Day 30: Stefon Harris, Jason Moran, Gerg Osby, Mark Shim "New Directions", Joe Lovano "52nd Street Themes", Andre Previn "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Well, I kind of stepped in it now with my more 'pure' notion of the grab bag technique. I pulled out a weathered and worn CD that turned out to be a three CD modern opera and a CD sleeve that was cleverly disquising two CDs without any marking whatsoever.

It's not the first operatic style CD I've had to do, but I think it is my first three CD set that has had all three discs in them. And all but one track transfered. Well, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

Interestingly enough, I think this is the first time an artist has repeated, and it's managed to do it in an interesting way. Not too long ago (like two days ago) I did a Greg Osby and Joe Lovano collaboration. Well, tucked in the very damaged little unmarked sleeve were separate albums from both artists. I'm not sure if this is pure coincidence, of if I received these all together and throughout all the upheavel they managed to stay somewhat united, but it's kind of cool. Add in Stefon Harris who was part of day 14. Though it won't give me much to say since I exhausted my stories about both artists two days ago, but I'm doing six hours of music today, so maybe if I'm not typing the entire time it's a good thing.


Stefon Harris, Jason Moran, Greg Osby, Mark Shim
The Blue Note New Directions Band

So, first, that's not the normal scanned image since the plain sleeve that the CD was in had to be destroyed in order to extract the CD.

So apparently this was an attempt by Blue Note to get all of their young turk players together in the same way that there used to be that cross fertilization. This also has Osby playing in that slightly wild way that I'm more used to rather than that slightly tamed way he laid down with Lovano earlier.

This is the result of what happens when the new hot jazz get together.

In the seventies there was a flood of the first of the 'film school' filmmakers. Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, and Lukas were the first real wave of people who had studied film and filmmaking academically. In the late 80s and more in the 90s the same thing happened with jazz. More so than with filmmaking there was not only a sense that jazz couldn't be taught, but rather that it shouldn't be taught. There was a real feeling that the old Louis Armstrong adage was law,  "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." You couldn't teach jazz in a classroom, the conventional wisdom went, it had to be learned in the clubs at the feet of the masters. It had to be in your soul and if it wasn't, tough luck.

I've briefly discussed the change in this in the 80s with the recording from Jimmy Heath, "The Professor." I was a product of this as well, I learned jazz academically. I also spent a fair amount of time following around local jazz acts and watching them in clubs and tugging their ears, but I learned a lot in a class room.

What this resulted in was a wave of extraordinarily technical players. I don't say this pejoratively, this technical skill did not substitute expressiveness or feeling. Sure, there were some amazingly technical players that emerged briefly who didn't have that hard to define 'feel.' But the ones with that hard to define element were also amazingly technical players.

So a gathering like this it is almost like the honor students putting on the science fair. There's no fake volcanoes here, if they're going to do something on volcanoes, expect actual lava.

The pieces are selected out of the Blue Note library, but this is no list of common standards. The most common piece on here is Song for My Father. The other tracks are ones like Theme to Blow Up,  No Room for Squares, Big Bertha, and Commentary on Electrical Switches. This is deep catalog. Hard bop, progressive selections that come from a well studied, extremely well trained musicians who want to flex the muscles they toned. This is not beginners jazz. You want Satin Doll, go to a hotel lobby.

Joe Lovano
52nd Street Themes

Again I don't have the real cover, but at least this album is available for download at Amazon, so it gets the big player unless you're running AdBlock, in which case you get nothing.

This is almost the opposite of the previous album, which is not to say it isn't technical. It's in fact fairly heavily arranged, bringing four saxes, a trumpet and a trombone in as the horn section. The title is a tribute to the famed section of 52nd St. that was home to a large amount of jazz clubs through the middle of the twentieth century. These are all fresh arrangements of charts you might hear walking down 52nd street on a Saturday night. The arrangements are done by a Willie Smith, but not "The Lion" Smith from an earlier entry.

This kind of feels academic in a way. When you put a bunch of jazz students together, the first thing that usually happens is you put them in big bands, but big bands are pretty limiting. Unless you're the first trumpet, alto, tenor, or piano player you're not looking at many solos and the solos people do get are not very long. So now you sort your students into combos, but you usually only have a handful of rhythm section players (they were sorted out when the big band was selected) and an abundance of horn players, so in school you get a lot more 'nonets' and octets and the like. And because that's really too many horns to have just do unison lines, they also do arrangements. I performed in a few groups like this, usually doing Hard Bop tunes.

There isn't a lot of these 'in the wild' so to speak. Economically, it's hard to get a gig that pays nine members. Or for a label to foot the bill on a relatively low selling jazz CD with that many musicians on the invoice. But it certainly is more common on CD than live.

Influence-wise, I did this a little backward. This is largely bop from 52nd Street's heyday and New Directions was largely post-bop.

I feel like I should talk more about this, but really I got nothing. It's good.

There's a pretty cool solo sax piece towards the end called Abstractions on 52nd Street. I dig solo saxophone, you usually have to head to a street corner for that.

Andre Previn
A Streetcar Named Desire

So, I still have that problem with operas in English. And I got three hours of it ahead of me. I like Tennessee Williams, though. I don't really know too much about this particular play except for the iconic line, which I'm hoping will be spectacular.

So, I have this for two reasons. The first is that I was an advocate modern composition, and new operas fell into that category, despite my difficulty in hearing them in English. I know it's unfair, but it just sounds like Opera parody. Blame Adam Sandler.

The second reason is it is the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. So it was a new opera performed by the local orchestra. I had to take the promo. Besides, it wasn't like anyone was going to fight me for it. I think i pulled it out once and tried to listen to it. That's apparently going to be the last time, however. I came back from the bathroom and found out that 'snap' when I got up was me splitting the second CD in half. Well, at least I got it onto the hard drive...

Oh yeah, there's the "STELLA!" Done by an opera singer. Happens a lot earlier in the opera than I thought it would. But then I don't know this play that well.

I think I may have discovered that the only thing harder for me to accept than English operas is opera sung with an affected southern accent. Also, wearing headphones for five hours makes your ears sweaty, something I wasn't aware was possible. When I do audio work I tend to at least move them to my forehead between takes.

I'm in the home stretch and I haven't really said much.  I keep getting this feeling like the reader is sitting in front of me waiting for me to comment, but that's not at all the case. Obviously.

Rape scenes in general are rough to watch or listen to, but in opera form they are a special kind of disturbing.

Ha, I got distracted and hadn't noticed that the music had gotten a lot more up beat and brassy, iTunes had moved on to the Canadian Brass Super Hits...

Well, opera is a rough spot for me.

Day 28: Joe Lovano & Greg Osby "Friendly Fire" and Don Byron "A Fine Line"

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.