Secret Society

I am fused just in case I blow out

So as a follow-up to our previous Jim McNeely listening session, Ethan Iverson and I got together again last week to listen to Jim's epic recording, East Coast Blow Out, in its entirety.

To begin, let me lay my cards on the table: this is one of the most mindblowingly great bigband albums ever recorded. Jim is very prolific, and has written a ton of outstanding music before and since -- some of which we talked about last time -- but East Coast Blow Out will always have a special place in my personal pantheon. As an album-length cohesive artistic statement for large jazz ensemble, I think it's up there with Ellington+Strayhorn’s Such Sweet Thunder, George Russell's New York New York, Bob Brookmeyer’s Make Me Smile, Kenny Wheeler’s Sweet Time Suite from Music for Large and Small Ensembles, and Maria Schneider’s Concert in the Garden. But unless you are an obsessive bigband junkie (and bless you if you are), you probably haven’t heard (or even heard of) East Coast Blow Out. Even John Scofield completists aren’t necessarily hip to this record, which features some of Sco’s most tantalizing work on disc.

It doesn’t help that the album is long out of print, has never been issued on iTunes or similar, and used copies of the CD tend to be rather pricey. But listen, people: Jim McNeely is badass and this is his masterpiece. You need to seek it out. (I’ve taken the liberty of uploading a few brief clips in this post so you can have a taste of what Ethan and I are talking about.)

Our conversation begins below the fold...

You should have known by now you were on my list

Last June, DownBeat's Frank Hadley invited me to "please list your FIVE most favorite big band albums; and add comments (of any length) about each album" for a piece he was writing for the magazine. That piece has finally gone to press -- it's in the April issue, you can read it here. 

I was far from the only one Frank contacted -- almost 200 players, composers, educators et al responded to this straw poll, and the results are fascinating. You'd have to expect that Miles & Gil's Porgy and Bess would be the odds-on favorite for the top spot, but I really did not expect to see Thad & Mel lock down the #2 (Live at the Village Vanguard) and #3 (Consummation) positions -- especially given the historically spotty availability of those albums. (They are both on iTunes now.)

It's also nice to see Taylor Ho Bynum quoted in the lede, especially since he tipped his hand and shared his top five on his own blog last year. (THB's blog is [temporarily, I hope] inaccessible, but here's the archived version via the wayback machine.) Now that the piece has been published, I thought I'd do the same -- and throw in a few audio clips while I'm at it:

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Like all music geeks, I’m attracted to list-making as foolproof discussion-fodder, but when asked to proclaim the “Top Big Band Records of ALL TIME,” I get agita. This kind of framing almost insists that you pick canonical records that have stood the test of time, without even considering what’s going on in the present moment. So I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting the rules to suit my own purposes. I’ve chosen five outstanding big band records released during the past ten years. [N.B. ten years as of the time I originally wrote this, which was June 2009.] If this disturbs you I encourage you to mentally substitute your favorite Undisputed Classics from Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, George Russell, Gerry Mulligan, and Thad Jones. I can assure you, I love their records as much as you do. But here are some recent albums that I think are equally worthy:

Bob Brookmeyer New Art Orchestra — New Works (Challenge, 1999)
In the 1980’s, Bob “wrote himself out of” the Mel Lewis Orchestra in by pushing the limits of density, chromaticism, and wrist-slitting bleakness. (I happen to love that music, though apparently not everyone shared that opinion at the time….) He spent the subsequent years composing for various European big bands, and eventually formed his own hand-picked ensemble. New Works is his first and best record with that group, and it marks a return to transparency, propulsion, and blissful melodicism. The album’s centerpiece is Celebration, a four-part suite written in tribute to Gerry Mulligan, and featuring unbelievably badass playing by guest soloist Scott Robinson. Bob said that in writing this music he had to “step back a few years to stay honest,” but this is no exercise in neoclassical nostalgia — the music gives a quick nod to the big band tradition before plunging straight ahead.

Bob Brookmeyer New Art Orchestra - Celebration Jig

Sam Rivers’ RivBea All-Star Orchestra — Culmination (BMG, 1999)
Sam Rivers grew up during the height of the Big Band Era, and Culmination feels like a playful re-imagining of the music of his youth. Like the Walter Page-Jo Jones edition of the Basie band, this record is heavy on grooves, riffs, and short-’n-sweet solos. Except the grooves are electrified, funky, and often slightly askew, the riffs are thick and prickly, and the soloists include fire-breathers like Steve Coleman — who also produced, and somehow persuaded a major label (remember those?) to put it out.

Sam Rivers Rivbea All-Star Orchestra - Bubbles (excerpt)

Maria Schneider Orchestra — Concert in the Garden (ArtistShare, 2004)
The wispy title track introduces Gary Versace’s accordion and Luciana Souza’s voice as distinctly new colors in Maria’s palette, and the dance suite Three Romances rides the wave of a reinvigorated rhythmic vocabulary. But nothing quite prepares you for the 18-minute flamenco-inspired epic "Bulería, Soleá y Rumba," which has at its heart a devastating slow burn from Donny McCaslin. The climax is brain-splattering.

Maria Schneider Orchestra - Bulería, Soleá y Rumba (excerpt)

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble — A Blessing (OmniTone, 2005)
Hollenbeck is one of the most compelling composers on the scene, and this record is the first document of his music for big band. His range is staggering: "Folkmoot" is a propulsive deconstruction of Marian McPartland’s theme music that also (improbably) weaves in minimalism, Jimmy Giuffre-inspired exoticism, and anthemic indie rock. "Weiji" is a portentous, monomaniacal rhythmic blowout followed by a perversely breezy coda. And "Abstinence" slinks along slowly, teasing us with a sensuous bass line and drawn-out, quietly yearning melodic figures, before finally succumbing to temptation. Needless to say, the drumming on this is killing.

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble - Abstinence (excerpt)

Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos — Filtros (Sunnyside, 2008)
Some might not consider this 11-piece outfit a true “big band,” but I see no reason to stop making up my own rules as I go. Besides, while the instrumentation might be slighted pared-down, the compositional ambitions are vast. Recorded immediately following a two-week stand at the Village Vanguard, the band breezes through Guillermo’s multi-metric minefields like they are taking a leisurely stroll. His melodies are so charismatic, you don’t notice the rhythmic slight of hand — until he goes for the big reveal, like the eye-popping time-shifting passages in "Miula" and "Luz de Liz." But lest you think this album is some sterile math-jazz exercise: many of the tunes on Filtros are in fact songs, which Guillermo sings simply and directly. Even his adaptations of Messiaen and Ligeti feel unaffected. This is beautiful, heartfelt music, whose complexity arises naturally out of the composer’s highly developed sense of flow.

Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos - Miula (excerpt)

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Some thoughts looking back on this list, ten months after I wrote it... 

I was certainly inspired by the comments thread attached to this post, and did my best to track down and listen (or re-listen, if it had been a while) to anything anyone recommended that had been released in the past ten years. 

It did not take a lot of foresight on my part to predict that recent recordings would be under-represented in this DownBeat piece -- the only album from the past ten years to appear in the Top 25 is Maria's Concert in the Garden.

One recent recording I did not hear in time to include is Django Bates' stunning 2008 release Spring Is Here (Shall We Dance?), which would otherwise easily have made the list. Honorable mentions would have to include large ensemble records by Jim McNeely (who made some fantastic recordings with the Vanguard Orchestra, the Swiss Jazz Orchestra, and the Danish Radio Big Band), Bill Dixon, Peter Apfelbaum & The New York Hieroglyphics, the Pedro Giraudo Jazz Orchestra, Rob Mosher's Storytime, the Delphian Jazz Orchestra, the Exploding Star Orchestra, and no doubt a whole slew of artists whose work I haven't heard yet.

I deliberately excluded from consideration albums by my Pulse colleagues Joe Phillips, JC Sanford, and Jamie Begian (it felt a bit incestuous to include them) but you should know that they all put out very fine large ensemble records last year.

Comments are welcome, as always. If you had to pick your five favorite bigband records ("large ensemble," whatever -- let's say anything with more than 10 players involved) from the past decade, what would you choose?

Spirit Music: Bob Brookmeyer at 80

Bob Brookmeyer turns 80 years old today. 

To anyone with any interest in large-scale jazz composition, Brookmeyer is a figure of near-idolatrous worship. He's earned his place in the pantheon of great large ensemble composers many times over, alongside figures like Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Gil Evans, Thad Jones, and George Russell. The breadth of his work is astounding -- he has never stopped searching for new sounds and new directions to explore. Over the past several decades, he has also been an extraordinarily influential teacher -- Maria Schneider, Jim McNeely, and John Hollenbeck have all studied with Brookmeyer and have been deeply and directly influenced by his compositional philosophy. I was fortunate enough to get with Brookmeyer as well, from 2000-2002. I blame him for enabling my ruinous bigband habit.

Brookmeyer one of the greatest living composers, full stop -- that's not hyperbole, that's just how it is. He is also a tremendous soloist on valve trombone (Bob gave up the slide instrument at the earliest opportunity). His swing feeling is unstoppable and as authentic as it gets: he grew up in Kansas City in the 1930's, and first heard the legendary Walter Page-Jo Jones edition of the Count Basie band live when he was all of eleven years old. (Bob says the experience "gave me my first full-body thrill.") He is a true improviser, never reliant on stock licks or patterns, and is consistently inventive and surprising even on the most timeworn standards. (His only peer in this regard is Lee Konitz.) Unlike the overwhelming majority of musicians of his generation, he is as comfortable playing free as he is playing over song forms. When I was at New England Conservatory, I heard him play some spontaneous duets with guitarist Mike Gamble that turned everyone's head right around, Exorcist-style.

And yet, despite his towering influence, outside of the community of bigband fanboys/fangirls, Brookmeyer's music isn't widely known. Today's 80th birthday milestone isn't being celebrated with a week at the Village Vanguard or a gala at the Rose Theater. (To be fair, Brookmeyer once compared the construction of the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex to the US invasion of Iraq -- he deemed them both absurdly hubristic, misbegotten, and doomed to fail, was basically the gist of it.) Instead, the official birthday celebration happened a couple of weeks ago, up at the Eastman School of Music. This was not something I wanted to miss, so ended up taking the train up to Rochester for the big event, which took place December 2. It was really moving to hear these fresh-faced Eastman kids play their hearts out, performing works that spanned almost five decades' worth of music -- especially with the man himself seated next to me. Bob also joined the band for the closing numbers, "Sweetie" and "Seesaw" -- his time and his sound remain undiminished and unmistakable.

 

You can read Brookmeyer's account of this concert on his own site. I can attest that the goodwill he shows towards the young Eastman musicians is sincere and well-earned. Bob has a not-entirely undeserved reputation as being a bit of a curmudgeon (one of his best war stories involves getting ejected from the audience during a 1981 performance of Satyagraha at BAM... for standing up on his seat and booing at the top of his lungs... a mere 45 minutes into the opera)¹, but that has honestly never been my experience with him. I've always found Bob to be warm, generous, and encouraging, even when I've at times pursued directions that run counter to his own deeply-held musical convictions.

 
Dave Rivello, Ryan Truesdell, Bob Brookmeyer, and yrstruly

 In honor of Bob Brookmeyer's 80th birthday, I'm going to post five tracks from his immense and varied discography. I'm very grateful to Bob for giving his blessing to this, and granting me permission to post these cuts for your listening/downloading pleasure. It is of course impossible to do justice to the scope of depth of Brookmeyer's career with just five selections -- even limiting myself to his bigband works, there's too damn much and I love basically all of it. These are just the five tracks I happen to be feeling today. They are all longtime favorites, but three of them were on the Eastman concert, which is still fresh in my mind. There is some chance this may have tipped the balance in their favor.

Big City Blues - Gerry Muligan Concert Jazz Band
MP3: "Big City Blues" - Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solos: Bob Brookmeyer, piano; Gerry Mulligan, clarinet; Jim Hall, guitar; Clark Terry, trumpet
Recorded December 18-21, 1962.
Originally issued on Gerry Mulligan '63 (Verve). Currently available on Verve Jazz Masters 36 - Gerry Mulligan.

The Concert Jazz Band had Gerry Mulligan's name on it, but Brookmeyer was the group's unofficial music director, "straw boss," and chief arranger. "Big City Blues" is classic Brookmeyer, looking backwards and forwards at the same time. It opens with the composer at the piano, playing an impressionistic prelude before walking an angular, harmonically ambiguous bass line. Then Jim Hall comes in with some Freddie Green-style quarter notes on blues changes and we're suddenly back in Kansas City, with Bob giving us his best Basie-inspired plinking. Jeru enters a chorus later on clarinet(!), and things begin to simmer. The band lays down some territory band-style punches, but then the head takes some sharp corners over the IV chord. The whole chart maintains a perfect balance between old-school bigband tropes and self-conscious modernism -- the apex of which is the disjunct brass line and grittily harmonized saxophones that follows Jim Hall's solo. (This passage sounds a lot like mirror-inverted Thad Jones.) Don't sleep on Clark Terry's searing, buzz-muted choruses, either. The drummer here is Gus Johnson, a veteran of both Basie (early 1950's) and Jay McShann (late 30's - early 40's).

Willow Weep For Me - Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra
MP3: "Willow Weep For Me" - Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra (right-click/ctrl-click to download)
(Ann Ronnell, arr. Brookmeyer)

Solos: Thad Jones, fluegelhorn; Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone; Richard Davis, bass
Recorded May 6, 1966.
Originally issued on Presenting Thad Jones/Mel Lewis & The Jazz Orchestra (Solid State). Currently unavailable -- it's on CD in the amazing, long out-of-print Thad/Mel Mosaic Box Set if you can find anyone willing to part with it.

I can never decide which of the charts Brookmeyer wrote for Thad & Mel is my favorite. It usually comes down to a dead heat between this one and his version of "St. Louis Blues" -- but "St. Louis Blues" is on YouTube, while "Willow Weep For Me" is almost impossible to find these days. This chart was adapted from an earlier version Bob wrote for the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band -- but Gerry hated it(!!) and they never played it. The opening, with its mysterioso harmonies and aqueous tone colors, is pure Brookmeyer, as is the series of emphatic on-beat quarter notes at 2:15. That line Thad plays in the stop-time break immediately following is something fierce. I love the way the intro material is refashioned into a solo send-off for Bob, and Mel's brushwork here is to die for. The four-way improv on the final bridge is a deliciously surreal touch, but you can always count on Richard Davis to take things completely over the top. A lot of people have observed that Davis would have been fired from any other bigband for playing like that. The fact that Thad and Mel didn't keep him on a leash is a big part of why this edition of the band is so good. The final E minor voicing Brookmeyer deploys in the coda slays me every time. 

The Nasty Dance - Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra
MP3: "The Nasty Dance" - Mel Lewis and the Jazz Orchestra (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solo: Joe Lovano, tenor sax
Recorded January 7-11, 1982.
Originally issued on Make Me Smile and Other New Works by Bob Brookmeyer (Finesse Records). Currently unavailable. (Try eBay. Vinyl is easier to find, but for a hot minute, there was a CD reissue available on Red Baron, which I once made the mistake of lending to someone.)

Brookmeyer left New York for California in 1968 and basically spent most of the 1970s attempting to drink himself to death. Thankfully, he did not succeed. 1977 was his first clean and sober year, and the year after that he returned to New York, where he began studying composition with Earle Brown. The first fruits of Bob's return to composition came with the release of an album's worth of new material for the (now Thad-less) Mel Lewis Orchestra in 1980. That record is overflowing with joyous reinvigoration. (Apart from a notoriously bleak take on "Skylark," that is.) The followup, two years later, is called, wryly, Make Me Smile, and it is an altogether darker affair. "The Nasty Dance" comes roughly 20 minutes into this hour-long suite, leaving only scorched earth in its path. The chart is full of long, indeterminate glisses and trills, unsettling squeals and shakes, and aleatoric harmonies, much of it over a relentlessly pounding low C pulse. But ultimately, all this serves as a ten-minute extended concerto/blowout/meltdown for a 29-year old Joe Lovano. The written tenor parts are so well-suited to Lovano's language, and he plays them with such balls-out intensity, that it's impossible to tell just by listening exactly when the notation gives way to improvisation. When Jim McNeely, Marc Johnson, and a downright fearsome Mel Lewis are finally let loose, they sound nothing like a bigband rhythm section -- more like the bastard stepchildren of Elvin Jones's  Live at the Lighthouse. But even in the midst of all this madness, Brookmeyer manages to slip in the hoariest of plunger-muted trumpet riffs -- and somehow makes it fit.

Say Ah - WDR Big Band
MP3: "Say Ah" - WDR Big Band (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solo: John Abercrombie, guitar
Recorded March 1991.
From Electricity (ACT). Still in print, praise the FSM.

Yeah, Bob made a fusion record. In 1991. With the one and only Danny Gottlieb on drums. And not one but two synthesizers in the mix, both sporting ultra-bright DX7-type patches. (Bob has continued to use synthesizers in his ensembles ever since.) This should not work at all. But it does, somehow -- in no small part because the groove is a kind of shuffle (swung 8ths, not straight), so the rhythmic connection to Bob's past is less tenuous than it otherwise might be. The insistent low A quarter notes are a bit like the low C's in "The Nasty Dance," but transformed from pulse into groove by a simple anticipation once every other bar. (The bass vamp from "Say Ah" has a tendency to pop up elsewhere in Bob's work -- you can hear it on "Boom Boom" from New Works, for instance -- but it sounds wildly different each time he uses it.) The unremittingly sequential theme feels a bit like a nursery rhyme with Asperger's syndrome. Abercrombie manages to keep the thread going throughout his solo without being too slavishly literal about it, and it's great to hear him and Danny go to work on this stuff. Brookmeyer has stripped down his harmonic language here, focusing instead on horizontal motion, a trend that continues till this day.

Seesaw - New Art Orchestra
MP3: "Seesaw" - New Art Orchestra (right-click/ctrl-click to download)

Solos: Bob Brookmeyer, valve trombone; John Hollenbeck, drums
Recorded Jan 6-8, 2001
From Waltzing With Zoe (Challenge). In print.

Since the late 1990's, Brookmeyer's primary outlet for his compositions has been the New Art Orchestra, his own hand-picked ensemble of mostly youngish, mostly European players. This is actually the first bigband Bob has ever led under his own name! The group's drummer is the amazing John Hollenbeck, who necessarily plays very differently here than he does with his own excellent ensembles. "Seesaw" was written to feature Hollenbeck -- the chart's final three minutes and forty-five seconds are given over to what amounts to a classic drums vs. band battle, as filtered through Brookmeyer's recent, somewhat deconstructive sensibilities. A lot of his music for the New Art Orchestra works in a similar way -- stripping musical ideas down to their most essential components, then reconfiguring those components for maximum effect. Brookmeyer's deep emotional connection to rhythm comes through as strongly in the little details (like the placement of the piano-and-bass hits under his solo) as it does in the big moments (like the elusively displaced ensemble hits at the climax of the tune). "Seesaw" is one of Brookmeyer's most consistently propulsive works, and that is saying something.

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1. Bob emailed me with the following correction: "it was after the interval for Glass and I didn't stand on my seat -- HOWEVER, it makes good theater that way so leave it."

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Happy 80th Birthday, Bob! Thank you. For everything.

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Further reading...

Bob Brookmeyer's ArtistShare site

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Marc Myers' superb five-part interview with Brookmeyer, published earlier this year:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

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Ben Ratliff's Listening With: Bob Brookmeyer piece from 2006.

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Inside The Score by Rayburn Wright -- the classic, micro-detailed analysis of eight bigband compositions, including three of Brookmeyer's. (You own this, surely?)

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Changes Over Time: The Evolution of Jazz Arranging by Fred Sturm -- this book famously uses four tunes as a lens for the history of jazz arranging. One of those is Jelly Roll Morton's "King Porter Stomp," which Brookmeyer arranged for octet in 1958. A new arrangement was commissioned for this book. Brookmeyer told them "I cannot guarantee one recognizable note" and he was not kidding.

Baby your mind is a radio

Secret Society's July 15 show at Le Poisson Rouge is going out over the airwaves on WFMU tomorrow, July 31, at (I am told) 10:30 AM-ish Eastern. If you're not within signal range, there's a web stream here -- and the show will also be available for download from WFMU's Beware of the Blog following the broadcast. (I understand there has been some confusion recently regarding my ontological status so I hope this helps clear things up.) Big thanks to 'FMU's Scott McDowell and LPR's Matthew Duane for making this happen.

UPDATE: Stream the show (or just our segment) here -- downloadable MP3s up soon.

Incestuous and vain, and many other last names

It is not entirely clear to me what the point of having a blog is if you can't use it to occasionally give a shout-out to your friends and colleagues. So, in that spirit...

Trumpeter and Secret Society alumnus André Canniere is briefly back in NYC, and has gotten the old gang back together -- Josh Rutner, Ryan Ferreira, Ike Sturm, Ted Poor -- for a gig at Saint Peter's Church this Thursday, April 16. 8 PM hit, suggested donation $5. You'll help me welcome the old boy back to Gotham, won't you? You can download a track from the André's 2006 joint As Of Yet here.

And, on the new-bigband tip, my Pulse colleagues have some minty-fresh large ensemble CDs for you:

JC Sanford and his co-leader, David Schumacher, have unleashed the debut CD from their 17-piece behemoth Sound Assembly. Edge of the Mind (Beauport Jazz) features a killing band (anchored by John Hollenbeck on drums) and deftly integrates an almost dizzying array of compositional variety. (Samples here or on MySpace.)

Meanwhile, Joe Phillips has a new, insanely ambitious release out on Innova. Sometimes I think cat-herding 18 musicians is Sisyphean, but Joe's own band is 25-strong. (Gah!) The very un-bigband-y palette includes five singers, seven strings, two vibraphones, two pianos, two guitars, and no drumset. Joe is one of the first composers I met in New York -- in fact, I met him before I even moved here, back when I was Fung Wah-ing my way into town every week for the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop. He is the guy who deserves the credit -- or the blame, I guess -- for convincing me that minimalism didn't suck, and that (post)minimalist-inflected jazz was viable. This new disc, Vipassana is flat-out gorgeous -- just listen to the excerpts here.

Finally, not to be left behind, Jamie Begian returns to the scene with a new bigband record of his own -- coming "sometime in the summer of 2009." Watch this space -- or, you know, this space -- and I'll sound the alarm when it drops. His previous outing, 2003's Trance, is formidable.

You deem me due to clean my view and be at peace and lay

I missed this Alan Moore interview in Wired when it first came out a couple of months ago, but if it's new to you too it's worth a look. It's super-curmudgeonly but very cogent, especially if you choose to pretend (as I do) that his ridiculous affectation about "magic" is all a very knowing put-on.

He also says some things that touch tangentially on everbody's favorite topic, the Complexity Wars. It's probably just a wee bit too simplistic to draw parallels between the relentlessly, reflexively misanthropic "grim-n-gritty" superhero comics that rode on the coattails of Watchmen and relentlessly, reflexively misanthropic "grim-n-girtty" high modernist works like, say, Die Soldaten... simplistic, but fun.

[Especially fun in light of the fact that the villain of Watchmen is a big fan of "avant-garde music in general. Cage, Stockhausen, Pendercki, Andrew Lang, Pierre Henry. Terry Riley is very good." I know, I know, Terry Riley? Maybe In C goes well with the multi-screen viewing?]

Anyway, here's Alan Moore:

What I was getting out of it was this unbridled world of the imagination, and the superhero was a perfect vehicle for that when I was much younger. But looking at the superhero today, it seems to me an awful lot like Watchmen without the irony, that with Watchmen we were talking very much about the potential abuses of this kind of masked vigilante justice and the kind of people that it would in all likelihood attract if these things were taking place in a more realistic world. But that was not meant approvingly.

[...]

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, "This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them." I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn't really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

[...]

I think the amount of work we contribute to our enjoyment of any piece of art is a huge component of that enjoyment. I think that we like the pieces that engage us, that enter into a kind of dialog with us, whereas with film you sit there in your seat and it washes over you. It tells you everything, and you really don't need to do a great deal of thinking. There are some films that are very, very good and that can engage the viewer in their narrative, in its mysteries, in its kind of misdirections. You can sometimes get films where a lot of it is happening in your head. Those are probably good films, but they're not made very much anymore.

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them, that everything be easy. And I don't think that's doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we're becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen's animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O'Brien's King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you'd given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver's seat, and I think it's a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

If you haven't got any money, you're going to need lots and lots of imagination. Which is why you'll get brilliant movies by people working upon a shoestring, like the early John Waters movies. People are pushed into innovation by the restrictions of their budget.

Read the whole thing.

All I wanna know is when is checkout time

I'm currently listening to the stream of the inaugural broadcast of Josh Jackson's new show on WBGO, The Checkout. (Do not be deceived by their "On The Air Now" badge, which still says "Jazz Profiles.") The Checkout is devoted to the revolutionary idea that at least some listeners at America's flagship jazz station might possibly be interested in what's happening in jazz today.

As I write this, Josh Jackson is talking to Mark Turner -- and getting some great technical information from him about how his cooperative trio Fly (Tuner, Larry Grenadier, Jeff Ballard) approach interpreting original material. If you are reading this, there's an excellent chance you disdain terrestrial radio, but never fear, there is a podcast (I can't find the iTunes subscription link for the complete show -- it doesn't look like it's up yet -- but here are individual iTunes links for the interview and new music segments. iTunes show podcast is here).

Incidentally, I will be a guest on The Checkout on May 5, talking about Infernal Machines. (Other guests on that edition include Julian Lage and Branford Marsalis.)

Also, I am sure you have already subscribed to WBGO's oustanding Live at the Village Vanguard podcast, yes? If not, you need to get on that shit. These (free! downloadable!) live recordings are also produced by Josh Jackson, and include some amazing recent sets by Kurt Rosenwinkel Terence Blanchard, and David Sanchez.

Finally, how insane is it that I did not know about the Brooklyn Jazz Underground podcast? Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since September 2008, and right now the server keeps timing out on me. But if it ever comes back, It's back! I am looking forward to checking out these interviews with Ted Poor, Dan Pratt, Alan Ferber, Shane Endsley, Alexis Cuarado, and others of equal awesomeness.

Sign up for the big band or sit in the grandstand

Like a lot of younger jazz composers who write for large ensembles, I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship to the "bigband tradition." For instance, the piece of Secret Society music that most directly draws on that vocabulary is "Lizard Brain" -- and it is in 13/4, incorporates a lot of highly dissonant, non-functional sonorities, and ends with an extended "fire in the pet store!"-type freakout (thanks to Matt Clohesy for introducing me to that descriptor). These elements coexist -- if not quite peacefully than at least in a state of uneasy détente -- with the more characteristically bigband-y gestures, like interlocking brass vs. saxes riffing and concerted shout choruses.

The thing is, there's an awful lot of bigband music that is important to the history of jazz that doesn't really do a whole lot for me. I'm afraid this would include a shit-ton of music that is beloved by true bigband connoisseurs. For instance, I know this sounds heretical, but most of Count Basie's output after Jo Jones left the group leaves me totally cold. Also, I've never really been able to develop much affection for the various Stan Kenton bands, etc, even when I respect the craftsmanship and inventiveness of some of the writing.

The stuff I like best and respond to viscerally and have invested time in studying in detail really represents only a small corner of the vast bigband universe. The center of this solar system is definitely the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra -- especially the first edition of the group with Richard Davis on bass. This has been my favorite bigband since I was thirteen years old.

Ironically, the impetus for Thad starting his own bigband was Basie rejecting a bunch of his charts. In retrospect, this turned out to be a very good thing -- imagine how that music would have sounded with Basie's circa 1966 rhythm section, instead of Richard Davis and Mel Lewis!

In the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orbit I would include its precursor, the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, as well as its successors: the Mel Lewis Orchestra of the early 1980's featuring Bob Brookmeyer's compositions, today's Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (primarily the Jim McNeely works), and, out in the far reaches of this planetary system, the large ensembles led by former Brookmeyer students Maria Schneider and John Hollenbeck. (Maria's "Green Piece" was originally written for the Mel Lewis band, and Hollenbeck not only studied with Brookmeyer but plays drums in Bob's New Art Orchestra.)

Outside of this sphere, the bigband music that resonates the most with me would be the Ellington band's rich and practically inexhaustible recorded history, Gil Evans's various studio projects and his (often-dismissed) groups from the 1970's and 1980's, and the large-ensemble recordings of Charles Mingus, George Russell, and Kenny Wheeler. Also some of Django Bates's stuff for Delightful Precipice and some of Carla Bley's writing for the Liberation Music Orchestra and her own groups. More recently, I dig Guillermo Klein's Los Gauchos, Pedro Giraudo's band, Andrew D'Angelo's (as-yet-unrecorded) bigband music and -- at the risk  of getting slightly incestuous -- the large ensemble music of my Pulse colleagues and of Infernal Machines co-producer Sherisse Rogers.

The above is a bit of a delayed response to the discussion of post-1955 bigband recordings that's been going on over at Doug Ramsey's Rifftides. The jumping-off point here was composer and educator Bill Kirchner's list of Recommended Big Band CDs, 1955-Present. It's an interesting and well-considered list, but while it has sparked a fair bit of back-and-forth amongst the Rifftides commentariat -- here, here, and here -- the discussion so far has somewhat predictably but depressingly been oriented far more towards the "1955" end of the spectrum, without much consideration of what's been going on in large-scale jazz composition and performance over the past 30 years or so. This despite the fact that Kirchner's list is admirably balanced and includes many excellent recordings from the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's.

Anyway, since we haven't done the whole list-making thing in a while, I thought it might be fun to find some additional post-1980 bigband recordings to supplement Bill's list. I'll go first, but feel free to jump in in comments.

• Mel Lewis Orchestra, Make Me Smile (1982) Brookmeyer compositions -- insanely great record, killing band (including a young Joe Lovano). Still a rarity, used vinyl or (long out of print) CD very hard to come by. Unaccountably not on iTunes.

• George Russell, The African Game (1983)

• Gil Evans Orchestra, Live at Sweet Basil, Vol. 1 (1984) Important document of Gil's somewhat surreal 1980's bigband.

• Jim McNeely, East Coast Blow Out (1994) Still my favorite of Jim's stuff.

• Django Bates & Delightful Precipice, Winter Truce (And Homes Blaze) (1995)

• John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, A Blessing (2005)

• Guillermo Klein y Los Gauchos, Filtros (2008)

You think you've heard this one before

Is this the first time the New York Times has published an entire piece focused on a single signature drum groove? David Segal's survey of the Purdie Shuffle is full of fantastic details. The "news" hook for on the article is ostensibly Bernard Purdie joining the pit for the current revival of Hair, although it also touches on his inclusion at the heart of Kutiman's brilliant and massively popular YouTube collage, "The Mother Of All Funk Chords," which you all have surely seen by now.

There are lots of Bernard Purdie instructional videos on YouTube and they are all really entertaining (Purdie is ridiculously charismatic), and well worth investigating for any musician. If anything, non-drummers have more to learn from these clips, especially when it comes to checking out how the various elements of the Purdie Shuffle sit against each other. Remember in Ethan's Wynton interview, where he talks about the "academy of rhythm in jazz and American music." If there is an Academy of Rhythm, then Bernard Purdie must be the Dean:

Don't it always seem to go

Back before IAJE's untimely demise (the real story of which has yet to be told and probably never will), their annual conference was kind of like the jazz version of SXSW. Except way smaller, geekier, and more insular. The "deal makers and gatekeepers" (such as they are in our little corner of the music world) were there, of course, creating an atmosphere thick with schmoozing and self-promotion. (I know I certainly contributed my share of that when we played the last-ever IAJE last year.) But despite all this, there was often a lot of great music to be heard -- it's just too bad that it was always confined to hotel ballrooms and reserved for IAJE passholders exclusively. It meant that jazz's biggest annual party had no engagement with the host city, no reach beyond the conference center walls.

The contrast to SXSW, which completely takes over Austin for a week and change, could not be more extreme. There's so much genuine excitement there -- huge numbers of people actually getting caught up in the thrill of discovering new music.

SXSW also garners a truly insane amount of coverage, from new media and old. I've been enjoying the experience vicariously through my buddy Amanda Marcotte's posts, which give an Austinite's perspective on the madness:

Day One: The Day Of The Bear, Panda And Otherwise
Day Two: You Need A Girl In Your Band
Day Three: Devolution Is Real
Day Four: Spring Break For The Cool Kids

Through Amanda, I discovered The Octopus Project and I'm really loving their stuff right now. Check out this video:

For a more exhaustive take, you could do worse than the All Songs Considered podcasts, which I've been listening to over the weekend:

SXSW Preview (Carrie Brownstein's first pick, from The Entrance Band, is killing).
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

UPDATE: Of course, not everything in SXSW-land is sunshine and power chords:

Some of you may have heard about this "secret" show that Metallica played at Stubb's Friday night. Or the Kanye West show Saturday night at the Levis/Fader Fort. Or the Playboy-sponsored Jane's Addiction show the night before. And, I'm sure many of you wished you could have been at one or more of them.

Well, I have a question for you: What the hell is your problem?

For all those who've forgotten, SXSW is supposed to be for unsigned bands, the place where fans and industry types go to discover new talent. Having a platinum-selling band like Metallica play a show in support of their new version of Guitar Hero isn't just a distraction, it's downright offensive.

Pete's not wrong, but that is yet another reminder how inadequate the IAJE Conference was -- the idea that there could be a large industry-oriented annual festival that was even ostensibly devoted to the discovery of unknown jazz artists seems pretty far out. To an optimist, the gap left by IAJE's implosion might look like an opportunity to build something better in its place. But I don't get the sense that there are a lot of optimists out there right now.

J&R MusicFest sets now streaming

Audio from the Friday night J&R MusicFest hit I wrote up last weekend is now available for streaming courtesy of WBGO:

Aaron Parks

Esperanza Spalding

Roy Hargrove

No Dave Samuels/Caribbean Jazz Project (yet?), but in addition to the above three sets, BGO has some nice additional photos including a close-up of Roy's Adidas -- if my SiteMeter results are any indication, people love those shoes almost as much as they love irrational rhythms. I griped about the live sound in the park, but the recorded audio is a big improvement, so check it out.

J&R MusicFest - 22 Aug 2008 @ City Hall Park

MP3: Aaron Parks, "Nemesis" (click to listen, right/ctrl-click to download)
From Invisible Cinema. Aaron Parks, piano; Mike Moreno, guitar; Matt Penman, bass; Eric Harland, drums. Posted with permission of the artist.

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So clearly the J&R MusicFest people do not fuck around when it comes to punctuality. Last night's mini jazz showcase was scheduled to start at 5 PM. I walked up at 5:02 and Aaron Parks & co. were already a couple of minutes into the anthemic 7/4 rocker "Nemesis" (see above). You know, even Carnegie Hall starts at five after.

Anyway, Aaron's Blue Note debut (and his first record as a leader in six years) dropped on Tuesday and he's been a busy boy this week, co-headlining (with Kurt Rosenwinkel) four sets over two nights at Smalls earlier in the week, and then this. I was at the first Small's set Tuesday night, sitting directly behind Aaron's piano bench (onstage, in fact, on the Rhodes bench), and the experience was kind of mind-blowing. Tuesday night was also the first time Kurt and Kendrick played together -- I do not believe it will be the last. The drummer on the record is Eric Harland, who is also great, but as I overheard one young jazz student at last night's hit tell his compatriot: "I love Kendrick's style, it's so fucking marching band."

The thing is, though, Kendrick is boundlessly inventive -- I've heard him play Aaron's music several times and he's always surprising me. One of his newly acquired toys are these special drum mallets with shakers inside the mallets -- he used them in dramatically different ways on Tuesday and Friday. And nobody plays the surging multimetric straight-eighth grooves that have become the lingua franca of modern mainstream jazz better than Kendrick.

As for the leader, Aaron has a real gift for spinning memorable, attractively folksy themes (like the pentatonic-based "Peaceful Warrior," which I have heard in a few different incarnations over the years) into mutlisection long-form workouts. He's always been kind of a scary technical wunderkind (like many jazz pianists, his piano guru is Sofia Rosoff) but what makes his recent music a thrill to listen to is the combination of effusive joy and an ambitious, architectural sense of structure and large-scale design.

 At this point the music industry's operatically extended death throes, EMI releasing a creative jazz record by an up-and-coming artist kind of feels like staging a jam session on the Hindenburg, but hey, I am not complaining. Good on them for putting Invisible Cinemas out there, and also putting some of that major-label mojo behind an eminently worthy young musician.

WBGO's Josh Jackson has a nice interview with Aaron (including some live-in-the-studio versions of songs from Invisible Cineams). BGO aslo recorded the J&R Fest and all of these performances should be available for streaming soonish now. When that happens, I will update this post. (Post has been updated.)

[As always, I don't pretend to be remotely objective about anything I write here, but especially not about Aaron -- he is a friend, he's subbed in Society rehearsals a few times, and he's the person responsible for introducing me to Lizz Wright. But, you know, if objectivity is your thing, what are you even doing reading blogs in the first place?]

Listen to Aaron's set.

Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has had the kind of storybook success I honestly did not think was still even possible for a jazz artist -- she grew up home-schooled in a single-parent family in Portland, Oregon, landed a full ride at Berklee, was hired to teach bass at her alma mater as soon as she graduated, started gigging with Joe Lovano, put out a couple of records as a leader, and recently ended up playing on Letterman(!) and -- like Nico Muhly -- featured in the Times' Fashion & Style section.

This was my first time hearing her. Live, she's an engaging and charismatic performer with a wispy, attractive voice. She easily enthralled the big, diverse crowd, especially on the neo-soulish "Precious," and a cover of Nina Simone's "Wild Is The Wind." I'd like to hear her inhabit the songs a bit more -- Esperanza somtimes comes off as self-consciously putting on a performance instead of sublimating herself into the song. She's hardly alone in this --  jazz singers in general tend to be more concerned with sound than story -- but I have trouble connecting to that.

My other gripe was that for most of the set it, was well-nigh impossible to hear her bass playing. You could feel her notes, sure, but there was practically no pitch definition, and the bass drum was amplified so excessively it masked most of the low-end frequencies anyway. Now I love the communal experience of the outdoor summer gigs, and I'm glad that this year there are a few more jazz shows in the mix, but sweet jeebus is the live sound at these things ever atrocious. I'd like to catch her band again under more favorable sonic circumstances.

Listen to Esperanza's set.

Mallet percussionist Dave Samuels -- of Spyro Gyra fame -- led his Caribbean Jazz Project in an energetic set that included the Dizzy Gillespie-Chano Pozo classic "Wachi Wara" and a Afro-Carribeanized versions of Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments" and Monk's "Bemsha Swing." The band is made up of very talented players, but the set suffered from a lack of contrast -- I wanted to hear more dynamic variation, more ebb and flow, more drama.

It's been a long time since I've heard Roy Hargrove and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. He's spent recent years concentrating on groove-oriented fusion projects and hiphop collaborations, but his most recent album, Earfood, is a back-to-bop testament. Roy brought the Earfood band to City Hall Park -- Justin Robinson, alto sax; Gerald Clayton, piano; Danton Boller, bass; Montez Coleman, drums -- and any worries I might had about dry, lifeless museum jazz were quickly dispelled by Coleman's swirling, billowing energy and Hargrove's swaggering intensity. (Dig the sneakers with the shiny black suit.) Clayton was another highlight, especially his impressive stopped-string work during his solo on a funky romp through Cedar Walton's "I'm Not So Sure." Hargrove showed us a few different facets of himself over the set, reaching for the fluegelhorn on an uncannily intimate ballad, but he seemed happiest when he was soaring out above the furiously churning rhythm section. Seriously, Montez Coleman is a total badass and he makes the perfect foil for Roy's unbound exuberance. A really fun closing set.

Listen to Roy's set.

More pictures below the fold...

These beats are out of fashion, this groove is 20 years old

Could it be that David Byrne's notorious Die Soldaten writeup, the post that touched off the latest round of Complexity Wars, was merely a cunning ploy designed to create an online stir in advance of his new record?

No. (This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.)

But you can get a free advance MP3 from the upcoming Byrne/Eno collaboration, Strange Overtones, by going here.

Thoughts? (The lyrics are appropriately meta.)

Fatty off the meter

Greenleaf Music is offering freebie downloads of the the first two tracks from the new Dave Douglas & Keystone album, Moonshine.

Their recording process actually sounds really interesting -- it's a single in-studio performance, recorded mid-tour in Bray, Ireland, in front of a live audience, but somehow the resulting multitrack recording was still isolated enough for Dave and co. to edit, mix, and master it with it the same flexibility and fidelity they would have with a "regular" studio record. Check out the treatment on Gene Lake's drums on the title track, and the slice of delay+echo at the top of Dave's solo.

UPDATE: Now you can remix the title track yourself. Or just listen to the instruments in isolation, if you want. (This is actually more fun than you'd think. And you find out all kinds of stuff -- for instance, it turns out the effects-treated drum beat at the beginning emanates from DJ Olive's turntables -- Gene Lake doesn't play until the rest of the rhythm section kicks in at around 0:16.)

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I'm out of phase and you're all stereo

MP3: Music for 18 Musicians, Section VI - Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble

The GVSU recording of Music for 18 dropped a few weeks ago. Since then there's been renewed interest in the ensemble, especially their 5 AM performance of this hourlong Steve Reich masterwork at the Bang On A Can Marathon earlier this year. A lot of people are surprised to learn that the Grand Valley State kids played for an audience of some 400 people -- "for reasons that no one could quite understand" to quote Alex Ross.

Well, speaking as one of The 400, it honestly did not occur to me that there was anything unusual about the size of the audience, even given the, ah, nontraditional timeslot. Of course, I'm the guy who thought it would be fun to liveblog the entire 27-hour marathon, so you may not want to put too much stock in my idea of what "usual" is. But I have received some email inquiries by people who are genuinely curious about what motivated those who turned out. (Perhaps some are thinking of launching their own 5 AM music series?)

It's tempting to be glib and say 'What part of 'The City That Never Sleeps' don't you understand?" On any given Saturday night in NYC, there are lots of people still out getting their fun on at 5 AM. (Obviously, it's not just NYC -- back in my callow youth, when we would hit Montreal's afterhours dance clubs, by 5 AM the party was just getting started.) When you've got close to a thousand people who came down to the Winter Garden to check out the free shows, including sets by The Books, Juana Molina, and a live version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, it didn't seem that surprising that many of those listeners would choose to stick around for the "afterparty" (or drift in after a night on the town).

The 5 AM set was planned to coincide with the rising sun -- the opening Pulses began cloaked in darkness, but by the work's end the Winter Garden's glass-enclosed atrium was flooded with daylight. (You can see the progression in the photos I took.) This experience now seems inextricable from the piece's story arc -- the maracas in Section VI will hereafter always evoke dawn for me.

•     •     •

Music for 18 Musicians is not an easy piece, and Grand Valley State University is not exactly a magnet school for young virtuosi. The students there mostly have their sights set on teaching gigs, not whirlwind international careers. But that actually makes the piece a better fit for them, in a couple of important ways.

First, given a certain basic level of competence, its difficulties are the same for everyone. It's no easier for a Juilliard wunderkind to learn to play Music for 18 Musicians than it is for anyone else. In fact, because the music allows so little room for individual showmanship, it may even be harder for the young hotshot to put aside his ego and submit to the demands of the music. (Kyle Gann talks about this equalizing effect in his post on coaching minimalist and postminimalist rep.)

Second, like all of Reich's music, Music for 18 Musicians is impossible to perform unless everyone involved has a highly developed sense of rhythmic authority. You need to be strong enough in your own sense of time that you can play your part securely and accurately, but you also have to be hyper-attuned to where everyone else is feeling the time, and sensitive enough to adjust your own placement to match what is happening around you. Without a conductor, a drummer, or a click track to impose the beat, it's almost inevitable that you will end up with an 18-way tug-of-war. Learning to play the piece is largely about everyone learning how to pull in the same direction. For these young musicians, being forced to take personal responsibility for the time in large group context... and then being forced to keep up that intensity of concentration for an hour or more -- this is the best, more important and relevant lesson you could possibly teach the next generation of music educators.

•     •     •

I've often found it a bit curious that for a composer who is both hugely influenced by jazz (especially Kenny Clarke's sense of forward motion and Coltrane's single-minded motivic transformations) and is himself hugely influential far beyond his own musical turf (to cite but the latest of countless examples, Radiohead's In Rainbows has at least two tracks that are explicitly built around Reichian techniques) -- Steve Reich's influence on jazz musicians has been practically nonexistent. There are exceptions, of course -- Pat Metheny, John Hollenbeck, Joe Phillips, and, uh, yrs trly -- but an awful lot of jazz musicians, from arch-traditionalists to ostensible avant-gardists, find Reich's music anathema. My own mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, drips contempt for all things minimalist. (He once had to be escorted out of a performance of a Philip Glass opera.)

A few weeks ago, I gave a workshop on Reich's music for some jazz majors out at Queens College. I started by having the class attempt to read through Clapping Music, which I hoped would (A) be fun, and (B) give everyone a first-hand taste of some of the difficulties involved in performing Reich's music. It's fair to say there was a wide range of reactions to this, from "enthusiastic curiosity" to "are you fucking kidding me with this shit?". The skepticism intensified considerably when I played them the first few minutes of Come Out. I was definitely expecting some pushback on that one, but I'd also hoped that the kids would at least be somewhat impressed by Piano Phase, especially with the help of these nifty video aids:

(Unfortunately, at the time the Aidu clip wouldn't load.)

Anyway, at this point the battle lines were clearly drawn, but we had a productive side discussion about the value of the avant-garde generally, and the merits of studying music you can't stand. I'm glad the people who were not into this music spoke up -- it's always much more fun when people say their piece instead of just gritting their teeth in silence. And I think even the skeptics found a little relief when we moved on to the comparatively lush Music for Mallet Instruments, Organ and Voices and the openly jazz-inflected New York Counterpoint. But the experience made me wonder how much grief GVSU New Music Ensemble director Bill Ryan got from his students when they learned they would be devoting the year to learning a piece that doesn't offer many of the obvious rewards most players expect when they perform music. It also got me wondering how and why the virtues of Reich's music -- propulsion, clarity, patience, audible development, complexity via the manipulation of simple materials, the gradual construction of an effective large-scale musical narrative -- do not seem to resonate with very many of my fellow jazz musicians.

And wake up where the clouds are far behind me

So now that we've all gotten our downloads, what does everyone think of In Rainbows?

First impressions are all over blogdonia, of course, but so far I'm most sympathetic to Jay Smooth's take.

Also, as I feared, the low bitrate (160 kbps) brings things down a bit. I am looking forward to the eventual release of a proper CD (i.e., one that doesn't cost $80 plus international shipping).

With a sky blue sky this rotten time wouldn't seem so bad to me now

I got mine. Did you get yours? In the unlikely event that you read this blog but did not order this record, well, I don't really know what to tell you...

There's a "Recording of Sky Blue" booklet that comes with the limited edition (free for those who preordered, a bit more coin for the stragglers). This is my first look at it. It is beautifully designed, with 40 pages of behind-the-scenes recording session photos taken by David Korchin and, ah, yrs trly. I can't tell you how pleased I am to have contributed in some small way to this amazing album.

Actually, yes I can. If you'll kindly allow me to geek out for a moment:

Dude! My name is in the credits for a frickin' Maria Schneider record!

Thank you. As you were.

Impulse control

Late night eBaying is dangerous.

UPDATE: Holy shit, y'all. Have youl heard Robert Fripp's playing on the alternate take of "Life During Wartime"? I feel less guilty already.

Catching up

Two long-overdue hard-copy acquisitions:

A reminder that you can download their entire March 6 hit at D.C.'s 9:30 club, gratis, thanks to NPR's totally happening live music series.

PS An underwriting deal I never thought I'd see:

Interaural Transmissions -- 2006.03.11

Since it ain't no music blog without regular "What I'm Listening To Now" posts, I thought I'd list my most recent CD acquisitions here. Many of these were catch-up purchases -- records I'd intended to buy when they were first released, but for various reasons (usually a lack of funds) passed on. Some are from bands I've heard live but never checked out their studio output. Some are "legitimizing" purchases of albums where I've already heard most of the tracks at a friend's apartment, or on Pandora, or through [ahem] "other means." And one was me finally caving to overwhelming peer pressure, online and off -- "No, no, the record's genius, you have to check it out... " See if you can guess which.

If anyone has any particular desire to know what I think of any of these records, let me know in comments. And, yes, I know I'm long overdue for a review of The Cellar Door, but that's an intense and time-consuming project, and I know y'all don't want me to do it half-assed. (Also, I vaguely recall that I'm supposed to be writing music at some point, not just blogging...) But it's coming, I swear.

I also really need to devote some pixels to the Complete Mumbles and Grumbles set, 2005's most overlooked reissue.