter ego. While his last solo recording, A Grave Is a Grim Horse, was really excellent, there’s something about the expansive fever dreams of Harvestman that’s richly compelling. On In a Dark Tongue (Neurot), Von Till plays a bevy of conventional instruments (including dulcimer) but the long album is suspended and wrapped in a variety of electronic treatments that give color to these nighttime mountainside dreamings. After the shimmering “World Ash,” I love the churning feedback and dulcimer of “Karlsteine.” While there are some occasional thunder grooves here—“The Hawk of Achill” (with Al Cisneros on bass) is great, while “By Wind and Sun” is a bit too long and jammy—Von Till concentrates on textural melancholy. It’s very effective here, whether it’s the sweet mellotron flutes of “Birch-wood Bower,” the heavy trance of “Carved in Aspen,” or the superb “Music of the Dark Forest,” which unpredictably conjures up the sound of Korean court music before moving into the country/Celtic “Eibhli Ghail Chiuin Ni Chearbhail.”

Michael Gallagher (of Isis and his solo project MGR) meets up with Mike Mare of Destructo Swarmbots on the appropriately titled Amigos de la Guitarra (Neurot), under the moniker MGR y Destructo Swarmbots. It’s the kind of shimmering, long-form, expansive heaviness that’s almost impossible to escape these days. Patient and reflective in the opening minutes, it bears not a little similarity to Old Man Gloom’s forays in these areas. Slow backwards-tape stuff ripples ever so gently, as clean guitars chime together with minor-chord simpatico.

The dynamic arc moves predictably up, a layer of organ and rumble beneath as some chug emerges alongside the guitars. The overall effect isn’t without its pleasures, but these kinds of records are just so

damn ordinary these days.

Chord (a Chicago heavy drone group consisting of Kyle Benjamin of Unfortunaut, Jason Hoffman, Phil Dole of X-Bax, and Trevor de Brauw of Pelican) explore long-form guitar/electronics feedback on Flora (Neurot). Using a fairly familiar avant strategy, each player is assigned a single note from a chord which is explored at length (four parts over an hour). With cues to change up the texture, dynamics, attack, and so forth, these heavies nod to Tony Conrad and Branca on a solid record. The first movement wallows through thick billowing sound, finding its way to a second phase that mutters softly, almost venturing into Radigue territory before a chiming, clean-guitar interval begins to echo throughout. The cool, lambent third movement sounds like the middle passages of an Isis tune, sans drums. And the record ends with the big payoff: bottom-end chug, some heat, and nice, overlapping tones and colors.

The latest from noise polymath KK Null is a doozy. On Oxygen Flash (Neurot), Null works the intersection of Merzbow noise, heavy drones, and sonic industrialism that recalls Voice Crack more than anything else. A nine-part suite of sorts, the record finds Null moving between claustrophobic spaces that make up a kind of sonic danger room where pipes wheeze, lasers fly, and sub-basement machinery churns hellishly. The best part of this recording is the way the structures crumble so frequently, as heaps of feedback eventually topple the rippling pulses or proto-riffs. There are moments where things breathe a bit: the fourth part (with its rapid little clicks) could almost be a Radian piece, and the seventh part is extremely spare. But Null seems to treat these segments as pit stops, from which he roars to life again.

On part six, the sound of squealing gears eventually subsumes everything, while on the concluding section, the sampled horns and radiator hiss remind me

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somehow of Consume Red. Supergroups suck, right? Yeah, mostly. But Shrinebuilder’s self-titled debut on Neurot proves a powerful exception to this generalization. Consisting of Scott “Wino” Weinrich and Scott Kelly (Neurosis) on guitar and vocals, Al Cisneros (Om) on bass and vocals, and Melvins drummer Dale Crover, Shrinebuilder meet at their point of common interest: slightly exoticized heavy riffs and trance-inducing rhythm. And it works quite well on this brief but effective record. The opening “Solar Benediction” captures the basic m.o., with a warm, sludgy assemblage of riffs bracketing extended psychedelic wandering.

“Pyramid for the Moon” opens with processed, phased-out guitars and Kelly crooning neo-pagan empathy with the trees, and it leads all the way to a serious bong-worshipping groove, with Cisneros mumbling ritualisms. And despite the star-gazing quality of much of the music, these fellers know how to pen a catchy riff, as on the up-and-down “The Architect.” Maybe not more than the sum of its parts, but damn sure equal to them.

Chicagoans Pelican have lost me on their last couple of releases. Not bad by any means, their fusion of trippy textures and heavy crunch just didn’t sound so fresh to me. What We All Come to Need, their first for new label Southern Lord, is pretty spry, and sounds like a needed fresh start. While they’ve always been quite attentive to dynamics, tunes like “Glimmer” and “The Creeper” sound far more convincing to me because they’re simply more patient songs, with parts less obviously cobbled together. These are simple, grooving jams in no hurry to get anywhere, and all the heavier for their obsessive repetition and riffage. There’s enough chugga-chug to please, on “Ephemeral” for example, with its lovely intertwining guitars, and “Strung Up from the Sky” (which sounds a tad like Oceansize). But the memorable tunes are the flowing ones with fluid tempos, like “Specks of Light” (I’m pleased to say that the drummer sounds great, a point of past contention among many listeners). High profile guests from Botch, Sunn 0))), and Isis contribute nicely to a few tracks, but wait for “Final Breath”—it actually has (for the first time in Pelican’s history) vocals, as Allen Epley sings a modified version of a Robert Burns poem. Nice.

The latest from Portland’s Subarachnoid Space, Eight Bells (Crucial Blast), treads similarly familiar territory—grooving, psych-swirl, hypno-riff minimalism—but it’s territory they’ve long occupied and on which they’ve made a distinctive impression. While the opener “Lilith” sounds a bit too by the numbers, the urgent “Akathesia” is a standout in this genre.

“Hunter Seeker,” which cannily uses layered feedback and tons of pedals, could almost be a cover of early Sonic Youth by a doom band—that is, until the cool descending riff with swirling cosmic noise comes in. This isn’t the abstracted, abjected doom you so often hear. While there’s plenty of shrieking din on songs like “Haruspex,” the slow descent—like scales peeling away—into a spooky, electronically smothered voice that sounds like it’s incanting something yields a more vibrant and fulsome sound than is customary in the genre, with lots of sustained guitar tones and a general “your mind enters the cosmos” excellence swirling everything up into its orbit.

Speaking of abjection, it’s been a helluva long time since I’ve heard a “metal” record as frankly disturbing as All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity

(Crucial Blast) by the Dutch solo act Gnaw Their Tongues. With plenty of unformed noise and sheer din, this person is also a listener serious enough to introduce a good dose of Scelsi-like horn polyphony into the general tableau of scraped metal and screams. I don’t invoke Scelsi’s name lightly.

I mean it: parts of this music sound like “Quattro Pezzi,” like a new-music hellhouse of sound.

There are plenty of horns everywhere, a contrabass clarinet floating around, tons of densely grouped brass instruments (again, Scelsi). And while there is occasionally some sludgy riffing peeking in from the howl—which at one point sounds like a boat being destroyed by the storm of the century—this is really far from the point of this truly nasty music. Seriously, it was actually difficult to concentrate on anything but this music, and difficult to turn away from it (much as I sometimes wanted to). The middle of the record features a creepy spoken word/noise piece (like older Sunn 0))) ), a descent into more spacious and ominous sound, before things rear up horrifically once more. At the end, we hear a woman shrieking “help me, somebody help me.” In a different context, this would sound juvenile. Here it’s real ontological horror metal, more like torture soundtracks. Truly unpleasant.

The latest entry from Wrnlrd, Myrmidon (Flingco Sound) continues the multi-instrumentalist’s journey into the fissure between improvised noise and heavy metal. “Girl” has chugging guitars that are far more referential than anything I’ve heard from him, but it’s not long before these are swallowed in a chorus of guttural voices, mad monks of a sort. I love how he just embraces wild polyphony and discord, with unsettling siren vocals from Buccinator on “Queen” and a pretty cool use of horns and strings (with help from Iksnis and Swanson Hill) to generate an effect like Neurosis circa Times of Grace. “Black Dress” shimmers and moans like Nadja covering the Boris/Sunn 0))) collaboration, while “Diamond” has some intense black metal crunch, even as it sounds like a mashup of several different monster movie soundtracks. This guy is pursuing his own sound, scenesters and adjudicators of “troo” metal be damned. Just listen to the noisy improv wildness on “Genital,” or the colliding backwards tapes, saxophones, and accordions on “Moaner/Revelator.” Authentic and wonderfully weird.

On Born Again (Crucial Blast), Overmars set their sights on the long form, a single 40-minute track that grinds down on a single chord, with howling like Didier from Knut and some resonant clean high-lonesome guitars. It’s like a long, much slower version of Knut’s “H/armless” in fact. What invigorates the music are the seriously intense female vocals, which sound like a really angry Björk during the quieter moments, and bespeak a notable Jarboe influence throughout. While they do make more use of harmony than many sludge/doom bands do, and there’s a big glissando of electro-noise that closes things out, there’s something about this one that didn’t stick with me too long.

Everyone’s favorite power trio Boris are almost as well known for their fondness for special-edition rarity releases as for their heavy rock. Southern Lord has released a marvelous series of singles, Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Vols. 1-3. And yeah, they could actually be hits, so artfully do they fuse the trio’s recent work at the intersection of psych-pop and metal.

After a minute or so of tinny musing, “8” explodes rather majestically, as if it’s urging you to crank this one in the highway of your brainpan. Sometimes the band gets a bit sidetracked by their influences, as on the odd techno echoes of “Black Original” or the sensual swagger of “Hey Everyone,” with a weird multi-tracked vocal dalliance that owes as much to Os Mutantes as Boredoms. But they feel their oats on “Heavy Metal Addict,” a slice of unfettered Hawkwind-meets-Entombed glory, and the deep melancholy of “16:47:52,” with a steady scrim of noise providing good contrast to Atsuo’s vocals.

White Mice, on the other hand, seems made up entirely of said sidetracks. On Ganjahovahdose (20 Buck Spin), the band spews grinding noisecore with a jittery intensity that recalls fellow pranksters The Locust. And yet, that’s not it at all. With meat-grinder megaphone vocals (complete with

“shocking” lyrics), the band cycles through drill-bit industrial music, detuned sludge à la Weedeater or Buzz’oven, the continually flayed sheet metal of early Godflesh, and at times the multi-tracked, deranged madhouse of early Butthole Surfers. Yet somehow, this disc struck me as very much less than the sum of its parts.

Laudanum’s second full-length release The Coronation (20 Buck Spin) finds the married duo (Judd and Becky Hawk) once again working the intersection of smoldering electronic improvisation and heavy noise. Much of this record struck me as good, competent sludgy doom. Many of the tracks have a kind of doper riff intensity that will please fans of Electric Wizard and Graves at Sea, with just enough attention to sonic detail to relieve the tension. Occasionally the band spices things up with screaming acid guitars and crazed vocals, or a spooky crypt-keeper vibe that reminds me of Bloody Panda. But what really made this record so cool to my ears was a trio of tracks that were weirdly reminiscent of Texturizer and AS211 (“eai” fiends will recognize these Antifrost artists) in their slow build from elemental grains of noise. Fascinating, and I hope they continue in this direction.

Black Boned Angel is one of the many monikers of Campbell Kneale, of Birchville Cat Motel and other drone-driven combos. He meets up with well-loved duo Nadja on a (self-titled) 20 Buck Spin release. The ethereality that sometimes characterizes Aidan Baker’s work is a shared point of interest, and the reflective chords of the opening of this 50minute piece sound like an outtake from The Cure’s Faith, slowly swallowed by static and noise. Then a buzzsaw guitar smashes through, pushing those bell-chords all the way down under the grinding riff.

Layers and layers of sheer howling din dominate the next phase of the piece, nearly half an hour that spirals down from metal crunch into ambient industrial.

Things get a bit more sparse and frosty but the riff, beaten down, now rises again. Not top shelf, but pretty damn good.

In the previous column, I praised the return of two long-dormant powerhouse bands on Relapse Records. The pattern continues with the return of math/noise vets Burnt by the Sun on Heart of Darkness (Relapse). Fusing the tricksy angularity of contemporaries Botch and Dillinger with a more pronounced hardcore sensibility (lots of chugging breakdowns and barked vocals), BbtS have always managed to avoid the solipsism of the former and the meatheadedness of the latter. On what we’re told is their swan song, the quartet deliver the goods pretty ferociously. Still pissed off about politics, they provide unvarnished attitude on tunes like “F-Unit,” showing a new willingness to strip things down. Indeed—as “Party to the Unsound Method” shows—they seem more focused on the sheer cathartic effect of their huge sound, piling the guitars high atop Dave Witte’s outrageously precise drumming. They’ve also extended the range of earlier tunes like “Forlani” with a penchant for shimmering textures (“There Will Be Blood”) that they sometimes fuse to stuttering rhythmic engines (“Goliath”). Things lose steam a bit with “Beacon” and “The Great American Dream Machine,” but the complex syncopation on “The Wolves Are Running” closes out the album memorably.

Savannah’s Baroness have come a long way from the early Isis worship of their first EPs. 2007’s Red Album saw the group incorporating sludge and crust influences as well twin-guitar majesty that had more to do with Thin Lizzy than with any more metallic source. Combined with a newfound interest in anthemic melodies and occasional nods to Southern rock as well, it marked a bold and winning step forward. With Blue Record (Relapse) they’ve come even further into their own, perfecting the predecessor’s approach while incorporating the elements much more seamlessly. Ranging from reflective interludes like “Ogeechee Hymnal” to complex prog-metal like “A Horse Called Golgotha,” the pieces on this album make a coherent whole, and the playing (especially from guitarists John Baizley and Pete Adams) is audibly passionate. Not only heavy, but downright exultant, this one grew on me quickly. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #56 | 83

ALL THAT JAZZ

Larry Cosentino examines modern-day manifestations of bop and beyond.

Bassist Linda Oh’s self-released debut, Entry, proves to be one of the nicest surprises of the year. You don’t expect exquisite balance from a trumpet-bass-drum trio, but Oh makes it sound easy. As a composer, she lays out an inviting, carefully varied terrain for the musicians to explore; as a player, she melds introspection with fun and a dignified, almost ego-free ease. Far from ceding ground to the leader, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmure presses his sonic advantage, playing with a heroic, clarion tone that seems almost too big for the other two, like a lion plopping down at a restaurant booth.

But Oh and drummer Obed Calvaire follow (or anticipate) his moods and declarations closely, bringing his gold tone deep into the conversation. The three-way dialogue is precarious, but the trio fine-grinds every asymmetry as it arises, maintaining organic equilibrium on the sonic, emotional and musical axes. Together, they create a new kind of musical space, a grand intimacy that’s a joy to inhabit.

Another off-center combination—alto sax, trumpet, cello and drums—makes a ringing noise in Things Have Got to Change (Clean Feed) by the Marty Ehrlich Rites Quartet.

Like Oh’s trio, this quartet builds a space all its own, fusing total authority with open-ended adventure. Each composition is a ceiling-high sandwich of ideas, but you don’t have to open wide to bite—the music almost chews itself up with momentum and urgency. The opening track, “Rites Rhythms,” pops into the air so fast it seems as if the band were just discovering syncopation. There are many fine moments, among them the combination of James Zollar’s muted trumpet and Erik Friedlander’s cello, alternately bowed and plucked, on the aptly named “Some Kind of Prayer.” Friedlander comes back with a beautiful bowed intro and bounding scalar waves for “On the One,” a plaintive song inside of a bebop assault inside of a Bach suite. The disc was inspired by Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A.D., and comes to a climax with a juggernaut roll through that amazing tune, 11 beats to the measure and thick as a brick.

If these piano-less discs leave you feeling keyboard-deprived—and if you haven’t had enough of “Dogon A.D.”—Vijay Iyer’s new disc, Historicity (ACT Music), ought to hit the spot. Iyer isn’t out to show how many bags he can play in. His influences—about 50 people are thanked on the sleeve—barely show. He plays a pile of piano, but he’s not a stylistic mimic. All of his virtuosity goes into the boiler as fuel for exploration: he stretches, crushes, slices and dices time with suave efficiency. There are good reasons why Iyer has established himself as a major presence in jazz. His aggressive, muscular mind plays against his liquid, satiny style to generate a brainy sensuality akin to high fashion. The title track tumbles lavishly toward some diminishing target, with elastic halvings and doublings of tempo. “Helix,” too, dilates with hypnotic accelerations and decelerations. He plays the familiar melody of “Somewhere” (yep, from West Side Story) against heavy tolling from his own left hand and Stephan Crump’s bassline. Driven by rolling thunder and crackling rim licks from

drummer Marcus Gilmore, Iyer jumps all over Andrew Hill’s “Smokestack” and digs his heels deep into the funky-robot stagger of “Dogon A.D.,” apparently the tune of the month.

I yer’s dynamism is subordinated to the more deliberate compositional bent of guitarist Rez Abbasi on Things to Come (Sunnyside), which also features Iyer’s frequent collaborator, alto saxman Rudresh Mahanthappa. It’s a South Asian jazz band—a novelty that Pakistani-born Abbasi savors in the liner notes—but the Asian elements are deep-blended into the mix (with the exception of Kiran Ahluwalia’s sinuous vocals). This music dresses in layers. On “Hard Colors,” Johannes Weidenmuller’s bass plays a repeating ground and Iyer overlays percussive chords that go in and out of synch, like windshield wipers that don’t quite match the radio.

Abbasi overtops everything with soft, probing filigree. The layers are carefully set, but fluid; “Air Traffic” is grounded by a nervous ostinato, with Abbasi’s solo in the middle layer and an arresting mix of vocals and cello drifting on top.

Iyer is incisive as ever and Mahanthappa’s juicy ideas are always welcome, but Abbasi’s guitar politely dominates with a mix of pointillistic picking, songfulness, post-bop noodling and garage-band grunge (coming from a pretty clean garage).

Veteran pianist James Weidman variously leads a trio, quartet and sextet through a program of his compositions on Three Worlds (Inner Circle). The disc sneaks up on you, offering straight-ahead but unremarkable pleasure until the fourth track. “Razz 2.0” gets into interesting territory, with a jerky tone-row-cum-fugue smartly whooped and zizzed by Ray Anderson’s trombone and the leader’s melodica. (Marty Ehrlich, already featured above, is back on alto.)

Suddenly, a Latin groove rips out of the bag, with Cuban-born drummer Francisco Mela on hand to lend authenticity. “Our Journey (intro),” a lounge-y tune featuring vibes, is much longer than the brief and cryptic cry it “introduces”—a free-form essay in long tones that rises up in warbling dissonance like mist from a river. The awfully-named “Questful” artfully marries a slow hothouse rhythm with the overall searching mood of the disc. “Theme for You” is just straight-ahead pleasure, and Ehrlich is back on bass clarinet on the staggery “Backtrackin.”

About Us (482 Music) is the follow-up to last year’s brilliant Proliferation by drummer Mike Reed's People, Places & Things, and the second disc in a planned trilogy paying tribute to the Chicago sound. It’s a brisk, gritty, witty walking tour, with three Windy City guests in tow: tenor man David Boykin, trombonist Jeb Bishop and guitarist Jeff Parker. This band can’t seem to help being original even as it pays homage. There isn’t a hint of regurgitation or recycling and the windy-sidewalk feel is perfect.

There’s bruising interplay between Greg Ward on alto saxophone and Tim Haldeman on tenor that puts most horn battles to shame. (They’re also charming when they dance nice and slow on a ballad, “The Next Time You Are Near.”) Individually, either saxman can stop you cold. Halfway through “V.S. #1” everyone suddenly lays

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out while Haldeman strikes up a beautiful solo in naked silence. “About Us” cracks open with the best knock-at-the-door riff since Beethoven’s Fifth, courtesy of the leader’s drumming. “Big and Fine” is one long smile, with Archie Shepp swagger and more two-horn tussles, with Boykin in the mix this time. A strange and mystical track referring to Saint Paul’s epistles breaks up the fight card with incense, but the sudden turn only adds to this group’s cachet.

Reed’s Chicago is recognizably contemporary, but composer and bandleader Gerald Wilson looks to the urban past on Detroit (Mack Avenue Records), an hour-long suite commissioned for the 30th annual Detroit Music Festival this fall. Wilson grew up in Detroit before it was Motown—almost before there were cars—and doesn’t seem the least bit interested in rehashing Motown cliché. Instead, he purposely peels back layers of funk, decay, corruption, industrial dominance and race troubles to paint a grand fresco of a partying port city. I don’t know why Wilson lifted Benny Golson’s “Along Came Betty” and called it “Cass Tech,” but the rest of the suite is paved with boulevard-broad harmonies and taken at a leisurely pace. Wilson doesn’t do frantic, busy arrangements and leaves plenty of blowing room for soloists. Credit him for his stubbornly romantic view of the nation’s most troubled city.

Anyone who dares to lay a lyrical flute solo over a lush big-band quilt of sound and call it “Detroit” has a lot of soul. The title track made me think of a photo I saw of Yusef Lateef playing flute on the grass in Belle Isle. I looked it up and was shocked to find that Lateef’s decidedly grittier Detroit is itself 40 years old.

A pair of piano veterans, while not quite as venerable as Wilson, were also heard from this fall, with different results. At 74, Ramsey Lewis has entered a fertile composing renaissance, judging by his new solo and trio CD, Songs from the Heart (Concord). The disc uses material from two recent suites Lewis composed for Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, “To Know Her Is to Love Her” and “Muses and Amusements.” Lewis wrote the former for his trio to perform with Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and the latter to play with the Turtle Island String Quartet. Some will balk at the tunefulness and sentimentality of Lewis’s muse, but the trio is in great form, and there’s a relaxed wisdom and Tyneresque grandness that grounds and uplifts the material. By contrast, McCoy Tyner himself is in turmoil, if Solo: Live from San Francisco (Half Note) is any measure. The live set crawls with restlessness, as if Tyner were trying to divert himself from a brooding storm behind the music. Clouds loom everywhere, even over “African Village,” which ends with a disturbing few seconds of near-nothingness, a rare thing in Tyner’s music. The void is batted away by familiar left-hand slams, sounding more impatient than ever. Riding Tyner’s whims has always been exhilarating, and this is one of his bumpier runs.

Impressionist idylls come on suddenly and last a few seconds, intervals of stride sink in quicksand, melodies are hurled down stairs, and oddly tidy endings bring the music up short. The closer, “In a Mellotone,” digs in like a freight train, only to float away and pop like a bubble.

WORD MUSIC

Fred Cisterna reviews recent spoken word recordings.

The great pianist and composer Cecil Taylor has been dazzling listeners for decades with his virtuosity and his often extreme approach to music-making. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that his spoken word album, Chinanmpas (Leo), is not a collection of quiet poetry recitations. Recorded in London in 1987, the album contains nine untitled pieces that finds him in full, gale-force effect. Accompanying himself on assorted percussion, Taylor bends language and his voice in startling ways. Sometimes the words give way to grunts and shouts that recall sound poets like Kurt Schwitters, Bob Cobbing, and Jaap Blonk. And like those fired-up intoners, he brings a sense of catharsis or possession to his work.

Taylor’s vocals can be surreal. At times, he comes off like a mad cartoon character being squeezed until a sound pops out. He sings a bit, whispers, shouts, chants a line before ripping it apart, speaks with odd accents.

Chinampas has brief passages of relatively conventional recitation, too, but even these sections become defamiliarized in this setting.

Everything seems to signify, but the communication is often felt rather than understood.

Listening, you enter a strange world; in a way, this is avant-garde science fiction audio.

Taylor also uses production technique to overturn habitual listening methods. At times, he uses overdubbing to create contrasting tracks that split the listener’s attention. The effect brings to mind the typographical experiments of writers who employ double-columns in their work, challenging the way the reader absorbs printed language.

His performance is restless, slithering here and there, constantly in the process of transformation. It makes sense that Taylor frequently

alludes to snakes, and the African Loa known as Damballah, a spirit associated with the legless creature. (One is also reminded that Taylor is a great lover of dance.) And the album’s name is an Aztec word for “floating garden,” which brings to mind two elements that are key to Taylor’s work: organic complexity and movement.

Eric Mingus and Catherine Sikora’s Clockwork Mercury occupies a more spare aesthetic space. Mingus sings, recites, and talk-sings his words and lyrics in compelling ways. (He also plays bass and guitar.) Sikora is a fine saxophonist and a sensitive listener: every note is both expressive and considered. She and Mingus are peers: she doesn’t overpower him with her horn, but she is never reduced to riffing in the background.

The album is punctuated with solo tracks for saxophone, such as “Death Knock,” “Depth of Darkness,” and “Beluga,” while “The Coat” and “Runninglord” feature the unaccompanied Mingus singing wordless, Spiritual-inflected melodies. But it’s the tracks where the two work together that shine. On “Bird of Prey” the sax phrases and the poetry are exquisitely balanced, allowing for true interplay. While a meditative bass line throbs away on “Walls,” Mingus plaintively sings, “We face the walls that have risen between us.” At one point on the track, voice and horn practically merge into one, creating a keening timbre. “Map of Dreams” is an appealingly droney cut that finds Mingus stating, “I stood there while others took the plunge.” The man clearly has a gift for drama-in-song.

David Greenberger has been publishing Duplex Planet for 30 years (and writing for Signal to Noise for close to 10). The zine pres-

ents fascinating stories told by the residents of a housing facility for the elderly. Greenberger, who was a member of the seminal indie rock group Men & Volts, has put out a number of Duplex Planet-related CDs, including a series of albums called Lyrics by Ernest Noyes Brookings, which feature various artists—including XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, and Yo La Tengo— performing songs with lyrics by Brookings, a contributor to the zine.

Greenberger’s 2009 release Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time presents tales based on conversations with oldsters who have various degrees of memory loss. The project was the result of Greenberger’s artist residency at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Center on Age and Community. Greenberger skillfully recites the monologues as he is accompanied

by Paul Cebar and other players who bring Cebar’s pleasantly eclectic music to life. (Cebar leads the Milwaukee-based band Paul Cebar and Tomorrow Sound.)

Cherry Picking is jammed with 38 tracks, most of which are less than two minutes long. On “The Only Memory,” a band with a marimba casually chugs away as Greenberger recites the words of a man who was only three when his father died—the man can barely remember the funeral and he can’t remember his father at all. A bluesy baritone acoustic guitar provides accompaniment on “Mother Comes After,” which doesn’t edit out the storyteller’s memory lapses. “Nuns Know How To Yell” is a rowdy delight, and “Crossword Puzzles” features bluesy harp and the story of a retiree who sounds a little bored. But Cherry Picking certainly is not boring; once you start listening to these sweet, sad, and funny tales, it’s hard to stop.✹

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REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

Elise Ryerson

Wadada Leo Smith

Reissuers giveth and they taketh away, and they’ve done both to the latest iteration of The Feelies’ first two albums. The absence of Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth from the music marketplace for most of this decade has been as sure a sign as proliferating tsunamis and the crashing stock market that we live in dark times.

Drinking deeply from the same well as the Velvet Underground, Beatles, and Modern Lovers, this New Jersey combo staked out the geek’s perspective on what was great about guitar rock and proved Bill Gates’ dictum that we should all be nice to nerds because some day they might be the boss. The Feelies were the boss, and if your ears are tuned to frantic strumming, they still are. Bar/None records gave the band control to do these reissues right, and these director’s-cut CDs feature peerlessly mastered versions of each album wrapped in a lovely faux-LP gatefold.

Unfortunately, in their determination to preserve the albums as complete documents, they’ve relegated all bonus tracks to downloads. Given that there’s half an hour of worthy material floating around out there, plus a whole EP by the Trypes, a 1984 Feelies off-shoot that bridges Crazy Rhythms’ tightly wound suburban breakouts and The Good Earth’s pastoral rave-ups, they could easily have filled a bonus CD. The Scene Is Now are Feelies contemporaries and one-time label-mates who have labored in near-total obscurity despite support from the likes of Yo La Tengo and Elliott Sharp.

Their second album Total Jive (Lexicon Devil) came out in 1986, the same year as The Good Earth, but it’s wayward and stop-start where the Feelies were unswervingly purposeful. The Scene’s best analog would be Rough Trade-era Red Krayola; they’ve got the same penchant for messed-up roots moves, coffee-nerved tempos,

and measured social observation. This is another no-bonus effort, but the record’s fourteen songs point in so many directions that you won’t really need more.

Even more obscure was the sole self-titled release by Flaming Tunes, which was the collaboration between ex-This Heat amateur-savant multi-instrumentalist Gareth Williams and his friend Mary Currie. Flaming Tunes deliberately reacted against This Heat’s sonic extremity; the duo actually wrote and played some of this music when Currie’s baby was down for naps.

While acoustic piano, handheld percussion, and conversational voices dominate, the free-ranging melodies and field-recording interludes might well rest easy in the ears of fans of Williams’ more famous band. Until now, this music has only been available on a cassette released in 1985 and on a bootleg mislabeled as This Heat demos. This CD was assembled with Currie’s involvement; the spare but handsome packaging gives the music its due.

Despite a name that suggests Reagan-era origin, Alomoni 1985 was recorded in 1976 by one Karuna Khyal. Who? Despite shout-outs from Nurse With Wound and Julian Cope, not much is known about the guy, but he sure was on to something. With guitar and drums in hands, the Japanese multi-instrumentalist’s poly-lingual rantings reimagine Captain Beefheart’s broken blues as a shamanic ceremony. Khyal was equally adept at Faustian tape-manipulation, which means that this witch doctor did his dancing in a house made of poured (musique) concrète flowing simultaneously in all directions. This stuff is bad-trip to the core and too good to have been left unfound, so there has been an earlier CD edition. But that’s been gone for about ten years, and this version from Phoenix Records come in

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a handsomely glossy cardboard wallet that gets you a bit closer to the original LP experience.

At the same time on the other side of the world, in rural Germany, a session transpired that went straight into the realm of legend for 21 years. On his way to record with David Bowie, Brian Eno took a detour to jam with Harmonia (Hans Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother). Even though the trio had already disbanded, they reformed for a week and a half to play with Eno as Harmonia 76. In keeping with the holiday-like tenor of the sessions, the music is gentler than that on the two Harmonia LPs, and it has an unfinished quality that reflects the fact that at the time no one really thought they were making a record. The initial issue of Tracks & Traces on Rykodisc was accomplished by just one of the four members; this second go-around on Gronland includes an additional ten minutes of music just as strong as anything on the original disc, plus a much less eye-damaging cover. Score one for augmentation!

Any outfit with ex-members of Erkin Koray’s band is likely to get painted with a psychedelic brush, and that’s how the Turkish combo Hardal’s music has been characterized, but that’s a bit of a stretch. With the rhythm section way up in the mix, 1980 style, as much room devoted to quickfingered synth solos as the twinned fuzztone guitars, and liberally applied Rhodes upholstery all over, Nasil? Ne Zaman? (Shadoks) sounds more like the work of well-trained prog-rockers.

Vocalist Sükrü Yüksel favors a more crooning style than his generally declamatory European and American brethren, and when the guitarists start inserting truncated Allman Brothers licks, the whole thing starts to sound like some lost Ghost album. For its first time on CD, Shadoks has as usual provided a no-frills transfer to disc.

Also on CD for the first time is the psych-rock compilation High All the Time Vol. 1 (Past Present). It originally came out on LP alone in 1993, when that seemed like the height of folly; maybe its appearance on CD now indicates that the shiny silver format’s stock is about to bottom out and rise again? This set collects fourteen trippy sugar lumps of mid-’60s franticness performed by never-knowns with names like Mammoth, The Hobbit, and The Sun Lightning Incorporated.

The requisite libidinous yelps, fuzztone wails, and frantic drumming are present in spades; some of the songs are pretty decent, too. It’s just the thing if you love the sound of Nuggets but are burned out on its songs.

Raw and raucous, most of High All the Time’s songs sound like they were written and recorded in an hour. But smoothness can also be achieved on a tight schedule; according to the booklet that accompanies the new Deluxe Edition of Isaac Hayes’ soundtrack for Shaft (Stax/Concord), the whole thing was done in three days. While it may be big and lush, it’s also larded with genre exercises — an organ combo here, a Memphis soul strut there, and plenty of slow-grind grooves — that work well with the onscreen action but seem a little generic on record.

But the title track is, of course, immortal, and the nineteen minute-long “Do Your Thing” detours

impressively from tell-it-like-it-is recitation into spacey guitar heroics. The packaging and annotation are swell, but the 2009 remix of “Theme from Shaft” sheds no new light.

If Shaft epitomized a new vision of unbridled Black masculinity, stalking the streets, taking what he wants, and taking no shit, Barbara Lynn represented a more conventional ideal of African-American femininity on her Atlantic LP Here Is Barbara Lynn, which has finally made it to CD after 39 years courtesy of Water Music.

Despite having the instrumental prowess to back herself on guitar and writing many of her songs herself, the persona she represents is of a longsuffering woman whose amorous adventures are ultimately aimed toward settling down. Producer Huey Meaux’s grooves stay true to Lynn’s Creole roots with arrangements that reflect a magpie vision of pop, taking a Motown sax lick here and Memphian trumpets there. The results are quite ingratiating but were a tad behind the times in 1970, which may be why this album did not break her beyond the Gulf coast in the US (although she ended up being big in England and South America). Water’s production team hasn’t added anything extra, but the sound is faithful and warm.

Water has taken a similar approach on Hokoyo! and Gwindingwi Rine Shumba, a pair of albums by Thomas Mapfumo whose original release straddled Zimbabwe’s transition from white-dominated possession to a hopeful, selfdirected black nation. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, as it turned out, but no one knew that at time. Once more, the mastering makes the music sound good without sounding different from its original self, and the liner notes nicely frame what each album meant to Zimbabweans upon its release. But would it have killed anyone to translate the lyrics from Shona to English?

Mapfumo’s living in the USA now, so it’s not like he or his people couldn’t have helped out, and it would be nice to get a firsthand taste of words that were so incendiary in their time that

they inspired mothers to send their boys to war and landed their writer in jail. Hokoyo! is a call to revolution, but it’s definitely a revolution with dancing; the guitar lines lilt and the drumming positively skips, propelling Mapfumo’s hoarse exhortations. On Gwindingwi Rine Shumba, Mapfumo and band affirmed their post-colonial pride by proposing a new sound, one he still falls back on to this day. They adapted the undulating mbira (thumb piano) patterns of Shona tradition to electric guitars, giving the music a distinctive rise and fall.

Further north in Nigeria and a few years earlier, Pax Nicholas asserted a more personal statement of independence with Na Teef Know De Road of Teef (Daptone). Singer and congas player Nicholas was a member of Fela Kuti’s Africa 70 band, but he had a few things of his own to say, and he said some of them on this strong Afrobeat article. Other members of Fela’s band provide the backing; they don’t stray too far from the sound they got for the boss, and they sure don’t slack. As befits a session led by a drummer, the grooves dominate; the sax and guitars lock in with the percussion, bear down, and just don’t stop. The album was mastered from vinyl and there’s a whiff of murk that can’t be dispelled, but it sounds no worse than your typical early ’70s Fela record.

Lester Bowie’s Numbers 1 & 2 was part of another revolutionary movement that was, if not as steeped in blood, no less serious in its lifetransforming intent than Mapfumo’s. Recorded in Chicago late in the summer of love, this album and its fellows Congliptious and Sound (both recorded under Roscoe Mitchell’s name, all precursors to the Art Ensemble of Chicago) offered music that was fired with possibility, deeply learned, soulful and sardonic, and contemptuous of fences small or large. Nessa has reissued it as All the Numbers, and this expanded edition makes a strong argument for the thoughtful addition of extra material. Disc one presents the original album, untampered-with. Then the

second disc presents the uncut takes that were edited into the originally released “Number 2.” Spread across 42 minutes, it establishes an episodic rhythm that’s even more dynamic than the original; this is the exception to the rule that consecutive takes make for boring listening.

The label has also reissued trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s Spirit Catcher. It was recorded in 1979, at a point when Smith had gone through a long period of intensive self-development and self-documentation and was just beginning to make records for other labels. Spirit Catcher presents two very different sound worlds, neither of which can be easily reduced. The two pieces with horns, vibes, and rhythm section bridge contemporary chamber music with collective improvisation, while “The Burning of Stones” is an eerie quasi-African feature for Smith and three harpists. What’s remarkable throughout is the clarity of each player’s statement; Smith’s compositions command and receive an exceptionally high level of involvement from his fellow musicians. For a bonus, there’s a second, slightly longer version of “Burning.”

Smith’s old AACM mate Leroy Jenkins pioneered his own vision of free chamber music in the Revolutionary Ensemble, whose debut Vietnam has recently returned to the bins in the now-standard ESP digipak. Like Smith, the Revolutionary Ensemble envisioned a collective music that incorporated strong individual gestures into a group sound. In other words, the balanced three-way interaction between Smith’s violin, Jerome Cooper’s drums, and Sirone’s bass and cello made space for some seriously strong licks, but they always pointed back to the music, not to the player’s virtuosity. Sadly, Sirone passed on at the age of 69 on October 21. One hopes that more of his great music, both inside and outside of the Revolutionary Ensemble, will come to light. Surely the world is ready for the return of The People’s Republic? ✹

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OUR FAVORITE THINGS

CROSSWORD

By puzzlemaster Ben Tausig. This issue's theme: The Most Covered Song of All-Time.

Alan Sondheim's been through a lot with his 1949 Romeo Di Giorgio classical guitar

1949 Romeo Di Giorgio classical guitar I bought it in Cambridge, Mass, around 1967, and have had it ever since. I started playing music after a disastrous relationship; this was 1962. I was influenced by Lightning Hopkins. I didn't know music. I memorized chords in alphabetic order, A,B,C,D,E,F,G, sharps and flats in due order. I went through a number of guitars, settled on a Gibson electric and the Di Giorgio. In the Cambridge scene, Al Wilson (later of Canned Heat) thought me a “city blues player” because I played fast, but I was more John Fahey than Charlie Patton. Other instruments came and went, but the Di Giorgio stayed with me. When I bought it, the store clerk cried; he'd been using it in concerts, had never heard anything like it. It cost $125. It came with 17 cracks and still has 17 cracks. It's gone through two floods, one in a closet in Providence, Rhode

Island, and one in a warehouse in Los Angeles, after having coming back from Tasmania. It’s been everywhere with me.

The guitar is remarkable: inside the soundhole, there’s a hyperboloid wooden band extending down to an inch of the back. I think this is from an eighteenth-century design. I haven’t seen any modern guitar with the device, except for the current Di Giorgio Tarrega, which has an oval sound hole.

From a description sent to me by the company: “Alan, thanks for calling. Sorry, I use a translator. The model Serie Artistica has covers it in pine, laterals and deep in plated of jacarand, fingerboard pau ferro, arm in cedar. The sound is very pretty. Is it a classical model. It was manufactured artisan.” Elsewhere I’ve heard Swedish Pine. The body is Brazilian rosewood. Once I had the top removed to re-glue the bracing —it was repaired by a luthier who made guitars for Segovia and David Lee Roth. The guitar

has unusually rich tones and very strong deep harmonic response. The wood is thin enough to shine a light through. Apparently there's no bracing under the bridge; the top bows, but the action's very low. Unlike other older instruments, the sound hasn't diminished with age. On occasion I repair the cracks myself, but let them breathe. I keep the guitar tuned low, usually a fourth or so. I think the value is around $5000, but who knows?

Now what‘s interesting to me—this is obviously not mass-produced; it has its own sound which is distinctive to anyone. Its very fragility requires a kind of tending or care, a necessary tending if the guitar is to survive. This is very different than most of my other string instruments (electric saz, tenor banjo, yayli tanbur, cura cumbus for examples), which are fairly standardized; on the other hand, it parallels the care needed with things like my hasapi and alpine zithers. In my writing I draw a distinction between analog and digital phenomenologies; the latter is based on replacement, equivalence, eternity, production, and protocols, while the former is based on dwelling, tending, imminence, and a chthonic modality within which object becomes subject. The analog is inhering, subject-like; the digital is remote, object-like. The analog, let us say, is really “in time”; the digital is construct and raster. Obviously I exaggerate (and my texts here are complex), but in terms of my work, the Di Giorgio has been with me, more or less as companion instrument (like Donna Haraway’s “companion species”) for over forty years; we continue to make music together. Most of my art comes through the computer now; the Di Giorgio reminds me of the fragility of what comes before and after the screen and wireless, what maybe matters most, the inhering wetware in an ultimately “alien” world of black holes and branes, not brains. I worry about passing the instrument on, but things sometimes have their way of making paths through the world, often beyond us, and not always accompanied by debris. The guitar will leave me in better shape than it arrived; I tend it, but possession seems mutual and hardly relevant at this stage of our lives. Alan Sondheim

Across

1. License to drill?: Abbr.

4. Sleeps with, in British slang 9. Contradict 14. Musical period, for example 15. Regular, in a way 16. Neural transmitters 17. R&B trio who covered 63-Across 19. Played notes of varying durations 20. Lhasa ___ 21. Saxophonist Vandermark 22. Person who's got something coming 23. Latin jazz giant who covered 63-Across 26. "Hex Induction Hour" band, with "The" 29. Mushroom variety 30. Paranoid supremacist's fear 32. ___-mo camera 34. In ___ (where found) 35. Bathroom, in Bath 36. Jaw problem: Abbr.

39. R&B quartet who covered 63-Across 41. Job application datum 42. Winning tic-tac-toe line 43. Like some acid 44. BlackBerry product 46. Tries to seize 48. Cavity filler 52. Chinese prefix 53. Motown artist who covered 63-Across 57. One-time label for the Modern Lovers 59. Found a spot while "it" counted 60. You are: Sp. 61. Sporty Mazda 63. The most covered song of all time, according to Guinness 65. "Give it ___!"

66. James and Jones of jazz 67. Watch carefully 68. N.W.A. co-founder 69. Story in a maison 70. Hi-___ image

Down

1. Spar, verbally 2. Make a quick visit 3. Addresses 4. Star Wars, briefly 5. Certain symmetrical poem 6. Osbourne daughter who wasn't on "The Osbournes" 7. Danzig or Gould 8. Thesaurus.com offering: Abbr.

9. Diamond stopping point 10. Tameka "Tiny" Cottle, to Lil Wayne 11. Soul singer who covered 63-Across 12. Place to get a room 13. Oft-covered South Bronx band 18. "Egad!"

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22. Prepare, as a TV dinner 24. Mushroom cap 25. Brother of Track, Willow, Bristol, and Piper 27. Place to hear the khaen played 28. Scientology founder ___ Hubbard 31. Made aware 33. Highway lead-in 34. Greaser's rival, in "The Outsiders" 36. Gear 37. DNA drummer Ikue 38. Folk singer who covered 63-Across 40. CV part 45. Something to manage 47. Funk bandleader with a "Rubber Band" 49. Food storage area 50. 51-Down, at sea 51. 50-Down, on land

54. Butler of fiction 55. Much-maligned Windows operating system 56. Dog collar attachment 58. Partner 61. Fannie ___ 62. Kaplan of Yo La Tengo 63. "___-haw!"

64. Jargony suffix

for answers, see: signaltonoisemagazine.blogspot.com

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Ben Towle

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SIGNAL TO NOISE #56

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