Filed under: 349
I’ve been watching the film “Jandek on Corwood” and I’ve been thinking about the way that privacy functions for the creative person. Music is one forum that has largely been assumed to be a public one. You either play for others publicly or release recordings for public consumption. The idea of making music as a private enterprise entirely isn’t something it seems possible to think about. Still, in the film on Jandek, one of the things that seems to puzzle most folks in the film, besides the difficulty and mystery of his music, is the way that he has simultaneously insisted on a public presence as a recording artist and a private identity as a person in almost every other respect. The music is for us, it seems, but nothing more. The rest is none of our business.
I find myself attracted to this concept because it makes us reconsider what music is a vehicle for. Is it something to communicate some idea, some “message” to people, or is it a creation of a set of pleasing sounds for oneself that others can choose to enjoy or not; it’s out there, that’s all, we’re not asking you to do anything with it exactly, just decide for yourself if it’s something you want to do anything with.
Filed under: 349
Over at The Morning News my colleague Dan Nester has an essay about the infamous Rock Critical List. I highly recommend it, as it explores how dismally screwed-up the world of writing about music has become in some circles. It made me recall that, at bottom, music writing really is irrelevant to the process of making good, innovative music. I have to admit, though, that I was somewhat relieved that some of my current favorite music writers didn’t appear in the screed. Nick Tosches and Robert Palmer escaped mention, though Lester Bangs got a little mud on him, but Lester probably wouldn’t much care. I think Tosches and Palmer do their best work as cultural critics and researchers, unearthing the wider historical contexts for certain performers and genres to tell a fuller story. It is a perspective that avoids the insularity and self-aggrandizing insiderism so much periodical music writing. Also in the piece, the blogosphere takes an overly-generalized slap for being a hotbed of amateur music writing that’s supposedly diluting the whole enterprise. No doubt most can name a few sites and blogs that can stand counter to that whitewash, so there’s always hope in the morass. Like most writing, music writing succeeds when it honestly explores and seeks to understand its subject. Something to shoot for, anyway.
Filed under: streams | Tags: Smalls NPR Sanctuary for Independent Media Mary Halvorson
If you’re like me and you’re a jazz fan but don’t get out much in the evening, there is virtual help. In the past week or so, I’ve found a few sites that feature streams of live jazz performance of a really high quality. The first is NPR’s series of audio broadcasts from the Village Vanguard.
I was personally excited about this one because it meant I could hear a set from last fall’s stand by Paul Motian, Joe Lavano, and Bill Frisell. One of the few times I’ve been tempted enought to brave the ticket cost and two hour ride to see a show in NYC. Now I’m somewhat less regretful that I didn’t do it.
Another find was the live stream from Smalls, the famous (and small) NYC venue. This one is in real time, so when they’re closed, the screen is black, but when they’re open, you see all the sets live, with internet wallpaper ambiance to boot.
Lastly, there is a great free jazz series at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in my own capital region stomping grounds. I have even less reason for not getting over the river to see this one, but they archive performances from the series on their website.
This series was an especially good find because a couple of the groups featured Mary Halvorson, who I’m really into right now.
Pictured is The Thirteenth Assembly, th
e musical collective she’s part of which includes fellow Anthony Braxton student/collaborator Taylor Ho Bynum, who is also excellent, by the way.
OK, well, hope other homebodies find this stuff useful. Enough sharing for today.
Maybe I’m limiting my audience with the references in the title, but I had a dream last night that this title might lead to something useful. I saw on a friend’s blog a video of one of Frank Zappa’s last interviews before his death, and it put me in the familiar state of missing Zappa and all the other really great musical figures who keep leaving this orbit on a yearly basis. Not to wax nostalgic or to rail against the crap parade that is so much popular music (of any time, including today), but I do miss people like Zappa being out there and speaking truth to power and/or idiocy (which are often packaged together). Anyhoo, in the interview, the woman from the Today Show gleefully asks the ailing Zappa if he’s heard that Tipper Gore has admitted to having played the drums in a band as a young woman. I fully expected Zappa to brush it off as silly PR, but he didn’t. He seemed genuinely (or at least politely) suprised and felt that such a tidbit of information gave him a different perspective on Mrs. Gore. He laughed, and acknowledged the Gores’ kind notice upon learning of his cancer. A really human moment, it seemed. Zappa said that he didn’t believe being remembered was important, that only the most conniving, self-interested public figures worked to secure a legacy, and that he truly didn’t care if he was remembered or not. Given his catalog, it’s a sure bet he knows he’s in little danger of obscurity for the next few hundred years, at least barring apocalypse. However, even in that grim circumstance, I can imagine a few dented souls wandering the roads with “Watermelon in Easter Hay” running through their heads. I guess the point of this rambling is this: that anyone who really needs music, whether playing it or listening to it, will ultimately find a way to have that feed them, regardless what side of the senate grilling table they find themselves on. As much as I am opposed to censorship, part of me still feels that, at the end of it all, the PMRC flap was just another pointless distraction from the real problems of the record industry: a disconnect from the idea that music can mature beyond the 15-25 year-old demographic and still be valuable as an art form and, most prominently, an emphasis on quantity over quality. Though I stand with Zappa’s position at the senate hearing, when it was all said and done, we ended up with the same boring music coming out of the same stupid radio.
At the end of his life, Zappa still made music, he loved making sounds and putting them out there to be heard. He demonstrated this in the Today interview by making burping sounds from his Synclavier; they came out like the sketch of a composition. I suspect that Mrs. Gore finds a love of music for herself as well. Maybe she’s out there in the garage woodshedding while Al tinkers with his Powerpoint. Who knows, but it seems that as the years go by and I notice more and more that the industry of music is perpetually circling the drain of irrelevancy that it’s been navigating for decades. At the same time, people who will make and listen to music do just those things, with relish and a healthy disregard for the cheap vanities of the industry. Shut up and play ‘yer guitar, indeed.
If you find a way to parse the unwieldy exclamations and absurd sales pitches that pass for rock journalism these days, then let me know. I find myself relying on old modes of discovery, such as finding a record that looks off-kilter somehow, vaguely packaged and illustrated so as not to announce what it is inside. Some lettering and picture that doesn’t scream GENRE! I so often look at the cover of an album and know right off that I’m not interested. Not fair to judge a book by its cover (or a record, of course), but I do and I’m usually pretty close. I’ve been surprised a few times, but never enough to distrust my instinct when flipping through the racks. So, I found a record this morning by Wooden Shjips. Very little information on the cover or inside, blurry photograph, but the spelling of “Shjips,” somehow triggered enough curiosity in me to pick it up. Had it not been for that inkling, I would have thought, “old songs, alt-country, retread.” Put it on, though, and you get this weird organ, bass, drums, and reverb vocal piece that made me wonder if I’d mistakenly put in the Spiritualized disc I picked up at the library as well. So, first impression makes me think that I still have some radar left to show me some things I don’t already know. A sure sign that my intellectual and cultural death has been staved off yet again.
Filed under: 349
A strange little clip from someone who stumbled upon him in a NY park. One reason to carry a cell phone with a video camera in it if you’re wandering around the city.
When you are so very tired of all the ways that boys in contemporary culture find to use guitars, it is a sweet surprise to once again come upon King Sunny Ade after a long interval. There are colors on the electric guitar that don’t get used enough for my taste, and he has a palette full of them.
Lately I’ve been listening to the archived shows from Nic Harcourt’s Morning Sounds Eclectic. It’s generally pretty up and lively without all of the heavy east-coast hipster irony of a lot of radio on this side of our collective land mass. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent most of the winter digging various shows from that bastion of hip, WFMU, but Spring seems to demand a change of musical wallpaper. So, Harcourt’s my man in the office these days.
My main reason for posting, though, is the archive I discovered of old shows from the early days of MSE. On the show’s webpage, there is a link to the 30th anniversary show, which houses a further link with lots of archived interviews and performances. My favorite thus far is the earliest stuff from the late seventies and through the eighties with Tom Schnabel. Peter Tosh, Fela, Astor Piazzolla, Milton Nascimento: what’s not to love? Highly recommended.
I’m Listening to Ornette Coleman Trio live in Stockholm, “Faces and Places.” Noticed Coleman’s voice in the introduction is rather quiet, suggesting reserve and even shyness. A surprising thing, given that I’ve always looked at his serious face on the album covers and listened to the searching howls of some of his musical lines and assumed that a fierceness must be attached to the voice as well. Still, maybe the smallish voice is connected to the force of the music, as if one cannot have all their power divided evenly among expressive outlets. I’ll always remember the way Ornette was treated at the last Grammy Awards, when he sought to do as they had asked him and read from the cards. He wasn’t as “TV LOUD” or as quick as they would have liked, so Natalie Cole cut him off and took over. The man was being given a lifetime achievement award, and you couldn’t spare a little more air time for his voice. Well, he won a Pulitzer for composition a little later, so that shows just where the Grammy Awards are at.
As for the music, the melodies he’s working with in a trio format are really fluid, with much of the punch and earnestness of his famed free jazz double quartet. As you might expect, though, the arrangements are more sparse and Coleman’s horn carries the bulk of the harmonic/melodic work. It almost feels, for instance, on “European Echoes,” as if you’re hearing how he can work out a simple line and explore it on the horn, without all the heavy rhythmic thunder and dissonant brass harmony. Nice to hear Coleman’s voice in such a singular way. He’s as expressive and soulful as they come, when you move past the complexities of his compositional strategies. Just a horn, a bass, and drums, opening up tunes and moving around curiously in the space. With performances like this, it’s no wonder the Swedes have been such big supporters of American jazz; they knew what they were getting and they showed up to appreciate it in person, not with some perfunctory award after the fact. Good for them.
