Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

You've got to be modernistic

David Byrne reviews the Lincoln Center Festival's insane Park Avenue Armory staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 12-tone opera Die Soldaten:

The playbill refers to the piece as both a monument and a tombstone, since music in this genre couldn’t really develop any further. With this opera, the end of the road had been reached: like a Finnegan’s Wake of classical music, an aesthetic and formal investigation was carried to [its] logical — and some might say ridiculous — extreme. Joyce’s novel is just about as unreadable as this music is, for many, almost unlistenable. Funny that in the visual arts, it turned out a little differently: that same all-over chaos, no-holds-barred and no-rules-apply aesthetic resulted in works which many now find beautiful and pleasant to behold. (I think the same is true of the late 70s, early 80s No Wave bands, whose noisy music could only be enjoyed in short bursts, yet their artist friends expressing similar impulses became hugely successful.)

[…]

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?

Having closely observed the behavior of New York’s downtown, avant-garde music scene for a few decades, I can say that this impulse is not limited to academic classical composers. There are many musicians and composers of experimental works who seemingly compete for the title of most obscure and most difficult for the listener, and even record collectors like to play along. In this world, any trace of popularity, however slight, is distasteful and to be avoided at all costs. Should a work become unexpectedly accessible, the artist must then follow the piece with something completely perverse and disgusting, encouraging members of the new, undesired audience to walk away shaking their heads, leaving behind the core of pure and hardy aficionados. This is elitism of a different sort. [My link, not Byrne's, obviously.] If one can’t be fêted by the handful of patrons at the Met, then one can be just as elite by cultivating an audience equally rarified in the completely opposite direction. Extreme ugliness and unpleasantness becomes the mirror image of extreme luxury and beauty.

[…]

In one scene, a group of bourgeois businessmen in pig masks lurch along the runway followed by two guys in Santa outfits, one of whom rapes a young woman screaming ceaselessly. When I saw the approach of the evil Santas, I got all excited — we’d suddenly descended into slasher movie territory. Killer Klowns: The Opera! The folks around me did not seem amused; I’d never seen so much seersucker in one place in my life.

A santa-clad rapist. Apparently played for horror and not kitsch. Really.

Read the whole thing.

Cold like Ike

Nels Cline on Ike Turner.

I hate your blog. Your recipe for vegan eggnog is stupid.

(Yes, this is the second time I've stolen from that MC Frontalot song for a post title, but look -- genius is genius, all right?)

Time Out New York's cover feature this week is a piece exploring the sometimes contentious interrelation between Big Media arts critics and the growing network of Artists With Blogs and Bloggers Who Write About Arts. The piece itself is actually very bloggy -- after an introductory "post" by Michael Friedson, he turns it over to a bevy of commenters, including some of my favorite artsbloggers -- Tweed & sharkskin girl of the performance art blog Obscene Jester, and Isaac Butler, theatre director and proprietor of the vibrant theatre blog Parabasis.

[A digression: Isaac and I met cute -- while we were waiting for the F train one day a few years back, Isaac recognized Lindsay from her blog photo and introduced himself to us both. Later, he ended up using a couple of Secret Society tunes in a play he directed, Talk of the Walk-Up. And by some strange coincidence, one of the actors in the cast turned out to be the paralegal who had handled my latest O-1 Visa application.]

Anyway, yrs trly was amongst the bloggers contacted for this piece, and here's the bit they quoted:

Darcy James Argue, editor, music-and-culture blog Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society
One charge we’ve all heard leveled at blogs is that they are “all about the blogger.” The people making this accusation generally seem to think this is a very bad thing, but I’m not so sure.… When you follow someone’s blog, you tend to get a much more vivid sense of the writer’s values and priorities than you get from reading a traditional review. I think this is much healthier than passively accepting someone’s verdict because they happen to write for The New York Times.

Dude, I'm an editor now? Sweet! (Wait, that doesn't mean I have to start proofreading before I hit "Publish Now" from now on, does it?)

I'm also honored to have made the list of "trusted blogs," as it will make for a much more dramatic reversal when I inevitably betray that trust in a blatant sell-out.

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Smacks you in the head

T-Money takes one for the team.

Font of wisdom

Don't miss Taylor Ho Bynum's writeups from FONT (Festival of New Trumpet Music) 2007, currently in progress.

In a world where I wasn't spending this week frantically trying to get music and grant applications and our January IAJE-related mini tour together, I'd want to be at these hits practically every night. At least I have Taylor's excellent reports to help fill me in on all the cool shit I'm missing.

Report from the FONT Volume 1
Report from the FONT Volume 2

Okay, back to the grindstone...

Can you not see that this is the path I am destined to take?

Matthew Guerrieri is a fucking genius.

Irony, man

[Okay, sorry, couldn't resist. Let me make it up to you -- here's a link to the awesome trailer. You don't get fanservice like that every day, let me tell you.]

Promoted from the comments on this thread:

In my opinion, a lot of the Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes that became standards were appropriated by jazz musicians the same way TBP appropriates their covers: in a kind of lovingly humorous way. For example, I find Sonny Rollins's duet version of Surrey With the Fringe on Newk's Time pretty funny, as if Sonny knows the song is corny, but still loves something about it, and is making fun of himself, in a way, for loving it. He shows us something about the tune that maybe no one else really heard, or thought to listen for. He also turns it into an amazing piece of music. I think this is what TBP does with their tunes, covers or not; these guys all have a sense of humor. A lot of people can't really hear humor in instrumental music, and/or don't want to.

MSK nails it in one. Stop and think a bit about some of the tunes that have become vehicles for jazz improvisation. I mean, "Tea For Two"? "I'm An Old Cowhand"? "If I Were A Bell"? "Someday My Prince Will Come"? "There's No Business Like Show Business"?? "My Favorite Things," fercrissakes??? (Let alone "Chim Chim Cheree"!! "Inch Worm"!!! Okay, you get the idea.)

Jazz musicians have been doing ironic covers since the very beginning.

However, viz. MSK's final sentence, I don't think it's that people can't hear humor in instrumental music. Obviously, most people have no trouble at all hearing the humor in The Bad Plus's covers, most of which "read" as at least a little bit ironic, despite the band's protestations. (I should add that I don't think irony in any way precludes sincere appreciation.) I think it's that some people have a rotten sense of humor. They are unable to perceive that music that is fun and clever and wry can still be artistically meaningful and serious in intent. They get that there's something funny about it -- but that's all they get.

All of the standards I listed above would clearly, clearly have been understood by audiences at the time as being ironic choices. But through a combination of the passage of time, the ascendence of the "Jazz Education" industry, the museumification of jazz, and and the overblown mythologizing of the "Great American Songbook," they have somehow been drained of their ironic bite and cultural significance. Most people today just hear them as melodies and chord progressions, divorced from any larger meaning.

This is impossible to do with a song like "Iron Man" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- their cultural associations are still vivid and inescapable. For reasons that I think are relatively obvious, it makes a lot of jazz musicians, critics and fans very uncomfortable to think about issues of cultural significance. We are much more at ease when talking about craft -- whether the rhythm section is hooking up, or whether the improvisers are listening to each other closely enough, or whether the surface qualities of the music are "complex" and "innovative" enough to satisfy our discriminating tastes. Most of us really, really do not want to think about questions like "what does this music mean?" or "why are we doing this?" or "how does this music relate to the culture at large?" That is, unless it's in an insular, oppositional way -- i.e., "our music is capital-A Art and contemporary popular music is shit." (Now there's a stance that both Wynton Marsalis and the Vision Festival crowd can agree on!)

Most jazz musicians and fans today don't know the original source of standard tunes -- they only know them through the jazz covers, and so they all get lumped into one big undifferentiated catch-all mental category -- "standards." So today, we often don't get the irony of jazz musicians covering tunes from Oklahoma! or The Sound of Music or South Pacific, because these songs have no non-jazz associations for us. How many jazz musicians/critics/fans born after 1965 have actually watched an entire classic musical, or own any Original Broadway Cast recordings? It doesn't really matter where they are from, or even what year they appeared -- they are all just "standards" to us.

But for audiences at the time, these songs were not "standards." They were covers -- reinterpretations of recent pop songs that had specific, current cultural associations. It's not just that the songs were familiar, it's that they meant something. When audiences in 1961 heard Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," they immediately thought of The Sound of Music, the Trapp family singers, "Doh, A Deer," "Edelweiss," Broadway kitch, Austria, WWII, all the rest. The show had been playing on B'way for less than a year before Coltrane recorded his cover version. (The movie version with Julie Andrews would not be released until 1965.)

So if we are going to encourage people to "respect the jazz tradition," maybe it's worth unpacking that idea a little bit. Is it respectful to Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane to bite their covers -- to play exactly the same damn songs they covered 50 years ago, even though the cultural significance of those songs -- a big part of why they chose to cover those tunes in the first place -- has almost totally evaporated?

Also worth considering: why is it that when Trane and Sonny use irony as part of their art, we understand that there is an underlying seriousness to what they are doing, but younger musicians can't touch irony with a ten-foot pole, lest they be dismissed a joke?

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife

The Bad Plus (yes, all three of them, this time) have written a post that has surely been brewing since they started blogging, in which they defend their choice of cover tunes against widespread accusations of... [sotto voce] irony:

With the rare exception, TBP doesn't choose to improvise on music written from 1920 to 1965.  Instead, we find it really interesting to search for ways to make rock, pop and electronica songs vehicles for contemporary improvisation. One reason that this material is not "standard" is that you can't call "Iron Man" at a jam session and pull off a mediocre interpretation of it the way you can with "All the Things You Are." There simply isn't a common language for it.

But just because the non-original songs we play can't be called at a jam session isn't the reason 10 English critics think it's a joke.  Why do they think it is a joke?  There are two possible reasons:

A)  The original music itself is a joke:  in other words, Nirvana, Blondie, Aphex Twin, ABBA, Neil Young, The Police, David Bowie, Burt Bacharach, Tears for Fears, Black Sabbath, Pixies, Vangelis, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Radiohead, Bjork, The Bee Gees, and Interpol is just inferior and not at the level of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood.  Implied is the phrase "rock is not worthy of the jazz tradition."

B)  The way we play the covers appears like parody or at least highly ironic.

Both are wrong.

Read the whole thing.

Do The Math doesn't have comments, but I do, and I'm rather curious what people think of this post. I would encourage everyone to check it out in its entirety, then return here to share your thoughts.

I actually have quite a lot to say about this, and when I have more time, I will probably follow up with some commentary, but for the moment I'm more interested in your take.

But perhaps it's not tipping my hand too much to mention that I, too, have previously blogged about the frequently dodgy lyrics that characterize much of the so-called Great American Songbook.

I also think it's worth considering why The Bad Plus's covers have become such a lightning rod for critical scorn, which is something I alluded to in my review of their double-bill with Jason Moran last year. It's not at all uncommon anymore for jazz musicians to play covers of post-Great American Songbook tunes, but for some reason, The Bad Plus (unlike, say, Jason Moran or Brad Mehldau) seem to attract particular scorn for this.

You read a pamphlet from a mailbox that urges low cunning - Part the Second

Picking up where we left off...

There are a lot of worthy music blogs and musician blogs now. It's true that the jazz blogosphere still lags far behind the indie rock blogosphere, and we are even getting lapped by the classical music bloggers (how embarrassing is that?)  but things are beginning to pick up.

New Allied Operatives

Perhaps Kelly Fenton (Bottomless Cup) can whip us into shape. She is, after all, training for the Philly Marathon. She also likes superhero comics and writes really great music, much of it inspired by superhero comics. I met Kelly back at the recording sessions for Sky Blue. She started blogging shortly thereafter and I've really enjoyed her personable, engaging style. She's got posts about Americana and driving music and listening to Beethoven 9 for the first time, and even writes up the occasional jazz hit.

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I met drummer Vinson Valega (Consilience Productions) when we were on a panel together at IAJE last January. In addition to serving up a weekly MP3 (one of which happens to be a groovy organ trio version of the Wonder Woman TV theme), he often posts some good links.

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Trumpeter Kris Tiner (formerly of Stop The Play And Watch The Audidence) is getting all serious on us. Whatta revoltin' development. You can continue to read Kris over at his no-fun new blog, The Soul and the System -- but if what you are really looking for from your blogging jazz musicians are posts about Elvis, you will have to look elsewhere from now on.

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As always, I recommend getting an RSS reader to help you keep track of your favorite blogs. If you are on a Mac, I recommend Vienna. If you are on Windows, I recommend a Mac.

You read a pamphlet from a mailbox that urges low cunning - Part the First

It's been far too long since the last blogroll refresh, but that's nothing new. But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you, right?

Rather than my usual M.O. of laying one long linkdump on you, I'm going to serve these up one by one over the course of the next few days.

New Allied Operative

Steve Coleman — M-Base Blog

It was only a matter of time, right? One of jazz's most original thinkers has jumped into the blogoswamp. The format so far is mostly Q&A, and Steve's not afraid to go long and technical. The blog only launched a couple of weeks ago, and there are only four posts up so far, but there is already an almost overwhelming density of information. I actually kind of wish he'd make it more blog-like and digestible by divvying things up into shorter individual posts, but there's no doubt this blog is shaping up to be one hell of a resource.

Here are just a few things worth mulling over. (I definitely don't agree with all of this!)

I have spent most of my career concentrating more on the rhythm/pitch/form aspects of music versus timbral considerations. I have certainly not ignored timbre, but I have not really delved into a systematized study of it either. And the musicians that I favor tend to be those that have highly developed and specific rhythmic and tonality languages. With these musicians I feel that the timbral elements are aids for expressing the sophisticated rhythmelodies. Of course there would be those who completely disagree with me and that is why their music would tend to run in directions that stress timbral qualities. For myself I prefer a more subtle expression of timbre.

I feel strongly that the younger generation that is involved in creative music today are foregoing the detailed rhythmic and melodic developments demonstrated by the older masters (which take an incredible amount of concentration to develop) in favor of more ‘effects’. These trends tend to pendulum back and forth, as each generation reacts to the excesses of the previous generation by moving in the opposite direction.

Read the whole thing.

In all of my teaching one of the main things I notice is that young people (who make up most of the class when you are teaching) tend to rush when playing music. Young people have less patience, and the tendency to want to push the beat is greater. So you have to make a conscious effort to relax and lay back. This tendency is counteracted in some cultures, especially in the African Diaspora. This may be because initially in these cultures it is frequent for much older people to play alongside younger people and the ‘way’ of playing may more easily be transferred to the younger musicians, but I’m just speculating here. My own experience is that I picked this up from playing with much older musicians. I remember when I first joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra that I was always ahead of Thad in terms of where I felt the time (this was true when I played alongside Von Freeman also), so I had to consciously slow down – and after some time this became a habit.

Read the whole thing.

You know, what really clarified things for me was when I got some kind of handle on ‘what am I trying to say with my music’. In other words it is one thing to play music with emotional feeling and expressiveness. It is quite another to try to express very specific ideas through your music. All humans are born with emotion as a basic language, even babies have this, for the most part it is the only language we possess initially. But there is more to us than emotion, feeling and emotion are not the same thing. Feeling actually encompasses emotion but other forms of sensation as well, physical and mental sensation and impressions and even spiritual sensations and impressions.

Read the whole thing.

Seafever

Doug Ramsey of Rifftides, in "Simple Answers to Simple Questions":

When I arrived home after a post-concert hang late Saturday night, I found this message from a musician friend:

Has there ever been a better concert at the Seasons than the Ingrid Jensen one this evening?

No.

There's more, of course, but you should go read it over at Doug's place.

He's just trying to tell a vision

More on the Vision Festival and associated issues...

Dan Melnick flew in from Chicago to catch the last few days of VizFest. He offers a different take on Friday's music, and weighs in on some of the meta-issues (mmm, sweet, sweet meta):

Part of the issue for me gets back to the role of so-called critics, pundits, and writers. I'm less interested in opinions than I am in descriptions of the music: how it made you feel, how it sounded, etc. Mr. Olewnick's review tells me more about his own personal taste and prejudices than it does about the music made. Is it the role of a critic to dictate what a musician should or should not do? Is a critic more qualified to determine how a musician should interact or play in a band than the musicians themselves? Of course it's okay not to enjoy something, and to enjoy one thing more than another. But to make essential value judgments about musicians, their intent, and how they go about their art, to me is distasteful.

Obviously, I don't agree with the above, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging. One of the things that I like about this medium is that it doesn't pretend to be about anything other than the blogger's personal tastes and prejudices. Many Old Media writers (especially jazz and classical critics) try to wield the authority of their publication like a cudgel. They make sweeping pronouncements in a stentorian tone like they have some kind of special insight into what is Great and True about Art. But studiously avoiding the use of the first person doesn't make their opinions any less subjective and personal. I'd like it if more critics were more explicit about where they are coming from.

I also think it's a good idea for everyone to talk openly about the stuff that's going on in our scene -- what we like about it and what we don't. Disagreement and controversy are good -- they are signs that people feel passionately about this music. Because our scene is so small and marginal, it's understandable that some people want to paper over the differences and project a united front to the world: "Everything is great! Every artist is great! Every show is great! Come check out how great everything is!" But I actually think that's counterproductive -- to an outsider, that kind of boosterism looks transparently insincere.

I'm not saying people should be mean-spirited. I'd hate for the comments in the jazz blogosphere to descend into pointless, reflexive snark, like the comments on some of the bigger indie rock blogs. But people should be free to say, "I didn't like it, and here's why" without everyone else bringing the house down on them.

Obviously, this becomes even trickier when you are yourself a struggling musician trying to establish yourself in a scene that you are also blogging about. It would be a lot safer for me to never say a critical word about a fellow artist, but then this blog would be incredibly boring and no one would read it. At the same time, I also have a direct and personal sense of how hard it is to just get out there and make your music happen. So I try to temper any criticism with a sense of perspective -- I'm not trying to make any Grand Pronouncements about anyone else's art. I'm just trying to express how I responded to it.

See also Pat Donaher on Zorn/Hadju, the Vision Fest, and related issues, and also Will Friedwald (NY Sun) for yet another take on the Friday night hit. And feel free to mix it up in the comments -- bring on the aesthetic fistfights!

Gimme one vision

Brian Olewnick casts a skeptical eye on the Vision Festival:

The odd (sad?) thing was that the better music from each evening almost inevitably referred directly to earlier great music. So you get pastiches of Handy, the Art Ensemble, Ellington etc., which are enjoyable enough but hardly possessing any "vision". Not surprising, of course, but still. Worse, as always, for something describing itself as "free music", countless strictures were constantly in place. There was rarely a moment where you got the idea that a given musician could do anything that came to mind.

Peter Breslin wonders why people gotta hate on the Vision Festival (and on John Zorn):

Somehow it has also become fashionable to be sort of snarky and unimpressed by The Vision Festival, which surprises me in my naivete, because when I look at the lineup my first thought is "Holy Shit! What an amazing bunch of inspiring and inspired programs!" There's a dart throwing impulse. All I see is the darts; I don't see the background. Of course, all sorts of political and economic controversy has to surround someone like John Zorn, someone like William Parker. Someone like Miles Davis. But I wish I could get a clearer picture of exactly what the dissatisfaction is, exactly where it resides.

Mr. Ron

Ethan Iverson interviews Ron Carter -- go read.

And through her blindfold she could make out the figures there before her

How did you do on The Bad Plus's 90's blindfold test? If you haven't taken it yet, stop reading this post right now and go here. I give you fair warning: spoilers ensue. (In return, I trust no one will tell me what happened on the final Sopranos ep last night -- I HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET, I CAN'T HEAR YOU, LALALALALALALALALA... )

Right... okay, did everyone write down their answers? Now, go here for the results.

I hate blindfold tests. I went an embarrassing one for four.

I have no idea why I didn't get the Branford -- I mean, shit, it's obviously Tain on drums, and after that everything else falls into place. I never really warmed to Branford's swaggering, burn-the-house-down trios (at least on record -- live it's another story) so I don't own any of this stuff, but still, this one should have been a gimme.

As for the Paul Bley, if you were feeling generous, you might give me partial credit for recognizing Evan Parker -- but all that inside-the-piano stuff had me stumped. Of course, it shouldn't have, since I knew that (A) Bley has ridiculous facility with the extended techniques like those heard in the excerpt, and (B) Ethan is a maniac when it comes to Paul Bley. But Parker's presence had led me to expect a European pianist, and I'd completely forgotten about this record with Bley and Barre Phillips. Dammit. I shoulda had this one as well.

Track 3, on the other hand, was a genuine stumper. I heard Monder in there, but couldn't recognize Stomo and Satoshi, and I'm not familiar with Pat Zimmerli at all, so there was zero chance I'd ever have gotten this. Ethan offers the following equation: "Babbitt harmony + Carter rhythms + jazz saxophone = Pat Zimmerli." Babbitt and Carter are probably my two least favorite composers in the history of composed music, but of course YMMV -- if that kind of relentlessly austere mid-century high modernism really gets your juices flowing -- or you're just curious to hear how a virtuosic jazz musician approaches hexachordal combinatoriality -- you should definitely give Pat's stuff a listen.

The Rosenwinkel quartet track I got instantly, saving me from the humiliation of a total blowout. Rosenwinkel's music means a lot to the musicians I know. When I was living in Montreal, there was an obsessive trade in live bootlegs and even studio recordings that were languishing in record company limbo. "Good melody played clearly" is a virtue I always strive for in my own music, even when I'm not doing something explicitly melody-oriented, and my particular take on that comes from listening to Wayne Shorter, Kenny Wheeler, Keith Jarrett, Maria Schneider, Bill Frisell, and Kurt Rosenwinkel.

Ethan's post, though, is much more than a blindfold test. Over the course of giving the answers and talking about the above four artists (all of them either somewhat underrepresented or wholly unrepresented on the Destination: Out survey -- oh, hey, happy birthday, guys), Ethan offers up some thoroughly on-point observations about the 90's jazz scene, from his perspective as an active participant in it. You should, naturally, read the whole thing, but allow me to highlight some of my favorite bits:

Wayne Shorter was "fairly contemporary, but not as ill as Alan Shorter" - Wayne was "boxed in by Miles Davis" - David S. Ware is "infinitely superior to Wayne Shorter": these are truly uninformed assessments that happily go into the fool's ring and hang out along with the worst of Wynton, Branford, and Crouch.

[...]

For all his faults, which are numerous, Bley can immediately make interesting music out of anything, anywhere, anytime. On the excerpt I posted, track one, he uses "extended piano technique" like a master. Does Bley need to think much about playing the piano strings like a muted harp? I highly doubt it. He just reaches in and is immediately burning.

[...]

My own polemic is this: I believe that the tributaries that these two trios from 1996 represent are equally important considerations for the young improviser today. It hasn't really happened yet -- Joe Lovano comes closest -- but when players can eat up "Cherokee" with Jeff Watts and create free harmony with Barre Phillips at an equal level, that will really be something. The fact that one trio is all black and one all white means something, too: not that the races should stay apart, but that due respect for each stream is important. How many times have I wanted to tell a young black pianist, "You should check out some Paul Bley," and similarly to a young white pianist, "How would you sound if you had to play with Jeff Watts?"

[...]

Whereas the older trios are not dealing with much in the way of written structure, my two peer selections show off elaborate compositions. Compared with either traditional or free jazz, most of the interesting music coming out of my age group - those born between from, say, 1965 to 1975 - is extremely composition based, or at least conceptual in nature. In TBP, composing and arranging is featured more than "blowing," a paradigm that lives next to indie rock but also goes back to earlier jazz (and a paradigm that seems to really stump some of our critics).

It's not just in TBP, either, but (to name just those who are friends, but of course there are many more) Jason Moran's Bandwagon, Brad Mehldau, Guillermo Klein's Los Guachos, Happy Apple, Bill McHenry, Fly, John Hollenbeck, Craig Taborn, Ben Monder and Benoit Delbecq all build their music from the ground up, with either a swing beat or total freedom being merely possibilities, not givens -- in fact, often both are avoided.

[...]

A couple of nights had Turner almost levitating out the ceiling on something like "Cubism" or "Synthetics," and Street and Ballard could get to a scary level of earthy intensity. I've played with those two together a lot and it takes some guts, like playing with tigers.

We're separated at birth, that’s demonstrated in the verse

Kyle Gann, 2007:

Someday someone will appear who has analyzed more minimalist-influenced music from the 1980s and '90s than I have, and if that person feels that I have divided my era into categories inappropriately, I will be glad to listen to her argument. So far, I've gotten plenty of argument, but only from people who don't come anywhere close to fitting that description.

[...]

Now, don't write in and tell me you don't like these pieces. Who cares if you like these pieces? Do I care if you like these pieces? Do I, Kyle Gann, personally give a shit whether you like these pieces? No. No, my friend. I do not give a shit whether you like these pieces.

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Milton Babbitt, 1958:

It often has been remarked that only in politics and the "arts" does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard. In the realm of politics he knows that this right, in the form of a vote, is guaranteed by fiat. Comparably, in the realm of public music, the concertgoer is secure in the knowledge that the amenities of concert going protect his firmly stated "I didn't like it" from further scrutiny. Imagine, if you can, a layman chancing upon a lecture on "Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms." At the conclusion, he announces: "I didn't like it," Social conventions being what they are in such circles, someone might dare inquire: "Why not?" Under duress, our layman discloses precise reasons for his failure to enjoy himself; he found the hall chilly, the lecturer's voice unpleasant, and he was suffering the digestive aftermath of a poor dinner. His interlocutor understandably disqualifies these reasons as irrelevant to the content and value of the lecture, and the development of mathematics is left undisturbed. If the concertgoer is at all versed in the ways of musical lifesmanship, he also will offer reasons for his "I didn't like it" - in the form of assertions that the work in question is "inexpressive," "undramatic," "lacking in poetry," etc., etc., tapping that store of vacuous equivalents hallowed by time for: "I don't like it, and I cannot or will not state why." The concertgoer's critical authority is established beyond the possibility of further inquiry.

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Okay, I keed, I keed. Babbittian crankiness aside, Kyle's Postminimalism: Chapter One, Metaphorically Speaking is a first-rate piece of analysis, tracing some specific commonalities between composers whose music sounds very different indeed and making some incisive observations about postminimalism as a kind of do-over of serialism, but without all the Germanic angst. He also hosts audio of one of the pieces under discussion -- Belinda Reynolds's "Cover." While it breaks my heart to know that Kyle Gann does not, personally, give a shit whether I like this piece, I like this piece. A lot. It's pretty kickass, actually.

Anyway, never mind the occasional cantankerous outburst, just go read. It's worth it, I promise. Or if you just want to hear the MP3 of "Cover," scroll down to just before the string of asterisks. This is, BTW, the title track from Belinda's most recent CD, which you can get here.

(As an aside, am I the only one having nightmares about this picture of Unca Milt?)

Industrial rhythms all around

Andrew Durkin on the Industrial Jazz Group's Dutch tour (which included some Society co-conspirators):

European newbie that I was, I immediately noted a few things about our temporary home-away-from-home: 1. Everyone speaks English to some degree. Even the TV is primarily in English. 2. It is not unusual to find beer in vending machines. Heineken is the beer of choice in said machines. (Okay, so the system isn't perfect.) 3. Everyone smokes. A lot. It's like they don't believe in cancer. 4. The coffee, which is exquisite, comes in very small doses. (And incidentally, I didn't see a single Starbucks the entire time I was in-country.) Anyway, we made our various introductions (this special international version of the group [personnel here] included west coasters, east coasters, and Europeans) and then set off to our first show, a half-hourish "preview" thing designed to pique people's interest in the festival proper. It was free, it was outdoors (somewhere in the midst of a fun little shopping area of the city), and it was windy as fuck. At one point during the performance I watched in horror as some of Wolter Wierbos's music blew clear across the stage and under the drum kit. Given those conditions, and the fact that we had a few brand-new folks on board, I was genuinely surprised when we made it to the end of the set without any train wrecks. Now, it's always difficult for me to judge the reaction of any given IJG audience, seeing as how my back is to them most of the time during a show. Of course I was well aware going into this that Europe in general has a fantastical reputation amongst jazz musicians as a fairytale haven of "true jazz lovers." But I have also always wondered how much of that is exaggerated, fed by a level of rejection-by-one's-home-country so telling as to make even the slightest appreciation abroad appear much more significant than it is. I suppose there must be a pretty broad range of experiences out there, but as for the reception we got -- well, it started out great and only got better. This first show had a pretty good crowd going -- it was, after all, outside, and people just got swept up in what we were doing as they were out running errands or whatever. The fact that we didn't scare folks off -- the reaction we probably would have had given a similar public performance situation in the states -- suggests a real difference in the everyday relationship that Dutch people have with the arts. While we have our street fairs, of course, the music is usually that which, by virtue of its commercial viability, most complements the sea of commerce in which it is situated.

Read the whole thing -- it features, among other things, the latest inside poop on the guys from Spyro Gyra.

This sort of thing is my bag, baby

[In which your humble narrator briefly ponders if enough time has passed since the Austin Powers franchise was thoroughly, mercilessly run into the ground that it's okay to quote from it again... ]

Mike Baggetta on Ran Blake:

What I can tell you about him is that he plays the piano like no one else alive that I know of. Another thing I can tell you is that he seems extremely focused and in the moment while maintaining a strong sense of humility and servitude to the music. I kept having a thought while I was listening at the concert that was something like "this is the closest thing I will ever witness to Thelonious Monk playing solo piano..." I think that my idea has a lot to do with his unapologetic touch for the notes he plays, as well as a strong confidence in his own phrasing of the melodies. Ideally we all have this, but something he had seemed so akin to the solo Thelonious albums I have listened to hundreds of times. (If you don't have the London and San Francisco solo stuff, you're missing out big time!) Mr. Blake definitely has a strong mastery over using the pedals of the piano too. This is especially evident in his, what I can only describe as, sforzando chords, as well as in a whole array of other sounds I have never heard come out of any other piano in my life with such intensity. His mastery was applied to two sets of music of his own written and improvised material and songs written by Dominique Eade, Cole Porter, Mary Lou Williams and Gunther Schuller, among others. All of this accompanied by some very insightful program notes by Mr. Blake, and I think that gives you one of the best concerts of the year!

It really was a tremendous performance -- Ran is looking and sounding very good these days. This kind of off-the-beaten path, low-key gig in Brooklyn (where he gets to pick the room lighting and there happens to be an exit extremely close to the piano bench -- these things are important to Ran) is just the kind of environment that brings out the best in his playing. The comparison to Monk might sound like hyperbole if you've never heard Ran play, but it's actually extraordinarily apt, especially since Monk and Ran had a complex but close personal relationship. At one point, Ran actually took a piano lesson from Monk -- can you imagine asking for a lesson with Monk? Can you imagine Monk giving one? The mind boggles. Ran also used to babysit for Monk's daughter Barbara (the "Boo Boo" of "Boo Boo's Birthday") and one of Ran's most-recorded and performed pieces is his dedication to her, "The Short Life of Barbara Monk."

[In the same post, Mike also blogs about his experience performing with some wanker in a morning coat last Saturday.]

Secret Society co-conspirator Josh Sinton probably knows as much about Ran's music as anyone out there. He also delivers the best Ran Blake impression, hands-down. He's offered to contribute a guest post on Ran's music at some point, which I very much look forward to sharing with you.

And he's the one who likes all our pretty songs

Part One of Destination: Out's "We Love The Nineties" poll is out. As a bit of a followup to last year's infamous 1973-1990 extravaganza, Proprietors Chilly Jay Chill and Prof. Drew LeDrew have asked a number of critics, bloggers and musicians (including Gary Giddins, centrifuge, Matt Durutti, and yrs trly) to submit their list of Top 10 jazz albums for 1990-2000. The consensus favorite so far is Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio outing Constellations, which was not on my list but could easily have been. Instead, I went with Stargazer -- his Wayne Shorter tribute, and the first Dave Douglas record I ever bought -- and Convergence, the last and strongest record with his "string band" -- Mark Feldman on violin, Erik Friedlander on cello, Drew Gress on bass, and Michael Sarin on drums.

Of course, it's no surprise that Douglas is represented on everyone's list since he kept coming out with, like, a record a week during the nineties, each one with a different band, on a different label, with a different concept animating the music. And, with few exceptions, they were ridiculously killing -- that run of 15 Douglas-led sessions (counting New and Used) from 1994's Parallel Worlds through  1999's Songs For Wandering Souls looks even more impressive in retrospect.

And it makes me wonder... has the decline and fall of the label system made that kind of sustained creative output impossible? It costs a lot of money to make a record, especially a studio record with the kind of sound quality and production values that those Joe Ferla-engineered Douglas joints embodied. Now that there's no such thing as a recording budget anymore, artists are left to foot the entire bill themselves, and if there was an emerging jazz musician today going through a Douglas-like explosion of creativity and wanting to document it and release it, they would quickly find themselves at the mercy of MBNA's debt collectors. (That is, if they had not already gone broke just trying to keep their head above water in the New New York.)

But while studio recording costs have not fallen, and the burden of paying them has shifted almost entirely to the artist, and the continuing collapse of the CD sales market makes it incredibly difficult for anyone to ever break even on their record, the flip side is that if you go the digital route, the distribution costs have dropped to almost zero. It's become much more difficult to actually make a record, but much, much easier to release it, and release it quickly -- almost as soon as it's recorded.

Speaking of which, the audio from Saturday's Bowery Poetry Club hit will be up real soon. (Pat Donaher has a writeup.) As always, I'm incredibly happy just to have you listen. I still marvel that an unsigned, underground big band without a studio recording can have a frickin' international following (of sorts). But should you ever feel the urge to offer more... tangible support, I would like to once again humbly direct you to the

button. Your continued support is what keeps us going, in a starkly literal sense.

Ten years ago, no one would have known about Secret Society except the people who actually came to our gigs. Now, it's all there for anyone to download, and has allowed me to reach people I'd never imagined would hear my music. Whenever this path starts to feel like a long, hard slog that can only end in heartbreak, I try to remember that.

Thanks also to all for your patience during my recent break from blogdonia. Regular blogging will resume starting now-ish. It's good to be back.

Holding court on Taylor Square

Over at SpiderMonkey Stories, Taylor Ho Bynum has a first-person report from the Anthony Braxton run at the Iridium (which I couldn't make, dammit), talks about his studio recording with Jason Kao Hwang's quartet, and writes up our Jazz Gallery hit:

After the first night of recording, I went around the corner from the Soho recording studio and caught the second set of Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society at the Jazz Gallery. (This is the “secret” themed blog post.) While I’ve of course enjoyed Darcy’s blog, this was the first time I had a chance to see the band live, and I was impressed. First of all, it’s just so good to hear a full 18-piece big band in an acoustic space! Darcy makes great use of the orchestral potential, adeptly mixing mutes in the brass section and incorporating multi-instrumentalism in the reeds, with musicians switching between various saxes and clarinets and flutes, for a rich palette of timbres. The music was very tightly composed, with echoes of both Reichian minimalism and post-Brookmeyer harmonic lushness. There was real compositional clarity, every piece had a distinct identity and dealt with a different conceptual question. I also thought it was interesting that each piece had only one designated soloist, almost like mini-concertos for improvisers; it was reminiscent of Gil Evans’ work with Miles, but with the soloist chair being passed around the orchestra. I was too tired to stick around after the show to meet my fellow-blogger in person, but I’m very glad I made it out, evocative and rewarding music.

Save the date: the CD release gig for Taylor's new album The Middle Picture will be at The Jazz Gallery on Friday, April 27. Readers of his blog get a secret discount -- consult SpiderMonkey Stories for details.

Took a year hiatus, now you wanna hate us

Well, not a whole year -- at least, I hope not -- but I am putting this blog on hold for the next couple of months as I enter crunch time for some upcoming projects. In addition to the Secret Society hits at the Jazz Gallery on April 5 and at the BPC on May 19, as well as the new Pulse project, Shir Halal (at Roulette May 5 and Makor May 7), I am deep in the throes of sweaty preparation for a couple of concerts on May 11 and 12 featuring Lizz Wright with the Atlanta Symphony, with orchestrations provided by yrs trly.

There being, I'm told, "only so many hours in the day," I'm afraid the blog will have to wait patiently for all of this activity to subside. But wait -- before you all start angrily demanding a refund, I'm leaving you in excellent hands. Behold the proud new additions to the Society's list of allied operatives, pamphleteers & advocates:

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Matana Roberts is blogging for real now -- not just on MySpace. Shadows of a People is intended as a forum for Matana to talk about issues related to her current project, the epic blood narrative Coin Coin. The new blog has only been live for a couple of days now, but already Matana has contributed several reflective, incisive, and brutally honest posts grappling with issues of race, identity, economics, culture, and jazz. This is some of the most powerful writing you will find anywhere. Check out her most recent offering, an epic post called Jazz, Blackness, Shame:

My maternal grandmother pulled me aside every chance she could get to tell me that the kind of presence I had was one that only a high powered lawyer  could posses. I would just smile at this, but frankly sometimes, when i'm freaked out about how exactly I'm going to make my rent, I wished I would have listened to her for purely economical reasons, as my last argument with a somewhat nasty student loan collector went something like this:

collector: so ms. roberts , what exactly is it that you are doing with your life?

Me: "Well sir,  I'm making a contribution.

collector: (insert smirk here) by playing in a band ms roberts!?

Me: um... well if you want to put it like that, then sure.

collector: "you should be ashamed of yourself...

thats basically where my shame has come from so far in this lifetime in relationship to music. Isn't that something? I'm pretty sure my ancestors were not betting on that scenario. My shame has come in the throes of trying to get a college education in the U.S.. In America where descendants of the folk that actually helped to build some of these financial empires  from the bottom up can't afford to finance their own education. 

Read the whole thing.

(Do you think if the debt collection agency that employs that asshole were to go into Chapter 11, that someone will call the CEO at home and tell him that he "ought to be ashamed of himself"?)

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NOLA trombonist Jeff Albert has added a spiffy new redesign to his worthy blog, Scratch My Brain. He brings the incredibly depressing news that King Bolden's, a relatively new jazz club on Rampart Street in New Orleans, has been shut down due to noise complaints:

Leo Watermeier, the same moron that has been busting WWOZ’s balls for years, had this to say later in the piece:

Watermeier said he doesn’t lament the loss of another jazz club in New Orleans.

“I don’t think there’s a huge market for more jazz places,” he said. “Even Donna’s struggles. It’s mostly a tourist thing. Locals don’t go sit and listen to jazz bands.”

Every time I have played King Bolden’s the crowd has been mostly if not all locals. King Bolden’s has been the site of some really great music. Vibrations that can make the world a better place. I’ve blogged about a few of them.

Read the whole thing.

(The idea that a jazz club in post-Katrina New Orleans could be shut down due to noise complaints breaks my fucking heart.)

Jeff also talks sense about the manufactured psuedoscandal of the Habitat for Humanity "Musician's Village" for not discriminating against nonmusicians:

It seems to be in vogue lately in New Orleans to find anyone who is trying to help, and give them crap about not helping “fast enough”/”the right way”/”the way we used to do it”, etc. This approach obviously makes everything run better (where’s that sarcasm emoticon again?). Why don’t we find everyone that wants to do some good in New Orleans and f*** with them until they get fed up and leave? Then we wouldn’t have any more carpetbaggers like Harry and Branford coming in here and trying to provide affordable homeownership for a city that has a dire housing need.

To even suggest that we should discourage non-musicians from receiving Habit for Humanity assistance is ludicrous. That is in no way different from saying that you can’t live here because you are black, white, straight, gay, or a writer for a mediocre music magazine. To make Harry and Branford defend this issue is appalling. It is a non-issue, and should have been from first glance. Those guys don’t have to do what they are doing. We should be thanking them, not giving them the 60 Minutes treatment.

Read the whole thing.

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As previously mentioned, guitarist Mike Baggetta has launched a little blog of his own, using the only logical title: Bloggetta. Check out his reflections on the Fryeburg Academy in Portland, Maine, where he was recently a guest artist:

I remember telling my girlfriend on the phone from the airport that evening that I felt so sad to be leaving that place. It seemed a little silly to be so sad for a place. I mean, there are millions of places all over the world, every one of them holding some amazing secret. But, for whatever reason, I just felt like I wanted to stay and just be there. And, frankly (reaffirmation), with guys like that to play with, along with other opportunities I know of around there, I would probably be fine with it.

Read the whole thing.

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Another blogging guitarist is the pseudonymous Improvising Guitarist. He uh... s/he... hmm... "TIG" has an amusing  reaction to this curious post by Dr. Yusef Copeland over at freejazz.org (a group blog whose existence I had not previously been aware of):

I try and stay away from freejazz.org (life is far too short), but I was perusing the pages and I came across this ridiculous piece: ‘Percentage Analysis Free Improvisation/Jazz Incl. Free Jazz’. Here’s an example:

SUN RA 21% Free Improvisation 79% Jazz

I marvel at how neatly free improvisation stops at the 21/100 mark and jazz begins there.
Maybe I’m missing a joke here, so, if this is some kind of a conceptual art exercise, why not go further and propose a package label for each musician?

Read the whole thing.

(The "Tradition Facts" label is 100% brilliance.)

TIG also has an interesting take on the perennial "Jazz: Dead or Just Resting?" debate, folding in some commentary on Wynton's recent appearance on The Daily Show:

The other issue is the ‘official stories’.

…It [jazz] was seen as that [subversive and culturally corrosive] a long time ago because of race. That’s the only way you could see Louis Armstrong as a subversive figure, or Charlie Parker, or Duke Ellington. Their message was always one of humanism….

Wynton Marsalis on The Daily Show, March 7th 2007 (watch the video).

So Marsalis claiming that, once stripped of its historical, political and, yes, racial specificity, jazz can stand for a universal humanhood. But is Marsalis also arguing that, having developed colorblindness, we can now appreciate the colorless message underneath the black faces? And isn’t this identity-free, discorporate, humanism a luxury of the wealthy? the white? the male? the heterosexual? Is Marsalis in fact saying that underneath the black faces is the music of/for whites?

(I think that last sentence is perhaps a wee bit uncharitable, but honestly, Wynton's comments perplexed me as well. I think the only way you could possibly not se