John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy – Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse!, 2023)

Since the end of the 1990s, with music lovers becoming more open minded like they were possibly in the 1960s and the following decade, Coltrane was again a pivotal figure for all the rock and alt rock aficionados who wanted to become aware of other styles of music, as jazz for example. That’s why there was a huge amount of new releases, mostly live albums.

Many of them were exceptional as far as material but poor in terms of recordings, like as an example the live at the Olatunji Center For African Culture (Impulse!, 2000) with Trane’s last quintet featuring Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. But others were incredibly good: take for instance the double album Live at The Half Note (Impulse!, 2005), with recordings from a radio broadcast of Coltrane’s classic quartet, or again the recording of the entire A Love Supreme suite included in the deluxe edition of the album (Impulse!, 2002) from a Juan-Les-Pins festival, or the recordings with Thelonius Monk (Blue Note, 2005).

All of this material helped people to keep the flame of Coltrane’s music alive and well. In these last years new original material has seen the light of day. The two entire studio records, Both Directions at Once, issued in 2018 and featuring material recorded in 1963, the other studio album Blue World, issued in 2019 but recorded in 1964 and with material dedicated to a soundtrack for a movie titled Le Chat Dans Le Sac by Gilles Groulx, and finally another live version of A Love Supreme recorded at a Seattle’s jazz club in 1965 and issued in 2021.

Now’s the time for this Evening At The Village Gate, recorded live with a single microphone in 1961 just a few times after the recording of Olé Coltrane, featuring the same personnel: Coltrane aside, there are the unforgotten genius of Eric Dolphy, the rhythm section offered by Elvin Jones and Reggie Workman, and McCoy Tyner’s piano. The album, even if in mono, is extraordinary and exquisite as far as the music comprised herein, end it will be possibly one of the albums of the year 2023.

Recorded originally by Rich Alderson the afternoon of a lazy August day only in order to understand if the acoustic of the club was enough good for the night shows, the tapes were lost for many years and finally recovered for the New York Library for Performing Arts. Last July, they were released by Impulse! as a single CD or a double vynil, and are finally available for all of you passionate listeners.

The first track in an incomplete, but beautiful in its almost 16 minutes lenght, My Favorite Things, one of Coltrane most successful compositions reworked and reimagined over and over throughout his entire career where Dolphy and its flute dominate for the first 7 minutes, thanks to an angular and graspy voice exploring both the severe and sharp tones of the instrument, over the propelling circular drums by Elvin Jones, Reggie Workman’s walking bass and McCoy Tyner’s voicings.

When it’s time for Trane to take place, he exploits his typical churning tone at soprano saxophone, that set of techniques that will inspire people like Evan Parker in the following decades. Overacute tones, almost binaural sounds, hints to the melody of the song interspersed with raucous and furious yells, all the arsenal that made some critic write the word ‘anti-jazz’ – we’ll see. But Trane is more than that: from the minute 11 he is able to embellish the melody of the song in a logical and consequential way, again abrasive but far from being an anarchist’s shout.

When Lighs Are Low is another classic tune shaped originally by Benny Carter and Spencer Williams in 1936 and that was subsequently interpreted by the likes of Chet Baker and Miles Davis. This version, again, start with a beautiful, almost cubist solo by Dolphy at bass clarinet, an instrument played in his high register this way only by Dolphy itself and few others trying to imitate him.

Those of you who are familiar with Dolphy’s language through Mingus’ live records will be happy to hear such a soloing in this version of a song played by the Coltrane quartet, since many critics in the past, starting from the studio albums in which the two were collaborating, asserted that Trane and Dolphy collaboration was sometimes harsh and difficult for both, since the melodic and harmonic idea of music by Coltrane was not completely malleable for a musician with the harmonic conceptions of Dolphy.

In this piece, instead, we can hear Dolphy playing at ease and at will for more than seven minutes, before leaving space to his pal and his soprano until minute 10, where the soloing is left to a bluesy and dense McCoy Tyner until the end of the song before a brief assertion by Dolphy again. The following Impressions is almost classical in its proceeding and sees Dolphy as a perfect partner for Coltrane, whose solo is developing lavishly and more consistent, which is so difficult to obtain at the same time, than the studio version.

Dolphy, again at the bass clarinet, shows us that idea of angularity typical of his concept of harmonic leap, even larger than that of Charlie Parker, that made him become famous and peculiar as a musician. The more than 16 minutes for Greensleeves open a song that, far from the original timing on the Africa/Brass album with the Dolphy/Tyner orchestrations, shows us, here, all its potential. Melodic as many of Trane’s material of choice, it becomes a true tour de force for all the musicians involved.

Finally, the most intriguing live execution of the record: Africa, a piece recorded originally for the album Africa/Brass with orchestrations by Eric Dolphy following McCoy Tyner’s piano voicings, with the two horns proceeding at the same time is that manner that was defined ‘speaking in tongues’ by the fans and critics following Albert Ayler and his brother Don in the same years, that means that every horn is proceeding speaking his own thing before taking time for a solo.

The more than 20 minutes of the composition are possibly some of those Steve Reich was referring to during the years as an inspiration for his works as a minimalist, and so they are an important document for all the people who want to understand better the many links between different styles of music such as jazz and contemporary classical.

Far from being a mere exhibition for the two horns, Africa features a beautiful exchange between Reggie Workman and Art Davis on bass: the first exploring the rhythm, the other expressing a pedal that is reminiscent of ancient African music. Those were, in effect, the days when Coltrane was exploring the music of India and Africa from a composer’s point of view, establishing also a significant friendship with musicians such as Ravi Shankar – Ravi will also be the name of one of Coltrane’s sons.

Few months later, John Tynan in Downbeat will review Coltrane and Dolphy’s music coining the label of ‘anti-jazz’. Coltrane and Dolphy will stick up for their music from the columns of the magazine in an interesting article available online and titled John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy Answer to Jazz Critics. An advised reading for you all, since if now we can taken Trane and Dolphy music for art, the path to that consciousness was not linear and it deserves to be deepened in full. 

 

 

Anohni and the Johnsons – My Back was a Bridge for You to Cross (Rough Trade, 2023)

“It’s time to feel what’s really happening” is what you can find written on the inside cover of Anohni’s last album. Produced by Jimmy Hogarth – James Blunt, Duffy, Amy Winehouse – and with the features of a fully defined soul or r’n’b record – with the notable exception of the noisy Hendrixian guitars of Go Ahead – this new album, the first in seven years and the first published by Rough Trade, is possibly the transgender people’s What’s Going On.

If Marvin Gaye with his materpiece in 1971 gave voice to a generation of African Americans who were coping with the Vietnam War, social injustice and the then rising ecological consciousness, this album by Anohni is the transgender version of it all, starting from the image put on the cover, a beautiful and intense portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, one of the very first hystorical transgender activists along with Sylvia Rivera and a few others.

Marsha ‘Pay No Mind’ Johnson was a gender non-conforming activist for her entire life. She was defining herself as ‘drag queen’, and she fought for the rights of the LGBTQIAP+ community. One of the pivotal figures of the famous Stonewall riots in 1969, she subsequently gave life to the STAR, the ‘Street Transvestite, Action Revolutionaries’ association. Openly keen on decriminalising sex work and raising awareness on the problem of AIDS disease, she was found finally dead on the Hudson river in 1992. 

Police labeled her death as suicide, but the investigation opened in 2012 by pressure of the activist Maria Lopez led to a sentence of ‘possible homicide’. Since 2017 you can view a documentary by Victoria Cruz titled The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. Having her potrait as cover for this album is one of the strongest, political act you’ll find by every artist this year.

Anohni, discovered as an artist by Lou Reed and hosted first in his album The Raven (Sire, 2003) with other important guests such as saxophonist Ornette Coleman, rose in popularity thanks to her first albums issued by the label Secretly Canadian such as I’m a Bird Now (2005) and The Crying Light (2009). Lately involved in rediscovering electronic and disco music for such a project as Hopelessness (2016), her new passage to classical soul music shows us a mature and reliable artist. 

It Must Change can be taken as a call to arms as the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece, with its determined rhythm and the voice that spreads the wings of a confrontational but sympathetic singing. Go Ahead is reminiscent of Hendrix’ Star Spangled Banner version at Woodstock, another invitation to the good fight, while Sliver of Ice, the album first single, is a classical, touchy torch song – the political and the private, they said in those days.

Can’t sees electric guitars again at the forefront, with a sympathetic orchestration in the background, with Anohny and her voice just in the middle of it all and a nice horn section becoming preeminent with the progressing of the song, all completed by a nice clarinet solo intertwined in the song’s structure. Scapegoat is possibly the emotional center of the album, a song about people being hated and victimised for no personal reasons but only because they’re born as such, better said because of patriarchy rules in the end. 

Cymbals baste a fragile rhythm while electric guitars give life to a frail and subsequenlty hymnodic melody. Being a scapegoat can be liberating for many people misusing you. It’s My Fault is the prosecution, emotionally speaking, and it talks about when you feel guilty for being harrassed or hit even not phisically by the strokes of life, as it were what you deserve, or maybe it’s only about when you feel guilty for the end of a relationship. Maybe both things. Guitar mimicks the vocal inflections here. Rest is another slow and long, touchy ballad, full of an epic tinge.

There Wasn’ Enough is another arpeggioed guitar and voice (there are two different voice layers superimposed the one to the other) ballad about the end of a relationship, with the invitation to ‘move forward into gray’, while Why I Am Alive Now? is a melody for piano, with the guitar creating a gentle rhythm over the hinted percussions and Anohni’s voice complaining about the harshness of the world both from a romantic and a political point of view.

You Be Free is finally, after the orchestrations reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s album, the last ballad, in which Anohni poses her life as a bridge for other people to cross and live a freer life. In a moment in which history seem to become excluded in our lives for an eternal present, mutuated by commercials and the social networks, Anohni in a way has, as African Americans like James Baldwin and other minorities’ intellectuals like Paul B. Preciado, the sensation of being part of a community and a well determined history. And that’s one of the reason we love her and her beautiful music. 

 

 

PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying (Partisan, 2023)

Through all the month of July I’ve been at home with a broken foot, and only today I’ve been able to grab a physical copy of I Inside the Old Year Dying by Captain Beefheart’s virtual ex pupil Polly Jean Harvey. A record that follows the previous The Hope Six Demolition Project after a span of seven years and the first issued on Partisan Records. If THSDP and the preceeding Let England Shake saw Harvey and her faithful pals Flood and John Parish engage with conscious lyrics, this new album is more focused on a tormented, crepuscular atmosphere.

And if PJ Harvey learned to play saxophone for THSDP adding this instrument to electric guitars, in this last output she plays also bass clarinet and bass, baritone, steel string guitar and piano. Lyrics are now more intimate, in an attempt to develop a language more keen on archaisms as on her recent praised book of poems Orlam, and the general feeling of this work is more cinematic than confrontational as her last records.

Prayer at the Gate opens the album with a strange synth by Flood, a sound a little bit more physical then that of a theremin, and Harvey’s voice over a plain, sorrowful ballad where the chorus is replaced by a childish quasi-scat. The voice comes to a falsetto full of pain that in a way has to lead us to the mood of the rest of the album, as an invitation to regress through grief and to access to our childish, more vulnerable but also open and joyful side.

Autumn Term sees Harvey’s voice reinforced through some falsetto chorus singers as it happened many years ago in Rid of Me – do you remember that appeal to ‘lick my legs I’m on fire / lick my legs of desire’? – but this time the song has more conciliatory rhythms and it’s full of children voices through fields recordings. Lwonsome Tonight, the album single released contemporaneously to the album, is an arpeggioed guitar crossed by another small synth plus a voice reminiscent of another of Harvey’s masterpieces, the album for voice and piano White Chalk.

Seem an I is a plain melody for voice introducing cymbals and a guitar, whose effects are interspersed through the backing vocals creating almost a circular loop, with the idea of a heartbeat more than a reference to ancestral rhythms. The Nether-edge welcomes us with far away voices leaving soon place for Harvey’s singing throughout a synth loop and a minimal drumming. With I Inside the Old Year Dying, first bite of the album spread through the Internet, we’re in the middle of the record with an acoustic guitar, some strange percussions and an electric, sore and melancholic solo.

All Souls opens the second part of the album with small synth’s stutterings, over which PJ Harvey’s singing produces itself into another intimate reflection. Male choruses add deepness and a little bit of restlessness to the song. A Child’s Question, August gives us that tired and slacked feeling typical of the hottest of the months, while I Inside the Old I Dying opens with another arpeggioed guitar and a vocal dirge before Harvey enters. Drums are particularly prominent, not in the sense of a speed rock piece of music, but only reatively, minimal as they are, to the way they’re recorded. The field recording of a bell completes the picture.

August is reminiscent in its structure of Leonard Cohen’s Master Song, from his first album Songs of Leonard Cohen, but the track soon evolves through strange electric echoes and rhythmical noises. A Child Question’s, July is a duet between Harvey and John Parish, while the final A Noiseless Noise is the most reminiscent of the band’s past splendors, with its four minutes of field recordings introducing a ballad evolving into a noisy guitars effluvium alternated by a solemn atonal riff.

Acoustic arpeggios alternating void and full dynamics help create the perfect farewell for a record that is one of the most varied Harvey and her pals gave life in the last years. I know this is a quick and hasty description, but this is the kind of record that grows with more listenings and details will emerge if you are patient enough to buy a copy and give it more than one spin.

Deep as it will reveal itself, I Inside the Old Year Dying is possibly one of Harvey’s most intriguing albums issued in these last years and, even if far from the bursts and the drive of the first three albums, is so interesting I bet it will accompany us through fall and winter this year. After all music needs care, above all in these times dominated by social media and their dynamics, were everything need to be consumed at the speed of light, and this is, at the opposite, the kind of album needing more than one listen to be fully appreciated.

 

Marc Ribot – Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist (Akashic Books, 2021)

If you don’t wanna to use Amazon to grab copies of books and records for your own – ideological and practical – reasons, it is harsh to find out what you’re looking for at the right time. In Milano, the town most near to the place where I’m currently living, you have to pay extra fees for import books and records once you’re ordering them. Things goes that way. So I put my hands on a copy of this book by Marc Ribot only after it was translated, unexpectedly, in my own native language one month ago.

Divided in four parts, and with only the first one devoted to music, the other three being dedicated to small novels in a style that reminded me the one that belonged to Bukowski – “bloody funny”, as Elvis Costello said – in a way, I was just reading a small novel about a Jewish girl that lived the first part of her life as a hippie and the other part as an attempt to become, after the harshness of life hit her, acceptable to her social milieu again before going to cinema to see the last movie by Arnaud Desplechin, the one titled Brother and Sister featuring two great actors such as Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard.

Curiously enough, the story in the movie was at the opposite of the story narrated by Marc Ribot, that of a liberation from their social milieu, but in order to do so the main characters, both Jew interestingly enough, needed to get outside of the society that gave life to them. One writing more about himself, the other leaving France for Africa. What both the book and the movie have in common is the fact that they try to cope with what remains of our cultural heritage and roots as part of the Western civilization. Nothing less, nothing more.

One can think, superficially, that the best part of Unstrung is in its first part: the hommage to Henry Grimes, the narration of the life of guitarist Frantz Casseus, some notes on people like Robert Quine, Derek Bailey and Hal Willner, some liner notes for Ribot albums or the text for Ceramic Dog’s rap The Activist. Nothing more wrong than that. The entire book, even the most funny parts, is interesting because it is an attempt by a navigated musician to fight body against body with his culture and even his own life.

Obviously the book can seem at a first reading as not pretentius or even superficial – even if there’s a line by James Chance quoted by the guitarist himself here, “I only live on the surface – I don’t think people is very pretty inside”, that can explain the aesthetic of Ribot style as a writer. Not that Ribot is a “nihilist”, he is in fact more as someone very gifted with (sometimes black) humour, but this tinge is more a testimony of an ancient culture that survived the Holocaust and still ask itself how to believe in a God whatever, talking about a people or a culture and not necessarily about a single human being.

Interesting as it is reading this book, as a critic I’ll bring back that note about musicians laughing hard at the attempts by people like me to understand and making comprehensible to the masses – two different types of translations at the place of a single one, that means two different possible types of mistake – the work of a musician, complex as it can be. You can take as an example the beautiful passages of the book where Ribot try to explain the difficulties in playing non-Western music like the one created by Susana Baca and others, thansk to cultural and existential – I mean, experiential – difficulties.

In the end, Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist is a book worth reading, full of notes about the music we all love and full of fantasy and fantastic stories to pass some good time with. Like those discussions with a friend who traveled the world around a table and a beer, full of strange facts but also full of new, interesting things to learn and to store in order to enrich your own personal luggage. Curiously enough, the Italian version of the book, the one I own, was published by the same publishing house that issued the last edition of Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog. 

 

 

Your favorite critic is too busy with his own woman to mind about the future of the music

I have to admit it: since I write only for passion, without any income – I don’t even host banners on this blog, because I hate when I try myself to read something through my laptop or telephone and all those bright squares appear abruptly – it is easy to write what I want, being also my own publisher. But tonight I want, while I listen to some good music like Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and The Abstract Truth and Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi, to remove some pebbles from my shoe.

Fact is that Italy is a strange place if you want to be a critic. In every musical genre, the mantra is always “you don’t like it, you don’t talk about it”. This way, a critic is not a critic anymore. The market is full of horrorful material and art places are, or better said were, full of horrorful concerts. But let’s start with some order.

First of all: the ego affair. I was attending a concert by pianist Vijay Iyer some years ago. I was part of the press staff, since I was writing reviews for an Italian webzine called Mescalina. That meant I had my own seat. In front of me an old guy, another critic, told litterally everyone in the (deconsacrated) church near him: “Let’s see if tonight I’ll discover a great pianist as I discovered Brad Melhdau many years ago”. I didn’t knew who the guy was. But this is a first problem.

Mr. Iyer was still discovered. Blow Up, an Italian magazine that is our version of The Wire – mine is a conservative country so we always copy everything from foreign countries, artistically speaking – still issued reviews of records and concerts by the New York based pianist and composer. There was no need to re-discover him. What the critic meant was possibly: Iyer need to be brought to the masses. I’ll do it. What the critic unconsciously was saying was: Iyer need to be brough to my ear because if I don’t know something, this something is previously unheard by virtually all those who matter.

And this is the ego affair. There’s no such thing as humility in the music world. Every critic – even me, for what it worths – has his own idiosyncrasies – let’s talk about mine: I can’t stand melodic jazz if played after bebop was born, with notable exceptions by singers like Nina Simone, but as far as pianists they have to beat it or prepare it, at the opposite if you’re a drummer and don’t own little percussions you’re out.

Obviously I listen to every styles of music, but when it comes to jazz it has to be as much distorted. I’m joking about myself, but if you don’t play free jazz in the present time you’re not adventurous enough for me. And this is a limit, because I heard a beautiful Italian singer dedicating a project, an entire CD, to David Sylvian few years ago and I didn’t even write about it because the arrangements were too smooth to me. See what I mean?

Now, let’s get over it. Every critic has his own idiosyncrasies, that was the main point. But every critic – even me? I’m asking myself right now and I don’t have so a proper answer – at least in my own country believes his own tastes are the only tastes that matter. That’s why it would be interesting to have other hands to strum that laptop keyboard for this blog other than me. But I’m a maniac of control as everyone else in this business. I think it as to do with the fear people would write with too much indulgency.

Now, let’s move forward to the second point. In this industry, you have to be controversial to be successful (and be paid). This is often misinterpreted for having your own vision. Let’s make an example. There was a guy, another critic, who now is one of the spearheads of a famous Italian jazz magazine. Before, he had his own blog as me. Being older, possessing a record shop and having more time than me to listen and read is a good difference. Another are his own judgments over my world, that of free jazz and improvised music in general.

Nothing against Coltrane or Ayler, but Dolphy as an example was not completely at ease with composition during his career for this guy – maybe I suggest because Dolphy died at an early age and always had few money in his pockets: why aren’t we talking about all the musicians that left the business to play litterally along the road like Giuseppi Logan or Charles Gayle? And the reason was? The business in itself, not giving enough money to the musicians and leaving the most part of it to the labels and their managers.

But the judgment about Dolphy was motivated in his dissertation about some recent re-releases of Chico Hamilton featuring the multi-instrumentalist, so I have nothing basically against it but that if you are a music critic you also need to be a little bit of an historian and an sociologist. Just a little bit, because you cannot always know everything, but it helps a lot. And what about Peter Brotzmann? This guy wrote in his blog many years ago that the German reedist was a “paper mache figure”, with no further explanation.

The guy also wrote and published a book full of judgement more argued and debated, but this is the tenor, more or less. Interestingly enough we had an email exchange in which I asked him why music and jazz also worldwide was, with notable exceptions, deteriorating. During those years the Turkish scene was exploding, and it was a good thing for the experimental music scene in general, but at the same time I heard in my country people whose attitude was really the one stigmatized by Mingus like, “fuck the school, I’ll play free”.

I was invited in person to attend at concerts where the musicians involved, releasing records also for their own little label, were not even able to LISTEN the one the other and react properly. Same in the world of contemporary music. So, I asked this now famous critic what were his thoughts about it, and he wrote me something like he was too busy with his own woman to think about this topics. I think he was saying I was loosing my time trying to separate the sheep from the goats.

This leads me to the third point: there’s no critic at all. An Italian musician once told to a friend of mine, that as me wanted to write about music: if [name of a famous American saxophonist] plays in a way you don’t like it, you can always write or say that he “played like it was”. This, with the other advice other people gave to me about “you don’t like it, you don’t talk about it”, it’s the end of my (unpaid) job.

It’s the end of the games, the end of the music also. No critic, no aspiration to create interesting, fresh and new music to be defined as such. No new music, welcome to the ego trip occupying the space originally devoted to creativity. I started with the last point, but now the cycle is complete I believe. Now. In Italy there is a horrible situation for music. In the world is the same. The old masters are leaving us, the young ones are interesting, sometimes very interesting – a couple names we discussed also here: Mary Halvorson, Patrick Shiroishi, Lao Dan – but none of them is renewing the palette bringing new colors to the light, at least this is my opinion.

Maybe it is not the right time: politically speaking this decade is worse than the 1980s. Economically and socially our civilization is in pieces. It is not a surprise we have great talents, but no innovators – I’d love to discuss this topic in the future with Anthony Braxton, after rereading some of his books – the real problem is that no one wants to talk about it. I lost an interview many years ago – my entry ticket to the press in my country on paper – because of my attitude, my need to define what’s good to me and what’s not, taking my own risks.

Because, if I look at what’s happening in my country, this is the scenario. On one hand, you have trap music dominating the hit parade, together or aside with Italian pop music. On the other hand, you have virtually nothing. People who are in their 20 years or less are not even interested in rock, alternative or experimental music. People of my generation, the Seventies, think ‘serious music’ is only Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin – or The Cure, or Depeche Mode – they don’t even know about Idles or Algiers, who are rock bands of the present time.

As far as music played live, it is full of 40/50 years old people playing that kind of rock music for old boring people as them. Young guys are interested mostly in people like Dark Polo Gang and their values: money and success. There is no such a thing as a counterculture in my country anymore. I truly believe this is also your future if you don’t pay attention to it. From where do we want to start, right now? 

 

 

Nina Simone – You’ve Got to Learn (Verve, 2023)

Nina Simone was a pivotal and exceeding figures during the decades she lived in. A revolutionary activist, a classically trained pianist, a soul voice, a jazz arranger, sometimes she also touched the realms of ethnic music, a label that during those times didn’t existed yet. The recording we’re talking about in this brief note is a live recording of one of her concerts at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966 and donated by promoter George Wein to the US Library of Congress, finally released by the label Verve.

The album is 32 minutes long, and features Miss Nina Simone at piano and voice, plus guitarist Rudy Stevenson, bassist Lisle Atkinson, and drummer Bobby Hamilton. The audio quality is good, except for the first seconds where Simone’s voice is not correctly amplified, but it’s one of those fails you can accept since the quality of music involved in the record. The opening track is Charles Aznavour’s You’ve Got To Learn, curiously also translated in Italian and a success in my country during the 1950s sung by Aznavour himself as “Devi Sapere”.

A nice, dramatic crescendo, the song is followed by a dramatic and almost perfect rendition of the classic I Loves You Porgy, from the classical Porgy and Bess. Recorded also by trumpeter Miles Davis, by the Modern Jazz Quartet and by the couple of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Simone’s version is one of the most intimate and touching. Blues for Mama is the first recording of the song, co-written with singer (and drummer Max Roach’s wife) Abbey Lincoln, in chronological order. 

While Be My Husband, played only with voice and drums, is the most faithful to the studio recording, Mississippi Goddam is less amphetaminic and more swinging than the correspondent version from the classic album Nina Simone in Concert issued only two years before this rendition. The song is inspired by a sadly famous murder of four African-american little girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

A completely swinging version of the song, this new edition enlisted in this live album is nonetheless rich of pathos and drama. The closing of the album is the beautiful Music For Lovers by Bart Howard, another first recording as Blues for Mama previously in this record, embellished by Bach’s quotes interspersed during the execution here and there.

This is one of the most intriguing new reissues this year, along with the Coltrane&Dolphy album we’ll review later on, when able to listen to that album in its entirety – I broke my foot last month and I have to buy myself a copy of it yet. An intimate set, with Simone magnetic personalty able to bring the audience together and to give life to her uncompromising idea of music and art. Possibly an appetizer for those of you who are less familiar with ‘classical’ jazz vocals, even if Nina Simone is far from clichés of any of the many musical genres she touched thanks to her personality. 

 

 

Tristan Honsinger has died

Sadly passed away on August 5, 2023, Tristan Honsinger was a hidden gem in the vast ocean of free improvisation. Known mostly for his work with pianist Cecil Taylor and guitarist Derek Bailey, but an accomplished musician on his own, Honsinger during his career collaborated also with post punk bands such as The Pop Group and The Ex. This remarkable folding of collaborations can give you also an idea of his style, that span from nervous glissandos to melodic quotes traken from Albert Ayler or classical music.

Born in 1949 in Burlingon, Vermont, Honsinger had music lessions at a very early age, so he gave concerts on a weekly basis with other members of his family since when he was 12. After he studied classical cello first in Boston then in Montréal, where he became conscious and interested in free improvisation. In 1974 Honsinger moved to Europe, particularly in Amsterdam where he became a pivotal figure of Netherlands improvised scene.

A musician that, according to the Dutch ‘Volkskrant’ journalist Erik Van de Berg “hasn’t lost his childhood fantasy entirely”, Tristan Honsinger can be taken as a representative figure for what European Improv scene is: for such musicians in fact ‘playing’ means not only expressing yourself through music, but also to take risks. While many would cite irony as a main topic for such improvisors, more than that their attitude is that of a child curious about what sound he can obtain from his instrument.

Spanning through his discography, a must have are his records with pianist Cecil Taylor, but there are also interesting collabortions with conductor Butch Morris, records for solo cello and duos with Derek Bailey and saxophonist Sean Bergin. The more adventurous listeners can try and find a copy, as a mere example, of his record with Steve Beresford, David Toop and Toshinori Kondo for Double Indemnity issued in 2001.