Bop soul to avant garde soul...

My apologies -I've been – as Jane Austen may have said – somewhat indisposed the past few days but now I'll try to get this blog back on track...


In 1960 Johnny Griffin recorded 'The Big Soul Band' album. The track I've selected leads on from the previous posts with its Art Blakey-ish/Hard Bop connection. The Messengers's pianist Bobby Timmons- who plays on a couple of tracks from this session and composed the track 'So Tired' - had written several titles that defined the 'Back to the Roots' movement of the time – and took Blakey's band deep into that re-defining process – 'Moanin', etc. What the critics termed 'Hard Bop' was seen as a reaction to the 'Cool School' with greater emphasis put on the roots of African-American music via the blues and gospel. And earthier timbres... So these musicians knew each other pretty well – the cross-references abound. In fact, Charlie Persip's back-beat that rides through this album is reminiscent of Blakey.
Norman Simmon's arrangements for a ten-piece band frame Johnny Griffin's solo tenor beutifully (and makes them sound like a much bigger ensemble – shades almost of the 'Birth of the Cool' nonet? A bluesier one, of course...). Griffin was reputed to be one of the fastest tenor players extant but here it sounds as if he reigned his usual pyrotechnics back for this project – the unusual understatement working superbly – and emphasizing the ensemble rather than dominating it. 'Wade in the Water' is an old traditional tune given the 'soul-jazz' treatment here – complete with handclaps at the beginning. Some nice rippling triplet fills from Persip – his drums drive this track along mightily against a shouting orchestral backdrop.

What was happening in 1960? Round about the time this albumn was recorded, the big story was the Gary Powers U2 flight scandal. But simmering under was the nascent civil rights movement. The end of the Eisenhower period saw the beginnings of federal government attempts to deal with the running sore of segregation – the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts pointed the way to the more radical legislation – and conflicts – to come. 1960 was an epochal year, literally – the election in the autumn was to bring in Kennedy and his Camelot, one of the deep iconic events of the decade, shiny new Democrats whip on old-school Republican Dick Nixon, Eisenhower's vice-president. Can one read between the lines with regard to this album? Why not have a go... ?
The black militancy that was about to surface and intensify would soon evolve its own vibrant rhetoric of dissent and protest. But in 1960 that was all down the road still...

Yet...

'Soul' music and hard bop can possibly be seen at the end of the fifties and early sixties, from one angle, as the soundtrack and musical response to the rising call for change in the Afro-American community – a celebration and conscious re-emphasizing of the roots of the musics they had pioneered. I see this album as more than just a blowing session, given the careful orchestration and perfect choice of musicians (Clark Terry plays some wonderful solos, for example) and the material itself - as could be gathered from a quick perusal of the titles, gospel music is the inspiration here. The possibility exists that there is a doubled coded militancy going on, embedded in the return to roots because the orginal spirituals possessed their own codes of defiance -
The lyrics to the spiritual are here...
and an interesting analysis of the original and the codes that were inserted into the 'slave songs' pre-Civil War is
here...


Three years later, Griffin left for Europe, following a select coterie of Afro-American musicians who had discovered that there was a fertile audience awaiting and they were treated, in the main, with a respect due to important black artists which did not exist in America to anyway near the same extent. Griffin had other problems as well but he also remarked in later years that another factor in his decision to decamp from New York was the rise of the 'New Thing'- the avant garde. One of the stars of which is now recognised to be Cecil Taylor, whose uncompromising, driving, seemingly densely dissonant music had brought a new, radical flavour to the jazz tradition.

Yet...

Taylor always struggled in New York at that time – the stories are well-known about washing dishing and other menial jobs because, apart from a couple of bohemian coffee houses, the New York jazz world had no time for him, in the main. Maybe Griffin was talking about the contrasted success of Ornette Coleman's arrival in NY, backed up with recommendations from the like of John Lewis, the smooth eminence behind the Modern Jazz Quartet. Whatever struggles Ornette had later, at that moment his star was in the ascendent whereas Taylor had to wait years for his to rise– it gives a sort of euro-link into Taylor's download mp3 on offer here – taken from a live gig in in Copenhagen, where he had similarly decamped a year before Griffin and for many of the same reasons. Hard bop tough tenor and mould-breaking iconoclastic pianist. The real story that pulls them together in exile where they were to continue their, on the surface, disparate takes on jazz – from bebop to hard bop from Griffin and the new thing from Taylor – is, arguably, race. Griffin came from Chicago via the Lionel Hampton group into the Jazz Messengers, Monk's quartet and a fruitful pairing with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, which created some of the most exhilirating wild blowing tenor sax battles to be heard luckily captured on a series of albums. Taylor came from a more middle class background – went to the conservatory to study classical music – and left because he found that his own tradition was ignored or just plain misunderstood. Then found he was dismissed as a musical lunatic, not just by contemporary musicians who couldn't – or wouldn't – hear where his sound world was leading – but by the larger cultural support networks. At that time, Europe offered an imperfect but more welcoming home and greater performance opportunites for black jazz musicians both from the immediate tradition and the the more problematic avant-garde.

The Taylor tune is taken from a live album 'Trance' recorded at the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen – where Griffin was to play as well, in his years of exile, and record a live album himself which is damn good –
Sonny Murray was in the process of redefining the jazz rhythmic pulse – his drums are all over the recording, hissing cymbals and rat-tatting snares that sound like a deconstruction of Blakey's bluesmarching rolls at times. Jimmy Lyons still has echoes of Parker in his playing but in a sense that anchors his lines for listeners unused to the complex soundscapes of Taylor. The pianist is everywhere – the terrible piano notwithstanding. Clusters, lightning fast runs, sharply voiced chords – like an awesome river, he runs through this session, chased and underpinned by Murray and prodding and provoking Lyons, who seems almost out of his depth at times yet comes through brilliantly. The rough sound of this session in a sense gives it more validity as a document of how one conception of the directions the new jazz was to travel in. You can literally hear history being made, being worked out on the bandstand of a club with the background buzz of conversation. It is as if Murray and Lyons are examining in real time how to play this music. And not ex nihil with regard to the tradition... The echoes of Parker (and Blakey) mentioned above are complemented by some aspects of Taylor's playing – occasionally he sounds as if he has a Bud Bowell-esque left hand spinning out diving quicksilver runs supported by a left hand that echoes Monk's games with dissonance and his marvellously oblique rhythmic sense:

"The one continual influence on my playing would be Monk... Ellington of course...Bud Powell...
(Quoted from here...)


So the tradition is here and not far from the surface – yet in this recording you can hear it being taken further down the line...

Oddly enough – I've just been listening to the new-found recording of Monk and John Coltrane playing 'Monk's Mood' live at Carnegie Hall – and Monk's piano playing sits not far from what Cecil Taylor is doing here – behind Coltrane he's sending out rippling up and down lines on this mainly out-of-tempo piece and Coltrane is playing back a bit. Synchronicity... it's all there... In some alternate universe, perhaps, one could find a recording of a jam between Griffin and Taylor at the Montmartre blowing bop soul to avant garde soul that would not sound dissimilar...


Johnny Griffin -

Wade in the water - mp3

download - here...

buy here...

Cecil Taylor

Trance - mp3

download - here...

buy - here...

Happy Birthday...

No music today - still working on a post that's going to push things out a bit further and try to link Johnny Griffin to Cecil Taylor (!)- but today is my daughter Amelia's 18th birthday and I can't be with her unfortunately -but she was online earlier - just gone to eat her late birthday dinner. I gather she had a celebration last night and I probably don't want to know the details! But I'd just like to wish her well - and thank her for being a wonderful daughter - funny, spirited, smart and someone with a lot of strength and character as she has had to cope with some serious stuff the last couple of years, not the least my own illness which I'm still recovering from... A daughter and a friend - and a great travelling companion... many happy returns, darling!

The picture was taken by our good friend Jon when we were in Dublin last year - outside McDaid's where I spent many a happy hour when I lived there way back...

More Monk... with Blakey... in Paris...

Monk recorded the first version of 'Rhythm a ning' I've put up below in 1958 with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers who at that time had the front line of the fiery tenor player Johnny Griffin and the underrated trumpeter Bill Hardman. The second comes from a concert in Paris in 1965. With the other version (with Gerry Mulligan) that I posted previously, it's fascinating to compare these interpretations. The Blakey one, of course, has Art booting along on the drums which makes it sound faster although they are all in the same time frame roughly – speedy. Three different horn players and a trumpeter mark the differences as well, although Monk's piano solos all have similar checkpoints – that quasi-stride or Tatumesque run down the chords, one particular figure he plays with in all three and hammered-out chords used rhythmically. Actually, I prefer the solo on the Paris recording... just... there again, it's taken at a lick but he's playing with Charlie Rouse(another underrated player). Rouse had become well-established by this time, after various other tenors (and rhythm sections) passed through – among them Johnny Griffin (see above with the Jazz Messengers) and of course that brief few months in 1957 when Coltrane held down the sax chair for the Five Spot residency. Also,they are on (relatively)safe ground – great audience and familiarity with the tune – he must have played it many, many times by now. But it sounds fresh – Monk was still on top of his game in the mid-sixties. Strange how these versions of the same song at almost the same tempo display - different feelings of relaxation, I suppose. The Paris version ticks along easily - probably due to the factors I mentioned - steady band, familiarity with material etc. The track with Mulligan sounds like an after-hours session, almost laid back. Blakey is always going to be frenetic – I saw him when he was an old man at a weird gig in a place called Stanford Hall near Loughborough which is... in the middle of... the UK, ok, let's not get too petty – sometimes I love my home town and sometimes... must have been about twenty years ago. Another story for another day – but what struck me was his fire – you saw this old white haired guy come on stage – but when he struck the first press roll – it sounded as if God him/her(got to be cool about the holy gender these days)self had summoned up thunder. Amazing energy.

Live in Paris... Rouse plays a fluent solo. Monk starts his solo in the bass, going eventually into that descending chordal run then into a hammering section where he bangs out a repeated riff that he alters harmonically slightly then into sparse, sharp chords. An exercise in the piano as rhythm instrument... Larry Gales plays well, getting out the usual walking patterns that still too often passed for 'the bass solo' round that time, leads into Ben Riley – slick drums and the crowd always loves the drummer. Different to Blakey – but Art was in a different drum world – those punishing rolls and relentless prompting of soloists – check him out behind Bill Hardman's solo - but Riley is assured and swinging. This is the longest version of the three, more spaced out because of the live recording, probably...

The Blakey session is a bit of a forgotten masterpiece, along with that date with Mulligan. Hardman seems hesitant at first but is swept along by Monk and Blakey's promptings – he rises to them well. Griffin never essayed forth a bad solo and was a supersonic player in most incarnations (and a very good ballad player in later years) – he also knew Monk's material as he had been in the group at some point. Interestingly, Blakey holds back behind him, until he goes into a wild, thumping solo at the end – archetypal Art.

See what you make of the differences – and similarities between these recordings- especially Monk's solos. Monk's segment in the film 'Jazz on a Summer's Day' was instrumental in jolting me at an early age into an awareness and subsequent obsession with modern jazz – and way beyond. A sonic visonary...

And to close on one of those obscure points so beloved of jazz obsessives – Johnny Griffin and his tough tenor sax soul brother, Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, with whom he recorded some raucous free-blowing albums, did a tribute to Monk session in 1961 – 'Looking at Monk' - and the bass and drummer are the rhythm section on the Monk Paris concert a few years later – Larry Gales and Ben Riley (who played with Monk regularly. The music goes round and round etc...




Download – Rhythm-a-ning - Monk with the Blakey JazzMessengers. Buy it
Download – Rhythm-a-ning - Monk in Paris. Buy it

MP3 - jazz - monk and miles and mulligan

Here's two tracks linking Miles Davis to Thelonious Monk via Gerry Mulligan who plays on both. The Monk and Mulligan session is from August 1957, the Miles track from the famous Birth of the Cool recordings, April 1949 - this taken from the Rudy Van Gelder CD remaster which is brilliantly clear and bright. If you wanted to make and obvious link via the received critical wisdom, you could see Monk as the father of bebop and Mulligan as the father(or one of them) of Cool Jazz... Actually, I picked these tracks at random - then realised that Mulligan was the common factor. Synchronicity - or something. The Miles recordings are, of course, acclaimed historical tracks from that point in the late forties when Bebop was mutating - here into an orchestral take with a nine piece group who sound larger due to the clever scoring of Mulligan, Gil Evans, Carisi (who wrote and arranged the minor blues here - 'Israel') which deploys the light, dancing alto of Lee Konitz and Miles' trumpet against trombone, french horn, tuba and baritone sax,giving a deeper sonority which was - relatively - new to jazz. 'Israel' is a couple of minutes or so long, due to the medium of the time - 78's. But it is crammed with movement vertical and horizontal due to the clever arrangement and the two soloists - Miles on open trumpet, sounding assured, Lee Konitz, one of the few original alto players who took their own road from under the shadow of the almighty Parker - his playing here very much pre-figures the so-called 'cool jazz' to come. Whose main man was Mulligan when he went to the west coast and subsequently formed his quartet. Who was a mighty creative force in this 'Birth of the Cool' band - he wrote seven of the twelve arrangements and three of the themes: 'Jeru', 'Godchild', and 'Venus de Milo' - and also wrote the sleevenotes to the original 1971 lp that brought the old 78 rpm tracks together for the first time - if you want a real, neat tie up. (An unfortunate reference given the plethora of hard drugs around modern jazz in the forties and fifties - and the battles both Mulligan and Davis had with addiction...)

And who features with Thelonious Monk on my second selection - a Monk warhorse 'Rhythm A Ning' which they bounce freshly through, taken from a somewhat obscure session. Quite why this has been so over-shadowed, I have no idea - maybe the pairing seems incongrous to some but Mulligan had been a creative wheel in New York especially with regard to the above group around Miles who recorded the Birth of the Cool oeuvre. And was always his own man, while happy to jam in any context. Monk, of course - is Monk. He recorded this tune many times - I have to hand one version with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers where they fly through it in hard-bop style. This version is taken at about the same speed - but seems slower, due to the relaxed ambiance of the session. This was an interesting set to compare Mulligan's rhythmic conception to Monk's - I think it works well - and he has the relaxed feel he always conveyed on his unwieldy horn. His playing is usually seen as slightly retro in conception, compared to some of his contemporaries - yet he gets along with the different world of Monk very easily, it seems. Maybe the key is melody - the piano-less quartet was an attempt to get away from the vertical bebop harmonies that the piano emphasizes and at its best was a counterpointing neo-baroque dance between Chet Baker and himself. Monk, despite his craggy, so-called dissonant complexities of harmony, always told his musicians to respect the melodies of his tunes and play from them rather than run the underlying harmonies ragged in the usual bop style when invention failed. Maybe the link between these two is the way that they both stand slightly apart from the received critical linear progression of jazz - Monk, for all the 'High Priest of Bop' malarkey and the complexity of his sound world, has much stride piano in him and his blues playing at times reminds me of Jimmy Yancey for some reason. Mulligan's contrapuntal muse seems to hark back in a disguised way to New Orleans polyphony at times. These are two musicians who doff their hats/berets to what went before... So.

And Miles -well - Miles was just timeless full stop. Even when playing wa-wa trumpet over a seething rhythm section and electronic stew, you can always see how the actual notes wouldn't be too far out of place alongside the playing of his old mentor, Charlie Parker. Although it is interesting to consider the ease with which Monk and Mulligan seem to get on musically and compare it to the famous Christmas 1954 session with Monk and Miles - the latter who insisted that Monk lay out behind his soloing as his piano got in the way too much...

A good place to ride on out... Enjoy...



Rhythm-a-ning - Monk and Mulligan. Buy it here...

Israel - Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool. Buy it here...

MP3...free... my own and others

I've decided to start putting up a few mp3's - some of my own stuff and for a limited time each, some from my collection for snapshots of various artists with all the usual caveats - these will be up for only a week at a time as per usual practice...

The first one is a track I did recently

leaving time

Ground Zero... late thoughts...

I was going to post on Sunday - but a combination of exhaustion -and anger - made me hang back. Anger over the anti-Americanism rampant over here - and the sheer ignorance on display in so many places... but I don't want this blog to be a political forum... that may happen elsewhere and soon. For the time being, I'll just stick to some thoughts I had when I took the photos above on my trip to NY in May with my 17-year old daughter, Amelia. We did the whole tourist trip - Staten Island Ferry, Broadway, Times Square, the fantastic MOMA, Macy's - and managed to fit in John Zorn et al at the Stone Club as mentioned in previous posts. But when we went to Ground Zero - that was something different. Solidarity, in some small way...to use that over-worked and over-loaded word from way back. What we were really aware off when we got there - on foot - and walked around to see what we could see through the mesh and construction - was the eery quiet. In the middle of a great city... It had a profound effect on both of us and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to take my daughter to New York, not just for all the sights, shopping, food, music, art, bookshops and most of all - the people - but to bear witness in some small way. 9/11 was the hinge for a new world to swing in on - and it will be my daughter and grandson who live with the fallout in later life...

Only connect... review of Odd Nosdam's 'Burner'... into the SPACE of the American Sublime...

I was late-night cruising the net when I came across an mp3 download and half-recognised the name so I snaffled it and when I played it back I was blown away. I followed the links and bought the album from Anticon direct - then forgot about it. (Well, I said it was late - and a certain amount of painkiller had been taken...) Ten days onwards it arrived and what a pleasant surprise... Back in the world of Odd Nosdam again, whom I knew from his work in Clouddead. But the cd I have by them has an ethereal quality to it, a fuzziness and a dreaminess. Neo-beat poetics recorded from the next mountain over if you ever read 'Desolation Angels' – which everyone should... (Dear God... in checking out a link for the Kerouac epic – I discovered that 'Bad Company' – a crap band from yesteryear with the appallingly overrated Paul Rodgers on squarking ersatz Americana vocals – had had the audacity/stupidity – delete where appropriate - to record an album in 1979 with the same name – 'Desolation Angels'... Further comment is superfluous... except to say that I would rather take a ball-peen hammer to my genitals than ever have to listen to it). However... This album – 'Burner' – is sharper and because of that, more dense, if that doesn't seem a contradiction. Because the layers are more defined. 'Lo-fi' is always the expression associated with Nosdam and you can hear some of that sonic roughness and granularity here but there is a subtle production going on behind the scenes. You can HEAR the roughness because of the disguised sharpness. An interesting push and pull between the foregrounding of the process- rough and ready street recordings etc and electronic grit meshed into a deceptively smooth production.

Just to be obscure(hey, we don't care, that's where we wallow!) the cd opens with a track called 'Untitled One.' Which also gives it a sense of incompleteness, a project that's ongoing, open-ended and that very much sums up the listening experience. The opening samples of – what? - old country music? and what sounds like a chunk of a Leone soundtrack ('Once upon a time in America,' maybe? Seems annoyingly familiar...) gives a flavour of something pulled out of the past, a rather sweet nostalgia. And there is a lot of melody among the found sounds and samples and 'My Bloody Valentine'- type distortion washes (for a quick reference point) – that intriguing mix that the American avant garde as it were of pop music has always handled so well. Think of the Velvet Underground. Or Husker Du at their melancholy best. Avant garde and pop at the same time and interdependently depending on each other to work. Drums come in slowly then out again – never allowed to settle. Four on the floor this is not. Referencing hip-hop – it goes way beyond...

Track two is 'Refreshing Beverage.' Whatever. Drums interrupted by sampled voice clips and background noise, Martin Dosh on 'Killer Rhodes' – which I figure is the source of the keyboard riff threaded through. Again, you have the mix of strong simple melodic figures being broken up by the drums coming in and out, fading and receding, stopping and starting - and washes of electronic noise. These are the materials Odd Nosdam – hey, can I call you Odd? - uses throughout. Which sounds very reductive when coldly written here – until you hear it and realise the complexity he achieves. This is cinematic music (for me) in its conception and execution – and reception.

'Choke' – sampled voices and some very distant music – a radio – then the drums and instruments building up riffs over samples with a simple melodica phrase repeated.

'Small Mr Man Pants.' Ending on an aquatic sounding fluid feedbacky loop – backwards tape?

'Untitled Two.' Like a wind and a campfire beginning as electronic keyboard droney
long-held notes come up to be slowly overlaid by noise and distanced samples – i.e. you don't know what they are – could be voices in the distance. No drums – cymbals at a couple of points, very faintly splashing – just space... and the long held chords slowly building, getting louder until they abruptly drop out leaving street (?) voices and hissing feedback (the slow chords can be heard faintly coming in deep at the end as a sample ...)

On '11th venue Freakout pts 1 and 2 ' he enlists Mike Patton on vocals and sundry keyboards and noise from others, (Josiah Wolf, Doug McDiarmid, Dee Kesler and Jessica Bayliff). It starts with distant sounds and voices and a faintly-heard bass line marking out a simple chord sequence etched by keyboard, very dubby reverby percussion enters coming in and out, starting and stopping. Goes into sampled voices (from the mike he [famously] hung out in the street outside his apartment?) and a bell-like keyboard riff.

'Part two' and the drums sound live – or liver, (not as in meat but live-r) more full in the mix with crashing, hissing cymbals as Mike Patton's vocals enter. Acoustic guitars come in on a stop time break almost – then the voices and percussion resume – ending on a voice sample, which sounds like Anthony Hopkins but I can't place the context – one for the obsessionals out there in dreamland - over a fade out...

'Clouded.' Crackling – not the burnt fat round a joint of pork (for our English readers – I realise that others might draw weird ambiguities out of that phrase...) but - a fire or just glitchy electronics as a slow two chord drone builds and Liz Hodson's voice just floats wordlessly over all. Short and ethereal...

'Untitled three' – Jessica Bayliff sings over – again - slow long-held chords. Lyrics this time! Reprising track one – 'Untitled One' - with added vocal... an interesting slight return. Drums edge in – minimal and falling back into the mix slightly. Drums here are more – suggestions - not the driving force. I'm reminded of the jazz technique where players don't state the obvious beat or inversion of a chord because they all know it anyway so imply it instead – deferring the obvious– then it comes back, rising – vocals multitracked but going further down as the long-held chords lift in volume – then those quasi-stop-time breaks where the drums fall out for a bar or two.
Goes out on what could be a reversed riff.

'Gun' – strange mutters and shouts and a racheting sound like a cross between a train starting up and a sprocket clanking in a machine that's falling into water.. (DJ Spleenbaby has a track that uses something similar!). Starts to build on a strange two and four. Sounds like the sea in the background – something oceanic in there as a counter rhythm. Then it stops, stutters, starts again as if a tape machine is screwing up – (unless it's my cd player!). More noise laid on as the beat fades and gets buried finally jumping into -

'Upsetter.' More train-like noise. Rising almost squealing note – like brakes being applied as the track slowly winds down and segues into -

'Flying Saucer Attack.' Long deep notes drone – Jessica Edwards and Jesse Edwards on guitars (it says here...) One chord... with a higher overtone(?) variational cross rhythm – think of a flanger sweep cutting across... after a minute or two (who's counting? This is quite hypnotic) you can pick out some crossrhythmic variations – buried samples, processed feedback, who knows what? Interestingly – you expect the drums to come in – but they don't. It just fades out...


Something here reminds me of Brian Wilson, recently redux with 'Smile.' Crossed with Michael Gira's 'Angels of Light' incarnation. Not in the sense of obvious influence or similar sound textures, rather in the aesthetic ambition to go beyond the now-obvious of pop and rock – and hip-hop.

And I see Odd, along with these guys, as slap bang in the Great Tradition – of American Mavericks...

Maybe it's my own preoccupations but moving back from music per se to wider related artistic currents, I see the shadow of Burroughs (and Brion Gysin) looming – the cut-ups that give up different/hidden meanings when re-aligned and mashed together with beats and tunes and other shards of sound and found noise. Of course, these have become accepted strategies by now, assimilated into music's mainstream – so rapidly that it is easy to forget that music like this out on the airwaves and the mainstream not so long ago would have sounded incomprehensible – or be viewed as some dadaist prank or Fluxus joke. Much has been said and written about Old Bill's influence on contemporary culture – more so in music, I think it will be discovered, than in literature – I'm not going to go over old ground here. Just mark the signposts...

And maybe the phrase 'American Mavericks' is misleading – in the sense that it can be argued that since American culture came of age in the 19th Century, it has been the 'Mavericks' who were the leaders and dominant influences – and that they are only seen as 'maverick' in relation to European high art culture? That a truly American culture is shot through with this 'Maverickness'. Or 'Essence of Maverick'. Yo ho... Which I would define as a mixture of high and low – in anticipation of the more liberatory strands of -post-moderism. (They do exist, honest...) Ives 'called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the old.' So I'm stretching a point – but it's a quote that popped into my head. (Interested – George Canning, English politician way back when– go here, brethren - )
So. Charles Ives... is this the real fountainhead? Someone who started to break all the old rules of classical music and allowed in the sprawling, brawling noises of the society he lived in – to the point where the structures are at bursting point and mutate into new ones, new ways of listening. To resolve the chaos in the music requires going to a new level of musical understanding:

'Taken as a whole, his works are incredibly coherent and focused and well-thought-out on a philosophical, religious, and psychological level. But of course, Ives' musical "order" is not the order that you typically find in traditional Western classical music. I think that it's this aspect of Ives’ work that most points to composers like John Cage or Charles Mingus, and the whole idea of jazz, as well as other forms of "process music." '
Scott Mortensen

If one can think of conventional 'European' harmony – even the extended dissonant intensities that European art music was edging into by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, finally to arrive at 'atonality' – as a sign standing for that culture of 'high art – well, when Ives goes way beyond its boundaries in his work – he lets AMERICA in and creates the foundations of an indigenous American music that echoes back from the concert hall to the church to the mountains and valleys to the streets of city and small town. And beyond. And back. Ives splashes into his pieces – ragtime, church music – hymns – pop songs of the day – brass bands - and quotes from Beethoven. And was years ahead of his time in doing so... (For a very good and short essay on Ives' anticipations and innovations see here...

Listening to Odd Nosdam – I hear similar patterns to Ives. These are the concerns of American music – to bring in the demotic, democratic voices and create structures appropriate to a freewheeling, rowdy democracy. This requires fluidity and a generosity that hears the transcendental in the streets of Manhattan or Central Park – or Oakland with a mike dangled out of a window to capture the day – Whitmanesque! Moving way beyond the conventions of art music. The joke is that Ives was finally co-opted into the concert hall – yet somehow still resists being flattened down into the 'serious' music world – I see him having more in common with Ornette Coleman, say. Read Ives' statements on music – then attempt Ornette's harmolodic theory... synchronous?
So. Take the breath:

All this requires – space. Space to let the music breathe...

'I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.' [From 'Call Me Ishmael', London, Cape, 1967, (first pub 1947) P15 – if you find a copy for under £10, let me know...]

As the great Charles Olson said... I don't think it's too fanciful to draw these links in my subjective take on Nosdam's album 'Burner' – Music such as this requires 'space' to breathe in, to exist and create new forms. If 'SPACE' is the true American sublime, I would say that this links Ives and Nosdam, high art and hip hop. And my use of the hackneyed word 'sublime' is deliberate – in it's defined meaning – there is an awesome quality to American SPACE – and there always was. We are reminded of this in the weeks after Hurrican Katrina – America had always been a dangerous place – 'Large, and without mercy.'

ON moves his constituent parts round constantly in the mix – drums come forward, recede, drop out, return, voices surge over instrumental parts and samples, then recede. Everything is always on the move... Which gives a dizzying sense of SPACE... in the way that Ives marshals his musical forces back and forth – think 'Three Places in New England' – the second movement 'In Putnam's Camp' -

'According to Ives’ own notes on this movement, he meant to conjure musically the experience of a young boy as he imagines the comings and goings of the Revolutionary Army near Redding. In this movement we seem to hear the sounds of two marching bands playing different tunes at the same time. Listen for "Yankee Doodle," "Bringing in the Sheaves," and Sousa’s "Semper Fidelis." ' (From here...).

(So this gets weirder – surfing to check an Ives reference - about the spatial elements in Charles Ives - I found this – and you can download and re-mix the bugger... I love the Internet! What a beautiful connection between Ives and now... synchronicity... remixicity... )

So here's the quote referred to in the above interruption -

'Charles Ives's "Unanswered Question" of 1906 was the first piece of the 20th Century using spatial separation as a major element of the composition. '

That 'spatial separation.' Using 'space' in the more immediately localised sense, instruments backstage, onstage and scattered round the concert hall – in the service of the mystical space of the 'Unanswered Question.'. In other works he evokes the sound of marching bands moving back and forward as their sound grows fainter/louder. And his use of polytonality – writing parts in different keys – expands the sonic space further, as the lines develop their own momentum, way beyond conventional harmonic areas. So I hear some kind of continuum at work here – Ives moving back and forward in the mix of American music – sometimes faintly heard, sometimes loud and clear. Space...

Let's try and tie this up... 'Burner' is, in Odd's own words, "an emotional roller coaster ride, meant to be experienced like a film." This wide-screen ambition in music is what unites – for me, have to get the academic rigidity of subjective opinional terminology right, old boy – Nosdam and Charles Ives. In the wildness and beauty of the SPACE of the American Sublime... From the 'Unanswered Question' to 'Untitled One.'

So. Riding out on a pithy sentence – or two...

Cruising the net late at night I found this latest from Odd Nosdam. Or did it find me? As the great metaphysician Fats Waller once said: 'One never knows, do one?'

The festival... in my father's improvising house... there are many mansions...

We did it... I got home - not too late, considering everything. Murray and I would have gone for a late chill-out drink and to compare more notes - but the valve I have in my throat had been playing up all day. Which meant every time I had a drink I was spluttering and running out of the venue space for a quick cough. I wondered if anyone thought it was part of the show - we have a certain reputation at the Club Sporadic for eccentricity... But. We did it. At nine am yesterday (Saturday 10 Sept) I was walking down the road inthe pouring rain to go and organise the pa delivery. And thinking - **** this! At this point -I should mention one of the people who has made all our gigs possible. The very wonderful Frank Marmion who runs a local folk music club - The Packe Horse - who probably hates most of what we play and put on - but has the grace to help us do it because he's a great supporter of live music and a good and valued friend. And a very good performer himself... We have used his pa since the birth of the Sporadic - and as we run on a shoestring it is a great help. Thank you, Frank!
By ten o'clock we had the pa at the venue. When Murray arrived we sound-checked and started to really wonder what we had let ourselves in for! Would anyone turn up? On a day when it rained solidly hour after hour... the afternoon commenced with an acoustic session - which I had to open as we were short a couple of musicians due to unavoidable circumstances. I only had my electric guitar with me, which I don't usually use for solo performance, but... I sat down with an eye on the clock (I had to keep going for about 15 minutes I reckoned - with music and banter) and improvised a strange medley- fiddling around in G until I hit on 'Ain't Misbehaving' played in and out of tempo then a segue into 'Lady is a Tramp.' Off into the blues and a couple of modal vamps based on A minor - D major chords. Ending on some scrambled dropped-D fumble involving bits of 'Statesboro Blues... it went down reasonably well -I figured people were charitable! It was also the first time I had played in public since the problem with my left hand had manifested itself a few months ago - and I had resigned myself to not being able to play guitar again - at least in the ways I used to. But - who knows? Mabe I'll start practising again and figure out ways round the problem...
Next up was Jake Manning - a young local performer who writes his own, very different, sensitive songs, accompanied by good guitar playing, a high, sweet voice and harmonica. I missed his set a few weeks back on one of our acoustic nights. I was impressed - and thought that in the current climate of some kind of resurgence in folk and acoustic musics he will do well in the future. Think Devandra Banhart maybe, as a frame of reference only, as Jake is already his own man.
The other artist in this segment was Gren Bartley. Who played one of his first gigs for us way back - every time I hear Gren I am confirmed in my gut feeling that he will be a very important contributor to the music in the coming years. In a short space of time, he's moved from his influences - an interesting mix of Kelly Joe Phelps and possibly Nic Jones is what I hear - to his own space as a performer. Accomplished stage presence, a high, accurate voice and some blinding guitar picking. And importantly I feel for a long-term contribution- impressive self-written songs alongside very good covers. (Gren does - not so much now, it must annoy him that he still gets requests for it but that's the price of brilliance - a brilliant version of Richard Thompson's 'Vincent Black Lightning' which I prefer to the original - but I don't like Thompson's singing very much...)
We had a good audience for this start-up to the festivities. More people arrived - including the Liquidiser crew from Northampton. As Murray had been liaising with them, I didn't know quite what to expect - but that's the fun of the Sporadic. Suddenly, an enormous amount of equipment and people started setting up. The band went into a long, loud improvisation which took us off from acoustic music into the other direction we are noted for. Unfortunately for Paul, his laptop had crashed which prevented his visual accompaniment to the music but luckily he managed to reboot and he did a fascinating set of short films - some of which provoked a girl in the audience to walk out as she said that they messed her head up. Weird. I thought they were soothing... A lot of very clever split screening in parts, these are works that encourage you to drop your own narrative onto the succession of images - while disrupting conventional narrative. (More about this in a later post). The Liquidiser people also bravely had a typewriter(I kid you not - they still exist, people) at the back of the room for audience to enter words/comments. I tapped in 'polyvalent' just to be pretentious and because I have the word in a sample chopped out of a Charles Bernstein interview with Susan Howe on some Internet download which I intended to use in the Plexus performance later. (I hear Bernstein read with Lyn Hejinian at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre several years ago but that's another story... they were great!). Sorry Charles... but, hey, it was in the spirit of 'Language Poetry' or something...

Liquidiser did a solid chunk of the day and proved that there is a hell of a lot going on in the UK out of London (they are based in Northampton and are getting a lot of stuff out -see their site...) The music and visuals weren't for everyone but I don't care - if I wanted to promote safe stuff I wouldn't be doing this. Most reactions I had though were very favourable and I look forward to exploring their work in the future. Interestingly, I thought their music operates in similar areas to ours in Plexus when we play at full strength - but is also totally different. Theirs is based a lot more round two guitars and some kind of electronic reed - Lyricon? -instrument and a lot of electronic percussion, ours more laptoppy but with guitars used in varying ways, going from the almost conventional to more textural sound.

The multi-media set came home with Sean Clark from Cuttlefish Digital Arts who are locally based. Sean collaborated with an improvisation by Murray on laptop and guitar - we haven't been able to play together much recently so I haven't heard a great deal of what he has been doing - this was a cooler blend of processed guitar and projected images, using a folky type of ambience that led seamlessly into Sean's solo set - softer, with an odd poignancy, with music weaving in and out that set up the visuals to good effect. It took you on an interesting journey... a trope used in footage of a night journey that interweaved with footage from nature to present a meditation on change and decay - maybe? I'll probably write more about the audio-visual sets of Sean and Paul from Liquidiser at some later date, as mentioned somewhere above... It's an intriguing area for me and one I want to get more involved in as I see it as a fruitful method of presenting laptop based improvisation (which is a bit boring for the audience, let's face it!) in a collaboration with film - spontaneous and created previously. Going beyond 'soundtrack' to a more active interrogation of the images projected...

We took a break for an hour to allow Liquidiser to pack up and for us to have a breather. I had been feeling very fatigued at one point but started to get my second wind. Murray and I also agreed that things so far had gone really well.
The evening performance started with The Good Anna. Murray had said they were good but they blew me away! Just guitar and stripped down percussion, these two played with a ferocious emotional intensity that belied their years. They were the youngest performers of the day - but by God, they held their own! An indication that improvisation is a flourishing area of music - they seemed to be simultaneously playing out of the rock and jazz tradition while creating something new. The rapid-fire drumming appeared to come out of free jazz and was very assured, the guitar more rocky via the volume from the Marshall amp but spitting some very fast licks here and there that crosses from jazz to rock and back re technique, then going into fast-strummed crescendos of noise. Watch out for these guys - they are serious!

Up next - the old firm. Warner and Ward. Your humble hosts. Murray using guitar and laptop - me, just laptop. I was going to use my electric guitar as a sound source but couldn't be bothered to set it up. Too tired. We played an odd set. We had discussed something a few weeks back in which I was going to use vocal samples so I had set up a load of these - based on a poetry them - cutting in and out of Allan Ginsberg reading 'Howl, some Charles Bernstein, Lew Welch and Susan Howe. I had also set up my usual battery of virtual instruments but not in a very flexible manner. We played for about twenty minutes and I felt that it built well. Then we did ten minutes more -and I realised that I hadn't the time to put in more patches and couldn't really use the voice samples again. So ended up playing a couple of noise sammples rhythmically off the scratchy, granular sounds Murray was throwing up. Not sure if it worked... But it's difficult to review yourself...

The culmination of the day... Dominic Lash and Paul May, double bass and percussion.
This is music that is more easily defined I suppose as being in the 'jazz' improvising tradition. I can use the word tradition because several have evolved over forty-odd years since the avant-garde emerged in Europe and America. Pick your own forbears - but the Sixties define the moment when Europen musicians coming off the jazz area of performance start to find their own unique voices. Something that, apart from a handful of names previously hadn't existed. I mean, Tubby Hayes, whom I saw several times and was blown away by, was a great player. But Joe Harriot actually took the music forwards from bebop, beyond a situation where you are always in the shadow of America. Both of them of course died too early so we are left with 'what-ifs'. Tubbs, after all, was developing composing skills which may have gone further out from the area labelled 'modern jazz.' ('Been down "Ronnies" recently, man? Etc...) And both areas sort of co-exist still. But Dominic and Paul don't play bebop licks, shall we say, in this setting. This is intense, physical music - a small stripped down kit and a plucked and bowed bass (arco and pizzicato - hey, I know these things... honest!). Hard, accurate drumming, full of a surprising amount of texture and nuance form a stripped down kit. Bass playing that explores the wide range available on the instrument, when you throw out preconceptions, from almost walking figures to smaller nuances of texture and tone. Perfect for the room that the Club Sporadic uses at the Swan... When you are up close and personal with this music I think you hear it and see it at its best... I've been lucky in the last year to have attended some tremendous gigs both in the UK and in New York (at the Stone Club, for which go - here - ) I think that all I can say is - I enjoyed this performance as much as any of them.

And so endeth the first all day Club Sporadic Sporadicfest... writing this at 4 am Monday morning, I'm still buzzing from the adrenalin, amazed we pulled it off, grateful to all who took part, performers and audience - even a couple who didn't like it, which is both their right and proves to me that we doing the right things and not just going for anodyne safety. And a special thank you to Frank Marmion for the pa. And all of the staff at the Swan in the Rushes from the landlord Ian Bogie downwards, who put up with us with good humour and played their part in making the day a success. And the Tyne Mills brewery, of course... And to Murray - the other beat of the heart that is the Club Sporadic...

The next one? Don't ask me at the moment! Worn out... But, I think that there is a possibility... running a club like this is love/hate writ large - but you miss it when it's not happening...

Cheap red wine and two budweisers in the refrigerator...

Anyone would think I was turning into an alcoholic...








but I've been sat here most of the evening dealing with stuff pertaining to the up-coming and very wonderful festival we are putting on - Saturday 10th September - SPORADICFEST - and after that I was working on a review of Odd Nosdam's album 'Burner' (scroll down a bit)
which started as a piece for the Plexus site - and then I realised the full length version should go here - if anyone gets through the initial part and is still breathing they can click - hypertextuality so does rule... and metanarrative almost as I find myself in need of putting some words up here to keep the bugger rolling and so I am writing about a review that I am still writing and will go up on two web sites and has a certain amount of cross-referencing which I have been checking back on Google etc for correct links and - the beat goes on, doesn't it? Sometimes, I get the dizzy feeling that I'm entering a Philip K Dick novel! Hey, it's just the Internet - and as I've been using it for a long time, I should know by now how it takes you. But I have always had enthusiasms - one of them being obsessional bookmarking of urls that grabbed me along the way - which does come in handy when a synapse fires in the middle of a sentence and you can click away to check something - or follow a tangental idea. Such as - the real reason I broke the review into two parts was - the first is a track by track critical essay: hey rock and roll etc - the second part jumps off into deeper waters, linking Odd Nosdam with William Burroughs and Charles Ives to put him squarely (or should that be - hip-ly - ?) in the American Maverick tradition - then spins off to consider whether the Maverick is not, after all, the mainstream of an American Aesthetic based, for my purposes, on the words of Charles Olson: 'I take SPACE to be the central fact of man born in America'. So now I'm commenting on my own critical review which hasn't been posted yet - which loops backwards and forwards formally - and all the links will be in it, I promise, as they are not here. But it's getting relatively late - the red wine was... interesting but sharp, bought from the Turkish shop over the road - a late night blessing. However, I think it needs to be cut with a can of Budweiser... and to those who say I have no taste - literally, folks, you are almost right. After all the surgery last year - I don't. Which is why I like Bud - something about the flavour I can respond to which is not there in other drinks any more. At last - free of the drinking mafia! And real-ale freaks! And for those concerned about my moral well-being - well, bless you, good people, but one of the other knock-ons from illness was that I can't actually drink a great deal anyway. Which for an old hardcore drinker should be a drag - but oddly enough isn't. Boozing can get very boring - and I know/knew a lot of boozers, many of them dead from the stuff. But let's not get sanctimonious (difficult on a couple of glasses of a red wine with very obscure provenance and a close proximity to vinegar soon to be chased with a Bud before bed)... most of them their company I enjoyed. So to end a 'filler' blog, I guess - let's raise the Parting Glass. Goodnight and joy be with you all...
And to anyone who got this far - and wants to HELP - HURRICANE KATRINA STUFF/INFO IS HERE...

Back from Dublin...

Photo by kind permission of DirectNIC.com

My apologies - I have been away in Dublin for a relaxing stay with my very good friends the Wares in Rathfarnham. Normal blogging will be resumed asap but I am back and enmeshed in the preparations for our festival on Saturday 10th September - Sporadicfest!
Also - the whole tragic saga of Hurrican Katrina broke when I was away but I was not aware of it for several days being deliberately isolated from the media. Coming back to some of the reporting I have witnessed in the UK on the BBC etc - well, this is not the place or time to waste on this subject. But I can put up a link for anyone who wants information on donating or helping in anyway... HERE...
And for a vivid insight into the appalling realities New Orleans in particular is facing
I have been following this site - a live blog by a couple of people stranded in Downtown NO -here

Boult to Busking... eclecticism gone mad...

I have never really analysed why I have such promiscuous listening habits... from a very early age I was fascinated by music and have an almost encyclopedic memory for the cluster of early sounds that soundtracked my childhood – theme tunes and songs from old radio shows, my cousin Sandra's rock and roll records, songs sung to me by my mother(in Afrikaans) and my grandfather (old songs from his army days and the only folk song I remember from that time: 'Jim the Carter's Lad.'). Yet my family were not particularly musical. Why I rapidly progressed in my teens to an engagement with the expanded sound-worlds of avant-garde jazz and later western art music I have no idea - maybe it's more fun to retain the mystery. But ongoing musical eclecticism gave me a healthy dislike of purists – in any idiom.
This week I have been busy preparing for a brief solo performance at the occasional club I run – the aptly-named Club Sporadic - and decided to attempt a dj set mixing up a weird collection of tracks – at the same time as stumbling across Pliable's majestic music web blog which led me off into a wild journey in the worlds of classical music – as mentioned in an earlier post. So I spent last night assembling an experimental mix taking in Lee Renaldo's solo work away from Sonic Youth, a load of hip-hop and odd rockish tunes, Groucho Marx singing 'Doctor Hackenbush,' an old recording of the great American piano player James P Johnson and some of my own arcane electronic ramblings – you get the eclectic (should that that read 'messy?') idea... This morning, after I played it all back, I had a quick look at Pliable's blog and noticed his listing for the Proms and some Arvo Part/choral music from last night – which of course can be accessed on here. Which I am listening to now and is absolutely beautiful... (It struck me that even though I don't find this abrupt shift from the profane to the sacred odd, unfortunately others do. Many of the musicians I know are only at home in fairly sharply delineated areas). Another reason to be grateful for the Internet which has rejuvenated radio. The BBC, an organisation that I find to be more and more irritating in other areas, has to be congratulated with its Internet radio presence. And the playback facility is what makes it so flexible. Certain programs that I used to listen to every week I can now catch at times which are convenient for me. Early morning especially I find is a good listening zone. And generally Radio Three – the new music and jazz shows usually and over the last few weeks, the Proms, sporadically.

To ramble on further...

This particular replay from last night's Prom provoked a strange memory – when I was fifteen I sang briefly in the school choir – one of the few experiences from the establishment I reluctantly attended which I recollect with pleasure! This culminated in becoming one of a motley crew taken from local schools to sing in the aggregated choir at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester with the County Youth Orchestra at a memorial concert to a local educational benefactor. Under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult, no less! (We sang 'Let us now praise famous men' if I remember correctly). This then stimulated another memory from a few years later of participating in the Don Partridge Buskers' Concert/Happening whatever at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969. A bizarre experience which merits a longer piece at some future stage – I performed with a banjo player in a duo called African Jack and the Matabele Uprising and also accompanying a male tap-dancer called Jumping Jack who decided to do the show in drag.

I figure that these two events and my obscure involvement with them gives a neat paradigm for musical eclecticism (or whoredom!).

From Boult to Busking.

And some there be who have no memorial... well, maybe not, in the days of the Internet and blogging...

(The photo is of Don Partridge performing in Loughborough Market Place a couple of years back).

Riding the electric highway... up to an overgrown path...

When I was a kid and just starting to expand my sound world I used to listen to our old radio and spend hours flipping the dial across the bands to find the european stations(forget the BBC in those days!) that might have something worthwhile to listen to - Luxemburg for pop, of course but also the Voice of America Jazz Hour - with Willis Conover, the other American Forces Network stations in Stuttgart - was it Frankfurt as well, can't remember - and many German and Dutch stations it seems that played jazz. Being a junior fanatic, I also used to write down the details of the tracks that I could figure out. This wasn't always easy, due to crackling signals fading in and out and not being able to understand the various languages - apart from French to a certain extent. The book it was all written in is long gone -which is a shame. It would be interesting to look back at what I was listening to then. Now I sit surfing the net and suddenly realised when I stumbled across a new music blog/site that has loads of links to mainly classical music that this is very similar - except that when I was young it was more difficult and you had to hunt the music down relentlessly and then not always get anything remotely resembling clean reception. The hiss and the crackle were part of the game...

How it all has changed. Within twenty minutes or so of clicking on this particular blog, I had surfed off to several other sites, bookmarked a few pages (to add to the absurdly expanding list which I keep promising to organise but never do) and started to listen to some disparate stuff - everything from Conlon Noncarrow to Schoenberg to Henry Billings! I love the internet! I have long periods where I just take it for granted - then on a random cruise bump into new treasure.

The blog in question is here and called 'On an Overgrown Path.' Thanks to Pliable for some great links and an interesting blog...

Strangely enough - the last time I can remember using one of those old radios (on the cusp of FM coming in) was down in Hastings at a friend's house in 1967 - the day John Coltrane died. I was moving the dial across Europe and station after station was playing his music in tribute. An eery experience, track after track of Coltrane as the night went on.

Nothing on the BBC though...

Another Tuesday... aftermath of cricket!

Another Tuesday - spent far too much time watching the cricket over the weekend and yesterday so only getting back to working schedule this morning! Above is a photo of Murray and myself that I discovered in some old posts by David, the third participant in the Plexus collective. Taken a while back...
A photo of Murray and David can be found here

I am doing a solo set on Saturday at the Sporadic this coming Saturday 10th Sept - and I suddenly realised that I hadn't prepared anything and would like to try something new. So feverish activity will be the order of the day and night for the next whatever. Murray wants to try something out on our festival in September where we will be collaborating with some multi-media artists. He wants me to supply voice samples over his instrumental laptop stuff. Usually we don't delineate improvisational areas much in advance but this looks promising as I enjoy playing with cut-up voices, choirs, poets etc and it will give us both a chance to sharpen our focus in performance. Often things get very dense as sound piles up on sound. Which has its place but sometimes it is interesting to lay back a bit. Also, the visual aspect should add a new dimension to our set and one that will require a different level of concentration.
So maybe this week's solo performance might contain a few seeds for September...

Strange wednesday... NY Memories...

I have been at home all day, doing various things and just messing about in general. A combination of chillout and busy... One of the tasks was to send an overdue mail to an old friend of mine and I enclosed the above photo of my trying not to look too terrified on top of the Empire State Building during our visit in May to New York. My daughter was hell-bent on going up to the top so I felt obligated to go with her. Trouble is - for some reason, possibly related to the operations I've had in the last year, I've developed vertigo and a mild balance problem. A nightmare... But I did it, even though I break out in a cold sweat at the thought! Strange - not so long ago, it wouldn't have bothered me...

I was hoping to get back to New York on my own in September but that is looking unlikely now for various reasons. Just have to wait till next spring. With my daughter in May we did mainly tourist things and shopping but I managed to get to John Zorn's Stone Club to see Misha Mengeldorf. Looking forward to spending a week there next time, getting out to see more music and exploring the art galleries. Although I managed to achieve an old ambition and see the Pollocks in the Museum of Modern Art. I also found my notes today for the trip, which I may get round to publishing - when I finish all my other current projects. But I did manage to write a review of the Stone Club and Jackson Pollock at Moma - strictly fan stuff but here on the Plexus web site - Stone Club
and
Pollock...

Staying in all day on my own takes me into a strange zone - but I managed to do some overdue things like finish my track on the cassette that David, one of our Plexus collaborators sent me. David and I are doing some old school tape swaps - one lays down some tracks, sends it to the other and so on... an interesting exercise. Also did a lot of editing on my book which is almost finished. And listened to the mixes that Murray sent me - the two latest cds that Plexus is planning to get out in time for our festival in September. ANd reading. And listening to music. And working on a review of the Odd Nosdam album, 'Burner.' Which I think is brilliant.
Going back to the straight job in October - which I may have to do for a while - is going to be a drag! Convalescing has weirdly enough given me the space that I craved to do all the things I want to re music and writing. And travel. On the down side - fatigue... and drinking a wee bit too much!

Plexus... and the beat goes on...

I've been working on a piece about free improvisation - a bit of an overview followed by a description of my own journey into the wild and wacky world of improvising free from the constraints of conventional music (whatever that is any more...) which leads into an examination of the technical issues involved - theoretically and in the practice of my own work - solo and with the group of musicians I am currently playing with. But it's going to take a while longer to complete as it seems to keep looping back on itself even more than my written work does usually... patience... plus I've been busy with various other problems and situations. A busy week...

So to keep the ball rolling onwards - and because I haven't posted for a few days (but who's counting?) -a quick piece about the recent night we played at the Club Sporadic - my bastard creation which I love and hate in equal measure!

The format was simple enough - we are three at the moment - and have been for a while since David joined the lineup of Murray and myself and took us in new directions. I would start, solo, then David and finally Murray would do their own solo sets. A break - then we would come together as a trio. I did not feel very focused and was glad to play first - to get it over with, on one level, but also because I was looking forward to listening to the solo works of my collaborators as we haven't been meeting up regularly due to a variety of reasons. When we play together I am trying to concentrate on what I can contribute and also listening hard to the other two - and we play long sets that ebb and flow all over the place. So it was a rare treat to just sit back and be in the audience for a change.

I played two pieces just on laptop - did not feel like using a guitar-one using Audio Mulch and some loops that finally evolved into a crackly recording I'd made mixing some of the soundtrack from Derek Jarman's film 'The Last of England' with a tape of part of the recent commemorations of VJ Day. Audio Mulch is an amazing software program for electronic music... The second was played in FL Studio which I have been messing around with quite extensively, using it in both a structured and an improvised way, using a ready made rough drum track intercut with improvisation. I wasn't really happy with either piece - found my concentration wandering due to being tired - and having other things on my mind. Which is deadly - a musician should be ruthless and cut off from the usual pressures of daily life when playing. But I did what I did - and got out the other side ok...

David performed then - and had a few problems synchronising his instruments which led to a bit of stopping and starting. When he got into his stride, however, it came together. Odd bits of guitar, harmonica, drum machine and other sound sources... Good stuff...

Murray went up next and was a revelation. Using prepared electric guitar he cut out a large chunk of evening for himself. I was impressed with the combination of freedom and control - he had obviously been working out some new directions on his battered old electric, played through various treatments on his laptop.

Then we all came together and played a couple of long pieces. I get lost(pleasantly) in these performances and lose track of time - we used a couple of the Brian Eno cards each that David gave us - Zen koans almost for oblique directional strategies. I was working with a fairly stripped sound set of patches - synthesizer, some drum sounds and keyboard stuff, all played off the laptop keyboard which can be limiting sometimes but I felt it worked this evening. Yet at the end, I had the impression that although everyone had enjoyed playing, no one was quite sure where it had all gone. Which leads on to the point - how do you measure the success and failure of these performances without conventional markers? This music is not new. But each performance will throw up its own set of problems and solutions. I felt that I had played less than usual - but that fatigue had caused this - and it wasn't a bad thing as - because I was a solo player for so long, I suppose - I have a tendency to play too much. For once I was letting it breath a little more than usual.

So. Another legendary gig at the Club Sporadic...

Yet... despite all the above comments - when I received a recording from David of the performances, I was pleasantly surprised. My own pieces seemed to have more coherence than I realised. All the solo pieces came across well - and Murray's sounded completely different to the way I remembered it - but just a s good. Which only goes to show... Positioning is all, maybe. Sitting at a lap top and playing at high volumes, you're not aware of what you sound like from, say, ten metres away. Or more or less. And in the group pieces, we seemed yet again to have created something new from some of our familar gambits, materials and timbres. When I listen to recordings we have made over the last two years it always surprises me how far we have travelled. This particular cd was a pleasant reminder that we may be creating some original work in an crowded field where there seems to be an amazing explosion going on across the world, fuelled by cheap technology and spreading awareness of the history, the present contexts and future potentials of the music.
Long may this state of affairs remain...

Red wine, dead writers...

Red wine again and 5.40 am. Been up since three o clock. I'm tired but my mind is in high gear -surfing the net I found some stuff on William Burroughs that I hadn't read before in a memorial/tribute by Levi Asher – transcript of Lee Renaldo phone conversation with Old Bill not long before he died. Interesting – Burroughs talking about Old Morocco and the Jajouka musicians among others. Burroughs comes across as someone with a great courtesy in his manner – not the wild drug addled old queer crazy naked luncher one might imagine. But for aficionados of the Great Man that was part of his enigma and charm. Patrician manner and all that old St Louis jive which reveals a wild and dangerous – and darkly funny - world underneath. Burroughs a massive influence on contemporary culture – especially in music. And I don't mean the Soft Machine, boys and girls. A lumpy band in my opinion, Brit jazz rock never having the street flash and bounce of the Fountainhead – the Prince of Darkness, Monsieur Miles Davis. Not that I have ever been much of a fan of Brit rock stuff in any form. That's another story/rant...

Soundtrack Last.fm again – looping some nice Steve Lacy playing Monk – and shit, Lacy is dead as well...

And of course Allen Ginsberg had died not long before this particular Burroughs interview. And the next section of the tribute/valediction is by Robert Creeley. Who also died a while back. And maybe there is some synchronicity here as my mother is probably dying slowly as I sit here, a few miles away in her Nursing Home. Far gone with vascular dementia and a failing heart – which sums it up, I think. While she still had the will to go on... one could still see something of the old Afrikaaner fire. But now, I guess that she has no heart any more for the struggle. But what do we really know of those who have slipped out of our world into some twilight zone which may be some biological mercy for the lack of memory and increasing physical malfunctions, the brain stuttering to grasp what is going down – and failing. Or realising only too well and compensating with surrealism... We just have to assume that they have some degree of happiness as they seemingly freewheel through the episodes of their life- like a Burroughs cut-up, slicing through the linear space/time of the so-called real world into some creation of their own beyond our immediate comprehension.

I suppose I should figure it out that at my age – knocking on sixty – most of the influences from my early life, people I dug mightily, like Burroughs and Creeley and co (and let's not forget an obscurer name, the late great Ed Dorn who really should be better known – a fine rebel American gunslinger of a poet whom I had the great privilege to meet a few years ago at a reading and afterwards. Next day we were sat in a bar in Aberystwyth – I kid you not – drinking Bass just after opening time to cure the previous evening's excesses – I was trying to finish my dissertation at the time – on Jack Kerouac's 'Mexico City Blues' – I'm nothing if not perverse! - but could not bring myself to be a fan or a groupie – I was too old perhaps – and although I knew Dorn had known Kerouac contented myself with a bizarre hangover conversation about football – a game I loath – and Paris – a place I love. Then the car arrived and Ed was gone to another reading in Cardiff or Swansea or somewhere down south of where we sat).

And I just had a strange but pleasing image come into my mind – thinking about Creeley and his poem – Drive he said – and suddenly I saw my father driving along some back road in Devon where we used to go as kids, no doubt on the way to some country pub. He was a drinking man. And maybe he is on his way to take my mother home with him to a place where they were both happy. Away from her present turmoil...

As the Art Ensemble of Chicago play it out with 'Song for Charles.' This Last.fm stuff is good...

Monk...

Thelonious Monk. Backstage, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1963.
Photo copyright 1989 by Jerry Stoll

Just turned midnight and I'm sitting here drinking some cheap wine and thinking about music and how I started out on this journey. My family were not particularly musical but I started buying records at an early age – first one was Jerry Lee Lewis – 'Great Balls of Fire' – you shake my nerves and you rattle my brain... I was a Jerry Lee fan from the start as opposed to Elvis and it must have been one of the last 78's put out because I remember buying the follow up – 'Down the Line' I think - which was a forty five – went in my old man's car out on a sunday somewhere and had it with me and it warped in the sun. One of the minor tragedies of childhood in the days when you saved for weeks to buy a disc. And somehow I got into traditional jazz which I loved – maybe some influence from my father who used to go out with his friends to see Mick Mulligan's band in Nottingham when George Melly was singing with them. (Strange – for years now I've found Melly irritating – some kind of camp burlesque of Bessie Smith). The program about British Jazz last Friday night on BBC2 brought back all the innocent duffle-coated splendour of the Trad Revival...
But the real epiphany was seeing 'Jazz on a Summer's Day' at one of the local cinemas – I haven't watched it in years but can still feel the impact it had. The hazy summer vibes of Newport, the esoteric sound of the cello in Chico Hamilton's group – Jimmy Guiffre playing 'Train and the River' – but most of all – MONK. The impact of whom still goes on down the years. My man. The fountainhead of all ensuing weirdness. Because Monk was – different. A big, imposing figure behind impenetrable shades always sporting a different hat. And the piece he played in the film was 'Blue Monk' which is an archetypal Monk blues – seemingly simple but having little twists that make it quintessentially -Monk. I saw the movie through several times which was a feat of endurance as it was second bill to a not very good flick called 'Paris Holiday' – Bob Hope and Fernandel. Crap... But the sonorities of 'Blue Monk' still ring through...

Round about that time I had inherited an old upright piano and also was living in my own part of the large house we had then, my own space where I could clang away on the piano and teach myself to play jazz as we had no money available for lessons – via Boogie Woogie sheet music and some Monk lead sheets that I somehow managed to get hold of. 'Blue Monk' of course and 'Trinkle Tinkle' which is a bastard to play – show that to anyone who says that Monk had no technique... And in the obsessive way I had – I started to read up on Modern Jazz in the books available at the time, not forsaking the old stuff, rather expanding my ears and my horizons. Discovering Kerouac at about the same time was the literary equivalent of wild bop. I started hitchhiking round the country under the second hand influence of Kerouac and the Beats. Jazz and the Beat Generation -the two big forces of liberation at that time. Sex and drugs and rock and roll came later... But through the music of Monk especially I travelled into bop and beyond – Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and then Cecil Taylor whom I first heard playing 'Unit Structure' on a scratchy radio medium wave broadcast from somewhere in Europe. (Oddly enough, I never encountered Albert Ayler who became one of my all time favourites until I heard some of his records in Paris at a friend's apartment in the early Seventies). In the age of instant Internet access, downloads and streaming and massive CD rerelease programs when you can pick up all your old albums so cheaply - it all seems so long ago...

When I was writing about Allan Ginsberg in a university essay a few years ago, I came across the following anecdote which I used to finish the piece. It ties up the mix of Beat and Jazz neatly...

Allen Ginsberg gave a copy of Howl to Thelonius Monk and a week later ran into him standing outside the Five Spot. He asked him if he had read it.

"Yeah, I'm almost through," said Monk.

"Well?" asked Allen.

"It makes sense," replied Monk.

Monk freed me up - I took up playing guitar which was more portable but the harmonic lessons I learned on the piano from Monk are still with me... It makes sense...

Grey Monday...

About a year or so back I became very ill with breathing difficulties and was diagnosed as having laryngeal cancer. Only way to deal with it by then was a laryngectomy - so I ended up without a voice - but alive! Most people who have had this operation can now regain a level of speech via a valve inserted into the throat - I was one of those who couldn't speak - had to utilise a voice prosthesis - which always provoked a laugh or two at least as it resembled an elaborate vibrator that I shoved into the side of my face and used to speak like a robot/dalek. Also made interesting noises when passed over the strings of my electric guitar... A good improvisor will always find new ways of making sound!
Recently, at long last, I started to speak via the valve and after almost nine months of relative silence was able to communicate more or less - still getting to grips with it but it gets easier.
I write all of this to get it out the way. I was working in a straight job and have been on indefinite leave since last September. Life has strange compensations... I had been planning on getting my music back on track and now had plenty of time to create. I still have a lot of fatigue and have to pace myself accordingly but the opportunity to play music and participate in the various projects I have planned with my collaborator Murray Ward (see us over at www.plexusmusic.co.uk ) has been a great solace. Also had the time to finish one book (sent of to publisher a while back - still waiting for reply!) and write the guts of another. The end of which has been weird - an aborted double suicide bombing on a concert hall in Paris with one of the perps shot by the French cops - which I wrote the week before the bomb attacks in London and the recent tragic shooting of the Brazilian guy. I had planned the ending months ago - but a week after the actual writing - even though it is set in Paris rather than London - was a bit of eery synchronicity to say the least. In one sense the bombing attempt in my story was at a tangent to the main story - but I realised over the last couple of weeks that we are overshadowed now and probably for a long time by the ongoing war with Islamofascism. I also thought back to William Gibson's last novel 'Pattern Recognition' which is so far the best post 9/11 book I have read. The falling of the towers is in the background of the book but slowly permeates all the way through. The zeitgeist with a vengeance to use an old term. Difficult to escape - and difficult to write about.
These random thoughts - since my illness I keep strange hours woke at 4 A.M. and had a hot drink then as ever started surfing and listening to music - just joined up with an interesting site - Last.fm - which builds a profile of your music choices and when enough tracks have been played creates your own radio station for streaming. Worth a look...
Went back to sleep about 11 A.M. and woke again at 2 P.M. The day will now be fucked maybe - a grey wet day outside - your archetypal Monday for psychotics everywhere. I'm sitting writing this and listening to a stream of Doom Metal from Last.fm - about right for today...
I may go back to the book I was reading - 'The Divine Invasion' by Philip K Dick. Read a lot of his stuff years ago, just coming back to it. Wacky ontological tricks with your head - just what I need today...

STARTING UP...

There will be no attempt at ordering this blog at the moment. I want to see where it goes organically - without falling into too much self-indulgence. A place where I can post random thoughts and ideas about the things that concern me most - the things I like such as music and books and paintings and movies. With the occasional rant thrown in, maybe... Politics? Maybe... I feel that my core values are the same pretty much as they were many years ago - but I've moved on in the more outward manifestations of those values - radically in many ways. As one should... standing still leads to death of the spirit...