You know what had to happen was that I mentioned that there were performers making several return appearances here and now they're all vying for top spot. Yesterday's Miles CD gives way to some more Don Byron (who has his third, I believe CD go on) and Duke Ellington who may or may not be pulling even. Peaking ahead there's even a Jacky Terrasson, but it's actually the exact same Jacky Terrasson that just went on the hard drive, so that hardly counts.
More Ellington. Another compilation, this one seeming on the cheaper 'might find this at a gas station' variety. These so far have been older, lower fidelity recordings of early Ellington. The liner notes are pretty sparse, containing an almost dry history of Ellington's beginning in music and a list of luminaries that he's performed with.
I tend to think of this kind of big band recording as 'cartoon jazz,' though that might conjure images of close harmony female vocals personified as singing flowers. It's not quite that, but it still has that mono recording quality, kind of muted sound that comes from a combination of old recording equipment and an air-tight horn section.
The back of the CD is laid out weird, too. It sets up columns for track title, composer, and publisher, all in equal font. It's such a strange way to lay the whole thing out. A lot of times the composer and publishing info is left out of the main listings, or if it's included it's much, much smaller. This kind of borders on data entry style. A little weird.
I'm sort of grasping at straws. Already with Ellington there's not much left to be said about him, but worse than that this is the fifth time he's come up. On the plus side, now I know the name of a song that I often would have in my head, Things Aren't What They Used to Be. And you can never have too many versions of Black and Tan Fantasy. Also, Sophisticated Lady ties Round Midnight for most represented song, which I didn't really see coming. Though it is a cool song. I play it every time I get a hold of a bari sax.
Don Byron Romance With the Unseen
Don Byron is third on deck. I don't remember if this was the empty sleeve or not, but Byron was one of those artists whose labels would give me advance releases and then the actual CD when it came out. I would usually forget I had the CD originally and end up taking both. So there is a fair portion of of the Albatross that is duplicate CDs. At one point I had like five or six of the same Screamin' Jay Hawkins CD. Sadly, they all met unfortunate demises.
One thing I can say about the Don Byron CDs that have gone in, they so far have been three different CDs. The only thing that's really carried over from one to the other is his skill at the clarinet. In that respect this is perhaps the most 'straight ahead' of the three CDs. No crazy instrumentation, no wild arrangements, straight quartet...
Of course as soon as I say that, extended electric guitar solo. But still, the most straight ahead of his recordings.
I'm starting to think that I should keep track of Beatles tunes that appear on jazz albums, because there are a lot it feels like. Byron has chosen I'll Follow the Sun for his album. I guess I can't be one to judge, in my high school senior year jazz concert I did Yesterday with the guitarist.
This is always the ideal, is an artist who experiments, who tries and delivers different things. But the counter-argument is, I guess, that most people--and with reason--want the same thing, or at least a little bit of predictability. Because of the nature of my collection and the way I dealt with it, I haven't for the most part known which Byron album is which. But I have felt a need to listen to Byron only to find out that wasn't the Byron I was yearning for, it was instead the much different Byron of the CD I just put in.
If an artist experiments then there's the risk, or rather the near certainty, that the experiment won't be to your liking. Even if you're Miles Davis, you can find Davis 'camps' among those that appreciate him and there are those that like the fusion stuff and those for whom Davis more or less stopped playing jazz. I was able to see him about a year before he died, and during a brief moment where he thought he'd address us (by speaking into his bell mic) someone started shouting "Play All Blues." Jackass, this wasn't a shitty downtown jazz bar, he's not going to play All Blues, and now I won't know what he had to say. How did you buy a ticket for Miles Davis thinking that All Blues was even a remote possibility?
So anyway...
Some of it is not going to be something you're into. And so now the artist doesn't get the superlative, 'Consistent.'
It works for him, though, I guess. I mean, he kept releasing albums that I would get promos of, so that's good. It's good to hear some inconsistency now and then.
As part of the Albatross' effort to tie everything in, two days after the Basquiat CD goes in, a CD with a track called Basquiat goes in as well. I really should look that guy's art up some time. Basquiat turned out to be a kind of haunting track, really.
Being able to measure traffic is a mixed bag. Like, it's cool to see new readers who come from traffic sources I didn't know about. But then you also get to see the days when even Googlebot isn't interested in your crap.
Anyway, it's Day 69. Insert your favorite joke here.
I actually remember this CD. I got it as part of that whole 'lounge' thing that happened and of all the CDs I ever got it elicited the biggest 'what the hell...?' reactions I've had from a promo.
How to describe what is happening to my ears right now...? It's regular old 50s/60s pop-style lounge, the album starts off Girl from Ipanema. Okay, and apparently makes its way to Yellow Submarine...but then there's Mrs. Miller herself.
Imagine some sort of June Cleaver caracature of domestic mid-century motherhood/housewife-ness. Now, pretend some hack comic was going to mock her singing popular yet innoffensive tunes. Falsetto, a warbling vibrato, just sort of hammering away through the song completely oblivious.
That's what's happening. Apparently, and this comes once again from Wiki, she was a novelty act in the 60's. I'll let you read that there instead of digesting it. Being the internet, there is of course also a website. Also worth exploring. Seriously, turn off your ad-block and click the player or right click on the link in the header for the album, listen to the samples at Amazon, experience this.
Generations might have a tendency to think that they invite irony. I know that I look at the younger generations romance with irony and think, "amateurs, Gen X already nailed that down..." But apparently the Boomers were into appreciating things ironically on their own (ours was still better...). Oh good lord, A Hard Days Night...
This is the kind of thing that existed before Karaoke where you can listen to average people murder popular songs in bars across the country.
From what I'm gathering from the various websites she was that perfect combination of novelty and completely sincere. There apparently wasn't much interest in letting her in on the jokes (there was a second tier to it when she apparently was used as an icon of the drug culture late in her career to her own dismay) but for the most part she was good natured about it. Sort of a 1960s William Hung.
This is the kind of thing I loved about getting promos. There's no way I would have known anything about this unless I had gotten this CD. And now I have 50 minutes of delightful ridiculousness on my iTunes.
How has she not ended up on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack yet?
Okay, that's ridiculously adorable. She apparently does a take on Roger Miller's King of the Road but instead it's Queen of the House. I really feel the overwhelming urge to create some referential pop-culture laden ironic movie that involves homemaking at least tangentially film just to use that song.
And of course he 'big hit,' Downtown. This kind of grows on you in an incredibly weird and indescribable way. And then there's that bizarre bird whistle...
I started this album with a 'Seriously?' and have ended it wanting to have met this woman. I feel bad because we're not entirely laughing with her but at the same time...I don't know. Very interesting.
Paul Bley Not Two, Not One
I'm cheating with the image, this is another homeless CD but I forgot to scan it before I put it in the computer and now I'm too lazy to stop the CD to scan it and for some reason don't want to do the graphic bit after the fact. Plus, the dim, gray cover lets you in on the kind of album it's going to be. Where Mrs. Miller might have been light and whimsical, this is the kind of arrhythmic, sparse and dissonant kind of music that you apparently hire Paul Motain to play drums on.
This is of course a sharp contrast to the previous album, but they were in the same CD case (to which neither of them belonged.) Which probably means they were part of one of my 'listening blitzes' that I've talked about before, where I listened to half of a few tracks on each CD and then ejecting it and moving on.
I think that every twentieth century composition class has someone at the final hammering or plucking or otherwise attacking the strings of the piano without the keys, which makes me not as receptive when modern performers do it.
This is pretty sparse, a lot of solo piano in it. But where I usually comment on the college common room piano pounders, Bley isn't any where near as dense and isn't mistaking pounding as intensity.
I like this kind of stuff, but I am having a hard time finding anything to say about it. There have been so many of these with this basic line up slipping in that I almost am just listening to it like music and forgetting this is supposed to document the experience. Or something. If this part is boring, please re-read the Mrs. Miller stuff, that's down right hypnotizing.
I don't have the liner notes to tell me what the idea behind the overall album was, but as we've learned, that doesn't always help.
I wish I had some sort of Halloween theme to today's entry, but the CDs are still more or less random (alright, I threw one back because it would have meant a triple day.) There is a change up in the style of CD but really, not out of character. Ah well, I hope your Halloween is cool if you do indeed celebrate it, if not, here are some CDs that don't have anything to do with Halloween anyway, so you're not missing out.
The Country Gentlemen On the Road (and more)
What Buena Vista Social Club did for Cuban music, O Brother Where Art Thou? did for folk and bluegrass. Truth be told it didn't take much to prompt some sort of sudden stampede to a certain type of music. A song by Iz appears on E.R., suddenly everyone is a fan of Hawaiian music. But a full movie, documentary or not, that can send people into a fury.
Of course, I have this CD, so that means that I had to have gotten caught up in it somehow, though there are even odds I picked it up merely because it said "On the Road," which is probably even more of a poser move, really.
Which is not to say that I don't really like bluegrass, and even had picked up some promos before O Brother Where Art Thou came out. But I'd be kidding myself if I didn't admit that there was a sharp increase afterward, both from heightened interest and from increased availability.
This is pretty straight O Brother style, it turns out. The Country Gentlemen are well known enough that I knew about them before I looked at the CD, so it's not entirely certain I have this promo just because of the movie. But it's standard issue, 'folksy' vocal harmonies, simple danceable rhythms.
Not the Rawhide I was hoping for.
Now they're doing an Englishman singing bluegrass music...strange. There is a lot of banter with a corny dry wit. There's a section where he 'introduces the band'...to each other. He almost introduces a feature player with 'here comes trouble." It's hokey but also has a charm to it.
And of course there is plenty of religious music going about.
I have well noted trepidations about guitar, and as I had discussed earlier, often you can judge a CD by its cover. But if I had thought about it this really would have fit into Blue Note's pattern, it's not really a weird angle, but there is that forced perspective putting the guitar in the foreground, so it's just a modern version of their classic cover picture.
But even though the electric guitar almost always makes things sound a little fusion-y, this is a progressive modern jazz CD like Terrasson or Kirkland or any of the other modern jazz players that I've put in so far. Which is great, because I love that stuff.
The liner notes are fairly philosophical, kind of bordering between the land of a pop Buddhist, a twelve step program graduate and a self help book. It's the usual artist statement, the commitment to the (in this case unnamed) influences that formed his understanding of music, a little wax nostalgic about his early encounters with music ("As a young child of six or seven I remember sitting underneath an old cabinet-style record player. I would listen and dream.")
But then it wanders into contimplation of the human journey and that whole "Who are we and why are we here," bit. The Undiscovered Few, it turns out, are his four principles that have some sort of importance to (at least to him) human existance. They are-
The Desire to know myself
The Experience of finding myself
Being Myself
Willingness to take the next step
Each principle of course is followed by a detailed description of how this is important to his life and life in general and how it made him a better person and guitar player. None of this shows up on the track list, you have to read the liner notes for that.
That's sort of the advantage/disadvantage of wordless jazz. The album, with certain restrictions, can be more or less about whatever you decide it's about and you can assign whatever meaning you want to it. But unless the person listening to it reads the liner notes (and presumably agrees with you) they're pretty much going to assign whatever meaning they want to it. And it might be, "This is some smooth music to play while I try and make it with my lady." Or just decide that My Favorite Things is about someone's favorite things. Or a tribute to John Coltrane. Or just a chart you dig.
There isn't a set group on the whole album, there are various larger and smaller groups depending. Greg Osby makes a few appearances on alto saxophone. Violinist Regina Carter does a duet with him on Through the Eyes of a Child. In that regard there is a lot of variation on the album.
All of this is making the Australian V8 Supercars race at Surfer's Paradise a little more mellow, despite the knife fight for first place in the last few laps.
Regina Carter returns for another duet, this time called Tears of a Forgotten Child. Makes you wonder what that child saw through his eyes in the first duet...
The album opens and closes with barn burners, holding a soft gooey center of gentler tracks. Ah, but it ends on the still enigmatic jazz fade out. Still don't get that.
Today represents two musicians I kind of backed into knowing, so to speak. They were either tangential to something I was into or they did one thing that I found curoious and as a result (and since whenever they released something I got it for free from the label) I started following. Also, today represents the first time something is verifiably from the actual rotation section of the Albatross because it comes from a sleeve to a broken CD carrier. On with the show...
Don Byron Music for Six Musicians
I have to keep checking because I become convinced that this album is already on the hard drive, but it's not. I listened to it enough that much of it is pretty familiar, even though that had to be a fairly long time ago because I don't remember this being available during that brief window in which I had a CD player in the short lived Vanagon.
Not that I associated any of this familiar music with this album. There is the slam poetry opener that I knew as soon as it started, but if I had remembered those lines separately I would not have thought immediately, "Oh, that Don Byron CD I used to listen to..." In fact, I was surprised to hear slam poetry when what I was expecting was just some progressive jazz played on a clarinet.
This, I believe, never really had a case, so it's little torn sleeve is as much home as its ever known.
Outside of the poetic opening it's pretty straight forward progressive jazz stuff, complex rhythms, some collective improve, dissonance, lots of counter-everything. I don't know that what makes up the six musicians stays the same from track to track, since I don't remember the electric guitar that's making a showing in "I'll chill on the Marley tapes..." on (The press made) Rodney King (responsible for the LA riots). The track names, by the way, are awesome. A little dated in their politics (a reference to both Rodney King and Ross Perot...), but that's fine. In ten or twelve years some rabid downloader is going to realize he has all this unlistened to music and start whatever indulgent method is available to him like blogs now about going through all his music and commenting on the outdated politics of half-term Alaskan governors and modern day tea partiers. And maybe people who do stunts to become reality TV stars. Or maybe by then we'll have given up and everyone will be reality TV stars.
The cool thing about being political in jazz is you really only have to come up with the snappy title and you're done. Well, unless you're Moss Allison, then you have to use dry wit in lyrics, apparently.
The music is as eclectic as I come to expect from Byron. Not so much as A Fine Line, more than Bug Music. Right down the center of variation. The relatively short The Allure of Enlightenment is a calm and melodic contrast to the previous Crown Heights. I'm more familiar with the beginning of this album than I am its end. I don't know if it's because by this time I was well into playing a video game and not paying attention, or if it stands out less, or if I simply just stopped playing it early on each time and moved on to another CD.
Wayne Shorter Juju
The internet has effected me. I feel the urge to create some sort of graph or something starting with Sidney Bechett and placing saxophonists along it in relation to which direction they took the horn and where they sit. Because in my mind at least, I start to do that in some form or another. There are groupings, like Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, and Paul Desmond all sit grouped up in one part of the graph, the 'mellow side.' Then there's Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Hamiet Bluiett on the crazy side, and just a little in from those guys would be Pharoah Sanders and Rashaan Roland Kirk, and a little further in Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter. But here's where the graph would get confusing for me, anyway, is finding the distance on a different axis between Shorter and Rollins. Rollins is more bombastic, more Kirk, and Shorter is more manic, more Dolphy. Of course for any of this to make any sense you have to know who all these players are, and if you do then you don't need the stupid chart.
Wayne Shorter is on or near everything cool at one point or another, which I guess would come from being part of not only Miles Davis' amazing group ("The Quintet" as some have called it) but also part of a whole lot of other people's amazing groups. Whenever I want to find an example of jazz albums I should have to demonstrate my collection's lacking, about half the time the example I bring up is a Wayne Shorter album. Half because he's a remarkable player with some landmark albums, but the other half I think is because he's one of those guys that people know is awesome but don't buy the records that he heads. I might be projecting here, but most of the time when I was able to look at a serious collector's stash, Shorter wouldn't really come up as often. Shorter albums don't appear on lists as much unless the list goes past twenty or so, but when it does the person making the list lavishes it with praise. I don't know what the distinction is or really even if it's just in my head. I was relieved that the CD had been pulled out, that at least I listened to this one when I got home, but not as often, apparently, as Don Byron's CD.
This is, of course, another Rudy van Gelder edition from Blue Note. If I had been tagging RVG CDs in the posts I'm pretty sure that would be the top tag. Everyone of the RVG Edition CDs has the exact same graphic on the back. There's that pose, the universal gesture, apparently, of someone wearing headphones indicating, "Shut up, I'm trying to hear something..." You see that all the time in movies...hell, I do it when I'm recording audio on a shoot. You're trying to pinpoint something in the audio and you tilt your head even though you're wearing headphones...like if I crook my head just right the proper audio will fall into my ear and I'll get what I'm looking for. Like for no reason we all become Nipper the RCA dog twisting it's head in front of the gramophone. I'm not sure why in the hell we do this. Alright, in movies it is really the only way to visually indicate that the person on the headphones hears something important and is trying to figure out what it is. And maybe it's just reflex because in every other situation if we move our ears we can hear certain things better and it's not like that reflex is going to go, "Oh, hey, the speakers are attached to your head...moving it won't matter." But it's still kind of silly.
I wonder if I could rate artists on how easy it is to do something else while listening to them. I don't really know how to do it without it sounding like a bad thing. I get distracted on a lot of the CDs, they're usually around an hour long and if I sat here with my fingers on the keyboard for the whole hour the posts would be crazy long nonsense, and already they're too long for one of my only readers. But for some of them I enjoy having them play and then merrily go about my business stumbling around the internet until "Shit! The CD is over and I haven't said much of anything!" Then I don't know what to do. It's hardly ever that I just didn't like the music, but rather I just didn't only listen to the music, I guess. And they don't have any tracks where I go, "What the hell is that?" which isn't a bad thing, necessarily.
Well, it's a day without Duke Ellington, so that must mean it's another day for a Blue Note Rudy van Gelder recording. That and a CD I know nothing about and don't have any liner notes for...away we go...
Avishai Cohen Devotion
There's got to be a term for this. Someone has to have identified this as a distinct style and I just don't know about it yet. It's a certain kind of progressive sound that was really popular in the 90s (I don't know if people are still doing it now). It's really distinctive of that 'young gun' crowd I had talked about earlier, the new wave of academic jazz performers.
Wiki isn't really any help here (I suppose I rely too much on Wiki, and I certainly understand its weaknesses, but I decided that there was no point in pretending to be an expert on these performers, rather be honest about the fact that quite often I have to look them up since this should be about my impressions of them in regards to having carried it around for so long instead of presenting myself as any kind of authority.) Anyway, Wiki sites a blend of Middle Eastern and Eastern European influences in his jazz, which might be the case in his current recordings more than it is here. There are certainly some different harmonies and rhythms here, but this sounds very much in that class of Jacky Terrasson or other progressive jazz artists of the 90s. This is not to say that they sound exactly alike or that there is no individuality to their performance. One of the great things about jazz is that even the same artist would have a hard time sounding the same twice in a row.
But I'm starting to feel like I could listen to the first few bars of a recording and go, "That guy was young and new in the 90s." The music is both sparse and complex, segmented in a way that older forms of jazz wouldn't be. There is a lot of layering, which seems contrary to that 'sparse' comment, but it's not thick layering, if that makes any sense. Tempo changes, time changes, even style changes within a single piece are not uncommon. Unison lines trade up with counter melody and repeated figures. And the playing is always very aggressive, even during ballads.
He apparently came up through Chick Corea so that makes a certain degree of sense, because in a lot of was Corea might be considered the father of this kind of sound. Maybe not, since I'm just now piecing this together, but I put it at good odds.
Also not uncommon is the sort of newish third (fourth stream?) style that will make use of larger string arrangements and even, apparently, electronica like in Ti Da Doo Di Da. But this is a bass player's album, so it might just be an excuse to use a different bass, which has a pretty odd tone on it. My brother might be able to identify it, I'm not that good with electric instruments.
Well, there's that Middle Eastern/Eastern European influence, it's pretty present in Linda De Mi Corazon. And the Eastern European again (complete with voice at the beginning calling out in an accent, "Igor come! We play Slow Tune!) is heard on, of course, Slow Tune. And apparently the next two tracks. So basically he backloaded and grouped up all of that so that I would look silly declaring it not present after only the first two tracks...
Lee Morgan The Rumproller
Seriously, how can you go wrong with an album called The Rumproller? So it's another Rudy Van Gelder edition hard bop Blue Note album. For a moment they felt left out, what with all the Duke Ellington going on the last few days. Hard bop is creeping up on blues and big band for most represented in the Albtross so far. And blues is kind of cheating, since I don't divide that up into 'Chicago blues' and 'country blues' etc. Without that it would be big bands followed closely by hard bop.
Seriously, though, that opening track rocked.
The problem with having so many of these RVG editions is that I'm running out of things to say.
At one point I was given a large collection of mock up album covers for all of these editions, well, not me--the store. So everyone got to pick through them and I got what was left. The problem was that the best ones were also the coolest looking ones, so I didn't really end up with that great of a collection. I haven't seen that in a few moves, so I'm guessing it didn't survive, so it's probably for the best that I didn't score the cool ones. Though I may have had this one.
There's a kind of cool 'hard bop meets calypso' recording called Eclipso on here.
Another contender for awesome track name, this CD closes out with Venus Di Mildew.
The Albatross hits the Big 5-Oh. That means that a few days ago 100 CDs went onto the hard drive (since some were doubles and some days I did more than two). One hundred CDs that I've also listened to all the way through. Crazy. I don't have anything in depth to say about that, just felt it needed to be noted. I'm already starting to fade as far as what is what. I went through to share some songs with my brother as he starts to consider new paths in his music career and I actually found myself going through the list and knowing it was something that got added but still having to think, "What was the deal with this stuff again?"
I knew that as soon as I got a new Mac there would be some event that would come up that makes mine out of date. This happened last time, too. I need to better time my crisis. This really doesn't pertain to the Albatross, but it was on my mind.
Also, I added a food blog written by an old college friend and theater person in the links all the way at the bottom. I might have to hunt for a new template, that side bar is getting lengthy. Anyway, check it out, it might make you hungry, though.
Onto the beast...
The Buddy Rich Big Band
Live Wham!
This is not your father's big band. Well, I mean, it probably is. It's just as likely as anything else, really. It was recorded in 1977 and 1978 after all. But for a big band, that's 'modern.' And Buddy Rich's big band carries that modern big band sound, sort of recycling back that Chicago/Blood, Sweat, and Tears jazz rock sound back into jazz, this is sharper and more dynamic that 'traditional' big band. More forceful as well, partially a function of being lead by a drummer as opposed to a piano or horn player.
The liner notes include a Modern Drummer Magazine interview with Rich from the time and I have to say he comes off like an old school jazz crumedgon. Here are some highlights:
Modern Drummer: Do you do any limbering up before a performance?
Buddy Rich: Yeah, I usually take my hands out of my pockets.
...
Modern Drummer: That trick of using both ends of one stick to play two different drums. Is that something you thought up?
Buddy Rich: Almost everything I've don I've done through my own creativity. I don't think I have ever had to listen to anyone else to learn how to play drums. I wish I could say that for about ten thousand drummers.
...
Modern Drummer: Are any of your drums specially made?
Buddy Rich: Nope, right off the rack.
Modern Drummer: That's interesting. I thought many name players use custom made equipment?
Buddy Rich: Yeah, that's because they can't play. I mean it's obvious you know...you put a race driver in a car, if he knows how to drive, he can drive anything. If he can't drive, the can't push a kiddie car.
...
Buddy Rich:...It's easier now because the kids that are playing have no musical background [earlier he eschewed musical education and listening to other players and practicing, mind]. They luck out with an album and they become stars. I mean, where is their staying power? Where is their creativity? Most drummers I hear today play what every other drummer has played on a record. I don't hear one bit of originality. I hear triplets coming of tom-toms by every kid that's been able to hold a pair of sticks. That's not my idea of playing drums.
I managed to find a transcription of the entire interview, it gets worse. You really should check it out.
Joel Dorn describes him this way-
Buddy Rich was like weather in the tropics, always changing. One minute you'd be sharin' a joint wiht him and laughin' your ass off, the next he'd be screamin' at you and shooting karate kicks by your head.
I'm not sure what it is about jazz that attracts this personality type, but it's not all that uncommon even among jazz musicians that you've never heard of unless you're into your local jazz scene. I've had instructors like this (alright, I've never had an instructor swing a kick at me, but I wouldn't have put it past a few...)
One of the odd take aways that they seemed to want to get to in these liner notes is that late in his career he became interested in cars and karate, each get a few separate mentions.
I've been trying to read all of this stuff while listening to the full on assault on my ears that this recording is. This refuses to be background music. Sometimes, when an album isn't that exciting I can push my headphones forward and still listen to the album while catching whats going on with the TV. I'd have to put the headphones in the other room to even hope to accomplish that here. I can't help but imagine smoke rising off this big band after their done. It is loud, it is fast, it is dynamic--as long as that dynamic is loud and fucking loud.
Jim, Kermit, and Buddy
And as if to underline that, here comes their four times speed version of Miles Davis' So What? Under Davis it was a medium laid back tempo moody modal study. Under Buddy Rich it's a bright, fast, multi-layered five minute long shout chorus.
The monster at the end of the book is a 26 minute long suite. I have no idea how they can sustain themselves through a marathon like that, it should be interesting.
Speaking of Muppets, for no explained reason there is a picture of Jim Henson with Kermit on the back cover. Awesome.
So clearly I am part of the problem. Because there is plenty of new jazz just sitting unlistened to in the Albatross, including new saxophonists. But if I had been asked before this project started I would have been able to name Chris Potter and Black/Note and then stalled. But two days in a row I've put a new saxophonist on the hard drive, so I wasn't even so much as paying attention to the stack of CDs that I was taking home.
This album includes some more Jacky Terrasson as well. Blue Note really like Terrasson it seems.
There aren't any fun liner notes to play with here, it's just a bunch of photos laid out from the recording session of all of the young lions of Blue Note getting together and recording and album. After that run of liner notes I'm almost disappointed. I kind of feel like I'm going, "Yeah yeah, good music...whatever...get back to me when you have an extreme political screed or want to rage against a generation of performers on your instrument..."
And that's not far from the truth. This is almost exactly the kind of jazz I like, on the instrument I prefer. It's clean, it's well done, well performed, but I'm just kind of sitting here. This is kind of what I've talked about before. With so much nutty or bizarre things that might surface somewhere in the collection my time for stuff that is just simply good becomes limited.
I guess I could expand this into a metaphor for our information age. When there's so much of it out there you simply don't have the time for quality. This blog (while I'm not trying to bill it as quality) is simply too long for anyone to really read...why spend fifteen minutes plowing through some guy's musing on a CD when a video of a cat riding a turtle is a stumble away? And I don't say that 'holier than thou,' I do it all the time. I watched that kitten ride the turtle and forwarded it even. I get TED talks that come up on stumble where I don't have to read shit, just watch a video...but its six minutes? Cracked might have a list of the Six Silliest Super-Hero Reboots if I just hit that stumble button...
When the filter becomes our attention spans we are not filtering for quality or even for content, we're filtering for noise. When there is so much that demands our attention can we even be criticized for paying attention to the loudest, the splashiest? I can listen to this absolutely good quintet recording, but over in the stack is a bagpipe CD that tries to make the bagpipe a modern instrument. (that may or may not be true, I know there is a bagpipe CD in the wings and I feel like I'm trying to burn through the CDs to get to it because I have no idea what it's about).
I don't even have rounds anymore, I just have stumble. If I hit stumble enough I'll get my rounds, IO9 will come up, Gawker, etc. I tend to forget that the Onion is even open as part of my set of home pages. There's so much information out there and so many ways for it to be hand delivered that I do the equivalent of just go out and lay on the lawn and let it fall on me. There's good stuff within reach, there is quality in the bag. There is a perfectly awesome jazz quintet recording under foot. But I can't see it because I'm too busy being led by whatever distracting noise is in my way.
Today is a return for both artists and possibly the biggest challenge as far as finding something to write about. In the first one I think I exhausted my stories about him and the second one it's one of the best reviewed CDs in jazz, anything I say is going to be ridiculous.
Charlie Hunter/Leon Parker Duo
Another day, another Blue Note CD. I was going to suggest for a second there that I get Blue Note to sponsor this blog, but really they already have by supplying all of these CDs.
As I stated last time that Charlie Hunter came up that I was always a bit more of a fan of his saxophonist than I was of Charlie Hunter, and this album doesn't have any saxophone on it. This is exactly as advertised, a duo of guitar and percussion. With Hunter's characteristic multi-layer playing (something I first became aware of with the 'double tap' playing of Stanley Jordan), the drummer/guitar combo is a little more filled out than it would seem.
Hunter tries to give his guitar a 'synthesizer' sound, so it tends to give me a smooth jazz vibe when listening to it. Still has a pretty good groove to it if my bobbing head is any indicator.
I'm only in the intro of the song so far, but he's giving a pretty cool 'spy movie' feel to the standard You Don't Know What Love Is. This is a smokey version to stand next to Billie Holiday's, really. It wouldn't be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, either, with the low sustained string bass and reverb heavy lead, it has that kind of surf flavor that pops up now and then on his soundtracks. That really was kind of awesome. Relatively short, for a jazz number.
That's true for a lot of the tracks on this album. It's ten in total coming to just under forty-five minutes.
There's a Beach Boys song on here, too, but you'd have to strain to recognize it.
I honestly remember getting this CD and kind of not caring. It wasn't the full group, I wasn't as into Hunter as I was the people he played with, the first track wasn't that dynamic. I just gave it a pass. Now that I listen to this, I was wrong, this is actually pretty cool.
"Duo" albums are pretty common in jazz, especially on Blue Note. The idea is either to legitimize a lesser known player or to hope that there is a multiplier effect of putting together two well known artists in an 'event' style performance. This usually means that I get some awesome hyperbolic liner notes ensuring that me that this was a pairing of the gods, that the universe had focused its energies to create a near perfect moment in jazz. But no such luck, it's really just simple credits. Which is too bad because I really would like to know the story behind Calypso for Grandma. Whatever the story is, the song is pretty peppy. And allows for the biggest moment for Parker to cut loose.
Miles Davis Kind of Blue
It's one of the most iconic albums in jazz. It has what could most accurately be described as a 'super group' as its line up with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans John Coltrane...every track is recognizable even to people who may not listen to jazz (especially if they listen to NPR, likely they've heard at least a few of these tracks used as bumpers.) Google "top ten jazz albums of all time" and you'll find Kind of Blue on just about every list at or near the top.
If you don't own this album, you kind of suck.
This is, I think, my third or fourth copy. I had it on vinyl which was thrown away with my comic book collection (frustrating...). Then I lost the first two CDs and more or less assumed that I had lost this one. It's one of the few albums where I know almost every note. While I was typing I found myself humming along to Adderly's solo in So What? I knew that the BART ride to work was exactly as long as All Blues. I haven't listened to this album in years, but in the years I did listen to it, I listened to it a lot.
The trivia that you can find anywhere on the internet: It's an all 'modal' album rather than using complex key changes and chord structures. The group didn't know what they were going to record until they showed up to record it, they had an idea, but the charts weren't presented to them until the day of.
One of the greatest elements of this album is its complete simplicity and openness. This isn't the bombastic bop or deep grooved hard-bop of the time, or the chaotic avante-garde that member John Coltrane would later go on to play. This is an open canvas style music, which works great when the players you give that canvas to are legends. It was this kind of open experimentation that eventually led to Cool Jazz, which Miles Davis pioneered.
I was going to contrast it with the other albums that came out that year, but instead I'm finding out that it was the best year ever. Time Out, Duke Ellington's score to Anatomy of a Murder, Mingus Ah Hum,Portrait in Jazz, Shape of Jazz to Come, Giant Steps...all in one year. Holy crap. These are some of my favorite albums and also a pretty good representation of those 'greatest jazz album' lists. What was in the water that year? To underline how bad ass this group is, on that list is albums by two of the band members, Portraits in Jazz by Bill Evans and the absolutely legendary Giant Steps by John Coltrane. Incidently, Coltrane tried that whole Miles Davis thing of just giving everyone the music the day of the session, except he gave them the most challenging set of changes in jazz resulting in in Cedar Walton nearly trainwrecking during his piano solo. No one holds it against him.
Whats more is each one of those albums represents a landmark in a new and separate direction in jazz. If you were to look at the development of jazz as a tree, this would be where the tree shoots off into a bunch of separate branches.
I missed a chance to name a day, I called the 42nd day the 'Meaning of Life Day,' I should have called yesterday Richard Petty Day. I got nothing for the 44th day.
There are CDs in here from people I've never heard of who have volumes of work, meaning that they've managed to sustain interest in at least a branch of their work to merit multiple volumes. Usually it's only a 'volume two' and yet I still feel bad that I don't know who these people are--especially since it was kind of my job to know who they were and someone handed me a CD so I would.
But I don't, and I didn't. And I don't know who this guy is despite him apparently having a series of four CD's asking...I'm not sure--if his flute said something? Which flute he should use? It's unclear.
Alright, enough of that.
I was kind of expecting a few things, either another one of those 'world of flutes' type CDs, or something on the 'easy listening' end of the spectrum, or at least cool jazz. I guess it's got some elements of the latter. But that might just be my bias towards the 'mellowing agents' that I think flute and guitar have (despite thinking Roland Kirk's flutes are awesomely funky.) But this is really just straight combo jazz, a little Coltrane, standards like Lester Leaps In.
Well, completely wrong about the album title. I guess not completely wrong, it is his fourth album. But according to the rather sparse liner notes, it's in response to the 'mad-positive' response he got to his previous album 3 Flutes Up where he played three different flutes. So on this he upped the ante. Fair enough. You don't usually get to hear much else other than the 'normal' flute and the piccolo.
This is really kind of good. Apparently not famous enough for Wikipedia. His bio tends to focus on the fact that he plays more than just the normal concert C flute. Released in 2000, this appears to be the last album he put out, at least according to his website. Too bad, I'm kind of getting into this. Flashback is pretty funky.
Jacky Terrasson
A Paris
Yet another Blue Note CD. I wonder how much of the Blue Note catalog I actually have...it has to be significant...it is a large catalog, but still...
Now we get Jacky Terrasson on his own.
This actually got off to a pretty good start with a slow funky groove (I know I call a lot of things funky, it's not because I lack another term but rather I listen to a lot of stuff that is in fact funky.)
These two albums are actually fairly complementary. There's a general lightness to them, a little playfulness in their set up, with some underlying funkiness thrown in and some straight up technical progressive jazz. Both kind of easy to listen to and kind of hypnotize. I feel like both entries are kind of light (I've usually written way more at this stage in the album, I'm already half way through), but that's because I start to just sit back and listen to it.
The sad thing is that I don't know that these songs are going to stand out on the iTunes shuffle. Already, at something like 88+ cds having gone into the hard drive when I put it on shuffle there have been songs that have come up where I think, "Where did this come from?" despite having listened to each one and written about it. So out of sheer volume good music like this, music that is just good to listen to, won't necessarily stand out. Rather what is going to grab attention is the bombastic, the weird, the caustic. Those are going to be the tracks where I go, "Oh yeah, I remember that." With this stuff I might think just as the song ends "That was good, who was that again? Ah, too late...next time around." I mean, I already forgot that I already did one Jacky Terrasson album.
This might be a quality shared in the world at large, where there is no time for the good to stand out--only enough for the loud and strange to stand out and be noticed. As a result, I feel like I'm condemning a CD when I merely call it 'good.'
Ah, sweet, La Vie En Rose is the name of that tune they always play when showing Paris. Now I know.
I don't understand the 'fade in'. I don't really like fade outs, but fade ins I don't get at all.
Both albums end with a kind of poppy bit with vocals, even. Terrasson's is a little more upbeat and more likely for me to not associate it with the rest of the album when it comes up on random later.
There is an ad campaign out for Sour Patch Kids where little animated Sour Patch candies do something messed up to someone and then follow it up with something nice with the tag line, "First they're sour, then they're sweet." I've had my issues with it, since the messed up things that they do are way more severe than being adorable can make up for, but that's not why I bring it up.
I bring it up because the Albatross has just pulled a Sour Patch Kids bit on me. Yesterday I entered a smooth jazz saxophone player who had a name deceptively similar to a free/progressive jazz player who I was a fan of. As a result I was kind of moody about the whole entry.
Well, after two empty nests--a celtic 20th Century composition album and another Real World entry, there was a fake out. Inside a Scatman Crothers CD (you may know him as the voice of "Jazz" the Autobot on the Transformers. Or, as a legendary jazz performer and prolific actor. Or as a Martini Rossi 935 Porsche race car that turns into a robot) and instead there was an actual David Murray (not a 'Mc' in sight) CD inside instead. Completely random pick, I swear.
David Murray Deep River
Ah yeah, that's the stuff...Murray isn't the most 'agressive' of the progressive/free jazz players by a long shot. I haven't seen him by himself in concert (I have as a member of the World Saxophone Quartet), but I don't envision him leaning into his saxophone's mic and yelling like I've seen Pharaoh Sanders do (in one of the coolest shows I ever attended). There's a little more exploration that goes into his style than shear sound. The second and third tracks are longer, slower, modal pieces with sparse, drawn out solos, M'biza being done on a bass clarinet.
In any gathering of saxophone players my default favorite always goes bottom up. First the bari, then the tenor player, then the alto. If all you play is soprano and your name isn't Sidney Bechet, stop it. But my love for the World Saxophone Quartet is so convoluted that I honestly think that my favorite is which ever one of them I'm listening to at the moment. I arrive at this conclusion because I was about to declare him my favorite when I realized that I have the exact same reaction when listening to my Hammiet Blueitt recordings.
These Coltrane-style modal pieces have a tendency to hypnotize me. I might start off moving my head to them, but with the amount of poly-rhythm going on it usually slows and settles into a thousand yard stare. Not a 'thing I have on in the background,' even if it is, I'll slowly stop what I'm doing and commence 'contemplating my navel' as some soccer coaches have referred to it.
This is kind of the stealth progressive jazz, like if I catch it at the right moment I might lure someone who is resistant to more, lets say 'aggressive,' sounds. Murray works his way towards that. We're four or five minutes in before the madness starts gradually. It never ultimately works, though. Sooner or later someone goes, "You listen to this on purpose?" and I have to switch to something tamer.
This album contains Mr. P.C., which is my favorite piece of Coltrane's Giant Steps album. This also brings the total of songs called "Mr" something to ten. Oddly enough, jazz and surf music are tied for most represented.
Well, the Albatross can't be completely predictable even when it's making up for earlier cruelty. I've talked a few times about the new swing revival that happened for what felt like a couple of months in the nineties. In an attempt to cash in on this quickly flaring trend several labels pushed out these kinds of compilations. Some of them contained actual artists, sometimes there were super-bland recordings by studio bands. This falls into the former category at least, it's a sort of 'greatest hits' album...just not really a 'jump jive' greatest hits album, more of a general swing greatest hits.
It has such stalwart standards as Take the 'A' Train and In the Mood and Sing, Sing, Sing. It does have some actual jump jive on it, too, with Cab Calloway's Jumpin' Jive (makes you feel six foot when your four foot five) and Louis Jordan's Caldonia (what makes your big head so hard?) I think I've talked about this before, I'm so familiar with these songs that those lyrics jump in my head not because of the original artists but because of wearing out the recording I got from the Scottish jump jive group Fat Sam's Band I encountered at the Sacramento Dixieland Jazz Jubilee. I don't have that recording anymore (I don't think) and have since acquired the original recordings, but that was what made me familiar with it (and started my weird obsession with wearing pleated pants, but that's another story...)
I now have another version of Cherokee as well, this one by Charlie Bernet.
Alright, I don't know this one, 47th Street Jive. It's all the awesome elements of authentic jump jive, including a weird skit/exchange between the singer and the band leader thick with hipster (before the people that term applied to were insufferable) slang which carries into the lyrics which are usually a direct address to someone who either needs to lighten up or stop doin' you wrong (in this case stop talking because you're about to lie.)
And really what compilation capitalizing on the swing revival is complete without Sing, Sing, Sing, which closes out the album. But this is no slouch version of the song, it's Benny Goodman's nearly nine minute long version. Take that, swing dancers.
I'm getting a late start today. I fooled myself by thinking I didn't have much to do this morning and so I could totally watch Punisher:War Journal on cable instead of pre-write today's entry.
Not worth it in the slightest. Anyway, let's get to it.
For female jazz singers there's always the 'big three,' the ones that people know who aren't even into jazz. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan are the royal court of female jazz singers. Not to take anything away from other extremely talented singers.
I'm sure there's some sort of 'what Beatle are you' type personality test that goes with who you prefer, but I'm not about to figure that out. But I have always felt that Ella and Billie were just a little higher on that pedestal than Vaughan. Like, if I were asked I would feel like I'd have to answer "Billie!" or "Ella!" if asked my preference, depending on if I wanted to sound edgy and soulful or like an appreciation of vitriousity. But really, I think of the three I really like Vaughan. Which is not to say I don't like Holiday or Fitzgerald. I still hum the Cottontail solo I heard all the way back from high school, and there is just something distinctive and haunting about Holiday--especially in songs like Strange Fruit.
But there's something about the way Vaughan sings. I recognize that this is really just a subjective thing, there's something ridiculous about trying to rate numerically performers in general and especially performers on this level. I guess there's something intoxicating about the internet that makes you lean towards that. Anyway, love Vaughan. And Gershwin has a pretty good songbook.
This has one of my favorite Gershwin tunes on it, Someone to Watch Over Me. My romantic fantasy has always been a torch singer, and Someone to Watch Over Me has always been one of the top songs for that fantasy. It was the only reason I would watch Mr. Holland's Opus, to watch that student sing that song.
This collection has a lot of well known tunes on it. I was going to comment that they must have spread them out over both collections, but really it's just that Gershwin wrote a lot of well known tunes. These are actually pretty interesting arrangements, though. And it's hard to come up with an arrangement of Summertime that will stand out, really. Everyone does that song.
Embraceable You is another one of those fantasy songs. The sultry torch singer sings that and I play tenor sax as a back up in a club where they still allow smoking...for effect.
Steve Swallow
Always Pack Your Uniform on Top
I seem to remember thinking that there weren't enough 'new jazz' groups to listen to and fawning over my Black/Note CD as an isolated case. But only 37 days in and it turns out that all I really had to do was pay attention to the pile of CDs that I was being sent home with every week. Right now, as the CD plays, it's just a guy more or less noodling on his guitar to an audience, but I do recognize the saxophone player on the cover of the unopened CD, so I have some notion of what I'm in for. Ah, there he is, Chris Potter has joined the guitarist on his saxophone.
Okay, that's kind of awesome. The liner notes to this CD is sheet music to the tracks. No explination (I was looking for the meaning behind the title), no lead in. No jazz critic or fellow musician waxing poetic about the artist or for that matter explaining who the hell this guy is. It is literally just pictures of the band recording and the sheet music to the CD. That's really cool. This is what the album is, this is what it's about--the music, here it is. That's it.
These might be my favorite liner notes yet. Well, the history of the blues ones were pretty good and informative, but as far as single artist liner notes go, these are the champ.
You don't get a lot of bass players as leaders of the band, but this really is pretty damn good. The eleven minute plus opening track had a cool disjointed rhythm to it that was inventive without resorting to the usual abrasiveness (though, I admit I really like the abrasiveness). I often consider guitar a diluting agent in jazz. It more often than not 'smooths' things out, and this isn't neccisarily an exception (even the Mahavishnu Orchestra has some mellowness to it that I blame on the guitar). Maybe it's that all the guitarists that really like the grind went to rock and all the ones that wanted to chill played jazz, I don't know. But this group has no piano, that roll is filled by the guitarist.
I kind of zoned out to this CD. I just kind of fell into listening to it, it's pretty good. I wish I had something more profound to say about it, but I don't.
I made it with an hour and fifteen minutes to spare! Unless you're on the East Coast, in which case...who are you? I mean, I'm happy to have you, I just don't know where you came from...
I guess I can take a few minutes away from obsessively checking the status of the video to work on my long term project. The completely clean and unrecognizable CDs keep popping up, including a sampler from a box set I don't remember coming out. Apparently they over-fed the beast. I guess you can't entice a dog on a full stomach. How many times can I restate that metaphor?
I almost feel like I shouldn't have to listen to this album to consider it listened to. Thanks to a friend's parents growing up, I listened to all of this all through my childhood. Other people my age might have Thompson Twins or Depeche Mode or Wham! in their closet of shame--or maybe they have a bunch of metal bands they have that they guiltily admit that they really liked (or no guilt, who knows...), but I have this stuff. Before Jazz (and before a brief detour in early rap), there was Funk for me. In fact, Funk is why I played the sax. I saw a video with Clarence Clemens standing on a tall white pedestal playing the tenor sax and I thought, "Damn...that's my instrument, I want to play that!"
My vision was to stand in the horn section playing Earth, Wind and Fire or behind someone like James Brown. I wanted to be on that giant white pedestal growling out an eight bar solo in a funk or soul song. That was my very first image of my potential future self as a saxophonist. Obviously, that image evolved and I've talked about the various stages of that daydream before.
These are the songs I sing mindlessly when I'm completely idled. The "Give It To Me" chant..."Giveittomegivemethatstuffthatfunkthatsweetthatfunkystuff(give it to me!)" I don't really think about it. It's just the music in the back of my head. And since it's the first music I 'learned,' it shapes my tastes in music I like now.
The weird thing is that outside of funk, I really don't like dance music. And I absolutely don't dance to this or anything. I bob my head, but no dancing.
Man, I love Fantastic Voyage.
I don't know what the dancing thing is, really. I could come up with a bunch of excuses. It's not that I'm ashamed of my dancing (though it is, really, just awful)--I don't have the desire to dance (my brief romance with breakdancing aside--also, just awful). Dancing is one of those things where I don't know if I'm watching a good display of talent or I should put a wallet in the person's mouth to keep them from swallowing their tongue. I even took a graduate level class on dance analysis, nothing.
Do your dance, do your dance, do your dance QUICK! Cameo never managed to popularize the cod piece.
Familiarity is probably a big contributor to why this CD was never opened. I knew all these songs, I could play them back in my head pretty easily, there was no rush to get them on the player. No doubt they came home with something I hadn't really heard. Certainly it didn't come home during the Great Monster Rancher Play.
For record store employees who also loved their video games, Monster Rancher was a godsend. A video game where you make monsters from your own CDs? Couldn't be more perfect. In fact, the game was designed to get you to combine monsters and make them better that way, presuming I guess that people would run out of CDs to make monsters out of. For us, this was not a problem. We never really made it far in the game, we were too busy finding out what monsters all of our CDs made. We even had informal tournaments where we'd bring over ten CDs we hadn't put in yet, generate the monsters and have them fight it out for supremacy.
My champion monster came from Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, a pretty spectacular Naga. It seemed fitting. I miss that game.
For all of the fawning over Funk, the only other just pure funk on my iTunes before the project is a couple of Funkedelic albums when I realized that I was losing them. I used to have the entire Funkedelic catalog, but they all went adrift and only two, Hardcore Jollies and The Electric Spanking of the War Babies, were saved.
Duke Ellington/Louis Armstrong
Selections from "The Complete Session"
This seemed too short to count as its own CD. This is another one of those advance promos where they don't even have the artwork sorted out or at the very least produced and they're not giving me the complete cd.
This is really a CD that was waiting for iTunes or related media player. Because there really wasn't going to be an instance where I was going to throw in a CD with four tracks, one of them with false starts and conversations to have in the background or something of that kind.
I guess if I had a multi-cd player, like my brief moment in my bus, then it would work.
This is another one of those legendary artist CDs where I don't really know what to say. I can't really comment on the sounds that everyone knows even when they don't listen to jazz.
I went through a heavy Armstrong phase for a bit when I was living in a house with a lot of roommates. One of my roommates was pretty into The Carpenters. This created a fusion in my head when bored at work and I started singing Carpenters songs in Armstrong's voice. It's a moment that delights me to this day. Try it, it's awesome.
4-Sight
4-Sight
I usually have been listening to the CD for a little bit before I start typing. The process goes, I pop in the CD, transfer it to the hard drive, get the Amazon player link, scan the cover, and then start assembling it into the blog. By then, the CD has digested and I've been listening to it for a little bit. Usually I've looked up anything I didn't know as well. I haven't done this one because I really didn't know who the hell it was and I kind of wanted to see what my reaction was going to be.
Turns out it's a progressive jazz quartet. Everyone in the group has managed to continue playing (and the bass player has apparently become a professor at Michigan State while playing bass in the Lincoln Center Orchestra.) But as this particular group, just this once.
Wow, on track four it got all fusion-y on me. Still a little funky though.
There were a few groups of like this when I was there, jazz combos with names (instead of the "So and So Quartet). I usually didn't see many follow up albums from most of them. In fact, Sex Mob is the only group I can think of that I saw two or more of.
Which isn't to say that these groups aren't any good, they are. I really like this, not as much as Black/Note, a group from the same period, but it's pretty good.
