The blog seems to have gotten away from
“top [fill-in-the-blank] of [today's date]” format, which was
really the format of the (off-line) music journal I'd been keeping
for myself, largely as a writing exercise (itself, largely as an
effort to “just do something”). The process of singling out a
song, or two, or five, or whatever to write about has largely been
replaced by adding said two-to-whatever songs to the playlist for the
next webcast. So now, to get some more writing done, and, let's face
it, create some more “content” for the blog, I'm going to try (at
least this week) to write some “program notes” for the webcast.
I first heard Katie Lee singing Real
Sick Sounds on a compilation called “Beat Jazz - Pictures from the
Gone World volume 2” and enjoyed it's depiction of the lover of
dissonant and off-beat music. Further research led me to the album
“Songs of Couch and Consultation” a sort-of song cycle of
psychologically themed songs which also include The Will to Fail, the
Guilty Rag, Shrinker Man, and others, collectively a
hoot-and-a-holler.
The main tune and the vamp that
proceeds it from Inside Straight by Naked City always put me in mind
of a late-night talk show theme. I swore upon first hearing it that
if I ever had my own late-night talk show, this would be my theme.
Since this is about as close as I'm ever going to get, here it is.
Bookioni features half of the great
Steve Lacy sextet in a rollicking performance. The album Bye-Ya was
released posthumously (hence the title, OK, Monk's tune of that name
is on there, too) but I'm not sure if referring to it as “one of
his last recordings” is correct. The recording is from 1996, and
Lacy lived until June 4, 2004. The discography at Wikipedia lists
another twenty or so titles after this, so I guess I'm wrong.
I'm not sure how I first came across
Tony Malaby's album Novela. The combination of tightly arranged
medium sized ensemble and ripping improvisation is (hopefully obvious
from the show) one of my favorite things. I was developing an
interest in the pianist Kris Davis, who handles the arrangements
here, and that probably had something to do with it.
The Giants of Jazz tour seemed to be a
marriage of convenience for those involved; In 1972, bebop was sort
of passe, what with all the various fusions getting all of the
attention, so this economy sized package of legends (Art Blakey,
Dizzy Gillespie, Al McKibbon, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Stitt and Kai
Winding) was probably an offer the musicians could not refuse.
According to Robin DG Kelley's biography, Monk didn't get along with
Dizzy all that well, felling Dizzy exploited his ideas without giving
him enough credit. 'Round Midnight is one of Monk's more engaged
efforts on the record, and Dizzy’s playing over the standard
introduction is quite something. This is (definitely) one of Monk's
last recordings, despite his living for about another ten years.
I first heard Harvey Averne's
arrangement of The Word (originally on the Beatles' Rubber Soul
album) as a sample on Cutting It Up from Tom Caruana's Wu-Tang Clan
vs. the Beatles mash-up album Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers.
Looking up the album, Viva Soul, also revealed it to contain the
source of Terry Reilly's early tape piece You're Nogood.
Otherwise, Averne was unknown to me until I heard him sitting
in with DJ Trouble on WFMU where he and his cohort Joe Battan
reminisced about their development of the Latin Soul sound in the
late-sixties. (They'll be on her show again Tuesday, May 20)
Steve Lacy's Napping (with his famous
long-running Sextet this time) features some lovely rhapsodic piano
from Bobby Few. It's too bad I didn't think to match this up with the
Liszt piece (les Jeaux d'Eaux a la Villa d'Este) from last week's
show.
This Julius Hemphill piece is the kind
of thing that represents my anti-genre arguments. Now, I often say
that genre is mostly useful for knowing where to find a record in the
store, literally or figuratively. As for the literal problem, this
was released by Tzadik records, a jazz label, but in its “composer
series”, which bills itself as “new concert works exploring and
exploding the world of classical concert music”, so off to the
classical department for you. So it's a mostly written-out piece by a
jazz musician, played by jazz musicians, but getting labeled as
classical, which ends up being ignored by both camps. Which is too
bad because “Water Music” as some stunning sounds, arranged for a
variety of woodwind instruments in Hemphill's distinctive
dissonant-yet-lyrical vocabulary.
Bill Buford's Feels Good to Me was an
album I discovered in high school and held a certain influence over
me at the time. It brought me forward from the kind of progressive
rock that Bruford had played in Yes and King Crimson to the jazzier
material here, more harmonically and rhythmically complex. It was
also one of the few records I could find featuring Allan Holdsworth
on guitar at a time when his greatness was being talked about
everywhere and taken for granted, but no one seemed to have ever
actually heard him play. The vocal and lyrical contributions by
Annette Peacock on Adios a la Pasada and a couple of other tracks
were something else all together, I didn't quite know what to make of
them. The range of delivery from speech-song to full out belting were
impressive, as was the Zen wisdom of this song in particular. It's a
song that's always been a favorite.
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