Born on June 15, 1938 in Sheffield, UK, Tony
Oxley left us, sadly, two days ago. Founder of Incus label, present with his
name on The Baptised Traveller (CBS, 1969), one of the very first record of
European Improvised music where he is drummer and leader followed by Evan
Parker on tenor, Kenny Wheeler on trumpet, Derek Bailey on guitar and Jeff
Clyne on bass, Oxley was a self taught pianist as a young child and only at 17
he started studying drums.
In 1963 after playing with a military band he
gave life to a trio of musicians including Gavin Bryars and Derek Bailey,
before moving to London where he became sideman for the Ronnie Scott’s. There
he played with musicians like Joe Henderson, Charlie Mariano, Stan Getz, Sonny
Rollins and Bill Evans, and with local glories as Alan Skidmore and Gordon
Beck.
In 1969 he played on Extrapolation by Miles
Davis’ ex guitarist John McLaughlin and then he formed the above mentioned
quintet. Pivotal and key figure for the London Improv scene, at a certain point
he inaugurated a long time collaboration with pianist Cecil Taylor and bassist
William Parker in the famous Feel Trio. I had the opportunity to see them play
live in Italy and the music was outstanding: every musician was playing
indipendently from the other twos, but listening to the three as a whole was an
enormous experience. They were in fact matching exactly together.
Skimming through his vast discography
one can only admire the varius contexts, from due to large orchestra, in which
Oxley played with some of the most important avant-gardists of his own time.
Strangely underappreciated by the critics who come to jazz from other musical
worlds – strangely because Oxley rarely was ‘swinging’ so his approach to drums
full of middle- or micro- rhythms would seem appealing to them at least
theorically – he was a musician’s musician, but he was also very appreciated by
the audience.
Difficult as it was to be an avant garde
improviser in Europe since the 1960s – no easy melodies nor easy rhythms to
approach, and the will to get rid of anxiety with only a sincere will to be
yourself while playing – Tony Oxley always tried to learn new tricks and tips,
curious to put himself in difficult and out-of-the-comfort-zone positions in
order to understand better the essence of the music he was playing and he was
in love with.
Post Punk is one of the most long lasting
musical genre in the alternative rock world. The main characters of that era
starting from 1978 until 1984 are mostly still with us – net of some losses
like that of Mark Stewart from Pop Group – and a new generation of musicians
are setting on fire the world of independent music. In the last months I
reported what Idles
and other
bands have done in this last years. Now’s the time to take a closer look at
the past, thanks to the documentary Kissing Gorbaciov.
It was in Italy during the end of the 1980s, in
Melpignano, a small town in Salento, that some young guys belonging to the
Italian Communist Party took power thanks to the elections in that
municipality. It was the same period in which in the USSR Michail Gorbaciov
took power and we started hearing those words – like ‘perestroika’ or
‘glasnost’ – that sounded like a promise for a better world. The guys in
Melpignano organised a concert of young rock bands, inviting also musicians
coming from the far away Russia.
The concert took place and if some bands coming
from the land of Lenin and Dostoevskij were some interesting, some less, this
event prepared for another, historical one, in which four Italian bands were
asked to play in Moscow and Leningrad in 1989. The most famous of these were
the New Wave band Litfiba and the Post Punk band CCCP Fedeli alla Linea. The
documentary by Mariani and D’Alife we’re referring to is a long interview to
the members of the latter. And it’s very interesting.
First of all CCCP Fedeli alla Linea was a band
openly and extensively reported also in Symon Reynold’s famous book Rip It Up
and Start Again, and that means they were at least for a period of time
internationally known or that at least they had an international scope. And in
listening to their first E.P.s like Ortodossia II (1985) and Compagni Cittadini
Fratelli Partigiani (1985), and their first complete album Affinità/Divergenze
tra il Compagno Togliatti e Noi (1986) one can admire how their distorted riffs
are perfectly matching with a singular singing/screaming helding always the
same note and the drum machine, like in the music of Suicide.
But CCCP Fedeli alla Linea were not only a non
derivative and original Post Punk band held by singer Giovanni Ferretti and
guitarist Massimo Zamboni. Thanks to the help of a ‘soubrette’ (Annarella
Giudici) and of a ‘people artist’ (Fatur) they were able to immerse folks at
their concerts in a decadent middle-European atmosphere. So, as an example, on
the song Curami (‘Heal me’) Annarella was wearing a nurse coat and a helmet for
electro-shock.
Just before the Russian concerts, the
theatrical part of CCCP was explored greatly thanks to a show in which
Annarella and Fatur, onboard because the violence of the music and the quality
of the lyrics was freezing the audience, had the majority of the space in
detriment of the music itself. But reality is that CCCP wasn’t a mere musical
act. They were a (Punk) vision, in which music and theatrical elements could
mix themselves or become the one preeminent on the other based on circumstances
or will of the performers.
The interesting part of the documentary is that
the repertoire images and films are usually used as a reverse shot for the
recollections of the musicians, creating a strange nihilistic effect more than
nostalgia. Ferretti and friends are recollecting memories while seeing the
images under our gaze, becoming newly performers through their own impressions.
Sometimes they laugh genuinely in remembering this or that particular aspect of
a night or of their creative process, but mostly we see older people and
hearing them, younger, singing Produci Consuma Crepa (‘Produce, Consume, Die’)
means being put in front of the time that passes inexorably.
The documentary, created through a
crowdfunding campaign, is release at the same time in which in Reggio Emilia an
exhibition with memorabilia, photos, dresses and other material is available
for the first time to the public, and after a ‘Gran Galà Punkettone’, a concert
by the re-formed band. Unluckily I was unable to attend at the night in which
the two movie directors were present, but anyway the atmosphere was the
opposite of a nostalgic event, and this is truly remarkable.
Notes on how some tracks were written – like Curami
starting from a guitar riff and a bass line that for the singer were
remembering The Cure, so in the end he started to sing ‘curami’, or Emilia
Paranoica emerging from a night of pure despair and fog – are interspersed with
archive images and recollections from the Communist era of USSR and from the
concerts of the other musicians involved, creating a collective narration of a
period lost forever, not necessarily worst than the one we’re living in
nowadays but destined to oblivion as everything.
I was about 23 or 24 the first time I
listened to Tricky. I was a student in a State university then. I remember that
sometimes I was waiting to take the train to go to the city in which I was
studying history, literature and classical music reading some alternative rock
magazines I was buying near the train station. I was reading also on the train.
That time, there was Tricky on the cover of the magazine. It was 1996 and he
was releasing his second soloist effort issued by Island Records,
Pre-Millennium Tension.
The fact is that I was always going in love
easily with paranoid people. I understood this fact while I started reading
William Burroughs. The fact that a paranoid is only a “well informed person”
was clear to me after reading Naked Lunch. Please don’t misunderstand me.
Tricky is not a paranoid in the worst sense of the word. He is because he
cares. In the interview on that magazine, he called back the woman who was
interviewing him after few days because of the fear she was misinterpreting
something he said about his daughter.
Sensitive people is the people I love the most,
so I decided, in an era in which buying an album by an unknown musician was a
bet – spending 20 euros for a music previously unknown, I mean – to buy a
Tricky album, intrigued as I was also by the dark blue cover with that red
globe, and completely noob as far as Hip Hop music. Luckily enough, I would
say. In those years Hip Hop was, more or less as it happens today with Trap music,
an affair of gangs and killings, with the music being as a patinated sountrack
to it after losing his decennial potential as music for a revolution that
didn’t came.
I loved both Pre-Millennium Tension and Nearly
God. I was constantly listening to those albums. Maxinquaye, Tricky’s first
record and masterpiece, came only after for me. But those three LPs and the
fourth Angels with Dirty Faces, Tricky last decent output, were like pure gold
to me. So I was happy to know this year that a re-release of Maxinequaye,
fleshed out with a second disc full of reinvented songs and live performances,
was ready for october. Curiously enough I bought it only yesterday afternoon,
while there was a transport strike and I was, once again, waiting for a train.
For many lovers of rock and punk music, Trip
Hop was the first approach to electronic music. I still remember how many
discussions I had in those days with lovers of New Wave about the fact that, as
an example, The Prodigy were not serious musicians to listen to because their
music was completely or mostly sampled. The same thing didn’t happened with the
Massive Attack, Tricky first approach to music, or with Portishead, or with
Tricky himself.
Taken for a revolution in sound and music, Trip
Hop is nowadays the quintessence of nostalgia. Time passes. But put in
perspective, even if some critics are telling us that Trip Hop was pure
escapism from an unfriendly world, with those slow soundscapes, the use of
marijuana – Tricky smokes it in order to avoid his anxiety for being onstage –
and a use of the recording studio as another instrument as it happens to reggae
and dub – Mark Stewart had a hand in it, so Trip Hop was black music for Post
Punk white guys basically – it’s a fact that this style and genre has renewed
Hip Hop itself in a few years. No Run The Jewels or Anti-Pop Consortium, nor
Dalek without Tricky.
Coproduced by Tricky and Mark Saunders,
Maxinquaye takes his name from Tricky’s mother, Maxine Quaye, who committed
suicide when the singer was four years old. The album is full of samples
reworked until they become mostly unrecognizable – see the sample from Michael
Jackson’s Bad on Brand Now You’re Retro – and of an attempt to use synthesizers
and effects in order to create a sombre sound, the aura of death is scratched
by a use of the opposite voices of Tricky and Martina Topley Bird, a young girl
who started singing – and her relationship with Tricky later – when she was 15
– she was 17years old while recording her vocals for this album.
But, far from easy scandals, the musical
relationship between the twos, and in particular the presence as a lead
character of Martina on Maxinquaye – differently from Tricky subsequent outputs
– drives us up to a gender overturning that is interesting even nowadays. Tricky
co-signs all the pieces on the album, but the main singer is Martina, with her
subtly raucous but also sweet amd deep voice that creates a nice contrast with
Tricky’s openly black intonation – listen to Hell Is Round The Corner to
understand better, or Pumpkin, with his Smashing Pumpkin’s sampled beat.
Maybe predestined to be a petty criminal if not
for the music – as a teenager he stayed also in jail for a while for small
thefts – Tricky entered the court of Massive Attack renamed Tricky Kid from
Adrian Thaws, but sooner some of his earlier productions made record companies
look for him to make him debut with an entire album. The second disc included
in this reissue features five ‘reincarnated’ versions of Strugglin’, Aftermath,
Ponderosa, Hell is Round The Corner and Pumpkin that are basically vocal tracks
– where Tricky’s new muse, Marta, substitutes Martina, with minimal drums and a
few effects.
Nocturnal and pensive as the new reworked
tracks are, and quite different from the original pieces so that they make us
think of a rewriting more than of a simple remix of the old songs, after them
there are live versions of some of the album tracks taken from some BBC Radio
sessions from 1995 and from a Glastonbury live concert of the same year where
Allison Goldfrapp embellishes Pumpkin and the electric guitars are more
preeminent than in the studio versions, leaving us with the feeling of a suture
between Trip Hop and the aforementioned Post Punk, that years before Tricky
combined black and white music – see Pop Group, Gang of Four and similar.
Between the following ‘rough monitor mix’ there
are the previously unheard on the album She Devil and Just for the Hate of It
where Tricky and Martina presences are more balanced, as in the following
Pre-Millennium’s Christiansands, while Overcome and Black Steel are possibly,
net of some d’n’b sensations, more similar to what Mark Stewart, originally
coopted as producer but soon defenestrated because the music he gave life to
was too dissonant, intended them. Finally, Leftfield remix for Brand Now You’re
Retro closes with an interpretation of Tricky from another, different
perspective and sensitivity.
If you missed the opportunity or are too young
to have been able to listen to Tricky when a teen or so, this is possibly one
of the best opportunities you’ll ever have. Reissues are usually an occasion to
beat cash for every artist, but this time, as it happened to Tom
Waits few months ago, and in a way also to Nirvana with the recent reissue
of In Utero, is the opportunity to reckon with a form of art that says so much
about the times it was conceived in. Since also Pre-Millennium Tension, as
Massive Attack’s Mezzanine has been reissued this way, we hope to see also
Portishead or other Trip Hop heroes being re-released this intriguing way.
It’s been a while since I limed the ground of
Milano’s Conservatory. Ten years ago I was attending at some classical concert,
and now it’s the time for Michael Gira’s legendary band Swans. On the strenght
of a new album, The Beggar (Young God Records, 2023) that was acclaimed by the
press as one of the most intriguing albums this year, the band is touring
extensively through Europe.
In fact after the Covid pandemic and the
erasing of a tour voices were circulating of a tired Michael Gira, and as it
seemed to a lot of critics his last album is a reflection on the themes of
becoming old and of being tired after a life spent always on the edge. Plus,
I’ve read anticipations online talking about an acoustic concert, and I was
very curious. But again: nothing more far from the truth. Gira and Co. played a
huge electrified set yesterday night. But let’s start from the Beginning.
Norman Westberg appeared on every Swans’ album
from their debut Filth until 1991’s White Light from the Mouth of Infinity.
Tonight he opens with a set for electric guitars and various electronic
devices. At the beginning you think this is blues for the new millennium, with
Westberg as the Ry Cooder of No Wave, but after a while you find he’s
unbearably near the New Age, with no attention to the dynamics of sound, a
little bit flat – volume is at mid level for all of the performance – and with
no will to scratch over the surface.
Things go differently, after a quick stage
change, with Gira and his band. In fact I’ve been invested by one of the huge
sounds I’ve ever met. Only Keiji Haino was so assertive as far as volume, many
years ago in Reggio Emilia. After the concert my ears are ringing a little
again this morning while writing, and this is the sign of a band who is giving
itself completely: people, down from the steps of the theatre, enjoyed the
night and the informality Gira invited everyone to reach.
In line with musicians / conductors such as
Prince, Miles Davis or John Zorn, Gira was giving instructions to the band with
his hands and his body, as to where to reach pitches and maintaining the volume
high, as to intersperse the sound with meaningful silences, as to increase or
decrease the sound volume. This theatrical aspect added drama to a music that
is still theatrical in its being ritualistic.
If I have to move a criticism, the only thing
I’d say is that, as it happened many years ago when I attended to a concert of
Jarboe, Gira’s lost half of Swans, I felt that something was missing. I can’t
tell exactly what, but something were lacking last night. Maybe the music was
too perfect, with no other space but for a single Gira’s scream during the tour
de force of an aptly stretched I’ll Forever Love You that pierced the band wall
of sound.
I mourned myself so, for not having see
previous live shows of the band, just to have a term of comparison. Obviously
the amount of sound was a spiritual attempt to wake up people but also a
protection from the outside world that incorporated its dangers in itself, but
this ambiguity haven’t been managed properly, maybe. But don’t mind about me
ruminating too much on what I’ve heard.
Swans are far from being historicized. They are
one of the most important current bands you’ll ever come across during these
years. Years in which we are standing for our necessary incomes and a little
bit of love while the rest of the world is burning around us for the wars and
the global warming. Music can be both a protection but, as every protection, also
a container for our anguishes and fears. And this is the lesson we listeners
took with us at the end of the night.
On a rainy night I finally encountered some of
my heroes from my youth, drummer Andrew Cyrille and bassist William Parker,
accompained by trumpet player Enrico Rava in an interesting concert in a full
occupied theatre in my city of birth. Not their first effort together, since
the three released a record in 2022 titled Too Blues for Cecil (Tum Records),
an hommage to pianist Cecil Taylor with whom under different circumstances the
three played together and played together in different occasions.
Andrew Cyrille, in effect, was one of the first
drummers to appear near the NY born pianist in two beautiful records by Blue
Note label who sanctioned the maturity for Taylor: Unit Structures and
Conquistador (both released in 1966). William Parker was part of the Cecil
Taylor Feel Trio along with drummer Tony Oxley – I had the opportunity to
listen to that trio: everyone was playing his own thing almost separately from
the other twos, but it all worked so fine together.
As far as Rava, finally, in 2022 was
distributed through
bandcamp a recording from 1984 originally recorded in Warsaw by an ensemble
comprising the Italian trumpet player and Taylor – and William Parker –
commanding one of his large ensembles he was famous for. But this is not the
only occasion the two played together: it’s only a good advice for you in order
to find out incredibly interesting music from the past.
A magnificent concert the one I attended
yesterday night, with a couple of Monk themes – Round About Midnight and
Straight No Chaser – put one in the middle, the other almost at the end of the
exhibition, echoing not only the pianist from Rocky Mount but also the phantom
of Miles Davis who recorded those themes, and the rest as pure improvisation.
Rava in a Miles mode with short sentences to which drummer and bassist
responded with their instrument.
Not a telepathic interplay as the one offered
by Mingus – the only bassist I can compare Parker, not by the techniques they
use but as far as feeling even if their personalities are far from each other –
bands, particularly drummer Dannie Richmond, but an intriguing way to underline
every phrase from one musician to another. At a certain point Rava made a
gesture with his hand indicating a circle to Cyrille, if this recalls something
in your mind.
Cyrille is able to create complex
polyrhithms, but in this occasion he also gave a lession in swinging to younger
drummers. Parker didn’t use that much his famous bow on his bass, only in few
point to underline the music in some passages. One might wonder where the
spiritual charisma from groups as In Order To Survive is finished – but the theme
from Criminals at the White House was beckoned yesterday night at a certain
point – but I believe it has been transformed into a new kindness.
Dense up to a certain point, but gentle as
Cyrille’s brushes on the skin of the drums, varied as you can exspect from
seasoned musicians, full of nuances and not only of thick textures, the music
did not pay hommage to the letter to the music of Cecil Taylor but was
nonetheless a sum of the experiences of the three musicians involved, and so an
indirect hommage to the late great pianist.
If I have to find a defect to what I heard,
this resides not in the music but in times. William Parker would subscribe the
phrase by Coltrane “I want to be a force for the good”, but with wars all
around the world these three musicians who were ‘only’ playing music were
seeming to me so small in comparison to what they have around in terms of
conflicts and climate change, as an example. But I believe if I had in mind
more than the music itself, this has to be credited to them, since music
yesterday night was still, as it has to be, more than just a sum of sounds.
People has not been very aware of who Angelo
Bruschini was possibly until he passed away today after a long battle with lung
cancer. Former member of Blue Aeroplanes and other bands, producer of albums
like Strangelove’s self-titled Lp in 1997, he should be known to you my reader
for the guitar parts on the Mezzanine album, one of Massive Attack’s
masterpieces and one of the most intriguing albums from the end of the 1990s.
I still remember the first time I heard the
guitar parts of Angel, Mezzanine’s opening track, with that precise and rich
sound. All the album has this intriguing parts that are perfectly on time, as
if they were played by machines or computers. More than a reference to Neu! or
Can and the krautrock world, Massive Attack accurate timing on this record is
due to the will to create a music that can be felt as alienating and
threatening as in the worst dystopian novel.
Cinematic as that album is, it required all
musicians to border on perfection, something rare in rock music not because of
a lack of technical skills from the people involved in it but because in this
style of music it is required to be emotional and expressive, and perfection
can be an enemy. Mind only during the passing of time how much low fidelity
counted even more or so, so that not only the musicians should have been more
sensitive, but also the recording process involved in it.
I’m relistening to Mezzanine right now, and
pieces like Risingson, full of pedal effects that seem to slow down or even to
brake the music creating a thrilling effect, the dialogue with the ethnic
instruments and electronic parts on Inertia Creeps by a minimal guitar, the
arpeggios on Man Next Door, the few notes spent during some parts of Group Four,
are all testifying of a unique approach to music that made the members of the
band declare today that is “impossible to quantify [Bruschini] contribution to
the Massive Attack canon”.
Far from being a minor loss, that of Bruschini
is instead the loss of a vision shared between musicians and the loss of a
creative process. I still remember how much was praised but also criticized the
approach to music by a band like black midi, of whom I talked earlier this year
in a group post, for an album like Hellfire. This album, far from being
relatable with Mezzanine as an overall project, has a similar approach to music
in that the players seek for perfection of details up to the point of refusing
to leave the listener, for almost an entire record, able to feel his own
thoughts, overwhelmed as he is by the music itself.
Not by chance another dystopian tale
through sound, and in this more direct than Mezzanine who is open to
intepretation, both bands created a perfect device in order to take the
listener and guide him through a mirror up to another dimension that tells many
things about the present time when the album was conceived: Mezzanine has left
people into a middle-ground, with all the implied sensations, while Hellfire
leave the current audience almost dismembered. Time has passed, and society has
changed for the worst since 1998 up to 2022.
Finally a part of history, Angelo Bruschini now
can rest in peace and it’s up to us to come back to the times in which, through
records or live performances – I remember one in Milano in 2010 at Circolo
Magnolia where the visuals remembering also the brutal murder of Stefano Cucchi
in my country by policemen were compensating a too much patinated sound – since
he and the music he created were such an important part of our lives.
Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California,
on May 11, 1936, pianist and composer Carla Bley has sadly passed away
yesterday due to a brain cancer, as told by her husband, bassist Steve Swallow.
For a long time associated with free jazz, Bley during her career spanned
through a vide variety of registries, including solos, duos – the longtime
collaboration with Swallow – up to exploring all the potentials of big bands.
The most famous projects she collaborated with
are obviously Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, a line up that
changed during the decades producing at least one masterpiece – their firsts
album for Impulse! released in 1970 – and the project under her name Escalator
over the Hill (JCOA, 1971), a triple album for a big band including Jeanne Lee,
Gato Barbieri, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Leroy Jenkins, Enrico
Rava, Roswell Rudd and many others.
The work was inspired by poems of Paul
Haines and it was depicted as a “masterpiece” and by some as “the most
important record of all times”. Far from sensationalism, EOTH is simply one of
the most successful attempts to mix free jazz, rock, indian music – ragas in
particular – and the cabaret music of Kurt Weill. Intense, physical and
intellectual at the same time, the album is an unicum in a career that quite
often explored delicate and meaningful places such as in the case of pieces
like End of Vienna from the album Fancy Chamber Music (ECM, 1998) with its
violin, viola, cello and flute delicate and intense dialogues.
In fact, Bley’s music was not only and not
always dense and thick, since many times it was lyrical and meditative as in
Fleur Carnivore, full of references to classical compostions, even if reworked
through a jazz sensitivity, as in More Brahms from Sextet (ECM, 1987) or again
adventurous and evocative as in the compositions selected by the Jimmy Giuffre
Trio for the alum Jimmy Giuffre 3 (ECM, 1961).
As it happened earlier this year with the
losses of Peter Brotzmann and Tristan Honsinger, the death of Carla Bley
deprives us not only of a magnificent musician/composer, but also of a refined
human sensitivity so useful in these days of conservatorship and cultural, but
not only cultural, homologation. Even because these musicians will not be
replaced by new or younger ones, more influenced by the days they’re living in
than the older ones, freer and less inclined to compromise first and foremost
in their minds.
Being able to see a concert at 8.00 PM in Milan
is almost an absolute novelty, even if I remember that when I lived in London
that was the standard time to attend live events. In fact this is the right
time since you have a regular job in the morning, maybe the early morning and
you need to get up at dawn. This is not the case since it’s Friday and tomorrow
I’ll sleep a little bit more than in the previous days.
Nonsenses or discussions about the weather
apart, tonight Friday 13 instead of the usual bad luck we have Ibrahim Maalouf
(trumpet, piano) playing with his friend François Delporte at electric guitar.
When I see Maalouf live I ain’t got any expectations: everytime he plays
something different and with different musicians. But yesterday night in effect
Maalouf have surprised me even more, because the most part of the concert was
based on interactions with the audience and his talks. But let’s start with
some order.
The introduction to the live show is held
by Maalouf playing the beginning of a love song by the legendary Oum Kalthoum.
The piece would have been last the entire concert, so we heard only a small
part of it, but it was a nice beginning. Then Maalouf took the microphone and
started talking about the roots of the pieces he would eventually play, like
one song for her daughter who is 14 now and who’s life he tried to depict with
his trumpet.
But this is still far from the very core of the
show, who was a song about hope Maalouf played at the piano asking the audience
to sing the melody: possibly one of the most touching moments I attended
through live music. In another moment, Maalouf asked us to sing à la Louis
Armstrong, thing that we, embarrassed and amused, have been careful not to do.
A nice sketch have followed. At the end of the show Maalouf asked for
forgiveness to that part of the audience exspecting for a regular jazz show.
But, as he told us at the very beginning,
Maalouf after 17 albums and even more years of career needed something
different and so he invited Delporte, a mutual friend, to be part of this show
that possibly was kind of a therapeutic session for him and also for the
public. Atipic as it was, it hit us anyway with Maalouf touching and
sympathetic sensitivity.
So, even if I had only the opportunity to
remember how much a great musician he is, above all at trumpet, in the end I
can’t say I’m not satisfied with what I heard and saw: in these harsh times,
Maalouf is finding his own way out from normalisation, and who can tell he’s
wrong for now? We’ll see what he we’ll cook us in the future. For the moment,
Maalouf passed my exam, for what it’s worth.
Finally the fall has arrived, and live music
comes with it. Jazz Mi is a revue of jazz and pertaining music, full of
intriguing shows: concerts, panel discussions, movies with live soundtracks,
and so on. The opening was let yesterday night to guitarist and producer Arto
Lindsay – the aficionados of this blog are remembering an old
review of his concert with Sainkho Namtchylak – who played a set of his
compositions along with bassist Melvin Gibbs and the sound design of Stefan
Bummer while waiting for the release of his new album next spring.
The venue was spectacular, held on four floors
full of people with Lindsay playing in what for people above him would have
been similar to a pit. Luckily enough I was at ground floor at few steps from
the musicians, so I had the opportunity to hear everything as it should have
been: honestly I don’ know if the place was aptly amplified everywhere and the
volume of the music was nice only for the first rows, or the first floor
anyway, or at least this is what came to me.
Now, let’s start from the end. I will not bore
you with how much the music was good – and it was up to a certain point – and
with the fact that Lindsay was trasforming his guitar and pedals into a sound
design machine, thanks also to Bummer that only in one occasion was stopped by
the guitarist since he was not producing the effects he wanted or no effect at
all as he wanted; I will not bore you also telling you how much both the Brazil
influenced songs were nice with all that slight guitar noise around and inside
them, as it happened to the songs more in the new/no wave vein.
It all was true and effective, but if I have to
tell you the truth, about the end of the concert, before the encores, I was
hoping for the concert itself to finish. And the reason is that the concert was
good, but it was all too much gentle and compromissory in my opinion. The
place, a foundation held by a famous Italian fashion designer, was not the
right place for this music as far as me, and the music itself was influenced as
it would have not happened otherwise. Obviously I’m talking about accents and
the general drive of the music, which I appreciated as a whole but with a
little bit of a disappointment for the intention that produced it.
Remember that Arto Lindsay started his musical
journey with DNA and Lounge Lizards, two no wave bands – even if labels are the
less important part of the story – one devoted to one chord noise guitars
pieces, and the other to distort the music of Thelonious Monk other than in
producing their own tracks on the albums and in concert. Lindsay as many others
were true revolutionaries, in the sense that they assumed the risk of being
rejected because they had a peculiar vision of their own. This vision nowadays
has been weakened by the world around the musicians, so it’s not their fault
but they pay consequences as each one of us.
That’s why in the end I hoped that Lindsay
would stop playing quickly after more or less than one hour – as it happened.
Obviously I’m not expecting that in 2023 people would love to play and listen
to music only in squatted centres or in occupied spaces at the highest possible
volumes as it happened in the last decades, when music and politics were mixing
together. On one hand in fact I believe that a political act by a musician is
to play as they want. On the other hand, how could they play freely themselves
with that audience and in those spaces? Another thing to worry about is the
lack of young guys. I am in my 50s now and all people around me were about my
age.
So my general impression was that
Capitalism won and it bought all of our souls, including that of the musicians
we’re attending to through their records and live shows. I remember when Bono
was singing in 1991 “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, all
kill their inspiration and sing about the grief”. Now, more than 30 years before
those lines, it’s as if there is no more grief but a little bit of diluted
creativity so that people in the business can be seen as the ones who are
saving the world of art. It’s not my perspective, anyway wait for more news
from Jazz Mi festival in the next days.
There are few occasions where you start
listening to one album casually and, even if you’ll need to deepen it with more
attendances, you know you are dealing with some important music. This happened
to me almost at the beginning of this year with Algiers’ Shook. But this
happened to me to some extent with e more intensity with False Lankum. The
Dublin’s collective has an intriguing story on its own, so it’s better to start
with some background in order to have a wider context.
Brothers Ian (vocals, Hammer Dulcimer,
hurdygurdy, Uillean pipes, concertina, piano, electronics, noise, loop) and
Daragh Lynch (vocals, Hammer Dulcimer, piano, organ) gave life to the a band
called Lynched self producing three albums variously described as alternative
rock, indie rock, and/or influenced by the blues, even if their first output,
Where Did It All Go Wrong (Cd Baby, 2013) was in fact a mix of influeces taken
from krautrock, punk, drone music and psychedelia mostly.
Strong also for the presence of musicians such
as Cormac Mc Diarmada (vocals, fiddle, viola, banjo, bowed banjo) and Radie
Peat (vocals, harp, concertina, harmonium, mellotron) the band released three
albums, more and more keen on rivisiting their cultural heritage and folk Irish
music, even if full of ‘strange’ accents coming from their many influences. In
2017 they signed with Rough Trade finally, and released their first album as
Lankum titled Between the Earth and Sky.
Other musicians involved in the current Lankum’s
line up are John Murphy (subsonic, vocals, samples), John Dermody
(percussions), Cormac Begley (bass concertina), Sadhbh Peat (concertina), Andy
Fenstermaker (vocals), Iona Zajac (vocals) and Ruth Clinton (theremin). The
amount of musicians involved obviously make you imagine the variety and the
nuances of the music you’ll find in the album, one of the most impressive I’ve
heard this year.
First band that comes to mind to many music
lovers as far as ‘folk revival’, along maybe with Gloaming and Stick In The Wheel, and adored by
legions of music critics, Lankum have released few time ago a new album this
year, and it is possibly one of the most intense records you’ll listen to in
2023. But let’s start with deep diving the record, from the firs track to the
last coda, in order to understand why this album is so special.
The record opens with the first single Go Dig
My Grave, a choice against the current since it’s more than eight minutes long,
but the visual impact of the video will be of help with people to familiarize
with the band and its musical content. The song comes from a group of ballads
originally created in 1611 circa, and many of the verses were originally
composed as stanzas of various different ballads, such as A Forlorn’s Lover
Complaint.
The theme is the death for love. But more than
that, what is fascinating in this piece of music is the almost limping cadence,
as of someone who can walk with difficulty – a tormented soul? It can be ... –
that find it’s resolution in a coda that reminds the violin parts on the first
GSYBE album F#A#∞ (Constellation, 1997). The coda is also the beginning of the
following Clear Away in the Morning, a meager acoustic guitar melody
interspersed by the noise sounds of a drone.
The vocal, doubled melody is representing a
work song from a 1983 album by the folk singer Gordon Bok (from Camden, Mayne)
with the vocal choruses fitting perfectly with the instrumental parts. After
the first two songs, appears a Fugue (there are three, splitting the album in
four parts) that is almost a noise crescendo abruptly stopping, and after that
it begins Master, Crowley, a song Peat was made aware by the well known
concertina player Noel Hill.
Featuring as special guests the concertina
players Cormac Begley and Peat sister Sadhbh, the piece is a rhythmic variation
on a theme and is a song that fills the air with tension – thanks also to some
musical brushes that depict noise at the very core of the piece before the
re-entering of the melody - in order to pass to the following track, Newcastle,
of which Lankum were educated by Seàn Fitzgerald from The Deadlians, even if
the song was first issued in 1651.
After another interlude, a second Fugue, it’s
time for the acoustic guitars and voices to start the beautiful melody of Netta
Perseus, with a coda where a musical heatbeat is superimposed to the violins.
The New York Trader describes a criminal on board a ship being detected by supernatural
means, with the violins and the concertina leaving you imagine what comes
after, while Lord Abore and Mary Flynn is possibly a Scottish ballad that came
to Ireland through the United States.
The most bare of the songs on the album
is embellished by the vocal melodies both male and female, a Lankum trademark
you’ll find all over in many of the songs, and by an instrumental, even if
minimal, crescendo. After the last Fugue, it’s time to close the album with the
intense On a Monday Morning, first released in 1966 with its melody for male
vocals and acoustic guitar interspersed with the sparse sounds of a harmonium,
and the final, 12 minutes long, The Turn, with its noisy but not
randomly-executed and contained coda.
With its one hour and ten minutes of music,
False Lankum is possibly my choice, if any, for a record of the year.
Differently from lot of folk music I heard in the past, this is a reworking
that takes into account many of the best musical experiences we had in the last
twenty – to say the least! – years, and this way it applies to be one of the
most intense, contemporary and original musical experiences you’ll find in
2023.
The last time I heard a perfect rendition
of a contemporary music piece live is something that don’t come to my mind so
easily. In fact I have to get back to a violin solo for a Cage work I heard more
than ten years ago in a small venue near the Garibaldi Railway Station of
Milano held by a couple of then friends of mine. I was really satisfied by the
music and in a way disappointed by some members of the audience who told the
young performer something as “you gave me pleasure [with the music]”.
The concept of having pleasure from music as it
were sex is an idea many listeners of music here in my country shared with me
in the past years, even implicitly. I don’t like it, but that’s it: after all,
music can also be sensuality – I remember a beautiful bellydancer during an old
performance by Ibrahim Maalouf, that I’ll go to see next week, that I really
enjoyed, but as far as music I think the best praise you can give a musician is
still the old fashioned “you moved me into another dimension”.
After all, music is something you need in order
to furnish time – as we furnish space with paintings sometimes – but, far from
being a mere embellishment, in the art of music you can find the seeds of every
revolution since when you listen to a piece of art you’re outside the
capitalistic mechanisms of “do ut des”, as old Romans would have said, and this
happens even if you have payed a ticket. In my own country some politicians 20
years ago said “You cannot eat with culture” and this became a mantra then, and
now is a reality.
But let’s go to today event, that was held at
Adi Desing Museum as it happened last week with the John Cage performance.
Actually, I was skeptical for today’s four hours of Morton Feldman’s For Philip
Guston since all the things you can find in my
review of the past weekend concert. But after the start of the performance
I had to change my mind quickly and easily. The performance was very similar to
some old recordings I found out last sunday after I’ve been told of this gig.
And this is because the musicians, a nice trio
composed by Sara Baldini (flutes), Veronique Delcambre (piano and celesta) and
Jean-Louis Maton (percussions) plus Frank Gizycki at coreographies and dance,
were very conscious of the music they were going to play. Inspired by Philip
Guston paintings, in which figures and/or textures emerge slowly from the colors
imprinted on the canvas, Feldman’s music slowly reveals itsel to the listener.
Small melodic cells made of few notes, an inner
and suggested dialogue between the instruments: Feldman painted the music with
nice and gentle gestures, influenced by the most intriguing visual artists of
his time as it happened also for the Rothko Chapel composition. These late
works, as the one we’re reviewing, have this quality of letting the thoughts
flow from your head after a sequence of few notes, and it is in my opinion
music for meditation.
Gizycki’s dance was at the beginning a little
bit too much descriptive, but after quite some time the music kind of took him
over as if it was suggesting to him to become more keen on marking time or
playing with the equilibrium, as it happens with Butoh dance for instance.
Unluckily the festival is over, but next week I’ll attend an exhibition by Arto
Lindsay and another by Ibrahim Maalouf, so I won’t let my readers dry as far as
reviews of live music.
Eunice Waymon, born in 1933, seemed devoted to a
career as a classical pianist since she was a child.She was not the first
ever, as Gianni Del Savio underlines in “Nina. La storia musicale e
politica di Nina Simone” (Shake Ed. Underground, 2023), but her future seemed to be
bright.The young woman's career came to a halt due to the color of her skin and
the fact that she was a woman, but the girl didn’t lose heart and so, after she
moved to New York, she began a career as a soul singer and pianist.
Soul is a controversial music, made of sacred
melodies and lyrics praising sex as well as the daily life of African
Americans, and not everyone saw it favorably.To avoid running into problems with her
family, the girl decided to change her name: she became Nina (a diminutive
given to her by a Hispanic friend) Simone (from Simone Signoret, a French
actress much loved overseas in the 1950s and 1960s).The rest is history:
the success, that music made of jazz, quotes from Bach, Billie Holiday from
which she took up both Strange Fruit and I Loves You, Porgy from the opera
Porgy and Bess, the political commitment in the years of MalcolmX, more or less happy
love stories.
Bigger than life – a black woman, a very well
educated one, emotionally intense but also bipolar, Nina Simone was praised for
her art as much as misunderstood, possibly, as a person. Amiri Baraka, as Del
Savio recalls, spent words of comprehension even for her most troubled behaviors,
while people like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave were really happy for the few time
they spent together or the few words of appreciation by her.
Sick for a breast cancer in her last years, after
she lost her family – the relationships with both father and mother were not
easy at all, not to mention her connection with the daughter who tried a
similar career – she was isolated almost completely for a period of time by the
people she chose in order to take care of her, but in the end her exile in
France was a choice not completely deepened in the book and maybe a more
simpathetic writer would have give us more insights.
Gianni Del Savio to be honest have an interesting
curriculum, beeing an historical collaborator for Musica e Dischi, Il Buscadero and Radio Popolare. In 2016 he published
another book dedicated to Dr. Nina Simone, showing to the world an outsdanding
appreciation for one of the most important Africa American perfomers, maybe the
most intense after Billie Holiday. But this is only my opinion.
Interesting dissertation the one in this nice book anyway, also because many of her albums, above all the one recorded from the end of the 1970s, desappeared from the shelves of the record shops and as far as I can read there are hidden gems along with other stuff more trendy at least in the times they saw the light. The book is enriched and embellished by the lyrics of many Nina Simone successes, with a notable interest for the ones more politicized. But also the most intimate sometimes are reported, so that the Italian listeners more lazy can finally appreciate how a fine lyricst and selector - as far as the covers - Nina Simone was.
Strange as it can seem this brief article to an international audience, since the book have been at least for the moment issued only in Italy and in Italian, my hope is that someone would translate it in English and that Gianni Del Savio will be able to give life maybe to a new edition, with a more extended analysis of Nina Simone last years, and above all an examination of at least part of the artists who took seriously Simone's challenge to create revolutionary and spiritual art.
With the end of the summer one hopes for
more live appointments and in a city like Milano there is plenty of occasions
if you’re a classic or pop/trap music lover. There’s also an intriguing JazzMi
Festival that features live performances of Ibrahim Maalouf – I got tickets for
him so you’ll read a review as soon as I get there – and of unreachable, if you
live outside the town and need to take a train ride late at night, concerts by
the likes of a trio led by Hamid Drake, another trio with Andrew Cyrille and
William Parker, plus a Halloween exhibition of the Sun Ra Arkestra at around
10.30 pm.
Obviously I will not attend such venues, and
I’m really sad about that, but the God of music, if any, decided to leave me
the opportunity to follow, for some saturday afternoons, a beautiful and
intriguing marathon of contemporary music live performances titled “Back to New
York: Downtown Music Sketches”. This way, this saturday I had the opportunity to
attend to a performance by pianist Franco Venturini and dancer Giacomo De Luca,
centered around three beautiful pieces by John Cage: The Seasons, Ophelia and In A Landscape.
We don’t need to introduce the multi-faceted
figure of John Cage with more or less quick prefaces, also because here in my
country the Milanese publishing company Shake
Edizioni Underground is issuing all the writings by the Maestro – the
second volume is just ready to be printed and it will be presented to the
audience next Tuesday. If you’re curious about the piano performer, Franco
Venturini, you can find an incisive bio at the following link.
More interesting is the performance in itself,
inspired by the longtime collaboration between Cage and Merce Cunningham, one
of the most important dancers and coreographers of the last century. Between
the creators of the postmodern dance, Cunningham was a long time friend of Cage,
sharing his concerns about formal rules in the art world. Also
contemporaneously both started studying the possibilities of chance and I-Ching
in particular, events that led to pieces like Sixteen Dances for Soloist and
Company of Three (1951) where the nine emotions (or rasas) of the Indian
aesthetic were presented in an order determined by chance.
The performance we attended this afternoon
started with recordings of Cunningham’s voice diffused through an old analogic
tape recorder, positioned over a metal box in which a transparent plastic bag
was containing the music sheet for the performance. The most interesting part
of it, to tell the truth, were the ones where the two, pianist and dancer, were
percussing or crawling the strings of the piano because the chance generating
the sounds was cagean in all its effects.
If I have to find out a defect in the piano
performance, I would find two. The first one: too much emotion and melancholic
coat in part of the performance, the one where the piano arpeggioed a music
that, more than Cage, was resembling the one by a sentimental composer. The
second one: too much will and power in the overall performance, as if the
composer was Beethoven and not Cage. Unluckily the pianist were dealing with
music composed by a Zen composer, that means surprise for the listener, not
deep emotion by the performer.
At a certain point I remember vividly I was
bored by the arpeggios, but at a certain point I was shaked by some attack, and
so I thought “mmmh ... dynamics, you know what to do, right?”, but even if
Venturini knows his work better than Thom Yorke – The Smile is a futile
project, badly orchestrated and cooked worse – for sure the effect was that of
a Romantic piece of music, full of drama and sense of resistance to a fall,
which is far from the feelings Cage wanted to transmit to the audience through
music.
As far as the dancer, I can’t criticize it
since I’m training as an actor since a couple of years and if it weren’t for my
feet – I broke the left in the last months – I would have trained myself yet
into the contemporary dance world not to become a dancer myself but to know
better what to do with my own body onstage, so the only thing I can say is that
I couldn’t find so much postmodernism in De Luca, whose attitude is overtly
sentimental as the one by the pianist. The circles he was drawing in the air
with his own body after playing with small compass over a blue book is an
example of what I’m saying.
I can’t tell who influenced who, but the mix
between the two performers is as far as results interesting enough if you want
to see two artists interacting together with a common goal, but unsatisfying as
far as an attempt to take Cage and Cunningham attitude back to us. I know it is
a way long discussion in the world of classical music, the diatribe between
conservatorship and will to innovate, but as far as myself I want to point out
that first you have to undestand what you’re handling and only after that you
can do something new if this is your path to glory.
Frankly, this afternoon I missed the part in
which the performers were elaborating all the spurs coming from the music
sheet, the possible old recordings of the pieces, the videos if any of
Cunningham performing with Cage, in order to give us something more contemporary
than the music and the dance of 70 years before; as far as it seems, they
passed over all of it with no that much grace and gave to the audience an essay
about their sensitivity, and what is wrong to me is that your sensitivity need
always to grow and face with what you’re handling, instead of being like a
tank.
Things are becoming weirder and weirder if
you’re a music lover in the present times. I was looking for a copy of
Tinariwen’s new album since when it was released earlier this year. I ordered
my copy last April through a bookstore who also sells records in Milan, and at
a certain point I came back since no message for the order was sent to my phone
trough SMS as I was told it would have happened.
Once at the bookstore, I canceled the order
since the guy there told me that the Italian distributor for Wedge was not
sending to the physical shops the CD version of their albums, and I don’t own a
stereo system through which listen to vynils. At a certain point, Tinariwen
came to Milan, near where I’m living, for a live exhibition, so I hoped to grab
a copy of their album in that occasion, but I had to let it go since that night
I had a special lession for my theatre workshop: in one week we would have been
onstage so I needed to rehearse more.
Finally today I was skimming through the
shelves of that bookstore again coming from a cinema, and, before Tool, i found
out a section for Tinariwen – and the CD was there! I suppose the distributor
changed his own mind, or maybe simply the physical CDs came from California
where the label is located and the distributor needed to finally honor his
commitment. It doesn’t matter anymore: Tinariwen’s last CD, Amatssou, that
means ‘Beyond the Fear’, is now spinning on my old PC where I’m writing this
review and I’m happy about the purchase.
The story of Tinariwen is more adventurous than
the story of how I obtained my copy of their last album, as it happens to many
intriguing forms of art. All started when a young Ibrahim Ab Alhabib, orphan
and exile in Algeria started listening to rai and chaabi music, along with
Touareg melodies and the blues. He tried to reproduce such styles with a
self-built guitar, with which he performed in Touareg refugee camps from the
1980s on.
At the end of the 1990s Ab Alhabib and his
acquired friends and fellow musicians Alhassane Ag Touhami and Inteyeden Ag
Ableine met at the Festival Au Désert in Mali Justin Adams, a musician who at
the time was part of Robert Plant, the ex Led Zeppelin singer, band. The two
produced Tinariwen’s first album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions (Wedge, 2001), and
in few years, also thanks to the diffusion of Mali musicians in the Western
world – the likes of Toumani Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré and Rokia Traoré amongst
the many others – they became one of the best new sensations from that musical
environment.
Tinariwen, as it happened to the most famous
guitarist Ali Farka Touré, is the kind of group who produces almost always the
same kind of records without becoming manieristic or cloying. It is obviously a
matter of accents – as an example this last album sees an important presence of
violins to flank the notorious electric guitars – but this music always sounds
fresh and thrilling to the listener, maybe also because of the experience of
the musicians involved.
Anyway, from Amassakoul (World Village, 2004),
their second album and the one I listened to the most in the past years, and
this last Amatssou, the evolution is evident. The production by Daniel Lanois
(U2, Depeche Mode, Bob Dylan among the many others) help sounds to be fresher and
more vivid than in the past, and the many musicians and featured instruments
involved – lute, pedal steel guitar, piano, banjo, violin – help the music to
sound as renewed from its inside.
The album is divided in three parts by two
interludes played by an African fiddle with only one string and this division
helps the music to be more sharp and precise at the same time. Ken Alghalm, the
opening track, is a three minutes ride that leads us in the middle of
Tinariwen’s world. Tenere Den is the first track with the add of the violins,
and as in many other occasions we hear the voice and the melody backing each
other creating a nice and intriguing unison: when the voice leaves, the guitars
and the violins are free to express themselves giving you an intense sense of
freedom.
Obviously this is hypnotic music as the music
produced by musicians coming from a desert can be. Not that much telluric as
the music by the Master Musicians of Jajouka, but nonetheless psychedelic.
Arajghiyine has as a base this nice interlocking between guitars and
percussions, where melodies and rhythm mix together perfectly, whereas Tidjit
with its almost limping strut represent at perfection the music of the band,
thanks to a guitar sound that electrifies the air filling it with circular
melodies.
Jayche Atarak is another immersion into the
deepness of the desert’s vision, one of the most slowed down and relentless
tracks of the entire album. Even the hand claps will give you that sense of
needing to take a rhythm with your own body since the musical instruments
aren’t enough. Imidiwan Mahitinam is a choral singing for the union of all
Touareg people to give life to the revolution.
Ezlan is a song where at the beginning the
violin creates a small wall of sound for the guitar to cling on it, and with
moments of decline and expansion it procedes along the track creating an
intense emotion into the listener. A guitar solo erupts from the sound mass
creating a link between the Touareg music and the most classic American blues.
Anemouhagh is driven by small percussions and a potent choir exalting another
time spiritual unity for all Touaregs in order to prevent their soil to be
exploited.
Iket Adjen has another classic intro of
electric guitar followed by percussions, a true trademark by this band, while
the final Nak Idnizdjam, beginning also with a nice, long guitar solo, talks
about the Touareg people once united and now dispersed “by this whirlwind of
confusion”. Possibly this division and loneliness is what’s “behind the fear”,
as the title of the album states. The Outro is for percussions and a female
voice.
Far from being a product for the Western
listener to consume, as it happened in the past decades where there was a need,
at least during the 1980s, to prepare people to listen to new kinds of music,
after the 1990s there was an original and sincere interest for styles coming
from all over the world with their own specificities and characteristics, and
Tinariwen are a vivid example of how a music group can be himself and at the
same time mix his style with instruments coming from other parts of the world
without misrepresenting himself.
We live times in which we’re almost forced to
disappear, while at the opposite we need to learn from minorities how to
rethink ourselves, our false privileges, and to ask ourselves what we really
want. Music stories like the one of Tinariwen can help us, but also their
music, with this psychedelia that can open our minds again – I wonder how they
can sound live, after appreciating on me the effects of a live version of
Riley’s In C – and let us free to use that openness for whatever we want.
A free gift maybe not that much welcomed due to
the period in which we’re living and the tricks power uses against us, but
nonetheless this gift is here for those who will be able to take advantage of
it. Ethnic music is more than a music genre, is a state of mind. Experimenting
with a tradition means starting with love and going wherever you want to go.
And this is a lesson worth learning.
