Don't forget the elders
Appreciating accumulated history and wisdom before it's gone
On the Road—Big Ears and Constellation
I’m well aware this hasn’t gone according to plan, but when I suddenly launched this endeavor in January I didn’t think about the time suck and mental demands of traveling, which I’ve been doing almost non-stop for the last two months. No complaining here—it’s been terrific—but I do apologize for not being able to shepherd this thing along. I’m not going anywhere for at least a couple of months, so I expect this newsletter will settle into a groove shortly.
At the end of last month I flew to Knoxville, Tennessee for Big Ears Festival, the first one I’ve attended since 2017. I think we all know it’s grown steadily. This year’s line-up seemed familiar on paper, but when I was suddenly in the midst of so many worthy choices, I think I took for granted that not only is easy access to much of this stuff not possible for huge swaths of the US population, just because I’ve seen someone like James “Blood” Ulmer multiple times and consider his best work behind him, that doesn’t mean he isn’t still capable of lighting up a space on any given night, as he did leading a trio with old collaborator Grant “Calvin” Weston on drums on the evening of April 1. I actually saw a lot of old-school jazz from musicians I’ve heard plenty of times. All weekend long I was reminded not to take these masters for granted in my search for something new. The passing of so many greats during my short trip to the US—Kidd Jordan, Harrison Bankhead, Karl Berger—and this morning’s news about Ahmad Jamal, makes such a reckoning even clearer.
The first jazz concert I ever saw, in 1984, I think, at the African-American Museum of Philadelphia, was by the David Murray Octet in support of the brilliant 1983 album Murray’s Steps (Black Saint). That concert fucked me up in all kinds of ways. I had memorized every note of every solo on that record—as you might do with a band that included Craig Harris on trombone, Henry Threadgill on reeds, Steve McCall on drums, Lawrence “Butch” Morris on cornet, Bobby Bradford on trumpet, Wilber Morris on bass, and Curtis Clark on piano—but I was knocked on my ass when I realized every solo I heard that evening was totally different than the one’s I had internalized from the recording. The lineup I saw was equally nuts, with a young Steve Coleman and trumpeter Baikida Carroll included. It was a mind-melting, life-changing realization that these guys were making it all up on the spot. Until then I had only seen rock shows, where every musician faithfully recreated their solos on the recording. (The exception being when the Dream Syndicate were booed off the stage of the Tower Theater in 1983, bathed in post-VU feedback and Karl Precoda’s wild abstractions, opening for U2. They were touring in support of The Days of Wine and Roses, which is about to get a lavish four-CD reissue treatment in honor of its 40th anniversary.) Okay, sorry for that digression.
Murray has always held a special place in my heart, and he played Big Ears with the mighty Tarbaby (pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits), a group that offered serious reverence for the reedist, but refused to slacken its ferocious attack on his behalf—they know he can still bring it. The set didn’t deliver any shocks, but it did reinforce how powerfully agile and passionate Tarbaby remains and it proved that Murray was in the best form I’ve heard in several decades. I caught two wonderful sets from guitarist Mary Halvorson: she gracefully and rigorously threaded the needle of the tricky, addictively jagged music she composed for Mivos Quartet on last year’s Belladonna, and she played a set of mostly new music with her astonishing sextet Amaryllis, bookending the new themes with a pair of tunes from the group’s excellent 2022 debut. The group sounded stronger and more assured, which also describes the guitarist’s latest book of tunes. I caught Tyshawn Sorey’s new trio with guitarist Bill Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano, a could-be successor to the group led by drummer Paul Motian, yet Sorey’s playing is so different that I still need time to process how it’s all functioning—and it is functioning. The heavy rapport of Lovano and Frisell aside, the sound is utterly different than the Motian trio. I’m eager to hear the trio’s forthcoming debut album for ECM, another echo of that past. Speaking of Frisell, his new quartet with pianist Gerald Clayton, reedist Greg Tardy, and drummer Johnathan Blake hit a sweet spot I wasn’t expecting. The melodists shaped a familiar iteration of Frisell’s pastoral Americana—and I was really impressed by Clayton’s minimalist approach, serving more as a Spartan colorist that routinely lifted the music in the subtlest ways—but it was Blake that floored me with his deceptively complex performance, bringing a sharp rhythmic tension I didn’t notice so much on the band’s eponymous debut recording.
There was a superb program of Annea Lockwood music, with Yarn/Wire and trumpeter Nate Wooley each playing the moving compositions she wrote for them, which were chronicled on an excellent Black Truffle album a couple of years ago. Y/W pianist Laura Barger also delivered a moving account of Lockwood’s exploratory piano piece “Ear Walking Woman.” On another afternoon concert Wooley shared his entry in Éliane Radigue’s Occam series, playing a much shorter program than planned with French clarinetist Carol Robinson unable to travel on short notice, but he more than made up for the brevity with an account of moving depth. Finally, perhaps the most memorable and intense experience I had in Knoxville was finally hearing Catherine Lamb’s divisio spiralis live, as rendered by the manically focused and precise JACK Quartet. The audience, which wandered in-and-out during the brief pauses in the brilliant 90-minute work, perpetually breaking the hypnotic spell I kept surrendering to with clunky movements and coat gathering, definitely impinged on the ideal atmosphere. Happily, I’m going to hear it again next Sunday in Berlin (see recommended concerts, below), at the acoustically stunning Pierre Boulez Saal, which I expect the quartet’s timbral richness to be elevated and the fidgety sounds of musical tourists to be largely squelched. Hopefully I’ll share some comments on the concert in next week’s newsletter.
I spent the following weekend in Chicago, happily celebrating the 10th anniversary of Constellation, the great multi-arts venue owned by Mike Reed, where I program the weekly Frequency Series and the annual Frequency Festival. As with my trip to Knoxville, I got to see a steady procession of old friends I hadn’t seen in years, and it was a total blast, even though it was difficult to reduce most of the encounters to brief exchanges. There were some truly knockout performances on a packed line-up, particularly a solo piano set from Craig Taborn, a truly riveting set from the core of Natural Information Society, which has unquestionably developed into an airtight band since I last saw them, a simultaneously otherworldly and commanding set from Josephine Foster (with strong guest spots from Taralie Peterson and Bill MacKay), and a solo Arto Lindsay set reducing skronk-meets-reductionist-love-songs to its pure essence.
On my last night in Chicago I caught the fantastic new quintet led by reedist Anna Webber, called Shimmer Wince, at the Hungry Brain. During the pandemic Webber spent about four months in Berlin, researching just intonation. I spoke to her for a story at the time, and I was surprised to learn she wasn’t consulting with the city’s swelling ranks of JI composers. Webber clearly found whatever she needed, because this quintet—with cornetist Adam O’Farrill, cellist Mariel Roberts, drummer Lesley Mok, and keyboardist Elias Stemeseder, playing synth bass and inducing the microtones that set the band’s harmonic sparkle aglow—has already found its voice after a half-dozen shows. It was a true knockout, with sectional depth, sophisticated writing and elegant arrangements. I can’t wait to hear the band’s debut album later this year.
Next week we’ll get back to some album reviews. In the meantime, check out the May issue of the Wire, which publish a lengthy review I wrote of the astonishing new box set, Quartz/Mirliton Cassettes—a stone cold behemoth packed with archival material from David Toop of a specific subset of the British free improv scene in the mid-1970s. The cost and sheer volume guarantee that it’s not for everyone, but it’s a remarkable object.
In Berlin this week:
I also caught part of a set by Bitchin Bajas at Constellation while in Chicago, but I’m looking forward to experiencing the full performance on Tuesday, when they play Hau 2 in Berlin. Drag City recently issued the trio’s pandemic cassette Switched on Ra—the group’s wonderfully clever treatment of Sun Ra classics using an arsenal of analog synthesizers a la Wendy Carlos—on vinyl (alas—it’s already sold out), but on this tour they’re focusing on original material in a more digital vein. Last year’s Bajascillators stands as the trio’s most refined distillation of its post-Terry Riley hypnosis and dayglo Kosmische, a glistening, cycling contrapuntal feast of synthetic spell-casting. Cooper Crane, Dan Quinlivan, and Rob Frye build puzzle-piece constructions of churning rhythms, gauzy melodies, and plastic tones. Three of the four extended tracks feature some subtle live percussion—cymbal patter from Mike Reed and Nori Tanaka one each, and another with Rex McMurry (who played with trio as a long-time member of Cave) on a full kit—but ultimately the grooves are built from electronics. The album has the fullest, most three-dimensional sound of anything they’ve made, and while I was initially put off by vapors of 1980s new age, I soon looked beyond that focus on the way each piece develops, tracking a minimalist modus operandi to take the listener somewhere quite far from where each piece started. Below you can check out the opening track “Amorpha.”
Opening for the Bajas are Dwarfs of East Agouza, the trio of Montreal guitarist Sam Shalabi, Egyptian polymath Maurice Louca, and former Sun City Girls capo Alan Bishop. The latter pair both live in Cairo these days, so I’m not taking this opportunity lightly. Early next month Sub Rosa Records will drop the group’s strong new album High Tide in the Lowlands, which features a pair of typically twisted, multi-partite excursions through warped Arabic traditions, shaabi, surf music, free jazz, krautrock, and more that constantly privileges the unknown while relying on a slowly yet firmly developed rapport. Recorded live in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus on September 5, 2017, the new album might be the most focused, hardest hitting transmission in the group’s history. Unfortunately, none of the music is yet available for online streaming, so here’s “Black Sun of Intent,” the opening track from the group’s 2020 album The Green Dogs of Dahshur (Aukphone), which was actually recorded prior to the upcoming album.
This week’s recommended shows:
April 18: ElektrovoX (Thomas Lehn, analog synthesizer; Richard Scott, analog synthesizer; Ute Wassermann, voice, objects) 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147 (Hinterhof 1.Etage), 10997 Berlin
April 20: Peter Ablinger and Biliana Voutchkova (works played by Peter Ablinger, voice, objects, play back; Biliana Voutchkova, violin, voice; Joseph Kudirka, music box), 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 20: Sven Åke-Johansson (Das Telefonbuchstück für zwei Gelbe Seiten, Sechs Klavierstücke im barocken Stil, Konzert für 10 + 1 Eierschneiderfür 11 Spieler, Solo für 2 Hi-Hats, Gesamtkatalog D) 8:30 PM, Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstrasse 50-51, 10557 Berlin (Part of BROKEN MUSIC Vol. 2_LIVE)
April 22: Margareth Kammerer with Catherine Lamb and Rebecca Lane, 7 PM, Nome Gallery, Potsdamer Straße 72, 10785 Berlin
April 22: Charlemagne Palestine (Strumming Music), Jessica Ekomane (Multivocal), 8:30 PM, Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstrasse 50-51, 10557 Berlin (Part of BROKEN MUSIC Vol. 2_LIVE)
April 23: JACK Quartet play Catherine Lamb’s Diviso Spiralis, 6 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
April 24: Kenny Barron Trio (with Kiyoshi Kitagawa, double bass; Johnathan Blake, drums), 8 PM, Georg-Neumann-Saal of the UdK Berlin, Einsteinufer 43, 10587 Berlin