So a little while back, an obscure gentleman going by the nom de web of Arbogast posted a comment here. Intrigued as I always am by a new presence, I followed his linkage to the very enjoyable blog, Arbogast on Film, which you can see listed there on the right. Check it out, it's quite good.

My immediate though was that it was actually the work of my friend, the noted playwright and all-around cuss Richard Harland Smith, who comments here occasionally. I mean, all the telltale signs were there: Mario Bava obsession, vampiric arcana, caustic, dismissive wit, absurdly detailed knowledge of cinematic ephemera. He claimed otherwise, insisting his blogging was confined to Movie Morlocks. I remain suspicious, however, though I'm told that everyone and his brother are posting about Lee Marvin today as have those "two". Then I see a link from Smith to Arbogast's site....Hmmm...

Advance 2nd birthday greetings to Richard's (and Barbara's) lovely daughter Vayda!

My lovely niece Tiana was down this weekend so I dutifully shepherded her around the city on Saturday, hitting several museums.

First up was the Frick which she'd never visited. Easily my favorite of the "classic" NYC museums, it's a small but incredibly strong collection housed in the former mansion of the Frick family. How strong? Well, there are 37 Vermeers in the world and the Frick has three. Plus, world-class works by Titian, Bellini, Holbein, Ingres, Velazquez, Rembrandt and Whistler. I've been there countless times but there are certain narrow hallways that tend to escape my perusal. I went down one yesterday and saw (I don't know if it's always been there or is a rotating piece) a fantastic little sculpture, I think you'd call it an haut-relief, by Houdon of a dead thrush:






















Then over to the Whitney, which I'd not visited in a bunch of years. Very impressive show of Rudolf Stingel, whose work I was unfamiliar with. Something of Gerhard Richter in his range, to be sure, though not quite of Richter's depth, imho, but still pretty cool. The top image is his but he'll also produce thing like:




or






















The Psychedelic Era show there had some fun stuff. First time I've ever seen a Mati Klarwein painting in the flesh, I'm pretty sure. Some good light show/videos. The La Monte Young piece, an illuminated box in a darkened room with complex sine-like tones occurring wasn't too engrossing.

Onto the subway and out to Queens to PS 1 to see the Organizing Chaos show. I think this might be the same one Richard caught a while back. In any case, it includes the Scratch Orchestra documentary as a featured event. Very funky place and surprisingly crowded. There was electronic music going on in the courtyard, eventually eliciting a pang of early 80s nostalgia in this listener as electro-percussionist David Linton took the stage. His stuff hasn't changed too much--less "primitive" sounding than it used to be, probably to its detriment--but it was nice seeing it get such relatively large exposure. As to the show itself, eh, it was ok. Nice video by Christian Marclay, Guitar Drag, providing ghostly echoes of the James Byrd murder case.

The book store there could have seriously dented my wallet if I had any surplus cash. As it was, Tiana bought me the score for 4'33" as a belated birthday present!

**********


Watched "Wild Strawberries" this afternoon which, inexcusably, I'd never seen. Very beautiful, moving film.

An outgrowth of the Galas event, this afternoon I picked up this 4-disc set on the British JSP label, "Rembetika; Greek Music from the Underground". Recorded from 1925 to 1947. Most of the way through the first disc and it sounds wonderful so far. Not dissimilar from what little I'd heard before or generally expected, but beautiful nonetheless. Also picked up a Juliette Greco album for Linda...we'll see about that 'un.

I've had hit and miss luck when purchasing Booker Prize winners or nominees. Chalk up another miss with Kate Grenville's "The Secret River", a 2005 runner-up. I'd read great things about it for a while and always kept it in mind before finally seeing it last week. Essentially a historical novel about the earliest days of the Australian colony, it reads like a bland TV miniseries, a network one at that. I at least expect the writer's ability to be of some interest and I suppose Grenville could be called "competent"; I'd prefer "pedestrian". You could have come up with the entirety of the plot line in about two minutes: poor, rough man doing his best for his growing family in London falls afoul of the law (well-intentioned!), is sentenced to hanging, gets a last minute reprieve to a lifetime banishment on England's newest penal colony, takes family, tries to begin a new life, is the most decent of a slimy bunch, has grudging respect for the natives unlike his fellow countrymen, works to establish a homestead, conflicts with said natives, conflagration ensues, he and family survive to preside over the new colony but with misgivings as to how they attained it. Snore.

On to "On Chesil Beach" from which I expect far more.

Cleared up another small matter at the Galas show that had been bugging me for a little while. I was seated at a table with composer/writer Mark Grant who was covering the concert for New Music Blog (not sure how reviews are posted there; maybe just added atop). He described his work in some general terms that prompted me to guess a comparison to William Bolcom might not be out of line; apparently it was at least minimally accurate. I mentioned being very fond of his "Graceful Ghost", a piece I wrote about here a month or two ago. Mark asked which version. Inveterate readers will recall that I was somewhat bemused by the violin/piano version on the recording in question. In my head I was positive I was hearing a solo piano rendition and I was reasonably sure I wasn't fabricating it out of thin air. Mark mentioned the other two sections of the "Ghost Rags" suite, "Poltergeist" and "Dream Shadows", both titles striking memory chords. I knew I must have it somewhere, presumably as part of a multi-composer album and filed elsewhere.

A bit of brain-racking on the way home gave me the answer: a wonderful 1980 release on Nonesuch, "Paul Jacobs plays Blues, Ballads & Rags" on which the pianist (who died of AIDS in 1983) performs the Bolcom suite in addition to Copland's "Four Piano Blues" and (my initial reason for purchase) Rzewski's great "Four North American Ballads". Well, that solved that!

It's spinning at the moment and sounding fantastic, the solo Bolcom especially far, far outpacing the version with violin. I'd always meant to hear more Jacobs, a beautiful player, who premiered works by Stockhausen, Messiaen, Berio, etc. Any recs would be appreciated (the above pic is from a recording of Bach Cantatas and other pieces). I'm pretty sure this recording (the Rzewski/Bolcom/Copland one) has never been discafied, a shame.

[Just remembered: I do have another Nonesuch LP featuring Jacobs: Debussy's Etudes, Books I & II]

Saw Diamanda Galas last night (a review will appear at Bagatellen within a few days). Hadn't seen her live since attending the Plague Mass concert at St. John the Divine which eventually made it to disc. Enjoyed it more than I thought I would; it's obviously not an area I listen to much these days but what she does, she continues to do quite well. She's been doing songs for a while now and last night's show varied between older blues-based pieces, French chanteuse songs and Greek lamentations. Her second encore, "Gloomy Sunday", was especially moving. But more later, in the write-up.

This was at the Highline Ballroom, a relatively new club on West 16th St. that David Bowie has something to do with (at least curating some shows) Though nice enough on its own, it's the kind of venue I rarely venture into. Essentially a dinner theater seating maybe 200-300, but determinedly upscale and...well, I'll delineate Galas' issues with it in the review. But I think she'd have been better served performing in a more modest, scroungier place. You choose to live the rock star's life and you make your accommodations, I guess. But I was imagining her doing her show at the 155th St. corner, even in the little Italian restaurant there. Happening to walk by and hearing Galas emanating from inside there or from the parking lot below, now that would've been cool....

(I looked around for a non-made up pic of her. Tough to find...)

Drove up to Poughkeepsie yesterday to see the folks and my brother Glen and his wife Arlo. Blasting Ligeti in both directions (very wide range of music in that set, requiring much more digestion). Conveniently for me, the annual Sean Meehan/Tamio Shiraishi outdoor event was taking place in upper Manhattan, at the intersection of 155th St. and Macombs Place at 8PM, which was near enough to my return route to make stopping by a no-brainer.

The site is on the east side of the island, looking out on the Macombs Dam Bridge, a frilly structure painted off-white and lit at night, and across the Harlem River, Yankee Stadium. It's pretty close to the site of the old Polo Grounds as well. There had been a late afternoon game and, as I pulled in, numerous fans in Yankee t-shirts were streaming by, elated by a Clemens-driven win. I serendipitously located a parking space, got out and surveyed the surroundings. It was about 7:45 but I didn't immediately see anyone who resembled a likely audience member for the event. A few minutes later a car service vehicle pulled up and disgorged a couple peering intently at a white sheet of paper and looking around quizzically. I ventured to ask if they were trying to find Sean's show and they were. Turned out to be Geoff Dugan and his companion (whose name I've stupidly forgotten). Geoff most recently was in the news for the release of his recording of orchestral tune-ups, "Favorite Intermissions". Shortly, others arrived, maybe 25 in all, including Shiraishi, but no Sean.

There was an Italian restaurant and attached bar near the corner, an odd place for such an establishment, and I met Chris Wolf there, had a drink. Meanwhile, Shiraishi had set up at the base of an old, stone staircase that led from the bridge level down to the street and which served as seating for the audience and had begun playing. His style has remained the same since I last saw him at Tonic, all ultra-high, keening tones on alto, something guaranteed to draw the interest and scorn of passing motorists and pedestrians. Every so often, I thought I detected other non-traffic sounds being emitted from somewhere above and then, about ten minutes into the performance, caught sight of Sean walking barefoot around the upper level, about 40 feet above Shiraishi, snare in hand, occasionally sitting down and exciting it. Soon he ambled down the staircase to sit and play at various points about 10 to 100 feet distant from his cohort.

Around this time, I got antsy myself at sitting in one place. It just doesn't seem appropriate to me to do so for one of Sean's concerts if one has the possibility of moving around. So I went back up the staircase and walked in the area Sean had occupied previously, sometimes paying close attention to the music, sometimes turning my back on it and listening to the traffic, watching the bridge and Stadium. Shiraishi's alto doesn't lend itself to environmental integration nearly as easily as Meehan's snare (which does so effortlessly); in fact, I think the duo combo is a little odd in that regard. But I walked west on 155th St (you can see the railing over the space on the left in the photo above) several hundred feet until I could no longer hear the saxophone, then slowly walked back, enjoying its emergence among the general noise.

Very nice evening. Hung around for the post-show watermelon and picked up the LP of Sean and Tamio recorded by Dugan, "Summer Concerts", consisting of similar events from 2002-06. (excellent stuff)

I came to Roach's music indirectly and still probably don't have a really good grasp of it. I think I first became familiar with his work, on record, through the recordings he did with Mingus around '57, some of which were issued on a Prestige twofer that I bought early on in my jazz listening years. Then, of course, there was the great, great "Money Jungle". I never acquired much classic bop, it being readily available and often played on KCR, but his drumming in those contexts always stood out for me. I remember Mingus saying that he could walk into a club and if Roach was in the middle of a solo, he could tell what the piece was; his playing was that melodically precise.

I was fortunate enough to see him six or seven times. The first was in duo with Abdullah Ibrahim at Environ in, iirc, 1977. Annoyingly, I can't really recall details of the show (except that Richie Havens was in the audience!). Sometime in the early 80s, I made my one and only call-in for a ticket giveaway on KCR. The DJ said to name the drummer and played "The Hard Blues". Ah the late, great Philip Wilson. The prize was tix to see Roach perform with the World Saxophone Quartet at St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan, a cavernous, amazing space. There was an oversized bass drum positioned front and center of the playing area, horizontally. To begin the show, Roach appeared, grasping a thick, wooden club. He raised it over his head and brought it down on the drum with significant force, then just stood there for about 15 seconds listening to the reverberations die away. He did this a few times as members of M'Boom! filed in behind him to begin their set. The collaboration with WSQ was wonderful; don't know if it was ever recorded.

Saw him several times in the 90s with his quartet, his double quartet and otherwise. For a while, we were friends with a close friend of Roach's daughter, Maxine, and would go to see them when they played in town. My condolences to Maxine, who was lovely and charming the one time we met.

My strongest memory, though, is of a brilliant concert that took place on a sunny afternoon behind the Brooklyn Museum, a duo with Randy Weston. The duo itself was as supremely musical as you would expect from these two but what sticks in my mind is the brief solo set Roach did to open the show. Playing only snare drum, he performed three or four "songs" with as much musicality as you'd normally hear from a saxophone or piano. Just a jaw-dropping event.

Obviously the end of an era, but also the passing of one of the supreme musicians of the last century.

Thanks for all the beautiful music, Mr. Roach.

Birthday pelf:

Simon Schama - Landscape and Memory
Jim Harrison - Returning to Earth
Shisaku Endo - Stained Glass Elegies
Manuel de Landa - A New Philosophy of Society
Kate Grenville - The Secret River
Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Waddled over to Other Music, which I hadn't entered in quite a while, and just picked up the first four items that attracted my attention:

Drumm/Menche - Gauntlet (Mego)
David Garland - Noise in You (Family Vineyard)
Ligeti - Clear or Cloudy (complete Deutsche Grammophon recordings)
IMJ 2006 issue (Berlin)

also on hand, the two new Formed discs,

Nakamura/Capece - Ij
Mersault - Raymond & Marie

Of these, I've only listened to Ij so far...

Off to the beach for the day...

I'm not the biggest Monet fan in the world. Maybe an early prejudice against certain painters I was "supposed to" like early on in my education is responsible, but I've never really clicked with his work. When I was taking Art 101 at Vassar, he was one of those whose works looked much better via color-saturated slide in a dark room than in the original. So I was a little surprised how taken I was with the above painting, seen at the McNay Museum in San Antonio a couple days ago. In this instance, the only image I could locate on-line, the reproduction is substantially off from the original, to the latter's detriment. It's too dark and the contrasts in the background between the various greens and browns are overstated. The red lilies, though looking ok here, explode out much more deliriously in the original. In fact, inevitably I suppose, I couldn't help but make analogies to certain strains of eai. In any case, a lovely painting.

That museum visit was pretty much the cultural highlight of the past week. I don;t get out much (at all) to middle American cities and perhaps it's typical, but downtown San Antonio was a weird experience for a New Yorker. First of all, it's much smaller than I would have suspected for such a large city (some 1.3 million), not significantly larger than Jersey City's. Second, aside from the River Walk, the place becomes virtually vacant after 5PM or so. We'd go out to find a place to eat and there'd be only handfuls of people walking around and almost no traffic to speak of. More bats flitting about than humans. Strange. That River Walk is a park/esplanade affair, sunken about 20 feet below street level, meandering along the San Antonio River, a waterway hardly worthy of the name as it's only about 50 feet wide. We call these things "streams". The central stretch is line with restaurants, bars and trees--nice enough though overly populated and semi-Disneyfied. The oldest architecture seemed to date from the mid to late 19th century, again fairly interesting in a Spanish/Texan way but not too striking. For a place founded in 1691, there didn't seem to be much from the earlier period. We (I went down with a geriatrician from Mt. Sinai) did happen upon a small house once occupied by O. Henry which was a little cool.

Some good eats including the obligatory BBQ and Tex/Mex but our favorite place was a small Japanese joint called, erm, Sushi Zushi.

Anyway, the McNay Museum of Modern Art was open late on Thursday so I cabbed out there. It's a former mansion, turn of the century or so I think, in Spanish style with an interior courtyard. About the size of the Frick all told, though the collection isn't up to that standard by a long shot. There are a number of fine pieces, though, including the Monet, a lovely Cezanne landscape sketch, and solid works by Picasso, Hopper, Larry Rivers and others. Special exhibitions included one by Keith's disreputable cousin, Reginald Rowe, a local artist who turned out 4th rate Rothkos and an odd series of drawings by David Hockney inspired by Picasso's "Blue Guitar". Rather surprisingly, the museum also house a couple of rooms devoted to Medieval and Early Renaissance Northern European works with a few beauties therein.

But the most fascinating find for me was in a space showing works in stage design and in particular, three watercolor and ink paintings by one Leslie Hurry done for a 1958 production of Tristan und Isolde. Small, intense whirlpools, dark but luminous with amazingly variegated bands of color. Really impressive stuff. Of course, I can find nothing on the web of these things and the only Hurry images I can locate aren't at all like these paintings (though whether or not the ones I saw were representative, I've no idea). Hurry was British, dies in 1978. Seems to have had a bit of a rep, wondering if Richard might know of him.

Listened to no music at all during the week if one discounts mariachi bands. Went to a small park one evening, though, found a bench equidistant between two man-made waterfalls (of differing sonic character) and enjoyed a soundscape that included train whistles, the water, kids playing and traffic hum.

Came home to a package from Tim Albro (thanks, Tim!) consisting of four items (a solo 3" disc, another 3" by a quartet calling itself Benito Cereno, an EP by Sympathizers and a collection of work by various folk under the title, Technicolor Hell, all of which are sounding pretty good to these music-starved ears this morning.

Light posting around here recently due to general busyness (and consequent lack of opportunity to delve further into Braxtonia) and paucity of interesting new releases finding their way into my grubbies. Didn't get a lot out of the new solo Dorner on Absinth and haven't a clue what, if anything, to write about it. The third release on Manual out of Korea, "5 Modules III", a quartet with Ryu Hankil, Jin Sangtae, Taku Unami and Mattin is intriguing enough but requires many more listens. I'm kind of hearing it in relation to "sight" though its means of generation is entirely different.

Picked up the older "Futatsu" release as well (Sugimoto & Malfatti) which also requires much digestion.

Off to San Antonio for a week on Sunday (work-related), back Friday. Carry on.

Reading or have read:

Amos Tutuola - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts/The Palm Wine Drinkard
Jonathan Rosenbaum - Essential Cinema
Russell Shorto - The Island at the Center of the World
Kobo Abe - The Face of Another
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim

Thank you, gentlemen.

One of the most oddly frequent search engine avenues to this site is when someone types in "bump on wrist" or the rough equivalent. This leads the concerned party to my wonderful post of last October (? I think) when such a bump emerged rather disconcertingly on the underside of my right wrist.

Well, for those who are experiencing a similar unwanted growth and are fearing some dire malignancy, I thought I'd mention that said bump, while lingering around for a few months, gradually retracted itself and is now only barely discernible, if that. All without recourse to hitting my wrist with a Bible or other dread tome.

So take heart, ganglion cyst developers. All will likely turn out well. Maybe.

Listening through my remaining Braxton LPs on Arista...

"Five Pieces (1975)" (aside from introducing parenthetical year markings in AB album titles) seems a bit like a reheating of the previous album, though on lower flame. The first cut on Side Two gets back to that dirge-like area I like very much though not nearly as intensely as on the earlier recording. Altschul gums things up a bit.

Of course, the Creative Orchestra recording perked up everyone's ears back then, particularly the parade track. There's actually a hint of that approach on the sax quartet piece, Braxton on sopranino emitting a Sousa-like line briefly. It's still fun, as is much of the disc, though once the surprise factor has worn off...If I'm not mistaken, this was George Lewis' first recording and he does indeed shine. Always enjoyable to hear dueling bass and contrabass saxes as well.

The duo with Muhal begins with a sprightly take of Dolphy's "Miss Ann" then arcs out into some fairly dry territory, never my favorite aspect of Abrams' playing. The brutally motoric piece at the end of Side One with the contrabass sax is still a fair amount of fun though the awkward run through of "Maple Leaf Rag" isn't. Nice ballad, "Nickie" (a rare--sole?--AB piece with a non-formulaic title, though I guess that's attributable to its being an improv between the two) to close things out.

Can't bring myself to listen through the 3-LP orchestral set. As I've mentioned before, aside from a lovely complex chord about midway through Side One that lasts for a minute or so, the entire piece is unrelentingly tedious. I've heard tell that the blame lies with the student orchestra and maybe so. But damn is the piece boring.

The last one is "For Trio" (Composition 76), an intriguing idea for an album wherein the same sidelong piece is performed twice by different trios, each with Braxton, the first with Threadgill and Ewart, Side Two with Mitchell and Jarman. It certainly falls into AB's "difficult" area, very abstract in a contemporary classical way, more concerned with instrumental color than anything else (the musicians all wield an enormous array of reeds and percussion). It's a recording that, at the time, gave me all sorts of problems but which, today, I enjoy pretty much as well as anything else he produced in this period; really very nice. The enclosure gives a rare (?) example of the real world aspects of his diagrammatic titles, in this case referring to the spatial situating of the musicians and, more abstractly, the flow of the music between them.

If Mosaic or whomever get around, one of these years, to issuing the Braxton Arista recordings in toto, the critical re-evaluation will be interesting to see.

Found myself thinking about this album in a very different light the other evening. It had always been a big favorite of mine and holds up musically pretty well, but I was wondering....

Well, check out that wonderful Benno Friedman cover photo. It's almost just too perfect in some ways, especially in what it transmitted to a young, suburban would be avant white kid in 1975. You get to have your black cred but without any vestige of anger, without a sense of street or ghetto or class. Instead you have an intellectual looking black guy, smoking a curved pipe no less, wearing a thick winter sweater, rimless glasses, and sporting a bemused smile as though chuckling in surprise at some well-turned mot that you've just delivered. On the back, his ghostlike form is strolling through leaf-strewn woods, not the South Side of Chicago. This was likely the first image of Braxton seen by most listeners as the Arista recording was the first of his to be generally distributed. It's an affable one and I'm guessing went some way in making the music herein more palatable.

More, when you play the disc, you're far from the fire-breathing free-jazzer you may have expected to encounter, given his prior press and the reputation of the AACM generally. You're presented with extremely complicated and convoluted lines, ripped off with a precision you'd come to expect from King Crimson and spawn thereof. This isn't Coltrane, it's too clean for Mingus, it's not even Mitchell, lacking the delicious sourness and granularity. I can almost--almost--understand the charge of over-intellectualism leveled at Braxton at the time but it's exactly the kind of approach that could hook smart young fans weaned from prog and eager to investigate modern jazz. On the first side particularly, with the quartet of Wheeler, Holland and Cooper (incidentally, Cooper--along with Steve McCall--was always my ideal drummer for Braxton) things are wrapped up in a very complex bow, but a bow nonetheless. He gives you a lot to chew on but maybe lets you avoid rubbing up against the harsher realities implicitly proffered by the Cecil Taylors or Julius Hemphills of the world. I don't mean this as an aspersion on Braxton, just a partial explanation for why his music may have been chosen as the stuff to launch a semi-major label like Arista, that there was reason to expect that he'd "go down easy" with a significant portion of the market, guys like me. otoh, you could simply argue that he was the most interesting young jazz musician on the planet at the time. No reason not to combine both...

I find most of my pleasure today on Side One is derived from the heads, the intricate insistence of the first track (giddily, massively obsessive on the last run through), the charming additive nature of the second (23C, I think. I remember at the time it's not being obvious to me how it was constructed--hard to understand how I could've missed it--took me a while to figure it out. Since then, I've wondered if Rzewski was a direct source of the structure here, from pieces like "Attica") and the lovely, lazily romantic theme from track three with its unexpected and delightful sidetracks on the recapitulation. The improvisations between, however, come off as somewhat busy and/or routine. Not bad but unexceptional.

The three pieces on Side Two offer more to this listener these days. The duo with Teitelbaum is restrained and interesting throughout; I like it much more today than I did back when, probably simply due to understanding the language better. The first seeds of the World Saxophone Quartet appear in track two, another attack of obsessiveness appearing through much of it, though only marginally interesting to me now, more for the historic value. However, the last piece, with the quartet from Side One plus Leroy Jenkins, remains one of my single favorite works of Braxton's. The dark, dark theme is wonderful, played by the contrabass clarinet, Holland's arco and Jenkins, brooding like a large reptile disturbed from sleep. The improv is fine but set off brilliantly later on when Holland re-introduces the written material with some seriously deep, abyssal bowing accompanied by Cooper's crisp, spare cymbals. Very beautiful. I always wanted to hear AB investigate this area more often.

It was an important recording, putting the AACM on the general cultural map (though the AEC had made inroads on Atlantic previously). Practically speaking, it may have been the best possible choice to debut the label, though part of me wonders if we might not have been better served with, say, "Coon Bid'ness".

The follow-up record, "Five Pieces (1975)" was kinda more of the same, less solid with Altschul's busyness replacing Cooper's ultra-musical precision, a little treading of water until the Orchestra album which I'll get to sometime soon.

Well, that'll learn me.

In the throes of my day long Shiina Ringo obsession, I figured I'd walk up to Book Off, the oddly named Japanese book/DVD/CD store located not too far from my office. So, skirting the recently created crater at 41st and Lex and the associated massive clean-up details attending to it, I made my way over at lunch. Sure enough, there was a Shiina Ringo section with six or seven discs available. Though I'd done some research yesterday, I didn't quite have her sequence of releases committed to memory and the fact that virtually everything was in Japanese didn't provide me with many hints. So I picked up "Adult pour Femme", a 2006 release ("Kalk..." was from 2003, I think) and a two disc package from, as it turned out, 2001 bearing the titles "Kame" and "Mori".

These latter are collections of covers, mostly Japanese songs but a few US/British as well ("Autumn Leaves", "Yer Blues", "More"). They're by and large just awful. Some of the pieces themselves are as bad as you can possibly imagine, the schlockiest of pop ballads with all affiliated detritus. I'm fairly sure it's not a joke. Just brutal stuff; it's going to be hard giving them my requisite minimum of two listens. "Well", I thought, "that was 2001. She obviously made some kind of creative leap between then and the
album I heard the day before. Maybe she advanced on that one for "Adult..."

Erm, it's better than those two I guess but doesn't come remotely close to KSK. At its best, it's somewhere in Ambitious Lovers territory. Jazz rocky in a competent manner for part, lounge-y for most of the rest but not very interesting at all.

Wha' happened?

Well, worth a shot I suppose, but very disappointing. Back to the Brax....

The first time I attended Record Club in 1998, one of the guests brought a track by Kahimi Karie, called "Good Morning World", an extremely catchy little number with one refrain that goes, "pretty like a trumpet" and which has lodged itself cranially on many an occasion. Almost picked up that and other Karie discs now and then but never quite pulled the trigger. A little while ago on IHM, a thread on Ms. Karie arose, piquing my interest again. In that she had recently recorded with Otomo's ONJQ and that "Nunki", pictured above, included participation by Otomo, Sachiko and Rhodri Davies, among others, it needed to be heard.

As it turns out, I only find myself moderately enjoying the album, three or four songs pretty nice, the rest so-so. My favorite, not too surprisingly, is the sparse track with Sachiko and Rhodri. Glad I heard it but doesn't make me overly eager to hear more.















A poster in the same thread made intriguing reference to Shiina Ringo, however, so I took a flyer on her "Kalk Samen Kuri no Hana". One of the several translations offered for this title is, "Lime, Semen, Chestnut Blossoms" though another, more idiomatic, is something like, "Semen Smell, Semen, Semen (Feminine)". I've also seen it referred to as the greatest j-pop album extant. Whatever, it's pretty wild. Just arrived today and I've only listened once, but damn. "Yattsuke Shigoto" has to be one the best pop songs I've heard in years. I understand she's something of a rarity in more than one respect, doing her own composing, arranging & lyrics.

Any more recs along this line would be greatly appreciated. (Jon, what does Yuko think of this?)

Not having listened to this in quite a while, I had it in my head that Side One from "Trio and Duet" (I believe it's Composition 36 in the current catalog) was as close as Braxton came to eai. Well, maybe it is, at least from earlier in his career, but it's really not very close at all. I was probably thinking of the extended, drone-like stretches but those actually occur mostly in the written passages. That plus Richard Teitelbaum's presence; he does engage in a few moments that, removed from context, might throw some listeners, but does far more active burbling than contemplative playing.

That said, it remains a favorite Braxton piece of mine. The theme is just gorgeous, one of the all-too-few beautiful dirge-like lines he wrote in the early 70s (another, best of all imho, serves as the basis for the last track on "New York, Fall, 1974" which is next on my hit parade). In fact, listened to now, the theme's couple of appearances are easily the highlight of the track. In between, the improvising of AB, Leo Smith and Teitelbaum is OK but really meanders off from everything the theme opens up.

One of the first concert events of this sort of music I ever attended was the Braxton/Teitelbaum duo that took place at Mt. Tremper on June 10, 1976, subsequently issued as "Time Zones" on Arista and reissued since with "Silence". Aside from my first live exposure to Braxton, it was also the first time I'd seen a synthesizer handled in non-keyboard fashion, having aurally teethed on Keith Emerson and his ilk. It was pretty revelatory to see Teitelbaum manipulating dozens of jacks and generating sounds that bore little or no relation to standard musical tones. Still, I've never really warmed to his playing. There was a point in the mid 80s where he and Braxton worked together (there's that double LP on Hat, I forget the name) and began to get into an almost rockish groove on occasion that got fairly exciting. I caught them at SOBs (!) around then on a double bill with Blood Ulmer (!!) and they rocked the place.

Of course, Side Two of the record in question is three duets with Holland on standards. Braxton seemed to have a penchant at the time for picking works from the repertoire that included "You" in the title: "You Go to My Head", "Embraceable You", "You Stepped Out of a Dream", etc. They're fine, though admittedly a bit boring at this point. Holland is absurdly agile, though.

About a year ago, I posted on my general hatred of attending weddings (nothing against the pair getting so married, just despising your average wedding ceremony and reception). Well, it still holds but over the weekend I attended about as enjoyable such an affair as I can imagine, short of Rowe and Caetano Veloso providing music at a civil ceremony.

Steve Griffith's (who JC denizens know as Captain Hate) lovely eldest daughter Heather completed the second of two rites with hubby Vineet (the first having taken place in India in January) on Sunday. The ceremony took place outside in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, as beautiful a setting as one could ask for. The affair was non-sectarian, presided over by one Rev. Cohen. Yes, that's right, Rev. Cohen. Can't be a whole helluva lot of those around. It took about 15 minutes--excellent--and consisted essentially of vows of love. Beats a mass any day.

The reception was in this large, sunlit greenhouse-like structure. As about half the contingent was Indian, the music was happily not your standard wedding crapola but included a great deal of bhangra. Now, perhaps it's my relative unfamiliarity with the music and I guess it's possible that there's some Indian version of Olewnick typing away right now in Delhi proclaiming the superiority of "Hot, Hot, Hot!" to his native pop music, but I could easily listen to bhangra all afternoon, no sweat. Way more rhythmically and otherwise interesting than US/Brit pop/schmaltz. There were also more than a few individuals who knew their way around the dance floor, providing some attractive and amusing visuals. Add several very enjoyable people at our table and some really good food and you have a wedding I can get behind.

Congrats, Steve!

Recent viewing:

Maria Full of Grace - Very fine, very sad

Samurai Rebellion - Wonderful Mifune; a small cut below Hara Kiri

Recorded in February 1972, "Saxophone Improvisations/Series F" is the next solo Braxton in my collection and, more so than "For Alto", makes a move into the cataloging of attacks that he'd engage in more and more frequently. Really a very fascinating approach at the time, imho, the isolating of the hundreds of possible approaches in a really rigorous fashion, concentrating intently on one basic attack and seeing what you can find. He's not as explicit about that here as he would be on subsequent recordings, but you do get the sense that there's little wandering about, that each track is tightly focused on a small area although, of course, that area probably doesn't turn out to be small at all. btw, I have to say how utterly cool the album title was back in the day. You just didn't get such (quasi) mathematical phrases like "Series F" every day. You just knew this fellow was up to something serious.

The short triad of pieces that opens the album (I have the 1976 Inner City release; I know it's been reissued with an additional set of compositions) is dedicated to Bobby Fisher [sic] with the parenthetical comment, "If Fisher wins the world championship I will add another stage. If he loses I will take off a stage and give it to someone else..."

The sidelong piece on Side Two, JMK-80 CFN-7 (Composition 26B per Martinelli's Discography) is one of Braxton's finest, a raging but precise storm wherein he engages in a bunch of amazing...not sure what you'd call it-hocketing? Where he rapidly alternates between higher and lower notes, giving the impression of two separate lines, all the while maintaining a ferocity level you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere in the jazz scene nowadays.


















I see that there's a two year + gap between Brax recordings among my vinyl and, consulting Martinelli, find that he only (as leader) recorded a couple of things in this period (at least as existed when the discography was compiled around 1999) none of which would've been readily available to me at the time, so it makes sense there'd be a gap. Needless to say, the "In the Tradition" releases--I only have the one volume--caused something of a commotion when released. There was a whole storm of controversy as to Braxton's legitimacy as a jazz musician in the early 70s even though he'd often included standards in concert and on record, and play them in heartfelt fashion. Well, here he was with a pretty mainstream group of musicians playing Warne Marsh (Marshmallow), Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Just Friends, Ornithology and Lush Life. The pieces where he uses alto are fairly straightforward and fun but it was the two on contrabass clarinet that raised eyebrows. The Mingus, a duo with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, gets some extremely abstract rumination before, at the tail end, settling into a dark reading of the theme in unison while Ornithology is just a riot. Braxton used to get a kick playing up-tempo bop on the most unwieldy of his axes (this and the contrabass sax) and he does so with gleeful abandon here.

Is there much lasting value? Probably not. Should he have bothered? Well, no, I don't guess so. There's something of the need to "prove" himself to the mainstream jazz world at play here. Of course, he was also piss-poor most of this time so it's hard to blame him for trying to walk that tightrope, especially considering he did have a true love for the music. In any event, it's an enjoyable recording, far more lively and creative than much of the straighter jazz of the era. Always meant to hear more Montoliu but never really got around to it.

















Once again, I have only one recoding from a two volume vinyl set, this time "Duo 2" from the Braxton/Bailey concert of June, 1974. Hey, funds were tight back then. Can't find an image of the LP anywhere...Probably saw this one and snatched it up, not having seen Vol. 1. Again, the youthful reader must attempt to imagine a time when Braxton releases weren't as plentiful as...um, latter-day Braxton releases. This was the first Emanem record I ever laid paws on, pretty sure, and only my second encounter with Bailey, the first being the ECM Music Improvisation Company. He still caused me a good deal of trouble then; this was about as abstract as any music I knew in '75, at least as far as improvisatory music was concerned. I recall going back and forth on it, sometimes baffled, once in a while catching a glimmer of what he was about. For a long while, the only other occasion of his music in my collection was on the Guitar Solos Vol. 2 (released in '76 or '77 I think) of which I was always fond, and I didn't really re-investigate Bailey until about 1990.

While listened to these days with the knowledge of AMM's music, the set necessarily feels a bit stuck in that "insect improv" aesthetic, though it works reasonably well on its own terms. There's a decent amount of communication taking place, each musician acceding to the other on multiple occasions. And there are certainly individual moments, such as the end of Side One, where a kind of tonal stasis (many notes, but staying in the same zone) is achieved that's quite beautiful.

Finally, for today (and once more bereft of any locatable cover image--annoying) is the Live at Moers solo recording, originally issued on Ring, from June 1, 1974 (Hey! Out of chronological order; must remedy!) Another very, very strong solo performance in front of, if the back cover photo is to be believed, a pretty large audience. Did Moers regularly draw like that back then? Must be 500 or so people in the photo, clustered tightly together on a hillside and clearly going past the frame. Again, a nice variety of approaches from the screeching to a ballad that sounds as though based on "A Foggy Day" changes, to a staccato boppish piece, to a lightly swirling bunch of tendrils, to a repetitive Kelvin series track, closing with an ultrasonic squeakfest.

Some thoughts stimulated by the "sight" discussion below, probably tangential but maybe serving to illustrate how I come to hear work like that, including aspects of randomness and how difficult it comes to making qualitative judgments of same.

Two events from my early painting career were crucial in my understanding of the nature of vision as regards art. One I remember specifically, occurring in my room in Boston in late '74 while I was attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. I was sitting around, trying to think of something to paint. (I should mention that I did then and still, to the extent I do at all, paint in what can be fairly described as a "realistic" manner). Finally one of the basic lessons osmosed from several years of poring over Vermeer and Velazquez hit home: it didn't matter. Whichever way I turned, whatever I focussed on, there was an enormous amount of visual beauty to be seen if only I looked. "Composition" didn't have to be set up, it could be developed by reading the scene deeply enough. I turned an arbitrary number of degrees in my seat and painted what happened to be in front of me, in this case an old, faded pink arm chair with a couple of brooms and mops leaning against it, my boards from the ASG baseball sim I was playing sitting on the cushion. There were wires coming down from somewhere, their multiple shadows resulting from the several light sources in play. Nothing astounding from a historical perspective, of course, but revelatory to that 20-year old. Served me in good stead.

The second is a bit more subtle and possibly more difficult to get across. I was, and remain (contrary to much 20th century pictorial thought) very fascinated by visual depth and its depiction on a two dimensional surface. I recall reading (I forget where or by whom) the assertion that Velazquez, like no one else before, succeeded in painting the air between and around objects. Now of course we all see in depth (at least those of us with sight in two eyes) but it's a different thing to be conscious of that depth, aware of the air between things. Again, very hard to explain, but I found myself able to mentally toggle on and off the ability to look at things as objects in space and be very, very, conscious of the surrounding air. Maybe everyone else does this routinely, I don't know. But I have the idea that most everyone functions (in terms of looking at things, not, obviously, in terms of interacting with them) in a kind of 2-D fashion. (Maybe this wasn't the case before TV?) It's a wonderful little technique to practice, especially outside, where you can get a vivid sense of the mass of large things, say the skyline of Manhattan, when you're conscious of the air behind it, its density, its emergence from miles back. Try it!

Combining these two states of awareness (really not trying to sound at all mystical about it because mysticism has nothing to do with it) makes for an impossibility of ever being bored in visual terms. There's simply, always, too much to see. You can probably see where I'm going in terms of sound.

To the best of my recollection, these visual understandings were things I (crudely) developed myself, though it wouldn't surprise me to learn of some other direct pointers that I've since forgotten. It took me a long, long time (well, maybe ten years) to make the obvious correlations to sound. That ol' transition from looking to seeing didn't automatically cause the jump from hearing to listening. A large part of this, I imagine, was simply the kind of music that was occupying most of my time, which is to say avant jazz, an area where Cagean concerns aren't paramount. But I'm also guessing that, once I finally got around to it, it made the transition to greatly appreciating eai and, especially, field recordings and associated areas, that much easier. Not that it's been a quick process; some baggage has a nasty habit of being difficult to throw off. In other words, having been able to see "blank" walls (after marveling at them in Vermeer for years), and paint them made it easier to hear "silence" and appreciate variations in same on recordings.

Just as I don't routinely flip on the depth-o-vision (I wish I did, but it's still something I have to think about), I also don't always walk around consciously experiencing sound in a Cagean manner. I daresay I do so more than your average Joe, probably more so than your average taomud-head but it's still a conscious decision, not my natural mode of operation. I wish it was; maybe it is for some.

This is a roundabout way of saying that just as I've for a few decades been able to entrance myself looking at whatever happens to be in my field of vision, so it becomes "easier" to happily lose myself amongst any ambient sounds in my vicinity. Still, there are preferences...a recent favorite has been waiting areas in airports. You have a cavernous space, all sorts of mechanized sounds, far more than are apparent on first blush and, as icing, conversations that are likely to be in six or seven different languages. Person I'm picking up's flight delayed? No problema! I'm not sure if it's a positive or negative that when the sound concerned is slightly less random (as in "sight"--how random can be argued) there seems to be even more, potentially, enjoyment to be derived. There shouldn't be, I suppose, but I'm afraid I'm too far gone acculturated to really make that leap. The same applies for contemporary visual art, I should mention. I'll still derive more pleasure, in all likelihood, from a Richter or Rothko than the wall next to them (maybe Agnes Martin comes closest to bridging this gap). And put me in front of a Velazquez, well, forget about me for an hour.

Cage's well-known aphorism is apropos here: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

The problem, such as it is (especially if I'm to write critically about something), obviously revolves around explaining why one might bother purchasing, say, "sight" as opposed to opening one's window. Sometimes I think this is a very good question. But for better or worse, there's still a substantial part of me that wants to hear human interaction, that still subscribes to the notion that certain people can hear (and make heard) sonic relationships that I'm unable to (and find beautiful), make choices that seem "righter" than those occurring, choiceless, in my vicinity. The reverse as well, that some choice don't seem right, seem awkward, ill-advised, aggravating (though again...). There's a wonderful dialog between Rowe and Cardew that took place around early June, '66 where the interviewer asked what their (members of AMM) reactions would be if a pile of chairs collapsed during a performance. Their response was that if someone had intentionally pushed over the pile, they probably wouldn't like it whereas if it just happened, it would be fine. The motives of the person pushing would go against the grain of what they were about, in other words, and that would somehow tinge the atmosphere of the room. I'm not sure about that, but it's something I've thought a lot about. Clearly, there's much more thought needed but, again, that's one of the things that "sight" compels and one of the reasons I value it so highly.

Not at all sure how much sense the above makes....