December 6th 2009
Here is a grab bag of photography and art books on jazz, blues, and pop. The selections are in alphabetical order by title.
February 6th 2010
During the last two weeks in January of 2010, the jazz media flooded the avant-garde jazz public with descriptions of the persona of Matthew Shipp in anticipation of the release of his “last” solo recording, 4D, scheduled on the 26th of the month. JazzTimes featured a story; Signal to Noise did a cover story; and AllAboutJazz.com published a piece, which I wrote. Several blogs, as well as Bulletin Boards, were delving into conversations about Shipp’s profane language, his casting aspersions on his elders, his self-involvement, his arrogance as well as the sheer amount of coverage given to the musician. In this entire hullabaloo, as I remember it, the music was only touched upon.
My feature centered on the recording session for 4D in May of 2009. The experience was unique for me; I went because I never thought that I would have another opportunity to share in this process. I did not take notes at the session. I absorbed as much as I could with my eyes and ears. When the challenge to write the article for AAJ arose, I had to do everything I could to integrate the information necessary to produce a full-bodied article. Months of listening to Shipp’s solo records and the promo CD, interviewing Shipp on the phone and exchanging emails, when gaps needed to be filled, were critical to the writing.
Shipp’s solo music from 1995 on to the present clearly spoke of its evolution. It was obvious to me how experiential influx moved him to render his sound. From album to album, the music shifted in delivery even in the smallest of increments. Out of the six solo records, the most noticeable change occurred between Songs of 2001, and One of 2006. Granted several years passed between the two records, nonetheless, a rebirth had taken place.
Shipp’s essence entered the grooves of One. It was if he had gritted his teeth and leaned into a full force wind. It was the first record for which he seriously composed both lead sheets and heads. The music was written down. It was embedded in stone, in perpetuity; it was repeatable. He had reached one of those moments in his musical life when he had taken an extra step, similar to the step a visual artist takes when he knows that he has to buy a better brush to paint with or a better grade pencil with which to draw.
It is at those times in the creative process when the artist is seizing onto shaping the quality of his work. A cycle has completed itself. A cycle of discovering has concluded and has broken through a wall in order to continue. It is not easy to face these moments because they are filled with questions and inherently uncertain. Yet, with the answers to these questions comes a sense of relief that passes quickly and morphs into a kind of truth. The truth is the artist is irrevocably wedded to this “thing” he has made. Its future is infinite. And the artist assumes the responsibility for taking his creation as far as he can.
Un Piano, from RogueArt in 2007, became a tangible stepping stone from One to 4D, both from Thirsty Ear. In Un Piano, he crystallized his musical language so that he could see it again with a sharper focus. Shipp continued to examine his language so closely that he knew how he had to prepare to record 4D. Traditional methods of practicing led him to the place he wanted to go: a place where details became the most important aspect of fulfilling his goals for the kind of sound he wanted to create. He had established a new plane from which he could spring. That plane was seamless, a sheet of glass. He could break away from it, but he knew he could reincorporate himself with the main road. His landscape was dimensional, full of breadth, height and depth and the nooks and crannies that were invisible until he came upon them in improvisation or in the choices he made from one track to another.
Seven months lapsed between the recording session for 4D and the CD release concert, both held at Roulette. The room for the concert on January 28th was filled. The concert started fifteen minutes later than its scheduled time.
Thirsty Ear’s founder, Peter Gordon, introduced Shipp. He mentioned that the audience was in “the place where all the magic had happened…” He was right. Magic had happened on that day in May of 2009. But more was to come.
Shipp came out of nowhere and took a signature deep bow before he sat down on the bench in front of favorite piano in New York City. Two seconds passed before he touched the piano. He had no reason to be concerned with stopping and starting, constrained by track length. Rather he had an entire blank sonic canvas in the eighty-eight keys before him.
In the time that followed, Shipp travelled through familiar territory stylistically, but he stepped into zones that were outside of 4D.The transitions from abstract to lyrical happened in varying tempos. The shape of the continuity changed constantly; he let the breaks in the sound release him from the direction he was in the midst of taking. He was using rhythm and melody to transform a metaphorical space.
From the beginning to midway in the set, it was as if Shipp had brought the audience through galaxies of stars, the darkness of the bass chords as effectual as the lightness of the twinkling treble notes. The prevailing idea of being nowhere and everywhere at the same time translated through the power of the sound’s flow as it fell into every extreme from high pitch to low, from fluid to dissonant and disparate, from intense to lullabye-like, from syncopated to separated, from heavily chordal to accented with cutting single notes, from being filled with clusters to settling into articulated phrases.
The head from “Gamma Ray,” from One, signaled that Shipp had reached another soundscape, where he was earthbound. The tonality became less ethereal. He reached into the piano and plucked a midrange string hard; he returned to the keyboard to play a lyrical interlude, stopped, and went back inside the piano. His fingers returned to the keyboard. He had arrived at a lyrical oasis. But the conversation between harmony and abstraction ensued. His hands alternated chords. He modeled ostinatos. He bounced on the piano bench anxiously. His face had passed though grimaces; he had mouthed his musical thoughts as he played. Then the densely packed music suddenly spread out. He was in ‘a state of grace;’ the description Jackie McLean had once assigned to Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk upon seeing the two in Paris.
Shipp played the theme of “Equilibrium,” from the album of the same name. He stopped a whole note’s worth and played the theme again. He did this several times quietly, peacefully. And then he simply came to rest. The set was over. It had lasted exactly sixty minutes.
The cycle he had completed with the recording of 4D was moving forward. Shipp was recharged. This concert marked the onset of yet another dimension of exploration.
In art making and music making, agony and decisiveness go hand in hand rather than contradict each other. If it were not for the dynamic between the two, the art and music produced would be boring and flat. In the real world, Shipp has too much on his mind. In his emotional world, he has become so much a part of the spiritual and epistemological universe that the state of his music can reflect nothing but transformation, out of how it already exists, one cycle at a time.
January 20th 2010
Not in any specific order:
(to be continued…)
January 18th 2010
January 16th 2010
A survey of reactions and responses to NEA data on declines in audiences for live music:
http://www.apapconference.com/docs/InsideArts_ND09_Jazz.pdf
January 6th 2010
Top 10 of 2009
1. Michel Edelin – Kuntu – Rogue Art
2. Vijay Iyer – Historicity – ACT
3. Miroslav Vitous – Remembering Weather Report – ECM
4. Louis Moholo-Moholo/Duets with Marilyn Crispell – Sibanye (We Are One) – Intakt
5. Sophie Agnel – Capsizing Moments – Emanem
6. Darren Johnston – The Edge of the Forest – Clean Feed
7. David Binney – Third Occasion – Mythology
8. Brian Groder – Groder & Greene – Latham Records
9. Matt Wilson Quartet – That’s Gonna Leave a Mark – Palmetto
10. Rob Mazurek – Sound Is – Delmark
Continue Reading »
January 5th 2010
THE TOP TWENTY (in alphabetical order)…
January 5th 2010
(listed in alpha order)
January 4th 2010
Abstract
Knowing that the jazz improviser creates his own material while performing, some jazz listeners assume that the improvisations can reveal the musician’s emotions. To evaluate this assumption, fifteen studies were conducted. These studies focused on the possible perception of anger upon hearing the improvisations of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. The instigation for the studies was that, during the early part of Coltrane’s recording career, one journalist had written that Coltrane was an “angry young tenor,” and another journalist had referred to “the rage in his playing,” both of which were the opposite of the performer’s stated intentions. Diversity of responses in the data was substantial, and it was found that the widely cited anger perceptions of those two journalists fall within a very small minority view. Nine out of 10 jazz journalists who were contemporaries of those two journalists did not perceive anger, and anger was perceived by only one of 23 jazz musicians. Anger was perceived by only 18% of 355 non-musician listeners. When 492 listeners completed questionnaires assessing their temperaments and heard a recording of the same performance that had elicited the journalist’s “angry young tenor” remark, it was found that those who scored above the mean in their own trait anger were twice as likely to perceive anger in the music as those who scored below the mean. This suggests that jazz improvisation may serve as the stimulus for a projective test, as an inkblot has traditionally been employed. The implications of published perceptions of emotion were demonstrated by two additional studies with a total of 143 listeners. They showed that perception of anger in the music was significantly more likely for listeners who were exposed to the journalist’s perception of anger before hearing the music.
January 2nd 2010
1. Bill Frisell: Disfarmer (Nonesuch)
2. Fly: Sky & Country (ECM)
3. Joe Lovano: Us Five Folk Art (Blue Note)
4. The Branford Marsalis Quartet: Metamorphosen (Marsalis)
5. Dave Douglas with Jim McNeely + Frankfurt Radio Bigband: A Single Sky (Greenleaf)
6. Vijay Iyer Trio: Historicity (ACT)
7. The Matt Wilson Quartet: That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Palmetto)
8. John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble: Eternal Interlude (Sunnyside)
9. David Binney: Third Occasion (Mythology)
10. Hal Galper: Art-Work (Origin)
11. Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart/Tales From the Acoustic Planet Vol. 3/The Africa Sessions (Rounder)
12. Cyrus Chestnut: Spirit (JLP)
13. Roswell Rudd: Trombone Tribe (Sunnyside)
14. Carla Bley: Carla’s Christmas Carols (WATT)
15. George Colligan: Come Together (Sunnyside)
16. John Patitucci: Remembrance (Concord)
17. Pat Metheny/Gary Burton: Quartet Live (Nonesuch)
18. Joshua Redman: Compass (Nonesuch)
19. Marty Ehrlich Rites Quartet: Things Have Got To Change (Clean Feed)
20. Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: On Broadway Vol. 5 (Winter & Winter)
NOTE: For comments on these titles and my favorite non-jazz albums, check out “The Himes Hundred: Best Albums of 2009.”
January 1st 2010
(This list is expanded from a similar list published in the Village Voice and Las Vegas City Life).
1. Allen Toussaint, The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch) – The old-school R&B hitmaker digs deep into jazz roots, applying elegant piano to New Orleans chestnuts and pieces by Monk and Ellington.
2. Chuck Owen & the Jazz Surge, The Comet’s Tail: Performing the Compositions of Michael Brecker (MAMA) – The Florida-based big band revisits and reinvents the music of late saxophone great Brecker.
3. David Binney, Third Occasion (Mythology) – The underappreciated alto saxophonist offers ambitious, expansive originals, with his quartet joined by brass.
4. Tom Harrell, Prana Dance (Highnote) – The trumpeter leads his tight-knit quintet on compositions that are brainy yet emotionally engaging.
5. Kurt Rosenwinkel Standards Trio, Reflections (Wommusic) – The most gifted jazz guitarist under 40 takes a break from his edgy originals for brilliant, shimmering readings of standards by the likes of Monk and Wayne Shorter.
6. John Patitucci Trio, Remembrance (Concord) – The bassist’s heavyweight pianoless trio, with saxophonist Joe Lovano and drummer Brian Blade, bring piercing original compositions replete with surprising detours.
7. Fly, Sky and Country (ECM) – Saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard turn in fertile modern-jazz explorations.
8. Joel Harrison, Urban Myths (Highnote) – The guitarist again draws from fusion, funk and blues for smart, multi-textured jazz originals.
9. John Scofield, Piety Street (EmArcy) – Sco wields his tangy overdriven guitar for hard-grooving gospel pieces, driven by Meters bassist George Porter, Jr.
10. New Orleans Nightcrawlers, Slither Slice (Threadhead) – The veteran brass band returns with horns chewy enough and funk deep enough to blast the competition.
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