Maria Schneider seems to do the impossible, at least as the 21st century is concerned--she's continually lead, maintained and recorded several outstanding albums with big band, an actual large scale jazz orchestra. Who knew this was possible in this day and age??
"Sky Blue", her new 2007 offering, seems to be the strongest effort yet: at once lush, impressively scored and voiced, buoyant and substantive, sufficiently satiated with, if not an in-the-pocket Basie-like groove, then at least rythmically perculating in her own way. And, less we forget, enough room for the soloists, which in the spirit of Ellington, Maria seems to base the compositions on the actual merits and strengths of her musicians.
In short, it's her prettiest and most intriguing record to date.
In the Gil Evans tradition, she's awlays walked a tight-rope, musically. Schooled in the European classical music raison-d'etre as well as the jazz traditons, her musical choices have veered towards the gently-swaying, pastel colored hues typical of pastorally-inclined music. And yet, possessing suffient weight and substance such that the note choice combinations do not float meagerly, aimlessly, listlessly and, ultimately, ineffectually into the ether, never to be seen or heard from again, like many an ECM record.
Perhaps she is the modern personification of what Gunther Schuller, John Lewis and the rest were getting at when they originated the "Third Stream" all those decades ago....
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Holiday Blues: Remembering the Bird
The Holiday Blues: Remembering the Bird
Category: Music
Charlie Parker, had he not been eternally frozen in time as a perpetually young man who looked 30 years his senior, would be 86, if he didnot succumb to his various vices, five plus decades ago. 86. Eight-ee-six!! Imagine the sheer magnitude of music he would have composed, played, and improvised in the last 51 years. Would he have gone in the same "reproduce the already innovated and maintain the traditon so far" dirction as Diz?? Gone Off the deep end, say sayonara forever to the ether and musically hurled himself face first into the cosmos, a la Trane? Cynically discover L.Ron Hubbard's side bet at a sci fi convention and consequently make the "artistic" decisons to subserviently accompany a Fender Rhodes, fuzz guitar, Marshall stacks, and a minimoog, all within the constraints of a basketball stadia, amidst scantily clad groupies eagerly awaiting backstage access?
In all seriousness: could such a "artistic" direction such as the final option be even remotely possible for someone who, despite acquainted with the aforementioned personal tragedies of life, nonetheless was on a first name basis with the essense of the bookended twins of beauty and joy; a musican without and beyond comparison who once said "first you master your instrument; then you master the music; finally, you forget the 1st two steps and just play"--to what extent would he need to modify this equation?? Indeed, he would have to forego the first two steps en masse and at once, forcibly sever and decapicate them piece by piece, limb by limb, and dehardwire them from his soul. Where would that leave him? Then the Bird would not have been the Bird. Rather, he would become directly comparable and easily categorizable, able to readily make do in the vast barren wilderness of commerce, product and commodities.
What indeed wold the Bird make of these days, as 2006 gives way???
Category: Music
Charlie Parker, had he not been eternally frozen in time as a perpetually young man who looked 30 years his senior, would be 86, if he didnot succumb to his various vices, five plus decades ago. 86. Eight-ee-six!! Imagine the sheer magnitude of music he would have composed, played, and improvised in the last 51 years. Would he have gone in the same "reproduce the already innovated and maintain the traditon so far" dirction as Diz?? Gone Off the deep end, say sayonara forever to the ether and musically hurled himself face first into the cosmos, a la Trane? Cynically discover L.Ron Hubbard's side bet at a sci fi convention and consequently make the "artistic" decisons to subserviently accompany a Fender Rhodes, fuzz guitar, Marshall stacks, and a minimoog, all within the constraints of a basketball stadia, amidst scantily clad groupies eagerly awaiting backstage access?
In all seriousness: could such a "artistic" direction such as the final option be even remotely possible for someone who, despite acquainted with the aforementioned personal tragedies of life, nonetheless was on a first name basis with the essense of the bookended twins of beauty and joy; a musican without and beyond comparison who once said "first you master your instrument; then you master the music; finally, you forget the 1st two steps and just play"--to what extent would he need to modify this equation?? Indeed, he would have to forego the first two steps en masse and at once, forcibly sever and decapicate them piece by piece, limb by limb, and dehardwire them from his soul. Where would that leave him? Then the Bird would not have been the Bird. Rather, he would become directly comparable and easily categorizable, able to readily make do in the vast barren wilderness of commerce, product and commodities.
What indeed wold the Bird make of these days, as 2006 gives way???
Remembering: Forever Trane
John Coltrane, the gentle, reserved, rarified and dignified, soul with the fiery angry tone. The emminance and grace, the power and the glory. Sounds, sheets and all, gutteral, bluesy, flowing, mystified, some played at beyond breakneck speed but yet still coherent and compelling. And how can we think of Trane without Elvin??? The Sound encouters its Fury, completing the whole, so to speak.
Trane could play every which way, fast and loose. And majestically and regally. Note, for example, "Naima" and "Alabama". In stark contrast, "Chasin the Trane", which pleads, wails, screams, sears simmers, gesticulates, full of fire and brimstone. And "Out of This World", a renditon worthy of the very cosmos, themselves!!! "You're clear out of this world, when I'm looking at you..." No smokey Chris Connor iteration, this, me thinks. Neither the Mulligan Concert Band's sinewy, polyphonic stew, either. No, Trane's "Out of this World" is indeed just that.
I was thinking thusly the other day: what if "Blue Trane" was not an anomaly?? What if Trane had indeed signed with Blue Note and not Prestige? At first glance: we would, of course, be robbed of the Prestige sides, and what a terrible loss that! But, in the alternative: Trane plying his trade for the best label in the business, with Messers. Wolf and Lion, two of the few Record Company Big Wigs who actually treated their musicians as actual human beings? Trane working with Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson, Billy Higgins, Lee Morgan?? Not just in blowing session after blowing session?
What a wonderment of riches we have from someone who died so young!!! The Prestiges, the Atlantics, the Impulses. And the beauty, fire in the belly, flowing consequently therefrom.
Unfortunately, I find myself having less and less use for the post "Ascension" period. But what a strange, apolyptic momment, though, "Live in Seattle '66" generated ten years ago, the CD blaring in my car during an all-night road trip through the heart of Nebraska in the midst of a driving, thunderous rain storm!
Where would Trane have ventured if his health had not fatally failed him?? Where could one go after stepping one foot into the abyss, mind still on fire, alight with imagination and the sense of experimentation??
Trane could play every which way, fast and loose. And majestically and regally. Note, for example, "Naima" and "Alabama". In stark contrast, "Chasin the Trane", which pleads, wails, screams, sears simmers, gesticulates, full of fire and brimstone. And "Out of This World", a renditon worthy of the very cosmos, themselves!!! "You're clear out of this world, when I'm looking at you..." No smokey Chris Connor iteration, this, me thinks. Neither the Mulligan Concert Band's sinewy, polyphonic stew, either. No, Trane's "Out of this World" is indeed just that.
I was thinking thusly the other day: what if "Blue Trane" was not an anomaly?? What if Trane had indeed signed with Blue Note and not Prestige? At first glance: we would, of course, be robbed of the Prestige sides, and what a terrible loss that! But, in the alternative: Trane plying his trade for the best label in the business, with Messers. Wolf and Lion, two of the few Record Company Big Wigs who actually treated their musicians as actual human beings? Trane working with Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson, Billy Higgins, Lee Morgan?? Not just in blowing session after blowing session?
What a wonderment of riches we have from someone who died so young!!! The Prestiges, the Atlantics, the Impulses. And the beauty, fire in the belly, flowing consequently therefrom.
Unfortunately, I find myself having less and less use for the post "Ascension" period. But what a strange, apolyptic momment, though, "Live in Seattle '66" generated ten years ago, the CD blaring in my car during an all-night road trip through the heart of Nebraska in the midst of a driving, thunderous rain storm!
Where would Trane have ventured if his health had not fatally failed him?? Where could one go after stepping one foot into the abyss, mind still on fire, alight with imagination and the sense of experimentation??
Jazz: Remembering Whitney Balliett (1926-2007)
Remembering Whitney Balliett (1926-2007)
Category: Music
An item in the news (buried way outside of the print
edition, somewhere on the margins of the online page,
requiring multiple clicks into four or five subpages,
i.e., completely irrelevant to 99.9999999998% of the
population) gave me meaningful pause for thought this
weekend. And, upon mediating on these thoughts, I've
worked out the following, hopefully, consequential
words on an important journalist and writer (well, at
least to those scant 0.00000000002% or so of us) who
is no more:
Whitney Balliett, the long time jazz and music writer
for the New Yorker magazine, died last week from
cancer in the city he was born, lived and gave his
lifelong fidelity to, and which, of course, provided a
proper name to his aforementioned journal. Over four
of his eight decades in which breath found his person,
this sin qua non of life in general also, in passing,
encountered Mr. Balliett regularly scribing away as a
music critic, albeit, I think, a humble and,
comparatively speaking, unpretentious one, in the
same manner and spirit as Nat Hentoff, who continues
to soldier on in a number of publications, principally
at the Village Voice. In that respect, he was one
member of a generally contemptible lot (i.e., those
who manage to evade rain delays by taking shelter
under the large "art/culture critic" tent) who was
actually worthy of respect. As he once wrote, ""Music
is transparent and bodiless and evanescent". What
could be simpler than that?? And, of course, springing
forth from such a simple and essential foundation are
the more profound concepts of beauty and sensuality,
two twin pillars of much of great art. Yet, as
always, bets remained hedged, as words are very
difficult, ineffectual, and rather clumsily fitted and
possibly misaligned when utilized to convey fully and
in a meaningful way the manifold and substantive
feelings associated with such rarified formal
qualities.
His collected New Yorker articles, attempting to untie
this quirky and seemingly irreconcilable Gordian knot
and given new life in a hardbound incarnation, have
been lying on my bedroom window sill for a couple of
months now; and I've been slowly been taking in his
various vignettes of a time when Giants Roamed the
Earth. I've particularly enjoyed his annual reports
back from Newport, the once great, legendary music
festival that, at one time, even provided Duke
Ellington's popularity a second wind that fateful,
breezy day in the summer of '56, fueled by nothing
else than Paul Gonsalves' magically taken and
improvised 28 choruses, aptly assisted by Sam
Woodyard's uncompromising and relentless swing onstage
behind the drum kit and fellow drummer Joe Jones
laying down the pulse and remaining faithfully "in the
pocket" in spirit off stage via the limited and meager
resources of a rolled up "Christian Science Monitor";
and amidst the delirious thousands in the audience,
a solitary audient: the bleach blond faux paux
Marilyn Monroe looking but to this day identity
unknown except to her family and friends (and possibly
departed--we are, as always, on the clock, and this
summer will encompass the 50th anniversary of this
event) dancing uncontrollably for all to see and take
note, giving shape and form to her (still years away
to be given the formal name by an otherwise useless,
contrived hack from Pittsburgh) "15 Minutes".
Being an honest writer, it was not difficult to sense
a bit of cynicism in Mr. Balliett's prose from Newport
at the end of the festival's creative life cycle, when
those rather difficult, intangible qualities such as
"art", "beauty" and "sensuality" proved to be far too
elusive to remain sustainable and, over time, feeling
the sand underneath their feet, gave way and found
themselves eclipsed. In their places followed the all
too familiar everyday $ignposts, the three-way
intersection of Commerce, Product, and Acid Rock.
Alas, Newport was never the same, and entered its
corporate, "jazz in name only phase", where "cool
jazz" was nominally played under the auspices of the
"Kool Jazz Festival", with all applicable signage no
doubt sublimely physically approximating a green
colored pack of cigarettes.
In this respect, I'm a fish out of water: of course,
the best road is always forward and lying off in the
distance, ready to reveal its contours and twists and
turns upon closer inspection to those who seek its
winding pathways. And yet, I think to myself on many
an occasion: what would it have been like to have been
alive and able to walk the walk on 52nd street all
those decades ago, scampering down Uptown and
sashaying up Downtown, when the great ones were
sporting confident, cocky looks, fedoras were neatly
aligned, sharp, classy suits were on the order of the
day; and all the while, artists were playing an
earthy, grounded music that began to take shape and
form(and continues to do so in small, out-of-the-way,
relatively unknown corners today, well away from the
main stage and light years and many stellar
constellations removed from the bright lights and red
carpets of MTV awards, bling and general concepts of ,
ahem, "show business") respectfully, slowly but
surely, individually yet collectively, instinctually
but nonetheless consciously and with purpose , and;
ultimately, in the course of its development, it
aspires to evade the gravitational impulses of
everyday life, and, in the wake of conventionality,
take flight and soar. Its ambition: why, the very
heavens themselves, no doubt.
In downplaying the role of people like him in that
peculiar Groucho Marx sort of way ("I would never want
to be a member of a club that would have me as a
member" the Marxist one took note), Mr. Balliet
simultaneously served to extend the grandeur of the
music he helped to humbly publicize and ultimately
serve: "It's a compliment to jazz that nine-tenths of
the voluminous writing about it is bad, for the best
forms often attract the most unbalanced admiration. At
the same time, it is remarkable that so fragile a
music has withstood such truckloads of enthusiasm.
Jazz, after all, is a highly personal, lightweight
form — like poetry, it is an art of surprise — that,
shaken down, amounts to the blues, some unique vocal
and instrumental sounds, and the limited, elusive
genius of improvisation." Of course, upon reading
this eloquent line of thinking, I should perhaps, if I
were more prudent, revise my crappy, ill-advised
"Icarus-inspsired" hyperbole in the prior paragraph.
Ah, what the hell: imperfections are, like everything
else, part of the learning process.
Category: Music
An item in the news (buried way outside of the print
edition, somewhere on the margins of the online page,
requiring multiple clicks into four or five subpages,
i.e., completely irrelevant to 99.9999999998% of the
population) gave me meaningful pause for thought this
weekend. And, upon mediating on these thoughts, I've
worked out the following, hopefully, consequential
words on an important journalist and writer (well, at
least to those scant 0.00000000002% or so of us) who
is no more:
Whitney Balliett, the long time jazz and music writer
for the New Yorker magazine, died last week from
cancer in the city he was born, lived and gave his
lifelong fidelity to, and which, of course, provided a
proper name to his aforementioned journal. Over four
of his eight decades in which breath found his person,
this sin qua non of life in general also, in passing,
encountered Mr. Balliett regularly scribing away as a
music critic, albeit, I think, a humble and,
comparatively speaking, unpretentious one, in the
same manner and spirit as Nat Hentoff, who continues
to soldier on in a number of publications, principally
at the Village Voice. In that respect, he was one
member of a generally contemptible lot (i.e., those
who manage to evade rain delays by taking shelter
under the large "art/culture critic" tent) who was
actually worthy of respect. As he once wrote, ""Music
is transparent and bodiless and evanescent". What
could be simpler than that?? And, of course, springing
forth from such a simple and essential foundation are
the more profound concepts of beauty and sensuality,
two twin pillars of much of great art. Yet, as
always, bets remained hedged, as words are very
difficult, ineffectual, and rather clumsily fitted and
possibly misaligned when utilized to convey fully and
in a meaningful way the manifold and substantive
feelings associated with such rarified formal
qualities.
His collected New Yorker articles, attempting to untie
this quirky and seemingly irreconcilable Gordian knot
and given new life in a hardbound incarnation, have
been lying on my bedroom window sill for a couple of
months now; and I've been slowly been taking in his
various vignettes of a time when Giants Roamed the
Earth. I've particularly enjoyed his annual reports
back from Newport, the once great, legendary music
festival that, at one time, even provided Duke
Ellington's popularity a second wind that fateful,
breezy day in the summer of '56, fueled by nothing
else than Paul Gonsalves' magically taken and
improvised 28 choruses, aptly assisted by Sam
Woodyard's uncompromising and relentless swing onstage
behind the drum kit and fellow drummer Joe Jones
laying down the pulse and remaining faithfully "in the
pocket" in spirit off stage via the limited and meager
resources of a rolled up "Christian Science Monitor";
and amidst the delirious thousands in the audience,
a solitary audient: the bleach blond faux paux
Marilyn Monroe looking but to this day identity
unknown except to her family and friends (and possibly
departed--we are, as always, on the clock, and this
summer will encompass the 50th anniversary of this
event) dancing uncontrollably for all to see and take
note, giving shape and form to her (still years away
to be given the formal name by an otherwise useless,
contrived hack from Pittsburgh) "15 Minutes".
Being an honest writer, it was not difficult to sense
a bit of cynicism in Mr. Balliett's prose from Newport
at the end of the festival's creative life cycle, when
those rather difficult, intangible qualities such as
"art", "beauty" and "sensuality" proved to be far too
elusive to remain sustainable and, over time, feeling
the sand underneath their feet, gave way and found
themselves eclipsed. In their places followed the all
too familiar everyday $ignposts, the three-way
intersection of Commerce, Product, and Acid Rock.
Alas, Newport was never the same, and entered its
corporate, "jazz in name only phase", where "cool
jazz" was nominally played under the auspices of the
"Kool Jazz Festival", with all applicable signage no
doubt sublimely physically approximating a green
colored pack of cigarettes.
In this respect, I'm a fish out of water: of course,
the best road is always forward and lying off in the
distance, ready to reveal its contours and twists and
turns upon closer inspection to those who seek its
winding pathways. And yet, I think to myself on many
an occasion: what would it have been like to have been
alive and able to walk the walk on 52nd street all
those decades ago, scampering down Uptown and
sashaying up Downtown, when the great ones were
sporting confident, cocky looks, fedoras were neatly
aligned, sharp, classy suits were on the order of the
day; and all the while, artists were playing an
earthy, grounded music that began to take shape and
form(and continues to do so in small, out-of-the-way,
relatively unknown corners today, well away from the
main stage and light years and many stellar
constellations removed from the bright lights and red
carpets of MTV awards, bling and general concepts of ,
ahem, "show business") respectfully, slowly but
surely, individually yet collectively, instinctually
but nonetheless consciously and with purpose , and;
ultimately, in the course of its development, it
aspires to evade the gravitational impulses of
everyday life, and, in the wake of conventionality,
take flight and soar. Its ambition: why, the very
heavens themselves, no doubt.
In downplaying the role of people like him in that
peculiar Groucho Marx sort of way ("I would never want
to be a member of a club that would have me as a
member" the Marxist one took note), Mr. Balliet
simultaneously served to extend the grandeur of the
music he helped to humbly publicize and ultimately
serve: "It's a compliment to jazz that nine-tenths of
the voluminous writing about it is bad, for the best
forms often attract the most unbalanced admiration. At
the same time, it is remarkable that so fragile a
music has withstood such truckloads of enthusiasm.
Jazz, after all, is a highly personal, lightweight
form — like poetry, it is an art of surprise — that,
shaken down, amounts to the blues, some unique vocal
and instrumental sounds, and the limited, elusive
genius of improvisation." Of course, upon reading
this eloquent line of thinking, I should perhaps, if I
were more prudent, revise my crappy, ill-advised
"Icarus-inspsired" hyperbole in the prior paragraph.
Ah, what the hell: imperfections are, like everything
else, part of the learning process.
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