Minton Turner Schiaffini Armaroli "Quartet", Milano, L'Arsenale, 04.24.2022

After a long period of non activity, quite some years ago, I ran into some young musicians whose music I defined in this blog as ‘Post-AvantGarde’. I meant this cats were experimenting from a crypt, or a laboratory. When I heard such musicians as Umberto Tricca or Paolo Sorge, on one hand I was feeling the urge to create new music and experiment with new sounds from the vast palette of the contemporary and improvised music of the past decades, but on the other hand that in-yer-face feeling coming from the 1980s and 1990s NY movement near John Zorn et similia was completely lost. I suspect younger musicians are unconsciously ashamed of being experimental and don’t enjoy themselves like a Zeena Parkins or a DJ Spooky. And that means a lot: after all, enjoying yourself is a political act of resistance in this conservative world.

In fact I had in my ear music created with accuracy and taste, but too conscious of the past and less free to be itself. A totally different approach I felt for the music matter of not younger and navigated musicians like the vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli, who’s last creature, the quartet with trumpet player and vocalist Phil Minton, drummer Roger Turner, and trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, I had the opportunity to listen live onstage last sunday, in the space of L’Arsenale, a school of theatre I’m attending to as a student and that is famous and well known since it’s a school founded by Jacques Lecocq, one of the last surrealists, friend and disciple of Antonin Artaud and master, between others, of Dario Fo and many others actors and performers from Italy.

The space is an old deconsacrated church, so there’s a great acoustic space for musicians to perform and actors to play. And, what about the music? The quartet played a dense, sensitive and diversified set, full of a complex and constant intertwining of different layers of sound matter. It’s not a complete unknown or original shape of music, even if the comparison that came to my mind was that with Lettrism (Isidore Isou movemente well represented through the movie “Traité de Bave et d’étérnité”), another younger musician talked to me about some months ago in a correspondence through email.

To that younger guy I was telling to diversify, intensify and make his music for drums and electronics less monochord. He answered to me a little disappointed telling me to listen to the lettrist poets, not knowing I was aware yet of that poetic current of artistic expression. Diversification, intensity and variety I deeply appreciated during the live set of Armaroli and his pals. The only little disappointment was for the voice, a little covered by the other instruments most of the time. I don’t know if it’s me, habitué of Diamanda Galàs performances, or if the space given to Minton was restricted for unknown reasons.

I obviously admired the courage of four navigated musicians whose non idiomatic interplay and musical structures were put in front of the audience in a place like Italy and in a year like 2022, a space and time clearly not good for those who love adventures and non-conformism. I obviously hope to hear possible new evolutions of such music in the future, and I hope for all of you they will issue live or studio material soon. After all, we desperately need artistic gestures that can open up for new feelings and visions in a square and narrow world as the one we’re living right now, before it’s too late. Try to reach these musicians and their live performances when they will be near you.  

 

Camila Nebbia & Patrick Shiroishi “The Human Being as a Fragile Article” (Trouble In Mind, 2021)

Even if improvised music is a niche since it’s very beginning in the 1970s, nonetheless it gained attention in every part of the world – this is also the main reason this blog is written in English: to give the best visibility to this music to all the people interested in it – so different scenes rose up all over the world. In the past I wrote for All About Jazz about an avant garde scene in Istanbul, and few months ago I reviewed on this blog a CD collection of experimental music coming from Mexico.

But those of you who are more keen on tasting different dishes with their own ears maybe are familiar with musicians like Kaoru Abe and Yosuke Yamashita from Japan, as well as Ibrahim Maalouf from Lebanon or Vijay Iyer from India. So, what I’m gonna do with this article, is to present you a couple of younger improvisors who gave life this year to a beautiful cassette now out of print but available to your listenings through the Bandcamp website.

The first improvisor featured in this cassette, titled “The Human Being as a Fragile Article”, is multi-instrumentalist and activist Camila Nebbia. Nebbia comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina, but recently she has moved in Stockholm, Sweden. Devoted to free improvisation, electronic music and mixed media (mostly super 8 film, archives and digital video). Nebbia is co-creator and curator of a collective interdisciplinary group and of a concert series. 

In her website I can see a huge amount of artistic collaborations I’m completely new to, so I think I’ll map them in the future. Her artistic companion in this cassette issued very recently is Patrick Shiroishi, a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles who, this year, has released other different and interesting material: from Hidemi, a solo album where he give life to a tribute to his father, also musician, Hidemi Shiroishi, through a multi-layered instrumental construction, to the more approachable album Natsukashii where he leads a quartet.

It’s not easy to find out resources on similar musicians along the World Wide Web and this is the reason I think it’s important to document their music in spaces like this one. Let’s start with the music, so. The first piece is called Un Nino Llamado Cuervo, opened by distorted saxophones intertwined the one to the other creating an intimate, meditative but urgent atmosphere. The second piece, El Ser Human Como Un Articulo Fragil, the title track, sees the spoken part introducing every sonorous fragment more linked to the music, which is a little bit more lyrical making me think about some of the early Braxton compositions. 

Al Costado De Los Recuerdos, with its seven minutes, its small percussions, bells, pre-recorded birds, crossed by a ghostly, delicate melody and some interspersed scratches. Olvido is introduced by small metal percussions and voice, bringing the horns in the background at the very beginning before a more peer to peer dialogue, while Mi Pies Son Tan Fuertes Como Mì Corazon is constructed on small blows and again a spoken part in the background. Mentiras y Silencio is based on continuous, subtle but assertive little lines on the horns with fragments of field recordings giving life to something I can visualize as a fire burning around the horns themselves.

El Espacio Entre El Lenguaje features percussions, horns and an almost far away chant, whereas the following short Terra Seca and Apagar El Televisor are based respectively on faster saxophone lines – again, derivative from Braxton language as far as I can hear – and squealing, honking horns remembering some experimental stuff from the 1990s of John Zorn. Finally, it’s the turn of the longest composition/improvisation on the cassette, the more than 11 minutes long Mientras El Cisne Blanco Se Eleva Al Cielo, No Deja Rastros Acà Abajo, full of raucous notes, shorter, deconstructed statements, meditative atmospheres, fragments of voice, of pre-recorded sounds like the resonating sounds of a Sitar, other effects, giving me the impression I was right in finding an inner atmosphere to the music I was listening from the beginning. 

In a way, listening to this music, I found myself at the far left of a spectrum of experimentation based in a world full of TV series pretending to give us instruments to our thoughts, and struggling and revolts who don’t resonate that much in our Western media, asking myself if I’m dreaming when I think of this music as derivative from a well defined ‘fire’ but more keen on looking at a well determined inner space. Obviously, we can say that starting from your inner self is the best way to rise up your own consciousness, but I miss that highly formal experimental statements from the 1970s as a way of telling the world ‘the hell with your common sense and wisdom, I’ll fight for a wider - and not a better – world’.

I’m not saying this music has a too much confrontational quality. It is confrontational and experimental as far as this world we’re living allows it to be. And this is the big deal. But one deal we can afford only listening better to records like this one and trying to confront this music with the one from the past, in order to understand better the different worlds they were created in. Paradoxical as it is, I think there were better information, in quality, in the pre-internet era. Now everything is accessible, but not only the good informations. But this is maybe another problem, and will talk about it another time. 

 

 

Podcast Episode 4 - East Meets West. Pt. 2: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha

Buckethead: First Master/Splinter Pool from “Cobra Strike II – Y, Y+B, X+Y <hold>” (2000) [6.56]

Giacinto Scelsi: Uaxuctum: The Legend Of The Mayan City Which They Themselves Destroyed For Religious Reasons - 1st Movement for large orchestra, choir and Martenot waves (1969) [6.33]

Zulie Banda from “Voices of Haiti recorded by Maya Deren” (1953) [3.09]

Masahiko Satoh and the Soulbreakers: Amalgamation Pt. 2 from “Amalgamation (Kokotsu No Showa Genroku)” (1971) [21.18]

Triocton: Hizuru from “Triocton” (1998) [3.46]

Kecak (Chanting) from “Music for the Gods – The Fahnestock South Sea Expedition: Indonesia” (1941) [5.27]

Makoto Kawabata: excerpt from “Subjection of Drone” (2008) [21.15]

John Zorn: Chronology from “Spy Vs Spy – The Music of Ornette Coleman” (1989) [1.04]

This podcast is dedicated to Maya Deren

Brian Patrick Carroll (born May 13, 1969), better known by his stage name Buckethead, is a guitarist and multi instrumentalist who has worked within several genres of music, spanning such diverse areas as progressive metal, funk, blues, jazz, bluegrass, ambient, and avant-garde music. Best known for his electric guitar playing, he has been voted number 8 on a list in GuitarOne magazine of the "Top 10 Greatest Guitar Shredders of All Time" as well as being included in Guitar World's lists of the "25 all-time weirdest guitarists" and is also known for being in the "50 fastest guitarists of all time list". Buckethead performs primarily as a solo artist. He has collaborated extensively with a wide variety of high profile artists such as Bill Laswell, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Iggy Pop, Les Claypool, Serj Tankian, Bill Moseley, Mike Patton, Viggo Mortensen, That 1 Guy, and was a member of Guns N' Roses from 2000 to 2004. Buckethead has also written and performed music for major motion pictures, including: Saw II, Ghosts of Mars, Beverly Hills Ninja, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Last Action Hero, and contributed lead guitar to the track "Firebird" featured on the Power Rangers Movie Soundtrack. (from Wikipedia)

http://www.bucketheadland.com/

Giacinto Scelsi, Count of Ayala Valva (La Spezia, 8 January 1905 – Rome, 9 August 1988), was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French. He is best known for writing music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his revolutionary Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola ["Four Pieces on a single note"] (1959). His musical output, which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of his life. A series of concerts in the mid to late 1980s finally premièred many of his pieces to great acclaim, notably his orchestral masterpieces in October 1987 in Cologne, about a quarter of a century after those works had been composed and less than a year before the composer's death. Scelsi was able to attend the premières and personally supervised the rehearsals. Dutch musicologist Henk de Velde, alluding to Adorno speaking of Alban Berg, called Scelsi "the Master of the yet smaller transition," to which Harry Halbreich added that "in fact, his music is only transition."

http://www.scelsi.it/

In the early 1940s, Katherine Dunham engaged the future experimental film-maker Maya Deren to act as her personal assistant. Deren toured with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company doing secretarial work for Dunham as the latter wrote up the findings from the anthropological fieldwork she had done in the mid 1930s in Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean. Dunham, a mixed race African American born in Chicago, sought to educate black and white Americans through writing about and choreographing with the rich dance culture which had developed as a consequence of the African diaspora. Deren, born in Kiev into a Jewish family who migrated to the United States in 1922, discovered ritual through her contact with Dunham and subsequently used it as a key device in her pioneering experimental film work. In a 1946 pamphlet Deren wrote about the importance of ritual in her films, two of which had been made with dancers who had been members of Dunham’s company; the following year she made her first visit to Haiti to study and film vaudun (voodoo) rituals that had been the subject of Miss Dunham’s research a decade earlier. (from “Catherine Durham and Maya Deren on ritual, modernity, and the African Diaspora” by Ramsay Burt professor of Dance History at Department of Performance and Digital Art, De Montfort University, Leichester)

http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/

Born in Tokyo in 1941, graduated from Keio University, Masahiko Satoh studied music composition and arrangement at Berklee School of Music from 1966 to 1968. In his fully fledged professional life after returning to Japan, he received the “Japan Jazz Award” by Swing Journal Magazine with his first album “Palladium” in 1969 where he led the making of the album. Later he was also awarded twice with the Award of Excellency at the National Art Festival of Japan with his original masterpieces of “Four Jazz Compositions” (1970) and “Yamataifu” (1972). He released numerous albums he led the making of such as the U.S. release “Amorphism”, recorded in trio with Steve Gadd and Eddie Gomez, and “Randooga”, born from the occasion of “Select Live Under The Sky ‘90” (“Japan Jazz Award” by Swing Journal Magazine) which was released in France. His jazz festival appearance includes Berlin, Donau Eschingen, Moers, Montreux, and East Meets West In New York, and the concert tours in Africa, Australia, Russia, and Latin America. As music composer and arranger he participated in recordings of many well-known musicians such as Nancy Wilson, Art Farmer, Helen Merrill, Nakagawa Masami, Itoh Kimiko, and Miyamoto Fumiaki. He composed and produced two releases of a new direction “Ranmon for orchestra and three improvisers” (1987) and “Concerto for the WAVE III and orchestra” (1988) and pavilion pieces as “World Exposition - Local Governance Memorial Hall” (1970) and “Flower and Green Exposition - JT Memorial Hall” (1990). He also works on TV programs, movies, and CM in Japan. He composed and arranged the pieces combined with the traditional buddhist monk music for “BUDDHIST MUSIC with 1000 Syomyo Voices” at Budokan in Tokyo in 1993. This work attracted attentions from different disciplines. He created his own production label BAJ Records in 1997 and his activities continually grow and diversify. (Biography from SuperFM.com)

http://www.mmjp.or.jp/m_satoh/English/E_index.html

Maurizio Suppo (Turin, Italy, Dec. 26, 1970) started his musical journey in 1987 with a thrash metal band, changing their music toward a crossover style in 1989, as Producers of Absurdities. The band split up in 1991, then he joined another musical project called Human Contrast in 1992, doing crossover funk with experimental touch. After this project end, in 1997, Maurizio Suppo did mainly improvisation units with people like Hoppy Kamiyama, Harpy, Kirirola (ex Girl), Xabier Iriondo, Chris Iemulo, Stefano Giust, Ivan Pilat, Alessandro Cartolari, Daniele Brusaschetto, Luca  Torasso (Sandblasting), Eriko Suzuki, Dominik Gawara, and many others. After being featured in compilations for Snowdonia label and an album with Hoppy Kamiyama called Urabami still unpublished, Maurizio Suppo has two projects in solo with collaborators: Triocton (avantgarde metal) and The Nuns Of Telekinesis (experimental dark ambient). Triocton is a solo project done with guitar, drum loops, samples and guitar synthesizer, it is deeply inspired by the graphic works of Jack Kirby and the Lovecraft's novels, with guests Forbes Graham (ex Kayo Dot) and Chuck Stern (ex Time Of Orchids). It is a mixture of progressive influences, extreme metal, avantgarde and expecially improvisation. All tracks have a theme and then there are solos totally improvised.

http://soundcloud.com/maurizio-suppo

Music for the Gods – The Fahnestock South Sea Expedition: Indonesia. The second release in Mickey Hart's Endangered Music Project captures the shimmering music of Indonesia as it existed in 1941, when the Fahnestock brothers set sail to record the indigenous musics of Bali, Java, Madura and Arjasa with state-of-the-art Presto disc-cutters. Music accompanies all aspects of Indonesian life -- the work of farmers, the play of children, royal ceremony, theaters, or rituals of birth and death. The most important form is the gamelan, ensembles dominated by magnificent bronze gongs and metallophones ( bronze-keyed xylophones). The gamelan is characterized by what might be called a sacred geometry -- everything from the number of beats to the arrangement and design of the instruments adheres to a precise symmetry and cosmology, reflective of a worldview rooted in Hindu Buddhism. In contrast to the driving energy of the large gamelan ensembles are simple and gentle performances featuring haunting voices, bamboo flutes and reed instruments, and one featuring nothing more than an Indonesian Jew's harp played by a young girl. And there is the legendary kecak, or Monkey Dance, the complex counterpoint of interlocking chants by a two-hundred man chorus, building to a kind of ecstatic, otherworldly frenzy. These recordings provide a window on a world radically different from our own -- one which has been changed almost beyond recognition in the intervening years.

http://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/fahnestock.html

"Music, for me, is neither something that I create, nor a form of self-expression. All kinds of sounds exist everywhere around us, and my performances solely consist of picking up these sounds, like a radio tuner, and playing them so that people can hear them. However, maybe because my reception is somewhat off, I am unable to perfectly reproduce these sounds. That is why I spend my days rehearsing. Where do these sounds come from? Who is sending them out? That is not something for me to know, and neither is there any way that I could find out. I simply believe that they come from the 'cosmos'. (Maybe other people would call God the source). Since I was a small child I have been prone to hearing ringing sounds in my ears and other sound phantasms. At the time, I believed that these were messages aimed directly at me from a UFO, and so I would gaze up at the sky. But once I started playing music myself, I came to feel that these noises were a kind of pure sound. And I promised myself that one day I would be able to play those sounds myself. It is only recently that I have begun to feel that I have been able to come close to reproducing these sounds in my solo guitar work, and in my INUI project. However, in June of 1999, I finally discovered my own 'cosmos' and I experienced an instant of total union with it!! That 'cosmos' is still tiny in size - although any cosmos can, by its very nature, be infinitely huge or infinitely small. The energy and vibrations contained within that it far exceeded my imagination in scope and beauty. I can only describe the miraculous instant when my 'cosmos' accepted my consciousness as MAGIC.” (Makoto Kawabata)

http://www.acidmothers.com/

John Zorn (born September 2, 1953 in New York City) is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer. He has had experience with a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, extreme metal, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music. Zorn brings these styles to his work, which he refers to with the label avant-garde/experimental. Zorn has stated: "All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there." Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City and the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada, composed Masada Songbooks (written concert music for classical ensembles), and has produced music for film and documentary. Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid 1970s and has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in diverse musical areas. By the early 1990s Zorn was working extensively in Japan, attracted by that culture's openness about borrowing and remixing ingredients from elsewhere, before returning to New York as a permanent base in the mid-1990s. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with varying ensembles to display his diverse output. (from Wikipedia)

http://www.tzadik.com/

To listen to the podcast, go to Podomatic website and search for 'completecommunion'.

To send me material to be featured on the podcast, email me at galasi.g [at] virgilio.it or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com

The DownTown Channel (Coup de Grace)

A sampled discography from the Loft-era - Pt. 3: Downtown New York

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

The Knitting Factory, founded in 1979

This is the third and final part of my recognition on both the Loft and Downtown NY scenes. In order to make a complete recognition of those years, a further chapter would be inclusive of English post-punk and experimental music, since Neneh Cherry, Don's daugther, played with the all-female punk-reggae-dub band The Slits - Malcolm McLaren ex-protegées and defectors - and was close friend of their leader Ari Up; since Pop Group fused wave, psychedelia, free jazz and avant-garde on their incendiary records Y and For How Much Longer do We Tolerate Mass Murders, just before their singer Mark Stewart founded the Wild Bunch collective (Massive Attack's and Tricky's narcolectic and paranoid trip-hop would be the last resorts to come out of the Bristol scene) and put out on his On-U sound label Sun Ra's Nuclear War as a single; since ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson co-opted young saxophonist Matana Roberts (now a full complete composer and leader in her owh right, as her last Coin Coin album on Canadian label Constellation shows us) in his records as a leader; and, finally, since in England (at the same time that in Italy and other European countries) the so-called 'industrial' scene started to develop in a manner completely unrelated to what Americans call with that name: not a blend of heavy metal, techno and psychedelia, but a deeply, groovy, obscure and wildly noisy experimental and transversal scene that had his standart-bearer with Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Einsturzende Neubauten and Maurizio Bianchi. Being Z'ev one of the most important musicians involved in John Zorn's Arcana book cited in the first article of that series, it is impossible to put it apart, but an excellent analysis is still easily available through Simon Reynolds Rip it up and start again: Post Punk 1979-1984, published in 2005 and still largely available. Industrial music is deep rooted in the figurative art world, Fluxus' companion in a certain way, and, more in general, related to all the avant-garde movements started by Dada, Cobra, Lettrism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. It' aint difficult to think about this movement in close relationship with some of the most important contemporary music composers like Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and more in general with all those who were dealing with pure sound, more than with notes, timbres, structures. For an overview of the American Downtown scene, look at Peter Cherches guide between the web links at the bottom of this page.

Arthur Russell - Another Thought (Point Music, 1994)

Loft-era doesn't mean only music related to jazz, nor only improvisation. Arthur Russell was a wonderful cellist, well known for his appereances with Allen Ginsberg reading his poems, and for being a highly multi-faceted composer. Minimalism, disco-music, power-pop, new wave, were the many styles he coped with during his career, with a constant attempt to refine his material. Not as an obsessive perfectionist though, but as a restless gold-digger. Between his many collaborators there were John Hammond, Philip Glass, David Van Tieghem, Peter Zummo, David Byrne, Henry Flynt, Julius Eastman, Rhys Chatham and Gavin Bryars. "Another Thought" is a record made only of cello and voice, recorded in a NY Studio that belonged to genius of Jamaican dub Lee 'Scratch' Perry, and the result is a masterpiece of archetypical, ghostly melancholy, far from both 'mutant-disco' Russel was involved since his singles released as Dinosaur L, and his 'post-minimalist' compositions collected on Audika Records compilation First Thought Best Thought in 2006.

Eugene Chadbourne & John Zorn - Sonora 1977-1981 (Materiali Sonori, 1998)

A particularly intriguing record featuring a couple of 'gurus' of the Downtown NY music scene, accompanied by other remarkable artists as keyboardist/composer Wayne Horvitz, guitarist Fred Frith, violinist Polly Bradfield, cellist Tom Cora, trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, percussionist Andrea Centazzo, pianist and violinist La Donna Smith, keyboardist David Boyle. This collection was selected by Chadbourne himself, and coupled by Materiali Sonori with a beautiful bilingual book.  Viaduct is a piece dedicated to Groucho Marx, recorded in 1977 at Davis, California's KDVS Radio on a Butoba-like recorder; A Welcome West (WKCR, 1978) is performed by the trio 300 Stuatues (Zorn on alto, Chadbourne on guitar and banjo, and Polly Bradfield on cello), and is the unedited version of Zorn's "School" Lp b-side; the composition is based on Greyound bus timetables between New York and Arizona. The Double AA is a piece by Twins (with Zorn, Chadbourne, guitaris Henry Kaiser, and saxophonist Bruce Ackley from the Rova Saxophone Quartet) taken at a club called Pangaea during the same years; The English Channel, originally written for orchestra and improvisers in 1979, is performed with students of the Creative Music Studio with Chadbourne's guitars and dobros overlapped in 1987; W VA SPEC (Chadbourne, Zorn, Tom Cora on cello, Mark Kramer on organ and tapes, David Licht on percussion) was recorded in Ohio in 1981 with additional recordings coming from Chadbourne's private collection. The fist two compositions are dominated by what Zorn might call an 'aural' quality of visuals, or viceversa, and are a perfect document of the first period of the Downtown era. The other three pieces show us the beginning of the sped-up, kinetic, post-modern era that will dominate the game-pieces, the cinematic scores and the hardcore / jazz experiences that will be great part of John Zorn's career as a composer. This record is a well-accomplished introduction to what most effervescent NY creative music was since the change of the decade.

Kip Hanrahan - Coup De Tête (Nagel Heyer Records, 1982)

Born in 1954 in Bronx's Puertorican neighbourhood, Kip Hanrahan is a composer, arranger, conductor, impresario, and percussionist. Coming from an Irish family, Hanrahan's work with music, is very relate to the one of a movie director. The producer of Astor Piazzolla during Piazzolla's last decade, as well as Jerry Gonzales and other figures coming out of the Latin music scene, Kip Hanrahan devoted many side-projects collaborating with poet Ishmael Reed under the name of The Conjure Ensemble, while his major works are an assembly of players and materials from the modern/avant-garde/free jazz cauldron, mix with latin rhythms and exotica spices:  from Don Pullen to Steve Swallow, from Milton Cardona and Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez to Jack Bruce. Coup De Tête is a collection spanning through Hanrahan productions from 1979 to 1981, and it's a blending of Cuban Santeria-based percussions, free jazz, funk and intimate, uncomfortable lyrics. Both Carla Bley and Michael Mantler, at the time involved with Hanrahan in the New Music Distribution Service project are featured in this debut record, one of the most representative of the NY melting pot of the time. Chico Freeman, Dave Liebman, Teo Macero, Michael Mantler, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Arto Lidsay are also giving their contribution in various tracks.

No New York (Antilles Records, 1978)

"No New York", a record produced by Brian Eno, was at the time the manifesto for an entire generation of young 'non-musicians' that wanted to go beyond the punk hangover coming out of the CBGB's bazaar avoding stereotypes - the usual AABA song format -, showing a confrontational - and sometimes masochistic - attitude on stage, displaying guitar single-line more related to early La Monte Young / Dream Syndicate drone-minimalism than to the Ramones one-two-three-four guitar riffs, but also attempting to put early free jazz enthropy and avant-garde atonality together often in the same, usually short, song. James Chance and the Contortions spin-dried James Brown's growls with Albert Ayler's squirls, while Lydia Lunch with Teenage Jesus and The Jerks put herself forward as the morbid Marquis DeSade's daughter; but for sure Mars and DNA were the most interesting stuff to be put on record in those years, along with Suicide first record, and Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham mimi/maximalist guitar symphonies: their music is beyond every known musical shape, vital and conscious of their attempt to take over the boundaries between popular and contemporary music. They were lead by their own instinct but at the same time they were trying to avoid mere chaos. It's not by chance that DNA guitarist Arto Lindsay and drummer Ikue Mori became two of the more active and versatile musicians of the yet to come New York Downtown, collaborating during the years with the likes of Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, contemporary pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, avant drummer Susie Ibarra. In order to find out a related scene, we have to go back in time and listen to the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement of the years between 1965 and 1970: both were the most important and genuine attempt to merge with a naïve but truly inspired attitude high and low culture, giving their proper contribution to a blurring of the boundaries of both.

The New York City Artist Collective Plays Butch Morris (NYCAC, 1984)

Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris was at his beginnings a disciple of David Murray. His first record is 1976's Frank Lowe "The Other Side", in which he plays cornet. His first compositions appears in Murray's "Penthouse Jazz" and "Holy Siege on the Intrigue". At his beginning a 'be-bop deconstructionist', since Billy Bang's "Outline Number 12" in 1982, Morris concept of 'conduction' starts to develop, fully flourishing in this record issued a couple of years after. "His Conduction 'system' incorporates the standard moves of the conductor, but fuses them with gestures and signs that instruct the musicians. As Morris says, 'I sculpt sound.'", as David Henderson puts it on an interview issued in Bomb Magazine. One of the most sophisticated, bright and complete composers of his generation, Lawrence D. 'Butch' Morris is also very aware of his time, and define music often in a way that can be considered part of the cultural world he comes from: "In an age when the term 'interactive' has come to mean between human and machine' - as he states - , it seem reasonable to hope that an acoustic medium of collective interpersonal intelligence could achieve a greater degree of cross-cultural dialogue and trans-social communication than it has to date"

A Loft-Era related bibliography and discography

On print:

Valerie Wilmer,  As Serious as Your Life: John Coltrane and Beyond, London: Serpent's Tail, 1977

Gary Giddins, Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop", New York, Oxford University Press, 1981

John Gray, Fire Music: a Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991

Carla Chiti - Walter Rovere Sonora. Itinerari Oltre il Suono, Italy: Materiali Sonori Italia, 1998

John Zorn, Arcana: Musicians on Music, New York: Granary Books, 2000

Symon Reynolds, Rip it up and start again: Post-punk 1978 - 1984, Faber and Faber, 2005

Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92, Duke University Press, 2009

Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker, Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965-83, Soul Jazz Records, 2009

On Web:

Sam Rivers, Warlord of the Lofts, by W. A. Brower, in "DownBeat", November 16, 1978

Sam Rivers Sessionography by Rick Lopez

Downtown Music, 1971-1987: An Overview and Resource Guide by Peter Cherches

New York's Lofty Intentions on JazzTime by Gary Giddins

Arista/Freedom Records Listing compiled by Brian W. Burgess

India Navigation Records Listing compiled by Michael Fitzgerald and François Ziegler

Passin' Thru Records official site

Black Saint / Soul Note on Cam Jazz

Io sono Tony Scott (Filmaker Festival, 28 novembre 2010)

... ovvero come l'Italia fece fuori il più grande clarinettista del jazz

Ho seguito pochissimo il Filmaker Festival quest'anno e mi dispiace, ma chiudermi troppo in una sala buia a godere delle creature altrui non fa per me in questo periodo. Tant'è che dopo questo, ieri sera, ci sarebbe stato l'ultimo Wiseman, ma non ce l'ho fatta, il dovere mi chiama. Però Franco Maresco (con Daniele Ciprì direttore della fotografia, non è vero che è scomparso, si è solo defilato) fa la sua cosa più equilibrata, dato il soggetto diciamo più da trapezista. E Tony Scott è uno tutto da scoprire: ha liberato il koto prima di Zorn, ha fiancheggiato Webster, Parker, la Holiday (dio, che regina), e negli ultimi anni ha fatto versioni definitive di una cosa chiamata Lush Life, che neanche Coltrane. Già basterebbe il confronto col suo eterno gemello/rivale, Buddy De Franco ("lui prova sempre, io no") a darci l'idea di che cosa siano genio e sregolatezza da un lato, pulizia e riespettabilità dall'altro. Egomaniaco ossessivo, torturato dalla polizia indocinese non si sa perché (spionaggio? ha rubato la donna al capo di stato? non si saprà mai la verità), ha anticipato la New Age, si è lasciato sedurre (in tutti i sensi) dall'oriente e infine ha preso posto nel paese più giusto per perdersi, il nostro. Il suo fraseggio al clarinetto è già liberato, ha suonato il blues come pochi afroamericani, ha rubato Gil Evans alla classica e lo ha regalato al jazz costringendolo al suo fianco finché il borghese timido timido non ha aperto le sue ali e volato con la sua propria musica. Che volere di più? Una tomba nella sua Sicilia che forse non avrà mai? Non scherziamo, questo è un uomo da amare, non un uomo da marciapiede.