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.
On January 7, 2013, a memorial for saxophonist David S. Ware was held at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan. Friends and collaborators from the entirety of his career performed, including multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore, saxophonists Rob Brown, Daniel Carter and Darius Jones; pianists Matthew Shipp and Eri Yamamoto; vocalist Fay Victor; guitarist Joe Morris (who also performed on bass); bassist William Parker; and drummers Muhammad Ali, Guillermo Brown, Andrew Cyrille and Warren Smith. Ware’s longtime friend and manager, and owner of AUM Fidelity Records, Steven Joerg, hosted the event and spoke, as did poet Steve Dalachinsky, Parker, Shipp, and Ware’s widow, Satsuko.
After the jump is a gallery of photos from the event.
Last Tuesday, December 4, Arts for Art (the organization that puts on the Vision Festival every year) staged a benefit at the Angel Orensanz Center to raise funds for a new Lower East Side performance space to be called The Under_Line. The room will be underneath Clemente Soto Velez, at 107 Suffolk Street in New York. Performers at the show included Marshall Allen, Cooper-Moore, Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, Joe Lovano, Christian McBride, Joe McPhee, William Parker, and more. Here are some videos from the event, shot by Don Mount.
Joe Lovano & Milford Graves duo:
Marshall Allen, Henry Grimes & Milford Graves:
Charles Gayle, Hamiet Bluiett, Jason Kao Hwang, Christian McBride, William Parker & Cooper-Moore:
To donate to Arts for Art and support The Under_Line, as well as the Vision Festival and all their other projects, click here.
The Wire reports that Peter Brötzmann has decided to retire his Chicago Tentet, having come to the decision that the group has peaked creatively. He has written an open letter which reads as follows:
14 years… The Chicago Tentet
That’s a long time for a 10/11 piece band. Time to say goodbye? Time to stop? For sure time to think about the future!
There are a couple of reasons why I decided to stop it, at least for the moment. The first one is the everlasting critical economic situation, actually with no expectation for better times – we Germans and Americans can’t count on support from our cultural departments.
The second, much more important, is the music. Hanging together for such a long time – with just a couple of small changes – automatically brings a lot of routine. In general nothing against, you need it sometimes to survive, but if it gets so far that one can’t exist without the other – music is over.
In 2011 with the weekends in London and Wuppertal we have reached the peak of what is possible in improvisation and communication with an immense input from all of us. For my taste it is better to stop on the peak and look around than gliding down in the mediocre fields of ‘nothing more to say’ bands.
I love to work with larger ensembles and I won’t say, ‘That’s it,’ but I need a bit of time to think about some changes, the financial situation is important and in a way the financial situation forms and builds sometimes the music. Who can afford to travel with a quintet nowadays, you see what I mean?
I think the next fall will answer the question about the future of a NEW tentet.
Tokyo, 17th of November 2012
P Brötzmann
WE NEED AGAIN AND AGAIN A MORE ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT
Excuse my language A KICK IN THE ASS and what we call in German VERUNSICHERUNG
The group, which at various times included Johannes Bauer, Jeb Bishop, Hamid Drake, Mats Gustafsson, Kent Kessler, Toshinori Kondo, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love, William Parker, Ken Vandermark, Mars Williams, and Michael Zerang, among others, made its first appearance on a three-CD set on Okka Disk, released in 1998. They released several sets of paired albums on that label over their 14-year history: Broken English and Short Visit to Nowhere in 2002, Images and Signs in 2004, and American Landscapes 1 and 2 in 2007. In recent years, the ensemble put out the two-CD Walk, Love, Sleep and the five-CD 3 Nights in Oslo box, which also included performances by smaller subgroups, on Smalltown Superjazz.
Here’s a 57-minute performance by the group as it existed in 2004:
