Here is the latest playlist. I hope you had a chance to hear some of these shows. We’re now in the middle of our semi-annual membership drive and we pulled in more (many more) pledges last Sunday than ever before. A BIG THANKS to all who pledged. There’s one more opportunity this coming Sunday: call 472-5667 or 1-888-917-5667 during our program hours on Mar 7.
Upcoming shows will feature the labels ESP-disk’ and ECM (1969-1970), an interview with Remi Alvarez, and (of course) the most recent releases of “cutting edge” jazz.
Originally released in 1968, Why Not?is one of three ESP-Disk’ recordings on which alto-sax player Marion Brown appears. His first for ESP was recorded in 1965, the same year he worked with John Coltrane on Ascension. With the late bassist Norris “Sirone” Jones, pianist Stanley Cowell, and the late drummer Rashied Ali, Brown creates music that juxtaposes elegant fluidity with a determined starkness.
Starting with “La Sorrella,” Brown floods his alto with a pure tonality that pervades the melodics of the remaining music. The piano sounds harp-like as it progresses in and out of chordal arrays; Sirone’s pizzicatos are soft, climbing and repetitive; and Ali maintains a predominately cymbal-ticking pulse.
The ballad, “Fortunato,” features a glowing interlude from the piano that weaves webs of heavenly phrasing, as Ali brushes and accents the skins in the background. The alto sings beautifully, seeming out of context with vanguard jazz; but given the recording date of the album, this music can now be understood as predicting a timeless future.
The last half of the record takes off in quick tempos. Brown energizes the title track with arpeggios that stay in mid-register, but launch easily into the high. Sirone moves through fast-paced pizzicatos; Ali demonstrates his smart stick work within a channel of exploration. A drum roll begins the last track, “Homecoming,” with a strangely slow entrance to the alto’s repeated pronouncement of a march-like theme. The group pursues that theme in multiple directions; the piano, at first, engaging the keyboard in incessant chord phrasings, some bordering on stride. The alto’s trumpet-like, staccato playing hints once at the tune, “Three Blind Mice.” Ali drives the drum set with a continuous variegated sound to usher in the reprise of the theme. The quartet closes with one swift tight swipe at brightness.
The photo at left by Margo Ducharme is part of the media campaign for Assembly New York, a “boutique focusing on international and otherwise hard-to-find luxury labels alongside curated vintage and art d’objet,” according to its website. It’s blogworthy because the model is the free jazz reedman Giuseppi Logan, who for decades seemed lost to the world.
In the mid-1960s, Logan made several recordings for the connoisseur free-jazz label ESP. He also collaborated with fellow New-Thing players including the saxophonists Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders.
However, as ESP-Disk’s founder Bernard Stollman noted in this allaboutjazz.com interview, Logan was plagued by two demons.
Giuseppi was doing an awful lot of drugs — he burned out, well, actually, he flipped out and never came back. I think that helps explain what happened to Giuseppi. Also, he was mentally ill to some degree and he attacked me once, just randomly. He would assault people without any warning; I loved his music, however, and when he did his first session, resulting from the October Revolution [ESP 1007, Giuseppi Logan Quartet], and he filed through the studio and as they walked in to record, Giuseppi turned to me and said “if you rob me, I’ll kill you. Milford was mortified — he had asked me to record Giuseppi — I’d given him a record date and he threatened me with death.
Here’s a clip, featuring Logan in 1966:
Eventually, Logan fell off the radar. People thought he was dead. However, two years ago, he resurfaced. In fact, he reappearance was even documented on YouTube.
The trumpeter Matt Lavelle has helped Logan return to music, and in fact, almost a year ago, they were on stage together.
It says on Lavelle’s Myspace page that in mid-March, Logan’s new CD will be launched. I hope that between his art, modeling work, and the kindness of friends, fellow musicians and strangers, Logan will be able to remain on his feet.
UPDATE: Giuseppi Logan’s new album, The Giuseppi Logan Quintet, is out! You can buy a copy directly from the excellent Tompkins Square label. You can even buy a signed copy.
There are recordings that have become vastly influential with musicians and have also caught on with the general listening public. Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue comes to mind. Then there are recordings that at least initially did not sell briskly but strongly influenced several generations of new jazz artists.
Certainly Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity (ESP) was one of the latter. When it came out in 1965 it supplied a vocabulary for the budding free saxophonist and just as importantly presented a model for the free rhythm section that remains very much alive today.
ESP has reissued the album as a CD, as a download and as an audiophile quality collector’s edition LP.
It’s not just Albert Ayler’s tenor work that was rather revolutionary at the time. Gary Peacock’s bass and Sunny Murray’s drums were equally so. Peacock acted with maximal freedom and true virtuosity yet his playing was a continual commentary on the implication of the simple folk-like quality of the head melodies as well as Ayler’s freely articulated excursions into expressive tenor sounds. Much has been made of comparing what Ayler played and the Pentecostal practice of “speaking in tongues.” I’m not about to question the aptness of that analogy. More to the point free music derived much from the freneticism of his playing on these sides.
Perhaps most importantly Ayler established a much wider palette of sounds the tenor sax could regularly call upon: the throaty growls. dynamic lower register overblowing, piercing upper register falsettos and much else. After this album and several key others that followed, the expanded sound resources suggested by Ayler’s work were adapted by many that followed in his wake, from late Coltrane onwards.
Then there is drummer Sunny Murray. He virtually invented the freely out-of-time style of drumming that has remained a critical stylistic aspect of the modern player. And one can hear how well enmeshed Sunny was in this way of going about it early on. Listen to how he interacts with Ayler and Peacock on Spiritual Unity and you will hear a master already fully formed.
The general public still may find this music a little shocking, perhaps abrasive. Compared to Kenny G. that is certainly so. (And of course that should tell you something about Kenny G. more so than Albert Ayler.) It took many years for a Beethoven or a Berlioz to gain general acceptance in the late classical-early romantic era. And there are still untutored ears that may find that music a little too “heavy.” So with Albert. He has an intensity that the listener needs to assimilate to appreciate his music.
Spiritual Unity is one of those records that belongs in the collection of anyone serious about the roots of the jazz of today. It’s that important and it’s that good.
The late tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe recorded and released an album in the early ’70s [Black Beings (ESP)] that at the time I thought was the most extreme music I had ever heard. It’s Lowe and AACM/Art Ensemble tenor man Joseph Jarman with electric violin, bass (William Parker), and drums. It was the tenor playing that was the kicker. They both honked, squealed, screeched and caterwauled with frenzy and abandon throughout in a tour de force of extreme weirdness.
ESP has released an unedited version with extra minutes that originally had to be removed for the performance to fit on one LP. It still sounds pretty extreme, but maybe not nearly so to me as it did then. Of course, I’ve listen to a great deal of out music since 1973, and the sounds produced by the tenor duo are more mainstream now, to those that listen, than they used to be. That is not to say that this disk doesn’t have the power to send the uninitiated through the ceiling. It isn’t going to get on the airwaves next to Nelly in the coming months. It still has enormous power and that can intimidate someone who doesn’t yet hear the passionate music as a high point in human expressivity.
Like the birds, there are those that warble and chirp, those that honk and give out with piercing swoops of sound. On the human level we can choose what sounds we make. Not the birds. A crow cannot wake up one morning and ask himself which sorts of sounds he is in the mood to let loose. At least not as far as I know.
This Frank Lowe album greatly benefits from being reissued without the edits. It is more balanced, more whole and organic. Don’t expect John McCain to be playing it at his next fund raiser. The rest of us can and should experience this music as part of our cultural heritage. It is a classic of hyperventilation and aggressive music making. Good for that. Let’s make this more popular than Britney and her cutesy dithering. Why not? We aren’t birds. We get to call the tunes we want to make, the music we want to hear.
Year:Reissued in 2009 – Originally Released in 1968
Record Label:ESP-Disk’
Style:Free Jazz / Avante Garde
Musicians: Marion Brown (alto sax), Stanley Cowell (piano), Norris “Sirone” Jones (bass), Rashied Ali (drums)
This reissue of saxophonist and ethnomusicologist Marion Brown’s 1968 quartet date, and second outing for ESP, highlights his unique fusion of cutting-edge avant-improv with sonorous melodies and yeaning lines. In a sense, Brown bridged the best of many musical worlds. And he recorded with John Coltrane on the classic 1965 album Ascension, amid affiliations with fellow avant saxophonist Archie Shepp and other artists of note. Brown became one of the premier 1960’s era avant-garde musicians, yet didn’t receive the glory or notoriety enjoyed by many of his peers.
Brown and his quartet inject blustery undercurrents into an expansive musical plane on this superb date that ages like the proverbial fine wine. Part of the album’s success lies within the saxophonist’s melodically tinged mode of soaring into an abyss of spiritual fulfillment. Brown sustains memorably melodic primary themes via soaring and climactically devised phraseologies atop his eminent rhythm section’s ascending currents. Recently departed drummer Rashied Ali is a polyrhythmic fury while Morris “Sirone Jones” linear bottom-end, excels with beefy underpinnings. Moreover, pianist Stanley Cowell executes an excitable muse during the scrappy, free-form piece titled Why Not? Here, the band transmits a fabric of sound that transforms wildly expressionistic forays into a substantive viewpoint.
The fourth and final track Homecoming, features Ali’s military band style press rolls to complement the stop/start motif and the musicians deft use of space as a metric. Marked by a bright and jubilant motif, Brown pronounces a warm welcome then denigrates matters into an improvisational foray that intimates confusion or disarray. Nonetheless, lucid imagery might parallel the indecencies and scorn inflected upon Vietnam vets coming home after a tour of duty, especially given the 1968 timeframe. Then Cowell tosses a curve by venturing into stride piano territory, where Brown revisits the opening melody for the coda. Simply stated, this 2009 reissue should be deemed essential listening. Brown strikes an everlasting chord on this somewhat under-recognized masterpiece.
Pianist Thollem McDonas is returning to St. Louis with his latest project, the bandTSIGOTI (pictured), for a free concert at 8:00 p.m., Thursday, May 13 at theSchlafly Tap Room, 2100 Locust downtown. The St. Louis band Magic Citywill open the show.
McDonas, who has performed in St. Louisseveraltimes in recentyears as part of his seemingly non-stop touring, incorporates elements of free improvisation, classical music, jazz, rock and more into his solo work. TSIGOTI, signed to the famed free-jazz label ESP-Disk, is described as “a collaborative and improvisational quazi-punk band dedicated to expressing their opposition of war, authoritarian regimes, and violent religious extremes.”
TSIGOTI’s album Private Poverty Speaks To The People Of The Party (ESP 4057) was released in January, just after they wrapped up a tour of Italy. Besides McDonas on piano and vocals, TSIGOTI includes Jacopo Andreini (guitar), Matteo Bennici (bass) and Andrea Caprara (drums).
This quarter in the International Association of Jazz Record Collector Journal, Stuart Kremsky published a number of glowing reviews for a number of ESP-Disk releases. Click the link below for the pdf.
Give first the line-up of the band. Arrington de Dionyso contralto & bass clarinet, Thollem McDonas piano, John Niekrasz drums, Gregg Skloff enhanced bass. Just say things, but completely incomprehensible … those who listen. Of course, in a modern band and album of the ESP-Disk ‘talking about, so perhaps the ’surprise’ to be taken for granted. But again, what a ’surprise’ if first not hear? How ‘amazing’ can be a shape, which in any event be entitled album with the ellinoprepestato “Gigantomachy? Difficult to answer. You hear, though, and put some things in place. It is not easy n ‘called the Naked Future «jazz figure,” let alone “just another jazz Figure. The four musicians carry the physical past – another free, other folk, another rock, another punk and together, and vice versa, again from the beginning – but that here, they want more is a overturning process, a reconciliation apnea and passion, but an endearing “identity”. Recorded in Portland of Oregon, in August ‘08, the “Gigantomachy” is the passionate combination of classic “soft - Massena »jazz-rock (the amplified bass Skloff is … 1 / 4 the money), and the savage gaming Ayler, such as “rokopoiithike” is in the books of the Godz, the Cromagnon, not me and Captain Beefheart. Another great album of ‘09 …
1. Sounds of Liberation – Sounds of Liberation (Porter)
2. Joe Maneri/Masashi Harada – Pinerskol (Leo Records)
3. Sun Ra – Interplanetary Melodies, Doo Wop From Saturn & Beyond, Vol. One (Norton Records)
4. Henry Theadgill Zooid – This Brings Us To, Volume 1 (Pi Recordings)
5. Aram Shelton’s Fast Citizens – Two Cities (Delmark)
6. Cesar Bolanos – Peruvian Electroacoustic & Experimental Music 1964-1970 (Pogus Productions)
7. Richard Barrett – Adrift (psi)
8. Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra – Take Off! (Alien Transistor)
9. Marion Brown – Why Not? (ESP-Disk)
10. Eri Yamamoto Trio – In Each Day, Something Good (AUM Fidelity)
Giuseppi was doing an awful lot of drugs — he burned out, well, actually, he flipped out and never came back. I think that helps explain what happened to Giuseppi. Also, he was mentally ill to some degree and he attacked me once, just randomly. He would assault people without any warning; I loved his music, however, and when he did his first session, resulting from the October Revolution [ESP 1007, Giuseppi Logan Quartet], and he filed through the studio and as they walked in to record, Giuseppi turned to me and said “if you rob me, I’ll kill you. Milford was mortified — he had asked me to record Giuseppi — I’d given him a record date and he threatened me with death.
