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Billy
Bang
Commandment
Free Music Records
38
This
solo record is among this violinist's very best work, and it takes
advantage of the live setting to acheive an intimacy which befits
Bang's story-telling approach. Bang, as always, balances rawness
with romance but this time around his fiddling is matched by inspiration;
obviously this recital played to commemorate a friend's sculpture
before a receptive audience grants Bang an occasion to rise to with
his distinctive abstract blues.
Ancestor's
Halo
Ed
Pias
Extreme 043
Grand Unification
Milford Graves
Tzadik 7030
Both
these records came out within several months of each other, which
is really cool for drumheads like me, because here are two masters
of rhythm, who joyously commit hand to skin. Spirituality and spontaneity
key both drummer's approaches, yet the resulting beautiful dances
are quite different. Pias, known as a member of sound painting ensembles,
(notably Land and those of Steve Roach,) layers sounds and beats
in a subtle interweaving while using different metrics to set up,
literally, rhythmic textures both delicate and intense.
Graves,
truly a living legend in creative music ever since his important
breakthrough recordings made with Don Pullen and Andrew Cyrille
in the sixties, makes recordings infrequently, so this new date
is somewhat the event. Well, it doesn't sound like the drummer Graves
cares either way about his legend or any events! What he does care
about is the direct connection between the buzzing drumhead and
his spirit, which hums with fervor on this non-stop rhythm praise-song.
If most improvs aspire to capture surprise, on this record Graves
has captured magic itself, and done so as the Shaman at the center
of an entrancing, pulsing ritual.
The
Montreal Tapes
Charlie Haden
Trio featuring Geri Allen
Verve 537483
Absolutely
peerless musical creativity is at work for a way too short forty-five
minutes on this superb disc. Even though it leads off with its strongest
song, the Monk-imbued, _Blues In Motian_, it stays at A high level
of inspired music making right through the silence after the last
harmonic has faded. Whether we're jaded by how jazz classicism is
marketed or simply inundated by gobs of stirling improved pianism,
it might be easy to miss how surely this music connects the tradition
with a cutting edge keenly represented by Allen's audacious futurity.
All three musicians have made literally tens of valuable dates but
this is not only Geri Allen's finest recorded outing, but is a date
for the ages.
Hommage
a Noir
Ralf Hildenbeutel
Zero Hour 1190
Hildenbeutel’s
odd combination of African folkloric material with samples, electronic
abstractions, and slices of environmental sounds make for an exotic
and rich musical background for an otherwise ‘voiceless’
movie by filmmaker Ralf Schmerberg about African culture. The appended
remix is the most complete and finished-sounding music on the disc,
but what precedes it provides a most unique sonic travelogue.
Mindfulness
William Hooker
Knitting Factory
Works 213
After
upsetting my expectations of having Hooker's drumsong extruded through
the lower Manhattan skronk and downbeat mold, I instead got walloped
by his hurricane force pounding. Naively I hoped to get a solid
glimpse of D.J.Olive's reputed recombinatorial prowess, instead
the scratching is backgrounded into irrelevency while drummer Hooker
and saxophonist Spearman pitch their free flows right at the end
of your nose. Spearman is marked as a Rollinesque romantic cranked
up to a psychedelic fervor, and Hooker has one arm on loan from
Blackwell and the other on loan from Rashid Ali. I imagine DJ Olive
spending most of this evening with a jaw dropped right out of mouth.
The turntabilistics of the great DJ Olive aren't quite gratuitous,
but whatever interplay there is, is totally overwhelmed by Hooker's
cathartic freedom. As if Coltrane came back a drummer, although
with tenor player Glenn Spearman, it's more as if 'trane came back
a drummer and the free version of Newk was in the group too; downtown
energy music.
Leimert
Park
Kamau Daaood
Mama Foundation
1019
Angry,
passionate, hopeful, revolutionary art from a new poet-singer who
is unsparing at both ends of the spectrum, even in the same song.
(“A precision lobotomy ear-to-ear...an army of healers, physician
heal thy self”.) Backed by the elite of Los Angeles’s
creative improvisers including Horace Tapscott, it’s a sign
of the times when Afro-centric high mindedness and radical fervor
is hopelessly relegated to the thin margins of the “Jazz”
audience. (Hopefully, K.D. has made more of an impact in Los Angeles.)
Nonetheless, an outstanding debut such as this is important, demonstrating
clearly that the multinational co-option of aesthetic sensibility
has missed a few brilliant corners. Certainly this is as strong
and pure as the other generational griots, The Last Poets, Gil-Scott
Heron, and Hakim Bey. I'm quite positive this is among the greatest
Black music of the last decade.
Fire
and Love
Jackie McLean
Blue Note 93524
One
of the greatest creative musicians; Jackie remains the flamethrower
he's been since the early sixties. Underappreciated for the mentoring
role he has long taken with younger musicians, this new Blue Note
record joins him with a young group and they're hellbent on delivering
the message. They do, he does...hard bop second to none and finally
Blue Note has given us a Jackie attack with lots of his distinctive
compositions. Wolfe and Lion would be proud.
Long Goodbye
David Murray
DIW 930
Murray
makes more records than the world needs but this is another one
the world needs. Focused by virtue of its being a tribute to the
late pianist Don Pullen, it surpasses the passle of other Murray
dates through its elevation of pianist D.D.Jackson to something
well beyond Pullen accolyte. Drummer Santi DeBriano's latin-flavored
bass lines meld with J.T.Lewis's smooth percussion strokes while
Murray and Jackson prove why they are among the titans of acrobatic
inside-outside improv. This is the current state of the art: swings
furiously, sings fearlessly, obtains Crouchian elegance but dispenses
with the net.
Ozamatli
Ozamatli
Almo 80020
Every
now and then the byways lead to a seeming wrong turn and I'm in
a musical neighborhood I might not want to be in, but then, strangely,
I keep to my self while slowly getting a feel for what is going
on. This is how I found Ozamatli. The charms of this band of barrio
homies indicates a path taken away from hard West Coast hip-hop
and toward what is, contextually, the populist experimentalism of
raving DJ culture, here mixed with a punkoid attitude and a steady
drip of Chicano roots swing. It's almost not possible, yet here
you have an hour of careening East L.A. rock and roll with not any
ol' attitude, but an attitude of wiseness. This is gusty music because
it's intelligent, guileless, big band, countering gang dumbness
and numbness where it matters: at street level.
Solo Bass
William Parker
Zero In 01
Voyage That
Never Ends
Stefano Scodanibbio
New Albion 101
First
Graves and Pias, now Parker and Scodanibbio; the last year will
be remembered for their exemplifications of the art of solo percussion,
and with these two superlative discs, also the art of solo bass
playing. As with the two drummers, the two bassists are virtuosos
and visionaries on their instruments, but the two have completely
different approaches. Parker, coming out of Black creative music,
is an intense, even ferocious explorer of the fundamentals of his
living tradition: the solos on Testimony are at once sanctified
and streetwise, confessional and declamatory, controlled but hardly
confined. The last point is at the core of Parker's vision, his
bass music gloriously extends the vocabulary of his instrument.
Scodanibbio is also unafraid to push past his instrument's limits,
but here his concerns are more singular and architectonic. His foundation
is the tradition of Italian minimalism associated with Scelsi and
Berio, so the form of this big symphonic bass solo is paramount.
It starts with hypnotic strumming and proceeds very slowly to develop
thematic offshoots, which swirl and mutate about the gravity which
centers the piece from beginning to end. There is about this true
masterpiece a vastness suggestive of how it is the edges of huge
clouds swirl and recombine. Finally, one is taken totally by this
great contrabass wash of maximalist rapture.
The
Bones of All Men
Philip Pickett
featuring Richard Thompson
Hannibal 1416
Pickett,
ex of the Albion Band and one of the leaders of the early music
new school joins his archaic instrument forces with the Fender reelism
of the legendary Thompson, and efficiently spin out a album full
of unfussy ancient west european folk music made modern. It's my
idea of power pop: congenial but not silly music for those with
a taste for Thompson or Pickett standing with one foot outside of
their typical boxes. Immensely fun but never downright disrespectful,
and always offhandedly virtuoso.
47th
Street
Malachi Thompson
Delmark 497
Trumpeter auteur Thompson has quietly been assembling both an important
and entertaining discography for Chicago's Delmark Records. His
latest disc is vitally centered on a sentimental concept: the echo
of a time when Jazz and Blues was the musical lifeblood of the urban
community. He sends up this positive notion with a nice variety
of what is now colloquial music: hard bop, jazz chants and vocalese
and several rides on the Coltrane. Solo testimonies include his
own sharp brasswork and storming sax work from Billy Harper and
Carter Jefferson. Malachi's music is saved from being a history
lessen by his forward-looking integrity which acknowledges music
serves an uplifting, fun, purpose in the community.
Terma
TUU + Nick Parkin
Fathom 11087
First
time through, it was obvious Martin Franklin had again delivered
finely etched landscapes of meditative aural designs, but it was
the subsequent two or three listenings which delivered the full
impact of what turns out to be a daring traversal of a musical razor's
edge. This edge is the challenge posed by the wish to effect a mood
without so highlighting the ethnic borrowings, in this case music
and modes from the Mid-east and Indonesia. This saves the mood from
becoming either secondhand or a profile of an ethnic lift job. With
the crucial help of reed and small instrument player Nick Parkin,
TUU pulls it off. What is truly impressive is the way in which the
austerity of the sound design reinforces the music's extremely mellow
exoticism. To my ears, this allows the two musicians to attain their
graceful reverent mood by insinuation instead of the more easily
fashioned highlighting of unusual textures or the cueing in of effects.
(Two methods which infect a lot of sound painting and ambient music.)
Like close woven silk cloth, the refinement of the design is only
revealed up close.
Odyssey
James Blood
Ulmer
Knitting Factory
220
Cross Fire
Music Revelation
Ensemble
DIW 927
Ulmer's
unholy amalgam of Son House and Steve Cropper ratcheted through
the harmolodic filter staggers through these two deep blooze dates
like a dangerous drunk, unpredictable but certain of his power.
The DIW disc is non-stop delta terrorism, urbalistic and swampy.
It features some storming turns by Pharoah Sanders and John Zorn
on reeds. The Knitting Factory reunion of Ulmer with fiddler Charles
Burnham and bassist John Lindberg trades raw shouts and craggy walkabouts
in for less edgy, yet soaring improvisations. Both sides of Ulmer's
string band visions are captured along with plenty of his metallic
voodoo; his best work to date.
(va)
Bismillah
[Highlights
from the Fes festival of Sacred Music]
Sounds True
3338
This distills gems from live sets performed at the Fes Festival
for Sacred Music. Its high points are many and so this is a 'must-have'
recording of the living tradition of Islamic music. All of the different
types of music here are documented more expansively elsewhere, but
the concert circumstance draws out gorgeous and brilliant music
often, with an emphasis on vocal styles, including several heart-massaging
Sufi chants.
(va)
Soca Gold 1997 / 1998
VP 1499/1530
A hotbed of delightful, sexy music, Caribbean pop roles together
any number of local musics together with borrowings from the latest
glossy club funk, be it Parisian, American, or African and dancehall
reggae. The last several years have seen the soca of Trinidad and
Barbados absorb lessons from the Jamaican dancehall, and these two
compilations showcase the furious mixture of erotic narrative, boastful
rapping, and island consciousness, swung with the hard and hip crunching
club beats. The best pure soca song from 1997, Chinese Laundry's
"Ah Have It" is pale next to the club remix of Beenie Man and Lady
Saw's "Healing", but, by sticking the dancehall hit in the middle
of the record, this is an ideally sequenced for partyin' down. A
year later, the dancehall influence has taken over the soca clubs,
but what is predictable in Jamaica remains unfettered and more sleek
to the south. Witness the extravagant and racy "How It Go Look"
by superstar soulman Ronnie Macintosh, or try to refuse the charms
of the intense workout by Osha, "The Stamp". Beenie Man gets reconfigured
twice, but this time around is unable to steal the show, although
his back-to-back tracks help keep the flame turned up, high.
Jesus
Dread
Yabby You
Blood and Fire
021
Blood
& Fire has done a major service to reggae fanatics by compiling
both the prime LP tracks and dub plates of the seminal rootsman
Yabby You into a stirring two record testament of faith. It is absolutely
a cornerstone issue capturing as it does a passionate singer and
his singularly glorious message of integrity coming out of the very
watershed years of reggae in the early to mid seventies. The dubs
and instrumentals follow each major track and underline the two
disc's easy flow with their familiar repititions but also reinforce
the ritual power of one of the handful of reggae artists who could
look Marley eye-to-eye. Essential.
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