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February 21, 2012

Doug Webb, Ehud Asherie

Ehud Asherie

Upper West Side (Posi-Tone)

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Doug Webb

Swing Shift (Posi-Tone)

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Israeli-born pianist Ehud Asherie‘s latest Posi-Tone release (his fourth) is a collection of standards arranged for piano and tenor saxophone, the latter instrument played by Harry Allen, who previously worked with Asherie on 2010′s Modern Life, a quartet album that also featured bassist Joel Forbes and drummer Chuck Riggs. That disc was recorded in June of 2009, and ended with a duo rendition of Billy Strayhorn‘s “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing”; this disc, possibly inspired by that performance, was recorded in October 2009.

Upper West Side is an extremely conservative, genteel album; it would sound perfect playing in the background of a Whit Stillman movie. Asherie’s piano playing is very much in a stride style, reminiscent of Fats Waller, Willie “The Lion” Smith and other figures of similar vintage. Allen’s saxophone sound meshes perfectly with this old-style approach, flowing thick and romantic like Ben Webster, Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins. Everything is very well played, and the album glides smoothly from one appealing, familiar standard to the next—”It Had to Be You,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” “Our Love is Here to Stay”…it’s dinner music, basically. Which is fine. Every jazz album doesn’t have to be a tiny revolution. But from a player as young as Asherie (he was born in 1979), this insistence on wearing his grandfather’s clothes, so to speak, is a little disconcerting. It starts to make you wonder if he listens to any new music, or if he has any interest in jazz of the post-swing era. Perhaps he should record something a little more out next time, if only to avoid being pigeonholed as “that old-timey guy.”

Here’s a video of Asherie and Allen performing “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket” at Smalls in 2008:

Also in 2009, on April 24 to be precise, saxophonist Doug Webb went into Entourage Studios in North Hollywood, California with bassist Stanley Clarke (yes, that one) and drummer Gerry Gibbs. Three different pianists—Joe Bagg, Mahesh Balasooriya and Larry Goldings—stopped by for a few hours each. The trio and its guest pianists recorded nearly 40 songs that day, many of them standards but others written by Webb or Clarke. Eight were released on 2009′s Midnight, eight more on 2010′s Renovations, and six more (one of them the 22-minute “Patagonia Suite”) on Swing Shift, the fiercest and most free of the series to date.

Webb may not be particularly famous, but his saxophone sound is one of the most widely heard on Earth: you see, he’s the “voice” of Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons. All those little solos in the opening credits? Webb. (I’ve thought for years that someone should string all of those together into one long piece—call it the “Lisa Simpson Concerto for Saxophone” or something similar. Now that I know who played them all, the idea seems even more appealing.) The first two volumes in this apparently ongoing series were much more romantic and relaxed than this one; they featured renditions of dusty relics like “Fly Me to the Moon,” “You Go to My Head,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “Satin Doll,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and the like, all swinging with great power and grace but little fervor. Indeed, at their mellowest moments, these albums would fit comfortably alongside the work of Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. But Swing Shift is a very different animal. It’s got the shortest track of the trilogy, “Rizone,” a 2:40 sax-and-drums workout somewhere between John Coltrane‘s “Countdown” from Giant Steps and Charles Gayle‘s Touchin’ On Trane, but it’s also got the longest by far, the aforementioned “Patagonia Suite,” on which Webb starts out playing soprano, but after giving Clarke and Gibbs a moment or two to express themselves, the latter man heading into almost William Parker-ish string-yanking territory, returns on tenor with some fierce, even discordant blowing that would make even David S. Ware lift his head and take notice. This is no mere post-bop collection of standards; Swing Shift proves that Webb and his bandmates can speak any dialect of the family of languages known collectively as jazz, and do so with fluency and undiminished expressive power. Highly recommended to those who want to witness real adventure, paired with undeniable swing.

Listen to “Apodemia” from Swing Shift:

Swing ShiftDoug Webb
“Apodemia” (mp3)
from “Swing Shift”
(Posi-Tone Records)
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February 15, 2012

Bebe

Un Pokito de Rocanrol (EMI Latin)

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by Phil Freeman

The third CD by Spanish singer-songwriter Bebe is her most sonically eclectic to date. As its title suggests, it’s slightly more conventionally rocking than 2005′s Pafuera Telarañas or 2009′s Y., with more electric guitars and a charged, postpunk energy on multiple tracks. But Bebe has always had a barely controlled edge of fury that’s made her one of the most compelling women in Spanish-language pop, and this time out, that side of her is more evident than ever. Hell, start with that cover, with her masking her face behind a cow’s skull.

Bebe‘s an artist who’s hard to file. Sure, there are other adventurous women working in superficially similar fashion – Natalia Lafourcade and Julieta Venegas in Mexico, Ana Tijoux in Chile, Andrea Echeverri (both in and out of Aterciopelados) in Colombia, and Mala Rodriguez in Bebe‘s native Spain. Hell, even Paulina Rubio is weirder than she’s often given credit for being. But she’s frequently more fierce than any of those women (even Tijoux and Rodriguez, whose work falls closer to hip-hop than pop/rock), and her voice and performance are often a direct challenge to the dominant gender stereotypes of Spanish culture. Where Venegas and Lafourcade are frequently flirty, and Echeverri transformed herself from punk to hippie after having a child, Bebe is in the listener’s face, her voice raspy and emphatic.

On the cover of Pafuera Telarañas, she was dressed in gender-bending punk garb – black jeans, a black button-down shirt and tie, and short, spiky hair. The album, which was ignored for quite a while before suddenly earning five Latin Grammy nominations at year’s end, was summed up well by its first single, the furious “Malo,” which called out a violent lover atop a backing track that mixed flamenco guitar with sudden stabs of turntable scratching. Six years later, it’s as powerful a statement as ever. The only link I can find for the video is un-embeddable, so go here, check it out, and come back.

Her second album, Y., was a much more stripped-down and quiet affair, dominated by acoustic guitar and vocals that purred and growled more than they barked. The first single, “Me Fui,” summed it up; here’s the video:

It’s a good record, but I don’t find myself listening to it as much as I did Pafuera Telarañas in the year or so after I first bought it. Un Pokito de Rocanrol, though, feels like it’s going to dominate my listening for a little while.

The album kicks off with “ABC,” a noisy collage of sounds. Slow acoustic guitar is backed by a wave of fuzz and big, emphatic hip-hop drums, as Bebe recites her lyrics in a witchy snarl, gradually shifting to a flamenco-tinged vocal as a stinging postpunk guitar figure begins to repeat insistently behind her. It’s a hypnotic song, full of restrained fury, and it sets up an album that’s going to demand close attention and repeated adjustments to the listener’s perspective.

The first shift comes with the second song; “Adiós” is a perky, pulsating kiss-off, set to a rockabilly guitar riff and a thwacking rhythm track. Musically, it sounds like it could have come off a Joe Strummer solo album, but the biting lyric – on which she declares, simply enough, that she’d rather be alone than be with the “you” she’s addressing – is pure Bebe.

Each of the album’s songs marks a sharp left turn from the one before. “Me Pintaré” is a thumping dancefloor chant, driven by zapping synths and handclaps, reminiscent of Le Tigre; “Sabras” is an anguished acoustic guitar lament; “Compra/Paga” is an almost literally breathless anti-consumerist rant over a punk-funk bass-and-drum attack straight from the DFA playbook; on “K.I.E.R.E.M.E,” she raps over high-speed electro-funk; and on and on. None of this album’s tracks sound like the others, and there’s not a bad one in the bunch. If the surf-guitar-fueled “Qué Carajo” doesn’t get you off your ass, you might be in a coma and not know it. This is one of those albums, like Tego Calderon’s El Abayarde Contra-Ataca, that seems almost guaranteed to leave its intended audience both baffled and thrilled at once. It’s Bebe’s way of pushing everyone who thought they knew what she was about. Not pushing them away, mind you; just pushing (or pulling) them forward with her as she journeys inexorably onward. If it winds up earning her as many Latin Grammys as Pafuera Telarañas did, that would be a truly optimistic sign for Latin pop, which is frequently too conservative for its own good.

Here’s the video for “K.I.E.R.E.M.E.”:

And here’s a behind-the-scenes video about the making of the album:

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February 2, 2012

Stan Getz

[This was originally published almost a year ago, but today would have been Stan Getz's 85th birthday, so I'm re-presenting it. Enjoy!]

Quintets: The Clef & Norgran Studio Recordings (Verve/Hip-O Select)

by Phil Freeman

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In the early 1950s, jazz was in an interesting place. Swing (the largely big-band, dance-oriented music) was dead or dying, and the bebop era was winding down, but the movements that would carry the music’s mainstream practitioners through the 1960s—hard bop, soul jazz—had yet to emerge. One thing that was happening was “cool jazz,” a movement identified with the West Coast and, for good or ill, with a lot of white players like trumpeter Chet Baker, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, pianist Dave Brubeck, and tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. (N.B.: There was another mini-movement within “cool jazz” that included pianist Lennie Tristano and saxophonists Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz; while “cool” in the sense that it avoided the overheated flash associated with bebop, their music was very different from that under discussion here, pointing in the direction of Anthony Braxton, Steve Coleman and many current, strongly theory-based players. So let’s leave them out.)

This three-CD set gathers five 10″ EPs and a few stray singles and LP cuts recorded by Stan Getz between 1952 and 1955, throwing in three previously unreleased alternate takes for a total of slightly under four hours of music. It’s possible to chart not only the saxophonist’s evolution as a player, but changes in technology as well; many of the first 15 or 16 tracks were released on 78 rpm singles before being compiled onto 10″ EPs, so they’re no more than three and a half minutes long. In that time, Getz and his bandmates—initially pianist Duke Jordan, guitarist Jimmy Raney, bassist Bill Crow and drummer Frank Isola—keep it simple, blowing through faithful renditions of the songs’ core melodies, offering brief solos, and returning to the melody for a quick final statement. There’s no compositional legerdemain or rhythmic trickiness on display; this is smooth, non-confrontational jazz, yet its beauty is extraordinary and undeniable.

Getz’s saxophone style is ideally suited to this compressed, concentrated format. His phrasing, which is thoughtful without ever being dry or emotionless, and his tone, which is smooth without being boring or monotonous, are best experienced in the short bursts dictated by the 78/single format. There’s plenty of brilliant playing on the longer tracks from 1953-55, of course, and/but there, Getz’s saxophone is frequently paired with Brookmeyer’s trombone, and the two engage in a lot of almost conversational interplay; when one solos while the other withdraws, it’s nice but less enjoyable, somehow, than hearing the two of them together. Among the few exceptions are the seven-minute “Minor Blues” and the nearly eight-minute “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” both originally released on Interpretations by the Stan Getz Quintet #2; on the former, Getz shadows Brookmeyer during the trombonist’s solo, but is then left largely alone to wander atop a walking bass line from Teddy Kotick and Isola’s persistent, ticking hi-hat, and on the latter cut, the reverse occurs, with Brookmeyer taking an extended solo which leads into quick spotlight turns by pianist John Williams and bassist Kotick, before the main melody returns.

The tracks that diverge most sharply from the mode described above are the first twelve, recorded in December 1952, and a quartet session from January 1954 with pianist Jimmy Rowles, bassist Bob Whitlock and drummer Max Roach. The latter session produced four tracks which were spread across two singles, and two previously unreleased alternate takes. In both circumstances, Getz is the sole horn, and his playing on the 1954 tracks is as concise as it was two years earlier, his tone a warm buzz. Even when playing with brushes, Roach manages to create an incredible rhythmic tension, a skill he would display to an even greater degree when the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet made its debut recordings eight months later.

On Interpretations by the Stan Getz Quintet #3, recorded in the summer of 1953 and the fall of 1954, tempos have quickened, and while Getz is as smooth and seemingly effortless as ever, his phrases tumbling forth inexorably, each note tapping the next into place like lines of dominoes, the band behind him seems eager to abandon “cool” for a twitchy jumpiness. Pianist Williams in particular seems intent on driving the band ever more energetically; on a version of “The Varsity Drag,” he’s barely staying behind the horns, striding forward like Professor Longhair instead, and when his solo spot comes, he jumps in with fleet and intricate scatterings of notes.

The CDs are sleeved inside a hardcover book, which includes a short but informative essay by Ashley Kahn and several overlapping annotations of the recordings (a chronological sessionography, a breakdown indicating the various ways they’ve been repackaged over the years, and a somewhat inexplicable alphabetical listing of tracks by title). There are numerous reproductions of album and EP covers, as well. It’s a beautifully assembled package, well worth owning in physical form, though the music—which is the point, after all—would please any listener, even one who had no idea who was playing.

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January 31, 2012

Jeremy Pelt

Soul (HighNote)

by Phil Freeman

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Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt‘s fourth CD with his working band—tenor saxophonist JD Allen, pianist Danny Grissett, bassist Dwayne Burno, and drummer Gerald Cleaver—has been described as a “ballad session,” but it’s really just a slightly more simmering album than its two predecessors, 2010′s Men of Honor and 2011′s The Talented Mr. Pelt. The trumpeter (who I interviewed in November) is not as indebted to Miles Davis as some other players out there—his open horn sound is much less piercing and sharp, and he employs a mute much less often than Davis, certainly not making it a linchpin of his style—but his quintet’s interactions are very much in the spirit of Davis’s mid ’60s group with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie  Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. And while The Talented Mr. Pelt at times recalled early recordings by that group, like E.S.P. and Miles Smiles, Soul reminds me, at times, of Nefertiti, a moody disc from relatively late in the group’s lifespan.

There are substantial differences, of course, between the two groups, and the two bodies of work. Indeed, the differences are so many, and so impossible to ignore, that they almost render the comparisons invalid and lazy. So let’s move on to talking about what makes the Jeremy Pelt Quintet such a top-shelf band, and Soul such an excellent album.

Soul begins with a trio of five- to six-minute compositions—”Second Love,” “The Ballad of Ichabod Crane” and “Sweet Rita Part 2: Her Soul,” a piece composed by pianist George Cables and also recently recorded by The Cookers, a group whose two albums I reviewed here almost a year ago. “Ichabod” is an almost strutting blues, with terrific piano work by Grissett and rock-steady timekeeping from Cleaver, who many probably know best as a free or avant-garde player. Working with Pelt’s group, he demonstrates a total mastery of blues and swing, anchoring the group quite firmly while still managing to make the drums a powerfully expressive instrument. “Sweet Rita” is the only time Pelt plays with a mute on Soul, and the reined-in horn blends beautifully with Allen’s murmuring, introspective tenor saxophone. Allen (Burning Ambulance #4′s cover subject) has a lighter touch here than he does on the albums he makes with his own trio, where he tends toward concise, moody statements. On Soul, particularly on extended tracks like the 8:36 “The Tempest” and the 11:20 “What’s Wrong is Right,” he drifts along for minutes at a time, letting the melody and an innate feel for the blues take him where they will.

Pelt’s playing on “The Tempest” is particularly fierce; he cuts loose with long, ribbonlike upper-register runs in the manner of Freddie Hubbard, dancing around the piece’s melody before diving right back into it, as on target as a predatory bird. Indeed, the album’s two longest tracks are also its best, allowing the entire band to romp and interact together in fascinating, yet viscerally thrilling ways.

There’s a surprise element added to Soul, too: On “Moondrift,” the quintet is joined by vocalist Joanna Pascale. It’s a straightahead reading of the Sammy Cahn standard, at 3:45 a good 90 seconds shorter than anything else on the album. In a way it serves as a rest break between the first five tracks and the disc’s final stretch, comprising the epic “What’s Wrong is Right” and the closing “Tonight…”

Soul is a tremendously accomplished, utterly pleasurable demonstration of the power of a working band operating at peak strength. There’s not a bad track or dead spot anywhere in its 53 minutes; it’s not only the best album yet by Pelt and his quintet, but one of my favorite jazz releases of the 21st Century. If you’re not paying attention to what this group is up to, you’re really missing out.

Listen to “The Tempest” below:

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January 26, 2012

William Gibson

Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam)

by Phil Freeman

I first found William Gibson‘s writing when I was in high school, and my small New Jersey town had two bookstores, one of which seemed determined to be the hip alternative to the other. They stocked George Carlin, and William Burroughs, and John Waters‘ Shock Value, and Gibson. I bought the Ace mass market paperback edition of Neuromancer, the one with the white cover, in about 1987. I tore through it like I was being timed, and as soon as I had more money went back to the same bookstore and picked up the other book available at that time, the slim short story collection Burning Chrome, which I devoured with equal avidity. Since then I have read every one of Gibson’s books, except for The Difference Engine, which was a) co-written by Bruce Sterling, a writer who leaves me cold, and b) set in Victorian times, so no thanks.

“Here is the William Gibson Plot, as iterated in every book from Neuromancer through Pattern Recognition: Young-ish but jaded person with some preternatural but utterly mediaverse-related skill/talent/ability is roped into a quest for some mysterious objay dart or cyborg critter that’s loping about the net causing disruption. Dark forces chase said young skilled/talented person, and ethically gray-area forces assist. By the end, multiple plotlines converge as young skilled/talented person comes face to face with the creator(s) of the objay dart, and everything winds down kinda ambiguously, but happily.”

I put that in quotes because I wrote it in 2007, somewhere else. But it’s still true, and its parameters can be expanded to include the two novels that have followed Pattern Recognition: 2007′s Spook Country, and 2011′s Zero History, which together finish out Gibson’s latest trilogy. There are three trilogies: the first one, Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive, was published in the ’80s; the second, Virtual Light/Idoru/All Tomorrow’s Parties, in the ’90s; and the most recent one in the 2000s.

In each case, the first book in the series is thrilling and pathbreaking, finding Gibson in new territory. Neuromancer, obviously, was a breakthrough for science fiction; Virtual Light is his funniest book; and Pattern Recognition is his most emotionally affecting, suffused with a genuine melancholy. The second book expands on the methods of the first, frequently with unwieldy results: Count Zero was Neuromancer lite, with one plotline too many; Idoru was a little too baroque for its own good; and Spook Country was a spy thriller with rock ‘n’ roll and art-scene skin-grafts. The third book of each trilogy is anticlimactic and undercooked: Mona Lisa Overdrive was so stripped-down it felt like a screenplay; All Tomorrow’s Parties was maybe Gibson’s only truly forgettable novel; and Zero History is literally about pants.

Distrust That Particular Flavor is a collection of Gibson’s nonfiction writing, most of which has appeared in glossy magazines, commissioned as it was after he’d already made a name for himself as a novelist. The pieces are frequently very short, and don’t say much. Reading them, I’m reminded of two characters in Richard Brautigan‘s novel Willard and His Bowling Trophies, who read to each other from an anthology of ancient Greek poetry. The poems are not always preserved in their entirety; some are just a few lines, and all that remains of one is the word “cucumbers.”

Some of the pieces chosen seem like particularly egregious attempts at padding: why is this piece (“Since 1948“) present, when it’s been the bio page on his website for years? Even the packaging reveals the slightness of the project; the hardcover is an inch or so shorter than the last three novels, and each piece is bracketed by colored pages, to grant heft to what would otherwise be an extremely slim volume indeed.

I continue reading Gibson because his characters and plots (even if they are variations of the same plot) are consistently interesting, and because his prose has the quality of sharpened crystals strung on fine wire—his sentences are beautiful. But this is easily the least essential book he’s ever published. If it was a CD, it would be subtitled “B-Sides and Rarities,” the better to ward off all but the most committed fans. Which I guess I am, since I went to the bookstore specifically seeking out an autographed copy (he’d been through two weeks earlier on tour), and got one.

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January 10, 2012

Nicolas Masson

Departures (Fresh Sound New Talent)

by Phil Freeman

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Listen to “Amber”

Nicolas Masson is a Swiss tenor saxophonist who studied with Frank Lowe, Ken McIntyre and Chris Potter; this is his fourth album as a leader. The band includes guitarist Ben Monder (whose work I’ve liked before), bassist Patrice Moret, and drummer Ted Poor. The recording was made in Switzerland, midway through a string of live performances in late February 2010.

This is slow, considered music. Masson and Monder are co-lead voices throughout; the guitarist is never reduced to mere background chording. On “The Faun,” he takes a scorching, distorted solo that, as he’s done in the past, reminds me of Bill Frisell‘s louder work. At other times, though, Monder is quiet, gracefully picking out melodies of thoughtful beauty.

Masson, too, is an unhurried player. He doesn’t chase his tail, or buy time with broad gestures. Instead, he demonstrates the discipline of Stan Getz or Mark Turner, working his way around a central idea like a spider slowly encasing a fly. His lines unfold slowly, floating over the rhythm section like a paper kite, mostly hovering but occasionally catching a draft and spinning and flipping in wild arcs, only to return to its previous pattern after a mesmerizing moment.

And speaking of the rhythm section: They get theirs on “Off Rhyme,” a nearly nine-minute track late in the album. (Departures is longish—nine tracks in an hour—but never really feels that way, possibly because of the sustained mood.) Drummer Poor seems to take a Paul Motian-esque approach, choosing to adorn the music rather than drive it, which leaves bassist Moret to do most of the heavy lifting. His tone is thick and resonant, with no buzz or twang; most of the time, he seems to create notes by rubbing them out of the strings with patient gentleness, rather than plucking. Thus, when he launches an outburst of somewhat wild strumming five minutes into “Off Rhyme,” and Monder begins to go all skronk-rock on the guitar, and Masson gets into this tunnel-vision solo that’s almost totally disconnected from what the rest of the band is doing, it’s the kind of thing that’ll stop your breath in your chest.

Departures lives up to its title. It’s never exactly what you expect, but it’s internally consistent. Masson—who wrote all the pieces—knows what he wants, he brought these three other men together to help him achieve it, and they did so. Listening to it is almost like watching one of those heist movies where a disparate crew arrives, pulls a job, and goes their separate ways, and the thrill comes from watching people demonstrate competence and self-possession, as though the successful performance of the task is more important than the object or money to be stolen. This album is a demonstration of (individual and collective) intelligence, craft, and skill. It’s dispassionate, in the best possible way.

Here’s a clip of the quartet performing “Yurei,” a track not included on Departures, a few days prior to the recording session:

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January 3, 2012

Mahavishnu Orchestra

The Complete Columbia Albums Collection (Columbia)

by Phil Freeman

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English guitarist John McLaughlin first emerged into the public eye in 1969 and 1970, a period he spent mostly working with Miles Davis. He can be heard on In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Big Fun and Live-Evil. He also played with Davis’s departing drummer, Tony Williams, as 1/3 of the band Lifetime, alongside organist Larry Young. Somewhere in there, he also recorded a solo album of psychedelic instrumental hard rock, Devotion (with Young, bassist Billy Rich, and drummer Buddy Miles), and then, after a period of isolation, practice and writing, decided to form his own full-time band. He pulled in violinist Jerry Goodman, keyboardist Jan Hammer (yes, the guy who recorded the Miami Vice theme), bassist Rick Laird, and drummer Billy Cobham. This was the Mahavishnu Orchestra. On August 14, 1971, they went into the studio and blasted through eight of McLaughlin’s compositions in a single day; the resulting album, The Inner Mounting Flame, was in stores less than three months later, on November 3. I know, right?

It’s a barnburner of a record: Cobham laying down lightning-fast, hyper-complex rock beats, with Laird galloping along beside him; Hammer chopping at his keyboards in a sort of Larry Young-meets-Rick Wakeman style; and McLaughlin and Goodman spinning out wild unison melody lines that then erupted into solos like showers of fireworks. Except for the three-minute closer, “Awakening,” its tracks are all between five and seven minutes long. One or two feel like jams; “The Dance of Maya” finds the group playing a skronky, showoffy version of the blues, and on “The Noonward Race,” McLaughlin repurposes a boogie-metal riff he premiered on “Right Off,” from A Tribute to Jack Johnson. It’s a hell of a statement, and the quintet supported it, as one did in the ’70s, with extensive touring.

They returned to the studio in August 1972, but things had changed. The second album, Birds of Fire, wasn’t cut in a single day, but required multiple sessions at two studios—New York’s Electric Lady and London’s Trident. The music was much tighter and more disciplined, with little or no jamming; where Flame ran 46 minutes with eight tracks, only one of which was shorter than five minutes, Birds offered 10 tracks in a tight 40 minutes, and only three of those were longer than five minutes. Hell, “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” was a mere 24 seconds of guitar and synth noise. The music was a little closer to hard rock than prog at times; at the climax of the album’s longest track, “One Word,” Billy Cobham takes a thundering drum solo that would have brought any arena crowd to its feet, roaring. There are also quiet moments, though, like the almost Baroque semi-acoustic piece, “Thousand Island Park.” Birds of Fire feels like Mahavishnu were attempting to streamline their sound in order to safeguard commercial success, without going so far as to hire a vocalist. It has much more in common with early ’70s progressive rock, particularly the work of Yes, than with jazz. Indeed, both Mahavishnu and keyboardist Chick Corea‘s group Return to Forever have always seemed more like prog rock played by jazz musicians than anything really tied to jazz.

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December 23, 2011

Greg Ward

Greg Ward’s Phonic Juggernaut (Thirsty Ear)

by Phil Freeman

Listen to it on Spotify

Buy it from Amazon

Greg Ward is an up-and-coming alto saxophonist; this is his second album as a leader, though he’s played and recorded with a bunch of people over the last few years. The CD came out back in October, but I’ve been thinking about it, and periodically dipping into it, since getting it in the mail in about August. It doesn’t sound like any other jazz disc I’ve heard this year. Ward is a uniquely obsessive player, worrying away at phrases with a crying, humanist tone, and you might expect the rhythm section backing a musician like that to act with exaggerated sensitivity, swaying slowly around him as though not wanting to shock him or hurt his feelings. But instead, bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Damion Reid are one of the most forceful teams around. Reid in particular is a real force, hammering the beat home and giving the music an assertiveness reminiscent of players who worked to blur the line between jazz and rock, like Ronald Shannon Jackson and Al Foster. He’s more concerned with staying in jazz territory than either of those guys, but the aggressiveness he displays on tracks like “Velvet Lounge Shut-In” and the album’s title track is genuinely shocking at times. Sanders has a terrific tone, sort of operating in the middle of the bass’s range with a real fullness and vibrancy, but he doesn’t make a big show of himself, really; he’s aware that Ward’s in charge and Reid’s gonna try to seize as much territory for himself as possible, so he just positions himself between the two of them and maintains a balance that ultimately winds up doing as much to create the group’s identity as anything else.

Everything I’ve said above applies to six of Phonic Juggernaut‘s seven compositions. The last track on the album, “Sectionate City,” is totally different, heavily processed, with Ward’s saxophone running through pedals and the drums staticky and clattering in an almost drum ‘n’ bass manner, and the bass both bowed and altered to sound more like a harmonium. It’s a droning ballad with double-time yet still somehow almost ambient drums beneath, and when synths begin to surge in, filling the sound-field with whooshes and hums, it all starts to remind me of a cross between recent Radiohead and, say, Briggan Krauss‘s Descending to End, an album composed of layer upon layer of digitally altered saxophone.

Greg Ward is clearly a musician with focus and vision, and Phonic Juggernaut is a powerful statement that makes me want to hear more of his music, particularly with these compatriots, ASAP. One of the best jazz albums of 2011.

Click here to listen to two tracks on SoundCloud.

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December 19, 2011

Burnt Sugar

All Ya Needs That Negrocity (AvantGroidd)

by Phil Freeman

Burnt Sugar is a New York-based improvising ensemble that blends funk, rock, jazz (swing to free), hip-hop, poetry and less easily defined sounds into a thick, swirling, smoky blend that’s like a one-stop history of the entire African-American musical continuum. They’re intellectual, soulful, raucous, simmering, and fiercely independent in just about every sense of that word. All Ya Needs That Negrocity is the seventh studio release by the group (assuming you don’t count the odds ‘n’ ends compilation Chopped & Screwed Vol. 2 and/or the “soundtrack” Burnt Sugar vs. the Dominatrix, each of which were released in slim CD cases, like hip-hop mixtapes). It follows their first and only album on a label not their own, 2009′s  Making Love to the Dark Ages, and yet it’s neither a statement of purpose nor a re-assertion of core values nor anything more than a dispatch from the group’s ongoing journey, which includes membership changes, increasing embrace of laptop loops, and an ever-broader musical scope.

(Before we really get started, it bears mentioning that Burnt Sugar are the cover subjects of the current issue of Burning Ambulance magazine, and you ought to pick up a copy—$10 for perfect-bound paperback, $5 for e-book, $3 for Kindle. Thank you in advance for your patronage.)

The album kicks off with two re-interpretations; calling them “covers” would disrespect the amount of mutation and transformation involved. “The Cold Sweat Variations” takes as its inspiration the James Brown track “Cold Sweat,” which according to its co-composer, Pee Wee Ellis, was itself derived in part from Miles Davis‘s “So What.” Thus it’s natural that this track is a stripped-down, entirely instrumental trio effort by trumpeter Lewis “Flip” Barnes, drummer Qasim Naqvi and pianist Myles Reilly. The rhythm is an intricate dance, the chords behind minimal and stark, the horn solo vocal and introspective even as it reaches one climax after another. It seems to serve almost as an overture, setting a meditative yet funky mood that’s uniquely Burnt Sugar while also offering notice that the listener is now in a zone where almost anything can happen.

Worth noting: group founder and mastermind Greg Tate, who conducts the group live and produces all the records, says of this track, “For the record, Flip kinda hates it—a lil’ too avant-garde even for him. But he knows the deal: the game of Con­duc­tion has never claimed to be demo­c­ratic. Band knows the deal. You don’t want to hear it on a record, don’t play it in the stu­dio.”

This shattering of boundaries continues on the album’s second track (and second re-interpretation), a version of Astor Piazzola‘s “Libertango (I’ve Seen That Face Before)” on which blaring horns and scraping, sizzling post-Hendrixian electric guitar battle a clattering drum kit and soulful vocals (not to mention a moody spoken-word interlude) for dominance. It’s worth noting that this track is likely a nod not so much to Piazzola as to Grace Jones, who recorded it on her Nightclubbing album in 1981, suffusing it with her unique blend of predatory lust and imperious scorn. Burnt Sugar’s version is much more unfettered, the reggae (not to mention the accordion) of Jones’s take scraped away in favor of a top-volume rock arrangement, plus Middle Eastern-inflected violin by Mazz Swift, who’s been a crucial element of the group’s sound for years.

Right around track five (which is only about a quarter of the way through the album; at 77 1/2 minutes, AYNTN stretches CD storage capacity nearly to its limit), punchy vocal numbers are abandoned in favor of sprawling instrumentals, beginning with “Claudine,” which is constructed from a GarageBand loop that sounds like something DJ Krush might have come up with. Atop that foundation, the horns—saxophonist Harald Keisedu and Barnes, again—spin out extravagant yet disciplined solos. “Bliques Haff Moor Funn” features pianist Vijay Iyer, an all-but full-time member of Burnt Sugar in its first half-decade but a more intermittent guest on later records (and gigs). The piece blends hip-hop’s rhythmic rigidity with free jazz’s squalling and willful fracturing of melodic convention, to dramatic effect. “Whut Rough Beast” and “Throne of Blood 33 1/3 (Encrypted Vernacular)” are similar in structure, but thoroughly different from each other in execution.

All Ya Needs That Negrocity concludes on an enigmatic yet final note, with the short instrumental “Blood Magic,” followed (after a moment of silence) by the unlisted “Start Thinking Like An African,” a dissonant looped rhythm track, barely over two minutes long, over which a voice declaims in an indeterminate accent—it’s almost like a sound-bite version of “Ghetto Youth,” the stark and brooding piece that’s the dark heart of Tricky‘s best album, 1996′s Pre-Millennium Tension, which pairs a similarly stark loop and a lecture delivered in a nearly incomprehensible Jamaican patois.

All Ya Needs That Negrocity is a terrific album, less sprawling than earlier efforts (like the double disc Black Sex Yall Liberation & Bloody Random Violets or the trilogy That Depends On What You Know) but every bit as compelling, in all the old ways and a few new ones. Hell, “Libertango” could almost be heard as a bid for radio airplay. Burnt Sugar are one of America’s best, most sui generis bands. They’ve never made a bad record, and their live shows are alchemical marvels. Get this album.

Listen to “The Cold Sweat Variations“

Listen to “Libertango (I’ve Seen That Face Before)“

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December 12, 2011

Elders Of The Apocalypse

The Law of Iron (No Visible Scars)
by Phil Freeman
Buy it from the label

Don’t be fooled by the cover art. Looking at the image above, you wouldn’t be laughed at for thinking Elders of the Apocalypse were a power metal band. Warrior wearing a lion skin, a fur Speedo and matching boots, holding a giant axe: check. Topless but spear-wielding woman beside him: check. Subhuman pagan hordes coming up behind: check. It sure looks like power metal. But then you notice that its 11 songs blaze past in less than 25 minutes, and you begin to question that assumption. Reading the song titles also helps clear away any confusion: tracks here include “Ritual Sodomy,” “Mass Murder of Believers,” “Angelripper” (a tribute to Sodom‘s bassist and headman, perhaps?), “Beneath the Boot of a Conquering Force,” “Berserkers for the Goat-Horned Dominion,” “The Thrashing Horde”…this is definitely not power metal. This is at best primitive thrash, and possibly grindcore.

Well, in fact Elders of the Apocalypse‘s music is primitive and savage, but it’s also unique and worthwhile. The beats, courtesy of drummer Plague Bearer, are pure early ’80s hardcore (think Bad Brains or Minor Threat circa 1982), with extra machine-gun fills and wild cymbal attacks thrown in, while Bestial Tormentor‘s guitar riffs and squealing, unfettered solos recall early Slayer. The vocals, mostly delivered by bassist Sadistik Slayer, are guttural, but not an incomprehensible death metal growl; in fact, they remind me of Brutal Truth‘s Kevin Sharp, whose backwoods snarl always gives that band’s arty grind an extra bit of punch.

Many of the tracks on The Age of Iron open with sampled movie dialogue; some of the most immediately recognizable bits come from Conan the Barbarian—”crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women” shows up, of course. This, and the squealing guitar solos, is the big difference (I’m assuming) between the music of Elders of the Apocalypse and the work these exact same guys do as the grindcore band Your Kid’s On Fire.

There’s not really much more to say. If you like grindcore, primitive thrash a la Venom and very early (pre-Rick Rubin) Slayer, Lair of the Minotaur, and Conan the Barbarian, you’ll like this.

Listen to “Beneath the Boot of a Conquering Force”:

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