Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

Emphasis

Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008)

In 1994, I had only just begun to buy jazz on CD (having finally upgraded from Walkman to Discman). So the prospect of obtaining four (four!) CDs for the price of one seemed a lot more exciting to me back when I only owned about a dozen CDs, total, than it probably seems to anyone today. But nonetheless, I assure you that I snapped up The Verve Story: 1944-1994 with considerable anticipation. My "collection," such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of discs by Miles, Coltrane, Bird, Heribe, Wayne, Monk, and Mingus -- here was a chance to hear music by older artists that I'd been told I needed to know about, but had not actually heard yet. So this box was, believe it or not, my first exposure to the likes of Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, and others.

The standout cut, though -- the one that quite literally stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I heard it -- was Jimmy Giuffre's recording of "In the Mornings Out There," with Paul Bley (piano) and Steve Swallow (bass). The tune is by Carla Bley. I had never heard anything remotely like it before. I remember thinking, "Wow, this is what Kind of Blue would have sounded like if everyone on it played like Miles."

There is so much space on that cut. All of the usual jazz musician instincts -- to define the time and the harmony, to fill out the sound, and so on -- are completely inverted here. Paul Bley doesn't play any real chords at first. He just rocks back and forth between a pair of mid-register perfect fourths. Giuffre enters with a dark and breathy clarinet sound, moody and introspective and modernistic, a world removed from the swing-era clarinet sound. The first harmonic "change" comes purely by implication -- Giuffre plays Bb instead of B natural, while Bley doesn't change a thing. There are no chord roots to pin down the progression -- Steve Swallow doesn't play a note until a full minute into the tune. The time is ambiguous too, juxtaposing the 12/8 implied by the piano ostinato with an undercurrent of double-time 4/4 swing, most often invisible below a surface of long dark tones. The chiaroscuro mood, which other jazz musicians might have confined to a brief intro (like, for instance, Gil Evans's written piano-and-bass intro to "So What")  is sustained and developed for almost seven minutes. This could easily get precious or boring, but instead Giuffre's quiet, focused intensity is completely transfixing. It still grabs me just as hard today as it was when it first drifted over my Discman earbuds fourteen years ago.

Everyone has a handful of recordings that changed their lives. "In the Mornings Out There" changed mine. I didn't know music could be like that. Here it is:

MP3: "In The Mornings Out There," Jimmy Giuffre 3 (click to listen, right-click/control-click to download)

This track is originally from 1961's Fusion, the first Giuffre-Bley-Swallow trio record. Fusion and the followup, Thesis, recorded one month later, were originally released on Verve, but ECM's Manfred Eicher loved them so much he bought the masters and reissued them both on his own label as the 2 CD Jimmy Giuffre 3, 1961 -- which makes this track kind of an odd choice for inclusion on The Verve Story box set,  but I am certainly not complaining.

If the above track doesn't convince you that you need to own these albums, I don't know what to tell you. You can get them from Amazon or on iTunes. The third recording in this trilogy, Free Fall, is a lot more acerbic but inarguably brilliant.

There have been lots of great blogospheric appreciations of Giuffre, who died last Thursday from complications of the Parkinson's Disease that prematurely silenced his voice. The best is from trumpeter Kris Tiner at his spiffy new blog (#3, I believe), All At Once:

I have been profoundly inspired by this man's music, especially in the past couple of years. He was a true innovator, once heralded by the jazz press but eventually all but abandoned by them as he embraced open improvisation, atonality, microtonality and pulseless rhythm long before it became "acceptable" to do so. But I think the most significant thing (evidenced by his early 60s work in particular) is that he proved that free improvisation didn't have to abandon melody, and it certainly didn't have to abandon the intimacy and quiet dynamics of chamber music.

Read the whole thing. Kris has written a tune in memoriam of JG. He also links to some great videos of earlier editions of the Jimmy Giuffre 3 -- the Bley-Swallow outfit is rightly regarded as his greatest trio, but the bass-free one with Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer is also pretty killing, as you can see in this video). He also links to a downloadable live bootleg from 1961.

Other notable links:

Nik Payton, whose blog first broke the news.
Ted Gioia (Jazz.com) places Giuffre's music in the greater context of West Coast jazz.
Ben Ratliff (NYT)
Matt Schudel (WaPo) -- his piece has a nice quote from Brookmeyer.
Andrew Durkin (Jazz: The Music of Unemployment)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides) -- it is astounding to think that the person who wrote a chestnut like "Four Brothers" for the Woody Herman band also made a record like Free Fall.
Mark Myers (JazzWax) has lots of recollections from West Coast jazz musicians.
blarney/rubble
Harris Eisenstadt (Tie a Bow Not A Knot)
David Brent Johnson (WFIU Night Lights)
Steve Schwartz (WGBH) -- this 1994 interview, conducted shortly after Giuffre had been diagnosed with Parkinson's, is a must-listen.

Also, Secret Society co-conspirator Mike McGinnis emailed me to say "I probably felt musically closer to him and Lacy than any other musicians.  I guess it's up to us to keep it all going."

50 Shots

Another fucking travesty:

Three detectives were found not guilty Friday morning on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens.

RIP Jimmy Giuffre

Nik Payton reports that the great Jimmy Giuffre has passed, just a few days shy of his 87th birthday.

More later.

You think you know me, that's your trouble

Please be advised that I will be making my legitimate music debut this Sunday, April 27 at 2 PM at the Brooklyn Museum, in the latest installment of the Music Off The Walls series (sponsored by the Brooklyn Philharmonic). I was commissioned to write a new work inspired by the artwork of Takashi Murakami, whose buzzworthy, controversial retrospective opened at the Brooklyn Museum on April 5. The piece will also be reprised that same night (8 PM) at Drom, a newish venue on the Lower East Side.

My piece, "Body Double," is for string quartet and tapan. The tapan is a Bulgarian drum that kind of sounds like a cross between a bass drum and a dumbek, except that the left-hand beater is a lightweight switch that can be held against the left drum head to create a rattling, snarelike sound when you hit the other head with the other beater. The tapan will be played by Svetoslav Stoyanov. The strings are Jennifer Choi & Suzy Perelman (violin), Sasha Rees (viola), and Joey Amini (cello). The ensemble has been rehearsing at Suzy's apartment this week and they are sounding very good.

"Body Double" begins and ends with a sonic representation of Murakami's Milk, seen above. [I have also written a piece (for Pulse) based on photographer Jeff Wall's Milk. And yet, I drink my coffee black -- black as midnight on a moonless night. Perhaps I am sonically overcompensating.] At any rate, the "canvas-as-score" is heard left-to-right at the beginning, and right-to-left (manga-style) at the end. In between are a series of representations of Murakami's ubiquitous DOB character, whose portrayals veer wildly between the cute and the grotesque. DOB's head is made out of the letters D-O-B, so it seemed appropriate to use those notes to construct the musical material. (I substituted "C" for "O", it being the closest in shape, and also conveniently located between D and B.) Writing the piece, I had fun tweaking the expectations game for both "high art" and "pop art" and I hope that comes across in the music.

I am grateful to composer Jeffery Cotton, whose Meditation, Rhapsody and Bacchanal contains a movement for violin and tapan (the "Bacchanal," natch -- which you can listen to here.) Jeffery was kind enough to send me the score, which also features a preamble which contains a wealth of useful information on the tapan.

Other works on the concert include Randy Woolf's Try To Believe for violin and electronic track, Julia Wolfe's East Broadway for toy piano [yeah, that's right, Woolf & Wolfe -- and here you thought only indie rock bands had a canis lupus fixation], Frederick Rzewksi's charming proto-minimalist game-piece Les Moutons de Panurge, and string quartet arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu's and Koji Kondo's video game music.

The concerts have been getting some nice advance blurbs in The New Yorker and Time Out New York. It is flattering to be referred to as "significant" and a "master," but with my birthday coming up hard and fast, it is even more flattering to be referred to as "young."

-----

Traversing the Mushroom Kingdom -- Sunday, 27 April -- 2 PM at the Brooklyn Museum, 8 PM at Drom.

He took a face from the ancient gallery

SECRET SOCIETY
THE JAZZ GALLERY
NEW YORK, NY
18-19 APRIL 2008

18 APRIL - SET 1
(click to listen, right-click/control-click to download)

1) MP3: Flux in a Box
Solos: Ben Kono - alto sax; Mike Holober - piano

2) MP3: Phobos
Solos: Jon Wikan - cajon; John Ellis - tenor sax

3) MP3: Ferromagnetic
Solo: Jonathan Finlayson - trumpet

4) MP3: Habeas Corpus
Solo: James Hirschfeld - trombone

5) MP3: Transit
Solo: Ingrid Jensen - fluegelhorn

Download 18 April Set 1 (.zip archive)

18 APRIL - SET 2

1) MP3: Desolation Sound
Solo: Mike McGinnis - soprano sax

2) MP3: Zeno
Solo: Alan Ferber - trombone

3) MP3: Redeye
Solo: Sebastian Noelle - guitar

4) MP3: Lizard Brain
Solo: Josh Sinton - baritone sax

5) MP3: The Perils of Empire

Download 18 April Set 2 (.zip archive)

19 APRIL - SET 1

1) MP3: Ritual
Solo: Mike Fahie - trombone

2) MP3: Chrysalis
Solo: Erica vonKleist - alto flute/soprano sax

3) MP3: Transit
Solo: Ingrid Jensen - fluegelhorn

4) MP3: Drift
Solo: John Ellis - tenor sax

5) MP3: Habeas Corpus
Solo: James Hirschfeld - trombone

Download 19 April Set 1 (.zip archive)

19 APRIL - SET 2

1) MP3: Induction Effect
Solo: Sam Hoyt - fluegelhorn

2) MP3: Phobos
Solos: Jon Wikan - cajon; John Ellis - tenor sax

3) MP3: Ferromagnetic
Solo: Jonathan Finlayson - trumpet

4) MP3: Zeno
Solo: Alan Ferber - trombone

5) MP3: Desolation Sound
Solo: Mike McGinnis - soprano sax

6) MP3: The Perils of Empire

Download April 19 Set 2 (.zip archive)

-----

Incriminating Evidence (courtesy of Lindsay Beyerstein)

-----

As always, my most sincere and heartfelt thanks to all who came out to hear us last weekend. We inducted several new co-conspirators into the Society, including Mike McGinnis and John Ellis, whose solo work you can hear above -- Mike plays on "Desolation Sound" and John plays on "Phobos" and "Drift." And don't sleep on Sam Hoyt on "Induction Effect." I also unveiled a sparkly new tune, "Zeno," the premiere performances of which you can now check out at your leisure. Finally, be sure to take in Lindsay's photographs -- she's a busy girl, so it's been a while since she's been available to shoot the band, but you can check out her latest work here.

You can also read a very generous writeup courtesy of poet and blogger Karen Hildebrand.

Unfortunately, my trusty digital recorder seems increasingly untrustworthy -- first, it mangled the recording of the final show of our January tour, at Toronto's Tranzac (I forgot to mention this earlier, but if anyone in the audience at Tranzac recorded the show, please contact me... ) and now, the infernal device has also garbled the final set of our two-night stand at the Gallery. However, the Jazz Gallery itself records all events there, so I'm hoping to obtain a copy of their recording and have it uploaded before long. (UPDATE: April 19 Set 2 has now been uploaded.)

Finally, while I don't anticipate that Secret Society will be declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the immediate future (sweet lord I hope not, at least), we are in fact still attempting to pay off many of the expenses related to our January tour up to Montreal and Toronto. Musically, it was a massive success, with hugely enthusiastic audiences and rave reviews all around. It opened some important doors for us and and I have every reason to hope it will lead to bigger and better things for the band. That said, what with gas prices being what they are (and the US dollar being what it is), it was also an extremely expensive endeavor, and we are still soliciting individual donations to help us pay for trip-related costs. 

Of course, my undying love and gratitude goes out to those who have already made a donation. You are all awesome and I truly cannot thank you enough.

And thanks to you (this will be more "inside baseball" than "rock and roll," for which I apologize in advance) we are very, very close (like, within $120) to meeting our initial fundraising goal for this campaign. If that happens, then we will become eligible to apply for  institutional donations to help us fund our next big project -- the nature of which I am not yet at liberty to reveal but let's just say it rhymes with "sudeo according."

If you can, please help us pass that important milestone. We are in a brave new post-record-company world here, folks, and we are trying our best to make a go of it. But we can't do it without your help.

Once again, all of your donations made via Fractured Atlas are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Alternatively, if you'd like something more tangible than my undying love and gratitude in exchange for your hard-earned cash, our stylish Secret Society t-shirts (silkscreened by Hemlock Ink) can be had for roughly 867% less than a shirt from the new Varvatos boutique.

And, of course, you can always help us by downloading the above live MP3s and sharing them with your friends. Thanks for supporting creative independent 21st century music, and thanks most of all for listening.

-----

MANDATORY DISCLAIMER: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North's Winter '08 Tour is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Black night

The last time I saw eighth blackbird, they were responsible for injecting a little "high-minded severity" into last summer's Bang on a Can Marathon. That was also when I learned they'd commissioned a "combo piece" from Bang on a Can's founders -- Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and the recently Pulitzer'd David Lang. The Blackbirdians have double-billed this with another ambitious commission from Steve Reich, who is effectively the granddaddy of the Bang on a Can approach to classical music -- which is, in a nutshell, "less high-minded severity, more grooves."

This program , collectively called "The Only Moving Thing," was premiered three weeks prior in Richmond, VA, and they've also done it in Ann Arbor, San Fransisco, and Costa Mesa, before bringing the show to NYC for Thursday night's hit at Zankel Hall.

•     •     •

The Reich piece was a double sextet called (you can probably see this one coming) Double Sextet. It's in the lineage of stuff like Electric Counterpoint and Triple Quartet, wherein one or more live musicians plays against their own prerecorded backing tracks. But most of those works have a uniform palette to them -- Electric Counterpoint is all guitar (Pat Metheny, actually, in the original recording) and  Triple Quartet is for string quartet and their recorded doppelgaengers. But the Blackbirds are a heterogenous flock (flute, clarniet, violin, cello, piano, percussion), which makes Double Sextet a very close cousin to Reich's Eight Lines for mixed double septet (4x violins, 2x each of violas, cellos, flutes, clarinets, and pianos). Readers of this blog are all really smart people so I'm sure it has not eluded your notice that you could easily play Eight Lines in the same manner as Double Sextet, with seven musicians playing live against seven prerecorded tracks. (Also, if you are wondering why a piece called Eight Lines is scored for fourteen musicians, see here.)

Eight Lines is one of my favorite lesser-known Reich pieces, and Double Sextet resembles it in more than just instrumentation. The engine underneath the hood of 2x6tet is an intricately interlocking piano-based perpetual motion machine, in this case assisted by mallet percussion. Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duval both have a crisp, consistent sense of pulse and a very sympathetic hookup, propelling the two fast sections that bookend the piece through a virtual minefield of time-signature shifts. The outer movements were satisfying, if a bit familiar: a methodical execution of pattern-based rhythmic processes, unpredictable on a micro level, but following exactly the trajectory you'd expect. However, the middle movement was unexpectedly lyrical, with a beautiful high cello and violin line that sounded like Reich channeling Piazolla. This is a good sound.

The harmonic sequence in each movement is based on some combination of D, F, Ab, and B (and/or their relative minors) -- this use of four equidistant key areas is similar to "Coltrane Changes" (i.e., "Giant Steps" and its offspring), which exploits three equidistant key areas. Reich is a Coltrane nut so I assume that's where he got this idea. This approach to pan-modalism is totally characteristic of Reich's music, but much of Double Sextet has a definite bite to it -- Reich doesn't go so far as to allow chromatic notes from outside the mode to infiltrate, but he does go out of his way emphasize the tensions inherent within each mode. There were a lot more minor second grinds in the sustaining instruments than you usually hear in Reich's music. This is also a good sound.

I did have one minor frustration when listening to the piece, which was that the amplified sound in Zankel was noticeably muddy. Colors that ought to have been bright and sparkling were thin and piercing, and timbres that should have been rich and resonant were dull and characterless. There didn't seem to be enough separation between the recorded tracks and the live playing -- the piano and mallets were clear, but little else was. Some of this may have been due to the live mics picking up bleed from the monitors -- I don't really know enough to say. I do know that I don't envy the Blackbirds' sound tech -- all of Reich's music which involves blending prerecorded parts with live players is extremely difficult to balance correctly, and those pieces tend to sound more satisfying on record than they do live.

•     •     •

The Bang on a Can "combo piece," singing in the dead of night, opens with a quirky, skittish prologue by David Lang (these broken wings part one), dominated by high-register timbres -- glock, piccolo, accordion, pizz cello at the top of the range, etc. This transitioned into Michael Gordon's the light of the dark, in which the cellist lays down a cascade of buzzsaw glisses and the rest of the ensemble alternately try to swat him with sudden clangs, or ignore him and concentrate on their own folksy melodic lines. It concludes with a great bit of staging (by choreographer Susan Marshall), where Matthew Duvall steals Lisa Kaplan's accordion and gets in her face with it while she tries to focus on the piano part.

eighth blackbird are known for their staging, and the most strikingly theatrical moments came during part two of Lang's these broken wings, a strung-out Handelian passacaille, during which clarinetist Michael Maccaferri was loaded up with metal objects and, with an expression of infinite pathos, began to slowly drop them. And Julia Wolfe's "episode," also called singing in the dead of night, began with some soft, dreamy piano-and-marimba figures, before Kaplan and Duvall abandoned their instruments to lay their heads down on a leaf-covered table with a contact mic strapped to its underside. (In previous performances, the role of "leaves" has been played by "sand" and "barley, quinua, & millet." Presumably the leaves are easier to sweep up, but they also seemed more metaphorically apt.) This bit of business is repeated several times, which some reviewers have complained about, but I saw it as setting the scene for an incredibly tender and unexpected moment when, during a later repetition, Kaplan sleepily reaches out and puts her arm around Duvall.  (You get the sense she's forgiven him for having stolen her accordion earlier).

I thought the best music in singing in the dead of night was David Lang's epilogue (aka these broken wings part three). It opens with a driving, disjuct piano figure that sounds like a pixillated version of the "Tainted Love" chord progression, with slamming pedal bass drum hits, piercing piccolo stabs, and a complex interlocking groove. It made for an exciting close to a well-executed theatrical-musical work. I liked that the balance between the choreography and the musical materials was constantly shifting -- the more active music didn't require much movement to come off, but in the more spacious, atmospheric moments, the onstage action was allowed to take on a more important (and necessary) role. I was also genuinely impressed with how well the Blackbirdians executed the choreography -- everything looked purposeful and motived without seeming contrived or pretentious, and that's no easy feat.

-----

Tickets to this event were provided by Carnegie Hall. Also, Tim Munro invited me to the post-concert hang, and I went.

Well New York City really has it all

The opening of the new Varvatos boutique in the husk of CB's went pretty much as expected, didn't it?

A section of wall from CBGB covered in band fliers has been preserved under glass, and in keeping with Mr. Varvatos’s image as a rock ’n’ roll designer — his models include Iggy Pop and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden — the store is decorated with rock memorabilia and also sells vintage vinyl records and audio equipment.

“The whole purpose of coming here was to retain part of the history,” Mr. Varvatos said in an interview, as bands sound-checked before the show, “so that anybody can walk in off the street and experience part of what was here.”

[...]

“We’re not trading on CB’s at all,” said Mr. Varvatos, whose stubbly looks and Detroit accent give him the aura of an ordinary rock fan made good. (He later corrected himself, saying: “Are we using the walls to help sell the clothes? Yes.”)

Also, could Arturo Vega (former lighting tech/t-shirt designer/hanger-on for the Ramones... oh, excuse me, "creative director") be any more of a dick? You be the judge:

On the sidewalk outside a handful of protesters complained about the effects of gentrification on the city’s music scene. Rebecca Moore, a musician who is one of the founders of Take It to the Bridge, an activist group that organized the demonstration, sparred loudly with Mr. Vega. Saying that Lower Manhattan is becoming “a playground for rich people,” she shouted: “Forty-thousand-dollar-a-month rents, $1,600 jackets and $800 pants are closing music spaces in New York.”

Smiling, Mr. Vega responded: “When you are good at what you do, money comes, people. Work hard and you’ll be able to afford.”

A chorus of boos drowned him out.

Go show Take It To The Bridge some love -- what they are doing is vital if Manhattan is going to have any music scene to speak of five years from now. And you think this pattern won't repeat itself in Brooklyn? It's already well underway.

And your grownups all gone bankrupt

It's not our fault, I swear...

Open letter from IAJE President Chuck Owen

Reactions from around the blogosphere:

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz)

David Adler (Lerterland)

James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)

Andrea Canter (JazzInkBlog)

Willard Jenkins (The Independent Ear) -- see also Willard's April 4 post, which has generated a lot of heated discussion.

It's a bit surreal to think that we performed at the final IAJE conference. Evidently the organization's leadership was a bit of a mess (to, um, put it mildly), but I heard many unforgettable performances at conferences past: Bob Brookmeyer, Clark Terry, Maria Schneider, John Hollenbeck, Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Josh Redman's early 1990's quartet with Brad Mehldau, Ingrid Jensen, Matt Wilson's Arts and Crafts, and his also his quartet with Andrew D'Angelo (wherein Andrew infamously smashed his saxophone to the ground and began to stomp on it), the Industrial Jazz Group...

Links to my tourblogging posts related to our IAJE 2008 appearance can be found here. And here's my coverage of the penultimate IAJE conference:

IAJE 2007: Day 1. Day 2. Day 3. Photos Day 2. Photos Day 3.

Secret Society @ The Jazz Gallery, April 18+19

Darcy James Argue's

SECRET SOCIETY

at the

JAZZ GALLERY

Friday, April 18

Saturday, April 19

Sets at 9:00 PM & 10:30 PM (both nights)

"Clearly some of the most ambitious and compelling sounds I’ve ever encountered in the past 40 years."

— Juan Rodriguez, Montreal Gazette

"This powerful and well-stocked ensemble juxtaposes postwar big-band conventions with ideas borrowed from indie rock, classical Minimalism and a handful of other idiomatic regions. The results are well worth hearing."

— Nate Chinen, New York Times

WHEN: Friday, April 18 (9:00 PM & 10:30 PM) and Saturday, April 19 (9:00 PM & 10:30 PM)

WHERE: The Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, NYC

SUBWAY: 1 to Houston / C, E to Spring

COST: $15 / $10 for members

TICKETS: By phone — 212.242.1063. Online — Friday night / Saturday night

Having rested and regrouped in the months following their recent cross-border infiltration, Darcy James Argue and his wily co-conspirators will soon retake the stage at SoHo's Jazz Gallery for their first-ever weekend showcase at the this most esteemed and respectable venue. That these unsavory molls and blackguards will apparently be permitted to besmirch this hallowed stage for two consecutive nights, in spite of their dubious record of preserving the sanctity of the Big Band Tradition, is but one more lamentable sign of this debauched age.

Worse still, Mr. Argue will be inducting yet more impressionable youths into his degenerate ways: namely, saxophonists John Ellis (Charlie Hunter Trio) and Mike McGinnis (The Four Bags, Loser's Lounge) and trumpeter Sam Hoyt (Perdro Giraudo Jazz Orchestra). Sometime co-conspirators Alan Ferber (trombone) and Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet) are also backsliding their way into the fold, to take their place amongst irredeemable Society habituals such as Ingrid Jensen, Erica vonKleist, and infernal duo of Matt Clohesy and Jon Wikan.

It is sobering to note that ever since the Society's Canadian splinter cell, Secret Society North, appeared at the 2008 International Association for Jazz Education conference in Toronto, even otherwise respectable scribes have been taken in by Mr. Argue's devious original compositions. Carl Wilson, of The Globe & Mail and zoilus.com, writes: "it was like hearing Duke Ellington and minimalism and Tortoise and Funkadelic and Elliott Carter and much else besides melding into one floating, shifting, dodging music." And Juan Rodriguez of the Montreal Gazette recounts: "After it was over - a full 110 minutes of music - there was a sense among the musicians and the packed, rapt audience that they had participated in something historic."

We implore you not to allow yourselves to become similarly infatuated with an ensemble that -- lest we forget -- has not once extended to its audience the simple courtesy of a saxophone soli in 4-part block voicings. And need we remind you that in the wake of their performance at the IAJE conference, the 40-year-old organization is facing a debilitating financial crisis? Can this truly be coincidence?

Will you sit back and allow steampunk infiltration, steampunk indoctrination, steampunk subversion, and the international steampunk conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids? Or will you take action?

We have told you when and where they can be found -- we trust you will do the right thing.

*     *     *

SECRET SOCIETY

REEDS

Erica vonKleist

Ben Kono

John Ellis

Mike McGinnis

Josh Sinton
TRUMPETS

Ingrid Jensen

Jonathan Finlayson

Seneca Black

Sam Hoyt

Tom Goehring

TROMBONES

Alan Ferber

Mike Fahie

James Hirschfeld

Jennifer Wharton

RHYTHM

Sebastian Noelle

Mike Holober

Matt Clohesy

Jon Wikan

COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR, RINGLEADER

Darcy James Argue

You can never catch up

Been busy rehearsing this week for the April 18 & 19 hits at the Jazz Gallery. We will be premiering a brand-spankin' new tune, composed via the tried-and-true method of putting together a run of increasingly frantic and overcaffeinated all-nighters at the last possible minute. It's inspired by this and this, but also this -- like Zeno of Elea, we will rock you with our unstoppable paradox style.

I always enjoy inducting new co-conspirators into the Society, especially players on the level of Mike McGinnis, John Ellis, and Sam Hoyt -- these guys sound amazing. And this rare chance to play four sets on two consecutive nights means that we will have the opportunity to feature just about everyone, and play everything I have ever written for this band -- I guess this means that, like Lindsay Lohan, it's time for my Mid-Career Retrospective.

Never ending math equation

[This post is related to the recent, suprisingly popular "irrational" rhythm posts -- Part 1  & Part 2. Since (A) I can't sleep, and (B) apparently y'all love this stuff, here is the followup I promised.]

Maria Schneider runs in very different circles from the metametric/totalist crowd. Her music doesn't sound anything like  Michael Gordon's (he of the infamous Trance bassline), Mikel Rouse's, John Luther Adams's, or Kyle Gann's. But I think you can see, in some of her works, an interesting example of convergent evolution. Her own approach to "feelable/performable rhythmic complexity" (which, of course, has been a part of jazz since the very beginning) is informed primarily by flamenco, and South American music, but it has led her to stretch those traditions in ways that are, in some respects at least, recognizably similar to the rhythmic techniques used by the above-listed metameric composers.

Let's take a look at Maria's Bluería, Soleá y Rumba from her 2004 release Concert In The Garden -- specifically, the initial bulería section. The bulería is a 12-beat flamenco rhtyhm. It comes in a couple of varieties, but the version we're interested in is the one with accents on beats 3, 7, 8, 10 and 12:

Note that the pattern begins on beat 12, and beat 1 is a weak beat. If you're not versed in flamenco (and/or if you're a white kid from suburbia, like me), you'd probably hear the bulería pattern like this instead:

Since Maria isn't trying to write authentic, traditional flamenco, but instead to use bulería as a jumping-off point for her own personal expression, she opts to use the shifted form above (which, as you will see later, makes her subsequent rhythmic twists and turns much easier to read). When you look at the shifted bulería rhythm above, you can see it implies a 6/8 + 3/4 feel — which is, of course, also ubiquitous in a whole range of South American music:

The first thing Maria does is to subdivide the "6/8" portion of the bar into four parts instead of two parts -- which, if we go back to the 12/8 notation, looks like this:

Does that combination of dotted eighth notes and non-dotted quarter notes in 12/8 remind you of anything?

No, it's not "irrational" like the Michael Gordon bassline -- if you wrote it out in 4/4, you wouldn't have incomplete triplets -- but the rhythmic profile is similar.

Anyway, in her score, Maria chooses to augment the bulería rhythm, doubling all the rhythmic values — again, out of notational convenience:

This makes it possible for her to notate the entire bulería section without resorting to any sixteenth-note subdivisions. But you can see that the underlying pattern remains the same, only instead of 6/8 + 3/4, it's now 12/8 + 3/2.

Here's the initial theme -- check out how it sometimes reinforces and sometimes pushes against the 12/8 + 3/2 bulería foundation:

(I took the liberty of making some slight alterations to the beaming patterns in the original notation, in order to make the 12/8 + 3/2 pattern explicit.)

Here's the audio of the above, from the original recording:

MP3: Bulería, Soleá y Rumba, Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra (excerpt) -- click to listen, right-click/control-click to download

A bit later on, Maria introduces triplets, a new rhythmic element that creates 3-against-4 and 6-against-4 relationships to the bulería pattern:

She also frequently uses this rhythm, a string of quarter notes starting on the second eighth of the bar:

There's also an incredibly striking moment beginning in m.19, where the 12/8+ 3/2 pattern is temporarily suspended in favor of an eight-quarter-eighth sequence, whose binary profile strongly implies a superimposed 2/2:

These are a lot of different, non-obvious ways of carving up the 12/8 bar! But even so, we have only just barely begun to scratch the surface.

For instance, I like what happens when you play the bulería pattern followed by its retrograde (in other words, play it forwards, then backwards):

Or, in classic metametric fashion, you could mess around with multiple simultaneous juxtapositions:

Finally, if you're interested in acquiring the score to Bluería, Soleá y Rumba -- which trust me, rewards close study -- you can buy it from Maria's site.

He was some kind of a man... What does it matter what you say about people?

RIP Charlton Heston.

Whatever you may think of his talent, his body of work, or his politics, he was (probably) instrumental in getting Orson Welles hired to direct Touch of Evil.

Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We've got to see it through.

MLK was killed forty years ago today.

Here is a tremendous video of the John Coltrane quartet playing "Alabama." The melody is based on the cadences of Martin Luther King's oratory.

Also: Read Digby.

One of the things I think people may not completely grok about us loathsome and reviled baby boomers is that our politically formative years were a little bit unusual --- when we were young our leaders and heroes kept getting assassinated. You can imagine how that might shape a person's view of politics. Fortunately that hasn't happened in a long time, which is something we should be grateful for. But for a while, in the 60s, it seemed to kids like me that this was normal.

Photographs of fancy tricks

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Andrew Durkin is a fucking genius.

Context.

RIP Jules Dassin

The above is an image from Dassin's Rififi, one of my favorite films of all time. Dassin directed and also played Cesar the safecracker, pictured above. The movie is famous for a 30-minute tour-de-force B&E + safecracking scene, in which the team of jewel thieves go about their work without speaking a single word. They are, after all, professionals.

The movie is a terrific heist flick, beautifully shot in a late noir style and very influential on the French New Wave directors. François Truffaut called it the best noir he'd ever seen, and I'm inclined to agree.

But it is also, in its own oblique way, a response to McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood Blacklist.

Dassin was on that blacklist. His name looks French, but Jules was born in Middletown, Connecticut (in 1911), and grew up in Harlem. Like a lot of Americans of the time, he was disgusted by the iniquity and brutality of robber baron capitalism, and joined the Communist party in the 1930's.

Dassin said in 2002 (quoted again in his NYT obit):

“You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

As the obit goes on to say, he left the party in 1939, Stalin's nonaggression pact with Hitler being the final straw. But despite having severed his ties with the Party, Dassin was nonetheless swept up in the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the early 1950's. He was fingered by two of his fellow directors.

Dassin refused to indict others in turn, and fled to Europe, his career in tatters. Even there, he could not find work -- US distributors made it clear to the European studios that they would not carry any film with his name on it. After five years of this, now completely broke and desperate, he finally managed to land a gig on a low-budget adaptation of a trashy, pulpy French novel.

The film he made is stunning, brilliant, almost note-perfect. I think it's one of the greatest movies ever made. I wish I could afford to buy everyone reading this blog a copy of the Criterion DVD. It's really that good. (After that, you'll want to go check out his earlier films, especially Brute Force, The Naked City, and Night and the City.)

For more, read filmmaker Jamie Hook's beautiful essay on the film, "Love Made Invisible."

And from around the blogosphere:

Campaspe (Self-Styled Siren) on the appalling AP obit:

It's been sixty years, people. You can stop pretending that protecting us all from Jules Dassin movies was essential for national security.

Matt Browner Hamlin (Hold Fast):

Seriously, just watch Rififi and you’ll find about a third of Tarantino’s themes.

noirFAN on Night and the City:

But Dassin doesn’t let us sit back and gawk at the grotesquery of the characters. Instead, he pulls us into their world, makes us feel for them as their dreams fall apart- even pulls off one of the most difficult tricks in storytelling- creating empathy for characters on both sides of a conflict so that we gain no easy satisfaction from the triumph of one side over the other, just an escalating tension which resolves itself into sickening inevitability.

Glenn Kenny (Premiere.com)

Dassin's run of pictures between 1947 and 1955—Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves Highway, Night and the City and Rififi—was about as inspired as any director ever pulls off, and Dassin didn't break his stride of inspiration even as he was going into exile.

UPDATE: Issa Clubb at On Five: The Criterion Colletion Blog:

As a person, he belied the “great director as tyrant” stereotype—there was something elegant, sophisticated, and almost gentle about him. For one thing, as much as we tried to get him to talk about the blacklist, he was extremely reticent to do so. He refused to “name names,” which I suppose would have been out of character. He would only specifically mention people who had gone out of their way to combat the hysteria—especially pointing out Gene Kelly. But Dassin refused to talk about the people who had taken the easy way out. The one person whom he reserved the right to speak ill of was Roy “I Can Tell in Five Minutes If a Person Is a Communist” Brewer.

Don't get any big ideas

Letting your fans download your record for free if they want, but charging them $5.94 to buy the individual components to a single song, just so they can remix it? (Hmm... didn't Dave Douglas let you remix his stuff... for free?)

"It's such a fine line between stupid, and clever" and I honestly can't decide which side of the line this falls on. David St. Hubbins is looking increasingly prophetic.

(And goddammit, yes, I'd probably be first in line for those tracks if I wasn't flat-broke at the moment -- I have no interest in crating my own remix but I very much love to take songs apart to see how they work.)

Meanwhile, Matana Roberts reacts to the idea (news to me) that an audible Radiohead influence amongst jazz musicians has gone from being trendy to being mandatory.

The pulse ripples

The Pulse blog has some shiny new content, including a vastly expanded MP3 archive. The music I write for Pulse is necessarily rather different than the stuff I write for Secret Society, but if you're curious about what my music for smaller forces sounds like. go here.