I've been going Godzilla on my CDs as of late. More than a few have found themselves under foot as I let the Albatross get the best of me and haven't really made any effort to organize the CDs as I go through them one by one. This is of course stupid as hell. I have managed to fish out some of the more scattered CDs and at least start making recognizable stacks. Which means that there is more left for the bag I was working on than I initially thought, almost two more weeks to go.
I haven't come any closer to figuring out a way to classify classical CDs in a system designed for pop music.
I was actually kind of dreading putting this CD in because while I like classical music, I haven't had to write about classical music since college, and even in college I wasn't really that great at it.
But I hadn't realized it was a 20th Century composer, which was what I took upon myself as a my mission as classical buyer to promote 20th Century composers. I even made special cards to indicate 20th Century composers, as if that was an incentive instead of a disincentive for the average person browsing the classical section of a suburban record store.
I've talked before about how, let's say 'out of hand' 20th Century music can be. That's not so much the case with this. So far it's pretty accessible.
According to the liner notes the first piece, Drowning Out, is inspired by a William Golding novel, Pincher Martin, about a drowning man. I haven't read or even heard of that book, but apparently that doesn't really matter. Turnage doesn't really commit to that whole 'impressionistic' composition style where the music is supposed to evoke certain imagery or the like.
I really like the cello. Like, in a kind of disturbing way. I bring this up because the second piece is a cello piece written as a tribute to a friend of the composer and cellist for Ensemble Modern who had died.
Turnage manages to dodge one of my main frustrations with iTunes by having his compositions play all the way though instead of in separate movements. iTunes doesn't let you imbed play lists so that when you put things on shuffle you don't get composition movements out of sequence or separated. Pretty frustrating when you have tracks that are supposed to go together in your library.
As much as I'm digging the cello piece (which really is pretty good, has a bit of darkness to it, almost a kind of updated film noir soundtrack feel), I'm looking forward to Three Screaming Popes...because, well, how can you not?
Pretty cool, and fairly tame for 20th Century music, but that's not really a bad thing.
Freddie Hubbard & Jimmy Heath Jam Gems: Live at the Left Bank
Freddie Hubbard is one of the people I've seen live, but it wasn't as an amazing a musical experience as say, Pharoah Sanders or Sonny Rollins. Instead it was a kind of old school spectacle. Hubbard was, the best of my estimation, completely plastered. What was even better was that he was fascinated with some lady in the back of Kimball's East. So really we got a front row seat to that most of the night. The performance was good, too, but really what I remember was the disjointed back and forth with a lady I couldn't make out (and I was closer to her than he was, so who knows what he was responding to...). It was kind of awesome. I mean, I'm way too young to have had the opportunity to be in a club where Parker might wander out of a bathroom just in time to take his solo after shooting up or Mingus slamming his bass and shattering it (I don't remember who that story goes to, to be honest). Jazz men to me are old men, dignified or mellowed with their age, or the ones that were professional enough to have survived long enough for me to see them. But Freddie Hubbard took one for the team to give me that old school jazz club experience.
Joel Dorn (who also wrote the description of Buddy Rich I quoted) also describes the old school jazz club experience in his liner notes, but that's of the more performance oriented variety. That legendary players would arrive at these clubs and play to enthusiastic audiences and the artists would feed off that.
I can't 'agree' as such because I haven't been to the old jazz clubs at that time, but I do know that the crowds now are more subdued. Fancy men taking fancy women on fancy dates to appear classy, upper middle class folk with the money to go to these things, and a smattering of music students, studying the playing. And I think that we were all judging each other for being there. No one was there 'legitimately' except the person making the observation. I imagine the same thing happens at punk rock shows.
This is from Label M, which packaged their CDs in the same cases used by 32Jazz. They also gave me a t-shirt. There's no insight there, I'd just been sitting here listening to blazing tenor solos and hadn't typed anything in a bit. This is pre-Professor days for Jimmy Heath and yet still awesome.
This isn't the cleanest live recording, but not the worst that's even gone onto the hard drive, and it does give a good feel of the crowd and their reaction to the pretty energetic performance.
I kind of hate Autumn Leaves. For some reason when I played in academic combos the instructor would often give the group Autumn Leaves. Maybe it's the easy changes or easy head, don't know. But it wasn't a particularly interesting piece to play and I played it way too often.
I think that what the Albatross is teaching me is that perhaps really jazz is too big. It really is. This might be true of all kinds of music. I'm sure if I dug enough I'd find that there isn't enough time in this world to absorb all the really good Klezmer music out there. (I seem to remember picking up Klezmer music...)
But jazz is too big. There is simply too much good stuff out there. You have to dedicate your life to absorbing all of the fabulous artists, and ultimately end up with an unmanageable beast of a collection for your troubles.
Today's two CDs are from artists I 'know' but don't really know. They're prolific, very present in the history of jazz, great players, I just don't know enough about them because I know Sonny Rollins, Branford Marsalis, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Paul Desmond instead. I may have only one album each from either of these guys and my collection is full of completely phenomenal and prolific players of whom I have exactly one CD. There may be no hope. It might just be that you can never really know jazz unless you make it your life's work.
Perhaps that's fair enough. You don't have to know every little thing about your entertainment. But every time I find one awesome recording that I should have known about I worry about all the ones I don't. It reaches a point where finding good recordings is actually worrisome.
Here's what is worrying me today:
Jimmy Heath The Professor
I try and not look too many things up lest this turn into some digest of Wikipedia and random jazz reviews I manage to find in a Google search. The idea is to mainly write about what these CDs mean to me after having dragged them around with me all this time without really exploring them.
But from some reason it was important to look this one up, because it was a name that would have made me go "Oh yeah, that guy" - and then hope there were no follow up questions. Not the first time that the Albatross has done that to me in this process.
But also because I have started to try and do all the site building stuff like getting the MP3 player and scanning the cover after I started to listen to the CD so I don't sit and feel compelled to write things while I'm listening even though there isn't much to say. Because of this I have been listening and the recordings don't sound the same. Turns out this is a compilation from sessions in 1974, 1985, and 1987 released a year after he left the Aaron Copeland School for Music as 'The Professor.'
So the liner notes (strangely intact) lean heavily on the notion of learning jazz and the complexities of that. I hadn't realized that I learned jazz in a bit of nexus where more or less it had just been begrudgingly decided that you could in fact teach jazz. If jazz could be taught, it would lose some of its mystique. It was no longer that thing that came magically from the fingers of giants.
But that has always been ridiculous, as the liner notes concede. Charlie Parker studied the hell out of Stravinsky scores, and players studied other players to see what the were doing, what they had come up with. Formalizing that didn't take away the mystique because there is still an 'it' between the players that study the book and the truly great players. But there is no harm in giving those players with 'it' the structure they need to not have to re-invent the wheel just to get where they're going.
So Jimmy Heath, after playing with Miles, Milt Jackson, Cal Tjader, and more became a professor of jazz formerly in the way he would have been for any young player secretly taping his shows so he could take them home and transcribe them to find out what he did.
I hate finding out that awesome people were teachers only after they're done teaching. Not that I would have the nerve to actually try and be a student of awesome teachers because I would feel that "I'm not ready." Ultimately that constant feeling of not being 'ready' is what eventually undermined my foray into music.
I just realized I have been bobbing my head to this track without really thinking about it, turns out to be a tribute to Sonny Rollins. There are other tributes here, one to Ben Webster, one to the saxophone itself.
There is a lot of jazz guitar on this CD, which is always a little tricky. I either like it or I hate it. When I like it, though, I tend to really like it. In defiance of that, I'm okay with this guitar. It's pretty good, not that annoying tone that too many guitarists adopted I think in the 80s, transitions smoothly between a rhythm instrument and melody instrument.
Okay, CD, you have me. It has found my already documented weakness for goofy chanting on track with the droning "There's no end..." on the track naturally titled No End. Usually I find soprano sax taxing because it's harder to play than the people who pick it up like to admit, but Heath doesn't have the buzziness I usually associate with soprano sax. And, as I said, there's a chant. Tell me that Salt Peanuts isn't one of your favorite bop tunes and that it isn't because of the "Salt peanuts! Salt Peanuts!" yelled in the middle of the head. Unless of course you don't know 'bop' or the tune Salt Peanuts. In that case, check it out and tell me it isn't awesome for the above reason.
They avoided irony and did not end the CD with that track. Instead, it ends with one of the tunes I liked to play the most, Sophisticated Lady. Basically, I didn't know my scales and chord changes that well, so I learned a lot of ballads which I felt were easy to fake it on. There's a tuba on here, sounds like. The tuba got shafted in Jazz... it was there at the beginning and people use it from time to time but, as far as I know, there hasn't been a 'legendary' tuba band leader. Every other instrument got their moment in the sun, but the poor tuba toils in obscurity.
Albert Ayler Witches & Devils
It's hard to believe but CDs really had a short run on center stage as the music medium of choice. When I started at the record store we still called it a record store, for one, and CDs were really only about a decade old. There were still hold outs coming into the store complaining about our diminishing audio cassette section and arguing that they didn't want to have to 'replace all of their tapes' (as if after you buy your CD player it would sneak around in the middle of the night and smash all players of outdated media.)
So one of the ways that CDs were sold was the increasingly 'detailed' digital remasterings. No movement of Moore's Law was too trivial to trigger the re-release of some marginally remastered catalog of a label's material. Jazz and Classic Rock got it the worst. Since the mine was richer over in guitar land the whole thing got much more comical with rock re-releases. Audiophile store regulars would call in like clockwork looking for that Boston or Kansas re-issue with the new-process-of-the-moment and bonus tracks of the five minutes the engineer left the mic on accidentally.
For jazz, though, it meant that some titles collecting dust on the shelves of a label's catalog got to see the light of day. And so this '24-bit remastered' Albert Ayler CD ended up in my collection.
This gap in my knowledge hurts the most because I love free jazz. After years of making fun of it, one day sitting down and letting John Coltrane's Om! play all the way through, I just got it. It helped that the music program I was enrolled in at college had been very focused on New Music, but it finally clicked with me and I've been a fan ever since. But if progressive jazz is hard to come by, free jazz is nearly impossible. Free jazz is what I played at closing time to empty the store.
And again, the covers don't help me. Free jazz artists don't meet me halfway by having an album cover with them pouring honey on their head while banging a trash can lid on an ice sculpture of the Mona Lisa to let me know the music inside is going to be the disjointed frantic collective improvisation that I've come to love from free jazz. Okay, I don't know that I would have guessed from that album cover either, but you have to admit, it would be hard to ignore.
This CD resisted the draw of others for 'bonus tracks' and remains only four tracks at a relatively brief 36 minutes. Frantic, wild, atonal minutes. The titles are consistent, there is a theme that Ayler was approaching. There is the title track, followed by the much shorter Sprites, then the longer Holy, Holy, followed by another short track, Saints.
This is something you see every once in a while from free jazz performers, where they suddenly pop into melodic mode as if to say, "See, I can do that too, I just choose not to." There is always pressure on a free jazz performer to prove they don't have to play free jazz.
This is pretty early in Ayers' career and in free jazz in general. It's really frantic. According to the liner notes he used a plastic reed usually reserved for members of marching bands or parents who are tired of replacing reeds. It's a unique and recognizable sound. I wish I had dug this up earlier.
