If free jazz power trio The Thing signed to the German techno label Kompakt, they’d probably sound something like Kriget. The Swedish band’s new album, Dystopico, is a trance-inducing effort that was created entirely with sax, bass and drums, but which somehow sounds like synth-driven electronic music.

Here’s the video for their latest single, “Sleeping With Buddha”:

Dystopico will be out in July.

Since its inception in the 1970s, metal has been a proving ground for vocalists. First there were the operatic screams of genre pioneers like Ronnie James Dio (of Rainbow, Black Sabbath and a lengthy solo career), Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, but in the late 1980s, as thrash gave way to the new, more aggressive form known as death metal, the preferred voice shifted from a high-pitched howl to a low roar, known alternately as “death growls” or “Cookie Monster vocals.” In the earliest days of death metal, the frontmen (and while there have been some excellent female extreme metal vocalists, including Arch Enemy‘s Angela Gossow, Cerebral Bore‘s Simone Pluijmers, Sinister‘s Rachel van Mastrigt-Heyzer, and Landmine Marathon‘s Grace Perry, this has been an overwhelmingly male style, even by metal standards) bellowed from deep in their chests and guts, attempting to sound as much like a raging demon as possible, the better to put across the mandatory lyrics about Satan and murder. For the most part, genre pioneers like Cannibal Corpse’s Chris Barnes, Deicide’s Glen Benton, Immolation’s Ross Dolan, Morbid Angel’s David Vincent and Suffocation’s Frank Mullen were guttural and menacing, but intelligible. But there was an exception: Obituary’s John Tardy.

Tardy’s vocals were qualitatively different from his peers’ in two major ways. On the one hand, his pitch and overall feel were much less controlled than anyone else’s at the time—he didn’t sound like a snarling demon so much as that unhinged, unclean guy you didn’t want sitting next to you on public transportation. But Tardy’s greatest innovation was demonstrated on Obituary’s 1989 debut album, Slowly We Rot. Rather than limit himself creatively by writing lyrics, the vocalist chose to simply improvise his way through several tracks, making vocal sounds not unlike those Boredoms frontman Eye Yamatsuka was exploring more or less concurrently on the other side of the planet. Tardy was an acknowledged influence on then-Faith No More singer (and later John Zorn collaborator) Mike Patton, who told me in a 2005 interview for The Wire, “I was probably 18 or 19 when that record came out. I thought the guy was a fucking genius, because there were no words. There were certain little phrases, like ‘wuuugh’ and ‘aaagh,’ and that really hit me at the time. I realized he was using the voice as an instrument within a song form. Especially with that form of music, that is genius, because no one knows. There’s nothing to say anyway. It’s a sound. Better that than hearing him talk about disemboweling some virgin.”

Over the years, and particularly in the new millennium, extreme metal vocals have become conventional. No longer a disturbing aberration, they are now a genre requirement, no different than blasting double bass drums or downtuned guitars. However, multiple styles have emerged within what might seem to outsiders like a limited approach. Traditional, old-school death metal vocals are still practiced by traditionalists like Cannibal Corpse’s current frontman, George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, and dozens of others, including the veterans cited above, whose bands still tour and record. But other subgenres have their own favored vocal styles. Black metal, for example, requires a high-pitched, unearthly shriek, or a sort of croaking sound from the back of the throat—Cradle of Filth’s Dani Filth is a perfect example of the former method, while Immortal’s Abbath opts for the latter, sometimes sounding like a hell-spawned toad and others like Popeye the Sailor. Grindcore, which marries death metal and hardcore punk, demands an earnest, almost breathless barking type of vocal (with some, like GridLink/ex-Discordance Axis frontman Jon Chang, opting instead for full-on screaming) that’s mostly unintelligible because of the speed at which the lyrics are delivered; if the bands would slow down, the words might become clear.

Some of the most extreme vocalists of all seem to bypass the vocal cords entirely, using the throat primarily as a kind of resonating chamber. Attila Csihar, of Sunn O))) and many other projects, rumbles in a range previously attained only by Milan Fras of Laibach, while Will Rahmer of late ’90s/early ’00s New York death metal thugs Mortician had a voice so low—he made Barry White sound like Barry Manilow—that his death growls were as close as metal vocals have ever gotten to being totally inaudible; they blended with the riffs and the simplistic drum programming (Mortician had no drummer) so seamlessly it was easy to mistake them for bass amp feedback.

The latest innovation in extreme vocal technique is what’s aptly known as the “pig squeal” style, which sounds utterly inhuman and has actually become divisive even within the death metal community. The guttural-but-still-recognizably-words approach of “classic” death metal is abandoned in favor of gurgles and bubblings that seem impossible to produce using a human throat—the impression is of a badly malfunctioning toilet on the brink of explosion. And of course, there are the ear-piercing squeals that serve as punctuation at the end of lines. The overall effect is both alienating and personality-flattening, as the effect saps all the vocalist’s individuality. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Inherit Disease’s 2010 album Visceral Transcendence, on which four different guest vocalists appear—none of whom can be identified, or even told apart from the primary gurgler.

Like most formerly underground artistic strategies, extreme vocals have been incorporated into the avant-garde (or, perhaps, had their existing avant-garde nature recognized by peers). Sunn O))), with Attila Csihar on vocals, have performed as part of a gallery installation by visual artist Banks Violette; Morbid Angel vocalist Steve Tucker’s growls were incorporated into Matthew Barney’s surrealist film Cremaster 2; Brutal Truth frontman Kevin Sharp and Mike Patton, among others, have worked with John Zorn. “Pig squeal” sounds have yet to make the transition to art-scene acceptance, though—some things remain beyond the pale, which is probably exactly how the artists want it.

Here’s a Spotify playlist featuring all the bands discussed above, plus a few more:

Brooklyn Babylon (New Amsterdam)

by Steve Hicken

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society made an impressive debut with Infernal Machines in 2009. Machines features tightly-written and expansively-played charts with memorable melodies and rich harmonies—”Phobos,” the opening track, is a favorite of mine.

The music on the Society’s new disc, Brooklyn Babylon, began life as the musical component of a multimedia celebration of the eponymous borough. The disc consists of 17 sections, some only a minute or so long, others over five minutes. Argue’s compositions are eclectic, partaking of a wide variety of styles and techniques, including melodies that sound like ethnic street music, acid guitar solos, and post-minimalist moves that are very much at home on the New Amsterdam label.

As a former trombonist, I have to admit that Ryan Keberle‘s work in the first interlude (“Infuse”) is a highlight of the record for me. What strikes me most on both this program and Infernal Machines is Argue’s feel for big band orchestration. When he is after luxurious harmonic progressions, the blend of the instruments is spectacular, and that’s not as easy to do as it may sound. At other times, the colors are as distinct as they can be. If you are a fan of big band jazz and want to see it flourish, you need this disc.

Read a 2010 interview with Argue

Stream the whole album on Bandcamp:

Burning Ambulance issue 6 is available now. This issue features a cover story on trumpeter Arve Henriksen, analyzing his solo career and his work with Supersilent; interviews with sound artist Reto Mäder (RM74, Ural Umbo, Sum of R), Bloody Panda frontwoman turned solo artist Yoshiko Ohara, Dutch grindcore/jazz sax-drums duo Dead Neanderthals, Robert Hampson (of the recently reunited Loop, Main, and sometimes Godflesh) and French black metal duo Spektr; a profile of Brazilian saxophonist and painter Ivo Perelman; an in-depth essay on the life and work of Plugz, Cruzados and Tito & Tarantula leader Tito Larriva; and a history of 1970s blaxploitation horror films. Contributing writers include Clifford Allen, MacDara Conroy, Phil Dyess-Nugent, Leonard Nevarez, and Leonard Pierce.

As always, it’s available in multiple formats:

Print edition – $10

Ebook edition – $5

Kindle edition – $3

If you’ve missed any of the previous five issues, you can get them all from our Buy Burning Ambulance page. Thank you for your support!

Other Dimensions in Music is one of the greatest groups in New York jazz. For decades, this fully improvising ensemble—Roy Campbell on trumpet, Daniel Carter on saxophones, William Parker on bass and Charles Downs (formerly Rashid Bakr) on drums—have been playing an exploratory, humanist form of free jazz that eschews fire and fury in favor of an introspective joy that’s unique not only on the New York scene, but in the larger world of music. Their discography’s pretty slim, considering the talent concentrated among the four members—a 1990 self-titled debut album; 1998′s Now! and 2002′s Time is of the Essence/The Essence is Beyond Time (with Matthew Shipp guesting); 2011′s Kaiso Stories, with vocalist Fay Victor; and a 2007 double CD, Live at the Sunset, on which Downs was temporarily replaced by Hamid Drake. Everything they’ve done is worth hearing, and Now! is, frankly, criminally overlooked—it’s one of the best jazz records of the 1990s, a life-changer.

Anyway, that’s all an introduction to set you up for this kick-ass video of the group playing at Clemente Soto Velez in NYC on April 5. Enjoy 20 minutes of pure awesomeness.

Tim Warfield is a tenor saxophonist who first emerged into the public eye in the early 1990s, as one of the featured players—along with Walter Blanding, James Carter, Herbert Harris and Todd Williams—on the Tough Young Tenors album Alone Together. As you’ll read below, that album turned out to be something of a novelty, and not the career-kickstarter the participants likely hoped.

Warfield ultimately made his debut as a leader in 1995, with the album A Cool Blue, on the Dutch label Criss Cross Jazz. He’s since made six more albums for Criss Cross, most recently this year’s Eye of the Beholder, and self-released Tim Warfield’s Jazzy Christmas this past winter. All of his records are firmly in the hard bop tradition, with the exception of 2008′s One for Shirley and 2010′s A Sentimental Journey, which were organ-driven albums that explored groove and balladry in equal measure. Warfield tends to work with a few musicians with whom he’s friendly and compatible; these include trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terell Stafford, pianists Cyrus Chestnut and Orrin Evans (on whose Justin Time and Captain Black he appears), bassists Tarus Mateen and Rodney Whitaker, and drummer Clarence Penn.

In addition to recording and performing regularly, Warfield is an artist in residence at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, and an adjunct faculty member at Temple University. After the jump, an interview.

What does your new record say about where you are as an artist, and what’s the through line from your debut to Eye of the Beholder?

Ooh, I’ve got somebody asking me hard questions! OK, let me think about this. I guess what I’m saying with this record—for me, at this particular point, well, let’s just deal with the title. It’s always been about the art, but this is the first time that I’ve actually implied that it’s about the art. I’ll start from the beginning, with A Cool Blue. If you look at the history of Criss Cross prior to my record, you’ll notice that they were pretty formulaic in terms of how photos were taken. And A Cool Blue was the first record where that idea changed, per my suggestion. I had an idea of what I wanted visually to go along with the record, I talked to [label owner] Gerry Teekens about it, and as usual, he was quite amenable to change, as long as it had some sort of integrity to it. So even then, it was about the art, it was a complete idea. It wasn’t just about going in and blowing some tunes. It’s never been about, “Oh, these have been my studies at this particular moment in space and time, and so I want you to hear these 10 formulas, or five formulas that I’ve been working on.” It’s never been that for me. It’s always been about the idea of music—jazz music transcending the idea of just being music, and being an art form as well. I always want to keep that in the forefront of what’s perpetuated under my name, as opposed to that being a secondary idea or no idea at all.

What’s your favorite piece on your new album—which one are you happiest with, and why?

“Ramona’s Heart,” probably. That’s a hard question, too, because it’s hard for me to think that way. I try to think about things in balance, the sum of all the parts equaling the whole. No, I don’t think I can do it. I’m not even sure it’s “Ramona’s Heart.” That’s a song I wrote, and I believe the band, collectively, really exemplifies the idea that I was trying to get across, but at the same time I really like Nicholas Payton’s song “The Backward Step” as well, and I like how we played as a collective on that as well. And I probably could say that about all of the songs, so it’s very difficult, because it really is about the whole.

How complete are your compositions—are they just melodies and chord changes, or are they fully structured songs?

With the exception of “Tie-a-Dish,” they were collective improvisations. All of the rest was melody, [then] chord changes. Sometimes chord changes [first, then] melody. Sometimes I write in terms of rhythm first, and try to come up with something based off that idea. The way I think about music has changed quite a bit from when I started.

What’s your goal when you enter the studio? Is each album its own thing, or are you attempting to build a body of work?

Probably both, in all honesty. Each album is its own thing, but you can always hear the relations between my records if you’re astute enough to do so. Even with my organ records, which were deliberately more fun, but still very personal, very much Tim Warfield—like, I didn’t approach the music from a repertory standpoint, though some people might think so. What I did was, I tried to amalgamate my experience that included information that I learned about the instrument, the organ itself, and that aesthetic from Shirley Scott. And then tastefully move it forward, listening to the band and how we play and how we’re evolving, and then bringing music in to acclimate to that idea. So that music, if you really listen to the harmony, and you hear how we approach and how we play collectively, because I do have fairly specific demands in terms of the type of musician that I’m looking for. I want somebody rooted in the tradition; I don’t believe in this “don’t listen to the tradition” or “don’t play the tradition.” That’s like saying, when speaking, “Don’t pay attention to ‘Look, Sally; See Spot run.” If you don’t have that, you’re like, “Well, we’re just gonna come up with something on our own, without a center,” and I don’t really think that’s ever been done. So for me, it’s important to have a center and then move forward and develop something personal. That’s how art works. I think that’s probably how Da Vinci did it, Matisse, Renoir, and I want to try to operate within that same methodology.

Warfield playing with Orrin Evans, trumpeter Eddie Henderson, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Obed Calvaire:

You had more or less the same band on all four of your albums from 1995 to 2002. Was that a working band, or just the guys you wanted to play with?

You know, it’s funny, because many people probably don’t think it was a working band, but it was, and I have bootlegs to prove it. We didn’t necessarily play in New York City, we played other places like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, St. Louis. But everybody was already in other groups, so what happened is I actually called those personalities within the very first gigs that we did, so at the time we were the Terell Stafford/Tim Warfield Quintet, or the Tim Warfield/Terell Stafford Quintet, depending on who got the gig. And then what happened was, it just kind of naturally segued into my band. I was the one who solicited the personalities, and a lot of the music was other people’s ideas—I would occasionally resource from some of the other musicians in the band, but for the most part it was my group, and at the end of the year, I’m the guy that got the tax forms, so it became my band pretty quickly.

And then you did the two organ albums, which had almost the same band on each. Was that a working band, too?

They’re still working bands. I go back and forth between them. I did a Christmas record, self-produced, and used the same group, except instead of Nicholas Payton it was Terell Stafford, and Stefon Harris played vibraphone, and then there were two vocalists, and Daniel Sadownick played percussion. So as you can see, I have a family that I work with, and I try to expand that family. I’ve been working with some younger people, as well, on some projects, and I try intermittently to get work for all of them.

One thing I like about you is, you’ve never done a “Young Guy Plays The Music Of Dead Guy” album.

Well, I may end up doing one before too long, but if I do, I’m gonna try to make sure it’s…I don’t think I’ll ever do the music of John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk or something like that, but there are certain things within the tenor tradition that I’d like to do. I know that I want to do a ballad record. I’m just sitting down now, trying to figure out, do I want to do it with just my rhythm section, or do I want to figure out how to conjure up some money and do it with strings, but differently. So I know that’s something I want to do, but I doubt that I’m gonna do any tribute things anytime soon.

You always have either Nicholas Payton or Terell Stafford as a horn partner—how do you think those guys complement your playing style?

Oh, we’re simpatico. In our thinking—first of all, I obviously was in Nicholas’s band for quite some time, and the closer we became, the more I realized that he had experiences—he knew about things he wasn’t even supposed to know about. Because he had to be seven or eight years old, but I was like, “How do you know about this video?” or “How do you know about this jazz program?” Understanding that this is pre-YouTube when we first started talking about this stuff. “How do you know about JazzStage on PBS, and you saw the Woody Shaw concert with Carter Jefferson and actually remember it?” It was these sorts of things that made me realize that we had a lot of musical experiences in common, so when we played together, it was very easy—our sounds fit into each other. And then with Terell, it’s even more intimate, because our friendship and our musical friendship happened simultaneously. And so we have been practicing together, he taught me things—some of my saxophone playing is based off of the concept of the trumpet, from learning so much from him and Nicholas, but Terell and I have had a lot of talks about the idea of wind. So I have embouchure techniques that I teach that are pretty much trumpet buzzing techniques. So we did a lot of playing together and hung out together a lot, so we’re always like one when we play together. You’ll hear some of my isms in Terell, and you’ll hear some of Terell’s isms in me, and it’s the same thing with Nicholas. Our approaches are still very different, because of the instrument that we play and how we think, but it’s actually a great marriage with both of them.

Warfield with Terell Stafford, pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Matt Wilson:

What players did you grow up idolizing, and whose influence do you think took the longest to work out of your system, or integrate into your own style?

Wow, that’s a hard question. I have a lot of influences, and they go beyond the saxophone, and I’m still studying, so the history of jazz, I would say, is my influence. There are some that might be more obvious; if you’re a surface listener, I’m sure you’ll hear Coltrane or maybe Wayne Shorter, maybe you’ll hear Hank Mobley, though I didn’t really study that much Hank Mobley, but I did study some key records for quite some time. There’s Charlie Rouse, there are a lot of contemporaries as well, like Gary Thomas, Kenny Garrett, Billy Pierce is and has been a big influence on my playing. But I’ve also learned a lot of Freddie Hubbard verbatim, Woody Shaw verbatim, I’ve learned McCoy Tyner solos—anything that I like, I sit down and try to figure out, can I make it applicable on the saxophone? So really, it’s difficult for me to say, but I can say that a foundation for me in the early years was Dexter Gordon, and particularly Junior Cook, but it wasn’t necessarily because I was like, Oh, this guy is the man and this is the sound for me, it was because as a kid I liked Horace Silver’s music and he was the tenor player on most of the records that I had. There’s not as much logic when you’re younger, you just get to it how you get to it. But that’s why I have so much Junior Cook vocabulary. And then as I was coming up, there was an organization in this area that I’m now on the board of, the Central Pennsylvania Friends of Jazz in Harrisburg, PA, and I got exposed to a lot of music through them. I saw Dexter Gordon quite a bit, and I was in love with his sound—I just thought he was the coolest person ever. So he was one that I tried to emulate. But obviously, he’s so personal, it’s very difficult to do. And currently I’m actually listening to Wardell Gray, and trying to play that style, which is so much different for a lot of different reasons, it’s challenging to me and it’s taking a minute. I’ve been studying more of the romantic tenors the past couple of years. I believe if you’re going to be a tenor saxophone player, and you don’t have that in your playing, you don’t understand that aesthetic—whether you choose to actually utilize it or not—if you don’t understand that, then you’re kind of missing what it means to be a tenor player. And there’s all kinds of colors in your sound that you’re going to miss as a result of not embracing that, or attempting to understand that. If we’re artists, it can’t just be about our harmonic methodology, that’s pretty trite, in my opinion. It has to be about the colors that we can create on the horn, as well as how we choose to then play the notes that we choose. So Wardell Gray, the shapes that he plays on the instrument are much more intervallic…he’s like the missing link in modern tenor playing. It’s Wardell Gray, then Dexter, who’s the beginning of modern tenor playing. Wardell, sometimes he’ll play very intervallic shapes, and then sometimes they’ll be very linear as well. And so it’s been interesting just trying to navigate and teach my muscle memory to do some different things, and get that texture or sound quality to my instrument as well.

What are your memories of the Tough Young Tenors album? Did that feel like a marketing gimmick at the time, or was it something you were excited about, or some combination of both? How did you get recruited into that, and how do you think you played?

I don’t know how I got recruited for most of the stuff I’ve done. I’ve always felt like the odd man out, ’cause I’ve always done my own thing, so there was definitely a very specific idea that was going on with the personalities on that record, and if you listen to that record, you can hear that I played very differently than everybody else. And I was very thankful to be a part of it. What I remember about the record is that—well, there were a couple of things. What was supposed to happen was, someone was supposed to get signed to Island/Antilles. That’s what we were told. Of course, that didn’t happen for anyone. That was fine. What I remember most was it was a really nice production, very well organized by Billy Banks, the musicians were all great musicians, they all could play. Everybody was deeply rooted in the blues, probably more than I was at the time. I could tell that was an aesthetic that they were studying, and at that time I was studying harmony, so it was a very fun session, but that’s the only time we ever played. We never did a tour, we never did a concert, and that record became a cultlike record at the time, which was very interesting. And I like it, I actually talk to Herb Harris—I just did a recording for him which was bizarre but fun at the same time. He was like, man, I want you to come in and record my music. I was like, Well, that’s some pressure; you’re gonna be in the studio and you want me to play your tunes? So I just did that. That record will probably be coming out this year. It was an interesting record; it was a fun record to do. What I remember most about it was that it was fun, that someone was supposed to get signed but nobody did, and that I had an opportunity to network, listen to some people’s concepts, and make some new friends, many of whom I’m still friends with today.

You’re an artist in residence at Messiah College in Harrisburg—what does that entail? You’re also adjunct faculty at Temple University—what do you teach there?

I teach at both schools. There’s a big difference in what goes on at Messiah and what goes on at Temple. Being adjunct, I’m at Temple every week. Aat the moment, I’m a small ensemble coach. I have two ensembles, and I do private saxophone instruction. At Messiah College, I am there less as an artist in residence, and what I do teach is concepts in improvisation. I teach people how to think about improvising, and that opportunity is allotted to anyone who is a registered student at Messiah. They don’t have to be in the music department. If they want to come in and understand what this music is, they just have to come over to the music department and say, I would like to take a lesson with Mr. Warfield.

That sounds like something I talked about with Charlie Haden some years ago. He teaches at Cal Arts, and he said he doesn’t teach music theory or anything—he teaches his students to look at the stars, and improvise.

Right. Exactly.

Your albums have all come out on Criss Cross—would you care to discuss that relationship? Does Criss Cross pay royalties? Do you sell many records?

I don’t care to talk about the economics of it. Not what I’m making on the records—I gotta keep that quiet, because I do know everybody’s making different amounts. I know that very specifically, after having a conversation with Clarence Penn. So I don’t necessarily want to do that. What I can talk about—actually, there’s a whole lot I can talk about, because whether I want to admit it or not, I’m becoming an old guy, or an older guy, and I definitely fit in as a veteran at this point. I just did a “jazz legends” concert recently, and I definitely wouldn’t accept that title, especially given the gentlemen I was playing with, they were such great saxophonists, so I was like a hopefully soon-to-be legend, but “veteran” I can take very easily.

I’ve been listening to jazz, in all honesty, probably from the womb, since that was the music my mother and father loved to listen to and it was the primary music played in the household, in conjunction with some gospel, some classical and some R&B and whatever was on pop radio at that time, which was a very fertile time for music, with a lot of songwriters who really understood the mechanics of writing songs, like Barry Manilow, the Carpenters, Burt Bacharach, et cetera. There was a lot of great music with really strong melodies and intelligent harmonies, intelligent lyrics, so that’s what I grew up in. I consider myself to be blessed. And I realized that even then, that I actually grew up during the fusion era and even the ECM period. When that was first introduced, that was when I was first starting to get deeply into music, and I had all of the Blue Note and Impulse! Records, thanks to my father, and there was this new trumpet player being discovered name of Wynton Marsalis, so there was a whole lot going on. There was still Musician magazine, people don’t even know what that was anymore, and Jazz Times was only a newspaper. So I’ve watched a lot of things go on, and I’ve realized within the idea of the industry, there are always enforced trends, because the industry is not interested in the art of the music. So artists must work on positioning to keep their integrity and not fall prey to enforced trends.

It’s tough to figure out how to do that. It might mean that being signed with the major record labels might not be as beneficial as they think it will. When they say, “We want you to do this project, and if you don’t do this project, we’re not gonna support the project you want to do. And now that you’ve done this project, and it hasn’t sold any units, we’re going to drop you. Even though it wasn’t your idea, it was our idea.” These are all things I’ve actually seen happen. So it’s important to understand that one of the things I’m most concerned with is this idea of enforced trends, and someone thinking that someone else’s idea is their idea, and playing that idea to the point of creating a homogenous voice, and then, when you listen on the radio, you can’t tell who’s who. ‘Cause still at this particular point, how we’re heard is through the radio and through the Internet, and some TV, if you have MusicChoice. But people are listening for a personality, they’re not necessarily listening for you to play the latest, hippest thing that everyone else is playing. And that doesn’t really do you a service if you haven’t figured out a way to evoke a true personality from that.

As far as economics are concerned, things are very different. Things have been very different since 9/11. 9/11, for anybody who hasn’t figured this out, is the reason things are different generally speaking. There’s been a regime change no matter what subject you’re talking about. People that supported this music when I was coming up in my teens are now in their 70s, some getting close to 80. So whether you’re talking music or politics, there are now these struggles in terms of value systems, etc., on music, on politics, on whatever you want to talk about, as things change and people embrace new ideas.

Pre-9/11, the jargon between artists’ reps and venues was, “Does your record company provide tour support?” The new verbiage is, “Are there any grants associated with the project that you’re creating?” So it’s the same idea, but a different story, and I see that on many different levels. Even musically, I see us reinventing ourselves. In terms of fashion, I see us reinventing ourselves, as I see myself wearing skinny ties I swore I’d never wear again after high school. So the more things change, the more they remain the same. I think if younger people want this to work, they have to reduce their amount of fear and stop playing like each other. If they want to get something of depth, they need to reach further back. The further back you look, the further forward you move. It’s just an idea and balance that makes perfect logical sense, and there’s not one example that anyone can come up with to refute that idea. So I think that’s important, because I actually would like them to do well. I try to support them as much as possible. I won’t buy a record if I don’t like it, but I buy records, I listen to guys, I follow them on YouTube, and I see who’s doing what. Sometimes I sneak up, I check ’em out and I disappear, if I have an opportunity to go sit and listen and actually hear someone. Because they’re needed to keep this music alive. They’re absolutely needed. And so one of the things I also suggest is that—and this is where I am in my career—is that they become advocates of the music that they play. There’s no reason to put this music in someone else’s hands, a music that is underexposed, and absolutely misunderstood, and expect that things are gonna be okay as a result of that. It’s our job to educate everyone. And it’s our job to try to shape and mold things—not necessarily the music itself, but the idea of the art form being public. It’s our obligation to shape that, and try to get that to happen. And there’s a sacrifice in that, in terms of, well, I don’t get a chance to practice as much because I’m on this board or I’m the appointed director of this arts organization…but the amount of time I see people spend on Facebook…stop doing that and do something that’s a bit more productive, that will help us as a whole.

As someone who knows Nicholas Payton quite well, where do you stand on the whole Black American Music versus jazz issue? Is a name change the magic bullet that’s gonna make young people care about jazz, or are there other ways of marketing jazz that can make a serious move to growing the audience—playing on different kinds of bills, streaming music, etc.?

Wow, that’s a real difficult question. I don’t want to be a soothsayer and say this is the way or this is not the way. The one thing I will say about this, and I’m not just saying this because Nicholas Payton is my friend—he’s a very, very intelligent man, and I think many times underestimated intellectually because he’s so quiet. So when he decides to speak, and he’s been quite verbal, I think it might be a shock to people, the level of conviction and love he has for the music. But I do know, or I’m going to surmise, that his reasoning for this is a result of a dynamic that he’s observed within the industry. And I think it’s really important to understand this: There’s a lot about the history of America that we’ve kinda swept under the rug, and instead of really addressing the issues, so we can move forward again, we say “Well, this doesn’t really exist—come on, come on.” We’ve tried to sanitize it. And I believe that that’s a big mistake, because the energy and how we’ve dealt with past history still permeates through everything we do today.

So there are a lot of things that aren’t said that I believe just need to be said. Now, maybe there’s a way to say them, but I believe they need to be said. Like, here’s something to think about—the idea of a value system. Everyone has a different value system based on their experience, in terms of what they’re taught and their experiences environmentally. So clearly, the history of this music—it’s understood how this music came to be. So I can see where it would be a bit distressing when you have so many people saying, Well, you know, this music didn’t come from the idea of slavery. That’s not why this music exists, as a result of slaves and how the music evolved from that point forward. But you have so many historians saying, well, that’s not what this is or blah blah blah. When clearly there’s enough in the history books that already shows that. That can create some sort of ill feeling. And rightfully so. Particularly when what’s really being addressed is someone’s heritage. ‘Cause when I look at jazz music, this is a part of my heritage.

Now, back when no one cared about jazz music, I have Jet magazines that have jazz charts. They had R&B charts, they had blues charts, and they had jazz charts. And all the music was related, and the musicians—when you listen to the Motown stuff, all the black musicians who played jazz were doing session work with a lot of the Motown acts. Now what I do is I kind of relate this to a value system. And understand when I say that this isn’t an issue of malice, this is an idea that people need to sit down and think about.

There aren’t really very many African-American producers in jazz, or promoters, or writers, so really, I’m subject to the value system and viewpoint of someone who has not ever had the experience I’ve had. Just as an individual, growing up. There are a whole lot of things people don’t know about me, just because no one’s ever asked. I’ve been arrested because I had a bandana on, and I was in the hotel that I was staying in after doing a concert! And clearly I was arrested because I was black. And I don’t make a big thing about it—it took me a minute to get over that, and deal with that. Like, I literally had to go back to the city in the same clothes, the next morning, and just walk around the police station. Because I just refused to allow my system to embrace all that they’d put on me the day before.

So what I’m saying is, there’s a whole idea about the music that I think is still not understood, and now that we’ve kind of gotten into this whole process of teaching the music—I’m not really sure how much African-American input there was, I know that there was some, obviously, there’s David Baker and some other people, too. But when you sit down and look at what it is systemically, the best way I can describe it is, how do you have a system of teaching a music that is clearly strongly syncopated, for obvious reasons, but meanwhile, when you go to schools and study, there are no real courses on that in depth. Well, it’s because of the values of the people who set up the system—that is not necessarily a focal point. Clearly, the focal point is harmony. But there’s a balance that makes those two ideas sympatico. And so I think it’s issues like that—and that’s mild. I’m being very mild; I could talk about industry stuff that I’ve seen, and that I know matter-of-factly, but that’s never been my energy. I’m not really trying to create any dissension. But I do really believe in the truth. ‘Cause what do they say? It’ll set you free. And that’s how I intend to be.

So there are other examples, industry examples, that clearly right now, when I listen to the music, I hear a lot of music that is improvisational but it’s not jazz. It’s more pop music, if anything. It’s like a new pop music, and so when you see all these groups at jazz festivals, it raises a question. Like, does the industry really understand anything about the music? And then the other question it raises is, does the industry care? And I already know the answer to that.

So what you have to do is, just like I find personalities I like to work with, I try to find personalities in the industry that I think are objective thinkers. So that you can talk about issues and you can work on developing your art. And I’ve done that with my relationship with Gerry Teekens. Gerry Teekens has never [interfered artistically], other than saying “I’d like you to play a blues, maybe something fast”—and he didn’t even say that to me the last couple of times. He really allows me to do what I do. Because he clearly understands the art. I can’t say that for some of the larger labels that I worked with previously. It many times was about some sort of hook or gimmick that had nothing to do with the personalities who’d made the record. Or if it did, it was something very surface. But it’s about money. That’s what it’s about.

Stream “Let It Snow,” from Tim Warfield’s Jazzy Christmas:

The 1984 double live album Zurich by the ultimate power trio, Borbetomagus (from left in photo above, saxophonists Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter and guitarist Donald Miller) has finally been reissued on CD via their own Agaric label. (Buy it from Amoeba.)

When I profiled the guys for Signal to Noise a couple of years ago, I wrote this about the album, which documents a single astonishing gig:

The Sauter/Dietrich duo album Bells Together aside, it’s as close as you can come to something you could label “Borbetomagus Unplugged.” The two saxophones are heard almost without effects pedals, which allows Sauter and Dietrich to demonstrate their astonishing, symbiotic yet thoroughly individualistic techniques. There’s a passage about three minutes into “Ohne Fleisch Loaf,” the second track on Side Two of the double LP, that recalls the keening opening passage of John Coltrane’s “The Father & The Son & The Holy Ghost,” the piece that opens the Meditations album, where Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders are sort of simultaneously going at each other and working in tandem. It’s quite beautiful. But on “Loaf” there’s also Donald Miller grinding and roaring behind the two men and eventually, in the piece’s final seconds, abandoning his instrument entirely, leaving it to feed back in a low-frequency (but very loud) crunching growl.

There are a lot of moments of raw beauty like that on Zurich. “Ms. Fisch Brotchen” finds one hornman or the other creating sounds like a didjeridoo as the other sputters and slaps the keys in an almost Evan Parker-like manner, while Miller does his best to yank the strings entirely free from his guitar. Another interesting track on the disc is “Fried Tampons,” which finds the Donalds—Dietrich and Miller—switching instruments. Dietrich takes up the guitar, while Miller plays alto sax, and the difference in approach isn’t honestly all that discernible, particularly when Dietrich just lets the instrument issue another long stretch of staticky, crunching feedback and distortion without releasing the chopping, blender-eating-bone “chords” that are Miller’s specialty.

Recorded live in the titular city in 1984, Zurich is much closer to free jazz in the classic, recognizable sense than later eruptions like 1993’s Experience The Magic or Songs Our Mother Taught Us (recorded 1999, released 2005). Again, there’s a lot of separation in the mix, and the saxophones aren’t slathered in distortion or electronic processing the way they would be a year or two down the road. And yet, even if you’ve heard Sauter’s work with Rudolph Grey’s Blue Humans or Dietrich’s work with the New Monuments, it’s extremely difficult to tell which man is making which noise. It’s not like listening to John Coltrane’s Live in Japan and knowing exactly which stream of notes is coming from his horn and which is coming from Pharoah Sanders’s. After playing together since grade school, developing their individual techniques side by side in near-total isolation from other out-jazz musicians, like two Kaspar Hausers, they’re almost a two-headed, four-handed organism.

After the jump, a short interview with all three members about the album and that era of Borbetomagus.
What are your strongest memories of this performance, 30 years on?
Jim Sauter: As soon as we started playing I knew that it was going to be amazing. The sound on stage was great and I could feel instantly that the audience was totally with us.
Don Dietrich: My overwheming recollection of the concert was being frustrated with Donald [Miller]‘s slowing down of the musical pace. My head was into the “frenetic” at that point (more like the last cut on the disc). I wanted ideas to come fast and furious. I think ultimately it made or a more interesting performance. Ironically, listening to the new CD after a very long time, I think his playing was the strongest and most interesting of the three of us.
Donald Miller: The Rote Fabrik show was the centerpiece, literally, of our first actual tour; not just of Europe, but anywhere. Up until October ’84, we had been limited to monthly (if lucky) one-off gigs in New York City and across the river in Don and Jim’s neck of the suburban woods, or the odd long-weekend jaunt to some other free improv communities (with small grants and big hearts) across the eastern US. This tour was the first time we ever had to work out night after night for three weeks straight. And Zurich was smack in the middle, and one of the two big money gigs that paid for our flights. And it was a venerable institution in the European “scene”, with a great sound system. And we were ready. Hence, the strongest memory is of seizing the moment on stage that we had worked towards for over four years, and stomping it to death. We were on, and we knew it.

Was this show a one-off or part of a larger European tour? Are there other unreleased live recordings from that time period?
JS: This was our first major tour abroad. We are indebted to Udo Jahnke at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich and Anthony Wood at Actual ’84 in London for committing the necessary “real” financial support we needed to get things started. West Germany: West Berlin, Hamburg, Muenster, Bremen, Frankfurt; East Germany: Leipzig (Jazztage Festival); Switzerland: St. Gallen (with Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl), Saignelier, Zurich; England: London (Actual ’84 Festival) and London Musician’s Collective (with John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Eddie Prévost and Hugh Davies). It was really something to be in East Germany before the wall came down. Going through the armed border checkpoint was pretty intense. People were starved for music from the West. When we were introduced, “from New York—free jazz extreme,” the audience of about 600 went wild.
We immediately bonded with Norbert and Andy. This was the start of a long friendship that has led to numerous tours, collaborations, and some pretty amazing recordings together. There are plenty of other recordings from this time period in the archives. Some might be historically interesting but not necessarily release-worthy. Zurich had everything—inspired playing, good balance between the three of us, and a great recording.

What made you decide a double LP was worth the investment, at that point in Borbeto’s career?
JS: I don’t know if we thought of it as an investment as much as the best way to present the music. Bob Rusch, the editor of Cadence magazine, advised against it. He recommended we put it out as two separate releases, Vol.1 and Vol. 2. That might have been more sensible, but it wouldn’t have had the same impact. We wanted people to experience the concert in its entirety—so we put it out the right way!
DM: We had the document: The concert was a classic; full-tilt boogeymen with two phasers-on-disintegrate 45-minute sets, and we had good recording; a rare combination, indeed. And there was the small political statement from a small independent label that, by putting out a self-produced double LP, you were here to stay, doing the long haul, not getting out of your face any decade soon. We were hardly the first to make this statement, but we knew it was our time.

The album features some long pieces, but also a lot of short ones—many of your early CDs (Sauter/Dietrich/Miller, Seven Reasons For Tears, Buncha Hair That Long) include shorter pieces, where more recent releases have tended to go long. Were these edits, or did you guys play more short, discrete pieces back then, and when/how/why did that change?
DD: What you hear is what we did. No edits.
JS: We may have had to rearrange the sequence of a few cuts to fit the LP format. One reason we have a lot of shorter pieces is because we kept getting called back for encores. So we’d huddle and try to come up with a strategy—do something short, or another “bells,” or change up the saxophones. Things do change over time but not for any reasons in particular.
DM: Technology may have effected our inclination to go longer. The pre-effects years of the saxes, with selected use of amplification, were once described by Don [Dietrich] as like “John Henry,” with Jim and him working overtime acoustically to match my “iron horse” of a guitar amp. Going for, say, an LP side’s length of 20+ minutes was usually what we could muster, granted a few times per show, if we had the entire evening. The advent of digital delay boxes, e-bows, etc., and, let us confess, the effects of aging, however, gave us more time to enjoy the roar while on stage. But in recent years and tours we have been returning to actual hard playing; call it evolution, we always have. And audiences seem to appreciate the digestible chunks, so we are also having to figure out how to end pieces like we were able to back at the time Zurich was recorded.

What saxophones were you using on this date?
JS: I’m playing tenor, alto and baritone saxophone. Don, tenor and alto saxophone.
The sound of the horns is very “naked” on Zurich—it hardly seems like you’re using any pedals at all. Did you not bring all your equipment, or was that the way you were operating at that point? It really is one of your ”jazziest” albums because of the ease of figuring out which sounds are being made by saxophones and which by guitar…
DD: At that point we were not using any effects pedals (that would come the following year). The fact that you thought we might be is because we were playing “bells together” on a number of tracks. For the first several years of Borbeto, Jim and I were playing through amps (I have a Sunn Concert Lead) with vocal mics down the bells to accentuate the metallic timbre. My recollection here was that the venue only had one guitar amp so we occassionally put the PA mics down the bells.
JS: We were not using pedals. We might occasionally shove a microphone down the bells of the horns but the use of pedals started around the time of New York Performances (Agaric 1986).

Most of the track titles just seem like Dadaist jokes, but do any of them have any real significance?
JS: “Nein is the Loneliest Number”—From our experience at the checkpoint to East Germany. “Ohne Fleisch Loaf”—Donald, a vegetarian at the time, learned enough German to say “no meat.” “Refried Tampons”—Perfectly describes a semi-petrified late night snack I ate from an automat in Amsterdam. “Schwarma Death”—Another late night favorite: schwarmas smothered in hot chili sauce. “Fleetwood DeKooning” and “Elaine DeFleetwood”—Don, Rev. Dr. Paul, and I came up with these on a fishing trip not far from East Hampton, Long Island—home of the great Dutch expressionist painter and his wife Elaine.
DD: All of the titles relate to some actual occurence or recurring nonsence during the tour. “Pink Pants,” for example, refers to a bit of clothes shopping we did earlier in the day in Zurich. Jim found a pair of bright pink plastic slacks at just the right price which I thought would perfectly round out his ensemble. He stepped into the fitting closet in the middle of the shop showroom and proceeded to get stuck in the pants as they were too small, the plastic laminated to his thigh skin. When he expressed his dilemma from inside the booth I grabbed the cuffs and gave a mighty tug resulting in him sitting in the middle of the showroom in his Fruit of the Looms, pink pants wrapped around his ankles, to the shock of the shopkeeper and other bemused customers.

When manufacturing these LPs back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, did you have any difficult discussions with mastering engineers and whatnot about what the music was “supposed to sound like”?
JS: We had a problem with our first album in 1980. The mastering engineer asked me to come to the studio because the tape reels weren’t labeled clearly. They couldn’t tell if the tape was tails in or tails out—if it was playing forward or in reverse. The only other time they had that problem was with an album of Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs. We’ve always been pretty good at communicating our general aesthetic, LOUD, BRIGHT, IN YOUR FACE.
DM: I recall Jim telling Don and me that someone from a pressing facility came back by to see him with the mastered reels of either our first or second LP. Even though we had clearly indicated that we had the “tones on tail” on all the tapes, he still could not figure out which way the tapes ran, and was deathly afraid he was going to press a whole vinyl run of our music backwards. Years in the music biz, and there was nothing in our work for him to reference as an actual instrument. And these were live and undoctored studio recordings, with actual instruments, and musicians. Jim probably has any other horror stories, but as I understood it, by and large, our money was as good and green as that of anyone else.

Buy Zurich online from Amoeba Music

John Coltrane‘s Sun Ship is an album that’s tended to fall through the cracks. Recorded in 1965, it was one of the final sessions with the so-called “Classic Quartet” with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones, but it remained unreleased until 1971. Nevertheless, it’s one of his most powerful albums, and very much worthy of re-discovery—even if the new two-CD set Sun Ship: The Complete Session (Buy it from Amazon; also soon to be available as a 3LP box from Mosaic Records) isn’t the best way to hear the material, at least not for the first time.

The original album contained five tracks – “Sun Ship,” “Dearly Beloved,” “Amen,” “Attaining” and “Ascent.” The title track launches the album with a quick, staccato figure, repeated with slight variation in a way that blurs the line between melody and fanfare. Tyner gets the first solo, dancing across the keys with ferocious energy, and Jones hits his drums like he’s wielding hammers, not sticks. Coltrane’s solo is blisteringly intense, chewing over brief phrases again and again with an almost canine relentlessness, but building up to the shrieks and roaring cries that would be trademarks of his final two years as a performer. From there, the album alternates between uptempo pieces (the title track, “Amen”) and slow, free-form ballads (“Dearly Beloved,” “Attaining”). The final cut, “Ascent,” gives over more than half its running time to a solo from Garrison, before embarking on an incantatory, swinging journey of the type Coltrane and the band perfected on A Love Supreme.

Sun Ship: The Complete Session does what its title implies, gathering every take (including false starts) and much of the in-studio dialogue between the bandmembers and engineer Bob Thiele and in the process creating a vivid portrait of these master musicians at work. It does not offer the original album plus alternate takes, as so many jazz reissues do, because the material on Sun Ship was subject to editing. The title track had Elvin Jones‘s drum coda chopped off; the studio dialogue which opens “Dearly Beloved” was actually from a different take of the same tune; “Attaining” was spliced together from two different recordings; and nearly two minutes of Jimmy Garrison‘s bass solo was cut out of the take of “Ascent” that was used. The only track from the sessions that made it to the original album unaltered was “Amen.”

There aren’t very many complete alternate takes, either—only one each for “Sun Ship,” “Dearly Beloved,” “Attaining” (though this one is nearly three minutes longer than the released take, and very much worth hearing) and “Amen.” The released version of “Ascent” was the only complete recording, and it was the first of eight takes. There are plenty of false starts, and a few inserts (passages where the band picks up in the middle of a tune, as though they’d been playing all along, and goes through to the end). And there’s some studio dialogue, which at times punctures the overly pious image of Coltrane, and jazz musicians in general—much fun is had referring to “Ascent” as “Ass End,” for example, and carefully spelling it out for Thiele, who’s keeping records of what’s recorded.

All together, there’s only about two hours of music on Sun Ship: The Complete Session, so it’s a relatively easy listen, nothing like wading through the infamous Stooges box 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, which stretched a 40-minute album to seven CDs. This is more like spending a pleasant afternoon eavesdropping on John Coltrane and his bandmates from the control room, as they get closer and closer and finally manage to create an amazing album. It’s not a substitute for Sun Ship; it’s a companion piece, intended for long-time, devoted fans.

Stream the whole set on Spotify:

Burning Ambulance contributor Steve Hicken wrote about the process of composing his Percussion Concerto in issue #3 of the print magazine—you can read that article online here. The piece recently had its live premiere, and it’s now posted on our Soundcloud page.

The Concerto for Percussion and Wind Ensemble, which has two movements (“Fields and Waves” and “Grids and Motors”) and runs about 22 minutes, features percussionist Omar Carmenates and the Furman University Wind Ensemble and was conducted by Leslie W. Hicken on February 22.