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.