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.
I hate the bottom of a bag. I don't even know why. Sure, some of the self selecting that insures that some of the bottom of the bag is not going to be all that great. But ultimately, this stuff is randomly assembled, no one bag is any different than the other, but so far I get pretty anxious to move on to the next bag, like I'm convinced that next one has all the treasures I've been looking for, and I could get right to it, if it wasn't for these blah CDs I have to do first. I wonder if it actually makes me meaner to the bottom of the bag CDs.
Jack Jezzro Jazz Elegance: The Trio Recordings
Not the greatest sign when iTunes thinks that this is an easy listening CD, despite the complete insistence of the title that it is in fact jazz elegance...
But yeah, it's winery jazz. A little guitar trio playing some mellow standards and some original bits. Good enough to listen to, not aggressive enough to disturb your wine tasting experience.
I was fairly sure that this is what I was going to end up playing. I'm always down on it in these posts because it isn't as dynamic or weird or whatever as the other CDs, but I don't really have a problem with it ultimately.
The liner notes flip the order of things a little bit, almost like the person sensed that he'd have to address up front that this was going to be a light weight set of recordings. He goes into all the 'flash' criteria people use to determine the value of an artist and implies that another measure, 'taste,' should be applied. Then the usual tour through the selections, timeless melodies etc. But usually the resume comes before all of this, but instead it follows. Ah, and it's because it includes him having released a few 'easy listening' CDs before this album, as well as apparently television soundtrack work. The salesmanship had to flip there a little bit to sell him as a jazz artist in spite of some of his background instead of because of it. His resume as a studio musician and bass player in an orchestra aren't the usual jazz bonafides that you can build on, so on the second page of the notes they go.
I've played about half the songs on this album.
I had this elaborate plan on prom to play Prelude to a Kiss at some point in the evening on my sax and then we'd have a crazy romantic kiss immediately afterward. It was a long walk for a kiss, and of course not necessary. We just started making out when she switched to comfortable shoes. That was right before we found out that I had parked in the front yard of a church. This is a pretty ridiculous pattern of me wanting the names of the jazz tunes to do the thing that they are, Maiden Voyage, Prelude to a Kiss...I guess I should be careful now who I play Serenade to a Cuckoo around, that's a mixed message that won't be fun to unpack...
This album brings the number of versions of Round Midnight to four. I suspect by the end of the project I should be able to create a fairly substantial play list of just Round Midnight. This version is about what you'd suspect.
Alan Pasqua My New Old Friend
From guitar trio to piano trio, it's a light jazz day today. I don't know if this is going to be light weight or not yet, it's still loading, but Wichita Lineman is on here, so my chances are pretty good. I don't see any vocal credits on here, so at least there is that.
There are no liner notes to save me this time either, just a dedication to "you, the listener." What a weird affectation. "Oh, I'm the listener...I was wondering what my role was in this thing."
Alright, we're underway. Before reading the track list and the credits I was kind of looking forward to this CD because it was a different kind of case for the CD. That can be an indicator of music that is also different, a little out there. Or that the manufacturer had a different supplier for their CD sleeves. This time it's the latter.
Since I don't have liner notes I had to go to our old friend Wiki, turns out that he is the guy who did the theme to the CBS Evening News. And apparently played with a lot of 80s rock bands.
Ah, the whispery voiced back up 'aaah la da dah' girl usually reserved for bossa nova recordings. Highway 14 must be a pretty mellow stretch of road.
Not to be outdone, this album brings the number of versions of Body & Soul up to five. I should start taking predictions on what's going to be the most represented song by, like, the 150th day or something.
It may not be possible to do an instrumental version of Wichita Lineman and not have it sound like we should be in an elevator. Smile is the same story, but it's such a pretty tune it doesn't matter.
Every time I start to think I'm about done with this bag another pack of unprocessed CDs pop up. The themes are staying pretty consistent, though.
Luiz Bonfa The Composer of Black Orpheus Plays and Sings Bossa Nova
Bossa Nova is somewhere between a successful date with The Continental and a dirty phone call. This might have a lot to do with the fact that I keep listening to this stuff on headphones, But it's that whisper singing that they do, it always gives me the impression that they're telling me something dirty.
I don't speak Portuguese, so maybe they are. Who knows. It is certainly one of the most mellow forms of music out there.
This is kind of a classic LP, I think. For some reason when I think of LPs it's always something like this, like 'so and so plays such and such.'
I know I know Black Orpheus but I can't think of it right now. This certainly provides a different feel to The Hurt Locker.
I'm starting to dread the bossa nova CDs because I didn't really have much to say about them in the first place and now I'm pretty much tapped out as far as insight goes. This recording bounces back and forth between the 'full orchestra' kind of stuff and the more simple percussion and guitar.
Of course I made the whisper sing comment, and the last track actually starts off with them really whispering "bossa nova cha cha" in my ear. Awesome.
This is a really short album, less than 40 minutes. This is the kind of thing where normally they would add bonus tracks to the original recording to fill things out, but not this time.
This was an especially difficult type of classical CD to file. The Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra wasn't necessarily an in demand orchestra. But then it isn't a single composer CD, so how do I file it so that whoever might be looking for it would find it?
Sony Classical seemed to put preference towards Rachmaninov. But it's not like Stavinsky is a complete unknown.
Ultimately I erred towards the standard I had set. I had laid this out earlier, if it was a single composer it would be filed by composer, multiple composers under the performer. So the Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra got a leader card.
I didn't get far enough to do a lot of studying of Russian composers. I know that Charlie Parker was obsessed with Stravinsky and piano players love Rachmaninov.
iTunes has an even harder time with classifying the CD since it attributed the whole CD to Rachmaninov, even the Stravinsky pieces.
This album contains a performance of Vocalise, which somewhere I also have performed on a theremin. Kind of awesome.
I'm as stuck with mainstream classical as I am with bossa nova, I don't really know what to say. I'm guilty of letting classical be background music, but really there's so much that goes on in music like this that it deserves more attention, not less. Somewhere we flipped it, classical became background music and we give attention to simpler, more repetitive music. I understand why that is, but it's still kind of backwards.
Today actually represents two very different artists that I became aware of solely through random promos that I subsequently became huge fans of. One of the CDs isn't even a promo, I bought the CD and was happy to do it. Today is an awesome day, which probably means I won't really write much. We'll see.
Uri Caine Ensemble Wagner E Venezia
I've made a few halted, insufficient attempts to describe Uri Caine in previous posts and I still don't really know how to do him justice. I'm stoked that there are MP3 downloads from Amazon for this album because when my words fail at least those of you without adblock can hear samples. But even then, thirty second snippets won't really do since his music really builds on itself and you have to give it time to accumulate.
In fact, that's exactly what he does here on this live album. The CD opens with the sounds of the crowd talking amongst themselves, that pre-concert chatter in the foreground. Faintly, you can hear the sounds of violins tuning up, or so it seems, until they come together in a nearly imperceptible crescendo...it isn't until the 'song' is over a minute and half in before the audience realizes the show has started.
Caine has an almost 'will it blend' approach to re-imagining music. You find yourself kind of playing 'spot the influence' as his arrangements jump from one to another. One minute you're listening to a straight forward rendition of Tristan and Isolde and then, and you're not always sure when this happened, there's an accordian in there somewhere. In the end you've walked from classical through klezmer, a few forms of eastern and western European folk, and progressive jazz and you have no idea how you got to any of it but it all fit together seamlessly.
I was hoping wiki could help me out here but all it really did is tell me he is from Philly (I seriously assumed he was from eastern Europe somewhere, nope, born in Philly lives in New York) and that I have eight other albums I need to seek out. As it is, I have his acclaimed Mahler album, this Wagner one I thought I had put on the drive but hadn't, a Mozart album I'm really hoping still exists somewhere, and Primal Light. The Mahler and Primal Light had already made it on to the hard drive.
I stumbled on Caine through a Winter & Winter sampler that had some absolutely amazing stuff on it. It's also where I discovered Big Satan and a few others with less catchy names. It more or less established that if that tell tale corduroy cover indicating Winter & Winter was there, what was inside was awesome. Unfortunately this didn't translate into sales and Winter & Winter went through a small distributor if I remember correctly, so I didn't really get a lot of promos, so I would end up ordering them for the store and then buying them myself.
Compared to some of the more elaborate take offs on the Mahler album, these interpretations are relatively tame. Relative, of course, only to Caine himself.
It takes a special composer and performer to make the accordion awesome.
How do you top ending a piece with the ringing of nearby church bells? By doing a Uri Caine version of Ride of the Valkyrie...so far with accordion and pizzicato strings and a hint of Sorcerers Apprentice. He's doing it as kind of a bounce or waltz...awesome. It's the heaviest song this side of Carmina Burana in classical music and he's given it a light bounce. This is what I'm talking about. Love it, love everything about it.
I somehow ended up with Kottke's iconic 'Armadillo' album (6 and 12 String Guitar) as a promo. I don't really know how, I guess because it was 'folk' or something. I kind of remember just picking it up out of the box and thinking, "Huh."
When I got it home, though, I was smitten. When that dude with the dreamy hair and less shirt than recommended sits down to noodle on the guitar, this is what I want to hear him play. So so often that is not even close to the case. I guess he can't be blamed, I'm not his target audience, I don't want to be wooed by him, I just don't want to be annoyed by him and his aggressive strumming of some half-figured out Alice and Chains song. (is it a dated reference? Yes, but I don't run into douchy guitar guy much anymore so it remains relevant to when I was, so there...)
Actually speaking of douchy guitar guy, while driving around with my brother a week or so back we saw the most metal dude ever, walking in long sleeve black in 100 degree weather with a guitar slung over his back, no case. This has nothing to do with Kottke, but I just remembered that and thought his metalness should be recorded.
Kottke is another one of those guys where a lot has been written about him and I feel silly trying to say something new about him. There are a couple styles of guitar playing that I actually like and this is one of them, that sort of simple/complicated folk guitar, no heavy handed strumming going on her or over involved picking, just enough warmth and complexity. It's pretty easy to let this music kind of take you in.
As the title suggests, there are no vocals, which was the case with the Armadillo album, but the 'one guitar' bit sort of implies that there is going to be just the guitar. Not so, every now and then a little texture is added by an organ and perhaps a synthesizer. A little distracting to be honest.
I've managed to hit a vein of CD cases where I'm familiar with the CDs as homeless CDs. Despite knowing that I've seen the homeless CD on numerous occasions, I managed to let myself get excited a few times, like with Duke Ellington's Money Jungle featuring Max Roach and Charles Mingus. Each time I see the case I get a little thrill that is popped as I remind myself that the CD is out there, homeless in one of the bags of homeless CDs that I'll eventually have to go through.
So after sifting through some likewise disappointments (a disc of Marcel Deauchamp, for one. I don't remember what that was about, but I'm sure it was interesting...) two cases with actual CDs have emerged for today's entry.
Grant Green Alive!
If there's one thing I don't know that much about (and frankly there are many things, but this is the internet and I have a blogspot account, so I get to talk about them to my audience of zero anyway...) it's jazz guitarists. I can list the handful of top names by rote if someone asks for suggestions.
But these aren't really suggestions because I can't really give you a good quantifiable difference between them for the most part. I know there is a Wes Montgomery and a Grant Green. And I know that I often confuse Grant Green with Basie guitarist Freddie Green.
I've seen Joe Pass in concert. And I think one other guitarist, but I can't really remember who that would be.
And of course there is Django, but even if you don't know jazz you know Django.
Thing is, there is no good reason I should be this ignorant. Sure, I'm not a guitarist and there was a little bit of disdain early on for guitarists when I was young because everyone played guitar. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting one. And thanks to my long hair and beard if someone found out I was a musician they assumed that meant 'guitarist.'
That all aside, I also played with an absolutely remarkable guitarist. If you have ever watched Home Movies, he was as close as you could get to Dwayne without actually being animated. Well, he didn't have his own rock band, though he could have if anyone could keep up with him. But they couldn't. Frustrated at being teased about guitarists not being able to read music he played the Charlie Parker Omnibook cover to cover. That's a book of Charlie Parker transcriptions that saxophonists spend their lives trying to go through. I never made it. I'm convinced that the only reason I can't find information on where he's playing right now is that I can't spell his last name.
I used to hang out and talk jazz with this guy and the piano player and talk jazz more than just about anyone. That means that guitarists had to have come up. At least enough to go to that Joe Pass concert. I just don't.
So I wasn't really expecting hard bop to come up. Again, I feel like it seems like I just label everything hard bop but really--hard bop is just over represented in the collection so far. There is some Latin like in Time To Remember, but then we're back into soulful hard bop with Sookie Sookie, which so far I have to say is awesome.
And now I have two versions of Maiden Voyage on the hard drive. I should start checking the accumulation of standards that's starting to happen on the drive.
Gil Scott-Heron The Mind of Gil Scott Heron: A Collection of Poetry and Music
This is another inexplicable blind spot. I like beat poetry, I like jazz, it almost seems like a no brainer that I'd be all over Gil Scott-Heron, perennial jazz poet. But alas, I think that this is the first time that I've even sat down to listen to Scott-Heron.
I've certainly meant to listen to him before. In theory I've been all about what he does. But up until this moment, when I sit down to listen to any CD that comes up do I finally actually take a moment to listen to him. I don't really have an excuse as to why I never stopped and listened to him before. I've always known what he was about, though I don't really know that much about him.
Honestly, I didn't even know I had this. I don't remember ever getting a CD by him.
It's a little weird to listen to a contemporary poem addressing Watergate (The H20 Blues). This is a compilation but it does not include the iconic The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, so it's not really a primer.
Ah, when unemployment being at 7% was bad...we'd celebrate that right now...
I think some of what kept me from listening to Scott-Heron was that Slam Poetry wore thin on my really really quick. I was kind of excited that poetry was making a mainstream comeback, that I was going to be able to listen to new work instead of old recordings of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, and Ginsberg.
But I had let history filter out those poems and proved to not be patient enough to filter the new Slam Poetry. So while I did encounter some that I thought was pretty cool, I found a lot of it, to be frank, fucking annoying. I realize now that a lot of it was people doing their best Scott-Heron, so it's a lot like someone watching Citizen Kane and thinking, "What's so special about this? All of this is trite and cliched." Well, sort of, but when everyone does those low shots or deep focus, they're imitating Welles. The movie was so influential, the techniques so imitated, that the conventions seem trite now but that's only because they were so mind blowing when they happened. Watching Citizen Kane is like looking at a Rosetta Stone for the language of film.
There is a track on here called The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash) which has a highbrow version of observational humor on the alphabet and the calender, but it also contains a reference to the practice of adding '-izzle' and 'sh-' to words as part of The Ghetto Code. Did not know that it was that old. He describes the Panama Canal situation as-
"There's a little bit of Panama over here, then there is some canal, then there's a little bit more Panama over here. But the Panamanians don't control the canal. You could think of it as if Amtrack came through your crib. You would at least want to know the man who was punching the tickets, and have a very tight relationship with him."
This is a good cross section/time capsule for the political outrage of the time, but mostly now I want to hear Scott-Heron poems on Tea Parties, oil spills, two wars, and the 'Great Recession.' Of course now I'm going to think "Oatmeal Man" every time someone brings up Gerald Ford...which makes me think of Wilford Brimley (who our manager had managed to convince a few people was his uncle in one of the more awesome moments of ridiculousness at the store) or Quakers. He laid out the rational for calling Ford The Oatmeal Man earlier on, I forgot what it was. But, I have liner notes:
Anytime you find someone in the middle
Anytime you find someone who is tepid
Anytime you find someone who is lukewarm
Anytime you find someone
Who has been in Congress for twenty-five years
And no one ever heard of him, you got Oatmeal Man.
Oatmeal Man, straddling uncomfortably
yards and feet of barbed wire
It's hard to live in the middle all the time.
So that's the story behind that.
There's a lot of those things that I eventually found trite in Slam Poetry, like word plays that were never as clever as the poets thought nor seemed to merit the crowd's reaction. Things like 'Hollyweird,' which was probably a tad more clever at the time but is still kind of 'eh.' I guess it's to counteract the 'normalizing' effect that the media has, but now it just feels like something that would be on an annoying handwritten sign or a Palin tweet.
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.
So, it's time I stopped 'throwing back' the double CDs and got to it before it becomes tragic. And why not start out with an opus paired up with something I haven't the foggiest idea about?
Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra Blood on the Fields
So, at least in my mind if not in reality, there was a distinct rivalry in attitude and philosophy between the two more famous Marsalis brothers (Jason and Delfeayo I didn't really know...). Wynton represented a scholarly look at the past, a complete embrace of the history and tradition of jazz. He was the ambassador, the professor. There is a fair chance that if anyone under a certain age knows anything about jazz and its history it is directly because of Wynton Marsalis.
Branford, however, represented the new, the now, the ten minutes from now. He was picking up the torch of Coltrane, Dolphy, of the progressive players that came before him and running headlong into that territory. Sure, he was still using traditional quartets and trios (Buckshot LeFonque not withstanding), but he was playing that dissonant rapid sound pioneered by jazz musicians of the late sixties. Though I do remember him at a show, trying to figure out what to do for an encore, laughing when someone called out "Giant Steps".
I was firmly in the Branford camp. I mean, what teenager likes bookworm-y history nerds? I was already nerdy enough for listening to jazz in the first place, I wanted in on the hip, the defiant. Besides, Branford played sax, I played sax. My side was chosen. I bought Branford religiously (even albums where Branford guested on, which explains the Sting CD I had for a moment), trying to get every Branford recording there was and all but ignoring his brother.
It's not that I didn't like his brother. Clearly, awesome. But I had made my choice, you can either repeat the past or write the future. Black and white, one or the other. Surely that's how it is.
Then I got Blood on the Fields. Holy crap. It won a Pulitzer Prize, so I don't really have to write it up like it's some hidden treasure. If you're into jazz even a little bit, it's a pretty famous album. To catch others up, it's basically a jazz oratorio about a family transitioning from slavery to freedom. (wiki link, since I realized I more or less just repeated the first sentence... I had thought there would be more criticism on the work itself rather than the political controversy of the award, but that's a publicly edited encyclopedia for you...)
Blood on the Fields repudiates everything I so smugly claimed when I bored someone with why I liked one Marsalis more than the other. This was traditional, modern, complex, simple... frankly incredible. It reminded me of Charles Mingus' Epitaph or the larger works of Ellington towards the end of his life. This was the large work that jazz had been trying for since 1917. This was completely amazing, far in advance of anything I had heard while still shin deep in traditional jazz structures. And it sounded badass.
I was wrong. Dammit. And now I had missed out on what Wynton had been doing this entire time, so I didn't see it coming.
Sadly, this is still one of the only Wynton albums I have, and he is very prolific, so it would be quite the effort to catch back up.
So if this was so earth-shattering, why is it lost in the Albatross? Well, it's long, for one. It was always one of those things that I wanted to sit down and listen to all the way through. Especially after the first CD blew my mind so much. But I never got around to it. I didn't have a CD changer until a recent pick-up of a five disc DVD changer free off Craigslist, and that was problematic and would have to be played through the TV. The first disc ended up an orphan, drifting around in one of the caseless piles probably too scratched up now to play. Once deep in the mix, it just got lost. I'd see it and think, "That's awesome, I should listen to it sometime" - and then nothing.
I really hate when the music I really like has a completely depressing theme. I remember when I actually listened to what was being said in Strange Fruit... that song was beautiful, but now I want to cry every time I hear it. And of course the coolest track so far on the second and third CD...Forty Lashes. I mean, it's okay to like it, it just means you have to change your vocabulary about it. "Forty Lashes fucking rocks, man. I love Forty Lashes! I gotta hear me some Forty Lashes!" Just doesn't sound right.
Fortunately, the last two tracks, Freedom is in the Trying and Due North , are also awesome without the same baggage.
Well, that first track wasn't at all what I was expecting. I was thinking how unfair the line up was, really. I mean, this guy I hadn't heard of was following an album I already held in pretty high regard. I was kind of expecting to ramble on new age-y artists and nondescript covers or something.
But instead the first track exploded with a pretty hot progressive thing going on, now I'm all thrown off.
I mean, the second track has cooled down, has that post-Jaco Pastorius fretless bass, more Weather Report than Wes Montgomery.
Of course, as I type that (and look up how to spell Wes' last name...) there comes a track that's more Wes than Weather Report. This guy is kind of all over the place in an awesome way.
I really don't know anything about this guy. I thought it was going to be a blues album to begin with. And with that English professor look he has on that cover, I wasn't expecting much in the way of blues. Maybe he was going to be another Paul Brady. The Amazon reviews implied that he was a fusion player, which is kind of true, but also kind of not. This is actually pretty cool.
Which is not to imply that I can think of a lot of things to say about it. Each track has been a kind of stand alone that he's brought something interesting to.
This was the best part about working at a record store, finding stuff like this that I never would have otherwise. Eventually, I would have come across Blood on the Fields, but Philip? I apparently wasn't intrigued enough to open the case. There's no way I would have listened to this without the Albatross. There isn't much coverage for Belgian jazz guitarists.
I don't really have much of a preamble to add today. Today's selection represents another set of people I know, but don't really know. I'm just going to get to it.
Pat Metheny A Map of the World
So, a long time ago, VH-1 used to have this block of programing, I think on Sunday nights, that ran just jazz videos. Sometimes it was hosted by David Sandborn... maybe it was always hosted by Sandborn, I don't know. But anyway, it was jazz music videos.
What's that, you say? How many jazz videos can there be? Not many, is the answer. Every week consisted pretty much of the same videos. There were some standouts:
And Last Train Home by Pat Metheny. It was a fusion song by this dude with crazy hair and an even crazier guitar, but damn if it wasn't catchy. That programing block started me on collecting Branford Marsalis and World Saxophone Quartet recordings. As it would happen, I already had the album that the version of Take the A Train came from. But as catchy as Last Train Home was, I never ended up even getting that album. After a while, Marsalis and the WSQ would lead me down the path toward more dissonant jazz, 'harsher' sounding stuff and I grew ashamed of the fusion I used to like early in high school. Metheny became part of that past.
Except I started seeing him playing on tracks with the guys I was listening to now. Like playing with Ornette Coleman. Clearly there was more to this cat than it seemed.
So every once in while a Metheny album would come up and I'd grab it and think, "This is going to be the crazy stuff, right?" To the best of my knowledge, none of it turned out to be.
This is another one of those soundtracks from a movie I haven't heard of. And again, a rather successful film, winning Golden Globes and starring Sigourney Weaver and everything. The music features really warm guitar with string back grounds. The music is pretty sad to melancholy. The logline makes the movie sound like kind of a bummer, "A woman's life falls apart after she's blamed for an accident on her property."
And, out of nowhere, there's a kind of funky track called Sunday. I have to say, that bit reminded me a bit of the scores to early Spike Lee movies. Not the soundtrack, the actual score--I'm not saying in the middle of a Pat Metheny album something like Public Enemy started happening.
There have been little specklings of sounds from the film, but not in the way we've come to understand that. It's not memorable lines or big sound effects, it's ambient sounds of cars in driveways or kids in a distant backyard, and then a really faint Weaver asking someone if they really want to run away to the desert. It adds to the overall eerie effect, really kind of cool. Though I don't know that I would notice if I wasn't wearing headphones.
There is a similar effect used on the soundtrack to Mickey One by Stan Getz. I'm really hoping that CD turns up in the Albatross... Anyway, it adds a unique feel to the score and helps connect it to the movie in a way that I had already commented was sometimes difficult. Especially when you hadn't heard of the movie until you read the subtitle of the album to realize it was a soundtrack.
This is a long CD with a lot of very short tracks. With the exception of that one track, Sunday, they're all pretty similar. You don't even get much of that distinctive sound of Metheny's super strange guitars, though it is there.
Probably not a good sign that I didn't quite notice the album ending.
Another CD that is surprisingly expensive now. Not the most, but a contender to be sure.
This is going to be fun for me, to be honest. It's about as perfect as it gets. Willie is one of those legends that I know is a legend but I really don't know much about him.
Well, I'm about to get a crash course in Willie Smith from Willie himself. The title of this CD isn't a euphemistic notion of playing greatest hits, it's literally Willie himself sitting down at the piano and telling the story of his life in the way an old vaudevillian stride player would, interspersed with songs and figures on the piano. In essence, you get a chance to hang out in a parlor with a legend while he tells stories.
He starts off delineating between ragtime players and stride players (stride players, apparently, have good left hands). He's rather proud of his studied musicianship, of playing good houses with other musicians who knew their stuff instead of what he calls 'three chord players.' There is certainly a hint of that piano player attitude that I hinted at earlier.
Seriously, it's too bad this is so expensive because it's about the most awesome thing that has popped up that I can imagine. I wish my Mac wasn't a busted hulk of its former self, then I could step outside and light up a cigar and imagine I'm sharing a stogie with Smith as he lays out the history of 20th century music from the first decade on from a first person perspective while laying down absolutely stunning piano tunes in between.
I've been trying to place Smith's accent, I think it's closest to Archie Bunker's. "First" is pronounced "Fiy-st."
This is a disjointed history, a sort of rambling through a half century of music with a who's who, anecdotes of various performers, a guide to terminology of either music of the scene, various practices of the piano hall player. Recorded in 1964 to preserve his unique perspective and knowledge of the history of 20th Century American music, apparently he sat in a room with two tape recorders going and a producer prodding him on with questions that have been edited out.
This is a fairly remarkable time capsule recording, if I had realized what it was at the time I would have been glad to have it. I'm glad that it eventually surfaced.
Starting out of the box with a fake out, I was looking forward to today, because I thought it was going to be Greg Osby and I was going to start having a progressive/free jazz saxophone representation to at least keep pace with the current leaders, blues and big band music.
But instead, it was another progressive/funk jazz player hiding inside the Greg Osby CD.
Even better, there's also an ambiguous self help CD in today's line up. Seriously, I can't wait.
The Charlie Hunter Quartet Songs from the Analog Playground
There was a brief period of awesomeness for progressive/funk/free whathaveyou jazz in the 90s. Honestly, it might be happening now and I just don't know about it. But, for a while, it seemed like there were a bunch of artists coming out with interesting, quirky, funky jazz. Sex Mob, Medeski Martin and Wood, and guitarist Charlie Hunter.
I have to admit that, initially, I was way more into Hunter's saxophonist than I was into Hunter himself, though I certainly found him interesting. He had formed a band that was at first called James T. Kirk, named for James Brown, Thelonious Monk, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but Paramount had something to say regarding that so the band became T.J. Kirk.
This exhausts the immediate knowledge I have of Charlie Hunter. I do know that there were bigger Hunter fans at the store than me, so I'm surprised I have this. It might have been something we got multiple promos of or maybe I squirreled it away in an act of pure dickishness (because I knew by this time that I wouldn't likely listen to it that often).
At the time, I had an aversion to anything too fusiony. I still have it for the most part, but I'm not as strict about it. And because I'm forcing myself to listen to these things all the way through, I'm more prone to letting the CD develop instead of ejecting it at the first hint of processing or electronic instruments.
And there is a lot of that here. It's definitely a funky album a little more than it is straight jazz. Mos Def and Norah Jones make contributions. It's closer to Branford Marsalis' short lived Buckshot LeFonque than it is Wes Montgomery.
The track that just started up is the lead contestant for 'best track title so far,' it's a funky little piece called Mitch Better Have My Bunny. Awesome. It's a pretty groovy little track.
Much of this is based more on the formula of 'figure/solo/new figure/solo/figure/out' rather than 'head/solo/solo/solo/head.'
Wait, I know this Norah Jones song... or rather, I know the Roxy Music single More Than This that Jones and Hunter have given the smooth jazz treatment. As you might have guessed, the dot dot dot represented a Google search.
This might be 'girlfriend jazz.' The kind of jazz you can listen to with your girlfriend that doesn't like jazz but have it still be at least remotely interesting. Or 'car jazz,' perhaps a less sexist way of putting it. Jazz you can play in the car without someone reaching for your presets.
Kurt Elling is doing his 'vocalese' bit on Desert Way. I have a hard time with vocalese, I find it goofy, but at the same time I get Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' Twisted stuck in my head on a regular basis. And King Pleasure would give me an opportunity to 'sing' Charlie Parker solos with out going "doodlydodododdeededede". Though I'm not 100% certain which one is worse...
The lead singer from Galactic also makes a contribution on the smokey track Spoonful. It's another one of those 'cruising across the desert in the middle of the night' songs. I get enough of these, I think I'm obligated to actually drive across a desert in the middle of the night. As soon as I actually get a stereo in my Bus...
This second Kurt Elling track is also the second track that is just percussion and the guest vocalist, the first being the opening track featuring Mos Def. This is not an artist that splatters his playing wall to wall on the album. Certainly he is featured a great deal but, to his credit, he does not get in the way of the music, to the point of not even playing guitar on two tracks so far. And Percussion Shuffle appears to be, unsurprisingly, a lengthy feature of traditional and improvised percussion instruments.
If you've spent more than half a day with a percussionist, this track will sound all kinds of familiar. Eventually, around them, everything either becomes a drum or a stick and you quickly learn what everything you own or are surrounded by sounds like when struck against or with.
Mos Def is returning with a track called Creole, which so far sounds a bit like a variation on Miles Davis' So What. But rather than that stumbling forward rap style that Mos Def has (it always feels a little ahead of the beat, like a waiter with a tall stack of dishes that you think he's going to drop, but turns out he's just that good at carrying dishes that he can lean the stack ahead of him at will...) he's actually singing this track. Not actually in Creole, though. Pretty decent, really. Kind of like the 'smooth jazz' Roxy Music cover earlier, so not as funky as I'd like it. None of the dissonance I would have expected.
I might have an accidental albums worth of Norah Jones songs, but none of it her regular catalog. Essentially I like a bunch of people who also seem to like Norah Jones or who Jones recorded with to establish her jazz bonafides. Every once in a while, these CDs pop up with a track or two sung by Jones. To the rest of the world, she might be 'that chick who did that song' (or maybe to the handful of people who saw the Wong Kar Wai movie, 'that chick from the film') but to me she has become the perpetual guest artist.
Smart Music Series You Know, You Can
This one is a total mystery to me. I don't know why I have it. It's not classical music, its some sort of Yanni-esque pastiche of electronic music, sound effects, and what they call 'ancient music.' I guess this might have fallen under my buying domain, I don't know how or where.
There was a lot of this stuff that came out, mostly on the heels of that whole Baby Mozart stuff where someone had decided that Mozart could somehow make you smarter, or your baby smarter, or you a smarter parent... I was never really sure how it was supposed to work.
But it sold a bunch, which meant that there was a bunch of stuff like it bound to come out.
Like this.
Now, I listen to classical and jazz, and I've discussed the liner notes in blues, so I'm no stranger to pretense and hyperbole in liner notes. This, however, is my current hands-down favorite:
Do not use while driving or operating heavy machinery. In case of serious problems, The Smart Music Method does not replace sound medical or therapeutical advice. Producer, studio, record company or distributor are not responsible for any damages caused by inappropriate use of the music. Shuffle play is recommended (except for Dreams & Sleep albums). Play softly. Headphones improve the third dimension of sound.
The rest of the liner notes follow in the same vein. Checked off in the cover, apparently this makes use of brainwaves, nature sounds, ancient music principles, natural sonic surround sound. I guess I have to go to something else in their series for multiple music layers.
Apparently 'ancient Greek scales' were used in the composing of this CD (the ancient Greek scale is actually listed as "Lydian." I shouldn't mock too much. I'm well aware of how modality effects the mood of the piece, and Lydian mode is kind of a go-to favorite of mine.
The full list of elements on tap are laid out for me:
Scale: Lydian.
Nature Ingredients: Birds.
Brainwaves: Alpha States.
Planet: Sun.
I'm apparently free, according to the instructions, to do what I would normally do. Relax, think about whatever, keep my eyes open or closed. Just don't drive, of course. Oh, and think of a garden where I apparently can get away with anything.
I don't know why our minds have to always go to gardens. It seems like a bunch of people who can reprogram my mind and creativity with a CD could also come up with something other than the tried and true 'garden' that I have to take my mind to. I don't have anything against gardens, some of them are pretty nice. I went to a butterfly garden in Canada where a bird humped my shoe (true story). These are the things I think about when I think of gardens. Shoe-humping birds or peacocks stealing my bread. I guess if you don't pick something like 'garden' or 'ocean' (I like the ocean, I feel I have to be near it, even though I never go to it) then you end up picking something that sounds materialistic and that would throw the whole aesthetic off.
My racing games are buried in the Albatross storage, otherwise I think this would be a great experiment. I could do a few laps without 'Smart Music' and then do a few laps listening to it and see exactly what the effect on my driving might be.
The liner notes tout the advantages of what they call 'random music':
Suppose you walk in a forest. Birds are singing. They sing without a conductor and without any system. No bird sings the same song twice (tell that to the birds out my window ~me), no bird sounds exactly like any other bird. You never know when any bird will start singing or finish singing. You hear 'bird song.' Likewise, all separate instruments in random compositions can start and finish at any given moment. Together though, all instruments join to create a total effect that is more than the separate voices or instruments. The music in The Smart Music Series is based upon this unique natural principal.
I have to say, they're having a lot more luck, harmonically speaking, than I did when we experimented with random music in 20th century composition classes.
In the end this doesn't sound too different than the earlier World Flutes 1 compilation. It's ultimately a very repetitive music and I can't say that I'm overwhelmed with a sense of confidence or 'yes I can-itude.' I did have to stop it twenty minutes in to unplug and restart the router...maybe it threw off my karma waves or something.
