Improvised Silence in the Star-Telegram

The Star-Telegram's Preston Jones gave us a shout-out. (It's in the last paragraph.)

Mo' Jass

I don't pretend to be a jazz expert. I remarked to my sweetie this afternoon that the way I listen to jazz is comparable to, say, someone who keeps reading Ulysses and Moby Dick over and over, and nothing else. It's taken me 40 years to absorb Ornette and Cecil, and now I'm really just getting started on the AACM. For shame. A few other way stations on the journey:

1) FZ. I've written elsewhere about how Weasels Ripped My Flesh prepared me to hear Ascension. Other important gateways were Waka/Jawaka and the second side of The Grand Wazoo. Listening to live bootlegs of Zappa's '72 "music music," one realizes how at sea he was, on the mend from near-fatal injuries in between the end of the Flo and Eddie band and the one with George Duke, Ruth Underwood, and Napoleon Murphy Brock that caused his cult to balloon.

2) Fuzak. Being a rockarolla of a certain age, I was once a sucker for what St. Lester referred to in print as "Mahaherbiehancockorea." Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow alerted my high school guitar mentor and me to the idea that maybe we should learn how to play good. We were wrong, of course, but the ex-Yardbird (whom I admire as much for Truth as for anything else) did go on to become a Zen master of guitar in spite of us. Personally I found John McLaughlin, Beck's avowed inspiration in this move, to be a mixed bag: I liked his early albums Extrapolation and especially Devotion (with Buddy Miles and Larry Young) fine, but to my then-less-feedback-scorched ears, the Mahavishnu Orchestra sounded like nothing more than the music one would hear in an elevator descending to Hell. (In this regard, it was not unlike King Crimson.) That said, I liked his drummer Billy Cobham's album Spectrum real much, especially a tune called "Stratus" that Beck actually covered on his Live At Ronnie Scott's DVD a couple of years ago. During my three semesters at SUNY Albany, I attended performances by Weather Report (the Alphonso Johnson lineup) and Larry Coryell's Eleventh House (my friends and I were obnoxiously drunk and yelled "ROCK AND ROLL!" throughout the opening set by violinist Michael Urbaniak and his scat-singing wife Ursula Dudziak; Larry -- who had once foolishly thought he could cut Hendrix with his bebop chops -- used a device called a Mu-Tron excessively, while his drummer Alphonze Mouzon ran laps on his double bass pedals). Later, I witnessed the New Tony Williams Lifetime with Allan Holdsworth. Tony was the loudest drummer I ever heard until I met Jon Teague; it wasn't until I heard him on Miles Davis' Filles de Kilimanjaro and Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch that I came to appreciate his musicality. Holdsworth -- whom we have to blame, at least in part, for Eddie Van Halen (and Bill Pohl) -- was technically astonishing but also kind of monochromatic. Probably the best of this bunch was the Gateway Trio that teamed guitarist John Abercrombie with the ex-Miles Davis riddim team of Dave Holland (bs) and Jack DeJohnette (ds). Abercrombie was a little more subtle and slippery than Beck, McLaughlin, Coryell, or Holdsworth. I hear echoes of him in the latter-day work of Nels Cline and Bill Frisell, who both emerged in the late '70s but didn't enter my consciousness until much, much later. Holland was the leader on Conference of the Birds, an era-defining sesh that teamed AACM figurehead Anthony Braxton with Blue Note/loft eminence Sam Rivers, and now leads a big band of note. DeJohnette went on to make lots of interesting records, my favorite of which is New Edition (not the boy band), with David Murray and Arthur Blythe (see below).

3) The Fifties. What a year 1959 was: Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, Mingus Ah Um, The Shape of Jazz To Come and Change of the Century. I love the Sonny Rollins of 1957, the Miles Davis Quintet of 1956, and all of Thelonious Monk. But I'm not an aficionado of the period. I remember a coworker at a record store where I moonlighted in the late '90s asking me what my "favorite obscure Blue Note album" was. I muttered something about Fuschia Swing Song, busied myself stocking CDs, and went red.

4) Ornette alumni. As important a figure as he's been in my life, I'm ashamed to say I've never seen Ornette Coleman live. I had tickets to see him once in New York but the show was canceled, and when he and his harmolodic progeny were regular visitors to Caravan of Dreams, I was busy being in the Air Force and starting a family. But I did see Old and New Dreams the first time I visited New York after moving to Texas. I'd been a Don Cherry fan since hearing Eternal Rhythm (Don and Sonny Sharrock with European free improvisers in 1968, and an important influence on my part, at least, of HIO), Brown Rice (which was simply called Don Cherry when I had it on vinyl ca. '76, a funky harmolodic world music record with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins), Relativity Suite (with the Jazz Composers Orchestra), and the first Old and New Dreams record on Black Saint (which I recently found on CD while crate-digging at Recycled). Charlie Haden, who grew up playing in a family bluegrass band like Matt Hembree and whose daughter Petra has made a couple of records that I really like, recorded a great series of duet albums back in the '70s: Closeness and The Golden Number (mentioned in a previous post), As Long As There's Music with pianist Hampton Hawes, and Soapsuds, Soapsuds with Ornette. I missed out on his Liberation Music Orchestra records until the G.W. Bush-era Not In Our Name, and now like Ballad of the Fallen even better. My favorite Haden, though, remains Haunted Heart, the '92 release by his L.A. noir-themed band Quartet West which I was able to buy in an Air Force base exchange the year I got out. Ronald Shannon Jackson, who drummed in Ornette's original Prime Time and one of Cecil Taylor's most demanding and rewarding Units, made great records throughout the '80s with his own Decoding Society, including Eye On You, Mandance (which remains a regular spin at mi casa), and When Colors Play. He's still playing and composing here in the Fort. I never really "got" James "Blood" Ulmer's '70s albums, and didn't hear his magnum opus Odyssey until many years after its '84 release.

5) "Great men." Before there was Wynton Marsalis, CBS tried to market Arthur Blythe, a good alto saxophonist from California via Lower Manhattan, as the Next Big Thing in Jazz. Blythe made good records, too. His major label debut Lenox Avenue Breakdown was a breath of fresh air in '79, a marriage of exploratory freedom and accessability; you could even dance to the title track, if you were so inclined. The follow-up collection of standards suffered from an ugly, shrill mastering job, but Blythe's masterpiece was probably his third album, Illusions, which alternated selections by a band featuring tuba, cello, and electric guitar with a straight-ahead quartet featuring Air's rhythm team of Fred Hopkins (bs) and Steve McCall (ds). Hopkins is all over the Wildflowers set referred to in a previous post, and I was a fan of Air's Air Lore (wherein they reimagined Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton) when it was new; since then, leader Henry Threadgill has gone on to do even more interesting things. (Burn me that Zooid album, Terry?) The best recorded performance I've ever heard by Hopkins and McCall is "Miss Nancy," a track from Blythe's Illusions. While I was stationed in Louisiana in '91, I somehow managed to stumble on a copy of Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages, simultaneously a great guitar record (the master of skronk had really gotten his tone together in the '80s -- see his overdubbed solo Guitar) and the closest thing you could find at that late date to a new Coltrane record (Elvin Jones and Pharaoh Sanders in full effect, along with Charnett Moffett, whom I'd once seen levitate the Recovery Room in Dallas with his brothers when he was _almost_ in his teens). The records Sharrock made with Last Exit (which also included Shannon Jackson and saxophonist Peter Brotzmann) are almost too intense to listen to, in the same way that Fushitsusha is. It's sad that Sonny passed in 1994, on the verge of signing with RCA. Another improbable find of my last year in the Air Force was Joe Henderson's Lush Life, the estimable tenorman's tribute to Ellington's collaborator Billy Strayhorn, and So Near, So Far, wherein he explored Miles Davis' music (having had the shortest tenure in Miles' band of anyone since Sam Rivers) in the company of ex-Miles sidemen Al Foster and John Scofield. Speaking of Miles, while his '80s resurgence never really did it for me, I became a fan of his '73-'75 period my last year on active duty, when I heard Agharta and Pangaea for the first time and discovered Pete Cosey. Finally, I've heard a smidgin of the prodigious recorded outputs of David Murray and David S. Ware, but I'm more impressed than moved by their achievements. Maybe I just haven't heard the right records. Now back to trying to parse George Lewis' very select AACM discography.

Peter Helms Feresten: "my mind wanders to the south side of town"

Christopher Blay sends:

This exhibit is a composite vignette of Peter Feresten’s labyrinthine portfolio. The works in this exhibit focus particularly on the photographer’s strong affinity for the south side of Fort Worth and his anthropological drive to document the marginalized and unfamiliar parts of the city. Feresten’s work is an irreplaceable document of where he lived and an honest portrait of the city.

“Peter was born June 15, 1945, in Fall River, Mass., to Wanda and Morris Feresten. He was trained in the social sciences and studied comparative religion at Columbia University, as well as fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Arriving in Fort Worth in 1975, he dedicated himself to public education and developed a program for the serious study of photography at Tarrant County College. He brought his unique vision and the art of his photography to so many in the Fort Worth area. In addition to the people he touched through teaching, Peter left a significant body of photographs of the Stockyards of the 1970s, as well as the churches and blues clubs of Fort Worth's African American community." (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 20-21, 2007)

This exhibit is free and open to the public. The Art Corridor II Gallery at TCC Southeast (2100 Southeast Parkway, Arlington) is open Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.



The show opens February 2nd and runs through March 8th.

Improvised Silence in the Dallas Observer

Dallas Observer scribe Jesse Hughey also gave a shout out to HIO's impending gig.

ADDENDUM: But wait, there's more -- T. Horn talked to the Observer's Audra Schroeder.

Jass: The Devil's Music?

I've already blogged at length elsewhere about my obsessions with Ornette, Cecil, and Mingus, but lately, after reading George Lewis' AACM book, it seems like all I want to hear is jazz from the '70s -- the stuff I was into when I briefly gave up rock 'n' roll in favor of Monday night wrestling, and became a jazz snob.

So I've been re-reading Gary Giddins' Weather Bird: Jazz At the Dawn of Its Second Century, a collection of his essays from the decade-plus (1990-2003) when I got out of the Air Force and, by degrees, back into music -- for it was Giddins' Village Voice scrawl, more than any other scribe's (although I was also an avid reader of Rafi Zabor, Francis Davis, and Howard Mandel), that helped me begin to get a handle on jazz from '75 (when I dropped out of college, my head full of chemicals, Harry Partch, and Captain Beefheart) until the early '90s, when I finally let my Village Voice subscription lapse.

I've also been revisiting The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson's bloggage on '73-'90 jazz, which reminded me of some things I'd forgotten, and pulled my coat to some others I'd missed. (Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds and Billy Hart's Enchance, for just two, and more surprisingly, two Charlie Haden albums that slipped by me when they were new: The Golden Number -- a much better record than the earlier Closeness, which I failed to realize when I had both as a teen -- and The Ballad of the Fallen.)

A couple of triple CD anthologies got me started down this road. The first one is Jazzactuel, a compendium of material released on the forward-looking French BYG label between '69 and '71, curated by noted obscurantists Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. (It's currently Amazon-available for about 40 bucks, although I've seen copies at Recycled in Denton recently for less. Recycled is also your best Metromess source for the Italian Black Saint label's catalog. You heard it here first. Next time I'm in li'l d, I need to hunt for Muhal Richard Abrams' Hearinga Suite and Blu Blu Blu.) The BYG sessions -- which Lewis describes as "ad hoc, impromptu, even insouciant" -- captured a particular moment when the '60s American avant-garde, including familiars of Ayler, Coltrane, Ornette and Cecil as well as AACM expats and Sun Ra, was at its zenith in terms of international esteem, and the label was as important in its way as ESP-Disk, Delmark, Nessa, Blue Note, and Impulse at documenting the new music.

More to the point as a listening experience (to these feedback-scorched ears, at least) is Wildflowers: Loft Jazz New York 1976, an audio snapshot, produced by Alan Douglas of "dead Hendrix" fame, of a week-long festival at Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea that I had as a download before iTunes took a dump and obliterated 70% of my downloaded music; I recently scored a CD copy for about 20 bucks. Wildflowers features a nice mixture of '60s veterans and the Chicago, St. Louis, and California crews that arrived in New York in the early '70s to revitalize (artistically, if not commercially) the jazz underground there. A few leaders are featured on both sets (Anthony Braxton, Dave Burrell, Cecil Taylor Unit mainstays Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons, Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray). Wildflowers participants like Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, and Rivers himself went on to make some of the most intriguing music of the '70s and succeeding decades, which I continue to investigate.

JATSDFM - "Schematics"

That busy beaver Hickey gots another single out. How on Earth does he do it?



ADDENDUM: It's also here in downloadable form.

Improvised Silence in the FW Weekly

This week, the Fort Worth Weekly's "Hearsay" column includes a blurb about Improvised Silence, HIO's new monthly gig at the Cellar on Berry St. Read all about it, then c'mon. Starts at 9pm, and it's free.

Nels Cline's Rig Rundown

Jeff Adcock and Frank Cervantez are rekindling my equipment lust. Thanks, fellas.

1.23.2012, FTW

Finished reading George E. Lewis' A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, probably the best music book I've read since Lloyd Bradley's Bass Culture. Lewis combines an insider's insight (he joined the AACM in 1971) with extensive interviews he conducted with fellow members and an academic's perspective (he's a Columbia University faculty member) to tell a story that's particularly compelling to one as obsessed with the idea of music-as-community-fulcrum as your humble chronicler o' events.

Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians germinated in the mid-'60s in response to the demise of the local club scene there. Creative musicians who'd developed their skills through a combination of private teaching, high school programs, and autodidacticism (working with recordings, seeking mentors from among more experienced players, practicing with peers) sought to find performance venues for their original music, which deviated from the dominant fixed performance model (standard repertoire and small group instrumentation which was cheaper to book because it didn't require extensive rehearsal), by becoming their own promoters, relying on grass-roots funding as well as the Cold War-spawned government arts bureaucracy.

Their cooperative aesthetic flew in the face of the "great man" theory of jazz, typified by the heroic solo, and the competitive model of music making typified by "best musician" polls. They sought to erase the dichotomies between composer and improviser, and "high" and "low" art.

In Chicago, they had an organic connection with their community as teachers (the AACM ran its own music school) and role models of Afrocentric pride and economic self-determination. Founding AACM members achieved international success when they traveled to Europe -- where their popularity could be seen as a reflection of local attitudes toward the political turbulence of the day -- and New York, where they were forced to compete economically not only with the mainstream but with the previous generation of the avant-garde. Expatriates not only from Chicago, but also St. Louis (home of the Black Artists Group) and California (where Horace Tapscott's L.A.-based Union of God's Musicians and Artist's Ascension performed a similar role to the AACM and BAG) were a vital part of the New York jazz underground during the late-'70s "loft jazz" era (a label they reject).

Their economic fortunes flagged with the coming of the '80s, when Wynton Marsalis and the neoconservative "young lions" that followed in his wake were anointed the arbiters of "real" jazz by the critical fraternity and Ken Burns. (Lewis quotes Dr. George Lipsitz: "Struggles over meaning are invariably struggles over resources.") The most prominent -- AACM founder Muhal Richard Abrams, the musicians in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill -- retain their undeniable stature. Lesser-known latter-day members maintain the AACM tradition in Chicago.

On a much less exalted note, I've been borrowing Ray's Gibson SG-1 since the last Stoogeshow. It was burnt up in a fire, and he's chosen to leave the neck unfinished, while the body is painted a Sherman tank olive green, and he had James Atkinson install a humbucking pickup in place of the original single-coil in the bridge position. Its action reminds me of SGs I had when I was young, which has been motivating me to practice guitar at home again, something I almost never do.

With my Hughes & Kettner -- consigned to HIO gigs since I bought Cody Yates' Twin -- I can get a decent saturated tone at a volume that won't disturb the cats, and I've been woodshedding on rock stuff I can't play in the Stoogeband (although I'm trying, so far unsuccessfully, to persuade Richard Hurley that we need to break in Blue Oyster Cult's "Hot Rails to Hell"), like Steve Hunter's intro to "Sweet Jane" from Uncle Lou's Rock and Roll Animal. I doubt it'll change the way I play with the Stoogeband, but as my sweetie points out, it's just nice to be able to enjoy playing again in a setting other than onstage with a band.

Carey Wolff

"Smolder":



"Our Song":

FZ, Roxy '73

It's been five years now since the ZFT posted these two songs, from the shows that produced the Roxy and Elsewhere album. While it's highly unlikely that a DVD release is imminent, it'd sure be welcome. The Brock/Duke/Fowler/Fowler/Humphrey/Thompson/Underwood lineup was something special.

My statistically insignificant ballot from the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll

...is here. I'm ashamed of voting with the crowd on the Tom Waits, but happy I could give some play to New Fumes, the Fungi Girls, Mark Growden, the Great Tyrant, and Allen Lowe. Surprised I was the only vote for Rocket From the Tombs and Boris. Oh well.

St. Vincent 4AD Session

Courtesy of Jeff Adcock, who once brought a suitcase full of fuzzboxes to my house (bless him). I swear, this woman gets the sickest tones of anybody this side of Nels Cline, and her latest album Strange Mercy is the best latter-day American psych this side of the Flaming Lips. But don't take my word for it, spend the next 15 minutes watching this.

1.17.2012, FTW

The li'l Stoogeband had a better-than-average show at the Cowtown Bowling Palace in River Oaks last Saturday night. It's a surprisingly good sounding room (we borrowed Pablo & the Hemphill 7's PA), we had a decent crowd (some of which we lost by taking a too-long break between sets, something I'd forgotten about since our aborted residency at the late Black Dog Tavern back in 2006, but we thankfully gained a few newbs for the second set), only alienated a few of the regs, and got the payout we were promised before Tyler Stevens had to split to go see her better half jammin' out with Confusatron at the Wherehouse.

The presence of two off-duty River Oaks police officers made some folks antsy, but they were just there getting paid like we were (the place is open 24 hours and they don't want to get jacked, I reckon) and were congenial enough, although I don't imagine they really dug our jams. Only non-snazz aspect was the inability of Rat and Calvin from the Asian Media Crew to rent bowling shoes (Rat thinks "They don't have Asian size").

Hembree opined that our unfamiliarity with our surroundings probably caused us to be more attentive than usual to what we were doing, despite the fact that 80% of the band was under the weather (Richard was "only mentally ill") and I had the worst onstage headache of my life -- a blinding skull-splitter -- throughout the second set. Teague did point out, however, that all of us started "TV Eye" on different beats -- "I was waiting to hear two people who were together so I could join them, but it never happened" -- which the audience, thankfully, didn't seem to notice or care about.

At the end of the night, I think the Stoogeaphiles were collectively happier than I've ever seen us after a show. We'd do it again. Next: the Wherehouse on 2.11 with the Mike Haskins Experience, Fungi Girls, and Doom Ghost, a dream show of sorts for your humble chronicler o' events.

Currently reading George E. Lewis' A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, a scholarly tome by one who was there that explores musical developments in the context of frequently ignored racial, economic, and gender issues, and invites the reader to rethink conventional critical wisdom in the same way as Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic or Allen Lowe's volumes of historiography.

FTW

If heavy makes you happy, Fort Worth is a pretty good place to be right now, with bands like Vorvon, Unraveler, china kills girls, Southern Train Gypsy, Stone Machine Electric, the resurgent Garuda, and FTW treading the boards.

Myself, I've never been a big fan of heavy. Back in high school, when my age cohort were going apeshit over Black Sabbath (and Grand Funk Railroad), I was digging the Yardbirds and John Lee Hooker. Who'd have guessed in 1970 that Sabbath would prove to be the most durably influential rock band of that year, 40 years on? I once wrote a review of an Electric Wizard album that started with "I hate this fucking record" and ended with "There isn't an amount of marijuana on Earth that would make this listenable." The era of stoner sludge jogged some memories -- what did Soundgarden sound like, besides Ronnie Dio fronting Sabbath? -- and during the Wreck Room's heyday, Jon Teague taught me to stop worrying and love the doom via Boris' Akuma No Uta and Sleep's Jerusalem. Still, I've walked out on Nebula three times, more than any national band.

But Sean Vargas, whom I've seen at shows around the Fort for ages and whom I recently learned is FTW's frontman, laid a copy of his band's self-released four-song CD on me the other night, when the li'l Stoogeband was playing two sets in a bowling alley in River Oaks, and this morning, I slipped it in the player while I was washing dishes. It started skipping in the middle of the first song (our CD player is getting senile), but I thought enough of what I'd heard to rip it to iTunes so I could hear the whole thing.

Even if you're not a fan of doom metal, you've gotta admit that these guys know what they're doing. Guitarist Jonathan Hill and bassist Nick Huff lock in with thunderous unison rifferama and fuzz-and-wah laden solo excursions, while drummer Mike McBride pounds his kit like he was driving coffin nails in the best Bill Ward tradition. Up front, Vargas -- who recorded all his vocals in one take -- tortures his tonsils like a hybrid of Dio and Matt Pike, a soul-wrenching squall of anomie and melody. He's not just screaming, either -- cat can hit them notes, making him a contender for the most powerful vocalist in the 817. In fact, there's just enough passion and blues (read Joe Carducci and Charles Shaar Murray on the [d]evolution of blues to metal) in FTW's grooves to make a believer out of a skeptic. Check 'em out.

(Their web presence is apparently limited to a Facebook page, so look for the one from Fort Worth and ignore the imposter FTWs from Manchester, UK, and Burlington, MA.)