v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Humacao, Puerto Rico 2009

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - Humacao August 2009

Best Music of the Year 2017 Round Up

 

 

Its taken me a little longer to identify and list what made my ears gel this past year, but here it is.

2017 will be remembered for lots of things other than its music. The natural disasters, the international decay of democracy, and of course  the political changes here in the U.S. and the rollercoaster life it has brought on to all of us has claimed our attention and pain. But music's role in these times becomes even more essential reminding us of the more simple and complex pleasures that allow us to truly be human. Opening our realization to what we can do coming together.

So this year for me began with a painful rupture that took my connection to recorded music and intelligent discourse away- that was when What.CD, the peer to peer Internet site, was taken down by the operators when they were informed by French authorities that they would be raiding their facilities. What.CD, a curated treasure trove of the best and most difficult to find sounds, had been my lifeblood to the new sounds I managed to hear on a daily basis had been an integral part of my existence for nearly 10 years. I planned my days around the investigation, selection and down loading of material leaving my PC on to let others access the digital files I had made available. I learned more about music from What.CD site and reading the commentary accompanying the music written by other extremely knowledgeable members but at the click of a switch all that was gone in order to protect its users and the music industry. Its little like putting Borges' infinite library up for torching. All that information gone.

So in 2017 I began using Spotify a service devoid of any information on any of those whose music resides within its firewalls. Though I appreciate the access to the wide range of music which is really incredible, you need to go outside of Spotify to learn, know, become familiar with the background and hisrory of those who made this music. Oh, and if you are looking to learn who played on this CD ,outside of the so called leader-forget it. Is this the future of music? Sound and no understanding of context? Ignorance is certainly bliss in our Trumpian times.

It is in this warped context that 2017's music makes its mark. Though some very good music got produced here in the States ( Billy Mintz, Eddie Palmieri, Julien Baker, Noah Preminger, Priests) the bulk of hard core innovation is elsewhere. In the past as is the case with Alice Coltrane's incredible output of yesteryear. Or in Europe or the Caribbean. The reality is that there will continue to be new  and impactful music developed throughout the world and it will be influenced by music on the opposite side of the globe. With electronic streaming services available, despite their lack of information, to all it will be easy for someone to become familiar with the Monk Quintet of the 50's or Don Cherry's Blue Note production in the 60's or Jorge Ben's transfomative Funk. As they say its only a click away. Where I think more explication and light needs to be shone is in the contemporary classical "genre" where only handful of souls spend their time telling us about what is interesting and good. Take some time friends and dive into these musicians-they are only the tip of iceberg of what is really, really good out there.

 

Alice Coltrane

Angles 9

Bertrand Burgalat

Billy Mintz

Cortex

Destroyer

Eddie Palmieri

Erik Griswald

Francois Bourassa Quartet

Jane Weaver

Jens Lekman

Julien Baker

King Krule

Lord Echo

The Necks

Noah Preminger

Orehla Negra

Pirulo y la Tribu

Priests

Sarah Davachi

Roots Magic

Yaeji

Yoko Miwa

2,100 Lies and Counting

From Democracy 21, a detailed report that provides evidence of what has become all too obvious to most of us about Trump and his despotic administration-download the PDF to get access to this objective and fair accounting:

As President Trump prepares to deliver his first State of the Union later this week, Democracy 21 and Common Cause are releasing a new report, “The Art of the Lie,” which pulls together a dizzying series of events and provides an overview of this unprecedented presidency. The report bundles together the crises, conflicts of interest, and new lows of the last year in 20 distinct issue areas to capture Trump’s failed first year record on matters of government integrity and accountability.

Among other case studies, the report discusses the president’s more than 2,100 lies, false and misleading statements, and untruths from his first year in office – an average of nearly 5.9 per day; his attacks on law enforcement and intelligence agencies; his accusations that the press is the “enemy of the American people,” and some of the 245 vacant positions that he had failed to nominate someone to fill one year into his first term – leaving the Trump administration by far with the fewest number of Senate-confirmed nominees in place compared to the last four presidents.

“In his first year in office, President Trump has been an historic failure when it comes to ensuring the integrity and accountability of our government. President Trump has been unlike any previous President in his incessant, irresponsible attacks on the judiciary, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, the media, members of Congress and judges, and private citizens, among others,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. “President Trump lives in his own world, failing to distinguish between truths and lies. In his first year, President Trump appears to be the biggest spreader of false, misleading and untrue information we have seen in national office. By repeatedly undermining our democratic norms and constitutional principles, President Trump has failed the American people. However, the American people will not fail. Our fundamental values, democratic norms, and constitutional principles will endure, President Trump notwithstanding,” said Wertheimer.

“Americans deserve a leader who is honest and who abides by high ethical standards and we the people have been let down by Donald Trump in our nation’s highest elected office,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause. “There is no question that the President of the United States used his first year in office to debase the guardrails that protect our democracy. For more than a year, Americans have faced a near daily barrage of news out of the White House that can be overwhelming and confusing to piece together – even though we all know that things are not normal. That is why we are releasing this report today – to serve as a resource for Americans to assess Trump’s destructive actions on matters of government integrity and accountability, and to examine some of the problems we’ll need to solve together to demand change. I have every confidence that Americans will rise to the occasion,” said Hobert Flynn.

Marilyn Crispell & Michael Formanek

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - Crispell at An Die Musik

 

The Passing of Hugh Masakela

 

 

It was inevitable, but Masakela's time was up. For me encountering his music in middle school and purchasing his first two albums in 60's were revelatory and a good introduction to the jazz that would soon dominate my life. The trumpet was great but the thing that caught my ear as I listen to the first albums with oversized headphones on my new turntable was the sonic power of the bass and how it set the stage for everything in front of it. His music was incredibly positive and years later my wife and I sat at an underattended  DC Jazz festival in the 80's where Hugh's band and then the transformational Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya played  music I swore would be the path to the future. But it was the end of the Reagan era and one had the right to hope. Here we are and its much worse with Hugh gone.

From The Guardian:

Even when he had returned to the country of his birth under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, after having lived and worked in the US and in Botswana, Masekela continued to comment fearlessly on political events in South Africa and around the world, enjoying his status as an international celebrity, playing for presidents and royalty and concert audiences, and often collaborating with other musical greats.

He was born in Kwa-Guqa township, Witbank, a coal mining settlement near Johannesburg. His father, Thomas, was a health inspector and sculptor, and his mother, Pauline (nee Bowers), was a social worker, officially classified as “coloured” in apartheid-era South Africa as she had a Scottish father. Hugh was one of four children in a politically conscious family; his younger sister, Barbara, would eventually become head of the African National Congress’s department of arts and culture. The children were raised by their grandmother, Johanna, and Hugh was always surrounded by music. At the age of four he was a pageboy at the wedding of his Aunt Lily, and was fascinated by the celebrity wedding band, the Jazz Maniacs, and their trumpeter Drakes Mbau.

Hugh was given his own instrument when he was 14. He was then a pupil at St Peter’s, a remarkable secondary school for black children that became a centre for opponents of apartheid before being closed by the authorities. The staff included Oliver Tambo, later leader of the ANC, and Trevor Huddleston, later Archbishop Huddleston, president of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. The young Masekela was always in trouble. “I was one of the worst delinquents”, he once told me, “always fighting with the teachers or going into town stealing.” He was sent to see Huddleston because “you’d be sent to him when everything else had failed”.

Masekela had wanted a trumpet, he said, after seeing the 1950 film Young Man With a Horn, and recalled that he told the priest: “If I can get a trumpet I won’t bother anyone one any more.” Huddleston managed to raise £15 (“a lot of money in those days”) to buy the instrument, found a black Salvation Army trumpeter to teach Masekela, “and then he sat outside the school making hideous noises”. Other pupils naturally wanted instruments as well, and the Huddleston Jazz Band was born. They wore black trousers and grey silk shirts, and played American rather than African music. Along with Masekela, the band featured the trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, who would also become a star.

Huddleston continued to help Masekela even after the priest had left the school and South Africa. In 1956, when he was in the US publicising his book Naught for Your Comfort, he told Masekela’s story to a journalist, who suggested that it might interest Louis Armstrong, the best known trumpeter of the day. Armstrong was fascinated and handed Huddleston one of his horns to give to Masekela. “I sent it straight to South Africa, and I have a wonderful picture of Hugh jumping for joy,” said Huddleston.

Masekela’s skills as a trumpeter increased and so did his fame. In the 1950s he played at fundraising events for the ANC in the years before it was banned, with Mandela among those who came to watch. He explored South African styles and avidly followed developments in the American jazz scene as he developed his distinctive Afro-jazz sound. He joined Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand) and Gwangwa in the Jazz Epistles, who in 1959 recorded the first album by a South African jazz band, Jazz Epistle Verse 1.

In the same year he teamed up with Gwangwa and others in the band for the adventurous hit musical King Kong. Billed as an “all-African jazz opera” its story of a boxer had an all-black cast and starred the country’s finest female singer, Miriam Makeba.

Such an extraordinary flowering of black culture could not last long in the apartheid era. Makeba left the country and her citizenship was revoked because she had taken part in the anti-apartheid film Come Back Africa. In 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC, Masekela also left. He was lucky to get out, he said, for his angry opposition to apartheid had already come to the attention of the authorities.

He travelled first to London, where he was disappointed by the jazz scene, and then to New York, where, like Makeba, he was helped by the musician and activist Harry Belafonte. Masekela enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music and immersed himself in the city’s jazz scene, watching Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. He was advised by Dizzy Gillespie and Armstrong to develop his own, African style, and in 1963 released his debut album, Trumpet Africaine. In 1964 he married Makeba.

Masekela’s angry political stance was not altered by his move to the US. He claimed that the South Africans passed information about him to the Americans, and that his phone was tapped in New York. He began to identify with the black power movement, and in 1966 played at the Watts festival on the anniversary of the riots in that black Los Angeles neighbourhood. . .  .

The cover of his Emancipation of Masekela album (1966) showed him dressed like Abraham Lincoln and was boycotted by distributors in the American south. Later, he followed his easygoing hit single with a furious, experimental set that included songs about Vietnam and the plight of migrant workers in South Africa. His house was raided by the police and he was put on probation, avoiding a prison sentence on drug charges only because they had had no proper search warrant. Promoters and universities cancelled his bookings, but he continued to record powerful albums, collaborating with Gwangwa and another fine South African musician, Dudu Pukwana.

After 12 years in exile he decided to go back to Africa to explore the music of countries he had never visited. He travelled across west Africa, from Guinea, where Makeba had moved with her new husband, Stokely Carmichael, and then to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In 1973 he spent time in Kinshasa, meeting such musicians as the guitarist Franco, and went on to Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria, where he stayed for a month with Fela Kuti. The rebellious Kuti introduced him to the Ghanaian band Hedzoleh Soundz, with whom he recorded and later toured in the US.

He returned to Africa with Levine in 1974, when they put together the Zaire 74 concerts that preceded the Rumble in the Jungle boxing match in Kinshasa between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Angry disputes with the promoter Don King meant that the historic recordings of the African artists involved, including Franco and Makeba, were released only in 2017.

Epictetus the Stoic

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

 

“Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don’t talk how persons ought to eat, but eat as you ought.”

 

“Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes, but death chiefly; and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.”

 

“Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will, unless itself pleases. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find it to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.”

 

Epictetus

Best Music of the Year 2017 - Billy Mintz

 

An impressive collection (2 CDs) of intelligent compositions and fiery improvisations by a veteran drummer who has assembled an experienced and adventurous group. The breadth and depth of the music assembled by Mintz touches on many of today's best tendencies in jazz. Reminiscent of Paul Motian's ensemble the two front sax players (Tony Malaby and John Gross) tear through the music creating lively tension while the others frolic and entertain.

From All About Jazz:

With Ugly Beautiful, Mintz moves into the realm of the "commercially dubious" double CD—dubious commercially, perhaps, but artistically a big chance-taking leap, that—for those who are ready and prepared—can pay off big time: see 2016's America' National Parks (Cuneiform Records) by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; or Lovers by guitarist Nels Cline. Mintz was ready and prepared. Joined by long-term collaborators, the band is a quintet with a two sax front line that plays with a remarkable precision/abandonment dynamic. Saxophonists John Gross and Tony Malaby wail with a "let freedom ring" manifesto: weavers of raspy, ragged lines rather than seekers of smooth unison grooves. The energy—to pick just one example—of "Smear" rips and roars, with Mintz driving the momentum from the drummer's seat. "Dit" shifts from frenetic hive activity to fluid swing, with keyboardist (mostly pianist here) Roberta Piket playing with an unrestrained recklessness (reckless like a fox) that slips into a crisp angularity bumping along inside her fellow rhythm section-er's rolling groove

And never has a studio recording sounded more like it was recorded live. Loose-limbed spontaneity reigns, from the double set's wandering opener, "Angels," to the second disc's closer, "Cannonball (extended)."

Throughout the sax guys explore the "out there" side of their artistry. Pianist/keyboardist Roberta Piket solos and comps with exceptional originality and inspiration, and modernizes the sounds with her Fender Rhodes, Nord Keyboards, Hammond B3 chops. "Tumba," the eleven minute opening tune of disc 2, blows in on an electric keyboard storm front that gels into a mid-sixties John Coltrane groove, with Mintz percolating, Piket digging deep into hypnotic McCoy Tyner chords. Five minutes in the horns enter, expansive and orchestral, before Malaby, on soprano sax, slips into a sinuous, mysterious exposition.

From Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches :

Simply put, Ugly Beautiful is an opus — more than two hours of music… And it takes about that long to show off every worthy facet of Mintz’s extremely broad, subtle and idiosyncratic talent. I wrote a while back about Mintz’s “jazz infinity”… the way he unfussily embraces the full spectrum of the so often pointlessly factionalized genre. Ugly Beautiful…is an even more potent illustration of this principle. There is just so much going on here: smeary, free-time, Paul Motian–y dirge (“Angels”), raging/rollicking inside/outside postbop (“Dit,” “Relent”), stunningly precise yet beautifully laid-back neo-Tristano-ism (“Flight”), arrestingly somber ballad miniatures (“Vietnam,” “Dirge”), borderline psychedelic groove pieces driven by Piket’s expressive keys (“Umba,” “Tumba”). And all powered by Mintz’s phenomenally deep, drum sound. This man, who will turn 70 next year, has a groove that rumbles up from the earth, the way Elvin Jones’ did; that bends time, the way Motian’s did. I just get such an earthy, elemental feeling of authority from the way he interacts with the instrument and drives a band. And the fact that he wrote all this music… makes this whole package even more stunning.

From Jim Macnie's Top Albums of the Year:

The roiling of the two-reed front line – sometimes gentle, always graceful – gives this set a feel akin to an ocean voyage: the motion never subsides. The drummer’s pairing of John Gross and Tony Malaby speaks to an approach that Joe Morris knowingly once deemed the “wraparound.” Total teamwork.

From David Orthmann:

Consisting of seventeen tracks spanning over two hours of playing time, Ugly Beautiful is a large, sprawling, wise, unflinchingly honest, powerful work of art. Billy Mintz's third recording as a leader—all of which were made in the most recent decade of a fifty-year plus career—stubbornly refuses to conform to stylistic boundaries and gleefully defies expectations of any kind. The record demands to be taken on its own terms. Trying to pin labels or anticipate the course of almost any track on the diverse two-disc set misses the point entirely. It's obvious that Mintz and company are working without a safety net, so why not the listener as well? There's too much going on in the profusion of compelling collective and individual performances to fret about what goes where in relation to the jazz canon.

The recording reflects Mintz's ease in assuming the overlapping roles of composer, bandleader and drummer. He's a composer who likes to revisit his own work. "Flight," "Dit," Shmear," "Cannonball," "Ugly Beautiful," "Relent," "Retribution," and "After Retribution" appear on either Mintz Quartet or The 2 Bass Band...Live, as well as Ugly Beautiful. It's apparent that on the current project a band of intrepid peers—tenor saxophonist John Gross, tenor and soprano saxophonist Tony Malaby, pianist, Hammond B3 organist, and electric keyboardist Roberta Piket, and bassist Hilliard Greene—who have played with Mintz for a collective total of seventy-five years, have risen to the occasion and discovered novel ways of animating his work. Separate versions of "Dit," "Flight," and "Cannonball" on Ugly Beautiful are indicative of the malleability inherent in his writing; in other words, there isn't any definitive way to interpret the themes, and each rendition stands on its own merits. Moreover, Mintz's drums are built into some of the compositions, particularly "After Retribution" and "Cannonball."

Puff

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - Puff Relaxing

Soho

Vallejo Nocturno 2018 - Walking Down Wooster

Best Music of the Year 2017- The Necks

 

1986 The Necks

After close to 30 years refining their slow evolving musical art, The Necks are an acquired taste that appear to grow and get better with age. Their newest work relies on shorter durations and each composition/improvistation occupies a side of a disc on this double LP. As usual there is meticulous direction, almost introspective, but determined as raga as it explores the limits of their sound puzzle. Those unfamiliar with this Australian institution should take some time and get acquainted with their elaborate explorations as it will change your thinking about how music can work.

From Pitchfork:

But Unfold’s unconventional format forces the Necks to condense its typical approach, to push and pull all the usual peaks, valleys, and arcs into more manageable spans. Everything speeds up just a bit. With that, by the end of the first two minutes of “Blue Mountain,” the bass, drums, piano, and organ are already intertwined and active. Buck’s distended drum rolls ricochet between layers of blue piano fragments and organ peals. And during the tumultuous “Rise,” which is so disorienting that the trio seems to be playing both meter and melody inside-out, the requisite moments of calm are fleeting. Here, the Necks make you gasp for air, never allowing for time or space to breathe very deeply.

Splintering the usual runtime of a Necks album into four largely disconnected pieces seems like it would fragment the experience—that is, turning a Necks record on, then disappearing inside it. Is Unfold the trio’s first album for our ever-shortening attention spans, at least since their salad days of placid bop in the late ’80s?

Turns out, not at all: The Necks’ newfound density is intoxicating. The ideas fly by in a way they never have with this band. Each compressed piece simply pushes you along to the next, eager to witness how a quarter-century-old act can again reshape your perception of drums, piano, and upright bass. After the Necks answer the psychedelic, wildly melismatic organ runs of “Overhear” with the pensive, clinched gaze of “Blue Mountain,” hearing what else is possible becomes a compulsion. (And if you’re new here, the quest can and should send you deep into a rich back catalog.) The relatively succinct tracks of Unfold aren’t some cynical concession to an audience’s fractured attention span or some attempt to become suddenly accessible. They are, instead, the result of a band that’s always tested supposedly solid borders—between jazz and rock, between acoustic and electric, between composition and improvisation. On Unfold, they’ve wondered aloud if the spell of their long-form magic works when stunted by the limitations of physical media and shuffled by the will of the listener. It does.

From The Quietus:

On Open and Vertigo, the single pieces evolved organically across several stages, with each instrument (drums, bass, piano) responding to the others and trading places in the limelight. The more compact nature of Unfold means that each track becomes a stylistic exercise in working through restrained conditions. ‘Rise’, the opening track, evolves gradually, with keyboardist Chris Abrahams dominating on both piano and organ whilst Lloyd Swanton traces contemplative bowed drones on his bass and drummer Tony Buck opts for restraint, at least initially, with gentle silhouettes sketched out on cymbals and rattles. This is The Necks at their jazziest, with Abrahams adopting a crystalline tone that wouldn’t sound out of place on an ECM record (indeed, he sounds remarkably like a hybrid of Keith Jarrett and Colin Vallon, two of that label’s most expressive pianists). Despite the pristine nature of the piano, the presence of melancholic drones in the background combined with Buck’s uneasy polyrhythms imbues the piece with a certain dread factor and acute melancholy, the trio never settling into a comfortable emotional zone. As ‘Rise’ builds up its notes in increasingly dense flurries and clusters, The Necks conjure an almost spectral form of tension that never quite dissipates even as the album progresses in different directions.

In a startling volte-face, ‘Overhear’ sees Abrahams ditch the piano altogether in favour of what sounds like a Hammond organ beamed in from the 1960s. Swanton’s bass scrapes seesaw metronomically like a beating heart whilst Buck continues to favour bells, cymbals and minimal extra percussion over his full kit. Despite this, the drummer still acts as the trio’s driving force, the sheer weight of his presence embodied here by the constant, almost motorik, way he uses such minimal means to deliver a form of blunt force. In many ways, although a very different proposition, Unfold touches on a similar vein of insistent beauty that inhabited Tony Conrad and Faust’s Outside the Dream Syndicate. Maybe it’s the retro-sounding organ, which shimmers and seethes like it’s been extracted from a Santana or Iron Butterfly album recorded circa 1970 and displays Abrahams’ talents at their most virtuosic.

From 4 Columns Sasha Frere-Jones writes:

On that day in 1987, and at every gig since, the trio appears onstage with no material and no plans. They stand still for a minute or less. (The band calls this “the waiting-around-in-silence ritual.”) Then, one member will play a figure, which will be repeated, even if that phrase is quite long. At a pace between slow and still, the three build up a piece, changing their parts by very small increments over an extended period. Their interaction involves no eye contact; Abrahams intentionally sits with his back to the rest of the band. The musicians can only listen to one another and rely on accrued instinct. “Hypnotizing” feels like a diminished way of describing the power of their music, even if it’s accurate, and characterizing their pieces just feels dopey: Time-melting. Neural rewiring. Drugless psychedelia.

For studio albums, the parts are improvised and then assembled in a way that allows for all the reflection they can’t indulge in live. The entire band, or just one member, lays down a foundation. Then they spend days listening and slowly adding improvised overdubs, not all of which are retained. One similarity between their albums and live shows is that most of their recordings are single, hour-long tracks. And the Necks do share one commonality with free improvisers: they don’t, and probably can’t, reproduce any of their recordings onstage. Everything the Necks do is an edition of one, whether or not it’s mechanically reproduced.

Unfold combines their live and studio approaches. Because the album was designed specifically as an LP, the band had to work within the time afforded by a side of vinyl. “Given the shorter format, and not wishing to rush our signature rate of change, that pretty much ensured it would be a double album,” Swanton wrote in his e-mail. Two pieces are around twenty minutes, the other two close to fifteen. Though overdubs were used, there are no edits within the body of each track. This means that, as in the live setting, any structural change had to happen in the moment of playing. Overdubs allow Abrahams to play organ and electric piano on top of his standard acoustic piano. It is slightly harder to identify other audible sources, because the Necks are devilishly good at pulling nonstandard sounds out of standard instruments. That frosty click? It could be Abrahams manipulating his piano strings with a tool. The animal moan? It could be Buck rubbing the length of a long stick against a drumhead. 

“Timepiece” features three Abrahams keyboard parts—an organ chord, a succession of hammering piano notes, and a high, thin electric piano part. Swanton is the secret agent here, playing widely spaced bass tones, and possibly other noises. Buck splits his time-keeping into bundles without marking a downbeat. A cowbell intermittently rattles, like a muffled schoolhouse ringer. The snare is hit, though not hard, at roughly even intervals. Bells and shakers and other resonant gewgaws shuffle through the track. The interplay of all these elements, without much harmony, melody, or distinct meter, makes twenty-one-and-a-half minutes evaporate. The shortest track, “Rise,” has the simplest core: Abrahams’s piano and Buck’s ride cymbal circle each other in a lazy gallop. Other events enter and exit, all of them in the traditional Necks fashion: without fanfare and irregularly.