There are times in which you wander (on the
internet, in physical places like record stores, etc.) just asking yourself if
you’ll find out what you’re looking for. And there are times in which you ask
youself if what you have find out is what you were looking for. This is the
case of this EP by the Manchester based band Maruja. At a first listening I was
skeptical. Too much similar to the post punk – and post rock – I love,
something I have listened to yet in the past.
Actually, they’re reminding me through the last
song of this mini album issued last March, Kakistocracy, of one of the bands I
loved the most at the end of last century: Goodspeed You! Black Emperor. Then
there are the effected guitars, the groaning saxophones, everything in its
right place. So I skipped and I quit, looking for something more unsettling.
Until yesterday, while I had the opportunity to watch them in a video playing
live and I was hooked.
Now, don’t take me too much literally.
Apart from the last release by Algiers last April, that album titled Shook that
is a reprocessing for the modern times of the music created at the end of the
1970s by the likes of the Pop Group, I don’t have listened to so much original
post punk bands in the last months. Someone would say post punk ended in 1982,
or 1984, to be more precise, but the new wave from the various Interpol and
similar during the last decades makes you simply ask youself if there’s the
opportunity for a defined artistical shape to give life, if not to something
new, at least to something good in the present times.
Anyway, Maruja are Harry Andrew Stanley
Wilkinson (vocals, guitars), Joseph Alfred Carrol (alto saxophone, guitars),
Matthew John Buonaccorsi (bass guitars) and Jackob Patrick Hayes (drums). A
classic line up for a good ole punk rock band, with no use of electronics – a
minus, I’d say, but not all of you would be with me in this – but with a
discreet collective writing and a nice potential to be developed in the future,
maybe with the help of a good label and producer.
For the moment we can enjoy these four tracks,
the beginning of Thunder with its guitar drones and sax lines intertwining
before the entering of nice syncopated drums and a killer groove, Blind Spot
and its circular rhythms setting some interesting alto sax twirlings, The
Tinker, an atmospheric track where the effected guitars and the saxophone are
introducing a more classic dynamic piece, and finally the hymnodic and last
Kakistocracy.
We don’t actually know if the promises will
fluorish in the future into something more interesting – but the live act leave
us with a nice feeling as far as high hopes – but is something we want to
monitor is the future development of this four elements band. On their bandcamp page,
where you can buy this self produce and self published digital EP, you can also
find updates on their future live act in order not to miss what seems to me at
every level a promising young ensemble.
There WAS a time when creating music was as
intense as giving shape to your own feelings, emotions, memories. To an image
of yourself you wanted to give to the world for all to see. A time when music
wasn’t only business, but also something purer. Not by chance a musician like
Daniel Johnston was loved by many successful artists such as Kurt Cobain. I
attended to a festival in Italy where Johnston was supposed to play, but in the
end he refused for health reasons.
Those were the days. You were entitled to risk
not to listen to one of your idols, but in the end you had anyway a music that
was a pure ode to love. On the other hand you had musicians that, as Bono sang
many years before, had to “kill their inspiration and sing about the grief”. It
wasn’t so easy to choose, but in the end the choice was there for you to grab
it. The world was full of musicians similar to Johnston.
Another one was Vic Chestnutt, a
singer/songwriter who released his first proper record – not the self produced
tapes of Johnston – in 1990 and happy, so to speak, to give life to his musical
vision until his death in 2009. Someone else has survived to his own demons,
like Mark Oliver Everett, leader of the band Eels. Mr. E’s music is possibly
the most similar to the music of Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse, today’s hero.
Just one year after Chestnutt death, in 2010,
Linkous passed away shooting himself directly into the heart. He not only
suffered for many years of a severe form of depression, not only was a heroin
addicted, but he also saw his marriage gone into pieces, and sometimes things
are too much. We thought so that the posthumous Dark Night of the Soul, a
record produced by Danger Mouse and with a cover designed by David Lynch, was his
last release,.
But time has many surprises for everyone, and
for us it’s the time for a new album by Sparklehorse. Bird Machine is its
title. The recordings found at his home were almost complete, and they needed
only some slight retouch. Notes on Linkous diary were almost impeccable, near
perfection, so one of three Mark’s brothers, Matt, had no difficulty in issuing
with the label Anti- a record faithful to Linkous’ will.
Opened by It Will Never Stop, with his drum
machine and a computer filtered guitar, the album starts with a surreal mood
where restlesness and a certain humour are mixing together. Kind Ghosts is
filled with kindly reversed sounds sparsed through the melody along with other
strange sounds that remind of Radiohead’s most experimental music, even though
the melody is well defined.
Evening Star Supercharger is for many one of
the best songs of the album. A “perfect” pop song whose atmosphere makes you
ask yourself why for someone is so difficult to heal themselves since they’re
so good at exorcising your demons: it’s just a mystery. I had to listen to a
couple of time the arpeggioed guitar and the melodies since they’re simply too
chrystalline just to have been given birth by a tortured soul, but they’re here
to remember us that reality is not black and white, simply.
O Child, for piano and a softly blown of
voice, ends with a coda made of sounds that seem to come from another dimension
and a field recording of a baby in it and it is possibly the most intriguing
song on the album. Falling Down, with its Waitsian title and a perfect pop
countenance it’s almost a hymn for all those moments when we see things get
worse and unable to stop it, with a use of the metaphores that start with
marvel and ends with concreteness.
I Fucked It Up is another song as we heard at
the beginning, and the most similar to Eels’ most straight r’n’r pieces. Hello
Lord, with its acoustic guitar and a filtered, doubled voice, it’s the peace
before or after the storm, whereas Daddy’s Gone it’s pure Beatles in their
essence of songwriting. Chaos of the Universe is a song built around an
interesting wall of sound made of guitars and various keyboards.
Listening to the Higsongs, Robyn Hitchcock’s
cover, with its jangling guitars, makes you realize that for the entire record
Albini gave life to a production respectful of the will of the artist instead
than producing a record with drums and bass deep and resonating as it happened
to In Utero and Rid of Me, showing how flexible it is as a producer.
Everybody’s Gone to Sleep is another beautiful ballad full of a ‘reversed
sadness’, with everybody’s sleeping but the main character of the song,
deprived of his love.
The Scull of Lucia is a melody for a music box,
that type of found sound that Linkous can’t miss in its own music, Blue is
basically a bassline nurtured with some sparse guitars over the main line and
finally we arrive to Stay, a melancholic ask for proximity. In many songs the
most used and intriguing device is to reverse the feelings expressed by both
the lyrics and the music, before leaving come out the real imagines from
Linkous fantasy.
A record created around contrasts and the
feeling of a bitter sadness mostly transfigured as if music can really save
yourself from harshness of life, nurtured with a faith in the art, that means
ultimately in men, Bird Machine is Sparklehorse last gift to our world, with
the hope to give someone in need a ray of light through the darkness.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
