You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘jazz’ category.
recorded (2004)
(note: Boustrophedon is one continuous hour long piece of music sectioned into 8 tracks. For sounds examples, I included short excerpts of the music, not very well edited; click the highlighted track to download and listen. You can buy the album here, or here.)
There is something remarkably Van Gogh-ish about Evan Parker’s Boustrophedon – the impending storms, the dark blue to gray to blackened skies, the fields thick and rich green before the downpour hits. There is a lot of weather in this music.
Van Gogh’s paintings often have a gritty, foreboding feel to them. The fields move in windblown grass; the clouds speed across the sky, mutating as you watch; the blue sky is never flat background but twisting organic slabs of color as if the very fabric that lies in the background is fluid and twisting; light never lies on the world and its things, but radiates in thick probing fingers that reach out and grab objects. Here, the world is constantly in flux; there is no backdrop that subjects sit in front of, but rather it all sits simultaneously in front, wrestling on the same plane. There isn’t really much depth and distance in Van Gogh, but there is constant events, constant flux, constant weather.
Evan Parker’s Boustrophedon seems to fluctuate with this same palpable unrest and energy. There is no backdrop rhythm, no constant pulse or structure – the music vibrates from all its surfaces. Flute and piano, viola and violin, bass and cello; the music often pairs off in dual dialogue while the space opens up underneath. At times, sunny and open, bright and with the sense of summer morning; often dark and brooding, with the sense of impending doom, shades that run under the dual soloists like cloud shadows skating over the land. Much of the hour long piece builds with that feeling when the weather is changing, when the air changes just subtly enough to perceive and the sky turns and the wind shifts. But still, when the rain hits, it hits with a suddenness and a force that is surprising.
Track 2: you can hear the rumbling of something ominous in the future, swelling and hinting underneath. A sunny day but with deep warnings about what’s to come.
Track 3 shifts back to the perfect summer afternoon with the heat sparking off the field grass as sun outlines tiny white bugs in the soft breeze.
When the first storm comes in track 4, it comes with all the suddenness of a summer storm hitting the day. But it passes. By the time we come to track 7, the big storms hit with natures build. Craig Taborn’s block chords thunder out heavy weather. The force of it builds with Evan Parker’s kinetic soloing; and Roscoe Mitchell comes at us with the real storm. It hits with the force of nature. Mitchell becomes a man alone, out in the storm as the rain turns torrential. Man questing meaning out in the fields.
This is some intense music. Not in the way Coltrane’s late music was, impassioned and cathartic and spiritually probing, but with a wild eyed energy that is much more of the earth, with feet in the mud and the natural world all around. I feel, after the hour in Parker’s weather-beaten session, like I am returning home from plowing the fields, drenched and scorched but alive and invigorated.
From the back of the hall, he looks like the dred-ed Hamid Drake without the hippie hat. The connection isn’t all distance and hair – they share a certain schizophrenic A.D.D. of beats and grooves, a kinetic, propulsive addiction to doing something new and different every second. Justin Brown is young, and the four times he has played in the area over the past year, he has grown like the Hulk, from clever, promising citizen to a bulging tirade of frightening potential.
Kenny Garrett shows almost always have these glorious, long fist-fights with the drummer when it seems all else is pushed to the side and KG faces down his (usually young) drummer and begs him for more rhythm. The nightly challenge seems to have long term effects and the drummers coming out of his band always seem more creative, complete and inventively busy: Tain, Brian Blade, Chris Dave, Jamire Williams have all been there; Justin Brown is the latest.
A year ago, Kenny Garrett showed up in town with a new band of young players, looking for some funk crossover of KG’s blowout jazz. Often, the problem with stiff backbeats is just that, the amazing, flexible and unpredictable beats and rhythms of modern jazz are too tied down trying to bring the funk (or rock). Steve Coleman has found one exceptional solution to this. KG seems to be looking for another, one that is more gospel and blues based, earthier. With Cory Henry preachin’ from the B3, and an electric bassist scaffolding the tune, it was up to Justin Brown to find some variable drive that still funk’d. It didn’t entirely work, though there were moments.
A little less that a year later, they came back to town with a sizable development. Whatever else happened in the months in between, Brown was absolutely bringing it now. The show began with a soul-tinged tune, a long KG solo over a very basic 2/4 backbeat that slowly, 10 minutes in, began to unthread as the fringes of Brown’s beat splayed off, blurring the beat and swelling in complexity. It was the last of any steady beat the entire night. Songs again turned into wrestling matches between sax and drums, endless rhythms peeling out, steady fills and intensity that built to steep heights, and then buzz-sawed higher. There was a sense emanating from the drums – here was an inexhaustible supply of rhythms and ideas that could tumble forth forever. The year with KG had uncorked something, and you could feel that it was only the neck of a very deep bottle.
In between the 2 Garrett shows, Brown showed up with Nicholas Payton’s band, filling in for Marcus Gilmore on very short notice. This was more of a jazz situation with the drum chair left to roam the uncharted maps of intricate and varied rhythm. He did so with surprising originality and fluidity – attaining some highpoint of listening and micro-phrased fills and beats behind Payton’s solo flurries and with Robert Glasper’s Rhodes and piano solos.
Four months after the 2nd Garrett show, and the 4th time Brown has been in the area in the last 14 months, it all came together – the driving intensity and challenges of KG’s funk band and the jazz rhythms of Payton’s ensemble. Brown was here this time as part of Ambrose Akinmusire’s Group (a young modern band with Walter Smith III(ts), Fabian Almazon(p), Harash Raghavan(b)). They had 45 minutes before Chris Potter’s Underground took over the stage and they filled it with an unbroken string of astounding music. Akinmusire’s trumpet is searing and brilliant, locking wonderfully with the modern harmonies of Smith’s tenor. Almazon drew open phrases sketching the piece while Raghavan held a beat to glue it all together. And for 45 minutes, Brown never repeated a single measure. There was no ride or high-hat rhythm to hold place, to make the song run on its track or stay within bounds. Instead, he just filled space, playing endless linked fills, soloing to the phrases of the other instruments, matching and interacting with the horns or piano, but in a steady, controlled solo style that never repeated, never settled into pattern. It was completely exhilarating. The energy and taste tumbling from Brown’s playing was overwhelming and inventive; it hurdled the music forward during the pensive modern harmonizing and phrasing of the tunes, and then sent it out on these sprawling journeys of sound. Piano solos turned into 3-way adventures, open landscapes where Brown responded to every note, continually changing the direction of the tune so the whole thing felt like an exploration of unmapped lands.
When Chris Potter came on with the complex funk-ish drive of his Underground band, and the excellent drummer Nate Smith laying down thick beats with loud snaps of signpost 2/4, it was difficult, despite the excellence of the music, to not think of the newness and potential of what had just been witnessed. Justin Brown, it seems, has arrived.
Listen to the Ambrose Akinmusire Group with Justin Brown: part1 and part2.
The Way We Were – from Go See The World (recorded 1997-Columbia)
David S. Ware-ts; Matthew Shipp-p; William Parker-b; Susie Ibarra-d
Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
The world is a clock. Time has been broken down into equally spaced parts, standardized fragments that fit like a puzzle of identical pieces. Years into days into hours into minutes into seconds, all equal, all taking the same measurable quantity to pass. All divisible, equal and measurable. Except it’s a lie, of course. Hours go by like minutes; moments take eons to pass; one lives whole lives in the gaps between seconds.
David S. Ware, with his enormous sound and telepathic quartet, plunges into the cracks of his music like a deep-sea diver, heading far beneath the surface, swimming through vast worlds hidden from the top, before returning, breaking through the surface again at the point of entry. The Way We Were becomes all they were, could have been and could be. A fragment of melody floats by like flotsam and Ware dives deep, the story embellishing into the turbulent fits of memory and passion. Back up for a breath of air and another clip of melody, and he’s down again to the far reaches of love remembered, lived and lost. Frustrated and turbulent, the swelling memory of the past gives way to a moment of calm, a tender phrase that shivers with all that lies beneath the surface. It is a song as dense and layered as any relationship. Thoughts peel off the mainline of events into quacking struggles of doubt and jealousy, only to calm again in the presence of affection.
A melody line could be drawn out like the standard demarcations of minutes on a clock, but the life truly lived passes in swollen stories between the seconds. Passion and love extend out of time to all they were; moments cluster into agitated memories of all they failed to be. Shipp’s piano solo breaks into argument in the tiny slice between tender moments; Ware’s tenor speaks years of passion and frustration in internal thoughts below the surface.
All of life, all the years and moments distended with meaning, can be reduced to just age and time. But it’s not. Time, with all its unpredictable fluctuations and derivations, all it percepted irregularities, is restored in a truer sense, with the life injected back into it.
There were certain nights when Bud Powell spoke to him. Clearly, cutting through darkness with a uniqueness and a directness that only he could put forth. They were night of sadness – a quiet, lonely tugging, a nostalgia for days gone by, a sadness tinged with peace for its purity, its genuineness. They were nights not when the inchoate depression of failing and lost wanderings nagged at Olin’s thoughts, but nights where a sadness that felt oddly satisfying in its completeness, in its absorption, filled his being with a fullness of emotion. Nights that rippled with memories of past pleasures and movements – where the pleasantries of having simply existed in some place, at some time, coated his body in a quiet solitude; a sadness tinged with satisfaction.
It seemed to Olin that of all the recorded expressions and tempers he had stacked in his collection, none spoke so clearly on these nights as Bud Powell’s. He would sit in the dark, the restless breeze making the walls creak, the push against the window glass, and Bud would cry out through the years, the splintery notes jumping over the ages and filling the night. There was something always quivering about his music, some tender fallibility that seeped through the notes. He would hammer away, pounding out block chords like laying brick then scatter out across the keyboards in splintering notes and dashing flurries. He would yell and gruff and mumble in the background, his fingers jamming out clusters of notes, toned ideas bursting forth, then pausing, then falling out again all-of-a-sudden. Loud, abrasive, chopping bursts blocked in with his locked hands chording.
But through it all, leaking bit by bit through the cracks and eventually overwhelming the technique and the runs and the clusters of notes, was a vulnerability and a sadness that was undeniable, unavoidable. It built up song after song – the teetering, the balancing – until it was all you could hear, all that mattered in the music. The abrasions, the harshness of the sound and the odd-timed figures, the energy and bustle gave way, in time, to this heart-wrenching tenderness. A cry out through the tough exterior that bled into the room, that spilled from the speakers and filled the dark night with all the loneliness and struggle of man, all the desperate and delicate holdings of a life. A cry that came straight through the years and reached out in need; need for warmth, for compassion, for some support against the wobbling tightrope, the fragility of time. In a song like “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” the flash and speed abandoned from the start, the song given over to its bare essentials, to the delicate fingering of its sparsity, the trite title is pulled apart and left barren, the notes stretched out and left to linger, alone, trembling against the soft pulses of time. The notes made frail but full, tender. A companion for all time.
listen to Polka Dots and Moonbeams
photo by Leni Sinclair
From the notes of Olin Fisher:
Where does, ultimately, enlightenment lead? Not to suggest that he had achieved that rarefied perch, but through the years spent struggling against the world he had seen some clearing. At least, if nothing else, he had come as far as feeling enough of an understanding of that persistent pest known as ‘the meaning of life’ to realize that the difficulty in an answer lies in the foolishness of the question. Meaning, that is, being the wrong way to look at it, since it in itself is entirely a man-made concept, and hence rendering it ‘meaningless’.
But what pulled on his mind like a great weight tied to his thoughts, then plunged off a cliff, was the idea of post-illumination. What of those few who achieved such an understanding and then continue to live? He thought of John Coltrane – an artist that immensely altered the course of the idiom he contributed to and beyond, and that had arrived at some culminating point of conception with time to spare. Persistence and unalterable focus on creation and searching presented Coltrane with unequaled gifts. Take his recording A Love Supreme; powerful, undeniably beautiful, intense, virtuosic. A complete achievement of musical conception and form – and directly spiritual. It was as if Coltrane had found a moment of clarity and enlightenment – the music itself traveling a path once searching and struggling, but ultimately resolved to a conclusion of peaceful beauty. But illumination is not an end for those unwilling to accept some Zen Master title and call the journey concluded, it is a clearing, a moment of sunlight and space. Coltrane never stopped searching. He walked through the fields of open and into the deep thickets that lie at the far side of enlightenment.
Weeks before he died, a little more than two years after A Love Supreme, he recorded a document rare in art. If A Love Supreme is a vision of resolution that ends with peaceful contentment, than the years that followed were a godly struggle with the black woods that lay beyond that clearing. Most, it seems, that get to this point turn the other way, or bow out of life, but Coltrane looked the dark depths straight on and left a document of what he saw. The Olatunji Concert is bewilderingly intense, and as powerful as anything in music. It is twisted, tortured and frantically searching music, as if the darkness of post-illumination leaves one panicked and starving, overwhelmed by restless determination and continual disappointment. He tears at the heart of the thing, plunging deep into the thickets and thorns of meaninglessness, violently hacking out a vision of struggle, suffering, and pain as the darkness closes in. And dark – oh so dark. When he comes to the end, it doesn’t end with some peaceful pasture of clarity, but with a suffocating intensity of weight, as if everything is closing in on him, overtaking him. His last breathe exhales like a collapse, engulfed by the void. It is as it is; a pathway hacked like a tunnel through the overgrown darkness at the far end of achievement; a vision of post-enlightenment.
