Two Pianos, a Harpsichord and a Few Magical Instruments More

One of my favourite activities since when I was young is to go through book and record shops, looking for some hidden gems. You can find records at half price sometimes, or used items, that have nothing to envy to the last releases. Since the one we’re living is a particular time, more devoted to reissues than to new material – with some notable exceptions – I’d love to spend some time talking about some interesting stuff I ran into a couple of weeks ago.

In this small record shop I found out, in effect, for half their price these three CDS of free jazz and contemporary music. Two are double albums. As I discovered at home, listening to them, they were worth the price and the time I spent listening to them. The first album is a piano trio by an old acquaintance of this blog: pianist Matthew Shipp, in a collaboration with long time collaborator bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Norman Taylor Baker. The CD is titled Piano Song and it was released by Shipp’s label Thirsty Ear in 2017. It is the most recent release of the three I’ll write about in this post.

A little disappointed by one of the last outputs by Shipp in a quartet comprising Paul Dunmall, Gereald Cleaver and Joe Morris (here is the review) because of its predictability, I find this other trio album, instead, exquisite, intense, fresh and innovative. Matthew Shipp is, above all, a spiritual musician. The world became aware of him thanks to his work with the great saxophonist David S. Ware, devoted to free jazz and to Ganesh, and thanks to his big open chords and great melodic approach to piano, along with bassist William Parker and many drummers – the one I loved the most was Susie Ibarra – he renowned the great tradition of energy playing, in line with the historical quartet of John Coltrane for the Impulse! label.

The 12 original compositions in this album are great examples of how varied a refinished composer can be musically. There are pieces whispered like a caress full of compassion and others that feature an assertive execution. The two partners are interacting with Shipp not only in order to provide the right accompaniment, but in some compositions, reminiscent of the use of electronics and space in other Shipp’s outputs via his label, they gain the foreground with sonic gestures that leave the imagination free to be hit. The above mentioned use of space as a compositional tool makes me think of Shipp as a contemporary composer, accustomed to modern music – as he told me in an old interview in which he cited Varèse and Baroque music along with Jazz as a first influence to him.

That’s why the second, double album in this multiple review article is so important. It is an album by another great pianist – one of the greatest in jazz history to tell you the truth: ‘Muhal’ Richard Abrams, founder of the Association for the Advancement of the Creative Musicians I mentioned in a series of articles about the Art Ensemble of Chicago few years ago. Abrams is a versatile musician: his many records spans through Contemporary Music and Jazz, and if Sightsong, a beautiful album duo with bassist Malachi Favors from the AEoC was a melodic and melancholic output, this other release, titled Sound Dance and issued by PI Recordings in 2011 is dominated by an impressionistic, pointillistic and vibrating style.

The first disc of the set is a duo with saxophonist Fred Anderson, the second features instead George E. Lewis at both trombone and electronics. If during the concert with Anderson it is more clear who is leading and who is accompanying, the second set is the most intriguing for how both the trombone and the electronics are mixing with the piano notes. The drive becomes less evident, almost hidden, and this sensation of uncertainty comes to the listener without a decisive solution, even if the music is capturing the attention with his beauty and peculiarities. After all what we’re listening to is a dialogue, and, as it happens when you speak to another person, sometimes your words are driven more by the person you’re interacting to than by your ideas and concepts. Call it interaction, or relationship: but it’s the same with music and it’s interesting to hear such a thing happening during a performance.

The most intriguing part of the third album is the second disk, because it features compositions for harpsichord, a far away relative of the piano, and an instrument used mostly in Baroque music but not that much appreciated by Contemporary composers. Xenakis here, as it happens with him, leads the instrument at his limits, and uses the harpsichord mostly as a percussive instrument. It becomes interesting to listen to the composition Komboi, 18 minutes of harpsichord and percussions, because the feeling of an exchange, with the percussive harpsichord and the melodic percussions is something familiar to the listeners of avant garde jazz: you’ll remember for sure that duets between Cecil Taylor and Max Roach.

The first disk, instead, features three compositions for large ensemble – one, Jalons, directed by Pierre Boulez driving his Ensemble Intercontemporain, plus Keren, for trombone, and Nomos Alpha for cello. These are all compositions by the late Xenakis, who let apart his stochastic approach to music – you can read my monography about the composer in this blog – but who was always curious about pushing the boundaries of the instruments: so in the compositions for ensemble, as an example, you’ll not find the usual glissandi but notes mostly on the higher pitches.

I’ve written three reviews of old music – the two Xenakis CDs were released by Warner Classics in 2007 – because I wanted to recap a little the meaning and the practice of a music that nowadays is losing part of its how-to. As I wrote in the last multiple review, when I look around myself I mostly feel the struggling and the difficulties of a niche to be issued and to be heard by a larger audience, and the difficulties from the younger musicians to build a vision from an inner to an outer world. But since the world of rock and other contaminations has mostly completely gone, improvised music and the avant garde is still the most important tool to critique our society and imagine something better.

From September, other releases are waiting for us: from the new edition of Coltrane’s Blue Train with a disk of never heard before material, to a couple of new releases by the Japanese enfant terrible Keiji Haino, one with SUMAC. I hope to hear all of this stuff and more, but for the moment I wanna go back to the records I bought during these last years and share with you some hidden gems that maybe you have lost through the years. After all, music is a matter of love, and not a matter of being fashionable. 

 

 

Peter Brotzmann, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell: The Last Masterpieces?

A couple of years have passed since I grabbed my copies of three records I wanna review even if some other years are passed after their release. The point is that these albums have marked the passing of time and maybe they have put the word ‘End’ to the possible evolution of a musical genre like jazz. A jazz contaminated with both contemporary music and tradition, but it’s not by chance that this backlash comes from three aged musicians – one, Taylor, died four years ago.

In fact, I can’t hear novelties in the world of free and contemporary jazz, even if there IS interesting stuff – search in this blog for any – from younger musicians, but they are quite often incomplete. Some are missing the developing of a personal language, some are missing the developing of a structure that can sustain their personal language, some lack vision. So, since these three discs have collected enthousiastic reviews, I wonder if by chance they are the last word on a world of sound, on a vision, on a musical practice.

Let’s start with Cecil Taylor’s At Angelica 2000 Bologna. I’ve written extensively about Taylor’s music through this post so I ain’t gonna repeat myself. Taylor was the most important pianist to mix contemporary music and jazz music, and still is nowadays. Every contemporary pianist, from Andrew Hill to Matthew Shipp, owes him something, even indirectly. Angelica, instead, is an important and renowned festival that takes place in Italy since 1990 and that hosts the most interesting music in the fields of contemporary jazz, contemporary music, experimental music.

I remember when I had the opportunity to listen to the precious music by Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith in 2011 on May 8, on various combinations. Angelica not only gives us the opportunity to hear such music, but also releases on CD and vinyl some of the most intriguing performances. In 2020, the I Dischi di Angelica label released an intriguing double album by Cecil Taylor. The first disk features the solo performance held at Angelica 2000 by the maestro, while the second features a one hour long interview with Taylor.

The music in this album is Cecil Taylor at his best. Not only you can hear the melodic and the strumming phrases he is well known for, but also the structure of the music – do you remember when Taylor talks about Calatrava bridges? – is quite audible and comprehensible. Obviously one pays the price for Taylor fire, for his poetry, for his mastery in mixing hints of stride piano and contemporary structures, but this is in my opinion, after hearing many of his records and having seeing him also live with his Feel Trio (with Tony Oxley on drums and William Parker on bass), his best performance ever, his spiritual and musical will.

To accomplish this mission there’s also a beautiful libretto with the text of the interview, for those of you who don’t understand english as native language and can have difficulties in listening to an american man talking. The second album for this collective review is another solo, Peter Brotzmann’s I Surrender Dear. Apparently less iconoclastic, noisey and harsh than his usual outputs, this solo album released by Troast Records in 2019 with a beautiful cover by Brotmann himself with crayon on cardboard is like an intimate confession.

I still remember a concert I attended in Oslo in 2011 where he played with pianist Masaiko Satoh but leaving us with a beautiful coda of solo tenor with all our tears spread along the road of our listening experience. This album is different because in a way we can hear, as someone wrote in another review, Brotzmann in an intimate situation, playing standards of jazz but giving them new shape and blood, on the other hand this operation will push us to ask ourselves what is an intimate act – this is, in fact, the Fluxus side of Brotzmann.

In fact we all are accustomed to listen to solo standards as something personal – paradoxically: as far as it seems, in jazz you are yourself the most when you play other people’s music, and the oldest as possible: it is a true topic or it is a convention? – and this is what Brotmann tries to do, but transcending the pieces of music in a personal way, even if renouncing to his usual confrontational approach. Surprising as it can be, a similar attitude will leave the listener with many questions more than with the pleasure of a ‘beautiful’ sonic experience. And this is Brotzmann at his best, conceptually and practically.

And now for the third album, another double: Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side, released by ECM in 2017. The oldest of this trio of albums, is also possibly the most fascinating. I still remember when I was reading in my own language the books by philosopher Davide Sparti, who was applying Foucault theories to jazz music. According to him, jazz music is the music of musicians who know where they start but don’t know where they will arrive to, and who they will be at the end of the performance.

But in listening to this trio performances of compositions by Mitchell, who sometimes acts as a musicians and sometimes lead the trios, you don’t hear such trasmutation, but something new: like a Zen quality of being, immutable and eternal, like the definitive expression of a pure soul. Described by some critics as the best compositions of music after Beethoven’s last quartets – I ain’t joking, the review is available through the internet although written in Italian – Mitchell’s pieces of music represented here were mysterious to me at a first listening, but they have this quality of reproducing sound cells and expressions in a way that really remind me the Zen meditation process.

This way, Mitchell pushes jazz faraway over its boundaries. From a research for a new identity to the affirmation of pure being. Pianos, trumpets, reeds, electric guitars, percussions, drums, noise, all is worth to create a realm of sound that give the listener the sensation of being absorbed in something that is out of time or fully in time, for what is worth. We will not hear easily music of such beauty as the one contained in these three records. So I really believe they are a milestone in contemporary jazz and it’s time for youngest musicians to get over it but starting from it. Unluckily it’s not time for enthousiasm in the realm of music, I can hear more struggle to tell the truth ... 

 

 

Charles Mingus on Paper

I have to confess it: I have a bad memory for books and movies. With the passing of the years, I tend to forgot about everything I read or everything I see. When I see again a film, or a read again a book, my memories tend to be dissimilar from what I reread or I resee. Sometimes I remember more something that occurred in that period of time: as an example, I can remember the feelings in reading the final lines of Saramago’s Blindness or the fact that when I started reading Tropic of Cancer I wanted to regain possess over my instincts, that my catholic education repressed for so many years.

This is also the case with Beneath the Underdog, the beautiful and meaningful autobiography by bassist and composer Charles Mingus, one of my all time favorites musicians. Mingus is luckily so recognized today that his birthday, April 22, has been taken as the International Day of Jazz. His autobiography starts with a confession by Mingus himself to his psychiatrist (the famous lines “In other words I am three” ... ) and, this is what I remember, it ends with Mingus taken into the mental hospital who hosted him for some weeks after a little crisis during which the bassist was completely unable to sleep.

What I was missing is the fact that during that period Mingus was at risk of being lobotomized, and that he was saved by his friend the jazz critic Nat Henthoff. I was made aware of this circumstance by a beautiful graphic novel titled simply Mingus issued in my country and in my language, Italian, by Coconino Press/Fandango last year, a novel created by Squaz with texts written by the music journalist Flavio Massarutto. A novel I have bought today and read during the train trip to home. The graphic novel is terrific. You’ll find the dance for The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, the recording session for the song Original Faubus Fables for the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, the period passed at the mental hospital and other episodes of his life, interspersed with interpretations of Mingus’ covers for some of his most famous albums.

As an example you’ll find the cover of Pithecantropus Erectus followed by a story of primates discovering how to extoll life from their counterparts (very Kubrickian), using tools like spears and stones, then you’ll find the photo for Blues and Roots with Mingus transfigured in a thorns-crowned Christ. But you’ll find also Mingus threatening Shafi Hadi after he composed the score for John Cassavetes’ Shadows. So you have basically all the three Minguses: the one full of music, the one who was at risk of harming himself, the one who endangered to harm others. This is, to tell the truth, the Mingus I like the less. When I think of an interview with one of his musicians in the interesting book Mingus Speaks, written by music journalist John F. Goodman, where Mingus is reported to have almost broke the hand of a pianist and punch on the mouth a saxophonist because they weren’t playing his music as it was intended, I would love to pass the buck. But it’s impossible, because I do love Mingus’ music.

The reason I love jazz is because it’s more than music to me. Coltrane, as an example, made me understand that creating (music) is something related to (universal) love, and so an artist has to pursue the goal not only to improve as a creator, but also as a human being. I talked many times about this issue with friends of mine who are artists (actors, musicians, etc.) and I had different answers to the same questions. One told me once that it was so compelling to him to improve as a musician he didn’t had the time to become also a better person, on the other hand another friend, an actress, told me that she was afraid by people who wouldn’t become better as persons as they age as artists.

My dream, so, was to unify the uman being. Studying acting and a little bit of painting myself, I have this urge to become one, not separating the artist from the man I am. On one hand, so, you have Coltrane who was an example for everyone (there’s also a church devoted to him!), on the other you have Mingus. But who knows, maybe Mingus would have been a worst person without the art he was creating. After all, who am I to judge? One of the problems you can enucleate in reading books such as the three this post is dedicated to, is how Mingus was trying to play with his so-called madness, having this documents he talk about in the interview book where it was written he was unable to understand and want.

Thanks to these documents, he was able to trick some clubs he initially signed an exclusive contract with. So in a way he started profiting about his mental condition and instability. I think this is an enormous confusion for everyone, because it helps you overcome your responsibilities since of your defaillances. Add some episodes from his life like the psychiatrist who wanted to practice electro-shock on him, because the doctor took him for a “paranoid as every black person (is)”, and you obtain a confusion and a certain amount of instability in the life of a man.

As Anthony Braxton wrote many times about Charlie Parker, another jazz cat who had troubles with psychiatry, and to whom Mingus dedicate the composition Parkeriana, people who taste how bitter is the hatred from societal norms, tend quite often to hate themselves. And not only themselves. Mingus was one of the greatest composers, but his social and personal funcioning was compromised by racism and I’d say ‘capitalism’, thinking with this term to the way the music industry was going on during those days in the U.S. After all, one of the reason Mingus hated free jazz and the avantgarde, was the fact that this music was not appealing to the majority of people, leaving the field free for white musicians to consolidate their robbing of rhythm and blues in the form of rock music.

So, if Mingus was ‘paranoid’, he was in the sense William S. Burroughs gave to this word, as ‘a paranoid is a well informed person’. Having treated the issue of Mingus’ violence against some of his friends, musicians, etc., another topic is religion. Mingus’ music is many times the music of a man of faith (Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, the opening of Blues and Roots, is a good testimony of this). But possibly, as stated by Mingus himself on Mingus Speaks, the man who helped him believe in God (and ESP perceptions) was drummer Dannie Richmond, a long time collaborator of the bassist and one of his best friends. His way of playing with Mingus was in fact almost telepathic. Sometimes the bassist tried to hide his instrument from the view of the friend, but he was always imagining what he would play.

As far as Mingus’ style of music instead, he was to me for free jazz like Thelonious Monk to bebop. Monk wasn’t a bopper, he was a world on his own. But he used to meet boppers because their sense of musical creation was the most free in his own time. Same with Mingus. Far as he was from free  jazz (read the firts interviews contained in Mingus Speaks to better understand the topic) he sometimes used musicians coming from that milieu, like multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, because of their attitude to be precise but instinctive as players. In fact, as Mingus himself tell to Nat Henthoff in a beautiful table of the graphic novel Mingus, the bassist was writing all the scores for his own music but didn’t wanted the musicians to read the sheet: he would have preferred to explain the music verbally, and because jazz musicians are always imaginative, Mingus would have obtained more spontaneous rendition of the music in comparison with the written notes. A risk, but a risk in name of the beauty.

How to conclude this little writing? Obviously with some advices. Here below you’ll find some of Mingus finest records and the three books I have talked about in this piece. It’s up to you to enjoy and deepen the music of a true genius through listening and reading. Enjoy.

 

Books about (?) Mingus

Charles Mingus/Nel King, Beneath The Underdog, New York Vintage Books, 1991

John Goodman, Mingus Speaks, University of California Press, 2013

Flavio Massarutto/Squaz, Mingus, Coconino Press, 2021

 

Albums of Mingus

Pithecantropus Erectus, Atlantic, 1956

Tijuana Moods, RCA, 1957

Mingus Ah Uhm, Columbia, 1959

Blues and Roots, Atlantic, 1960

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, Candid, 1960

The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, Impulse!, 1963

The Great Concert of Charles Mingus, America, 1971

Let My Children Hear Music, Columbia, 1972