Setlist 8/29/05

Setlist 8/29/05

Artist "Song Tile" - Album Title [Record Label]

Anthony Braxton "Cut Three" - Five Pieces 1975 [Arista]
Joelle Leandre & India Cooke "Firedance 3" - Firedance [Red Toucan]
Homo Liber "In Memory of Andrey Tarkovsky" - Golden Years of Soviet New Jazz Vol. III [Leo]
Joe McPhee "Sweet Dragon" - Tenor & Fallen Angels [Hat Hut]
Marion Brown & Leo Smith "Njung-Lumumba Malcom" - Marion Brown Duets [Arista]
Talking Pictures "Deep Pocket" - The Mirror With A Memory [Red Toucan]
Steve Reid "Odyssey of the Oblong Square (Side A)" - Odyssey of the Oblong Square [Mustevic Sound]
Steve Beresford / Pat Thomas / Veryan Weston "Bermondsey" - 3 Pianos [Emanem]
Evan Parker "Synergetics, No. 5" - Synergetics: Phonomanie III [Leo]
Sainkho Namtchylak with Mikhail Zhukov "[Untitled]" - Golden Years of Soviet New Jazz Vol. III [Leo]

Got lots of calls on the Steve Reid, especially since it's mad out of print. I'm gonna play Side B next week to get it on CD like I did with Side A. Nova and Rhythmatism, however, have both been reissued by the fine folks at Soul Jazz Records. Yes, I know, more imports, but you can find decent prices at hip record stores and distributors like the ones lifted on the right side of the site.

Red Toucan goodies

The mailman's been feeding the box quite heavily and happily this past week. A bunch of new records for yours and my enjoyment on New Orbit (I'm back this Monday 10PM-12AM EST). Here's a quick rundown of what I got:



Compilations are rarely worth mentioning. They're incoherent, self-congratulatory, and fail to represent the discography of a particular artist's career. Maybe Red Toucan's 2-disc retrospective, Amalgam(e): 10 ans de Red Toucan, is not much different, but after ten years of solid releases, the French label's earned their right to a 142 minute collection. From what I've listened to so far, every track's been stellar. While it's a good sampling of French free-jazz scene, the Toucan's sound reaches all over Europe and Canada. Just to name a few: Marilyn Crispell (piano), Glenn Spearman (tenor sax), Achim Kaufmann (piano), Joelle Leandre (contrebasse), the Laura Andel Orchestra, Dylan van der Schyff (percussion), and George Graewe (piano). Admittedly, most of the names on here are new to me like Talking Pictures from Vancouver, a group you should really check out if you're a fan of the Chicago Underground Duo.



Both Joelle Leandre (contrebasse) and India Cooke (violin) were also unknown to me when I attended the Vision Festival this past summer, but their performance left a permanent mark on me as to how a jazz musician can play live. With a style so impassioned yet playful, the duo engaged the senses of the audience. Firedance is a live recording and it shows. Lucky for them the acoustics of the Guelph Youth Music Centre were a great match for contrebassist Leandre's low, ambient, and violent bowing and Cooke's joyful, disjunct fiddlin'. Their free improvisation is full of powerful energy, yet - dare I say - fun.

Cadence stocks Red Toucan.

Also downloaded more OGG files from Leo Records. More on those later.

Mindfulness

William Hooker's a name more associated with the noise spectrum of avant-garde jazz; thus, mentioned less often around the bigger current names like Ware, Shipp, and generally the whole Thirsty Ear roster. This brings up an interesting point because there was the mostly boring, yet supposedly groundbreaking, Optometry (DJ Spooky) on Thirsty Ear collecting the talents of William Parker, Craig Taborn, Tim Berne, et al remixed and interspersed with DJ Spooky's beat-based turntablism. Yet on drummer William Hooker's Mindfulness (1997), DJ Olive clearly holds the reigns of free-turntablism. Granted, it's not the same aesthetic as Spooky, but Olive's putting the records through a series of processors that render any possible aural connection to "scratching" moot. This live recording (which also includes the talents of reed-man Glenn Spearman) is the most inspired I've heard out of turntablism in avant-garde jazz because the DJ isn't some cheap afterthought, but a fully integral part of the work. Brian DiGenti's article in Wax Poetics points this out quite succinctly and is worth the read.

I'm looking into finding a place to host MP3s or MP3 excerpts of the albums I write about. Don't know when this will happen, but soon, I hope.

Golden Years of the Soviet New Jazz, Vol. III

I mentioned the OGG-download purchase in the last post and after some difficulties with Paypal, all 4 CDs worth of the Golden Years of the Soviet New Jazz Vol. III boxset was on the hard-drive. I've only had the chance to listen to 3 of the 4 discs (really easy to transfer to CD even on iTunes... more on that later), but everything has been a treasure. Leo Records splits the discs into essentially 4 or 5 sets of musicians. From what I've heard so far Homo Liber is by far the most interesting (and most rarely recorded). "In Memory of Andrey Tarkovsky" (the Russian filmmaker) is a saxophone and pipe organ stepping the bounds between apocalyptic church music and the aural equivalent of taking a gun to the temple. The Vladmir Chekasin Big Band tracks remind me a lot of what William Parker's Litttle Huey Creative Music Orchestra does today: bombastic big band with alternating sections of bop, chaotic free music, and horrible noise accentuated by vocalist Elvira Shlykova. The split disc between vocalist Sainkho Namchylak and Tri-O has been the most spun so far. Namchylak is the ultimate free vocalist both reacting and counter-acting those around her in cadence, rhythm, pitch, and tone. At times, I can barely distinguish her voice from the sax. The only tracks I haven't gotten to have been those from Andrew Solovyev, Igor Grigoriev, and Vlad Makarov all under different group names.

For other Mac users, once you have downloaded the OGG decoder, iTunes automatically recognizes the tracks and will burn them to CD-R, though it takes longer than burning MP3s. The wait is worth it, though, because the sound quality is top rate. I'd suggest immediately burning OGG files to CD-R immediately since they take a chunk of your RAM (causing pauses and such while playing).

There are 4 volumes in the Golden Years of the Soviet New Jazz series. It's quite an invaluable document of the avant-garde/free-improvisation scene in '80s Soviet Russia and the surrounding countries. My only complaint with the download is that it doesn't include the extensive liner notes. I wouldn't mind a printable text document or PDF file because like most jazz folks, I'm a nerd and love to read up on the obscure artists.

Thanks to Phillip for DJ-ing New Orbit this past Monday. I heard some David S. Ware and he apparently played Rova's 50 minute version of John Coltrane's Ascension. Good man.

Pop-Punk Dixon

My friend Phillip will DJ New Orbit this Monday and like I wrote, he's the only one at the moment I'd trust with it. Expect to hear the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, and Steve Reid (this guy, not that guy).

I was googling Bill Dixon last night after I mentioned Paris Transatlantic's diss on his Vision Festival performance and I came across an odd, yet refreshing review for Odyssey, the 6CD box set of his solo material. Of all people to write about Dixon, I never expected one of the guys from pop-punk band J-Church to shell out the $100+ for hours of Bill's negative space free-jazz, much less any of the sort. You can read his review at the bottom of this page, and it's not a bad one. Maybe one day I'll have the money for it, but that won't happen until it's outrageously out of print and selling on eBay for twice the price.

Getting some new records in the mail from Red Toucan and a download from Leo Records soon. More on those later.

Speaking of, Leo Records is offering $4 OGG downloads of their catalog until the end of the summer. For those of us in USA not wanting to pay import prices, this is an amazing deal. True, we're missing out on the artwork, but OGG files have great sound quality. (iTunes users like myself have to decode the OGG, though. Find out how here or here.)

Sweet Dragon

I may or may not host New Orbit this coming Monday (rest assure, I have a competent sub in mind), but if you're up for a good read, check out Paris Transatlantic's Vision Festival X review (though I disagree with his critique on the Bill Dixon performance). It's one of the more articulate (if a bit prude-ish) avant-garde jazz/modern composition magazines I've read, so it comes with my recommendation. I also reviewed the Vision Festival at Opus a while ago.

Here are a few recent additions to my personal collection that'll get some spins on the show:
+ Joe McPhee- Tenor & Fallen Angels (Hat Hut): Reissue of the 1976 solo release. As bloody brilliant as you'd expect it to be.
+ Rabbincal School Dropouts- Cosmic Tree (Tzadik): Yay for klezmer jazz.
+ Raz Mesinai- Resurrections for Goatskin (Tzadik): More on the modern composition side, but who else is going to play it?
+ Milford Graves/John Zorn- 50th Birthday (Tzadik): Still hasn't come in the mail.

Yeah, lots of Tzadik love, but I found a guy on eBay with a bunch of it.

Test

First show of the fall semester is this Monday, August 22nd.