Secret Society

So let's dance the last dance

Saxophonist Matana Roberts recounts her recent experience working with the late Merce Cunningham:

i had been staying away from the computer the last few days and wished i would have stayed away a day longer as i opened my inbox to come across an email from Merce Cunningham's amazing music coordinator Stephan Moore about Mr. Cunningham's passing. I got to work with Mr. Cunningham and his dancers last month surrounded by amazing art work at the DIA in upstate NY for three amazing performances. It was an incredible experience. He loved my saxophone sound so much that he gave me a kiss on the cheek at the end of the first rehearsal!!!!! it was so cute!!! and such an honor to work in the same room with him. Not to mention that because of him i got sit at a dinner table with some of my heroes bjork on my right, david berhman on my left and directly across from me, mustering up crazy awesome vibe, La Monte Young. I couldnt even talk to bjork--i was totally speechless-- she was really sweet and super talkative, and i could barely get out full intelligent sentences to Mr. Berhman and Mr. Young whose vibe was a little overwhelming at times, but still awesome... My biggest regret though is i had to leave that dinner early to get back to the city and there was no time to have a few more words with Mr. Cunningham. But i felt that the performance experience was so positive that I would most likey see him again. Aren't i pompous eh? I had so many questions for him that i couldn't wait to ask, but figured there would be time. ha. no time like the present i guess.

back to work.
xo
m

Countdown To Ecstasy

Dave Douglas's Brass Ecstasy -- a postmodern take on the New Orleans street band, via Lester Bowie -- plays live at Fern Bar HQ in about 20 minutes (3 PM EST), and there is a video stream. They band includes Vincent Chancey (horn), Luis Bonilla (trombone), Marcus Rojas (tuba), and Nasheet Waits (drums) -- I caught them this Saturday at Jazz Standard and the group is killing (Marcus Rojas is literally unstoppable), so I definitely recommend tuning in. The band has a new record out, too, which like all Greenleaf releases, can be streamed in its entirety.

What we are saying is, you’d better put our country first, you merde-heads, or soon there will be so much lipstick on your pit bulls it will make your berets spin!

Long live George Saunders.

[via M. C—]

I heartily endorse these events or products

My pal Isaac Butler on the stunning Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, which opens in NYC and LA this weekend -- (seeitseeitseeit) and also Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads, to be released as a digital download on Aug. 29. (Free live preview clips here.) I've been impressed with what I've heard of Katrina Ballads so far and I hope to write more about it here sometime soonish. Also, Ted has a blog and you should read it.

I can't sing no song of hope

You know how John McCain has been running all of those ads complaining that Barack Obama is "popular" and "inspiring" and "adored by millions of people around the world"? Well, it turns out that one of the benefits of having people actually like you is that it's a lot easier to get artists to agree to allow their songs to be used by your campaign. While Obama has apparently commissioned new campaign theme songs from Joss Stone, Alicia Keys, and Jay-Z, McCain, on the other hand, is having trouble securing the rights to use any music at all:

Regular readers will recognize that this isn't the first time McCain has received the cold shoulder from the music industry. Earlier this year, ABBA nixed McCain's attempt to use "Take a Chance on Me" (a personal favorite) at his rallies. "We played it a couple times and it's my understanding they went berserk," the candidate confessed. John Hall, formerly of the 1970s band Orleans and now a Democrat ic congressman from New York, wouldn't let McCain use “Still the One." When hardline Dem John Mellencamp learned that McCain was blasting "Pink Houses" before events, he requested that the Republican cease and desist. Shortly thereafter, McCain settled on "Johnny B. Goode" as his signature song. "It might be because it is the only one [the artist] hasn't complained about us using," he said at the time. But Chuck Berry quickly came out for Obama. While Will.i.am, Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, the Grateful Dead, Macy Gray and Wilco have personally serenaded Obama fans at campaign events, McCain's musical support has been limited to octogenarian composer Burt Bacharach and one half of the novelty country duo Big & Rich. Even the reliably Republican Ted Nugent is no fan. "McCain seem[s] to be catering to a growing segment of soulless Americans who could care less what they can do for their country, but whine louder and louder about what their country must do for them," says the Motor City Madman (who has the same criticism for Obama). "That is both un-American and pathetic."

Attention McCain staffers: do not despair. I have your new campaign theme song right here. I'd be perfectly willing to license it to the campaign -- for a suitable fee, of course. I recommend that you play this stirring number any time the candidate takes the stage, enters a room, or appears on television. I think you will find it vividly encapsulates everything John McCain stands for.

[hat tip: Daniel Wolf]

War is over, if you want it

I have a piece up at NewMusicBox today, "Dispatches From the End of the Jazz Wars."

Affinity

Bill Evans makes people a bit crazy. He is, unquestionably, the most influential white musician in jazz history, and this has, at times, made it difficult to disentangle his symbolic status from his actual musical legacy. Surely this is part of the reason why Brad Mehldau kind of flips out every time someone compares him to Bill Evans, or why the 1961 Village Vanguard recordings are viewed with almost religious adulation ("This is it. The breakthrough. The pinnacle of spontaneous musical communication")^[1], or why Stanley Crouch takes such evident delight in denigrating Evans as a "punk" and "all Debussy" and claims he "didn't understand jazz rhythm."

Evans is too complicated a musician to be reduced to one of the two prevailing stereotypes -- "greatest genius in jazz" (because he "elevated" it by making it more "classical") or "painfully introverted, non-swinging nebbish" (because he was too "classical"). One of the most clear-headed Bill Evans advocates I've encountered is André White, who was one of my teachers at McGill. It's not just that he's spent many years studying the Evans discography -- he's hardly alone there -- but he is also equally accomplished as both pianist and drummer, and as such he has unique and profound insights into Bill's approach to the time and his relationship to rhythm sections over the years.

So I was very happy to see this post over at Peter Hum's blog, Thriving on a Riff, which has extensive commentary from André. There's lots of great stuff there, from his comments on Bill's late-period trio with Philly Joe Jones -- "[Jones] didn't need to adapt his style to play with Bill, and I think that's why some people respond negatively to him, because he plays his way no matter what. I'm sure that's what Bill loved about him" to a qualified defense of Eddie Gomez: "Eddie gets bad-mouthed by a lot of musicians too, because of intonation, and his busy-ness. But really, his style is so unique, and he is such a great improviser that these concerns should be mumbled quietly in the background."

Read the whole thing.

André is the person who persuaded me to listen to late-period Bill Evans with an ear towards the masterful rhythmic displacements embedded into his fluid lines. One of my favorite example of this is Bill's solo on "Nobody Else But Me," from 1977's I Will Say Goodbye. I still don't think I will ever exactly love late-period Bill Evans, but thanks to André I have a much deeper appreciation of its virtues.

Bill Evans is a tangent in Ethan Iverson's recent five-part Tristano epic. Ethan writes:

All In the Mix:  I like to hear a black bass player get in Bill Evans’ way and be a funky counterpoint to his impressionism more than I like to hear Evans with the long line of white virtuoso bassists he would soon specialize in. (Not that I don’t admire Scott LaFaro, Eddie Gomez, and Marc Johnson, but my preferred LaFaro, Gomez, and Johnson records are somehow never with Bill Evans!)  My favorite Evans is the comping he did with Miles Davis and Oliver Nelson with Paul Chambers on bass, my favorite Evans trio record is Everybody Digs Bill Evans with Sam Jones on bass, and my absolute favorite Evans piano solos are on this Half Note date with Garrison on bass.  (Of course, there are white bassists who play more in that tradition, too;  I would have loved to have heard Charlie Haden or Dennis Irwin play with Evans. Teddy Kotick on the very first Evans record sounds great, too.)

In light of this, I'd like to point out an often-overlooked recording featuring Bill Evans with a hard-charging black rhythm section: Charles Mingus's East Coasting (rec. August 1957). Yeah, that's right -- Bill Evans with Mingus and Dannie Richmond! (Clarence Shaw, Jimmy Knepper, and Curtis Porter round out the sextet.) It is fascinating to hear Bill adapt his approach to fit the needs of Mingus's music -- "Guess the piano player on 'West Coast Ghost'" makes a great blindfold test.

-----

1. I've always been a bit perplexed by this -- to my ears, Portrait In Jazz is clearly a much stronger and more exciting representation of the Evans-LaFaro-Motian trio.

Gravity on me never let me down

Did y'all catch Matana Roberts being interviewd on WNYC's Soundcheck last week? It's a good interview, with some nice commentary on her recent CD The Chicago Project. If you missed the broadcast, you can listen here.

During the interview, the seemingly inevitable "women in jazz" question came up. This isn't really a topic that lends itself to radio-friendly soundbite answers -- Matana rightly points out that there are a lot of first-tier female horn players on the jazz scene right now, but for the more fully-realized version of her thoughts on gender and music, you should check her new video blog -- I am not yet ready to use the word "vlog" in earnest.

Yes, the video is split into four quadrants of Warholian colors -- if that bugs you, you can always, you know, avert your eyes and listen to the words.

Matana's new (or new to me, at least) drummerless trio GRACE (Gabriel Guerrero, piano; Kevin Tkacz, bass) is at the Jazz Gallery on May 31.

Also at the Jazz Gallery, this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday -- Henry Threadgill's ZOOID, a sextet that was first unveiled on the 2001 disc Up Popped The Two Lips. The band still features guitarist Liberty Ellman and cellist Dana Leong, but the 2008 edition adds a few new players to the mix, including the fearsome Stomu Takeishi on electric bass.

If you're not planning on catching this gig, I'm honestly not sure why you are reading my blog.

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting fucked

I am very glad that Christopher Bird is around to explain these things to me. Otherwise, I might be tempted to believe that this movie getting greenlighted was the consequence of someone losing a very expensive bet.

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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Live around the world

What's the most important thing in comedy and essays about the unbearable whiteness of indie ro...?

Timing.

On any given night in an American rock club you can hear bands like Gogol Bordello, Man Man, Beirut and Balkan Beat Box playing odd-metered songs drawing on the rhythms of Eastern European Gypsy music. You might encounter Antibalas or Vampire Weekend riffing on African sounds, Dengue Fever making psychedelic Cambodian pop or a D.J. like Diplo spinning Brazilian funk. On the recent “Kala,” a contender for the year’s most exciting pop album, the British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., who works from Brooklyn, draws on Indian, African and West Indian sounds. The folk-rocker Devendra Banhart creates fusions with Mexican and Brazilian musicians on his recent CD, “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.” And the veteran musical adventurer Bjork toured this year with a West African percussion troupe and Chinese pipa virtuoso.

Does this mean Devendra Banhart deserves a higher SFJ score than SFJ himself is willing to award?

And again with the curious omissions -- where the hell is Calexico? Ironically, that band decided to take a break from their signature Southwestern noir soundworld just as "world music" becomes the Next Big Thing in indie rock. Talk about timing.

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.

Baby can you read my mind?

In this thread at be-jazz, I called for Norah Jones to embrace her inner indie rocker. Now she's gone and covered Arcade Fire's "Ocean of Noise." It's good, too.

[Via Stereogum.]

UPDATE:

Naturally, it's also on YouTube (though the sound is much, much worse -- it looks like someone just pointed their video camera at the TV):

Words words words

The blogosphere's favorite newlywed has not one but two writeups of co-conspirator Sam Sadigursky's new disc, The Words Project -- one for the blog,  one for the day job. Not-entirely-unjustified fears of the jazz+poetry genre are dispelled, and Sam earns comparisons to the poetic projects of Fred Hersch Frank Carlberg, and even Steve Lacy, and on the blog, is juxtaposed with a review of David Garland's latest.

Sam wrote about the challenges of working with poetry in a piece for All About Jazz back in June. (I can attest from personal experience that Sam is not kidding when he admits that prior to embarking on this project, he did not tend to listen to song lyrics attentively.)  I just got my copy of this disc the other day, so if I ever start talking about CDs on this blog again, I may have a few words of my own to add.

Heavy Metal Fiberglass

I don't know about this game, but I'd totally buy Glockenspiel Hero.

[Via Molly.]
 

2112

This thread over at Norbizness's prompted me to ask a question that's been on my mind a lot these past few years: when did odd meter indie rock become cool? Seems like everyone's doing it now. Here's a good one I hadn't heard before:

This is seemingly without any critical rehabilitation of your Yes, your Rush, your Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. (The exception is King Crimson, which has always been the prog band it's okay to like.) For a very long time, doing any odd-meter stuff at all meant you were automatically lumped in with those bombastic seventies show-offs. But fairly recently, it's become cool for bands who wouldn't be caught dead listening to "Jacob's Ladder" to play in tricksy time sigs that used to be the exclusive province of the Neil Peart fan club.

Of course, this is all old hat for jazz players -- non-4/4 meters are ubiquitous in current jazz, and have been since at least the mid-1990's. (Not everyone is happy about this.) But I wonder what has changed, so that people are suddenly willing to embrace odd-meter grooves even on otherwise straightforward indie rock songs?

Uncontrollable notes

I didin't know Flea was a band geek in high school either, but it's not that surprising -- he had to develop his appetite for flashy virtuosity (and the chops to back it up) somewhere, and that's not something he would have gotten from the early eighties LA punk scene. But anyway, good on him for stepping up with this:

After sitting by chance beside Fairfax's music teacher at a Knicks game in New York several years ago, the rocker decided to revisit his alma mater -- and found its music program decimated by budget cuts: "Everything was gone. I couldn't believe it," he says. "When I went, you could pick any instrument. You want to play in an orchestra? No problem. When I went back, it was a volunteer teacher, a couple of acoustic guitars. It was this shell of this thing that was still alive while I was there."

Flea says he put up "a few hundred thousand dollars" to open the Silverlake Conservatory with high school friend-turned-music teacher Keith Barry, who is the school's dean.

Flea actually teaches there when he's in town, and apparently his trumpet chops are still strong enough to allow him to give lessons on that instrument in addition to bass. This almost makes me want to forgive him for inflicting Jewel on us.

All my tubes and wires and careful notes and antiquated notions

Look, I thought we were all agreed that you, the readers of this blog, would tell me about stuff like this. Thomas Dolby -- who was the best thing about last night's Ethel Fair -- has a blog. In fact, he's had it for almost a year now. His most recent post folds in Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Marvin Gaye, the Grammys, and YouTube, and you need to go read it right now.

El público

I'm not exactly what you would call a fan of opera (sorry, Steve), but Ainadamar rocks hard and I was glad to see it get the Grammy nod. Most classically-oriented types have already made up their mind about "it" composer Osvaldo Gollijov one way or the other, but if you're new to the party, this interview is an excellent place to start.

And underneath the arcade, details collide

Who says schadenfreude is bad for the soul?

The band onstage included two French horns and two violins, building arrangements toward the orchestral. Yet even when the music sounded triumphal, as it did in “Intervention” — with pipe-organ chords, a martial beat and horns suggesting fanfares — the words said otherwise: “Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home/Hear the soldier groan, ‘We’ll go at it alone.’ ”

Not that it was easy to make them out. A better audience question might have been “Why the Judson Church?” — an elegant space with a long artistic history and awful acoustics for a 10-piece, full-tilt rock band. In the bass-heavy room, the drums just about steamrolled the voices and upper-register instruments. For a band as careful about its textures as Arcade Fire is, choosing the church was a mistake.

The band has three more NYC dates May 7-9 (venue TBA). No word if the pikers at tickets.com will handle the sales for that show as well.

You can punk the skunks of freedom with your jeweled Etruscan knife

I'm a wee bit late on this, as I was in the middle of something when it was originally published, but this piece on Lee Hyla in the Boston Globe is outstanding:

"I think I was having such a hard time because I knew all these musics were equally important to me, and I couldn't find a way to reconcile them," Hyla said. Minimalism was one obvious solution in the air at the time, but for Hyla, this pop-inflected repetitive language lacked a basic harmonic tension that he saw as essential. He was seeking a blend of uptown and downtown influences at once more edgy and rigorous. He longed to capture the anarchic spirit of punk rock but his ear was too sophisticated to simply quote guitar riffs or crank up the volume of his string quartets.

Finally the dam broke in 1984, when he wrote a piece called "Pre-Pulse Suspended" for 12 instruments. "I was able to clarify how the energy of rock 'n' roll could come into notated classical music, how to get that energy unencumbered with extra intellectual baggage. The intellectual stuff is all still there, but it had shed its weight."

Lee was a tremendous teacher -- if I have any insight into Varèse, it's entirely due to Lee's influence -- and while I'm sorry (for their sake) to learn he's leaving NEC at the end of this semester, I wish him the best of luck in his new gig at Northwestern. I know he'll enjoy being close to the fertile Chicago improv scene, but I also hope the guys from that crowd manage to slip past the gates of the ivory tower and come check out Lee's stuff, which is always thoroughly killing.

Lee is the most down-to earth academic composer I've ever met. He's got this quiet, unassuming voice, but in class he'd just casually drop these incredibly penetrating observations about the music under discussion that would turn your head around for the rest of the day. He could talk just as authoritatively and passionately about John Lennon and Neil Young as he could about Elliott Carter and Stefan Wolpe. He is incredibly supportive of his students, one of the rare comp teachers who doesn't try to force the kids into a particular mold, but instead tries to help them acquire the tools to express whatever it is that they're trying to express... and maybe, along the way, open them up to some sounds and ideas they hadn't previously considered.

When I was at NEC, there was a bit of a weird vibe between us jazz composers and many of the "legit" comp majors -- I don't think it was outright animosity, just a little of this going on (on both sides, for sure) -- but Lee never distinguished between us, and in fact seemed genuinely happy to have a bunch of unruly, opinionated, and often flaky jazz composers crash his orchestration class. The Globe article mentions a few send-off concerts, including the official one next week, and if I can get free, I'm going to try to Fung Wah it out to Boston to catch the hit.

UPDATE: I think I will also take the opportunity to point you to this piece on Hyla, by listen.'s Steve Hicken. Steve is one of the guys who first hipped me to Hyla's music (long before I ever even considered going to NEC), back in the glory days of Salon Table Talk. Make sure you read all the way to the bottom, including this footnote:

15 In an April 14, 2004 e-mail Hyla writes:

I have a small footnote to add to that. I felt that at that time, some of us were starting to revolt against the idea of the composer as academic, which in the 70's was an overwhelmingly shared belief. When I left school after receiving a masters degree (and not following through with a doctorate) I was told by many composer friends that I was committing career suicide. I didn't pursue teaching positions and was academically unaffiliated with any institution from 1978-1992- something that I believe allowed me to re-claim my own compositional voice. During that time I drove a truck, worked in a bookstore, drove a cab, and managed to pay low rent. Starting in '84 I got lucky with a string of grants and commissions and worked exclusively as a composer until '92 (aided enormously by the low rent factor). At that point I felt it was safe to go back into the teaching world, since I felt more clear about who I was as a composer. Just thought I'd mention that aspect, since it was so important to me at the time.

You don't even make the list

The results from Idoloator's Jackin' Pop -- the massive "year's best" meta-poll of music critics (specifically, these ones), intended as an alternative to the Village Voice's venerable Pazz and Jop in the post-Christgau era -- are now up. David is right, the ability to sort the results by demographic is incredibly entertaining, as is the "Enthusiasm 40" -- like Pazz and Jop, Jackin' Pop is a weighted poll, and critics can give more weight to some choices than others.

Here's the top ten albums overall:

1. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain (1338 points in 125 votes)
2. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (1247 points in 118 votes)
3. The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America (1073 points in 95 votes)
4. Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury (1057 points in 102 votes)
5. Joanna Newsom - Ys (883 points in 84 votes)
6. Bob Dylan - Modern Times (749 points in 70 votes)
7. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere (623 points in 61 votes)
8. The Knife - Silent Shout (607 points in 56 votes)
9. Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (588 points in 58 votes)
10. Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit (586 points in 54 votes)

I remain thoroughly transfixed by #1 (I forced Ethan I. to listen to "A Method" when he came over before Xmas) -- it might be the most compelling indie rock album I've heard since Funeral, and I really need to blog about it at length at some point.

I've heard some killing individual cuts from #2, #3, and #4, but haven't gotten around to obtaining the albums yet, though I'm most excited about #3, which from the sounds of it is a fun record. And they have the Anti-Social Music connection, which is very cool.

Much respect for #5, the unlikeliest indie rock darling ever. You would think this record would be right up my alley. I love harp -- in fact a few years ago, I joked with my friend Travis that harp was going to be the next big thing in indie rock. I love long-form through-composed songs. I love Steve Albini's engineering skills, and Van Dyke Park's orchestrations are to die for. Newsome's quirky, unpredictable, fully-committed vocals keep things from getting unbearably twee. (Sometimes.) But this record does absolutely nothing for me. While I'm very appreciative of the way Newsome has broadened the scope of the musical conversation, especially online, I don't want to hear any of her many supporters use the word "pretentious" to disparage anyone ever again. Not Tori Amos, not Meatloaf, not Yes, not even Sting. No, not even when he grabs for the damn lute. I mean it, now.

I'm not a Dylan-hater, but I have to confess I have very little interest in #6.

#7 is better than the anti-Gnarls backlash would have you believe, but contra Klosterman's "auteur" idiocy, many of the weaker tracks survive purely on the strength of Cee-Lo's vocals.

#8 -- I evidently slept on this band this year. I've barely heard of them, and have no idea what they're about.

I like Neko better as a New Pornographer, but #9 proves she does what she does better than just about anyone else. And if we're comparing occasionally over-precious Renaissance Faire-styl'd lyricis, I'll take Neko over Joanna anytime.

Belle & Sebastian is a band I have no particular objection to, but find it hard to get excited about, and nothing I've heard from #10 has done much to change my mind on that score.

On the jazz tip, Ornette's Sound Grammar comes in at #45, just behind Thom Yorke and just ahead of "Midlake," whatever the hell that is. I must confess that I still have not heard Ornette's new joint -- I'd been expecting Santa to help me rectify this, but evidently Sound Grammar Records don't have great distribution to the Arctic Circle. And, as previously noted, Vancouver's record shop situation has gotten dire. But now that I'm back in NY, I'll probably just order online.

Also, if you're not totally listed out by now, Francis Davis, who's still at the Voice -- they apparently haven't gotten around to firing their entire music staff yet -- has began an ambitious Jazz Critic's Poll. Davis weighs in on the results here.

KADS unbound

I just got word from drummer Kendrick A.D. Scott (who making his Secret Society debut on Nov. 30) that his website has just gone live. Kendrick is probably best-known for his work in the Terrance Blanchard Group, but his debut as a leader, The Source -- featuring Derrick Hodge, Lionel Loueke, Gretchen Parlato, Seamus Blake, Aaron Parks, Mike Moreno, Vicente Archer, Lage Lund, Myron Walden, Robert Glasper, and Walter Smith III -- is set for a 2007 release.

www.kendrickscott.com -- check it out.

While the subway's screaming, all the junkies dreaming

In totally unsurprising news, a new public health study finds that the noise in the NYC subway system is literally deafening -- and cranking your iPod to drown out the din makes it worse. While I basically find it impossible to ride the subway without the sonic isolation of the iPod, it was pretty clear to me I was doing serious damage to my hearing by trying to drown out the incredibly loud sounds of the subway by blasting even louder music directly into my eardrums.

Last Christmas, Lindsay got me a pair of Shure E Series sound isolating headphones. These are essentially earplugs with integrated earphones. They block outside noise, allowing you to listen at a lower volume and hear better detail. They work on the same principle as the in-ear monitors some of the stadium rock guys use (in fact, they are basically a consumer version of them). These things aren't for everyone -- some people have trouble getting a reliably good fit, and others are creeped out by the feeling of sealing your ears off -- but for me, they've been an absolute lifesaver. They really do block an astounding amount of outside noise. Before, I had to turn my iPod volume 3/4 of the way up to even make out the music over the noise of the train -- now, I rarely need to take it more than 1/3 of the way up, and I am barely even aware of those piercing, shearing sounds when the driver leans on the brakes.

As far as preventing hearing loss goes, it's probably a safe bet that these earphones aren't as good as wearing straight earplugs and reading a book instead. But for iPod junkies like me, they beat the hell out of blasting out my eardrums in an effort to make the subway ride tolerable.

Seen and Not Seen

David and Régine take time off from PopMontreal to moonlight as lab rats:

There were a number of what looked like small project recording studios, and we settled into one with an upright piano in it. A young woman demonstrated that the piano was actually a Disclavier, a piano that “records” the performance of anyone who played it and then plays it back with the keys moving exactly as they had been played. One of the lab’s projects aims to get a sense of where the emotion, the feeling, lies in a performance. To do this they had a classical pianist perform a piece expressively and with feeling — we heard part of it played (or performed) back. They then used a program to remove all the feeling from the performance. It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well. Regine, who has some musical training, said it sounded like a 4 year old after a few piano lessons. To me this “dead” performance was also a faithful transcription of written music with no expressive markings. Much of Bach is like that, I believe, the expression left to the interpreter, but if played exactly as written it would sound like a machine. The limitations of musical notation.

Then the expressivity dial was turned to 50%. It still sounded pretty mechanical, but a little better. At 75% there was feeling there, but not played very well — “a promising student”, said Regine. But it took until 75% for the performance to begin to have what we would call feeling, expression, and humanity.

Then we heard the same performance with randomized expression — notes and time held and accented at random. We laughed, though some in the room thought it sounded eccentric, but good. Daniel said he thought only musicians would think it was interesting, because they have an acquired sense of how it’s supposed to be played, and confounding and surprising those expectations can sometimes make a piece even more interesting. I thought it sounded a little like Thelonious Monk.

This was at Daniel Levitin's lab. I've been meaning to check out his new book. Cognitive psych as it relates to music is an incredibly fertile subject, but I've been disappointed by most attempts to make sense of it, especially when it comes to books targeted at the general reader. I keep hoping for something like The Language Instinct for music, but the chapter in How the Mind Works on music and the arts is frankly embarrassing. But Levitin is both musician and a specialist in musical perception, so I'm guardedly optimistic about This Is Your Brain on Music.

The post also contains Byrne's thoughts on performances by Joanna Newsome and Danish band Under Byen, as well as a very nifty pie chart breaking down CD costs. Go read.

Joy in Repetition

A phase-shifted but sincere happy 70th birthday to Steve Reich.

My favorite Reich interview (from Kyle Gann's American Mavericks radio series).

E# [O]

NewMusicBox.org's Frank J. Oteri interviews Elliott Sharp. Be sure to check out the video, especially if you've never seen Elliott's insane two-handed tapping before.

This ain't no recent development

David Byrne reviews Sunday's Sufjan Stevens Town Hall hit (we saw the Saturday show):

I also felt was what I can only describe as a kind of Protestant reserve and reticence. Sufjan’s voice — most of the time a fragile introverted whisper (see also Chet Baker or João Gilberto) — was juxtaposed in this case with the emotional and even majestic spiritual release of his string and brass melodies. As if what he was feeling inside, but couldn’t express, was expressed in these instrumental passages.

Plus: Oxypoet on Fishbone at CBGB last week. This incarnation of the band isn't quite as happening as the lineup from the glory days, but Angelo still brings it. And Dub Trio were absolutely killing.

Who's Not Honoring Me Now

That's it -- ASCAP, I'm putting you on notice.

[Seriously, congratulations Steve.]

Concentric layers, proportional carbon density of the radius

Dave Douglas reviews last night's FONT hit, featuring Lina Allemano and Ingrid Jensen. It was really great to hear Lina again, especially with Ingrid, Lage Lund, and Society stalwarts Matt Clohesy and Jon Wikan.

In Oct-Nov, Lina's own quartet will be doing an extensive cross-Canada tour, with dates in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, and more -- if she's playing a hit near where you live, fercrissakes go.

Here are a couple of tracks from Lina's recordings. "Concentric" comes Dave Douglas-approved.

MP3: Lina Allemano Quartet - Pinkeye
MP3: Lina Allemano Quartet - Concentric

Get Lina's CDs.

Let’s Call This

Smack in the middle of his recap of the Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition (while I remain skeptical of the premise behind what is basically "Jazz Idol," sincere congrats to winner Tigran Hamasyan and runners-up Gerald Clayton and my friend Aaron Parks), Ben Ratliff drops this bomb:

At what point will jazz just crumble under the weight of the glib encomiums paid to it?

This is a very good question, and something I've wondered about myself, especially during Important Jazz Events. Read the rest and jump in in comments. I may have more to say about this in a few days.

The book I read was in your eyes

David Byrne on Revenge of the Book Eaters:

Benefits are funny things. Often the public pays exaggerated ticket price to see “watered down” versions of the musical acts — most times I myself play a few songs on acoustic guitar, as do many of the others. Now, watered down it maybe be, but sometimes the “unplugged” version is more moving and emotionally involving that the more fully arranged version — well, sometimes. When that happens it’s not a bait and switch deal.

For this show I decided that since Sarah Vowell liked my version of Webb Pierce’s “There Stands The Glass” that I did in Brooklyn I would take that as a hint and do an all country set. My rhythm section consisted of Mauro, Paul and Graham augmented by Jon G. on pedal steel, fresh off a recording session with Ryan Adams.

I asked Sufjan via e-mail if he wanted to do “Saginaw Michigan”, the song made famous by Lefty Frizzell, with me. (I thought many would think he wrote it for his Michigan-themed CD. I wonder if anyone fell for it?) He agreed and I sent him an MP3, chords and lyrics. My bunch also did the country-ish tune that I sang on Mauro’s upcoming Forro in the Dark CD. So, a lot of new stuff.

Anyway, the evening went well — it was scary doing so many new (to me) tunes, but I think it came off O.K.

We are atomic... we are fire

Fusion reconsidered -- Will Layman of Pop Matters looks at the latest from Bobby Previte, Wayne Horvitz, Ben Goldberg, and Don Byron:

But in the early '70s, a particular genre of "fusion" was founded by the collision of jazz and rock, with various prominent musicians finding ways to dress up their improvisations in Sly Stone grooves, Jimi Hendrix psychedelia, or prog-rock filigree. The style — associated mainly with groups founded by various alumni of the Miles Davis groups of the time such as Chick Corea's Return to Forever, John McLaughin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Weather Report — filled arenas for a few years, but it soon devolved into fangless Smooth Jazz or (worse?) pointlessly virtuosic noodling.

The term "fusion" was soiled forever.

But I think it's time to bring it back. The best of today's jazz musicians seem intent on a process that really can't be described without using the word "fusion". In fact, today the act of fusing jazz with other forms of music is so essential — and so natural — to what jazz musicians do that it typically involves more than one fusing at the same time.

Read the rest.

Just a passing breeze filled with memories

Looks like Mwanji (scroll down to "the simple things can hang you up the most") and I aren't the only ones who feel the Great American Songbook is overrated:

When you talk to, or read about, anyone making an album of standards, the refrain is the same: “These songs will never die.” “These songs are eternal.” “This is real music.”There are two problems with this viewpoint. The first is that it isn’t true. Rock ’n’ roll killed the Great American Songbook deader than a doornail from roughly the late ’60s to the late ’90s.

The second is that it’s backward. Songs are not living, breathing entities, though they may seem that way: They’re collections of directions to players and singers. People don’t record certain songs because they’re eternal; songs are eternal because people won’t stop recording them. And with the standards album becoming as ubiquitous as the Christmas album, there doesn’t appear to be an end in sight.

(There’s a third problem – the concept of “real music,” which implies that some music is not real, which is baseless. But that’s another subject.)

[...]

Apostles of the Songbook aesthetic often claim that today’s music doesn’t speak to them. But have male-female relations really not progressed past “My Funny Valentine”? “Cheek to Cheek”? “Tea for Two”? Do these songs really address the reality of your life? Of anyone’s?

It’s nostalgia. In some cases, it’s escapist nostalgia – other people’s memories that today’s listeners wish they had. “Memories” of a supposedly simpler time and place.

And there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with nostalgia. Personally, my favorite music of all time is the ’70s pop and soul I grew up with, and some of my favorite current records are by artists (such as Ron Sexsmith and Van Hunt) who emulate those sounds.

But that’s personal preference, and I know it. I don’t claim for a moment that there’s something objectively superior about that music. I don’t claim that that music will never die. I know that someone who grew up in a different time and place will feel differently about it.

Pulling out jives and jamboree handouts

Beck is curating the music for this year's Wired-sponsored NextFest (Sept 27-Oct 1). His picks: Jamie Lidell and Of Montreal.

[via Pitchfork]

But you were hearin' a different song

Hmm. Orchestral Aphex Twin ⇒ Orchestral The White Stripes? Who knew?

[via Stereogum]

Almost Always Is Nearly Enough

Coming next week -- A Lazarus Taxon, a 3-CDs-for-the-price-of-one box of Tortoise rarities and outtakes.

Thanks to Stereogum for the heads-up -- and this, from JF in comments, is too good not to reprint:

Also: what a trip that era in indie music was. It came and went, and things are more "fun" now, but for a while there (95 - 99 maybe) it really seemed like singing was over and marimbas were the new normal.

Listen, all you fools out there, go on and love me, I don't care

While I'm consistently impressed by Carl Wilson's writing over at Zoilus, I'm often baffled by his aesthetics. (For starters, I don't think I will ever be able to grok how someone can possibly prefer Destroyer to the New Pornographers. And his upcoming 33 1/3 book on Céline Dion's Let's Talk About Love seems like, well, the textbook definition of... ) But I have to give him props for going to bat for Randy Newman:

Every once in a while I get into an argument with someone in which I try to claim that Randy Newman was the most significant songwriter to follow after Bob Dylan. I do mean as a writer, not as a performer, in which regard he pales compared to dozens of others. But still I can never persuade anyone. There are other viable late-sixties and early-seventies candidates - Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart, Curtis Mayfield - but Newman did more than anyone to widen the palette of techniques in 1970s pop songwriting, with his uses of irony, unreliable and/or actually despicable narrators, and pastiches of classic American pop forms (which was a minor sixties post-folk trend - see Lovin' Spoonful, various "jug bands," etc. - but never done so richly and competently as Newman did it). He arguably introduced serious Brechtian techniques to the pop tradition - a little-noticed influence on Dylan, actually, but one Newman used as more than an affectation, unlike what the glam crowd (including Bowie) tended to do. He's also one of the few people to have combined comedy with rock music and not come off like an idiot or vulgarian, but he's just as effective a tragedian. Besides immediate successors in the L.A. scene, such as Steely Dan and Tom Waits, I would put Elvis Costello at the head of the line of Newman's heirs, along with Morrissey, the Magnetic Fields, and dozens of other pop ironists. You could even add the likes of Kool Keith and Eminem, though I think their play with flipside identities comes out of strategies from the histories of black music, minstrelsy etc. - a legacy that Newman has always been keenly aware of, anticipating all the recent pop scholarship and discussion on the centrality of the minstrel tradition to American pop by decades.

I don't know about "most significant post-Dylan songwriter" -- that's an impossibly tough call -- but Randy Newman is a shoe-in for both "most underrated" and "most unfairly maligned by people who have never heard a single goddamn thing he's done outside of 'Short People' and his Pixar soundtracks."

Okay, so his self-titled, mostly orchestral debut is a wildly ambitious disaster, but he started to hit his stride with 12 Songs, and thereafter gained the self-assurance and experience to make Sail Away and Good Old Boys, two of the most brilliant singer-songwriter records of the 1970s. If he hadn't subsequently gone into the family business, he would probably have become a cultishly adored Warren Zevon-like figure. Instead, he's become the preferred target of the unimaginative and talentless on YouTube.

Also, while most people thought I must have had a bowl of lead paint chips for breakfast when I compared Corey Dargel to Randy Newman (including Corey, I'm afraid), I'm now feeling retrospectively validated by Wilson's post, which makes that Newman-Merritt-Dargel triple-bank shot seem more plausible.

UPDATE: Apparently I totally misread Corey on this. He writes: "I appreciated your comparison of me and Randy Newman. I don't know what I might have said or done to indicate otherwise."

[Thanks to Zoilus commenter Ryan Catbird for the pic.]

Out Loud

This is how it's done: Steve Coleman interviews Dave Douglas in this month's Down Beat.

SC: As an independent label, how do you go about marketing, which is what the majors are supposed to be better at because they have more resources?

DD: After the first year of Greenleaf's existence, we radically changed our take. We were doing the traditional brick-and-mortar distribution, but then we started to see the chains and independent record stores closing down. We also noticed that people who listen to alternative music are much more involved with searching out an artist they're interested in. We shifted to a much more Internet-based distribution. We found that easier, but the one concept that's not going to change through all this record industry shifting is an artist having contact with an audience at live shows. We sell a ton of records at shows.

[...]

DD: [...] But the one thing about these new business models is that listeners and people who love music also have a responsibility to support the artist. It doesn't take a lot. With an artist-run web site, you assume the goodwill of people-that they will buy the CD but not copy it for their friends. I see it at gigs. With a group of college guys, where once I'd sell five CDs, now I just sell one. How you purchase music is a political decision. To perpetuate the music, people have to pay back into the system. It's only happened a few times, but I've been approached by fans asking me to sign a CD-R. They don't understand the humor of that.

SC: As far as playing for live audiences, do you think your success has had anything to do with touring a lot? I think of someone like Charlie Hunter who got grassroots notice by traveling around the country in a van and then got signed by a major as a result.

DD: Charlie, yes, and The Bad Plus today. And Medeski Martin & Wood. They got in an RV and crisscrossed the country for years. People used to complain: How did they get so big? Well, they went on the road. If you're willing to put in that kind of work--and it ain't easy playing 200 gigs a year with everyone in the band willing to commit--it's a no-brainer.

[...]

SC: I read a quote from Michael Jackson once where he said he wanted to make music that touched everyone in the whole world. And I immediately thought, that's not me. That sounded bad to me.

DD: (laughs) And he made a record called Bad. Seriously, everyone who reads this magazine loves music and has a strong opinion on what they hear. It's about what moves you. When I hear a piece of music I like I want to capture it so that I can share it with someone. Composing is sharing those moments with somebody who is moved by sounds. That's what I want to communicate. When I write, I try to find those places of spark. My happiest moments come when I'm onstage performing a new book of music and the band plays a tune the way I heard it and the audience hears it too.

[...]

SC: We're all familiar with the 12-tone language, but not everyone is familiar with it conversationally.

DD: But the general listener can put their ear to it and get it. I've been using it for more than 15 years, and you're one of the reasons why I'm using it.

SC: Me?

DD: Yeah, you. I went to Visiones in 1990, and Greg Osby asked me to sit in. So I played on a tune. Then you came up, and I got my ass kicked around the stage by you guys throwing the M-Base language at each other. I went home and was so impressed that you guys had this language I couldn't speak. That was enlightenment. That's when I decided I wanted to come up with my own language for improvisation, which was using 12-tone lines and writing tunes for my bands with that. That's led me to play lines that are not clichéd, not overused.

[...]

DD: [...] The most frequently asked question I get is why I studied Balkan folk music-in the late '80s before the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the records were widely available. I honestly don't know. I wish my family had Balkan ancestry, but it doesn't. I found the music fascinating, and I wanted to bring that language into jazz. I discovered rich, meaty stuff by listening to the brass bands of Macedonia, and looking into the Balkan musical language spoke to my language of playing in odd meters. It was like learning how to play modal jazz, with which I now have a mixed relationship.

SC: We can't let that slide by. What do you mean by that?

DD: In 1987, Horace Silver told me and Vincent Herring, "You young musicians all got the wrong musical lesson from John Coltrane."

SC: (laughs) Now, that's a hell of a statement.

DD: Horace's point was that people listen to Trane play all that stuff over a D-minor seventh chord. They want to know how to superimpose and put the most complex substitution in. In Horace's musical world, what was hip in music wasn't what you played over one chord, but how you got from one chord to the next-voice leading. That lesson has stayed with me. If you look closer at what Coltrane played, the reason all those superimpositions worked was because they were so brilliantly rhythmically voice-led.

[...]

SC: It's all in the details, living moment by moment. There's a lot of detail you don't see by just looking to the past. Looking back to the '40s and '50s is like seeing the highlights of a basketball game on ESPN versus seeing the entire game. We're not hearing conversations that Charlie Parker was having. In the future, no one's going to be writing books about this. It's just a moment, but it may be an important moment to you or me or both. It may be an important energy node in our lives that has a grand effect.

DD: Looking back to the '40s and '50s is fascinating, but looking back to the recent past is just as fascinating.

SC: How recent?

DD: The whole era of the '70s and '80s, between the so-called golden age of free-jazz in the '60s and the reemergence of mainstream jazz in the '80s. That middle period is a hazy area that doesn't get talked about much. A lot of artists from that period have not become part of our generally accepted history of the music.

SC: Like Henry Threadgill.

DD: And Julius Hemphill and even Woody Shaw. I had a conversation with Anthony Braxton about how history is leaving him behind. The official histories being told are not reflecting those viewpoints. I wish somebody would write a book about the post-war jazz scene-and I mean post-Vietnam War. Not necessarily a history that takes a position, but a real survey.

Read the whole thing.

Just be patient, I'm a work in progress

Composer Derek Bermel has a great post about making revisions:

About ten years ago, in Den Haag, I was chatting about the thorny process of revision with my friend Peter Adriaansz, a fellow composer whom I hold in high regard. "I am a chronic reviser" he said. "It's my curse; I'm never satisfied with a piece. I rethink and rewrite until I'm absolutely satisfied. It can take years. And some of my pieces I just won't release again until I make all the necessary revisions."

I thought Peter overly dramatic. "Why don't you just write a new piece, with these insights in mind?" I asked. I showed him an orchestral score I had written recently; the work had already been performed twice, and I still wasn't entirely happy with the last section. However I had decided to leave it unrevised, as a document of my compositional mindset at the time; I explained to him my feeling that returning to that piece and reinterpreting it within my current aesthetic would be anachronistic and untrue to the original conception.

Peter smiled. "I suppose you and I are just different kinds of composers", he murmured wistfully.

[…]

Around the time of my encounter with Peter, I was writing a piano piece, which I called Turning. One reason I gave the piece that title was because I could sense my compositional process beginning to shift; I had determined that I was most satisfied as a chronic reviser. These days, to the chagrin of my publisher, I tend to revise after virtually every performance. I recall my encounter with Peter and I find it hard to identify with the composer I was then.

We live in an era of marketing makeovers, in which politicians deny their mistakes, change original rationales to suit the polls of the moment, and take credit for events and trends that have nothing to do with their own policies. If politics is rooted in appearances, perhaps art (with a small ‘a’, just to be safe), is the other side of the coin: truth-telling. Such truth-telling must of necessity start with oneself, and painful questions follow: Why write this? Is this interesting? Does it go on too long? Not long enough? Is it clear? Is it muddled? Is it pretentious? Simplistic? Someone else can – and probably will – answer those questions for us, but we only become good composers when we answer them ourselves, and then make appropriate changes.

I'll cop to being a chronic reviser as well. In the age of Finale, it's almost impossible to resist the temptation to tweak, and to be honest, I find the act of revising a lot more enjoyable than the act of composition. It's always more grueling and anxiety-provoking to trudge out into blank staff paper (or, um, blank screens) then it is to tighten and sharpen a piece that I'm confident basically works already. If I had the time, I would probably revise every chart in the Secret Society book before every performance. Of course, some of the changes would be one-time adjustments to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of the specific players involved, or just to mix things up according my personal whims at the moment. But by necessity, the more substantial revisions are focused around newly written material.

If you compare the first three versions of "Phobos" -- from November, January, and April -- you will hear all kinds of variations, from the absence of cajón on the first version (which now, with the benefit of hindsight, feels so very, very wrong), the length of the introduction, the orchestration of the melody, the changes and duration of the solo section, and the rhythm of the concerted ensemble passages following the tenor solo. Next time you hear it, there will be still more changes -- all of the for the better, I hope. I flatter myself that all this revising isn't the result of chronic indecision or directionless fiddling -- I'm just trying to get all of my pieces to the point where I feel comfortable abandoning them.

All your compliments and your cutting remarks are captured here in my quotation marks

Feed your brain...

Minton's reopens after over 30 years:

"The jam-session policy . . . was all but unique," said Schaap. "The musicians union frowned on jam sessions because they saw it as a way of getting people to play for free."

But club owner and tenor saxophonist Henry Minton was a delegate to the union, so his open jam sessions were allowed.

• • •

The NYT's Nate Chinen on the resurgent Brooklyn jazz scene:

A similar ethos prevails at Barbès, universally acknowledged as the vanguard (Village Vanguard, even) of the new Brooklyn jazz scene. "We tried to build a no-pressure environment for audiences and musicians," said Olivier Conan, who owns the bar with a fellow French expatriate and musician, Vincent Douglas. The club's success confirms the wisdom of that premise.

Barbès may be the place most responsible for the perception of a Brooklyn jazz renaissance. Its cozy dimensions suit small audiences and rapt attention. And its booking describes a rough bouquet of sounds: from French musette to Brazilian forró, as well as multiple strains of jazz, from Gypsy swing to collective free improvisation.

[…]

But nothing beats the neighborhood's leading spot, Zebulon Café Concert, which combines the flea-market chic of Barbès (the owners, Guillaume Blestel and Jef and Jocelyn Soubiran, are French) with the no-cover rule of Tea Lounge (but with one significant distinction: every artist receives a guarantee). Zebulon's programming has lately leaned markedly toward world music, but the free-jazz violinist Billy Bang has made notable appearances, as has the composer and conductor Butch Morris.

Mr. Morris also helped inaugurate a more extreme outpost, the nonprofit Issue Project Room, when it relocated last June from the East Village into a silo on the Gowanus Canal. "The industrial environment tends to inspire a rugged sort of experimentation," said Suzanne Fiol, the organization's director, hours before a recent premiere by the Japanese composer Shoko Nagai.

Rugged experimentation of a different sort was one hallmark of the jazz scene in Brooklyn during its original heyday, from the late 1950's through the 60's. Throughout those years a cluster of African-American establishments thrived around Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue.

One of them, the Blue Coronet, served as a laboratory for youngbloods like the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Another was immortalized by Mr. Hubbard with a 1965 Blue Note album called "The Night of the Cookers: Live at Club La Marchal," on which he locked horns with Lee Morgan in a casual but heated exchange.

"Going back to 1960, there was something loosely called a Brooklyn sound," said Robert Myers, referring in part to that album. "And it started with the venues, which gave the musicians license to explore new avenues onstage and not be confined by management." Until the close of 2004 Mr. Myers operated Up Over Jazz Café, a bar on Flatbush Avenue that fulfilled a similar function for the latest generation of post-bop strivers, like the tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland and the pianist Robert Glasper.

• • •

Greg Sandow, in praise of hybrid vigor:

Why shouldn’t classical musicians play concerts like this? Why shouldn’t they treat themselves as jazz and pop musicians do? Instead of saying, “I’m a bassoonist, I’ll play the bassoon repertoire,” why not say, “I’m a musician, what music do I like? How can I make it work for my instrument?”

[via Jen]

• • •

Kyle Gann on software snobbery amongst electroacoustic academics:

I’ve been becoming aware that, even among the Downtowners, there is a standard academic position regarding electronic music, and am learning how to articulate it. I’ve long known that, though much of my music emanates from computers and loudspeakers, I am not considered an electronic composer by the “real electronic composers.” Why not? I use MIDI and commercial synthesizers and samplers, which are disallowed, and relegate my music to an ontological no-man’s genre. But more and more students have been telling me lately that their music is disallowed by their professors, and some fantastic composers outside academia have been explaining why academia will have nothing to do with them.

The official position seems to be that the composer must generate, or at least record, all his or her own sounds, and those sounds must be manipulated using only the most basic software or processes. Max/MSP is a “good” software because it provides nothing built in - the composer must build every instrument, every effects unit up from scratch. Build-your-own analogue circuitry is acceptable for the same reason. Sequencers are suspect, synthesizers with preset sounds even more so, and MIDI is for wusses. Commercial softwares - for instance, Logic, Reason, Ableton Live - are beyond the pale; they offer too many possibilities without the student understanding how they are achieved. Anything that smacks of electronica is to be avoided, and merely having a steady beat can raise eyebrows. Using software or pedals as an adjunct to your singing or instrument-playing is, if not officially discouraged, not taught, either. I’m an electronic amateur, and so I won’t swear I’m getting the description exactly right. Maybe you can help me. But at the heart of the academic conception of electronics seems to be a devout belief that the electronic composer proves his macho by MANIPULATION, by what he DOES to the sound. If you use some commercial program that does something to the sound at the touch of a button, and you didn’t DO IT YOURSELF, then, well, you’re not really “serious,” are you? In fact, you’re USELESS because you haven’t grasped the historical necessity of the 12-tone language. Uh, I’m sorry, I meant, uh, Max/MSP.

No one likes a smartass but we all like stars

I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but the first few tracks from this 2003 Radiohead Earl's Court hit are stunningly good. Obscure Sound has the goods -- go get.

[via Brooklyn Vegan]

Also, I take back (some of) my previous skepticism of the Arctic Monkeys. I'm still not convinced their songs are anything special, but based on the audio from this show, Andy Nicholson (bass) and Matthew Helders (drums) can definitely kick it live, and have considerably more agility than most pop-punk rhythm sections.

The latest All Songs Considered has a track from the upcoming (tomorrow) Calexico record, Garden Ruin.

And, of course, who doesn't love Neko?

Jason Moran's Bandwagon plays tribute to Jackie McLean

A review of Saturday's gig, via Chuck Obuchowski of the Hartford Courant:

Moran created a very different sonic environment for the next selection, an as-yet-untitled composition he co-wrote with one of his acknowledged musical mentors, Andrew Hill. The pianist began unaccompanied, establishing a serene mood with carefully chosen single-note patterns. When Mateen and Waits joined him, they were instantly attuned to Moran's gentle musical wavelength. Solos emerged and disappeared seamlessly into the trio flow. Mateen's Marco acoustic-electric bass was especially effective here, offering both the woody resonance of an upright bass with the added flexibility of volume and tone that an electric stringed instrument provides.

The Bandwagon's set offered captivating slices of jazz history, from the stride piano-meets-barrelhouse boogie of a Jaki Byard medley to a deeply spiritual take on "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

The 14-piece Artists Collective Youth Jazz Orchestra opened the Hartford Jazz Society event with a half-hour dedication to McLean. They presented heartfelt renditions of McLean's "Dig," "Blues Inn" and "Appointment in Ghana."

Staring across the water at the pillars that stand on the far shore

On Ran Blake's website, there is a new video (Safari users control-click and select "Download Linked File") of Ran playing solo piano in his apartment near Coolidge Corner in Brookline, MA. Amazingly, the lights are left on and Ran even allows the camera to show his hands occasionally. (For best results, someone ought to plant a hidden night-vision camera near Ran's piano and capture his playing when he thinks no one is listening... )

Ran starts with one of his own, the classic "Horace is Blue," then moves on to a medley of themes from Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo -- vintage Ran Blake, in other words. If Ran's abbreviated appearance at The Stone last month left you hungry for more, check out the video.

Clear Your Ears

I understand that some of you will need some mental floss after listening to the Right Brothers. So, please enjoy this deliciously old-school video for one of the greatest political songs of all time:

More M

My Pulse colleague Joe Phillips has a terrific extended review of last night's Capital M gig.

Go read.

Grown in solid ground

Lipstick Records have released an advance track (downloadable MP3) from Calexico's soon-to-be-released record Garden Ruin. Click here for audio, etc.

"I can no longer sit back and allow Minimalist infiltration, Minimalist indoctrination, Minimalist subversion, and the international Minimalist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

This is priceless:

It happened in 1969 at Berkeley. The campus was roiled by the Vietnam era's antiwar unrest, but that made little difference in my anti-counterculture counterpoint and fugue class. Even if we walked in coughing from the tear gas canisters that the National Guard had exploded outside to disperse demonstrators on Sproul Plaza, the atmosphere in the music building was monkishly directed toward another time and place.

The textbook we used was "Treatise on the Fugue" by André Gedalge, who had taught at the Paris Conservatory in the early 20th century. Absorb it all and you too could write like 19th century French opera composer Gounod. Our professor had been glazing over the eyes of uninterested little Gounods with the confining rules of species counterpoint for far too many years. We knew enough to take classes from him in the afternoon, after he had had a leisurely lunch at the local watering hole.

Then one day I walked into class ostentatiously carrying the new Columbia LP of Terry Riley's "In C." The jacket opened up to reveal the score of 53 short, melodic modules meant to be freely repeated against a continual pulse, defying every law of counterpoint ever concocted. When I showed that to the genially aristocratic professor, he went uncharacteristically ballistic.

Riley had studied in the department a decade earlier, and it was there that he and his classmate La Monte Young first began exploring the conceptual ideas that led to the rebellious, repetitive, nondirectional music that would ultimately be dubbed — because of what it seemed to have in common with the art movement of the '60s — Minimalism. Three years after Riley got his master's in composition from Berkeley in 1961, he put Minimalism on the musical map when he premiered "In C" in San Francisco.

"He betrayed Berkeley," my red-faced professor shouted. "He betrayed music. He betrayed Gedalge. He betrayed everything this department stands for. I will not allow that album to be brought into my classroom. This has nothing to do with Vietnam. It is about preserving civilization."

Via Alex Ross.

Ruminant creatures

This PopMatters interview with Deerhoof's John Dieterich is worth a read:

You guys opened for Wilco not too long ago. What was that experience like?

That was a new thing for us. We played in venues much bigger and fancier than anything we ever played in before. For us, it was a challenge to try to communicate our music in that sort of environment. Have you ever seen that Led Zeppelin DVD that came out a couple of years ago? It's quite incredible -- here was a band coming of age playing in stadiums. It wasn't an accident that they sounded that good. Just through trial and error, they learned how to have their music come across in that kind of environment, which is kind of a rarity and difficult to pull off. They were able to respond to their environment and made music that worked like that. I think we sound better in places that aren't super-tiny or huge.

Do you think that's a sound issue, or do you think it's because you don't play epic, grand-sounding songs?

Well, I think there's a lot of detail in our songs, and that kind of detail, in a huge environment, gets lost. Through all the reverberation happening, one sound gets confused with the next. If we're playing in a big place, we try to play a little bit slower. It helps give a sense of the articulation. Whereas if you are playing it fast, it can end up sounding like mush.

[...]

Did your previous experience impact how Deerhoof's sound has evolved since you joined?

I think the band was already in the midst of some sort of shift before I joined. I was coming from a group where most of what we did was free improvisation. If we did play songs, it was very abstract. When the possibility of joining Deerhoof came up, it was extremely exciting, especially to work in the framework of Satomi's voice. I was also really attracted to the way melody was used in the band. I had been in a band with a singer before, but a lot of the singing wasn't very melodic -- let's put it that way.

Song Art

My friend and fellow NEC alum Monika Heidemann (whose recent Cornelia Street gig I reviewed here) gets a nice sidebar profile in this very smart NewMusicBox piece by singer Corey Dargel.