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.
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.
There's a failure in the blind method and my own weakness is setting me up big time. The grab bag method is all fine and good, except when I feel a double CD in my hand and think, "Man, I'm not up for that at the moment."
Of course this means that soon it's going to be nothing but multiple CDs that I have to do. And I have only myself to blame. But for now, I've kicked that can down the road and serve up two very different kind of progressive jazz CDs.
Regarding Ping...I have yet to figure out what the point of that even is...to share my iTunes purchases with the public? Apparently it only notices activity within the iTunes store. For the featured CDs I can either use the ten it picked at random from my collection (that I bought through iTunes) or I can clumsily look for the album in iTunes. For two days straight the album hasn't come up. I thought it might have been another way to experience the collection, but it looks like it's just a way to look into my shopping cart. Meh.
Joe Lovano & Greg Osby Friendly Fire
There are CDs in the Albatross that are 'familiar' without me having ever actually opened them or played them. They just surface a lot and I notice them. Maybe they have a catchy cover, a strange album name, or, in this case, two great tastes that taste great together that I probably kept intending to listen to. Joe Lovano was someone I got into in college, helped out a great deal from working at the store. Osby, I came across at the store, otherwise I might not have never heard of him.
And that would have been a shame, because I dig Greg Osby. With Lovano, on this CD, he's a little more on this side of wild with his playing. There's even a track called Serene. I don't know who is playing the flute, perhaps both of them...the liner notes are fused shut.
There was a time where I thought that two saxophones together was...I guess, unnatural. It just didn't seem right. Four or more saxophones? Of course, who wouldn't love that? But a band where there were two saxophones as the only horns, that was just wrong. There had to be a trumpet or trombone chaperone to prevent anything untoward. You simply could not lead a band with two woodwinds, it was unheard of. A combo consisted of one brass and one woodwind, at least if two or more horns were involved, and that's just the way it was.
I'm not sure why I thought this, I don't know what I had against two of my saxophone brethren standing up together to lead a combo. There wasn't any precedent for it. The fact of the matter is, two saxophones can sound great together, they don't need a brass to get down.
Two trumpets, though, that's just wrong.
This is a positively sedate recording, really. Not to say it's easy listening or anything, and I'm not about to confuse it with the Pat Metheny soundtrack, but it's pretty easy going by the standard I'm used to hearing these two play at. Maybe I've played it up in my head. It's still pretty awesome, though. The guys play pretty well off each other. And they switch things up enough that the tracks don't bleed even if you're not paying attention. There's the flute/sax bit, and another where they both play sopranos (a dangerous proposition in anyone else's hands.)
Don Byron A Fine Line: Arias & Lieder
I first got hip to Don Byron when he released an album called Bug Music performing the full songs of all the pieces composers like Carl Stalling would sample for the cartoon scores.
Normally I don't really like the clarinet. Too many keys and fingerings, kind of a strange sound. And they were too eager to be in marching band for some reason. I mean, it's not like anyone can hear the clarinet...
Anyway, Byron turned out to be the kind of curious musician that I really like. So much so that I apparently have duplicates that have been lost. I bought Bug Music twice (and am really hoping that it pops up in this process.) One of the empty nests was a sleeve for this CD (which itself doesn't have a front case at all). That really wasn't all that uncommon. We'd get promos in the sleeve like that in advance of the CDs release and then when the release date would come another promo in a proper jewel case.
I felt there was something familiar about this CD even though I'm fairly certain I never got around to listening to this album, and there it is, on the personnel on the back cover, pianist Uri Caine. I had mentioned him in passing when I raged against piano players (good times...) as a musician composer who manages to successfully blend music from the classical canon into a modern jazz (among other things) texture in a way that escapes most. His hand print is noticeable here as Byron takes music from Ornette Coleman, Gershwin, Roy Orbison, Schumann, and even Henry Mancini.
So, even without the no doubt over the top liner notes, we can see what the 'fine line' alluded to in the title is all about. It's really been a kind of pulling towards the center. The Coleman song was a little less 'wild' than it would have been for another free jazz player, while the Orbison or Schumann songs are a little more 'out there' than they would have been otherwise. All of that is laden with the unique sound that Uri Caine manages. It's this weird blend of American pop music of the early sixties, Eastern European folk, and whatever else he can find. If you spun an AM dial and wrote down the first eight genres you came across, it might be something like listening to a single Uri Caine piece.
A bass clarinet, the saving grace of the clarinet. I can't stay mad at an instrument that has this in the family.
I really wish I had noticed that Caine was on this album earlier. Caine is one of the only survivor CDs from the Albatross, the first to make it onto the hard drive when I first got my computer in an effort to make sure I always had it. Add onto that Byron, whose playing I really enjoy, this would have wound up in regular rotation had I known.
Byron rids himself of the band to do a Chopin song on the end (though thanks to a quirk of iTunes and a sketchy CD I have the Stevie Wonder song playing last). Not something you usually associate with Chopin, so it's a nice touch.
