Recent Listening

A couple of more well-developed posts are waiting in the wings, but in the meantime, here are some ramblings about some of the music that has particularly gotten under my skin in the past few days. Some of this stuff is new to me; some I’m known for awhile.

Tony Parenti – Tony Parenti’s New Orleans Shufflers (Jazzology). Parenti was one of the good, not great, New Orleans clarinetists, but this 1954 album is more than the sum of its parts. I love the band he put together; it’s half young musicians, half older veterans; half black, half white; half New Orleanians, half Northerners. Well, it’s a seven-piece band, so each split is not exactly half and half, but it’s a four/three (or vice versa) on each. The music is relaxed, sounding more like New Orleans than New York dixieland. My man Danny Barker is on hand – he sure had a springy beat on rhythm banjo. The young cornetist Jack Fine made his recording debut here; 54 years later I was in Donna’s on Rampart Street in New Orleans when he came in, set his horn on the bar, and ordered a drink. For the rest of the evening, whenever he felt like playing along with the band (Tom McDermott and Loose Marbles), he’d pick up his horn and start blowing from his barstool, much to the delight of the musicians on the bandstand.

Cecil Taylor – Algonquin (Bridge). This music, a duet between Taylor and violinist Mat Maneri, was recorded in concert at the Library of Congress about 10 years ago and issued on a classical label a few years later. It’s a lovely concert; the music belies the perception of Taylor’s music as unremittingly thunderous and intense. (Of course, that perception doesn’t hold up to much actual contact with Taylor’s music.) Maneri seems to totally inhabit Taylor’s world, while, at the same time, Taylor bends his music to Maneri’s sound and style. This beautiful performance further deepens the mystery of how Taylor’s music is put together: what’s composed, what’s improvised, and what’s the difference in Taylor’s world, anyway?

John Patton – That Certain Feeling (Blue Note). I’m using this wonderful record to represent Patton’s Blue Note recordings in general. I’ve had a couple of them for years, but my recent exploration of the Blue Note organ scene of the 1960’s has led me to realize what an interesting musician Patton is. I’ve been tracking down more of his Blue Notes, and find myself going back to them often. Big John could play standard organ funk with the best of them, but was not content to stay in that bag for very long. While perhaps not a great improviser, Patton composed or chose settings that would allow him and the other soloists to stretch quite a bit further than was typical on an "organ grinder" date. “I Want to Go Home," from That Certain Feeling, is an interesting tune in 5/4. It doesn’t have an obvious groove like “Take Five” – it took a little while to reveal itself to me.

Roscoe Mitchell – Nonaah (Nessa). Specifically, the 1977 solo alto saxophone set from Willisau, which is the only part of the double CD I’ve had the stones to listen to so far. This music knocked me on my ass. The first several minutes consist of the same short, jagged phrase played over and over, while the audience gets increasingly (and vocally) more restless. To quote Mitchell from the liner notes: “It was a battle. I had to make the noise and whatever was going on with the audience part of the piece. The music couldn’t move till they respected me, until they realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, and if someone was going it would have to be them.” When the tension is almost unbearable, Mitchell finally begins to develop the piece, and does so in amazing ways. Several more minutes in, and he has the audience with him; the catcalls have subsided, and there is total, mesmerized silence behind Mitchell’s softest passages. At the end of the 30-plus minute set, the crowd erupts. This is some of the most intense, stunning music I’ve heard for quite a while, and I regret waiting 32 years after it was first issued to experience it.

I should be ready to tackle the rest of Nonaah tomorrow….

Magic Slim

I don't often read music magazines anymore. At one time I had subscriptions to several, including Downbeat, Cadence, and Living Blues. I'm not sure why they don't interest me anymore; I know that I no longer try to keep up with up with the latest news and latest new names in the kinds of music I like. (Sometimes this is to my detriment - I'm a year or two behind the curve concerning saxophonist Steve Lehman, whom I heard about just a few days ago. I've got some catching up to do there.) But I was in a bookstore yesterday and took a look at the music magazines; there, smiling up at me from the new Living Blues, was my favorite living bluesman, Magic Slim.

Well, you know how it is. In a couple of days, I might name someone else as my favorite living blues musician - Honeyboy Edwards, B.B. King, or even Corey Harris. But Morris Holt, aka Magic Slim, is certainly up at the top of the list. Magic Slim and the Teardrops play straight, unadorned Chicago blues - the kind of Mississippi blues overlaid with big city energy that you might have heard in the Windy City back in the fifties or sixties. But I hope that doesn't give the wrong impression - there is nothing "retro" or nostalgic about the Slim and the Teardrops. Even if they are playing a 50-year-old variant of a 110-year-old style, they play it with a strictly contemporary energy. This is music for tonight!

Slim is 72 now, but is still hitting it as hard as ever. He was born in Grenada, Mississippi, at the edge of the Delta, and took up guitar when he lost a finger on his right hand in a cotton gin accident, putting an end to his budding piano career. After playing local juke joints and house parties, he moved to Chicago when he was in his early twenties and apprenticed with Magic Sam Maghett, who gave him his nickname. About 15 years ago, tired of the crime in his Chicago neighborhood, Slim settled his family into the least bluesy spot on earth - Lincoln, Nebraska. Except that in Lincoln you can find more than just rabid Nebraska Cornhusker fans and the Penis on the Prairie (as the irreverent call the Nebraska Capitol building); you can find the Zoo Bar, one of the country's great blues bars.

I've been lucky enough to hear Magic Slim and the Teardrops at the Zoo Bar and another one of America's great blues bars, Blind Willie's in Atlanta. Slim (who hasn't lived up to the second half of his nickname in years) is pretty unprepossessing until he climbs onto the bandstand and plugs his Fender Jazzmaster directly into the amp - no pedals or effects for him, thank you. His guitar sound is as raw as you might expect, his vocals are strong and basic, and the Teardrops rock the Chicago shuffle like no other band around. The resulting sound isn't fancy, but it sure is strong. Slim's music has a directness and purity that make "revivalist" blues bands sound phony.

There are quite a few recordings by Slim and the Teardrops out there. I can't claim to have heard them all, but my favorite out of the ones I am familiar with is Black Tornado, on Blind Pig. Two tracks, "Wake Me Up Early" and "She's Got Bad Intentions," could serve as a two-part primer in Chicago blues grooves. "Early" is a perfect Chicago shuffle - intense, yet relaxed, while "Intentions" has a groove that the blues guys call a "flat tire shuffle" - the last triplet of every beat is accented. The result is a loping groove that is incredibly laid-back, yet at the same times moves forward like a freight train.

Magic Slim is a treasure. I hope he stays around for a long time.

Holy Ghost

"Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I was the Holy Ghost."
-saxophonist Albert Ayler

The first time I heard Albert Ayler I was horrified. I was 17; my mom used to frequent junk stores, looking for bargains, and she would bring home any records that looked like they might be jazz. I've mentioned the Arista/Freedom Sampler album that she picked up for me in a previous post. As I said before, the Anthony Braxton and Oliver Lake tracks got to me right away, but the Ayler track, "Saints," was just repellent. I couldn't believe anyone would want to play like that. But, being a curious guy, I also wondered why anyone would play like that - what was Ayler getting at? So I listened again, and then again. On the third listen, a light bulb went off - the piece was a rondo. Ayler kept coming back to the same melodic material. And there was a melody - I could hear it. I was fascinated. Once I knew that the piece made "sense" - it had form and logic - I wanted to hear more Albert Ayler and understand his message.

Thirty-something years later, I sometimes feel that I'm not much closer to "understanding" Ayler, but I love his music - the best of it, anyway. Albert Ayler represents the furthest extreme of jazz; the most "advanced" music (in terms of language) created in the name of jazz. It's difficult to imagine how anyone could take the musical language of jazz further than Ayler did, and almost 40 years after his death, no one has. At its most extreme, Ayler's music was harsh, atonal, and devoid of regular pulse. It makes for very intense and demanding listening.

If you have access to the Revenant Holy Ghost box set of Ayler's work, listen to his first small-group recordings, with Herbert Katz's Finnish group. He plays the written melodies of these conventional tunes with assurance, but once his solos start, he is in another place than the rest of the group. It's easy to understand why some of the group thought he didn't know what he was doing, since his improvisations have little relationship to the harmonies of the pieces. But it's also apparent, at least in hindsight, that they were wrong. As odd and unexpected as some of Ayler's note choices were, it's obvious that he knew exactly where he was in the structure of the tunes all the time. And it's equally obvious that Ayler needed a less conventional setting in order to get his message across.

In practice, Ayler's mature music was not unrelentingly harsh or demanding. Many of his improvisations, no matter how intense and abstract they were, were launched by simple, singable "heads," often marchlike. And as his career went on, the tonal, folkish melodies became longer, while the atonal solos got shorter. And pieces like the beautiful "For John Coltrane" had an identifiable key center throughout.

But in my opinion, the music he recorded in 1964 represents Ayler at his purest. The heads are short and the improvisations are frightening, accomplished, and utterly unlike anything heard up that time in jazz or any other music. His colleagues (usually Gary Peacock on bass, Sunny Murray on drums, and sometimes Don Cherry on trumpet) are totally in tune with Ayler's aims. He created some wonderful music after that, but for a taste of the "real" Ayler, hear Spiritual Unity, Prophecy, Vibrations (also known as Ghosts), or The Hilversum Session.

Although Cherry came from a somewhat different place than Ayler, musically speaking, his work with Ayler showed how adaptable he was - he adjusted his playing so that it fit perfectly with Ayler's. Later, Albert tried to create a trumpet player in his own image by bringing his brother Donald into his band. This was valuable as a negative example; Donald's one-dimensional playing showed that Albert, in contrast, was really onto something. On any record on which they play together, compare Donald's blaring, monochromatic playing to the range, variety of phrase shapes, and dynamics of Albert's improvisations.

Ayler's intense music came from a pretty intense individual. As might be deduced from the titles of his pieces ("Holy Holy," "Spirits Rejoice," "Zion Hill"), Ayler's music was largely inspired by his strong religious feelings. The Holy Ghost box set contains a 1966 interview in which Ayler frankly sounds a little crazy; he is so full of pseudo-biblical sayings that's it's a little scary. He sounds somewhat more in control in the 1970 interviews; he is still pretty intense, but also amiable. But in November of that year, his body was found in the East River; the circumstances of his death have never been completely explained.

This post has been difficult to write, and I'm still not satisfied with it. Ayler's music is so complex and demanding that's it's difficult to talk about. So I'm going to end with a copout. Here is perhaps the best paragraph ever written about Albert Ayler, by Max Harrison. Reading the first sentence here always gives me a chill.

Even decades later, on listening to Ayler's courageous, bewitched, desperate music, we are haunted by the strange and disquieting impression that we are out on the very limits of the expressible, out on the last dangerous fringes where the ice of what we normally call art is so thin that we can almost see through into the depths below, into the mysterious thing-in-itself from which we abstract the all-too-human conventions of music. What he did in his best moments seemed like a further attempt at exploding the language of music so that it might eventually approximate to the mind's complexity. To those who say that language, even musical language, is a social contract which cannot be broken without loss of communication, Ayler would maybe have replied that his aim was less communication that communion in the appreciation of mystery.

from The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2; p. 502.

Art In Spite of Itself

"Morning Dove Blues" by Sippie Wallace is a perfect work of art. Every detail is just right, and each works to heighten the emotional affect of the song: Wallace's strong voice, with its pleasing Texas accent, the rich piano accompaniment by her nephew, Hersal Thomas, and the simple, well-chosen fills provided by King Oliver on cornet. It's all just perfect.

And the amazing thing is that nobody involved, from the musicians to the Okeh record company officials who set up the date in 1925, had any thoughts of creating a work of art. Yes, they wanted to make a quality product, but product it was - designed to fill the demand for "race" records. It took record companies until 1920 to realize that African-Americans would buy records, wanted to buy records, if the recording industry would give them something they liked. For the next nine years, until the depression all but wiped out the record business, the companies threw an astonishing variety of black music into the marketplace, with no idea what would sell. Much forgettable music resulted, but they also recorded, almost in spite of themselves, some masterpieces like this one.

Some of Sippie's records sold pretty well, but "Morning Dove Blues" apparently didn't - not many copies have survived, and all the LP and CD issues I've heard have lots of surface noise competing with the music. For those with ears to hear, though, it doesn't matter. 84 years after this performance was recorded, I'm able to hear Sippie sing "Early in the morning, I rise like a mourning dove...." King Oliver answers her with his muted cornet, and my heart constricts. Art in spite of itself.

Gil Evans and the Magic Moment

I discovered two of my heroes, Steve Lacy and Gil Evans, at one fell swoop at age 18 when I bought a reissue of Gil's first album as leader, Gil Evans & Ten. I've loved Gil's music ever since, from the highly detailed charts he created for Miles Davis in the late fifties and early sixties, to the loose, improvising big band he had late in his career. Evans had many strengths, but one of them was the knack for creating the magic moment that would lift the music to another plane.

Gil spoke on several occasions about his debt to Louis Armstrong. In a 1986 interview with Ben Sidran, he said, "I bought every one of his records from 1927 till around 1936.... In every one of those three-minute records, there's a magic moment somewhere. Every one of them." And he's right. No matter how lame the song, how clunky the rhythm section, how corny the arrangement, Louis was always able to lift it to another level, even if only for a moment.

Gil apparently learned this lesson well. Of course, many of his great recordings don't need the magic moment, because they are incredible from beginning to end. But when they weren't, Gil could make something magical happen. An unlikely example is the main title theme from the movie The Color of Money. I don't know how much Evans contributed to this film's music (his name is barely to be found on the soundtrack album), but the exact moment he took over the arranging of the main title is apparent. 45 seconds in, the trendy (mid-1980's style), ordinary music we have heard so far takes a darker turn. The real magic moment comes about 10 seconds later, when an ominous bass clarinet riff, a trombone lip trill, and a tightly muted trumpet solo occur simultaneously. It's an unexpected combination of sounds that only someone of Evans' genius could have conceived.

Often, especially in later years, the magic moment manifested itself by Evans simply knowing which soloist to point to. Listen to "Half Man, Half Cookie," from Bud & Bird from 1986. This comes from the period in which Evans' band played at Sweet Basil every Monday night. He encouraged his band members to contribute to the book, so that they would have plenty of different material to play. Saxophonist Bill Evans wrote "Half Man, Half Cookie," a big-band funk piece that is competent rather than outstanding. That is, until guest star Johnny Coles, an Evans associate for years, steps up to solo about two-thirds of the way through the piece. The atmosphere instantly changes, becomes more mysterious and unpredictable. Coles, of course, deserves much of the credit for raising the musical level, but Evans chose to have him on hand and knew just when to add him to the mix.

Like I said, most of Gil Evans' music was all magic. But when it wasn't, he could make that magic moment happen.

CT

Cecil Taylor, I have read, is ill and has canceled a concert tour. Here's hoping he has a speedy recovery. And without wishing to be morbid, I decided that now would be a good time to write something about this great musician, who is 80 years old; I don't particularly want to write a memorial piece about him, and I hope this doesn't turn out to be one.

I'm not sure if I remember the first what the first Cecil Taylor music I heard was. It may have been Indent, a protean solo piano piece from the early seventies. I picked up that album in a junk store, and I remember being awestruck with Taylor's ability to improvise atonally at such length, with such intensity, and with such logic. The music made sense to me right away, even if I didn't (and still don't) always understand the principles that guide the construction of CT's music.

And it's obvious that the music is carefully constructed, even when it's mostly improvised. Taylor has made it clear over the years that he considers the idea of "composing" music in the western sense to be a highly dubious concept. But at the same time, his music hangs together in a compositional way - he seems to control the predetermined and spontaneous elements of his music in such a way that they form a unified whole. I feel this, even if I am not always able to look back at a Taylor piece when it is over and describe how that compositional unity was achieved. And others who have attempted to analyze CT's music have made similar observations. There's a wholeness to his music, and a mystery as to how that wholeness is achieved.

I have been lucky enough to hear Cecil Taylor perform only once, when he presented a solo concert in Atlanta in 1986. Taylor is also a trained dancer, and he began the concert, as he often does, with a series of ritualistic movements that slowly brought him from the wings to the piano bench. (He has said that "you don't just walk up to a piano.") At the same time, he intoned words and phrases, sounds and poetry; some of these vocalizations were intelligible and some were not. When he reached the keyboard, he began playing fairly sparely, but the music quickly increased in intensity and complexity. After about five minutes of atonal piano fireworks, large parts of the audience gave up and started leaving in droves. The rest of us were enthralled.

Listening to the recorded music of Cecil Taylor presents certain challenges. It's intense, the pieces are usually quite long, and the recordings are often hard to find. His two mid-sixties Blue Note albums (Unit Structures and Conquistador) are usually easy to find and are excellent representations of Taylor's music. They both feature his longtime musical partner, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, and no piece on them is over 20 minutes long. Other Cecil Taylor recordings may feature one piece which lasts for an hour or two, spread over a couple of CDs or several LPs. Listening to these obviously requires an investment of time and concentration, which, however, is always rewarded.

It has struck me that the titles of Taylor's pieces can be seen as little poems, as mysterious as the music itself: "Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)," "With (Exit)," "It is in the Brewing Luminous." The title which keeps coming to my mind, given the state of Taylor's health, is "One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye."

Matt Perrine

New Orleans is full of incredible musicians who are hardly known outside the Crescent City. One of these remarkable musicians is bassist/sousaphone player Matt Perrine. With all due respect to Kirk Joseph, etc., Perrine is my favorite New Orleans tuba player, and with all due respect to James Singleton, etc., he is my favorite NOLA acoustic bassist – I try to hear him play every time I visit the city. On my recent trip (only four days long) to New Orleans, I heard Perrine play three times. That seems about right. Perrine plays regularly with several different bands and always seems to be playing somewhere with somebody. He is a member of the Tom McDermott/Evan Christopher Danza Quartet, the New Orleans Nightcrawlers brass band, Bonerama, and the Tin Men, which of course is “New Orleans' premiere guitar/tuba/washboard trio.” As busy as he is, Perrine doesn’t seem inclined to coast - whoever he’s playing with, and whatever kind of music they’re playing, Perrine's playing is imaginative and fully involved.

About a year ago I picked up the first CD under his name, Sunflower City. The cover actually put me off for a minute – it’s features a close-up photo of a large sunflower. I thought, “Great – this is just good-time happy music.” But then I looked at the picture again, and saw that in the background, to the right of the flower, you can see an “X” and some numbers painted on the front of a house. This, of course, is the code sign used by the search and rescue teams after Katrina; the “X” shows that the house was searched, and the numbers indicate how many living people, bodies, and pets were found in the house. Perrine has explained in interviews that sunflowers were the first wild plants to grow in post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s a great cover, symbolizing rebirth and renewal after disaster.

The music is, for the most part, joyous rather than happy, if that distinction makes any sense.* There is traditional jazz, straight-ahead jazz, Caribbean music, and even a touch of avant-garde. The opening track is the most elaborate arrangement of the hoary old New Orleans warhorse “Muskrat Ramble” that I’ve ever heard. The instrumentation and color of the track is constantly changing. But it works – it's one of the most enjoyable “Muskrat Rambles” I’ve heard. Perrine plays a stunning solo on this track; the range, technique, and conception of this tuba solo must be heard to be believed. I played it for a friend who is a low brass specialist, and he was convinced that it must have been played on a higher, four-valve tuba in E flat or F. He actually wrote Perrine to ask; MP confirmed that it was played, as were all of his tuba parts, on a standard double B flat sousaphone.

I definitely recommend hearing on of Matt Perrine’s bands when visiting New Orleans. He shouldn’t be hard to find.

*To me, “happy music” is mindless music. Much New Orleans music, however, is full of the joy of life, but seems to have an underlying awareness of how short that life is.