Secret Society

Don't start me talking I could talk all night

Two essential new interviews:

Ethan Iverson unleashes another epic conversation, this one with Tim Berne:

Intro
Part One
Part Two

A taste:

EI: You are a pretty rare example of someone who isn’t playing music already as a teenager but then has the willpower - because of a love of the music - to like really devote yourself to it, a bit on the late side, and then turn it around. In a few years you’ve made your first record and you’ve got your own voice coming.

TB: Yeah I was pretty strong-willed. I don’t know what possessed me. When I look back on it, it seems incredible, especially considering my overall lack of confidence. The more I learned, the less confident I felt. I would take these jazz lessons and stuff, but I didn’t really ever do sideman stuff. I think the first thing I ever did as a sideman could’ve been the Mark Helias record Split Image, where I played with Dewey Redman for a couple of tunes.

That was amazing. Mark might have given Dewey the music but I seriously doubt he looked at it. He came in from a gallery show, where he’d been drinking some wine. He’s kind of laughing and screwing around. And I’m paralyzed with fear. Not even just about him, but just recording a record in a studio. Somebody else’s music, some of the tunes have changes, you know I’m just mortified I’m gonna fuck up. And, uh, then Dewey just shows up and we play this thing and it’s like "boom." We’re playing this tango of Mark’s, and playing it “correctly” and all this, and Dewey comes in... his solo’s killing. And then we play the other tune he’s on, and it’s the same thing. He’s not nailing the music, but all of a sudden it has a vibe. It’s like this guy is a pro in the best sense of the word. This guy’s been around the block! He just knows how to cut to the music. Get to the music quickly. You put up all these blocks: “I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” I was just fighting myself on every issue. “I’m not as good as these guys,” or whatever. All that shit’s spinning out of control in my brain. And this guy’s coming in like “I’m Dewey Redman. I play the saxophone. It’s just music. I’m gonna play some music.” He wasn’t worried about somebody saying he fucked up letter B or whatever -- and if they had, he would’ve done it again, of course. But on the improvised stuff he just sort of killed it.

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Ethan is famous for his extended interviews, but Marc Myers of JazzWax is giving him a run for his money. This week he is publishing his 5-part(!) interview with my mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, and it is riveting. There is a lot of stuff in here I didn't know!

So far, only the first two parts are up... parts 3-5 coming later this the week. I will update the links as needed.

Part One
Part Two

A sample:

JW: How did you come to play the valve-trombone?
BB: The stories about me starting to play it cold with Claude Thornhill’s band are wrong [laughs]. Yeah, right, I just walked into Thornhill’s band, picked up the valve-trombone and started to play it. The truth is I started playing the instrument when I was 13. I didn’t want to play slide trombone, so I found some old baritone horn in the band room and learned to play the valves. Then friends gave me an old Czechoslovakian valve-trombone. I learned to play the instrument by watching trumpet players.

JW: Why didn’t you like the slide trombone?
BB: Who likes the slide trombone? Sax players got all the girls because they were seated in the front row. Trumpeters got all the money because they were driving the band from the back row. Trombones sit in the middle and develop an interior life [laughs]. Trombonists didn’t get the money or the girls.

Another gig and another guilder

Let me be the latest to welcome NYT stringer and JazzTimes exile Nate Chinen to the Fraternal Order of Jazzbloggers. His new blog, The Gig, has been officially unveiled and already has some killer content -- the audio interview with Grizzly Bear bassist and former Branford Marsalis student Chris Taylor (no, really), in which Taylor talks about the influence of Ahmad Jamal on the band's latest, Veckatimest (no, really) is a must-read. Kudos to Nate for catching the Vernell Fournier-inspired off-beat ride cymbal beat on "Southern Point." He also reports on the ongoing mustache-growing competition between Andrew D'Angelo and Bill McHenry, and oh yeah, Brad Meldhau's special guest appearance with McHenry's quartet at the Vanguard last night, which marks what is, improbably, the first-ever musical encounter between Meldhau and Paul Motian.

It always seemed to me Nate's naturally casual, vivid, engaging style sometimes gets a bit dampened down by the Professional Voice requirements of Major Publications, so I am glad Nate has decided to hang up his own shingle and begin dispensing the unfiltered stuff. I am sure this newfound liberation totally makes up for the loss of a regular paycheck from JazzTimes.

In other news, Nate recently interviewed me for the BBC's Jazz on 3. Said interview is airing tonight at 11:15 PM GMT (i.e., 6:15 PM EST). The show will be streaming thereafter for a week.

UPDATE: Listen here -- my interview segment begins 1:27:00.

Together we'll wreak havoc on the throne

Society photographer/consort Lindsay Beyerstein has been nominated as a finalist in the 2008 Weblog Awards -- she is nominated in the category of Best Individual Blogger.

Vote early and vote often. No seriously, vote often -- ideally once every 24 hours. (It is allowed and encouraged.)

UPDATE: The poll is now embedded right here. Click the "continue reading" link below to vote. Polls close January 12, so get your votes in now.

I hear you calling his name, I hear the stutter of ignition

I am so glad I don't have to go through this electoral season without Fafblog. Giblets's latest missive is brutally funny but completely deserved:

What these namby pamby privacy-pamperers don't seem to realize is that in order for Barack Obama to affect real change, he has to get elected president, and in order to get elected president he has to appeal to the millions of ordinary hard-working Americans who want to get wiretapped by Barack Obama - ordinary hard-working Americans like the staff of the Obama campaign. Now that doesn't mean Barack Obama doesn't stand for change, because he totally does! He isn't just going to be spying on you and blowing up the mideast - he's going to be the first black man in history to spy on you and blow up the mideast!

Remember -- now is the time to hold Obama's feet to the fire. After the election is too late -- after the election, he doesn't need us anymore.

So think about this little scene, apply it to your life

Theatre director Isaac Butler weighs in on the, uh, Complexity Wars, as they pertain to his own corner of the art world:

There's a lot of really great thorny complex bizarre freaky shit out there, and I love that stuff. I love the overwhelming nature of Decasia (which has one of the best final ten minutes of any music piece I've ever heard) and the raw crazy trance power of Animal Collective, I like Jason [Grote] and Shelia [Callaghan's] writing and Songs From the Second Floor is like my favorite movie ever. What all of those works and artists have in common is that the complexity (or thorniness, or experimentalness or whatever we're calling it these days) is fully integrated with the thematic concerns at the root of the work. Furthermore, as Douglas Wolk talks about in Reading Comics, by to some extent frustrating easy conventions, it leaves room for the work to have a different kind of impact, closing one door opens a few others.

What gets me, however, is work that embraces thorniness for its own sake and doesn't really have anything of value to offer beyond it. Now sometimes something is so formally groundbreaking that that's enough to sustain a work of art, but very very rarely. This line is (of course) subjective. I've said many times that I don't think there's much to Blasted or Cleansed beyond the brutality directed towards the audience (although perhaps Soho Rep's upcoming production of the former will cure me of this notion). And part and parcel of my anger at this is the spurious counter argument that claims that saying "work X doesn't really do anything beyond be thorny" is to be either anti-intellectual, anti-complexity, anti-challenging art, or anti-art itself. Frankly, I think that's horseshit designed to invalidate a viewpoint we disagree with.

Read the whole thing. The David Foster Wallace interview Isaac quotes at the end represents a serious turning point in my own thinking about this stuff.

All my pictures are confused and now I'm going to take me to you

Kyle Gann follows up on the David Byrne vs. Bernd Alois Zimmermann controversy that sparked so much discussion here and elsewhere. While I still think people are trying to weigh down Byrne's arguments with baggage he did not pack himself^[1], Kyle's excellent post cuts right the heart of the matter:

Proposition 1: not every thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand piece that's been written is a masterpiece, worth listening to over and over again.

Proposition 2: at least some thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand pieces are beautiful and profound, and those listeners who come to know them well derive immense pleasure from them.

I would hope that both of these statements would seem entirely sensible, non-controversial, and non-contradictory to most people who love music. But in practice, in certain circles -- circles readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with -- it is effectively impossible for anyone to make an argument that flows from Proposition 1 (especially: "this piece of thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is in fact a piece of shit") without people assuming that you are in fact launching a full-bore assault on Proposition 2 ("so you're saying that all my favorite thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is worthless???")

And look, I understand the defensiveness -- especially on the avant-garde jazz side, where the proponents of thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music as The Way Music Must Be did not come anywhere near mounting a successful takeover of the academy, as the hardcore American serialists did. And nobody -- least of all myself -- wants to be seen as trying to re-ignite the Jazz Wars. But really now. We should be able to talk honestly about the merits or demerits of individual thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand works without everyone feeling like the fate of entire swaths of music hangs in the balance. And mentioning that a piece of music offers only thorniness, complexity, and difficulty, without the slightest regard for clarity, communication, and emotional resonance should definitely be fair game.

Anyway, go read Kyle's post, in which he delves into these issues at great length but with terrific incisiveness.

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1. Seriously, this is David Byrne we are talking about, people. His latest project is a building as musical instrument. He's collaborated with Robert Wilson on his own crazy-ass operas. He's tried to make art out of a PowerPoint presentation. He's really into Giacinto Scelsi's single-tone music. And perhaps you've heard some of the stuff he did with that band he was in for a while back in the day. A lot of it is, um, pretty weird. David Byrne, of all people, does not hate experimental music. I kind of thought that went without saying.

You've got to be modernistic

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

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

[…]

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

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

[…]

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

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

Read the whole thing.

Cold like Ike

Nels Cline on Ike Turner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smacks you in the head

T-Money takes one for the team.

Font of wisdom

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

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

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

Okay, back to the grindstone...

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

Matthew Guerrieri is a fucking genius.

Irony, man

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

Promoted from the comments on this thread:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both are wrong.

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

Picking up where we left off...

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

New Allied Operatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Allied Operative

Steve Coleman — M-Base Blog

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

Read the whole thing.

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

Read the whole thing.

Seafever

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

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

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

No.

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

He's just trying to tell a vision

More on the Vision Festival and associated issues...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gimme one vision

Brian Olewnick casts a skeptical eye on the Vision Festival:

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

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

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

Mr. Ron

Ethan Iverson interviews Ron Carter -- go read.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

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

Kyle Gann, 2007:

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

[...]

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

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Milton Babbitt, 1958:

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

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

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

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

Industrial rhythms all around

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

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

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

This sort of thing is my bag, baby

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

Mike Baggetta on Ran Blake:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holding court on Taylor Square

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

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

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

Took a year hiatus, now you wanna hate us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

SUN RA 21% Free Improvisation 79% Jazz

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

The other issue is the ‘official stories’.

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

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

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

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

With every pamphlet we receive

As always, the blogroll only seems to get fixed when its decrepitude becomes sufficiently embarrassing, when I look at it and go, "Wait, I still haven't blogrolled Blog X? How can that be?"

New Allied Operatives

Andrew Durkin (Jazz: The Music of Unemployment)

Yeah, that would be the most thoroughly embarrassing omission, especially since Andrew's been blogging since September 2004. And you know when it might have been a more opportune time to blogroll him? Before our double-bill back in January. Anyway, Andrew has apparently decided that January's East Coast tour wasn't enough to sate the nation's love for Industrial Jazz, and in March will be launching a full-scale invasion of Portland and Seattle, although for this new tour of duty he's got to rotate the troops:

This week I was preoccupied with the task of organizing things for our next set of dates (March 7 and 8 in Portland and Seattle, respectively). This should be easy, right? We just came off a burning east coast tour, the band is white-hot and ready to go, right? Right!

Wait a minute! What's this? Lo and behold, I depleted my entire budget making the east coast tour happen (not complaining here, just stating the facts, m'am). So it actually turns out that for the upcoming northwest hootenannies (hottenanni?), I can't afford to bring any of the usual suspects up from LA. That's right -- I'm gonna have to do these dates with a brand-freakin'-new band.

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Kris Tiner (Stop The Play And Watch The Audience)

IJG associate Kris Tiner has also been blogging since before I started, though I only discovered his blog when he started liveblogging the "Industrial Jazz On Ice" tour. Those posts are still well worth reading -- go to the January archives, then scroll down and work your way up. Kris valiantly attempts to make the case for Shooby Taylor, The Human Horn, which he then uses as a jumping-off point to riff on his own descent from Jazz Puritanism into pop apostasy (something I blogged about myself a while back):

Somewhere along the way, though, I absorbed this awful "jazz ideology" that forcefully declared any and all other music inferior. I'm not talking about the cultural conservatism of the J@LC crew, mind you. But for much of my teenage years popular or commercial forms of music (and for a while even all that dusty, dead old classical music) were completely banned from my consciousness. I just didn't want to bother with it. For the life of me I still don't know exactly where this idea came from. I often suspect my subscription to Down Beat magazine (long since cancelled) had something to do with it.

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Surviving The Crunch (Ted Reichman)

You all know Ted as the accordionist from the Claudia Quintet. His blog is thoughtful, personal, and literate, as might be expected from a fellow Pynchon fan, and his reflections on Hyde Park, MA (south of Boston proper, near Mattapan and Roslindale) are on point:

Hyde Park, like my neighborhood, which is nearby, is in some ways a place that feels trapped in time. Boston as a whole, like New York, has changed a lot since I moved away, but in the outer neighborhoods between the city and the suburbs the big money hasn't quite purged the pre-milennial Americana yet, though it is trying. As Anthony Coleman said when I took him on a short tour, "You could film a Douglas Sirk movie here."

New Pamphleteers & Advocates

Thomas Dolby

As noted previously. Definitely check out his video podcasts of his recent live gigs. The guy's making a return to the scene after a long hiatus, which he spent designing polyphonic ring tone hardware, so clearly he's got a lot to atone for. But Dolby is deep -- there's a lot more to his catalog than just "She Blinded Me With Science," and he'll be coming out with a record of new material sometime this year. His blog is endlessly entertaining, too -- check his post on scoring the Ken Russell flick Gothic:

I had never worked with an orchestra before, and I’d made the mistake of signing a deal with Virgin where I had to pay all recording costs out of my own fee. I reckoned I could just about afford the London Philharmonic plus an orchestrator for one day. We had 18 cues to record. I carefully prepared and sequenced them all in my Fairlight and gave the recordings to the orchestrator to transcribe. But I don’t read music and have little or no formal training, so I trusted him to transcribe my Fairlight versions faithfully. This he had not done. Orchestral players being heavily unionized as they are, on the dot of 9am they opened their sheet music for the first time. I stood there in the middle of a 96-piece orchastra thrilling at the sounds of my compositions. But every few bars, something was off. I made mental notes as they played each cue through. I had to walk from one section to the next saying, “Ok cellos… that part that goes ‘da DAAA da da…’ what’s your top note there?” “Erm, A flat?” I thought about it and said “…ok…. change that to an A natural will you?”

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Bird Lives (Brett Primack)

Brett's video blog. Not to be confused with the muckraking, shit-disturbing original. Just jazz videos and GooTube links, lots of 'em.

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The Black Torrent Guard (Andy H-D)

Flattery will get you everywhere. Seriously, I thought for sure Andy was already on the blogroll. Anyway, with St. Botolph's Town gone, he's your go-to guy for Boston happenings and pinhole photography (for examples, check his Flickr stream). Best of all, Andy's not afraid to stick his neck out:

This moment was ruined, [Stravinksy's] Mass is a godawful piece. Nevermind the lackluster Bach consort or the poor blending from the Chamber Singers, the piece is bad. I can think of no other way to describe it other than it sounds as though it was written for high school choir. Some things are rarely heard because they were ahead of the curve or circumstance caused them to slip through the crack, but sometimes it is because it isn't very good. One neat thing I managed to glean from it was its continuation of the Palestrina tradition of homophony when you really need to hear the words. The machine gun-like pace of the Credo may have been meant to play behind interesting figures in the winds, but the winds certainly weren't making it sound like that. One brief glimmer of brillance came at the end of the Credo, after the aforementioned march the Amen blossomed into what seemed to be infinite shards of tradition. That might have just been by comparison.

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Soho the Dog (Matthew Guerrieri)

Composer, conductor, pianist, and Boston Globe correspondent. (Yeah, there's a whole lot of Boston in this update -- deal.) Matthew blogs about you stuff you need to know, like diamonds made from DNA extracted from Beethoven's hair and how composer cred affects a band's sight-reading.

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Thirteen Ways (Eighth Blackbird)

Definitely the most helpful new music ensemble blog out there: How to bowl. How to do interviews. How to tour without roadies. How to drink. How to cue. How to sequence your album. And how to slaughter a chicken.

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VancouverJazz.com

Brian Nation and Steve Bagnell document the scene in my ancestral homeland. See also their individual blogs, Brian's Beat the Devil and Steve's 14 Days In May.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes...

Prof. McJeebie is on sabattical. RedBlackWindow is become rogerbourland.com. Latitude 44.2 North has merged with False 45th. St. Botoloph's Town is no longer with us. Goddogo is gone, baby... has posts that will "most likely be randomly appearing and disappearing for the the time being"... has requested that he be removed from the blogroll. Café Aman also seems to be on permanent hiatus.

Suspended in nothing too dramatic

As it turns out, I couldn't make it up to Boston for NEC's farewell to Lee Hyla (and missed the following day's absurdities, courtesy of Boston's Keystone Kops, America's Worst Mayor, and Fox News). But Andy H-D of The Black Torrent Guard was there, and has an excellent writeup.

One excerpt:

The second half of the concert consisted of the Boston premiere of his saxophone quartet "Paradigm Lost" and his big hit "Pre-Pulse Suspended". Hyla himself marks "Pre-Pulse" as a turning point in his career, the mythical fusion between concert music and rock and fucking roll. I don't think it rocked as hard as the concerto, mind you, but the glimmers of light are definitely present. Written for twelve instruments, the uniting force was a nervous ostinato quickly tossed back and forth between all of the strings. Generally it was a stream of sixteenth notes, the ultimate punk bass line, but often each player would take liberties with either the pitches or rhythms. These twists in the line reverbated throughout the ensemble like stone dropped in a pond. Similar to "Basic Training" the proverbial stones got bigger (rock, Buick, small moon) and the ensemble became more and more unhinged until the stones stopped and everything reverted.

Read the whole thing.

In other Boston news, Pat reports from the Dave Douglas masterclass at NEC.

You can make history young again

Okay, I don't know how long this has been going on, but the "Search this blog" button in the sidebar -- which relies on Google's blog search engine to work -- is no longer showing results for anything not on the front page, making it rather useless. I'm afraid I have no idea what's going on, nor how to fix it. Anyone got any ideas?

(UPDATE: As an interim measure, I switched the box so it now uses regular Google, which seems to be working okay, at least for older posts. But Google Blog Search still doesn't see any of my archives.)

While I'm at it, I notice Typepad isn't showing the complete list of monthly archives in the sidebar anymore unless you actually click on the "Archive" button. That, too, is extremely annoying. If you know of some way to change it back, please share.

MLK 2007

Last year on MLK day, I posted an excerpt from a speech King gave here in New York at the Riverside Church on 4 April 1967. The speech is called Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence and it contains some of the most powerful rhetoric ever delivered by the 20th century's greatest orator.

If anything, it is even more painfully apparent in 2007 that this administration remains intent on reenacting the Vietnam tragedy in full, including their recent intimation that extending the war to Laos and Cambodia Iran and Syria will somehow help end the war more quickly. ("We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.")

This year, Taylor Ho Bynum has also linked to King's Beyond Vietnam speech. I thought about choosing another passage to excerpt this time, but really, there is no substitute for listening to King's delivery -- reading his words without hearing to his voice is like looking at a Coltrane transcription without hearing the record. So just go listen.

A madness contagious

Other people blogging their IAJE experience:

LA Trumpet player Kris Tiner (Stop The Play And Watch The Audience).

Garland, TX-based saxophonist Kevin McNerney.

A capella vocal jazz ensemble Clockwork.

Critic Forrest Dylan Bryant (FoJazz).

Bassist and educator Matthew Wengerd (104 Weeks).

Critic/blogger J.B. of J.B. Spins.

Cedar Rapids-Iowa City public radio station Jazz 88.3 KCCK.

North Stars -- St. Charles North High School (St. Charles, Illinois).

And probably many more that Google doesn't know about yet. If you see one, let me know.

What if just like everyone else

Okay, fine. I give.

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:

1. Movie score: The Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Bernstein. Yojimbo, Masaru Sato. Fargo, Carter Burwell.

2. TV theme: Hockey Night in Canada (original theme), Dolores Claman. (Perplexed non-Canadian readers click here.)

3. Melody: Mahler 9, mv. I, first theme. "In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning," Bob Hilliard/David Mann. "Peace," Ornette Coleman. "The Long Honeymoon," Elvis Costello.

4. Harmonic language: "Half The Fun," Billy Strayhorn. "The Barbara Song," Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht, arr. Gil Evans. "God Only Knows," Brian Wilson. "Dreams," Bob Brookmeyer.

5. Rhythmic feel: Charles Mingus and Dannie Richmond on "Fables of Faubus." Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer on "Tête à  Tête." George Porter Jr. and Zigaboo Modeliste on "Pungee." Bootsy Collins and Jabo Starks on "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing" (14 minutes and 44 seconds of unstoppability). The Talking Heads on "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)."

6. Hip-hop track: "Check The Rhime," A Tribe Called Quest. "Blue Flowers," Dr. Octagon. "Virus," Deltron 3030.

7. Classical piece: Igor Stravinsky, Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Béla Bártok, Divertimento for Strings (second movement). Steve Reich, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. Frederic Rzewski, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!

8. Smash hit: "I Want You Back," The Jackson 5. "When Doves Cry," Prince. "... Baby One More Time," Britney Spears. "Hey Ya," Outkast.

9. Jazz album: Such Sweet Thunder, Duke Ellington.

10. Non-American folkloric group: Tom Zé (not really "folkloric," and, come to think of it, not really a "group," but... )

11. Book on music: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

BONUS QUESTIONS:

A) Name an surprising album (or albums) you loved when you were developing as a musician: something that really informs your sound but that we would never guess in a million years: Uh, yeah -- see this post for an exhaustive and embarrassing list.

B) Name a practitioner (or a few) who play your instrument that you think is underrated: Ran Blake. Paul Bley.

C) Name a rock or pop album that you wish had been a smash commercial hit (but wasn't, not really): Lewis Taylor's self-titled debut. The New Pornographers, The Electric Version. Also, while Sign O The Times was obviously a massive hit, I never understood why "Starfish and Coffee" wasn't a hit single.

D) Name a favorite drummer, and an album to hear why you love that drummer: Stevie Wonder, Talking Book (I'm happy to see that Jeff Ballard agrees with me that Stevie's drumming is underrated.) Mel Lewis, Make Me Smile.

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Feel free to play along in comments.

Any obsession to blather over by blog

Jazz blogdonia, and specifically, the new jazz '70-'90 wiki, behearer.com, gets some love from the NYT's Nate Chinen.

In case you missed it the first time around, here is my contribution to the original discussion.

One album I now realize I unaccountably left off that list: Julius Hemphill's Coon Bid'ness (reissued as Reflections). Worth it for "The Hard Blues" alone -- that's a tune in need of a restraining order.

A spanner in the works

Voting is now open in the 2006 Stereogum Readers Poll -- the Gummys.

Body Meta

Oh, look -- this week's Time Out NY hosts a round of every New Yorker's favorite sport: inside baseball. They asked these guys ("artists and industry leaders") to rate and comment the local criterati (including TONY's own) on a six-point scale, over five categories: knowledge, style, taste, accessibility, influence.

The comments and numerical ratings are anonymous, but the obvious party game is to try to pair the panelist with the invective. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to who said, of (otherwise top-rated) New Yorker critic Alex Ross, “Writes well, can’t hear, knows little”? Or of NYT pop critic Kelefa Sanneh, “His agenda is to raise crap to the level of art—he tends to write glowingly about some of the worst American music”? My favorite comment is whoever called Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni “the George Bush of restaurant reviewers: He’s a little man in a big job who got lucky but has never acknowledged the need to learn on this big job.” (If you don't get the reference, click here.)

One annoyance -- in an otherwise fun piece, the unnamed TONY editor(s) responsible for the intro can't resist taking the obvious cheap shot at bloggers:

At least they’re pros, unlike the thousands of armchair analyzers equipped with nothing more than opinions and a blog.

I can't resist noting that the top-rated pop critic and the top-rated classical critic, plus one of the two runners-up, all appear to have something in common...

And I noticed he was carrying a pamphlet

It's that time again... more allies and pamphleteers for the sidebar:

SpiderMonkey Stories - Taylor Ho Bynum

Taylor is a killing trumpet/cornet player and it's great to see more NYC jazz musicians getting into blogging. The clear must-read posts so far include his take on the already-legendary Cecil Taylor-Henry Grimes-Pheeroan akLaff hit, and his reflections on working with Anthony Braxton, but I'm also digging the frequent bookblogging and this anecdote.

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The Beauty of Disappointment - Seth Gordon

Seth is notorious for his acerbic comments over at Sequenza 21 and NewMusicBox -- any greatest hits compilation would have to include his contributions to this thread -- but I can testify that in meatspace, Seth is the most laid-back pro wrestling fan I've ever met. I've been bugging him to get a blog since a few months after I started mine, and I'm happy to report he finally caved. His "first impressions" of Phil Kline's John The Revelator is the kind of earthy-but-informative review I wish I had the chops for, and Seth has actually seen O.C. and Stiggs, which must be worth at least 2000 hipster-points. Added attraction -- Clint Eastwood: hack or genius? (see comments)

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The Concert - Anne-Carolyn Bird

I don't know how I could not link to someone who sang on one of my my favorite recordings of the year, especially when she was so kind as to link to me. ACB is a freshly-minted New Yorker (having spent the past few years operating out of sunny Seattle) and her personable and witty blog tells of opera-type things and young-artist-in-New-York-type things. She also happens to be blood-related to the lead developer for everyone's favorite NYC indie rock showlistings, Oh My Rockness. ACB's blog is named after this poem, which is a good one.

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Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches - Hank Shteamer

Hank Shteamer writes for Time Out NY and plays in Stay Fucked. He also gave Secret Society our first positive mention in print, which I think means he has dibs on my firstborn or something. Anyway, check out the love for Capt. Beefheart's other records (here and here), the unpretentious foodblogging, and his description of Donald Sutherland's Hawkeye and Elliott Gould's Trapper John as proto-hipsters. (I think the key difference is, Hawkeye and Trapper are actually good at what they do.)

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Los Amigos de Durutti - DJ Durutti

Boston-based jazz/soul/hiphop/politics/etc blog, with a timely helping of Sun Ra -- I'm sure you all know by now that Mass. governor-elect Deval Patrick is the the son of Arkestra bari saxophonist Pat Patrick, but in honor of the Bay State's first interstellar elected official, go check out the sounds of the Afro-Futurist underground.

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Godoggone - godoggo

Frequent commenter/occasional troll (and you know I say that with love) godoggo is jazzblogging from LA. He has a nice appreciation of Anita O'Day up, from the perspective of someone new to her music. I was away from the blog when news of Ms. O'Day's passing reached me, but godoggo has the roundup of obits, as well as links to some outstanding performances. Definitely check out the YouTube'd clips from Jazz on a Summer's Day -- Anita really brings it.

Irregular Pulse

In an effort to resuscitate the long-dormant Pulse blog, I've been doing a bit of linkblogging over there today. The other Pulseketeers have been busy getting married, having children, and working long-distance commutes, not necessarily in that order. When I get a minute, it will also be updated with fresh audio and pictures from our June (yes, yes, I know, I know) gigs. But if you missed our Eloquent Light 2 program this summer, we are reprising it on December 17 at the Bowery Poetry Club. Details will be forthcoming on the soon-to-be-regularly-updated Pulse blog.

Don't call it a comeback

Mwanji returns to blogging after a two-week hiatus with a review of Jason Moran's new record.

Three of the same from two different

Mwanji on Jason Moran and identity.

Like some tacky little pamphlet in your daddy's bottom drawer

With my usual impeccable timing, I've given the Secret Society blogroll a much-needed overhaul. Never-updated blogs, nonblogs, and blogs I don't read regularly anymore have been ruthlessly culled to make room for the following:

David Byrne's Journal -- okay, it's not exactly a secret that I'm a shameless fanboy, but Byrne's blog is also Exhibit A in "Why I Love Blogdonia" -- artists communicating to their audience directly, unmediated. Obviously, this model is not for everyone, but listen, if you had to pick a rock-star-cum-blogger... right? Check out his review of the new documentary Jesus Camp.

Destination Out -- proprietors of the previously blogrolled Chemistry Class, Chilly Jay Chill & Prof. Drew LeDrew have a new MP3 blog that's been linked/blogrolled everywhere else already, thanks to a pretty sweet find -- bootleg audio from Ornette's recent Carnegie Hall hit. (Makes me wish I'd snuck a recorder into last year's Bad Plus+Ornette gig at NJPAC.) But they've got many rare/unreissued gems to share -- like these tracks from Anthony Braxton's Creative Orchestra Music. (Get 'em while they're hot.) Great conversation as well.

Living in Stereo -- worth reading for the sweet, sweet design alone, but any country-centric blog that also gives it up for Mavis Staples, Irma Thomas, and Candi Staton is golden -- and the politics are refreshingly sharp, heartfelt, and bullshit-free.

Shot of Rhythm -- new release roundups (almost) every week, with audio. Hip hop's the focus more often than not, but the proprietor, one Dove With Claws, casts a wide net ("soulcountryblueshiphopbluegrassgospelreggae et cetera") and the catch is always impressive. The mission statement says it all.

Hip hop music dot com -- proprietor Jay Smooth is not only one of blogdonia's best essayists, he also happens to be the stepson of the great jazz drummer Warren Smith -- which I found out when Jay stopped by this humble blog to comment. But listen, Jay, we're still waiting for that review, you bastard.

Words and Music -- just what it says. Long thoughtful posts on the likes of Wayne ("The Newark Flash") Shorter, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, plus audio.

Soul Sides -- Oliver Wang's indispensible audioblog. Emphasis on classics and rarities from the private collection, kinda like a groove-saturated Destination Out. Check his recent pre-relocation post "Break Dis," about songs that follow up on the promise of a killing drum break -- and songs that, uh, don't.

Red Black Window -- a blog that started as an incubator for UCLA professor Roger Bourland's book on Rufus Wainwright and has mutated completely out of control, much to blogdonia's benefit. The main event is still Roger's Lessons For Rufus -- a remarkable primer in academic music for the nonacademic musician -- but dude knows how to drink, too.

Classical Pontifications with Prof. Heebiee McJeebie -- fair and balanced blogger that I am, I have also added Prof. Bourland's polar opposite to the blogroll, Prof. Heebie McJeebie, the "well-respected TANDY Professor of Electronic Music at the Hotel Cadillac in Rochester, NY," who concentrates with laser-pointer-like focus on "the trajectory of Contemporary Canonic Classical music (serious music)" -- although he does occasionally deign to "trifle with the less-grounded trends of younger, vagabond composers." Such young composers would do well to heed the warnings in Prof. McJeebie's inaugural podcast. Now, somehow or other, rumor has gotten around that Prof. McJeebie is merely a facade created by that insolent pup, Corey Dargel. However, unlike some tawdry pamphleteers, this blog does not deal in vulgar rumor and innuendo. Besides, I have it on good authority that Prof. McJeebie doesn't care for Mr. Ross's scribblings.

And, straight from the "Wait, you mean they weren't already on the blogroll?" dept:

Brooklyn Vegan -- NYC indie rock central: upcoming show info, interviews, and first-rate gig photos. I covet his gear, whatever it is.

Stereogum -- omnivorous pop culture ephemera, and curators of the first show in this year's experiment in hipster-herding-and-baking, the Sunday Pool Parties at the McCarren Park ex-pool.

Sounds of Sculpture

Steve Smith has the goods on Ornette at Carnegie.

Phil Freeman, David Adler and Ben Ratliff are also worth reading.

Doubt by numbers (from within) in your, in your analysis

Jay Smooth (of hiphopmusic.com) asks a question I've been meaning to blog about for some time:

Why Does the Existence of Musical Analysis Anger People?

I've been watching music discussions online for ten years now (word to rec.music.hip-hop), and every discussion board always a few of them: those people who are offended that serious music discussion even exists at all. Whenever a nice debate gets rolling, they will jump in and accuse all debaters of disrespecting the music by taking it so seriously. Here's an example from okayplayer's Lesson Board this weekend:

"Can anyone on the lesson just like an artist without having to analyze and critique until they suck the enjoyment out of music? Who cares if it doesn't fit your subjective standards about what real funk is? Do you like it or not?"

I'm leaving out the poster's name cuz it's not my intention to pick a fight, but I've never understood where this kinda thing is coming from. I can understand somewhat if you take personal offense to critiques of your favorite artist, but sometimes (as in the quote above) those who take offense don't even have a horse in the race. Which means, I have to assume, they are offended by the very existence of such musical analysis, just on general principle. But if that's the case, what do they imagine is the purpose of the discussion boards they're on? As another OKP countered, "what are people supposed to do? just name an artist, throw confetti and clap?"

Read the rest. Good discussion in comments, too.