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

Best Music of 2021- Josep Colom & Federico Mompou

Each year someone puts out their rendition of Mompou's Musica Callada - the solo piano composition consisting of 28 piano minature pieces, like haikus that manage to evoke a wide array of feelings. The music never gets old though it is a relatively recent (1960's) addition to the classical idiom. Josep Colom has just released his second version of this work and its crystal clear, evoking those lazy Barcelona afternoons nearing the end of the Franco regime. But this music is open very wide to many interpretations with its spaces and silence. This is an excellent version.

From International Music Web:

A quarter of a century later, Colom has retained those fleet tempi, but otherwise the difference is startling. The engineers at the audiophile Spanish label Eudora have realised sonics of extraordinary refinement. Colom’s 1957 Steinway D instrument has been captured to perfection in what sounds like a glorious acoustic over in Zaragoza. This crystalline sound picture enables the listener to marvel at Colom’s nuanced, fastidiously manicured yet paradoxically instinctive response to Mompou. I would suggest that listening to any of this composer’s piano music becomes doubly rewarding with a score to hand and in the case of Colom’s reinterpretation of Música Callada his profound respect for Mompou’s notes and markings comes across in spades, whilst furnishing the responsive listener with at least a degree of insight into what’s going on beyond the dots and the lines. Colom’s layering of dynamics in each tiny piece seems simultaneously spontaneous and infinitesimally detailed.

I’d like to suggest a couple of examples for readers to sample so they can hear this at first hand. I recommend a couple of less obvious examples from Book 2, the exquisite Lento (track 12) and the rapt piece marked Tranquilo – très calme (track 13). To achieve such variegation in dynamics and timbre in music as still-centred as this requires ears and touch of extraordinary sensitivity, on the parts of both player and engineer. It is a consistent feature of the music-making on this disc. Although Colom still emphasises the modernity in harmony and gesture of some of the pieces in Books 3 and 4 any astringency seems completely at one with the arc of the whole cycle. I would assert that one needs to take as much time and as many plays as is necessary to truly access Mompou – to my mind this is where all those Satie comparisons fall down; the rewards a determined listener may reap from grappling with Música Callada over an extended period completely justify the effort. That is certainly the case with this new version; there’s an apt bonus too in the shape of the extended song Cantar del Alma. This taps into the same spiritual well-spring that informs Música Callada; this haunting cançon is riveting, almost sculpted by the soprano Cecilia Lavilla Berganza.

This disc has rarely been off my player this week. It inevitably sounds splendid in surround (in my case via the SACD option on my modest Blu-ray player) for those who do like to hear piano music that way, although I’m more than happy with the stereo incarnation. Taking into account both sonics and interpretation this disc takes its place at the top of the heap with two other revelatory readings; Herbert Henck’s superb ECM disc from 1995 (ECM 1523 - my entrée to this work) and Jenny Lin’s equally mesmerising account on Steinway (STNS30004) – the detail of the sound on that disc is certainly a match for Eudora’s. I certainly couldn’t select a top choice among these recommendations, for me they are all essential. As is the aforementioned account by Adolf Pla, a sophisticated, unpredictable reading in perfectly fine sound – although La Ma de Guido’s production is a tad restricted compared to the other options I’ve identified. It also goes without saying that Mompou’s own recordings, originally recorded for Ensayo but reissued in a bargain four disc set on Brilliant Classics (review) are also essential, although by now those recordings (made in the 1970s) somewhat betray their age.

From Barcelona Classica:  

El concierto estaba integrado por una sola obra, dividida en los cuatro álbumes que conforman Música callada de Federic Mompou, una obra de gran magnitud y duración, compuesta a fuego lento y que fue tomando forma con el paso de los años. El mismo compositor la reconocía como la más propia de su estilo y fue titulada a partir de un verso del Cantico espiritual, de San Juan de la Cruz: “…la música callada, la soledad sonora…”.
 
Es una obra en la que la importancia radica en el aspecto sonoro, tímbrico y temporal. Una música creada a partir de luces y sombras, que enfatiza el silencio y las resonancias con reminiscencia a las campanas, presentándonos una reflexión sobre la sencillez y la belleza, y buscando en el oyente la audición interna y una emoción secreta. Una música que contiene influencias de Chopin y Paul Valérie; como también de la música francesa y del folklore musical catalán y español ofreciéndonos una proximidad en un mundo extraño o una lejanía de nuestra propia esencia, y que requiere un gran imaginario sonoro, tanto en su composición, como para ser interpretada.
 
Josep Colom ofreció una interpretación que fue exquisita. Antes de empezar, se dirigió al público pidiendo que no se aplaudiese entre los álbumes, sino que se conservara el silencio hasta la finalización total de la obra, que describió que gozaba de un carácter místico. A continuación empezó con el primer movimiento, Angelico, en el que consiguió desde la primera nota, a partir de un increíble control de las sonoridades del piano y de una articulación precisa pero sin un fuerte ataque, un timbre maravilloso y lejano del mundo terrenal, con el que consiguió llevarse a la audiencia a un nuevo espacio y tiempo fuera de la vida cotidiana.
 
La interpretación de la obra estaba basada en mostrar este control del teclado y la búsqueda del límite sonoro del instrumento, en la organización temporal tanto de los silencios como de las duraciones de los sonidos, y en la construcción de paisajes sonoros diversos para cada uno de los movimientos. Todo esto lo consiguió enfatizando la resonancia de las notas, con juegos de pedal que nos cambiaban de espacio arquitectónico, buscando los extremos dinámicos del piano y jugando con las densidades sonoras. Con estas herramientas otorgó a la música de Mompou del poder magnético que ofrecía el flujo sonoro que emanaba del piano, en un concierto en el que el intérprete fue creciendo en cada movimiento.

El último de los movimientos presentaba una solemnidad a partir de una melodía de armonías claras, que ofrecían una sensación de bienestar y paz. El público perduró en el mundo sonoro de la Música callada, más allá de que se desvaneciera la resonancia final de la última nota, dando tiempo al pianista a quitarse las gafas y cerrar la partitura con total tranquilidad mientras el público mantenía un silencio espectral, que poco a poco se fue convirtiendo con unos aplausos entusiásticos que mostraban asombro por parte del público de lo que acababan de vivir.

 

 

The Photography of Rinko Kawauchi

Some spirited photography from Rinko Kawauchi-check out his works at his site.

Photos of Rinko Kawauchi

Best Music of 2021- Charlotte Greve

 

Ambitious and sonically rich, Charlotte Greve's music is unclassifiable in within today's set of genres but that is its advantage. The choir gives this music an early music component that I've been waiting to hear in contemporary music but the saxes and electric guitars touches other sensations. Hits the right spots.

From Pitchfork:

Greve was driven by the reality that any object is a collection of particles, capable of gathering and dispersing. She considered the construct of family: how it is a whole, but also made up of interconnected yet individual members. In conversations with her grandmother, she noted the intergenerational similarities between relatives. Greve eventually enlisted her older brother, Julius Greve, to pen lyrics for Sediments We Move, maintaining the theme of family in a literal sense. The knowledge of this process makes the songs more tactile. You can imagine their construction—experience the layers as they accumulate, like the sediments that inspired Greve.

Her interpretation of the sedimentary process is formal; though many of the instrumental parts are structurally simple, they layer to form grand obelisks of sound. Remarkably, the album credits list only five types of instruments: saxophone, synthesizer, guitar, bass, and drums. Greve’s lithe voice and alto often curve along the surface, but Cantus Domus’ massive, spectral melodies provide the most drama. The choir constantly changes shape: On “Part IV,” their vowels are elongated and their frictionless harmonies glide through the atmosphere. Greve’s saxophone ripples in the foreground, anchoring their voices to terra firma. On “Part V,” the choir fractures into dizzying, staccato measures, their incessant “la la las” buzzing like hornets. Neither state is permanent; what once was rock will again become silt.

Sediments We Move is more interested in transition than discrete forms. “Think of layers as always present but not always visible in their entirety,” Greve wrote on one page of her notebook. At times, the album’s faint layers are masked by heartier sounds: jagged guitar, pummeling drums, synthesizer sheen. But occasionally, Greve peels back these elements to reveal underlying activity. Toward the end of “Part III,” the choir and rhythm section become sluggish and eventually cut out altogether. What’s left is a nest of whispers, rustling like restless insects. Have they been there all along, hissing obscure messages? The words are only intelligible with the aid of a lyric sheet: “Molten crust, inner core, a salted rain drop.” The consonants stack up, light and crisp. Even Greve’s leanest passages contain strata to sift through.

From The Quietus:

Sediments We Move might be alto saxophonist and composer Charlotte Greve's debut solo album, but she is certainly not a newbie on the jazz scene, whether in her native Germany or her chosen US home town of Brooklyn. Greve has been leading the jazz quartet Lisbeth since its inception in 2009. They have released four albums and won two Jazz ECHOs, the German equivalent to the Grammys. Since 2014, Greve has also been leading the Brooklyn based four-piece band Wood River that presents jazz-inspired alternative pop-rock. Additional projects in New York include the alto saxophone quartet Asterids and the trio The Choir Invisible.

Sediments We Move brings together a myriad of influences from Greve's past and present musical explorations, including long-time collaborators like Wood River and Berlin-based choir Cantus Domus, with whom Greve first collaborated in 2017. Like different layers of a cake she serves (free) jazz, ambient, metal, noise, rock, and choral music – at times all in one composition. Just like the layers of the cake, enjoyed as a whole, the genre-fluid compositions make for surprising sonic experiences.

'Part I' starts off ambient: a floating alto sax, discreet synths, the drums playing freely on the cymbals. A solo electric guitar emerges, accompanied by the female voices of the choir, and a few minutes later, the drums crash in and the whole composition becomes almost metal. The voices retreat into a circular pattern. Greve likes circular patterns and movements. And suspension. We encounter Greve singing solo on a light, upbeat alternative pop song, and a multitude of whispering voices at the end of 'Part IV'. The 'Interlude' is metal, noise, free jazz chaos, before it evolves into a soothing, calm ambient melody. 'Part IV' is an a capella piece reminiscent of Gregorian chorals. Out of this world, stand still. 'Part V' gives room to a grooving bass, majestic choir, straight forward rock, beautiful melodies, solo sax, and solo electric guitar.

From Jazz Times:

Charlotte Greve is a polymath with an exceptional talent for blurring a diverse stylistic breadth. The German-born, New York-based composer, saxophonist, and vocalist’s compositions thread a densely layered web where elements of jazz, rock, pop, chamber, and choral music intersect. Her ever-mutating approach to music-making has manifested as leader of Lisbeth Quartett and in the Choir Invisible, a collaborative trio alongside drummer Vinnie Sperrazza and bassist Chris Tordini, as well as through a wealth of sidewoman work.

On Sediments We Move, Greve homes in on—and fully realizes—what she calls a “genre-fluid piece”; this seven-part set challenges orthodoxy as it toes the fringes of sound. Because she’s leading Wood River, a pliable and adventurous group of avant-jazz mainstays including guitarist Keisuke Matsuno, bassist Simon Jermyn, and drummer Jim Black, one would expect something derived from the jazz paradigm. Not the case. Sediments We Move is an entirely different, otherworldly thing of beauty that defies category. 

Joined by the Berlin choir Cantus Domus and lyricist Julius Greve (Charlotte’s older brother), Wood River plays with a hypnotic sensibility that bends minds and rattles the senses. And the soaring, angelic voices of Greve and Cantus Domus are a combination to behold. While synthesizer-fueled pieces such as “Part 2” and “Part 3” lend an idiosyncratic pop-centric touch and “Part 4” is a dreamy, voice-dominated dronescape, the final two pieces are dizzying and abrasive, propelled by the crunch of Black’s heavy-hitting beats and Matsuno’s mathy shredding. Whatever genre Sediments We Move is filed under, it stands on its own.

Microscopic Listening

From Fred Thomas' essay on Joao Gilberto's artistry:

My proposition is that what João didn’t do is at least as important, if not more important, than what he did do. His artistry is best understood in terms of the strict limits he imposed on himself and the soaring freedom he attained within them. João is the ultimate archetype of this time-honoured paradox. His musical process involved a search for what he called “the simple truth”. With his recordings and live concerts as our deep listening guide, we will try to find out what his truth means.

With a tenacity bordering on obsessive-compulsive, João delineated his stylistic perimeters, rejecting many of the characteristics most commonplace in music for voice and guitar. Through sheer stubbornness, he managed to set up an enclosed and rule-based system that nevertheless cultivates a specific kind of infinite freedom of phrasing. Beneath their surface layer of simplicity, his recordings are intricate, elusive and, above all, subtle. In other words, João unearthed the holy grail of music making: the transformation of extreme complexity into sounds that are simple, relaxed and clear. Sounds that just float into our minds.

João’s musical style balances exquisitely at the edge of a precipice: just a hint of lush orchestration plunges it into an abyss of queijo. On richly orchestrated and over-produced albums such as “João” and “Amoroso”, arrangers lead us by their grubby hands straight into the elevator: a sublime Japanese ink-drawing transformed into a sicky oil painting hung on a hotel room wall. To those who associate João with easy listening, I simply say, “your listening is too easy, try harder”. His musical essence is minimalist, single-minded, rigorous, unsentimental and child-like: “maybe I would like to go back to when I was a boy,” he said. “After that I learned too many things, and they came out in my music. So now I refine and refine until I can get back to the simple truth. Like when I was a boy”. 

Instrumentation and Repertoire

Within João’s earliest work there are many exceptions to the claims set out below. But I’m going to be dealing with his mature solo albums: “JoãoVoz e Violão”, “In Tokyo”, “Live in Montreux”, “Live at Umbria Jazz” and “Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar”. To my taste, as soon as other instruments were added to his voice and guitar, the music very quickly got worse. My one exception to this rule are Sonny Carr’s narcotic hi-hats on the 1973 album “João Gilberto”, often referred to as the white album (which I will therefore add to my list). By purging everything from his percussion set except these essential hi-hats, Carr mirrors João’s stripped back musical proposition, blending perfectly with the guitar meanwhile. Whether it was Carr, producer Rachel Elkind or João himself who took this radical instrumental decision, it was a masterstroke that lends this hugely influential album its uniquely soporific atmosphere. 

Apart from the odd song in Spanish (“Besame Mucho”), Italian (“Estate”), English (“’S Wonderful”), French (“Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours”) and the few pieces he composed himself such as “Bim Bom” and “Hô-bá-lá-lá“, João’s huge repertoire derived from three essential Brazilian sources. Having started his career as a drummer in Bahia, João broke through showcasing the radical songs of Tom Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes and other late ‘50s composers, before going on to combine these Bossa Novas with older tunes by composers such as Ary Barroso, Denis Brean and Dorival Caymmi, excavated from the forgotten past. To complete the triangle, the Tropicália movement from the late ‘60s and ‘70s – founded by young apostles such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil  – provided João with the likes of “Coracão Vagabundo”, “Menino do Rio” and “Sampa”. To this extent, João encompasses the past, present and future. Yet it is remarkable that, filtered through his ultra-fine stylistic sieve, every song he interpreted sounded fundamentally the same. And I mean that as a great compliment. In precisely that way, João is a true minimalist.

Until his last performance in 2008, João continued to play the same hit songs. This insistence was not only generosity to his audience, always gagging for yet another version of “Desafinado”. It also speaks to the sense that, as in jazz, the process was more important and more interesting than the content. During the performance of a song, João would often repeat it over and over, more times than the average listener with limited concentration considered reasonable. Yet each round was phrased uniquely. His search for perfection was obsessive, devotional even; he could repeat forever without repeating himself. “Fazendo sempre a mesma coisa que nunca é a mesma” – always doing the same thing that’s never the same, said Caetano Veloso.“Refine and refine”, even within a six-minute song. 

Best Music of 2021- Fred Thomas

Fred Thomas · Mesmer (Paul Motian) - Martin Speake & Fred Thomas - 2017

A classical artist who plays jazz and pop in beguiling ways and one who I just recently came to know. His musical sensibilities come bleeding through in everything I've heard of his thus far. Someone to watch closely.

From Jazzwise:

Stan Kenton's 1964 LP release Wagner/Kenton might well be the only jazz tribute album to Richard Wagner in existence. Until now that is. Unlike Kenton who attempted to match the excess - and came close - of the infamous German composer with his own bombastic brand of orchestral jazz, the F-IRE Collective multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas' tribute is a far more low-key, offbeat setting for jazz trio. What it definitely isn't is a ‘third stream’ jazz-classical fusion of any kind, and ostensibly it sounds like it has nothing to do with Wagner at all. The musical aesthetic might be best illustrated by the contribution of the musicians involved: Ewan Bleach is an early jazz and blues woodwind specialist but he doesn't so much jazz up Wagner's leitmotifs as entirely reinvent them. He's an old-school swinger who comes deliciously close to the romantic yearning of a human vocal so isn't a million miles away from the dramatic pathos that's generally attributed to the infamous composer.

Regardless, his playing is stylish throughout whether shifting in and out of idioms that resemble early swing, a blues or spiritual through to classical-sax, Brecht-like cabaret and Klezmer. The veteran Parisian pianist Benoit Delbecq, who's a prepared piano specialist, veers imaginatively and always responsively between free jazz, contemporary classical and largely pre-bop jazz – Ellington being the common denominator between him and Bleach. Thomas' resonant bass sonic mostly anchors the ship or triggers otherworldly ensemble textures that perhaps echo the tonal ambiguities of the subject at hand. You can see it in part as an affectionate parody: hence Wagner's famous ‘Wedding March’ has Chopin's ‘Funeral March’ dumped on top of it, the Tannhäuser Overture has been remodelled as an impressive pre-war swing standard, and the sleeve artwork is an illustration of the composer's skewered head. Jazz listeners will be happy to hear that you don't have to like Wagner to like Dick Wag but ironically it actually might be a good entry point. 

From Vortex:

Fred Thomas turns his fertile mind to the music of Richard Wagner, ahead of the launch of a new album on Babel. He himself plays bass and includes clarinettist and saxophonist Ewan Bleach, known from many of our Gypsy/East European nights. The pianist will be French maestro, Benoît Delbecq.

‘Dick-Wag: a Tribute to Richard Wagner’ is a new jazz trio dedicated to a notorious Bavarian composer many idolise and more despise. Comprised of the most unlikely collaborators, this tribute band attempts to reconcile itself to opera’s most depraved, politically divisive and love-hated little man. With huge dramatic scenes boiled down to discreet miniatures, each expressed on a single piece of paper and treated like found objects as a jazz musician might, the resulting improvisations teeter surreally between the playful lyricism of swing and the abstraction of modernist prepared piano grooves.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas has masterminded these profane yet respectful interpretations of Wagner’s sublime, bombastic, time-stopping, sexually suggestive and earth-shatteringly beautiful creations by assembling a seemingly dysfunctional trio of motley talents. The recording includes Benoît Delbecq who can miraculously synthesise with Ewan Bleach’s unparalleled sense of melody and tone, glued together by Fred Thomas’ foundational bass playing. Silly and serious in equal measure, ’Dick Wag’ serves up mercilessly blooded chunks hacked off masterpieces such as Tristan and Isolde, transforming them into grotesque parodies of Teutonic pomp, luscious jazz ballads, jingoistic marches and Ellingtonian jungle grooves. And if you listen closely, just audible between the cracks of these affectionate caricatures, is the unmistakable sound of Richard Wagner turning in his grave.

From Fred Thomas:

It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to record some of Bach’s solo keyboard music. Its emotional, intellectual, technical and spiritual demands seemed overwhelming. Twice I started only to quit the idea, daunted and feeling unready. Then, in a moment of lucidity, I wondered: when you’re dealing with the most miraculous body of human creation in all the arts, when are you ever ready? Life is short. Bach himself was not prone to procrastination. He produced a quantity and quality of music some consider literally unbelievable. 

I recorded alone with a huge piano, trying to coax the monster-machine into behaving well. Why the piano and not something ‘authentic’? For one thing, it’s my first instrument, but ultimately it’s a tired question, certainly in comparison with the sheer wonder of the music itself. In the end, the most scholarly ruminations on the abstractness of Bach, or on the piano’s range of articulation, or on the futility of pursuing authenticity in the absence of an authentic audience, just can’t match the sonic revelation that, played with some imagination, Bach sounds good on a tenor banjo – more on that soon.

His music is the most transcendent, all-encompassing, wise and child-like thing I know. In the words of Bernard Chazelle, “Bach’s music is soft and gentle, often suffused with piercing tenderness. If his work has an unmistakable child-like quality, it’s because its spiritual aspirations, borne of faith, joy, grace, and wonder, call for the deepest seriousness – and no one is more serious than the child”. I have the immovable feeling – knowledge, almost – that Bach fathoms and encircles everything.

John Cage considered music from the past useful only to the extent to which it leads to the creation of new things, a view far removed from the occasional dogmatism of the historical performance movement. Though I value both viewpoints, my aim lies somewhere in between: to derive something personal from a combination of historical enquiry and poetic imagination, using fantasy to supplement the fragmentary knowledge that contextual study reveals. Furthermore, the violation of chronology – my choice and ordering of tracks – is an attempt to give this record narrative force.

Best Music of 2021- Roy Brooks (Understanding)

I heard Brooks several times at the Famous but not this one. He always brought top flight talent and they palyed their hearts out for us in Bmore on Sunday evenings. The group I remember included Carlos Garnett and James Spaulding. It was just another Sunday in the 70's. This is a great reflection of what it was like and the sad thing is that the Left Bank Jazz Society taped every concert but the majority have disappeared. Great mystery.

From The New Yorker:

From the nineteen-fifties through the seventies, the jazz drummer Roy Brooks performed with some of the major musicians of the time, such as Charles Mingus and Dexter Gordon, and led some talented groups of his own. But as he was making a name for himself as a leader, in the seventies, his career was interrupted by mental illness; he died in 2005, at the age of sixty-seven. Today, he’s among the great jazz musicians whose enormous artistry stands in unfortunate contrast to their relative obscurity. The release, last week, of “Understanding”—a two-CD set of a live recording, from 1970, of a quintet led by Brooks, which is also available on vinyl and digital stream—should suffice to establish him as one of the most original jazz performers of the era.

The instrumentation of Brooks’s quintet is classical—trumpet, tenor sax, piano, bass, drums—but its mix of musical personalities is volatile, ranging from post-bop to avant-garde. The venue where the band recorded, the Left Bank Jazz Society, in Baltimore, was known for its engaged and enthusiastic audiences, and the rediscovered tapes of “Understanding” reflect the sympathetic vibe between the crowd and the musicians, who pour themselves into the music with an uninhibited energy. They break the boundaries of the familiar post-bop format with the heroic length and fervor of their solos—all energized by the inspirations of Brooks’s drumming. The album includes five main pieces, each more than twenty minutes long and one running past a half hour, and the solos have a dramatic and athletic span to match; the tempos range from brisk to rocking and jet-propelled. The music’s tone, too, has a ferocious expressivity that’s on display from the very start of the concert.

The first track, “Prelude to Understanding,” begins with Brooks setting not a tempo but a turbulent tone, before the trumpeter, Woody Shaw, comes in and launches a majestic, furious eleven-minute solo that’s something of a manifesto of the moment. The piece, by Brooks, begins themelessly, with merely Brooks’s drum thunder, and Shaw leaps in to mesh with Brooks in a rhythm that shifts between—and even daringly intertwines—an extremely fast double time and a hefty, straight-ahead jaunt. Here, as throughout the concert, Brooks channels the mountainous energy of Elvin Jones, the drummer in John Coltrane’s classic quartet, with rhythmic solidity and weighty swing balanced by a free rumbling that rises to near-catastrophic tumult, all while keeping, with a daring tenuousness, the thread of the beat.

From Jazz Times:

his two-CD set comes from the archives of the Left Bank Jazz Society. From the mid-1960s into the 1980s, this organization presented Sunday concerts at the Famous Ballroom on Charles Street in Baltimore. A self-taught engineer, Vernon Welsh, recorded hundreds of shows on his Akai home tape deck. In recent years over a dozen releases on several labels have been sourced from the Welsh tapes. One of the most essential is Understanding.

Roy Brooks was from Detroit. When he died there in 2005 at 67, he had been off the jazz radar for years because of mental illness and incarceration. He was a unique, creative drummer who is remembered today (when he is remembered) for his four years with Horace Silver’s quintet in the early 1960s. Occasionally Brooks led his own bands, like the quintet that played Baltimore on November 1, 1970.

Brooks, trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett, pianist Harold Mabern, and bassist Cecil McBee light the Famous Ballroom on fire. They unleash raw passion for two hours. Shaw, at 25, with daredevil chops, was in a zone that day. On the opening “Prelude to Understanding,” for 11 minutes, his brilliant short ricochets gather into more brilliant long streaks of resolution. He is rough, reckless, and wildly exciting.

Each song overwhelms the room for 20 or 30 minutes. Garnett has the unenviable task of following Shaw. He matches Shaw’s energy if not his artistic individuality. Mabern is blocky and powerful, but in this ferocious ensemble he is the voice of reason. McBee is quick-on-quick. Brooks is relentless. Sometimes, with his explosive press rolls, he sounds like Art Blakey on steroids. But he was more than a basher; he varied his vehemence.

There are actual compositions, like Brooks’ attractive, lyrical title track, Shaw’s intriguing “Zoltan,” and an epic, over-the-top version of Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce.” But the improvisations leave these starting points far behind. This is music of its turbulent time. It occupies a productive historical interval between hard bop and freedom.

The sound of a Vernon Welsh recording is far from perfect. It is harsh, glaring, and sometimes out of balance. But it puts you there, smack in the front row. When the two discs are over, you are exhilarated and exhausted, like those lucky folks who were in the Famous Ballroom on that Sunday long ago.

From New York Times:

In 1991, as part of its Magic Music Days initiative, Disneyland hosted the International Musical Saw Festival. Fifty people who played the instrument — the actual tool, held between one’s knees and stroked with a violin bow — descended on Anaheim, Calif., to compete in different genres. Roy Brooks, a drummer from Detroit, took home third place in the pop/jazz category.

Two decades earlier, while touring Europe with Charles Mingus’s band, Brooks received a more prestigious honor: a regular feature called “Blues for Roy’s Saw,” where the drummer would step away from his kit and solo on his side instrument. (Instead of a bow, Brooks used a mallet.)

Brooks, who died in 2005 at 67 after a life of ecstatic highs and perilous lows, worked with jazz legends like Horace Silver, Yusef Lateef and Mingus; he also had bipolar disorder, and served a sentence for felony assault from 2000 to 2004. On Friday, a previously unreleased Brooks live album from 1970 titled “Understanding” arrives on vinyl, providing an opportunity to deepen listeners’ comprehension of his talent. (Digital and CD releases will come out July 23.)

The seven-track “Understanding” was made at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom, where Brooks and his band had recorded their lauded live set “The Free Slave” only six months prior. The concert features the trumpeter Woody Shaw and the bassist Cecil McBee — holdovers from the night that resulted in “The Free Slave” — plus Harold Mabern on piano and Carlos Garnett on tenor saxophone.

Despite similar personnel and only a brief interval between engagements, “The Free Slave” and “Understanding” are worlds apart. Where the first release is a euphoric joy ride that touches on funk and odd-time grooving, the new album is an intense, hypnotic journey that seems immovable even at its gentlest moments. What a difference a half-year makes.

Zev Feldman, a co-producer of “Understanding,” was struck by the LP’s sprawling nature. A typical track runs about 20 minutes, making room for multiple unhurried solos. (Brooks breaks out the saw on “Prelude to Understanding.”)

“There’s expansive boundaries here,” Feldman said. “It’s so adventuresome. They’re really going out there.”

Brooks, who grew up in Detroit playing basketball and in jazz bands, was in a pivotal place in 1970. He had just wrapped a three-year stint with Lateef (he can be heard on “The Golden Flute” and “The Blue Yusef Lateef”) and was newly a member of M’Boom, the Max Roach group featuring seven or more percussionists.

 

 

Best Music of 2021- Tyshawn Sorey & King Britt

Two creative minds who know and master their musical tools get together and produce some exceptional sounds that clearly trace a viable path into the future, today. Impressive-highly recommended. A welcome product from the pandemic.

From The Paris Review, an interview with Sorey:

NTERVIEWER

The last thing I wanted to ask you about is Paul Motian. I watched the Village Vanguard streamed concert you did with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano. And I thought, Oh my God, are they doing the Motian trio? He’s one of my favorite drummers and one of my favorite jazz composers. I’m wondering in what way he’s important to you, and what the plans are for that project.

SOREY

There will be a record coming next year. Paul Motian is another major force of influence for me, both as a composer and as a drummer. We talked earlier about space. Well, Paul Motian was kind of an expert at that—being able to leave a lot of space and allow things to happen. And when he allowed things to happen, it made him push the music even more in interesting directions. The other thing was his touch.

He’s pulling sound out of the instrument rather than playing at the drum set. He was pulling sound out of the drums by his touch, the attack, the dynamics. He’s a very dynamic drummer. That has inspired me since I began performing music with ensembles in the late nineties. From a compositional standpoint, too, he has a very oblique sense—and I don’t mean oblique in a negative way—of melody and harmony. A lot of notes that he would write melodically would end up in unexpected places. But they’d make sense, somehow. The musicians he had around him—like Joe and Bill, for example—could do so much with one very short, simple phrase that Paul Motian wrote. And he was my type of person. He was always very crass and had a very interesting sense of humor.

From Creative Independent, an interview with King Britt: 

You’re a musician as well as a teacher. You’re also a mentor. As someone who spends a lot of time advocating for other people, how do you make sure you’re not sapped of energy by the time you get to your own projects?

It’s one of the first things I tell my students. When I first started getting into production, which is right after high school and going into college, I was making all these demos. I was working at Tower Records, and then also DJing. You’re 19 and you think you can do anything. You have all the energy in the world, so you just do it. You don’t even think about it.

In ‘94, my daughter was born. You have a kid, you have bills, so you have three, four irons in the fire and you’re just going for it. You’re really not thinking so much about time management until it overwhelms you. Then my label with Josh Wink, Ovum Recordigns, was through Sony from ‘99 to 2002. That was during the time when electronic music was exploding here, at Amp on MTV, all these shows. What we learned, me and Josh, is how to organize time. We had to think about things in a nine to five way. In the day, we would do more paperwork, faxes, all of this stuff in the day, the red tape. And at night, it’s all about the music.

But then in 2001, because I was married at the time, I also had my daughter, it was overwhelming. And so, I had to make a decision: Do I continue with the label and all of this touring, all of this? One thing has to go. When you get to that point in time in your career, you realize, I really need to get on a routine schedule, a daily routine or weekly routine, whatever it is, but you need a routine to get in a rhythm. You have to stay in rhythm. I left the label and just was 100% creative and less the business side of things.

Around Winter Music Conference 2002 maybe, 2003, I’m talking to Louie Vega. And I’m like, “Louie, dude, you have the family, you are pumping out remix after remix, you and Kenny, and also alone. How are you doing it?” We were just chilling poolside. I think it was Gilles Peterson or whatever spinning. I’m like, “Dude, how are you doing this? And he’s like, “I go to the studio from 11:00 AM to 8:00 at night and that’s it.” That’s his day as if he was going to work. He said the most important thing for him was having the studio out of the house. Going to another space. If you’re able to find a separate space that you can go to, and when you come home, home is home, it really is great—because the lines are too often blurred. As you know with Zoom, everyone working at home now, these lines are blurred. When he said that, it just clicked. So I got a separate space from where I was living. It changed the game. When I’m home, it’s strictly home and watching movies, whatever it is, other than music. I find that has been the best.

From The Buddy System (their label):

Upon first meeting one another, drummer / composer, Tyshawn Sorey and synthesist / producer, King Britt, had a mutual respect for one another's practice.
Growing up in Newark NJ, Tyshawn was exposed to east coast club & electronic music, which always had a special place in his heart. His record collection is an example of a true connoisseur of the genre, who has travelled the world extensively. Working with everyone from Vijay Iyer to George Lewis, Tyshawn is one of the most sought after composers and improvisors
in music, he had yet to explore his electronic side, except for his occasional unannounced dj sets!

King Britt's continued contribution to the advancement of electronic music, producing or remixing everyone from Solange to Miles Davis, help solidify
his native Philadelphia as a necessary point on the map for dance music enthusiasts. Growing up in a household of jazz fusion, funk and soul, his love
of the electronic heroes of those genres, pushed him to explore djing and improvising with musicians using the cutting edge technologies available.

These two titans went into the studio for 2 days, which happen to fall right before the world went into lockdown in 2019. With no rehearsals, direction or
plan, armed with drums & synths, these two did what they do best and created a sonic documentation of fearless exploration into polyrhythmic time
travel. They were channeling and conjuring sounds from an alternate universe, releasing whatever emotions were in the moment. They were
focused on the journey leaving the destination in the listener's mind.

Matthew Finn's Excellent Photography

I was just introduced to this photographer from the UK that captures a familiar sensibility with true artistic skill. Here are some of Matthew Finn's photograph's and a link to his website and a fabulous interview at A Small Voice, Ben Smith's podcast of interviews with photographers.

Matthew Finn from his Mother "project"

Here is a link to his website:  Matthew Finn

Here is a link to an interview at the always excellent A Small Voice, Ben Smith's Podcast with photographers.

Best Music of 2021- Aya

For my ears Aya's music, her new album, sounds like electronic Early Music. The Early Music I love from 15th Century. The vocals, the repetitions. The chorus, the song-like quality. With a modern bent. But there is lot to hear and think about. A real sonic surprise.

From Pitchfork:

Building on the club sounds of LOFT, aya’s former alter ego, and extending into the realms of musique concrète, drone, and knotty wordplay, the Huddersfield-raised, London-based artist’s debut album, im hole, takes her boundless energy and unbridled creative instincts into a wild new space. On record, her voice is either pitched up and wreathed in the clammy reverb of a small, dank tunnel, or digitally pulverized and scattered to the winds. On paper—the album’s physical edition is a clothbound book—her lyrics take the form of carefully typeset poems whose butterfingered misspellings (“once went west ypp off ur chesdt my ribssn embpdty vessel,abeadt slippd an ekxtra stuttr fluttr midst th wrestl alll breath losstt”) reflect their origin as notes tapped out on her phone in what she has described as states of “transient psychosis.”

aya’s previous releases hewed to more or less familiar traditions of experimental club music. “a fflash gun for a ffiver,” from last year’s Physically Sick 3 compilation, recalls the intricate, jewel-toned bass investigations of labels like Wisdom Teeth, where LOFT released an early EP in 2017. The cartoonish vocal processing of last year’s playful “delishus” sounds like an homage to SOPHIE songs like “Lemonade” and “Hard.” But on im hole, some of aya’s playfulness has burned off, making way for a steely, psychedelic intensity.

The opening track, “somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor,” charts strange new territory. Over a chilly microtonal blast—recorded with her phone in the stairwell between the eighth and ninth floors of her old apartment building, where the wind screaming through a broken window created an uncannily electronic-sounding effect—she intones a sing-song incantation in a witchy pipsqueak: “Me, more, me, more, me, more. Red or blue, me, more, red or blue, red or blue. Red shoes or blue shoes! Red shoes or blue shoes!” It sounds less like a song than a spell being cast. And by the track’s end, a magical transformation has taken place, one that introduces the autobiographical theme that gives this baffling, enveloping album the personal gravitas to balance its dazzling sonic fireworks: “Last year I came round from a hole/With a broken thumb/And a note on my phone/Four words,” she croaks, her voice digitally garbled: “Thee/Vibe/Hath/Changed.”

Change is deeply woven into the album’s fabric. Sounds shift their shapes in midair; rhythms morph; timbres transmogrify. aya favors volatile textures evocative of blown glass, oily concrete, and quaking Jell-O, but the provenance of any given sound is rarely clear. On “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under,” her voice takes on a gravelly, fluctuating buzz, as though she were hissing into the rotors of a swiveling electric fan. On the instrumental “dis yacky,” crows caw over dangerously arrhythmic breakbeats while a gummy acid bassline tries desperately to hold the song’s jagged shards together. Even at the music’s most overwhelmingly physical—like the tinnitus-and-nausea cocktail of pinging highs and oozing sub-bass of “tailwind”—this is as spare as her music has sounded; rarely are more than a handful of elements in play at any given moment. A few tracks are essentially spoken-word poetry set to industrial grinding and buzzing sounds—or post-industrial, seemingly inspired less by rusted-out Northern English factories than the ominous throb of this century’s sprawling underground server farms.

From Quietus:

im hole is as much about advanced sound synthesis as it is about self-revealing lyricism that sheds light on her trans experience, as well as reflecting on the whole notion of queer art. My experience of the album is very emotional, even voyeuristic, like a sonic diary with the most private entries reflecting on aya's personal struggles ("It's been four years now / I've been trading places / Evading faces / Saving graces / Elegiac susurrations bubble up / But if we grip we set the pace") presented in an excitingly futuristic sonic environment.

It may come across as braindance for the Web 3.0 generation, but the immediate reaction is physical, prompting an urge for body twists and breakneck moves. One of the centrepieces of the record, 'the only solution i have found is to simply jump higher', comes across like a manifesto. Riding on arpeggiated, trancey stabs, hyper-synthetic, kalimba-like synths, explosions of static, and eccentric humanoid utterances, it is one of those meditative peak-time head-turners. Disorienting and all-absorbing, there are not many existing coordinates in dance music to help us move around in aya's artificial soundscapes. Those who have come to love her deconstructed bangers and cheeky edits released as LOFT might find her new direction a tad too serious, even highbrow, but underneath the apparently more scholarly approach to music-making she retains her own sense of detached irony.

In the early '90s, a quarter-century after Roland Barthes famously proclaimed 'the death of the author', we witnessed a process of dissociation between dance music producers and their music. Anonymity prevailed over the charisma-driven charm of disco and house. The development of the information superhighway and influence of new cyber-aesthetics prompted this trend. Producers became part of the collective body – a single mechanical joint of the separate techno, hardcore and jungle machines. Artists would hide behind various monikers, exchanging different masks on a whim, and the notion of a pop star as a complete artist who might branch out into poetry, film or painting, as part of a single project unified behind a proper name à la Nick Cave, Madonna or Beyoncé, sounded almost blasphemous.

From  Loud and Quiet:

On debut album im hole, Aya (fka LOFT), surely one of the most captivating electronic producers to emerge from the UK scene in recent years, continues her boundless exploration of club-tuned sound design, while developing her presence as vocalist. The project stands as a singular work, imbuing themes of internal doubt and external pressure, questioning ideas of sexuality, gender and identity. It’s the marrying of Aya’s increased vocal presence, and her unrivalled approach to sound construction that navigates these thematic threads in idiosyncratic ways, neither wearing through obviousness, or alienating though opaqueness. There’s no wonder the album’s lyrics have been released as a book of poetry – new meanings are sure to be exposed in print.

But it is the symbiosis of sound and voice where the record’s unique perspective is most captivating; the broken, drunken beat of ‘once wen’t west’ where time stretches like taffy, the layered, pitched vocal following suit obediently. The line between poetry, voice and instrumentation is blurred with simultaneously reckless glee and knowing calculation. 

The instrumental tracks reinforce the atmosphere of the record. The grime-adjacent charm of ‘dis yacky’ which ends up sounding something like an early Big Apple Records release, or the gorgeously harmonic plucks of ‘the only solution i have found is to simply jump higher’ that occasionally flirts with gurning acid lines, before altogether detuning itself to jarring effect. 

Start Jabbing

From NYT Op Ed, Jamelle Bouie writes:

This week, we learned that Donald Trump had tested positive for Covid before his first presidential debate with Joe Biden. He may well have been positive, and infectious, during his Rose Garden celebration with his final Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, as well as during his meeting with Gold Star military families.

Trump appears to have exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of people, including his 77-year-old opponent, to a potentially deadly illness. It was a remarkable demonstration of his selfish indifference to the health and welfare of everyone around him. And in the same way that he refused to act on his own infection — until it was almost too late — he also refused to act to stem a pandemic that, at the time of his positive test, had killed more than 200,000 Americans.

When asked about this news, on Wednesday, President Biden said, simply, that he did not “think about the former president.”

In keeping with the tone of his administration thus far, Biden wanted to show that he was more concerned with the work of governing than the antics of his predecessor. But I think this dismissal is a mistake.

No matter how well you govern, no matter how popular your policies, politics is not a game you can win from above the fray. And in the modern political environment, one must use every available opportunity to seize the attention of the media (and of voters) and force a conversation that happens on your terms, with your aims in mind.

The news of Trump’s decision to endanger everyone around him was an opportunity to do just that. It was a chance for Biden to emphasize the many and overlapping disasters he inherited from the former president and how both Trump and his party were poor stewards of the United States and the American people. A sharp remark would have put Trump’s failure back in the news and forced other Republicans to respond to it — on Biden’s terms.

Instead, by speaking as if he’s above the controversy, the president has, in effect, defused it.

Biden does not have to be like Trump — he does not have to try to dominate the public’s attention every minute of every day — but he should at least throw a jab when his opponents open themselves up to the hit. There is no reward for taking the high road in politics; there is only a lost opportunity to leave a mark.