Day 54: Uri Caine Ensemble "Wagner E Venezia" & Leo Kottke "One Guitar, No Vocals"

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.

Leo Kottke
One Guitar, No Vocals

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.

Day 53: Simon Rattle British Composers: Mark-Anthony Turnage and Freddie Hubbard & Jimmy Heath "Jam Gems Live at the Left Bank"

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.

So I better get to it.

Mark-Anthony Turnage conducted by Simon Rattle
British Composers
Turnage: Drowned Out/Kai/Three Screaming Popes/Momentum

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.

Day 52: Ernie Watts "Classical Moods" & Tamba 4 "We and the Sea"

Deck of cards day? I know...

I'm getting down to the last of this bag of CDs. So far the pattern has been that I'm impatient with the bag I'm working on and want desperately to move on to the next. Well, this is only the second bag, but more or less...

So let's get through this bag...

Ernie Watts
Classical Moods

Sometimes there are artists that I don't know if I'm familiar with them because they come up often or if I've heard of them a lot or if their CD just kept popping up when I was going through my CDs. Ernie Watts is one of those guys, because the name is very familiar but anytime I think of it it's just this album cover that I think of.

Watts, from the liner notes, is a studio/session player that would spend his nights playing in LA clubs. This is his chance, so he says in the liner notes, to play these classic jazz standards that he grew up with because during the sessions he's playing original works of the people he's working for.

There's a double edged sword with the whole 'session musician' thing. The good side is that generally you are a master of your instrument. You don't get into the studio unless you can bring it on the first take. It's one thing for the artist on the top bill wastes time, but the hired help can't miss a note. And so these players are on point before they even arrive. And of course if they're good, they get to do it a lot. And they develop their playing because they do it so often and with so many different ways.

The bad side of that is that you are 'for hire,' and that means all of you--your sound your style, everything. They never really get to cut loose, experiment that much--they serve the person they're recording for. Ideally Watts shakes off those cobwebs in the aforementioned clubs, but I think it doesn't really turn on and off.

And so Watts playing on this album is that of a master saxophonist playing extraordinarily well, but all within the lines. These are exemplary samples of jazz standards that are played well. I don't want to add a 'but', not every player has to be wild, unconventional. There should be room for the craft. And in that room would sit Watts. I would take lessons from him just to be that clean all over the sax' range.

At some point I think I was really into Mugrew Miller, the piano player on this album, but I don't really remember the context. I think he played with someone I really liked or something. Google isn't helping me remember.

Tamba 4
We and the Sea

I might be able to momentarily escape Blue Note, but I can't escape Rudy van Gelder. I was perusing the liner notes hoping for something more intelligent to say other than "Nope, don't know who these guys are" or at the very least have some good old fashion fun with the liner notes when I see the 'Recorded by' credit. Gelder. He's everywhere.

So, yeah. Don't know a thing about this CD, wouldn't have given it a second glance in the store. It's the first group to have recorded Girl From Ipanema.

The first track was a completely awesome first track because it started out as a progressive jazz number that built and built and then, four minutes in, broke down as the bossa nova rhythm started to come in. What a great way to start their first American recording. By the second track that softly sung Portuguese is in place to let me know it's Brazilian music.

This is a tragically short CD, just over thirty minutes. Good timing though, because I'm kind of tired. But I've had a long run of straight jazz and some pretentious jazz, so this is a nice change up.