Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey at Their Very Best: Race Riot Suite

The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey have continually gone their own way. I must say I have not liked absolutely everything they've done, and at 21 albums (!) and counting I've missed a few. I do think they've entered a very productive stage in the last few albums. And their Race Riot Suite (Royal Potato Family), just out today I believe, puts them in vital territory.

It's the regular band [Brian Haas, piano; Chris Combs, steel guitar; Jeff Harshbarger, contrabass; and Josh Raymer, drums] plus five horns: Steven Bernstein on trumpet plus tenor-bari, two more tenors and trombone. It's a full-length suite that depicts musically a racial pogram that took place in Tulsa in 1921. It was brought on by a racist and manipulative white oil elite in tandem with the local government and the news media that did their bidding. That's a dark subject matter indeed and Chris Combs has created a work that expresses simultaneously a sense of outrage and a matter-of-factly dark sensibility in very creative terms.

The writing is excellent, with the core band and especially Combs's steel interacting with the horns for a brashly raucous music that has the freedom and fire of Carla Bley's Genuine Tong Funeral and Liberation Music, only a great deal more darkness. It is a marvelous pairing of the sharply defined individuality of the players with a score that is ultra-expressive.

Every bit of this suite counts; there is no dead weight whatsoever. In the end you get a sense of a musical reckoning, a retribution in tone, a emotionally wrought expression of disgust and sorrow. It does to my mind establish Chris Combs as an important jazz composer of our era, someone I hope we can look to for more music such as this.

It's music that disturbs, haunts and ultimately, honors the victims with a kind of musical memorial. Excellent music; highly recommended.

Marc Ducret: His Guitar, Composition and Distinctive Quintet Interpret Nabokov's "Ada" on the Projected Multi-Volume "Tower"

It would be enough that Marc Ducret is a consistently interesting electric guitarist in the avant fusion zone. His composition-arrangements are also a huge factor in his music. Tower, Volume One (Ayler 118) finds him embarking on an ambitious multi-volume series of works interpreting and reacting to Vladimir Nabokov's post-modern masterpiece novel Ada. Like the labyrinthian multiple realities of that work, Tower in its first installment carves out densely textured, multi-voiced music. All that from a well-chosen quintet of Ducret on guitar, Matthias Mahler, trombone, Peter Bruun, drums, Kasper Tranberg, trumpet, and, instead of bass, the bass saxophone of Fred Gaspard. That latter factor alone (and Mr. Gaspard's zealous attack) contributes much to the unusual ensemble sound.

In essence the quintet sounds like a mini-big-band-orchestra. The parts are voiced to get a largeness and complexity of sound way over and above what you expect to hear in a group of this size.

The parts conjoin with improvisational interactions in ways that are pure Ducret. He is not Frank Zappa. He IS a logical choice for one of the handful of really stimulating jazz-rock-classic innovators following in Zappa's wake.

This is music to startle, music to sink into with absorption (and how else would someone sink in? But never mind that). It's one of Ayler Records' most illustrious releases. Marc Ducret is no "fusion as usual" or "freedom as usual" sort of musician-composer. And the band digs into the material like they wrote it.

An achievement, this is. It is. I certainly look forward to the volumes to come. Marc Ducret is not someone to watch. He is already here! He is someone essential to the avant electricity of the present. Tower, Volume One has all the earmarkings of an album of vital importance to what's happening this year, even this decade. If the volumes that follow are this good. . . well, we will have to wait for them and see.

Dominic Duval and Cecil Taylor, The Last Dance

Cecil Taylor has played with some great bassists throughout his long career: Alan Silva, William Parker, to name a few. Yet unless I am wrong he never recorded a lengthy series of duets with any of them until the recently released The Last Dance, Volumes One and Two (Cadence Jazz 1229-1230). This is an entire live concert of Cecil with one of the masters of the contrabass, Dominic Duval. It came about when the producer of a documentary of Cecil and his music (All the Notes) came to realize he was in need of more performance footage for the final version. A concert gig in California resulted, from which the documentary pulled several minutes. The Last Dance gives you the whole of it, 70 minutes on disk one and the final 25 minutes on disk two.

As Dominic states on his lucid liners, the duet is a special one in that Duval's bass playing directly engages Cecil's whirlwind-then-calm-then-whirlwind treatment of melodic cells. There is an inspired two-way interaction going on, which perhaps the duet situation makes especially possible. Cecil's particularly fertile inventive imagination is at a high point for this concert and Dominic unleashes his very considerable arsenal of musical imaging and technical prowess to match and engage Cecil at the note-phrase level. Now that is just a sentence. If you hear the results it will take you far out of the realm of language and into a very special world that transcends the vocabulary available in a short review such as this. This is musical language, a musical conversation on the highest improvisational level. A few paragraphs do not begin to do it justice.

I probably don't need to state the obvious--that Cecil Taylor's improvising in the last 20 or 30 years has catapulted him to a place very few attain. His style-technique has matured and his imagination has soared to the point where he is, at nearly any given moment, a veritable dynamo of musical creation. And one part of that that seems to me especially remarkable is that he doesn't tend to repeat himself. Sure there are key motifs he may return to now and then, but the rest has the tabula rasa excitement of truly free playing at its most extraordinary.

And through this long concert Dominic operates on the same plane.

This is indispensable Cecil, indispensable Dominic, indispensable avant jazz, a landmark among landmarks. So I suppose you can tell I like it? Seriously this is a disk you could spend 20 years listening to (no doubt I will) and there will still be something in it for your ears to absorb anew. Very much recommended. Oh, you can get more info on grabbing a copy of this set by clicking on the CIMP Records link on this blog page, then navigating over to the Cadence Jazz Records section.

Guitarist Luis Lopes and Afterfall in an Avant Set

We recently encountered guitarist Luis Lopes as part of the Humanization 4tet (see January 13th posting). He returns today as a member of the equally adventurous Afterfall (Clean Feed 208). It's a free-avant encounter with a quintet that includes Lopes, Joe Giardullo on soprano and tenor, Sei Miguel on pocket trumpet, and a rhythm section of Benjamin Duboc on upright bass and Harvey Sorgen on the drums.

This is five-way interaction, a cooperative date all the way, with all five members sharing the composing credits. What that translates into for the listener is seven musical vignettes, each somewhat different in mood. The freetime feel is pretty constant, with time sometimes more overtly implied and sometimes in a free falling zone. Some numbers are sparser and more reflective, some more extroverted and energetic. Sei Miguel's always muted pocket trumpet forms a good contrast with Giardullo's shining soprano or gruff tenor and Lopes' sound-color oriented guitar.

A high point is Giardullo's tenor work in "American Open Road with a Frog," where he is is rippingly muscular over churning drums and bass. "American Tryptich" finds some room for Lopes' spicy, floating chord voicings and chopping staccato-line crafting, some after-Miles-and-Cherry tartly stating-the-fact trumpet inventions and grainy bowed bass. "Return of the Shut Up Goddess" brings a storm of bowing thunder and weighted brushwork underpinning more Miguel muted eloquence and then vibrato-laced sustained guitar lines of a rough beauty. There are plenty of such moments, each one with a slightly different mix of musical voices, shades and degrees of emphasis.

This is a sleeper. It is so subtle in many ways one has to listen a number of times before the logic of the improvisational language truly speaks to you. But I found that it did after a time. And what it said was most definitely worth hearing.

Guitarist Joe Morris and the New CD "Camera"

Joe Morris is a horizontal cat. By that I do not mean that he spends his time lying on the couch. It's his improvisation style on guitar. It has extraordinary linear motion. Like a Jackson Pollock canvas he fills out his improvisations in an all-over sort of way. Not from top to bottom so much as from point A to point B. His lines are inventive, harmonically multivalent, continuous and very expressive. It's safe to say that nobody sounds like him. And it's not just that he is note-ful. He constructs melodic cells that not-so-much repeat as they form sets of variations on variations, continually spiraling upwards, to return at each pass in a differing way. And yet it is not cyclical lines he constructs, really. They are horizontal, reaching toward the future.

Well that's my take. Joe Morris is a guitar original. There's no better place to experience his playing than on his latest CD, Camera (ESP 4063). That's a nicely extended live set recorded this year at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Joining him is the equally all-over Luther Gray on drums, plus a kind of string section of Katt Hernandez on violin and Junko Fujiwara Simons on cello.

You get plenty of time to hear the group in action, and the action is quite good. There is a uniqueness to the sound. And for me it's a kind of horizontal experience, a journey in time, an unfolding of avant improvisatory melodic richness.

Joe Morris has created his own musically free zone. Go there on Camera and get transfixed. Don't miss him, especially this new one.

Commitment: The Compete Recordings 1981 / 1983

Based on the No Business release (NB CD 14-15) of the complete 1981-1983 recordings of the avant jazz group Commitment, I realize I missed out on a very distinctive conflagration the first time around. The 2-CD set includes their studio date of late 1980 and a live appearance from 1983 in Germany (the latter unreleased before).

The band had an interesting aural presence partially due to it's not entirely standard instrumentation: reeds (Will Connell, Jr.), violin (Jason Kao Hwang), acoustic bass (William Parker) and drums (Zen Matsuura). The sound is greatly abetted by William Parker's enhanced sound staging, especially on the live date. He's out front throughout and plays ensemble passages when not engaged in the flowing free bass anchorage for which is has become renowned.

The studio date takes up much of the first disk and has less expansive, more compact improvisations. The live date stretches out more and has the advantage of two years of the band's history under wraps. They seem more attuned to one another and the expanded time frame lets them flow to and from each interlocking arranged-improvised musical cell at a more leisurely and considered pace.

It's both individually and as a ensemble, especially the latter, that they distinguish themselves. The sound texture of the group in full sail is dramatically powerful and nuanced. The players as individuals have well developed musical personalities. Parker is assertive and sound-color oriented, a moving force and a direction taker throughout. Matsuura has a tumbling drumming style that has energy and freedom. Connell can and does catalyse the proceedings with his energy travels on flute, alto and bass clarinet. Hwang's violin is sharply cutting when it needs to be and blends well with the melodic principals when engaged in ensemble improvisation or pre-worked line weaving.

Having the studio and the live date on two CDs furnishes for you a kind of mini-retrospective that shows the band's initial potential and its realization on two occasions. If only they stayed together even longer, they might have accomplished even more in the improvisatory realm. For a relatively brief moment in the '80s they showed themselves as one of the most important improvisatory ensembles of the era. You can hear why on these sides.

Guitarist Joe Morris, Trumpeter Nate Wooley in "Tooth and Nail" Duets

A CD of all-improvisational duets between archtop guitar and trumpet is not a standard sort of offering. A rather starkly rigorous lineup of this type can be anything from mesmerizing to a raving bore. Thankfully Tooth and Nail (Clean Feed 190) falls closer to the former end of the spectrum than the latter.

Joe Morris, a player who seems to enjoy increasing exposure on disk, cajoles conventional and less conventional sounds out of his microphone-captured archtop guitar while Nate Wooley, another artist getting increasing attention, plays improvisational phrases that unleash an arsenal of techniques and ideas.

Morris and Wooley are exposed to our ears without the cushioning of a rhythm section, and so they face one of the more difficult challenges of the improvising artist. There are no corners to hide in; there are no other players to fill in the gaps and take center stage when the chops or ideas flag.

Both Morris and Wooley show amply on this recording that they have plenty of good improvisational ideas and that their chops are up to the endurance test.

It's helter-skelter, seat-of-the-pants musical performance all the way. Generally Morris and Wooley carry on a varied and contentful dialog with a kind of paralleling double voice rather than a call and response or line and counterline discourse.

In the process they enter rarefied improvisational realms. The music remains on a somewhat abstract level throughout. In that sense this is more or less a purist-modernist outing. Don't expect quotations from "On The Trail" or "BlueTail Fly."

Perhaps this music is not for everybody. Most music isn't. What it IS, it is consistently. It is a high-level example of advanced improvisational duets. And it's a good example of why both Joe Morris and Nate Wooley are getting so much attention lately. They gracefully carry their own weight but they also make that weight the standard by which similar ventures might be judged. In that way Tooth and Nail establishes a kind of standard measure for unconventional duet-ing.

Anthony Braxton Back to Basics, with Trio

Originally posted on December 18, 2008

Since the later mid-sixties when Chicago AACM artists like Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Richard Abrams burst upon the scene, the lineups and playing practices for the free-er sorts of jazz began to change radically. The number of unaccompanied solo albums by any sort of instrumentalist multiplied; the use of multi-instrumental lineups burgeoned, so that a sax player, say, might also be playing any number of percussion instruments; larger ensembles and even traditional quartets or quintets began to play not just head arrangements or free improvisations, but compositions where what was “written” or pre-planned could fall in and out at any point in a performance. Also, references to music outside the spectrum of acceptable jazz styles were more frequent and lengthy, with results that could be magical, or they could be a sort of failed experiment that formed part of the process. Either way, a healthy "anything goes" attitude was in the air.

Anthony Braxton was at the forefront of all these trends. He put out a double record of unaccompanied alto performances around 1967 that I can remember a traditional player waxing absolutely livid about in a Downbeat Blindfold test. Braxton was accused of not having any technique (although he most certainly did in his own way), dubbed “anti-jazz,” and dismissed as not even worthy of consideration. That traditional fellow was completely wrong, as time has shown.

Braxton was also a pioneer as a creator of unusual musical structures in his small groups; and he was known for his multi-instrumental barrages. And further he was central for large group compositions that innovated on a number of levels.

Mr. Braxton has remained a vital participant on the scene and seems to be in a particularly fertile period today. A recent release on Tzadik (Beyond Quantum) finds him in the company of an all-star free trio in a series of lucidly expressive improvisations. He is joined by two masters of the art: the incandescent bassist William Parker and the ever interesting drummer Milford Graves. Milford, you may recall, was a member of the 1964 Paul Bley group recording reviewed earlier this month. (How do you like that for longevity on a scene that is more than a little volatile?)

This is music that gives the lie to the idea that free improvisation is aimless, indulgent, or otherwise somehow anti-music. Each player operates within well-defined performance parameters, each contributes strongly with expressive music making that combines to create a vibrant and exciting group personality. Braxton in particular is in his finest form, phrasing and finessing his sound on each instrument in ways only achievable by someone playing and exploring as long as he has. It seems like he has risen to a new plane of creativity lately and this recording certainly shows it. I look forward to what he will be doing next.