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 14: US3 "Cantaloop" (Single), Stefon Harris and Jacky Terrasson "Kindred", Archie Shepp "Live in New York"

Going for another triple at the end of the week as this time I've encountered an honest single and it seems a cop out to count it as a full album. Getting more into CDs I don't remember ever getting, including unopened ones.

The worst part is the addictive nature that brought on the Albatross in the first place, because after starting this project, I've wanted to actually go and get more music. I'm discovering music that I had that I really enjoy every week so far, but I still feel the need to go and actively add to the pile. Something has to be wrong...

Three empty nests today as well--Duke Ellington in Sweden, Don Byron "Romance With the Unseen", and Jerry Granelli Jeff Riley.

US3
Cantaloop (Single)

It's hard to find too much to say about this. I suppose I should be embarrassed by this quickly faded rap fad of one taking samples from the Blue Note catalog to make modern rap songs. I hoped it would catch on, I'll be honest about that. I have some rap in my past. I liked Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, and Grandmaster Flash...I even went to a Fat Boys concert. I've made my peace with it.

But I grew into jazz, and when it looked like I could combine my early love of hip hop and jazz, sure--sign me up. And Cantaloupe Island is a funky song all by itself, perfectly fitting into a hip-hop mix.

So I was into this as much as anyone else with at least a passing fascination. But Cantaloop was the only one that did, and US3 faded quick. I don't know if they're recording anymore or off doing other things or what, but I never heard from them again the entire time I worked at the store.

Singles on CD are a difficult thing for me, but that might be because I'm not often that into 'remixes.' I get it, it's several different takes on the same song, and that can be intriguing, but essentially I have the same song now five times. To its credit, some of the later remixes are fairly different, but they all come back to the old Herbie Hancock piece.

That was a refreshing side effect, people started searching out Herbie Hancock records to find out where that track came from. This of course wasn't Hancock's first foray into Hip Hop, he was also responsible for the iconic Rock It, which prompted my dad to speculate that Herbie Hancock didn't know how to play piano. Little did he know...

I think singles exist to completely cure you of liking the song after listening to five slightly different versions in a row. I still like it, but man, I'm kind of done with this song for like a month or so now.

I have to admit, there was a part of me that was hoping I'd end up for at least a little while as a saxophonist in a live Jazz/Rap band. I was kind of willing to be a whore on the sax, mostly because I felt, no matter what, the horn always classed up the joint. I had a bias, obviously.


Stefon Harris and Jacky Terrasson
Kindred

There are probably some sound reasons I never got around to listening to this CD. All white covers are never a good sign, The Beatles aside. White covers and white suits, double whammy. People named Stefon, also not generally a good indicator. All respect to Stéphane Grappelli, but violin is still a little hard to get into in jazz.

And as much praise as I had for the vibes earlier, it's still a bit of a land mine instrument.

When taking home boxes of CDs at a time, these all seemed like sound reasons to put off listening to this CD.

My mistake, apparently. While there are some tracks that are easy going and light, this is a progressive jazz CD that goes right along with the earlier James Carter CD and anything else I would normally listen to.

It has a pretty good spread of traditional Jazz standards and modern pieces, like the rather smokin' Rat Race that finds the two performers chasing each other in overlapping solos.

This is a far more intense jazz experience than the cover suggests.  I'm not sure what they were trying to convey. I guess it's pretty hard to come up with a concept for a jazz album cover, now that I think about it. There's only so many shots of a guy standing next to his instrument one can try and pull of.  I remember reading an interview with Wynton Marsalis where he complained to the photographer that he didn't want to hold his horn in yet another photo-shoot, though he eventually did. Now that I think about it, it might have been Chet Baker. Doesn't matter, I guess.

I mean, rockers can identify the 'hard-coreness' of their music by the look of the cover and the amount of stage make-up their performers wear, but a progressive jazz album could end up looking like a fusion album by the cover.

This is another damaged set of liner notes, so I don't have much insight into the CD itself, but this is really pretty good.


Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd
Live in New York

I've mentioned before my fascination with trombone players and there not being enough of them. Well, the Albatross has been hiding this unopened gem since 2001. Roswell Rudd, which by the way is an awesome name, joins saxophonist Archie Shepp (I'll admit right now I thought he played piano) for a live concert in New York.

There's a lot here for me to like. Progressive jazz sound, trombone, live music banter right off the bat, with Rudd introducing his composition Acute Motelitis with "Trapped in a motel room in the middle of nowhere." There's even poetry, apparently.

Eventually the Albatross was going to reveal my fascination with spoken word, and it apparently decided to slip it in here on what is apparently a super album of 'things I dig.' Yep, I like spoken word. Now, I thought what you're thinking, that it meant that I like slam poetry. Turns out, not so much. I mean, there have been a few instances of slam poetry that I have actually liked, but it took a whole lot of bandless rap artists before I got to those. I feel that poetry struggled really hard to let people know it didn't have to rhyme only for slam poets to re-enforce the idea that it had to.

But that aside, I actually dig spoken word. It all started with a quest to find a recording I had read about of e.e. cummings, which I never did. But I discovered a lot of Beat recordings and other spoken word story tellers and kind of got into it. This also led to my beard, but that's apparently a long story that after I typed out I realized even I didn't care about...

Every track, it seems, is getting an introduction. A heartfelt tribute to a loved one with the a pretty cool nickname (Steam), and the introduction to Pazuzu that made it sound like a summer insect, but is instead apparently a demon who is also featured in The Exorcist. Also the gargoyle that Prof. Fairnsworth lets loose in Futurama. The two trombone Slide by Slide...jazz titles like their puns...this song metamorphoses a lot in its 11 minutes. I also like the acknowledgment at the end, "Thank you very much for Slide by Slide...featuring everybody..."

I've never been comfortable with saxophonists who also sing. Perhaps it's jealousy. Maybe it's that the trumpet is easy to hold to one side out of the way, but the saxophonist has to lean over his horn dangling awkwardly from his neck or to the side to sing and we have an extra hand to position when we start to play after we sing.

Or it's just that I can't sing so I don't think other saxophonists shouldn't either. Nice closer with a tribute to Elmo Hope.

The Albatross closed out with a lot of lies and fake outs (including the disappointing Fatal Error of the Count Basie Plays Ellington...) but also some albums that were destined to languish in obscurity if I actually selectively went through this. Not bad, Albatross...now quit killing good CDs in the process...