Derek Bailey and the Death of Jazz (and the future of music blogging?)

In 1992, in conjunction with the release of the second edition of his landmark book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, Derek Bailey wrote and narrated a companion documentary series for Channel 4 TV in the UK. Roughly five years later, I got seriously interested in Bailey and his deliberately off-putting improvised guitar performances, and started an on-and-off love affair with the idea of tracking down and watching the documentary.

I wasn't serious at all about it - it has been screened a bunch of times, occasionally within a couple miles of me, and I wasn't thinking about it at the time. I finally sat down today with a couple hours to kill and stumbled across two of the four episodes posted here. I also found some ten-minute excerpts on youtube, and the clip below is one I find especially worth discussing right now:



The whole clip is worth your time. In the series (and the book before it), Bailey takes a look at the phenomenon of improvisation as an aspect of music making without regard to tradition or genre - there are chapters on music from all over India, on flamenco, on post-1960s "free improvisation," and all kinds of other stuff, presented in a mostly organized, but deliberately rambling fashion. It's an effort to pin down something about music that is, by necessity, not really pin-downable. In episode III of the four part series, Bailey looks mostly, but not entirely, at the jazz tradition. In these ten minutes, you get to watch Max Roach working with children and a lovely clip of a young Louis Armstrong, and hear a lot of facts, opinions, and errors about the jazz tradition. But the sentence that got to me today is Bailey's own, and shows up at about 5:30 of this clip:

“Great jazz now mostly belongs in the archives, and successors to the innovative giants of yesteryear are nowhere to be found. Kept afloat by the nostalgia industry and the education system, jazz is no longer the expressive force that uniquely combined a revolutionary art with working music.”

For me, this argument raises many more questions than it solves. If you look at any kind of music magazine that has been in publication for ten years or so, you'll catch a cycle in the criticism - Jazz (or rock, or hip hop, or opera, etc.) "dies" every few years, and folks lament and celebrate, and look around desperately for the Next Thing. That Next Thing, depending on the critic's point of view, either saves the dying culture for the next 20 years or so, or gives us a new direction in which to move forward in a new, post-rock, post-jazz, post-CD, post-whatever era.

This little critical cycle is almost invariably full of bad predictions and mislaid hopes. But what is curious to me about Bailey's line isn't so much what he's saying as the context, both historical and on the scope of the documentary, in which he's saying it. 1992 was not really a year for this kind of debate in the jazz world. That was all Down Beat was devoting itself to maybe ten or twelve years earlier, when fusion ruined everything. But by 1992, Wynton Marsalis was already old hat, and he had come on the scene with guns blazing to make America a Jazz Nation again, and the debate was squelched for a long while. And there was already the beginning of a resurgence in New York of 1960s style free jazz by then, and only a couple years later, Homestead Records would release an album by the David S. Ware quartet, at which point jazz was officially no longer dead, but the music that punk kids listened to when they became grownups. I think in this sense, Bailey emphasized the phrase "innovative giants" to good purpose, and as a pretty direct jab at both Marsalis and Ware. Bailey's own records, while not jazz in any kind of purist sense, sold out of the jazz section of most record stores, and he played as often as not in jazz clubs. And in the early 1990s, even as audiences for jazz had started growing again, the popular jazz artists were all looking back and not bringing much innovation to the party. Marsalis sounded like 1958, and the more advanced "avant-garde" wave all sounded like 1967. I think that that era in jazz has passed as well, but has it? On my more jaded days, I think that the most anyone is doing in jazz to make it sound like 2010 is covering old rock hits, like the Bad Plus does, or adding a danceable beat and playing for ex-Grateful Dead fans, like Medeski Martin and Wood did. I do start to wonder if there's a voice for this tradition now, even if not a herald of a new era, who is really bringing anything to jazz that hasn't been heard before. There's room for your comments here, and I'd like to hear them.

The other strange thing about Bailey's line is its placement in the special. We've just seen Max Roach, one of the most innovative, groundbreaking, and long-lasting musicians in jazz, teaching children, who seem to be taking his lesson well. Then Roach talks about jazz being sprung out of necessiity, that musicians like Louis Armstrong couldn't get formal music training so they improvised and then jazz was born. At which point, a few moments of a Louis Armstrong performance lead into Bailey's declaration. It's very strange, sandwiched between scenes of children being taught how to improvise by a jazz master, to hear a statement that indicates that all that footage is of an education process gone to waste. And it's further strange because Max Roach, musical genius that he was, had his history wrong about Armstrong, about the availabity of formal musical training (Armstrong had it, getting trumpet lessons in the orphanage at an early age) and the pervasive improvisation in Armstrong's music (it has become clear through careful listening to Armstrong's recorded ouvre, and to his copyrighted trumpet solos in the Library of Congress, that Satchmo wrote a lot of his stuff down, learned it, and played it more or less the same way for years at a time). It occurs to me that Bailey's decidedly non-linear approach to music is at work with his words here, and that the questions raised by his statement are more important than the statement itself. Again, I'd love to hear what you think.

The Spanish Avant-Garde, apparently.

Ubu-web, one of my favorite sources for information about and recordings of deeply weird music of the last century or so, has just posted a page dedicated to the Spanish avant-garde here.

I don't fully understand what that means yet, and I'm not terribly familiar with experimental music in Spain - my biggest exposure to Spanish creative musicians so far has been going to grad school where a composition professor was a pretty arch-conservative composer who liked to write everything in the same time signature. But briefly skimming, this seems like a pretty interesting anthology of strange music, with a range of sonic abnormality from proto-New Wave non-dance music (Esplendor Geometrico sounds like Suicide en Espanol) to environmental soundscape to academic electronic play.

I intend to revisit this link after a busy weekend with some more thorough reviews, but skimming briefly as I did this morning, I am hearing a pretty interesting document of Spain in the late 1970s. Not too different than what was going on in New York or London, but a bit more mechanical and aggressive than a lot of similar stuff from other countries. No doubt, with some extra time to reflect and listen closely, I'll find a way to talk about a culture coming out of dictatorship and dealing with newly found freedom after becoming accustomed to extreme control, or something like that. For now, at least I've found a fun web page to share.

Scream of the Week

A day late, but worthwhile to get the series back on its feet.



Previous to this week, I've been trying to focus on genuine screaming. The goal has been to find real terror, real anger, real existential cries. This week I want to spend a moment focusing on more artificial, theatrical use of screaming, and I can't think of anyone better at that than Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. On this clip, the proper scream doesn't happen until the very last note, but Dickinson's whole vocal style depends on the sense that he's at the very edge, ready to abandon pitch and technique at any moment and just let loose. There are probably better examples of Dickinson's screaming, and I'll revisit him, because time is short and I want to get into this a bit more. But this song is a classic, and now there's an excuse for you to listen to it again.

Dock Boggs

I was pleasantly surprised the other day, trawling youtube for something to write about, to see this clip of Dock Boggs performing "Country Blues" in the mid-1960s:



It's a pretty great performance, and it has a quality that I've found in a few late performances by jazz saxophonist Lester Young, and a few other people at the end of their performing careers and lives. When the clip starts out, Boggs looks and sounds a little tired, and he can't make his phrases at the sleepy tempo he picks. Everything is a bit gloomy and tired, and the banjo playing is abnormally simple and sloppy, but performing one of his "hits" from 40 years earlier, he wakes up. Each verse is a little faster than the one before it, and his singing gets gradually more confident. By the end of the tune, Boggs is sitting up straighter, tapping his foot, and nearly smiling, although that never quite happens, out of respect to the gothically depressing lyrics, typical for the repertoire Boggs usually chose to record.

I also had a good time comparing this clip to the original 1928 recording he made:



The earlier recording is a very different arrangement. It's at a faster tempo, with more complex banjo playing, more consistent phrasing, and a higher key. There's a pretty clear decline in Boggs' playing and singing over the 25-year-long break he took from performing, but there's also a deliberate change in the way Boggs approaches this song at two very different points in his life, and I think I can hear the difference between a young man singing about how he's messing up and an old man looking back at his youthful mistakes.

I listened to Kenny G so that you don't have to.

First of all, thanks to anyone reading this for your patience after I suddenly dissapeared from the blogosphere a few weeks ago. It's a sorry excuse, but my laptop bit the dust at the end of June, and it took me a while to set up to post again.

I just found out a few minutes ago that, in a grand contribution to my Schadenfreude, Kenny G released a new album a couple weeks ago, following a two year break from his last LP, during which time it seems he spent a great deal of time cultivating his hair, because his stylistic development as a musician has been minimal since 2008's breakthrough album Rhythm & Romance.

Calling R&R breakthrough is only a half-joke, honestly. While I must admit that I can't bear to hear all five albums that Kenny G released since I wrote about him in my book, I did manage to get through two tracks on the album, and darn it, if he hasn't augmented what I called "rapid but simple solos that largely consist of scales up and down the instrument that might be a warm-up for other musicians" with a couple bebop licks. Seriously, I counted two.

I'm currently streaming Heart and Soul for the first (and likely only) time - the brave can hear it here - and I can't say I hear the artistic courage he displayed on Rhythm & Romance. Kenny G's website claims that the album "returns the legendary saxophonist to his R&B roots," and while I don't hear much of Barry White here (it was while touring with White that Kenny G dropped the "orelik" from his last name and found his mature voice), the standard mechanical backing beats and total lack of interaction among the (probably entirely sampled) band is back in full force, with the latin beats of R&R (which frankly remind me of a polka gig I used to work with a crazy Polish accordionist who also worked the subway system of New York) replaced by a weak backbeat on alternate tracks, and something a little catchier on all of the even numbered tracks. And on a marked departure from the albums that made him a superstar in the 1980s, I have heard two tracks so far with final chords instead of nice, unobtrusive fadeouts.

That seems to be all there is to say, really, about Kenny G's most recent album and any distinguishing characteristics it might have. What has not changed, and likely will not ever change, is Kenny G's cloying vibrato, weak attack, and apparent breath control issues, especially evident during longer phrases. And the annoying limited vocabulary with which he ornaments melodies. Listen carefull and it's easy to catch the quick upper-neighbor tones, mordants, scale runs and maybe three or four licks played over and over again, as he has been doing his entire career. There's probably a fine line between a signature style and a schtick, but Kenny G doesn't really threaten that line in the least.

All of this said, though, I stand behind my defense of Kenny G's importance as an artistic voice, and his stature as a central figure in post-fusion jazz. As bad as his music is (and - I'm serious about this - I listened to at least half of his 23 albums before I felt comfortable judging his music in general as bad), if you go out into the street right now, and ask everyone you see to name a jazz musician, you'll get about five names from everyone unless you stumble into an obsessive geek like me (and probably you) - Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, maybe John Coltrane. And if you then ask them to name a currently active jazz musician, maybe 25% of them will say "Wynton Marsalis" but the other 75% will surely say "Kenny G." Calling him a talentless hack is easy and hard to argue with. I honestly always wanted to argue in his defense as a musician, but then I sat down and listened to hours of his music, and yes, he's as terrible as, say, Pat Metheny says he is. But Metheny only gets half the story, and so do many, many jazz purists and other folks who recognize Kenny G as an easy target. The fact of the matter is that it's easy to trace the lineage from Kenny G's music, and that lineage has a lot of great jazz names in it. G sounds like late Miles Davis, who took a cue from Grover Washington Jr. and Wes Montgomery and even Charlie Parker at the end of his career. As much as most jazz listeners want to say that Kenny G isn't even jazz, they can't honestly do that. He developed a tradition that goes back throughout the American musical tradition, and added his own instantly recognizable stylistic developments to that tradition. Just like John Coltrane did.

The important difference, of course, is that John Coltrane's music is usually at least bearable to listen to for an hour.

Scream of the Week

Here's a classic. The story goes (according to my formidable research skills applied to a 30 second glance at wikipedia.org and allmusic.com, anyway), that former boxer, soldier, and Tiny Grimes vocalist Screamin' Jay Hawkins had envisioned his 1956 hit "I Put A Spell On You" as a ballad to feature his operatic, Cab Calloway inspired delivery, but he got wasted with his band and recorded the classic version in a drunken blackout.

It's hard to justify this recording as a mistake, though, given the rest of Hawkins' career, and the creepy lyrics to the song. Hawkins gloriously presented himself not as a great singer, which he could have done, but as a character from any number of matinee horror/adventure b-movies. It's all there on the recording, and this television appearance just makes it obvious. The cheap, darkly lit, gothic set, the parody-horror of a 5-and-10-cent store pair of false teeth, and of course the trademark bone through the nose and skull-on-a-stick sceptre all evoke not true terror, but the mid-Century "horror" trope. A generation that saw the true terror of the Holocaust and nuclear warfare coped with the experience in better times by poking fun at the feeling and distancing true threats with humor and an artificial world. And Hawkinns, for all his convulsions and wide eyes and speaking in tongues, keeps the audience comfortable with a konked out hairdo. It's a neon sign glaring at the audience saying, "I'll creep you out for now, but I still spend hours at a time in a barbershop making sure I still look like one of you when I'm done with the act."

But boy, does Hawkins commit to the performance. Through all the humor and stereotype, his screams sound awfully real, and they come from the gut the same way Roky Erickson's would later (without the friendly winking). It's one thing to let an audience in on a joke, but it's another to welcome people in so they can hear what they might not otherwise want to hear. This song, and this performance, is all about control, and the need to live in a magical world outside this one to have any control.

Is it too much an extension of metaphor to say that "I Put A Spell On You" is about the nascent Civil Rights movement? Consciously, it probably is. But on one hand, it's not too much of a stretch to say that this song directly says in the lyrics, and indirectly says in the performance, "I can't get what I want in this world, but I am entitled to have it, so I'll just change the world to one in which I have what I want." A man who, due to his skin color and background, can only aspire to serve richer, paler people, can serve them by fantasizing a world in which he can kill them and put their head on a stick.

This kind of thing is hardly unique in African American culture, either, or I wouldn't be so quick to buy my own interpretation. While watching this clip this morning, I decided that it's time to start a series in this blog, profiling African American science fiction fans in music. That sounds a little silly until you seriously look at the list of folks to profile. Just off the top of my head: Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, Anthony Braxton, Michael Jackson and Doctor Octagon come to mind without thinking too much, and I remember other examples like John Coltranes titles in his late career that frequently touch on outer space and astrology, and the opening minute or so of the seminal De La Soul album Three Feet High and Rising, featuring the creepily (and comically) intoned "Blood Sucking Freaks, just like yo momma." I could probably go on like this for weeks if I'm not careful, and I invite your suggestions for other examples. But they all, on a fundamental and occasionally explicit level, say the same thing: as a black man in America, I have to live in a world I don't want, but I can at least fantasize about a different world as an artist, and show you the power of which I am capable.

Free Improvisation, Memory, and Recording.

I'm just back from Brooklyn, where I spent the weekend recording my free improvisation quartet, Carlos' Red Shoes. I suppose I'm pretty happy with the results - I'll post tracks here as soon as they become available - but recording improvisation is always a massive head trip to me, and I generally find my own thoughts more interesting than the recorded results when I record unplanned music.

About ten years ago, I did a recording session of some improvisation, and one the players (I wish I could remember who, sorry) told me, "look, improvisation is always more fun to do than to listen to, so there's no point in worrying about how it sounds." As jaded as that perspective is, it really does take the pressure off the musician to come up with something engaging off the top of his or her head, and I find it helpful to remember it when I'm sitting in the corner with furrowed brow, trying to figure out what to play (which is more often than I'd like, but sometimes the best thing to add to a sound is nothing else, too). Call me an idealist, but I have a different take on what I'm doing when I improvise freely - my goal is still to have fun doing it, but I also think total improvisation can be the best way to address a moment as it happens - right now, I don't really want to hear a Serge Gainsbourg tune, I think I'd rather hear a tuba played with a saxophone mouthpiece, and if I'm improvising, I have the extreme luxury of playing my tuba with a saxophone mouthpiece right now, and I get to hear it. Because of this approach, I tend to forget pretty much everything I played right after I've played it. Partly because the moment is passed, and what I played doesn't serve a purpose for me anymore, and partly because I was so darn busy playing the stuff that I couldn't really make a note of what I was playing. The other guys in CRS tell me that I had a pretty nice extended tuba solo going on at one point, and I do remember that at one point everyone stopped playing except for me, and they all came in again at the same time and I had a good feeling. But I have no idea what I played, for how long, and whether it felt good because it sounded good. It didn't matter at the time and I can't really go back and play it again anyway. But the strange thing to me is that in a week or so when I get the rough mixes from Sunday, I'll know exactly what that sounded like, and if it's good enough to make the cut and we release it, anyone who wants to know what my playing is like will have that moment to listen to and come up with an impression of my musical approach.

I wouldn't say that it was pointless to make that moment permanent. On one hand, I enjoy some recordings that I understand to be completely and freely improvised and I'm glad that those particular moments have been made permanent. On the other hand, well, CRS has had trouble with clubs and gigs, and maybe yesterday we played something that will catch the right ears, and they'll hire us to play, and we'll make back a little bit of the money that we spend to keep the band going. I think I will say, though, that a recorded improvisation is a completely different entity than the actual improvisation that got recorded. It's pure chance that the recording sounds like it does, that the moments we were playing were the same moments that microphones were present and that zeros and ones were arranged on a hard drive in a specific order to make a machine reproduce the sounds of that moment. But there's no going back to change that data now. What had been a flexible, reactive, fluid moment is played back the same way, every time, with no change, for eternity. It almost feels like I have no part in the recording part of recorded improvisation, and the stuff on that hard drive is not what I played in the same way a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence is not the actual birth of a nation from a rebellious British colony.

And at the same time, what we played yesterday was in response to a strange moment. It wasn't just what we felt like playing at the time. It was what we felt like playing at the time, with microphones pointed at us, and a guy in the other room making sure that what we felt like playing was being made into a permanent thing, a list of numbers that will not change once we're done with the technical fiddling. Now, that's as valid a moment as any moment we might spend on stage, or in a rehearsal space, or wherever, but it's no more typical a situation in which I might make up some music than if I were to be riding on the back of a zebra down Canal street with a tuba in my lap.

I will know, in a few weeks, once I've forgotten the weather, and the conversation I had had the night before, and the endorphin rush when Dave and Dan kicked in together at the end of my tuba solo, whether what we recorded is worth listening to. But as a performer, there's really no way I can listen to my music and tell you whether it's any good or not. Not while I'm playing it, because I don't have time and I'm focused on playing the stuff. And not while I listen back, because I hear what I thought were mistakes at the time and I hear the band giving up on what we were trying to do and just floundering for a few minutes - all while you just hear music, the completed result of what we ended up playing at that moment. On some level, that's always true. I know things about the structure and method and style of my playing that you don't and likely can't hear, and in exchange, I can't hear the music I make in the way it's listened to by anyone besides me.

And in the meantime, I never have these thoughts when I listen to a Derek Bailey album. They don't matter. I can't hear them and I don't care. And while I still generally say that there's no good in recording improvised music, that what we play with no preparation is not intended to be heard past the moment in which we decided to play it, I can't say I've ever turned down the opportunity to listen to a few favorite albums multiple times just because I knew that the music was only to be played live once and then never revisited.

Scream of the Week

The best screams don't always have to come from the human voice. One of my favorite screamers of all time is Pharoah Sandars.



I chose this live performance of the Coltrane Quintet from 1966 mostly because Sanders takes the first solo, but you can hear his astonishing screaming throughout his career, and especially when he played with Coltrane. Here, the most obvious examples of what I'm talking about happen at 2:20, 4:40, 6:00, and 8:00 of the clip.

To my ears, the piercing squeal that Sanders achieves, almost always built up with rising glissandi, and similarly trailing off into Ayler-like smears down in pitch, have that same kind of existential rawness that I talked about Roky Erickson having a couple weeks ago. The context makes it maybe a little less jarring than Erickson's screams, since this is some pretty up-tempo, chaotic, screamy music to begin with. But it's also probably a little more direct because of the same context.

There's also a sense in which each of Sanders' screamy moments in this solo serve as a microcosm of the solo itself. Each of those moments is a little louder, higher, and more human than the one before it, and like the ahh-ahhh-ACHOO effect of each moment, he builds over four minutes, and then trails away. Sanders isn't working much with pitch motives or melody in his solo (that's Coltrane's job in this group, and by the way, Sanders really never avoids melody or harmony as a player, with the exception of his work with Coltrane - I suspect it's an overlooked clue about the degree of control and arrangement that Coltrane had in his freer, noisier performances that he could convince Sanders to focus almost entirely on non-tonal, gestural, and screamy playing with the group, even if Sanders' own interests lay elsewhere), but he builds a long-term structure on repeated ideas in a way that reminds me a lot of Lester Young (no joke!).

Destroying Classics for Fun and Profit.

Okay, not profit. But maybe to cover expenses.

I've been putting off this review of Puttin' On The Ritz's new project, a full scale re-arrangement and performance of the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat for several reasons. One reason was due to family obligations, but the rest have been musical. Here's a link to singer BJ Rubin's blog post about the album, with a link to a free download of the whole thing, and a youtube clip of the recording of "Sister Ray:"

http://feelfreefeelfree.blogspot.com/2010/06/puttin-on-ritz.html

To put my personal connections out of the way first: Kevin Shea, the drummer (and for a long time, the other half) of Puttin' On The Ritz has been a friend of mine for 15 or 20 years. We go way back, and have played together a lot. I also once sat in for BJ during a POTR gig at a loft party in Brooklyn and had a grand old time.

Kevin is brilliant. No one plays drums like he does, and in the right context he is a powerfully engaging, fun, and almost shocking performer. In the wrong contexts he can be overpowering, but he has the wisdom to keep those situations to a minimum. BJ is an engaging and charismatic performer, too, and one of the worst singers you'll ever applaud at a show. That's the schtick - POTR was originally a duo that stuck to the Great American Songbook, with no reference to pitch and only occasional attempts at keeping the rhythm together. If it sounds awful, well, it was awful, and hilarious, and pretty refreshing a few years ago.

Eventually, all projects mature, even the deliberately immature ones. White Light/White Heat sees the group expanded with bass and a horn line, and the deliberately amateurish sloppiness is mostly gone from the band, save for Rubin's highly stylized, mostly pitchless vocal delivery. For this project, that's really too bad. I think it's a little easy to do what POTR did a before with older material that's pretty removed from our generation. With the decision to recast the Velvet Underground, though, the band commited a kind of cultural suicide. Folks my age and Kevin and BJ's age still worship White Light/White Heat and Velvet Underground and Nico, and the attachment to the "classic" label is real for us. While it's still possible to have a respect for Rodgers and Hart, it's difficult in 2010 to feel the kind of cultural resonance for Old Broadway that we feel for a group that really started punk rock and indie rock and the whole nihilistic slacker thing that white people in their 30s happily accept as the label we got stuck with.

I think the mistake that POTR made in their deconstruction of the Velvet Underground is that they didn't get their own joke, or maybe they got it but they blew the delivery by overcommitting, like a nervous guy on a first date who tries too hard. There's some very, very nice playing from some of my favorite New York weird jazz musicians on this record, but it's wasted on the wrong context. If the intent of this record is to kill idols, then there needs to be violence, but the arrangements are too polished and too committed, and they barely make reference to the songs they're recasting. If the intent was to show respect with a new voice, well, songs like "Sister Ray," as grand as it is, are too simple re-envision, and rely on the performance for success - and that's precisely what's missing from the POTR version. And if it's a parody, then it's just too high-concept. These guys love the Velvet Underground and they're only able to parody their own fondness for the record. BJ's bad singing, when applied to songs we're used to hearing sung by Mel Torme or Nat King Cole or someone, is hilarious because BJ's commitment to his singing is obvious, and the contrast with what we expect to hear from a lounge singer works. But Lou Reed is a bad singer, with a weak voice, and a committed but poor delivery. So what's added by doing that again, but louder? I really wanted to have an answer to that question besides "nothing," but instead I just couldn't get through the record. It's a shame.

Scream of the Week

After last week's existential bellow, I thought it would be a good idea to get a little more traditional with the screaming. Starting with the first cry of the title sans band, Poly Styrene lets forth a a continuous, adolescent, slightly whiny scream of defiance and anger for the entire performance of "Oh, Bondage, Up Yours" that is more punk than punk.

With the passing of some 30 years since this record was made, it's pretty easy to hear X Ray Spex as classic early British punk, but in many ways the band were a scene unto themselves. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols both excelled in a kind of bratty, sarcastic shock tactic that was really at the core of a lot of early punk, celebrating child abuse ("Beat on the brat with a baseball bat"), tearing down idols with biting sarcasm ("God save the Queen. We mean it, man!"), even celebrating Nazism with a shallow, meaningless, our-parents-are-going-to-HATE-this nihilism (I won't offend readers by posting the image here, but I will post the link and let you decide - this is Siouxsie Sioux in her usual club hopping outfit circa 1975 or so: http://images.newstatesman.com/articles/2008/1026/026_p22.2.jpg). But there is no winking here: Poly Styrene, at the time she recorded "Some say little girls should be seen and not heard," was a little girl trying desperately to be seen and heard. Instead of terrorizing the old guard with the threat that she might be trouble, she's trying to BE trouble, to really break the shackles of English polite society. It's barely even a metaphor.

Saying it better than I can, from some documentary I haven't seen but need to track down soon:

People made a video and I didn't know about it.

By which I mean the duo of Mary Halvorson and Kevin Shea. It's not new, nor is the song, but I need to get out of the 1960s on this blog as quickly as possible:




Later tonight I intend to review one of two ironic cover albums that Kevin has done this year - Puttin' On The Ritz's cover of the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat. He has also apparently recorded a version of Kind of Blue with Moppa Elliot's band Mostly Other People Do The Killing.

I will have a LOT to say about Kevin's involvement in two projects to re-record entire classic albums from an era before he was born. But in the meantime, this is a nice, short song to get you accustomed to Kevin's playing and his fondness for dropping stuff during performances.

Scream of the Week

I wanted to do a little essay on Great Screams in Music History, but I got a little overwhelmed thinking of the possibilities. So I hereby designate every Thursday as Scream of the Week Day. This week, the Godfather of Psychedelic Screams:



First, full disclosure: I studied tuba with Roky Erickson's youngest brother, Sumner, and we became good friends, and I have met Roky a few times and he always remembers me. Not that it presents a conflict of interest or anything, but... well, it's an opportunity to brag.

Roky Erickson is one of the great masters of screaming, and he lets loose multiple times in this, his biggest hit and one of the greatest and earliest examples of psychedelic rock. I think he takes off from Little Richard's (also brilliant) screams, and uses them similarly, to punctuate phrases and put climactic moments over the top. Little Richard clearly gets it from gospel music, and so does Screaming Jay Hawkins in his own weird way, but if I trace it all the way back I'll end up with a book, and anyway every week is a chance to further discuss the great screamers.

Anyway, Roky starts where Little Richard leaves off, but when Little Richard goes in with a nice, satisfying "Woooooo!" it's all party. Roky gets much, much deeper, just opening his mouth wide, and shaking his head a bit and letting loose from the depths of his gut. It's usually "AAAAAAAAWH!" But it's more than that - it's the unfettered cry from the core of his being, uncluttered by consonants, or any effort to make a sound in English or any other language. It could be absolutely terrifying, and I've heard a few recordings where Roky is, in fact, absolutely terrifying. Here, it's more existential. The song is already an affirmation of existence and importance - you might be mean, but I'm more important than you think, and you're gonna miss me. So pretty much every minute - at the top of the song, the top of the second verse at 1:05 and on the way out of the song at 2:05 - he blows like a train whistle.

It's not the only scream in Roky's vocabulary, by the way, even if it might be the one that makes him an important singer. Check out that weird bark at 1:34, right before the second bridge. I'm not even sure what that sound is, besides intense. I am reasonably certain that this will not be Roky's only Scream of the Week - there are a lot of screams of his worth writing about.

Albert Ayler, part III.

I originally wanted to finish my opening volley on Ayler with a 1966 performance of "Truth Is Marching In" from Berlin. Actually, I wanted to do write on Live In Greenwich Village from the same year, but I couldn't find a handy youtube clip to link to. Turns out that's fine, though, because I found yet another 1966 performance of the same tune that makes a pretty darn interesting comparison to me.

Here's the Berlin performance - to my ears, this recording is a little harsh with high-end, and the violin is a bit too hot in the mix, so be ready for that:



Looking back over the last two posts, I think I've been so eager to talk about my argument that Ayler is less far out than he sounds that I haven't really talked much about how he sounds. This performance has a lot of what I think of as typical Ayler - the simple melodies and repeated riffs, the cluttered, in-your-face textures, the kind of smeary yowl that he plays when other folks with his technical facility might go for Coltrane-like showers of arpeggios and scales. The opening and closing sections are really lovely - very reminiscent of a New Orleans funeral - but importantly, Ayler likes to include all the  cracks in the surface that appear in a good field recording. There are deliberately sour and out of tune notes all over the place, and the musicians are free to leave the choir playing the main melody and chatter along in parallel, like folks talking during a performance, or maybe weeping and wailing during a funeral. After a couple centuries of listening to big and loud groups work their hardest to sound like one voice, the seeming lack of cohesion that Ayler goes for can be pretty disconcerting. Fifty years ago, you either got this sound or you didn't. And while free jazz is certainly a sound that many people are used to now, it's still far from the kind of cliche that you can safely play in Starbucks without people noticing. Of course, that's the point of playing like that. Pretty in a vacuum becomes boring. If you want to get from pretty to beautiful, you have to include contrast, and you have to include enough ugly to make things more like your life. That last chord is the simplest and most common major triad that you can hear in last chords dating back at least to the 15th Century. It's no big deal. But the ugly moments in this performance (most free jazz fans won't call the music ugly, but we're being a little disingenuous, I think. We just like ugly and try to rationalize it later) make it sound transcendent. We all just went through all that together - it was loud, and chaotic, and we couldn't get a grasp on what was going on, but now we're through it, and back on solid ground, but transformed. Shoot, Greek tragedy works on that premise.

Ayler's music on the surface level contains a lot to think about and discuss, and it's pretty understandable that there hasn't been a lot of discussion of what's going on beyond that surface. Just about everything I've read about Ayler's music can fit into two categories. There's the introductory spiel: Ayler has a huge sound with a wide vibrato, he likes folk melodies and really simple tunes, and when he's not playing the tune, it's loud and chaotic and can be really hard to take. Or there's the blind fandom approach: Ayler is deeply spiritual, truly free, uplifting and if you don't get it, you just don't get it. I certainly have no argument with either of those angles on Ayler's music, and there is nothing exclusive about either of them. But there is a middle ground that doesn't get a lot of discussion. For all the attention to the "free" part of free jazz, if it weren't still jazz it wouldn't sound the way it does. We hear total chaos every day when we walk out into the street, but it takes some tradition and coordination to turn that into a recognizable performance. In this performance, Ayler sticks to a very clearly delineated form, and for as much freedom as everyone in the group is allowed, they move in lock step from section to section. It opens with that lovely, New Orleans inspired chorale, of course, and stays there for over half of the performance. At 4:12 in the above clip, Ayler introduces new material - that almost Irish sounding shuffle riff, and the rest of the band is right there with him before he even finishes the first phrase. That B section doesn't last long - at 4:40, Ayler shoots up into the altissimo register of the sax, and that's the signal for the group to join him in fast, loud, chaotic blowing. It's the only properly free section of the performance, and again it starts on Ayler's signal and everyone knows to go right into it (it's also the first time the group leaves the firmly entrenched tonal center of the tune. I would not call it atonal, though, which implies using the western pitch system in a way that avoids the implication of a tonic. This is non-tonal playing - pitch is not really the point here at all.). The free blowing goes on for almost exactly one minute, at which point Ayler re-introduces the jig theme and again, no one in the band misses the cue. And at 5:57, it's a return to the opening chorale, shortened to one minute this time, and it winds up on that gloriously quiet last chord. So the form here is ABCBA - that's the more-or-less classic arch form that Duke Ellington famously used a lot, and I think that indicates that Ayler was playing jazz with a depth greater than the often acknowledged nods in his music to Sidney Bechet's sound on the sax and the improvised counterpoint of New Orleans second line bands.

In fact, I think Ayler's attention to form in his performances is something that he has in common with Ellington, George Russell, Stan Kenton, and a few other composers and arrangers of big bands, but it hadn't cropped up in a lot of smaller groups before, who most often are content to stick to the head-solos-head form that makes up probably 90% of bebop and post-bebop jazz.

Funnily enough, on some level, it's the formal aspects of Ayler's compositions that identify tunes for people, even if they don't notice it. I came across this clip from Slug's Saloon in New York from the same year, also titled "Truth Is Marching In."



I don't know who applied the titles to these two performances, but it's not the same tune at all, and not even the same form. I can only assume that it's the opening chorale followed by triple-meter riff followed by basically free playing that gives the impression that they're the same performance. That's funny to me, because this performance is also just as tightly played in just as clear a form, but it's not an Ellingtonian arch. I hear it as a Rondo, which is a form that dates way, way back, and Mozart used it all the time. After the intro, that riff is used as a refrain that pops up between sections of contrasting material. So the whole performance goes Intro-ABACADA(etc.). I'd like to know who identified these two performances and gave them the same title. If it was a listener, well, it was just a careless listener. But if it was Ayler announcing the tunes as such, there's a whole discussion to had some other time about what Ayler considered a composition, or whether he attached much significance to his titles at all.

Albert Ayler, part II.

Here is an earlier clip, from a 1963 recording:




This recording ought to be a classic. It's stark raving gorgeous, and just about everyone I've spoken to agrees with me. It's not even terribly rare or unappreciated, either - it gets blogged about all the time, it seems.

I've always been just a little bit confused by this track, and by that whole first album in general. I can't honestly say I've done the deep research on Ayler's career like I have with some other people (I think I'd rather be a fan and not make the transition to expert). But I haven't been aware of much early, transitional, pre-mature-voice recordings - really, I only know this album. It's not clear to me from what I've read whether this album is Ayler before he figured out his own sound, or if he's just keeping it toned down for the straights. Either way, it wasn't long before he was working with folks that were willing to abandon straight rhythm and Western pitch and harmony with him. Still, I'm not entirely convinced that he isn't reacting to the band and the tune the way any good musician does, and the breadth of style and approach in this tune alone (let alone in contrast to the rest of his recorded output) show Ayler to be not just good, but great.

One thing that crops up in a lot of assessments of this track is that the Swedish rhythm section "didn't understand Ayler's playing." I don't know who the first critic was that said that, but it's a cop-out - and, like the old story that Louis Armstrong started scat singing on "Heebie Jeebies" because he dropped his music during the take, it doesn't take long to disprove it just by listening to the recording carefully. For one thing, that's Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen on the bass. He's like the Swedish Henry Grimes. He can and does play anything and everything, and sounds great doing it every time. This is not someone who wouldn't understand Albert Ayler, especially when Ayler is playing old chestnuts like "Summertime" and "Bye Bye, Blackbird." I can concede that there are moments on the rest of the album where the dissonance between the mostly inside playing of the band and wild slurring of Ayler's solos come off like a plaid shirt with a striped tie, but not here, and check out that nice little chromatic crunch from the piano at 0:55. It's subtle, but it's there. This quartet knew what it was doing. If you want to hear failure in action like that, it's better to look at Cecil Taylor's album Stereo Drive, which is now better known as Coltrane Time and released under Coltrane's name. Kenny Dorham could not hang with Taylor's busy, dissonant comping, and he walked out of the session, which is why he isn't on the second side of the LP. That's what happens when it doesn't work out (and by the way, that was 1958. Surely, by 1963, word had made it to Sweden that American jazz musicians could get pretty weird).

So why cast aspersions against the rest of the band on this album? Well, for one thing, there's that dissonance between styles. Niels Bronsted really does keep his piano solo inside, and it's really nice, but it could have been played seven or eight years earlier and not raised eyebrows. To my ears, that's a welcome contrast, kind of like when John Coltrane played a million notes per second with the Miles Davis Quartet so that Miles could play three notes over the next two minutes during his solo. A bigger reason, though, is that what this recording says can make both musical conservatives and free jazz people a little uncomfortable: weird music may be weird, but it's still just music. The contrast between some of Ayler's wild sounds and Bronsted's inside playing isn't misunderstanding, it's just contrast. It's not like Ayler doesn't get the changes, and in fact he plays them beautifully, with occasional non-pitched commentary (and vice versa, really - he packs a lot of different things into the five minutes or so that he plays here). And similarly, Bronsted isn't ignorant to the fact that the saxophone player is doing some different sounding stuff, and he very tastefully stays out of the way and lets it happen.

Ayler's approach to music making here is to concentrate on his remarkable phrasing and some of the odder sounds he can get from his saxophone (many of which can be heard on rhythm and blues recordings from ten or fifteen years earlier, although not with Ayler's huge and inimitable core sound), while still openly and happily playing fairly traditional jazz. He's not that weird, he just sounds that weird. And as I mentioned, I'm not sure if this is a transitional thing for Ayler, or if it's just the way he works with this band for this recording. But I think it might be fair to say that, as far out and noisy and dissonant and "free" as Ayler sounds, there is still a strong core of the post-bop jazz tradition in his music, as I hope to show tomorrow when I look at a clip in which Ayler, blowing as freely and noisily has I've ever heard him, nails Ellington.

Albert Ayler, part I.

I've been listening to and thinking about Albert Ayler and his music a lot lately. He's one of those characters whose biography can outshine his music - partly because it's really strange (Did he really sound like Charlie Parker back in Cleveland, or did Cleveland just have that weird a music scene? He liked to stare into the sun? Really? How DID he die?), but I think it's also because his music can be pretty tough to talk about. His music, and the music of a lot of his successors, it awfully weird and intimidating on the surface. I find, though, that at it's core, this is still post-bop jazz, and the weird aggressive sounds are just weird aggressive sounds. Once you can hear what's NOT avant-garde about Ayler (and many others), you can come around to hearing what's beautiful about the strangeness. Here and in the next couple posts are three clips to show you what I mean, and my own attempt to actually discuss the music itself:



That's "Ghosts" from the album that kind of puts him on the map, Spiritual Unity. It's a frequent choice to introduce Albert Ayler to people, and it shows up in quite a few jazz history textbooks, including mine. There are lots of good reasons for that - with just a trio, you really get to hear what Ayler is doing - a lot of the time his recordings sound like massive, disorganized pile-ons at first, with six or seven people all sounding like they're trying to take the first solo at once. Here, you get Sunny Murray's usual tempoless chattering on the drums (and I mean that as a compliment - it's really hard to do what he does) and Gary Peacock playing pretty clearly supportive bass. So the focus is on one instrument, Ayler's tenor sax, and that can be plenty to absorb if you're not used to listening to stuff that fights tradition.

There are one or two things that come up in all the intro books with this recording - Ayler doesn't bother with traditional harmony, he makes some pretty strange noises, and he doesn't start with the head right away. And when that's all you read about his music, you can leave with the impression that there's not much more to it than that. That's not only unfair to his stuff, it's the reason it took me a good two years to actually like his music. Pay attention to that short, weird introduction, because it's a clue to his approach to free jazz in general. The notes don't make sense, the lines kind of meander around chromatically, and there's that ugly multiphonic bark in the second phrase. So the stage is set early - don't expect a pretty song, don't expect a lot of pretty in general, at least by the standards we've all been taught. But it's not nonsense, either - it's the same rhythm as the melody that he plays a couple seconds later, on which the whole performance is really based. And beyond that, the lines he plays have the same question/answer structure, and even the same pitch contour as the head (by which I mean, when the melody gets higher, so does the intro before it). Really, what he has done is to take away all the elements of music that we can discuss easily with the vocabulary of music theory - harmony, counterpoint, pitch, etc., and played a variation on all the other sonic aspects of the tune. He specializes in playing with contour, phrasing, tone color, dynamics, etc., and really, he doesn't get too far from the head in that respect. If you listen to the track four or five times in a row (it's not that long - you can take it!), you start to hear how he does this throughout the solo. The traditional way to discuss his soloing is to say that he dispenses with the head and plays what he feels, man! And sure, he does that. So does Louis Armstrong. So does Beethoven, for that matter. But it's not like he chose his compositions at random and then ignored them. As far as those not-so-easilly-discussed aspects of the tune itself, he starts out very close to the melody in his solo, and even in the long chromatic run that makes up most of what he plays, those shapes and phrases and general pitch directions come back again and again, even in the three minutes or so that he solos. Like a lot of people do when they develop non-traditional systems from scratch, Ayler comes up with a pretty simple and easily grasped solution - if Western Music took 1000 years to get to where it was in 1966, and Ayler only has about ten years to learn the saxophone and come up with a new kind of music, he isn't going to be able to come up with something as complicated as the tradition he's bucking.