Secret Society

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 see Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, etc as fundamentally subversive artists is if you deliberately and perversely decide to pretend that race did not play a significant role in shaping their artistic sensibility. And I know that's not what Wynton means, so... what does he mean?)

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Daniel Melnick's Soundslope is a scholarly and thoughtful blog dealing with all things intellectual and aural. His most recent post leaps from a discussion of Muhammad Yunus's book Banker to the Poor to a query about home recording:

What it really made me think about and wonder is if jazz has moved towards having more home based recording environments, as many rock musicians and producers have, and if it hasn't, why is that the case? Recording technology keeps getting cheaper, so why is the studio even in the equation? I wonder if it has something to do with the technical difficulties of recording jazz. I would assume, based on my own rudimentary knowledge of microphones and recording technology, that making a good jazz recording requires a higher level of mastery than the average home recordist possesses. Nevertheless, I think it makes sense for jazz artists to look beyond the traditional studio environment as a means of making records if there is really value in being able to spend more time recording.

Read the whole thing.

(A few factors that may partially explain why home-recorded albums don't happen more frequently in jazz: [1] Lo-fi, as an aesthetic, lacks widespread acceptance in jazz circles -- when you're recording acoustic instruments, there really is no substitute for a good recording engineer using good mics in a really good space. [2] The buy-in and setup costs for a home studio, while falling, are still well beyond the means of many jazz musicians, especially young artists (cf. Matana's comments above). [3] In New York, at least, many if not most musicians do not live in spaces where they can play (especially when there is a drummer invovled). [4] As a corollary to [3], many New York musician apartments are barely large enough to serve as functional living spaces as it is. Where are you going to put the home studio?) [5] The number of home-recorded commercially-released nonjazz CDs is vastly exaggerated -- unless you count things like Prince records as "home recorded," which is obviously absurd. The overwhelming majority of successful and semi-successful albums are still cut in professional recording studios. [6] When someone actually does release an album recorded on a shoestring budget, reviewers inevitably gripe about it.)

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The Wordless Music series is definitely one of the most exciting things to happen on the New York scene this year. So far, I've only made the inaugural event, but I've talked to a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds who have made some of these shows, and the reaction has been uniformly positive. I'm thoroughly bummed I can't make tonight's show (featuring Polmo Popo, Toca Loca, and the Social Music Work Group, performing individually and then joining forces for Terry Riley's In C, (a work I have never seen performed).

The people behind Wordless Music have a blog. It is called Good Vibrato, but don't hold that against them. It is, I'm pretty sure, the only classical music+indie rock MP3 blog where each post is accompanied by a painting. Sort of like a tasting menu/wine pairing kind of thing, but with music and art. Check it out.

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Also on the classical music tip is Steve Hicken's listen. -- Steve is an old buddy from my Salon Table Talk days, way back from before the Great Purge. (Think they regret killing off that once-vibrant community by requiring people to pay to talk to each other?)  Anyway, in a post called Class Divide, Steve comments on another perplexing statement made by another prominent member of the musical establishment (it's short, so I hope Steve doesn't mind if I reproduce it in full:

Daniel Wolf wants to start a campaign to get publishers to make study scores available on the web for free. That's a very good idea. An indication that publishers would not be the only roadblock to this open source conception of music comes in this article (from The New York Sun) by Fred Kirshnit (h/t to Robert Gable):

Copyright and royalties are a major issue as well. Mr. [John] Corigliano recalled encountering a student in Beijing who is writing her thesis on his Symphony No. 2, a work neither published nor commercially recorded. She possessed on her computer not only the score to the piece, but a pirated recording as well.

I'm assuming here that Mr. Corigliano was not celebrating this as a triumph of the internet's ability to spread our music all over the world, and if I'm wrong about that I'd love to be informed about it. (I'm less thrilled about a pirated recording, but I don't know the specific circumstances of that, either.)

My point in quoting this is to say that there is a class divide between the haves of the composition world, represented by Mr. Corigliano, and those of us who struggled to be heard and studied. Mr. Wolf's idea, even if it were to be implemented on a modest scale, would be a step in the direction of getting more of us studied, played, and heard.

(This reminds me that I need to upload more of my scores -- "Desolation Sound" and "Transit" are already up, but that's it so far. I always intended to add all my music, but I've never quite gotten around to it, as many of my scores still need to be updated to incorporate my hand-scrawled revisions, etc. Sometime this summer, I promise I'll make some significant additions.)

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Anastasia Tsiouclas's classical/world music blog Café Aman is back! I feared it was gone for good. Turns out she was just busy indoctrinating her newborn in the way of the pulse.

(BTW, I finally got around to getting the Phases box set last month -- obviously, this is old hat for everyone who picked up the Reich/Bang on a Can record when it came out, but man... how great is Evan Ziporyn's version of New York Counterpoint?)

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Of course, these are just the latest additions to the blogroll. There are many more worthy interweb pamphleteers to be found in the right-hand column. If you've never explored the blogroll before, now is the time. And if you are newcomer to this blog, there's lots of material squirreled away in the archives -- just put something in the Search box and see what comes up.

Anyway, that's all for now... if you're in New York, hope to see you at the Jazz Gallery or Bowery Poetry Club hits, or at one of the Pulse Sihr Halal concerts.  If you're in Atlanta and you can make one of the Lizz Wright hits, please grab me afterwards and say hello. If you're just out there somewhere at the other end of this infernal series of tubes -- many, many thanks for reading and I hope to see you again in late May.

My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in thirty years

I missed this the first time around, but Hank Shteamer's interview with Chico Hamilton on the occasion of Chico's 85th birthday may be the greatest thing that has ever appeared in Time Out New York:

You teach drums and lead ensembles at the New School—what led you to that?

I realized that this could be my way of giving something back, because music has been very good to me. Schools are the only place to learn jazz today, but sadly, a lot of people teaching this music know nothing about swinging.

Okay, how do you teach someone to swing?

It takes just two things: patience and fortitude. [Taps rhythmically on table] You hear that? Okay, do that for me.

[Taps along]

Good. Now can you talk at the same time?

Okay… [Still tapping] My name is Hank, I was born in Kansas City.…

You’re from Kansas City? Oh shit, okay!

Read the rest.

(Via Mwanji.)

Vipassana

My Pulse colleague Joe Phillips's brilliant, sprawling, massively ambitious and deeply moving Vipassana will be performed at Makor tonight. Joe's music is thoroughly compelling on a purely aesthetic plane, but perhaps it's also worth noting, in light of this discussion, that it also completely destroys stereotypes of what music written by an African-American composer is supposed to sound like.

If you're unfamiliar with Joe's work, get thee to his MySpace page. His music, his drive, and his friendship have meant a lot to me. My own music would be very different (and much poorer) if we'd never met.

To turn the ironic into the symphonic

I'm pleased to announce that I've been selected for Meet The Composer's Brooklyn Philharmonic Composer Mentorship Program. Over the course of 2007, I'll be working with Randy Woolf on a piece of original orchestral music. I've done lots of orchestrations of other people's music, but I've never had the chance to write for orchestra in entirely my own voice, and I'm pretty stoked. Like Maria says, it's like graduating from the Crayola 16-pack to the Big Box.

Four years gone

Candlelight Vigil, originally uploaded by A Schultz.

End it now.

Let me tell y'all what it's like being male, middle class and white

Mwanji Ezana -- back from Cuba and tanned, rested and ready -- jumps into the always perilous race ring and leads with a one-two punch.

Actually, these are a pair of sincere and searching essays on a topic that never gets any easier to talk about. But it doesn't do any of us any good to pretend that our society -- or for that matter, our scene -- has somehow progressed "beyond" race. Only someone who has had the privilege of not having their racial identity inform their every interaction, every day, could possibly make that kind of absurd claim.

Anyway, just go read... listen... think...

Part 1

Reading about jazz, collecting albums and seeing who I and others think of as avant-garde/cutting-edge/innovative, I sometimes find myself wondering if young black musicians haven't disappeared almost totally from that category. Maybe they have - or maybe avant-garde jazz has become an oxymoron (for some reason, recent Ben Ratliff articles have been implying this) - but there are two elements that contribute to this feeling: media selectivity and the strong conciousness of tradition/history/lineage that's both felt within black America and also imposed upon it.

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This - a white avant-garde apart from a black mainstream - is something that is often stated, explicitly or implicitly. Apart from Don Byron, everyone mentioned in the article quoted above and Will Layman's on fusion is white. Nate Chinen's "Brooklyn Jazz Renaissance" is slightly more balanced, but still prompted heated replies from trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah that, as far as I am aware, went largely unnoticed (perhaps because Abdullah was rather long-winded). Also, the only young black jazz musician prominently cited by Chinen is Robert Glasper, which kind of reinforces the "black jazz is stuck in the mainstream and/or past" sentiment.

Read the whole thing.

Part 2

On Matana Roberts's blog, a post titled "Hello black folks? can you hear me?" delves quite deeply into the web of feelings invested in this community/isolation tension. She starts from an overjoyed observation of the "wall to wall blackness in the audience" at an Alice Coltrane concert, but then gets depressed because "we are struggling cause not only are there not a lot of black folks in the experimental jazz realm that I am a passenger in, but there are rarely any black folks in the damn audience." The comments to the post are interesting too, as other young black American jazz musicians like Corey Wilkes and Jaleel Shaw chip in. Shaw's and Roberts's early educational experiences are really depressing and strange to me, and make this initiative seem particularly relevant.

Read the whole thing.

I'm not angry, I'm not angry anymore

Last weekend, John Zorn and Cecil Taylor made their debut at Jazz at Lincoln Center, a concert self-consciously promoted as a daring double-bill for the notoriously conservative cultural institution. If I'd had the cash, this is the rare JALC hit I'd actually have liked to have caught, especially since it marks one of Masada's last performances as a band, and I still haven't heard Cecil's new group with Henry Grimes and Pheeroan AkLaff, which everyone says is his strongest trio in decades.

But since I couldn't make it, I read Ben Ratliff's writeup with interest. I think he did a good job of concisely encapsulating the essence of the two groups -- Masada as "logical, comic, athletic" and an "airtight system"; Cecil's music is "all in the movement," the "millions of choices that make a flowing gesture" -- sounds about right to me. It was also no surprise that the Jazz at Lincoln Center audience warmed immediately to Masada's hard-grooving, high-energy post-Ornette klez-jazz (everybody loves the beat), but remained somewhat mystified by Cecil's more abstracted pulse -- to the uninitiated, his music often sounds discontinuous and disconnected, and it can take some time immersed in his sound-world for the shape of things to reveal themselves.

[It's also, sadly, no surprise to learn that the house management at JALC's Rose Theater apparently tried to cut the concert short by bringing up the house lights before Cecil's set was done, presumably to try to save on overtime fees.]

But shortly after the article went live on the Times' site, I got an email from Secret Society co-conspirator James Hirschfeld, reacting angrily to the third paragraph in Ratliff's review, which reads:

But above all, the experimental composers and bandleaders whose work refers to, argues against and engages with different parts of jazz — the putative jazz avant-garde — just don’t need Jazz at Lincoln Center anymore. Their interests and audiences don’t extend there. They’ve built their own festivals, their own record companies. (Mr. Zorn has created his own Lower East Side club, the Stone, with music six nights a week.) The MacArthur Foundation has honored almost all the major figures of the jazz avant-garde with fellowships. Academic presses are pumping out books about their achievements. What’s the big deal, for them, about a gig at the Rose Theater?

On a casual reading, this didn't seem particularly objectionable to me -- I took it as a somewhat veiled way of saying that the financially struggling Jazz at Lincoln Center needs Zorn and Taylor more than they need JALC's seal of approval. Who needs the blessing of The House That Wynton Built when you've got Guggenheims and MacArthurs?

But James begged to differ:

In this paragraph, (in my reading) Ratliff is speaking generally about "the putative jazz avant-garde," not specifically Zorn and Taylor. I think that a comparison between the institution of J@LC to whatever institution exists for jazz avant-garde artists is a bit silly. The operating budget of J@LC is $31 million. And while the MacArthur Foundation has given 8 or 9 avant-garde jazz guys grants over the years (which is hardly "almost all the major figures"), there still just isn't a huge audience or much institutional support for this music, though there are some exceptions (like this concert).

Ratliff seems to say that the avant-garde doesn't need Lincoln Center since we have our clubs and festivals and our record companies and our grants. But there is NOTHING on the scale of Lincoln Center. Can you really compare the Stone to Allen Hall? There is a chance that greater inclusion of this music into the J@LC programming would have an enormous impact on the marketability of this music across the country.

And, over at SpiderMonkey Stories, Taylor Ho Bynum voiced similar objections:

The point isn’t whether the avant-garde needs Jazz at Lincoln Center, the point is what truly creative artists could do with the truckloads of money they pour into that place! In a culture of very limited arts funding, Jazz at Lincoln Center is the elephant in the middle of the room, eating everything in sight, while everyone else fights over the crumbs. Marsalis, Crouch, and crew were very focused in marketing themselves as the only arbiters and purveyors of “real jazz” during their jazz purges of the 80s. I really think this was as much a well-organized business plan as it was an aesthetic crusade. Arts funding in general and in jazz in specific has become a very top-down, institutionally dominated field, and Lincoln Center is the most dominant institution. There is little support for independent artists and grass-roots movements. The festivals and record labels Ratliff mentions were all started out of necessity and run on shoe-string budgets. The Stone is a great place, but comparing a tiny sixty-person capacity room on the lower East Side to a multi-million dollar complex in a corporate mall on Columbus Circle is simply silly. A few MacArthur grants does not make up for the difference. (And hardly “almost all the major figures of the jazz avant-garde” have gotten one, that’s a pretty snarky comment. And I’m sure Marsalis’ annual salary over five years dwarfs even the generosity of a MacArthur Fellowship.)

These are all good points. I honestly do not begrudge Lincoln Center its conservatism. They are supposed to be conservative -- that's their cultural function. And while I'm glad to see Zorn and Taylor finally get their turn onstage at JALC, I also don't see this as embracing the avant-garde so much as embracing reality. Cecil Taylor and John Zorn may have started out as shit-disturbing radicals, but they have been established, respected figures for decades now. Their music may still be vital, provocative, and controversial, but it's been a long time since either of them has been a hardscrabbling up-and-comer.

James and Taylor are right that JALC would generate a lot less antipathy if they hadn't appointed themselves the exclusive arbiters of jazz legitimacy. But the problem is far bigger than who gets a JALC gig and who doesn't. The real issue here is that there's no structural support for up-and-coming artists. For starters: jazz has nothing remotely like South by Southwest -- although David Ryshpan asks an excellent question: why can't IAJE be more like SXSW? Taking over the local clubs, showcasing new talent, reaching out to the public and generating buzz outside of the hermetically-sealed walls of the hotel convention halls -- why doesn't this happen?

The record labels are fading away and there's nothing emerging to take their place -- no way to pay for that crucial first studio record other than going massively in debt to predatory lenders, with scant hope of ever breaking even. The only recording grant for US artists (that I'm aware of) is the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording, which is supposed to "provide wider exposure for the music of contemporary American composers," but look at who gets their support -- that's not exactly a who's who of hot young artists (notwithstanding a handful of notable exceptions). And no disrespect intended, but -- Roger Sessions? John Cage? Conlon Nancarrow? Lou Harrison? Harry Partch? Charles Ives??? The Copland Fund people are obviously operating under a definition of "contemporary" somewhat at odds with the one I'm aware of. They also tend to disproportionately reward large organizations whose staff includes full-time professional grant-writers -- like, say, Jazz at Lincoln Center.

While I'm obviously all for the proliferation of independent, artist-owned, do-it-yourself labels and young musicians trying to pull off ambitious projects even in the absence of institutional support, the problem is (as I have said elsewhere) if everyone's just doing their own thing, how does a collective scene emerge from that? How do we get people excited about the vanguard of independent, creative, contemporary jazz as a movement, instead of just gravitating towards the handful of stars who somehow emerge to wider acclaim?

There's more in the vault

Trombonist Jeff Albert on Ingrid Jensen's workshop at Loyola.

Ted Reichman on the NEC big band's Hollenbeck blowout.

Kris Tiner on his daughter-to-be.

DJ Durutti on Donald Byrd's Blackbyrds.

Mike Bagetta has a blog, which you should read.

Vijay Iyer on the word "jazz" and why many young jazz-trained artists are running from it. Reaction by Daniel Melnick and commentors at Soundslope. I don't think I'm unusual in having a love/hate relationship with the term, but I always feel most possessive of it when somebody tries to snatch it back -- like Ethan said: "I don't think you can have the word 'jazz,' Stanley -- you would make too many people upset if you took it away from them. "

A bunch of Downtown composers are blogging for the NYT, and I can't read them because it's behind the Times Select wall. I'm generally in favor of the Times Select wall as it prevents me from reflexively gaping at their perpetual car wreck of an Op-Ed page -- seriously, Maureen Dowd? Tom Friedman? John Tierney? David Brooks? Guest columns by Ann Althouse? And you want me to pay for that shit sandwich? But The Score blog actually sounds pretty cool. Just not $50/year cool. Plus, you know, it only encourages the aforementioned.

Histoire sans fin

Over at SpiderMonkey Stories, Taylor Ho Bynum has a great writeup of  the latest performance of Matana Roberts's sprawling, riveting musico-historical epic, Coin Coin. The performance he saw was of Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libre. I saw Chapter Two: Missippippi Moonchile at Tonic back in December, and while her collaborators for each iteration were completely different, it sounds like the overall effect was very much the same. Much to my regret, I didn't get the chance to write about Coin Coin back in December, but now I don't have to, since Taylor appears to have read my mind:

The music ranged from folky interlocking vamps [...] to two-beat shuffles and old-time waltzes, to the deconstruction of all the above, often by solo improvisers. Lyrical hockets would be interrupted by intense squalls [...].

[...] 

In terms of scope and structure, I’m reminded of John Carter’s “Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music”, his epic suite following the development of music in the African-American experience.

Be sure to read the whole thing -- Taylor has some great insights about the importance of independent artists pursuing unreasonably ambitious projects, of "going for the big one," even when the institutional support isn't there.

But that's where your support comes in, as fans of independent creative music -- Matana is performing both  Gens de Couleur Libre and Mississippi Moonchile at the Jazz Gallery on March 29. Coin Coin, while still a work in progress, is shaping up to be a powerful personal narrative from one of the scene's most probing and creative young musicians. I've been listening to Matana for a long time and Coin Coin definitely marks a major new phase in her artistic journey. It's exciting to hear the work unfold over time, like a serialized novel -- I can't wait for Chapter 3.

Until tomorrow but that's just some other time

With apologies to the indefatigable Steve Smith and the fabulous Molly Sheridan, the best interview with Nico Muhly (a young composer who's been receiving considerable attention in advance of his Zankel hit on Friday) remains the one conducted by Prof. Heebie McJeebie in July of '06. While the well-respected TANDY Professor of Electronic Music at the Hotel Cadillac in Rochester NY is currently on sabbatical, we feel certain that on his return to the blogosphere, he will insist on credit for being skeptical and/or dismissive of Mr. Muhly long before it became fashionable.

From the freezer to the boil

There's an interview with me in the inaugural issue of Steampunk Magazine, a magazine devoted to steampunk culture writ large. The first issue devotes itself to "Putting the Punk back into Steampunk" and it's a honor to be included among such august company as the legendary Michael Moorcock, singer-songwriter/builder of insane mechanical instruments Thomas Truax, and the theatrical industrial band Abney Park -- all of whom have a much more legitimate claim to the "steampunk" appellation than I do. Other features also include pieces on musical instruments both exotic (the glass armonica) and theoretical (the pyrophone, which is exactly what it sounds like), as well as a nifty how-to tutorial on electrolytic etching. Plus fiction, essays, and such.

The magazine is being offered as a free PDF download, or you can order your very own dead-tree copy (or in this case, recycled dead tree) at cost ($3) -- I just received my very own hard copy and I highly recommend going that way. Second-best would be to print the PDF and read it offline. And yes, of course you could technically just read the PDF from your computer screen, but really, how punk would that be?

Everybody's going Uptown (it's where I wanna be)

Wednesday, 7 March 2007 - Makor

SETLIST (click to listen/download)

1) Transit
Solo: Ingrid Jensen, fluegelhorn

2) Desolation Sound
Solo: Sam Sadigurksy, soprano sax

3) Chrysalis
Solo: Erica vonKleist, alto flute/soprano sax

4) Induction Effect
Solo: André Canniere, trumpet

5) Phobos
Solos: Jon Wikan, cajon; Dan Willis, tenor sax

6) Flux in a Box
Solos: Ben Kono, alto sax; Mike Holober, piano

7) Habeas Corpus
Solo: Alan Ferber, trombone

Download All (ZIP archive)

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Thanks to all who came up to hear us venture outside of our usual haunts. Makor is a very hip venue, an oasis of eclecticism lurking in the monocultural shadow of Lincoln Center. (Though presumably the uneasy fit with Uptown concergoing tastes is a big part of why they're moving to TriBeCa.) But it's a great space, with great sound -- as you can hear on the above MP3s. Mike Holober was happy to play an actual acoustic piano for once -- check his solo on "Flux," as well as Ingrid's return to the fold on "Transit," Alan's take on the somewhat revised "Habeas Corpus," and the blistering playing by special guests Ben Kono (also on "Flux") and Dan Willis ("Phobos").

If you missed us at Makor, we will be at the Jazz Gallery on April 5, and then back at the Bowery Poetry Club on May 19 (in a double bill with Kyle Saulnier's band).

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Sorry, no incriminating evidence this time -- the band photographer was busy with other assignments.

TONIGHT - Secret Society @ Makor

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

7:00 PM

Makor

35 West 67th Street, Manhattan

Subway: 1 to 66th Street; 2, 3, to 72nd Street

BUY TICKETS ONLINE

This evening, Secret Society's impudent minxes and canny sharpers will infiltrate the ranks of Respectable Uptown Concert-Going Society in an attempt to draw their betters into the seductive demi-monde of steampunk big band. Featuring the long-awaited return of Founding Co-Conspirator Ingrid Jensen; the reunification of partners-in-crime Matt Clohesy and Jon Wikan; and an assist by a pair of knavish louts borrowed from the Hollenbeck Gang: Mssrs. Ben Kono and Dan Willis.

CO-CONSPIRATORS

REEDS
Erica vonKleist
Ben Kono
Dan Willis
Sam Sadigursky
Josh Sinton

TRUMPETS
Ingrid Jensen
André Canniere
James De La Garza
Tom Goehring
Dave Rezek

TROMBONES
Alan Ferber
Mark Patterson
Mike Fahie
Darrell Hendricks

RHYTHM
Sebastian Noelle, guitar
Mike Holober, piano & keyboards
Matt Clohesy, acoustic & electric basses
Jon Wikan, drums & percussion

COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR, RINGLEADER
Darcy James Argue

Some bright morning when this life is over

Corey Kilgannon has an amazing piece in the NYT about the jailed bassist Tarik Shah and his brother Antoine Dowdell, who's been picking up pointers in jazz theory from his sibling during visiting hours:

While a public drama has played out in headlines and courtroom hearings over the terrorism charges, a private one between the two brothers has been occurring every other week in a special isolated visiting area of the jail. There they enter a booth and sit separated by a wire security screen, their conversation monitored by correction officers, and Mr. Dowdell takes a tutorial from his brother during which the two discuss jazz theory and sing passages to each other.

“We know the guards can hear us scatting and singing away, and they probably think we’re both crazy, or talking in code or something,” said Mr. Dowdell, 49, who uses his brother’s left-behind collection of sheet music and handwritten practice exercises to help teach himself.

He says his brother’s inspiration and instruction from prison has helped him make huge strides as a jazz pianist who now gets paying gigs around the city, including a regular weekend engagement at the Caravan of Dreams restaurant in the East Village.

“All my life I studied the piano, but I was never able to play what was in my heart,” Mr. Dowdell said. “I could never make the piano cry, maybe because I couldn’t get in touch with the blues. But seeing what’s happening to my brother — his music and his life unfairly taken away — I feel an urgency now to play his music for people. It’s like they took the jazz musician from my family and I have to fill that void.”

In jail Mr. Shah has no access to an instrument or radio, but he has begun to write exercises, chord progressions and even compositions for his brother.

Tarik Shah was arrested as a suspect in the global war on terror in May 2005. He has been held in solitary confinement since then. His long-delayed trial is finally set to begin April 23. David Adler has written extensively -- and controversially -- about Shah's case for his blog (links to Shah-related posts here) and for Jazz Times. (See also the subsequent letters exchange.)

You must sing more sad

Founding Secret Society co-conspirator Sebastian Noelle brings his new band, Koan, to Cornelia Street tonight. The lineup is killing, as you can see above -- Loren, Thomson, and Ted all bring their own formidable personalities to bear on Sebastian's intricately plotted tunes. Seb's got more details about the music he's written for this group up on his website.

8:30 PM hit.

This is a public service announcement... with guitar!

From my inbox to your screen:

For years, AFM members have had problems bringing musical instruments aboard planes as carry-on luggage. Recently, discussions with the airlines trade association and Congress have picked up to the point where an acceptable solution to the problem is possible. However, we need to show that there is urgency to the problem. We would appreciate it if you would describe your recent experiences when traveling with instruments to us so we can show the seriousness of the situation for musicians. Please send your recent airline experience to me at [email protected]. Thank you.

You don't have to be a Union member, just a traveling musician who'd like the right to not have your axe mulched.

Torture Garden

Naomi Klein: A Trial For Thousands Denied Trial

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an "enemy combatant" and taken to a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a 9-by-7-foot cell with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a "truth serum," a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defense. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that "the extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged," his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent," that his treatment is irrelevant.

US District Judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. "It's not like Mr. Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place." The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify at the hearings on Padilla's mental state, which begin February 22. They will be asked how a man alleged to have engaged in elaborate antigovernment plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, "like a piece of furniture."

It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of CIA "extraordinary rendition" as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, former Army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. "They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over." All of Delta Block was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

[...]

The manual was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK Ultra program, which in the 1950s funneled about $25 million to scientists to research "unusual techniques of interrogation." One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron of Montreal's McGill University. Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960 Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks Airforce Base in Texas in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia."

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the US military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The Army's field manual, reissued just last year, states, "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior," as well as "significant psychological distress."

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of US psychological torture.

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Zoilus (Carl Wilson): Celine Dion, Barney the Dinosaur and the Weaponization of Culture

Now, I get the impulse to blurt out, "Anybody with a toddler knows what effective torture the Barney song can be!" If I've never called a piece of music "torture" in print in the past decade, I'd be very surprised (though pleasantly). But when you stop and think, Sesame Street songs as psychic bludgeons isn't just ugly; it's a gross perversion of what that music was made for. It's the weaponization of culture.

Clearly, it is only one point on a spectrum that includes worse abuses. I don't mean to magnify it out of proportion. But I think people whose lives revolve around culture, and music in particular, should consider taking the lead in objecting to this one.

[...]

But musicians and music lovers' deeper moral rights are violated when the story goes beyond a figurative abuse of cultural discourse to the literal abuse of human subjects. And finally, some people are saying so. In February, the U.S.-based Society for Ethnomusicology took an official, unanimous position against the use of music as torture, demanding the U.S. government end the practice. (Predictably drawing yet more asinine humour.) In 2005, Irish music therapist Jane Edwards wrote a letter to Condoleeza Rice in protest and a column urging her peers to speak out (notice the Celine Dion crack she quotes). Perhaps the music industry could follow their lead, turning their attention from the "monetization" of music to the weaponization of it for a few heartbeats.

She makes me wonder why I never wear enough

I just noticed that the Cologne Contemporary Jazz Orchestra have updated their webpage, which now includes a downloadable MP3 of their version of Ritual, recorded live at our Stadtgarten gig back in October '06. While you're there, check out their Slayer cover, big band stylee.

Also check their MySpace page, from whence you can branch out to hear more music from some of the amazing individual CCJO players and composers, including Matthias Bergmann, Frank Sackenheim, Ryan Carniaux, Tobias Webmer, and Matthias Schriefl.