Two Pianos, a Harpsichord and a Few Magical Instruments More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Paul Dunmall – Matthew Shipp – Joe Morris – Gerald Cleaver “The Bright Awakening” (RogueArt, 2021)

I started listening to this record as one of the very first things I did since I came home this afternoon, very excited for it, and then bam! Never hearing before the music of Paul Dunmall, not even when I resided in London ten years ago, after a couple of phrases on tenor saxophone I was hooked! The soul, all the values I learned to love in this music were here, coming out of my speakers.

But I wasn’t completely happy. And then, I recognized those sounds. “Oh my!” I though. “I can recognize where this music is coming from!” But lets’ start from the beginning. Paul Dunmall is born in London, or best said Welling, London, in 1953. His father was a semi-pro drummer, and thanks to him Paul started playing with the drum kit at a very young age: at 12 to be precise.

After a couple of years Dunmall got his first alto, then he started playing Otis Redding material with his first regular band. Classically trained at a local conservatoire, his first idols on saxophone were Junior Walker and Chris Curtis. At a record shop he worked after school, Dunmall was finally able to listen to the likes of Ben Webster and Stan Getz.

At 17 he started playing with Marsupilami (“a heavy, hippy, strange band” he stated in an interview) and moved, following his new friends, to a farm in Langford, Somerset. That was the time he first toured in Europe, visiting France, Holland and Germany, and also the time he first heard of Coltrane thanks to his band’s singer.

At first it was “Meditations”, but after a month Dunmall listened to “Afro Blue” and was definitely into Trane. Then, it was the time of Albert Ayler and Wayne Shorter. For a few time he started playing improvising with the drummer, then he came back to London where he experimented what he after called “a spiritual awakening”.

At first, Dunmall thought about a trip to India, but then he discovered the Divine Light Movement in London. Spiritual practicing and making music became his daily life, touring with the musicians he met at the ashram even in the US. The music he played with the guys were “jazz/soul/rock-based modal things with few solos now and then”.

Then after some problems with the ashram the group disbanded and Dunmall played with different rock bands. In 1975 he incided his first record with Johnny Guitar Watson. At the same time, Dunmall was heavily practicing while listening to Freddie Hubbard, Mc Coy Tyner and Rashaan Roland Kirk.

In 1976 he came back to the UK where he played folk and jazz music. After hearing the album “Spirits Rejoice” by Louis Moholo (now Louis Moholo-Moholo) he was introduced to the free impro movement. And now, after you’ll go to his website or to other resources all over the internet just to find out how impressive his discography is, is the time for a more recent history.

Pianist Matthew Shipp – you can find a full, very interesting interview by me with him here – met Dunmall at a Café Oto residency in 2010, and after a couple of years the tenor saxophonist called him to play live with Joe Morris on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. The resulting concert is the one hour-long album issued this year by label Rogue Art titled “The Bright Awakening”.

The music is very aware of Coltrane’s album “Meditations” to me, as I said before. Even if Dunmall avoid Coltrane’s use of tri-tones and the sound consequently is not so overwhelming, he in a way reproduces, or cites, some melodic lines from that album and, for the rest, adds that raucous and graspy sound he takes with him from the old days in which he was playing R&B.

Matthew Shipp has always been conscious of the music of McCoy Tyner, Trane’s companion in many sessions, and while Dunmall explores both upper and lower registries, he provides a rhythm according to Morris bass and Cleaver drums that makes the music levitate in an excellent manner. But the reference to Coltrane, quoted not litterally but almost, can be a problem as we’ll see now.

I remember when, at the beginning of my career as a reviewer, I met an Italian critic who told me that Wayne Shorter in some of his older stuff was “embarassingly similar to his idol Coltrane”. I tried to listen to that stuff myself, and even if I recognized big qualities to Mr Shorter, above all in the music he gave life with Miles Davis, I was with the here not nominated Italian jazz critic.

The problem is, I listened to many musicians who claim for their music a spiritual quality. Sonny Rollins as an example, and then his disciple David S. Ware, who played for a long time with Matthew Shipp and who is in no way similar to his master. Because, you see, what’s the spiritual quality in being similar to someone else?

Obviously the quotes can be only quotes, i.e. an hommage to a great spirit and a great music. But the problem here is that the music seems an accommodating version of Coltrane’s free jazz. Some hints on bossa nova pianism and funky drum and bass rhythms can suggest this difficulty in being fully “free” the way Dunmall states in his interviews, not knowing what will happen next.

I’m not saying that while listening to this album you’ll know for sure what will happen, but in a way at the end of the record nothing had blown your mind with something you were not prepared for. The fact that this is really a good album and that I want to listen more to it, even if I usually get bored when immersing myself in things I know yet, doesn’t solve the problem.

Obviously there’s Anthony Braxton great theory to give us a little help: there are musicians, who are great innovators, and others who follow the path – there’s a third way: being nostalgic, but it’s not the case here. Paul Dunmall is a great follower. Great. Anyway, somewhere in my head, something is saying to me that if you cannot be completely original, you are not really yourself.

But for the moment, I want to give credit to the four guys here more than to myself, and give this anyway interesting new record more spinnigs. Maybe one key to this music is from a Dunmall’s quote: “I just want to have my own voice and have a great sound, like Dexter Gordon – but used in a free improvisational context”. I don’t think there’s nothing definitely wrong with that. 

 

 

Allen Lowe - Blues and the Empirical Truth [Music and Arts, 2011]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Allen Lowe, Marc Ribot, Lewis Porter, Ray Shury, Jake Millet

Did you ever felt a deep struggle, listening to some records, to be aware that you are listening to amazing music but that the project is maybe at risk of being lost in the big sea of today's huge amount of releases? 

If so, you can deeply understand  what I'm feeling everytime I give a spin to Allen Lowe's last year effort, the three CD + 12 page booklet set - have you ever complained for a 3 cd set nowadays? now's the time to change yer mind - that under the title of The Blues and the Empirical Truth collects 52 compositions in which the now Portland-based multi-reedist and guitarist shows to the world what does it means to take blues, gospel, cakewalk, Albert Ayler, hollers, The Carter Family, and Cripple Clarence Lofton, and to use creatively that kind of DNA and tracks giving life to a music, as Lowe himself observes, born of 'things lacking in the music world, or at least I perceive to be lacking'. 

Born in Massapequa Park, NY, in the 1950s, Allen Lowe started playing saxophone in jazz groups aged 15, at the Slugs Saloon - Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman played there - finalizing his education with Super Sessions (Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield), Grateful Dead, Louis Armstrong and The Mothers of Invention. 

Roswell Rudd

Right in the middle of the Seventies, he befriended Al Haigh, Curly Russell, Bill Triglia, Dick Katz, Tommy Potter, and met Lenny Tristano, Jaki Byrd and Art Pepper. Finally relocated in New Haven, Connecticut in the '80s, Lowe started playing with David Murray, Julius Hemphill, Don Byron, Roswell Rudd in clubs as the Knitting Factory and for Enja - for which he recorded the first reenactment of Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground - and Music and Arts labels. 

Director of Jazz in New Haven in the 90s - a free outdoor summer festival that featured Tony Williams, Max Roach, Freddie Hubbard under Lowe's artistic direction, once moved to South Portland, Maine, after a period of inactivity the musician took again guitar and composing, learning sound restoration while working on books as American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo (issued by Cadence with a 9CD set), The Devilin' Tune: A Jazz History 1900-1950 (issued by Music and arts with a 36CD set), and Really the Blues? A Blues History 1893-1959, the last two published without any institutional financial support. 

Mattew Shipp

While Allen Lowe's modernistic approach to music is widely recognized as enriching the matter he's digging, and highly praised by the likes of the composer Anthony Braxton and journalist and author Greil Marcus, the 3CD set of The Blues and the Empirical Truth is not only structured around Lowe's deep knowledge through his 'restructural' skills on the blues and folk tradition, and by his almost harmolodic-flavored alto saxophone - as in the Mingus-inspired, cubist boppish moans of Blues and Transfiguration, C-melody sax, tenor sax and guitar, but also embellished by Matt Shipp's piano and farfisa, Marc Ribot deconstructive attitude, Roswell Rudd and his trombone - particularly brilliant as on Manhattan Moan, and a well-trained assembly of lesser known - but highly expressive - players as guitarist Ray Suhy - listen to his duo with Lowe on The Children of Ella Mae Wiggis, altoist Spike Sikes, bassists Jessie Hautala, Derek Reynolds and Chris Day, pianist Lewis Porter, singer Todd Hutchinsen and drummer Jake Millet.

Marc Ribot

There aren't collective renditions on the album, but small groups - from duets to quintets - and a multi-layered attempt to give life to new music welcoming the most diverse and brilliant approaches to the music matter itself. Take for instance No 5 No Flats No Sharps Blues, inspired by both the attitude of the classic Delta singers to stay on the chord changes while keeping themselves instrumentally on the 1st chord with the non-synch typical of Ornette and Don Cherry, or the field hollers inspired Mama, Mercy Comes in Spurt duet between Lowe's Richard Hell-flavored guitar and the almost metaphysic Shipp's interpretation of a ragtime; or again, the cross pollination between the White Folks and The Primitive Baptists, reminiscent of John Zwed's essays on the creolization of American music and embellished by a brassy Sikes' alto solo, whose alternation with Suhy's guitar statement is the kind that fully explains their value even outside a record like this one.

This set is one that really make you understand how music can be fully enjoyable, while rich and complex at the same time, as on the 11 minutes of Reconstruction Dreams (The Ballad of Blind Tom), dedicated to Blind Tom Bethune, one of the many nuggets Lowe's attitude to dig out of the history of music put newly the lights on. Blind Tom was a possibly autistic slave, born in 1849, that from early childhood started touring as a pianist due to his brilliant technique and his ability to replicate any music he heard, while writing on his own spiritual and expressionistic pieces that are almost philosophycal reflections on the human condition through music; the long suite Lowe, Ribot, Porter, Huatala and Millet dedicate to his memory is, as the other compositions herein, an attempt to give back to present life the richness and the deep charm, beyond mythologies and narrations, the music in his forming is able to communicate to who listen, as the quote - better said: the invitation - by Miles Davis reported on the back cover can testify.

Interview with Matthew Shipp

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

March, Thuesday 24. Pavia’s Municipality Culture Department scheduled a very good jazz review called Dialoghi Jazz per Due including Rudresh Mahanthappa playing with Vijay Iyer, whereas on April, 6, it will be time for Marc Ribot and Marco Cappelli to play. This night there will be a previous unheard performance by pianist Matthew Shipp and drummer Gunther ‘Baby’ Soemmer. They have never met each other before. You can see my photos of the concert here. Matthew joined at about 6 p.m., I asked him directly for a little interview and he very kindly agreed. Matthew Shipp was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1960, and debuted on Rob Brown’s Sonic Exploration (Cadence, 1987). Since the beginning of the 1990s, he was part of the David S. Ware quartet along with bassist William Parker, and also featured as a member of Roscoe Mitchell’s The Note Factory. As a leader Shipp issued many records with HatOLOGY, along with the likes of Mat Maneri, Joe Morris, Susie Ibarra and many others, and he devoted himself to both piano/bass/drums trio and electronic music as the curator of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series, that at the beginning of February 2011 issued a two discs set (trio and solo performances) titled Art of the Improviser. I thank Matthew for his kindness and for the time given to me, and also for his ecstatic performance with Gunter at night in Santa Maria Gualtieri.

C.C.: The first question is about the beginning of your career and your first solo record, which is from 1997, Before The World; in the liner notes, you wrote that you were influenced by baroque music …

M.S.: Thought also in baroque music … Baroque was a matter of contamination also, but I like to be on linear sense, because jazz can be very linear, and baroque music also can be on a flake, inventing on lines from a quarter, but there’s also kind of a thing in Renaissance music called the Breaking of the Circle that I’m really into to even now, in a much more modern way… I don’t remember the liner notes at all, but I think all I meant was that there is a rich traditional keyboard music, and in baroque history, and jazz musicians has often used it as a device for practising because it’s very similar to the way jazz musicians would play, not language-wise, not inflection-wise but just in how keyboards lay out, because baroque indulges from quarters, that’s why.

C.C.: Thinking about your palette of colours, you skimmed through improvisation, hip hop, and also electronic music … as far as jazz, you studied with Dennis Sandole who was John Coltrane teacher, and Ran Blake, but as far as electronic music and hip hop, were you having in mind some particular musicians, that could have influenced your style?

M.S.: No, no, I’m primarily an acoustic jazz player, as far as when I have done experiments with electronic music I’m just relating to the modern world in a modern field, I mean, I’m fifty years old but I grew up listening to a lot of funk music and even now hip hop generations a lot younger than myself, so I’m still settling in, so I don’t have any directing point as far as electronic music; I’m into what’s happening up on the street, but at the same time I’m familiar with music concrète, and Varèse, I know that music.

C.C.: Using real instruments and layering them with others recorded on tape?

M.S.: Yeah, exactly, I know that music, I wouldn’t say that I know it more than anything else, but I had checked it out …

C.C.: Were you also into the way contemporary composers are layering and patterning instruments or into borrowing structures from that music?

M.S.: No, it’s more … just the psychological space, and the idea of the spinning sound, I wouldn’t say I had borrowed any structure.

C.C.: Your new bassist is Michael Bisio, that replaced Joe Morris within the trio that recorded your last record The Art of the Improviser, along with Whit Dickey,

M.S.: … Right …

C.C.: What are the main differences between those musicians playing together? Did the entering of Michael Bisio change in some way the way you improvise… ?

M.S.: I think Michael Bisio enjoys playing with Whit Dickey, the drummer, more than Joe Morris did, cause there was some friction (laughs) …

C.C.: So your playing together is more fluent …

M.S.: I would say that the drums and the bass are enjoying each other and coupling more now than they did in the past (we both laugh) ...

C.C.: I was reading an interview in which you said that when you were playing with David S. Ware, usually in this quartet it wasn’t the drummer to give the pulse, but you and William ... it’s the same with your trio, as a matter of dictating the pulse of the composition in general?

M.S.: Oh, I think what I met in the Ware quartet was that we had four drummers, in the time I was there, so the direction of piano and the rhythm section was more dictated by William and myself than it was the drummer, so William and I started to swerve in, serve in and aquit and the drummer skimming at and up to it, but we never allowed the drummer to really dictate the direction of the rhythm section. While in my own trio I’m bringing people that I have a natural relationship with, so I don’t think it’s a matter of anybody dictating anything, just … We feel each other and we know where we need to go …

C.C.: You were also talking about this thing referring to people saying ‘oh, those guys play avant garde music, like in the ‘70’; and you were also talking about the differences between the New Thing, and even before, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, and the next generations, because they were kind of investigating new sounds by themselves because maybe, I mean, maybe it was different for Albert because he was playing with people like …

M.S.: … Sunny Murray …

C.C.: Yes!

M.S.: Very picked up ...

C.C.: but maybe for someone like John Coltrane, who had McCoy Tyner on his back, maybe McCoy would follow him, but maybe he wouldn’t help him to have kind of a net, as a musician …

M.S.: Right, right …

C.C.: And then, after a while, there was this new generation, people like Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, and Roscoe Mitchell, who, like Sun Ra, tried, at least some of them, to make a relationship between composition tools and ancient philosophies …

M.S.: Right …

C.C.: …So, in some way,do you think that Roscoe Mitchell, with whom you played for many years in a double quartet [and besides the Note Factory, the two musicians played together in 1996’s duo record 2-Z, on Thirsty Ear label], is the nearest to your generation of players, kind of a middle figure between the old avant-garde generation and your generation?

M.S.: Oh, I’m older than I am … (laughs) Yeah, yeah, I agree with that, I think the great thing about Roscoe is that especially on the soprano playing he has a kind of approach opposed to Coltrane thing that he did with … you know, he doesn’t sound like Coltrane at all, so he stopped a very strong post Coltrane experience in sound and approaching; in many years of development Roscoe music have been incorporated and many has this kind of crazy Roscoe post bop feeling. So I think that what he really mixed and incorporated is not again the same thing of the sixties, in fact he is very conscious of the music having his step on it, and in another way he is a bridge between the older generation and my generation, definitely …

C.C.: Talking about piano players, what are the ones that influenced you the most? Duke Ellington, Mal Waldron, Andrew Hill, and maybe Clifford Brown outside piano music …

M.S.: Yes…

C.C.: I know that your mother introduced you to his music …

M.S.: She was a friend of him …

C.C.: Ah …

M.S.: Yes, as far as piano, I don’t have influences (laughs), I would say the whole tradition of music. Mal is an indicative and very colourful pianist … I think he was a big influence on all of the first generation of avant-garde players, he was an amazing influence on Hempsey Davis and the second and third generation maybe … and he was an organizer of improvisation itself, and also going to be an influence on Monk as a pianist, who is often mentioned by avant-gardists as a major figure so I would say that Mal Waldron is someone people don’t talk about but he was my favourite piano player…

C.C.: I have an old record [in fact, from those live sessions at the Five Spot Café in 1961, three records were issued on Prestige label: Eric Dolphy at Five Spot voll. 1 and 2, and Eric Dolphy and Booker Little Memorial Album] in which he was playing with Eric Dolphy and he had this piano completely out of tune, but he made such things on it  …

M.S.: Oh right, look, what I like about Mal, he was abiding to play traditional bars but at the same time he often has his minimus thing where he can do repetitions on various things and almost make in a free festival like electronic music even on playing, and I also did a big orchestra staring a very rich distorted sound on the instrument and he’s .. yeah, that’s what I mean, he was a bridge between Bud and Monk who is somewhere else, so I really love Mal Waldron a lot.

C.C.: I wanted to talk a little also about spirituality, because every time I listen to musicians like Willam Parker, Leo Smith, or even Toshinori Kondo, you can relate the building of their style as musicians to a personal quest … William Parker often described himself not as a creator of music but as a conductor … do you mind about something similar, I mean you feel as a composer or as someone who takes elements that are existing in the world, putting them down on notes or …

M.S.: Oh, that’s what everybody does … I mean, I don’t know nobody dealing with pure void, I mean you always try to empty your mind so you can deal with the void, but at the same time we’re human being, so there’s limitations to how pure we can be because the world’s not pure, and I’m not pure myself … but I’m attempting to reach a pure rama creativity and a pure rama language, and a pure rama vibration, in other ways pure mind or even behind mind and that’s another chance that you have, you know, whatever I do up in there there’s a spiritual quest because there is a request to understand language and who you are. We can depot a picture of the whole universe and the whole cosmos …

C.C.: So … a couple days ago I talked with a painter that also has a huge interest in spirituality and there is a reflection of that in her creation … in some ways, Sunyata, that is the name of your master, that was also a musician ..

M.S.: Right, right, Nothingness, that’s what that name means to extent … I’m definitely aiming for the void that is empty but full up .. so the process of playing to me is a meditating process, that’s what I’m trying to do.

C.C.: Ok, the last question is about some of your past statements … talking about which, I’ll try to make some sort of self-analysis ... maybe often critics tend to be lazy, in some ways, maybe there’s people that would write a lot about, say, Herbie Hancock or Wayne Shorter, musicians that forged their own style maybe fourty or fifty years ago, but maybe in this very present there could be lots of musicians that are trying to find out their own way and maybe people like me isn’t try to deal with them, because we’re still listening to old musicians …

M.S.: I don’t remember talking about writers  …

C.C.: … I read about this controversy [I read about that first on AllaboutJazz forum at the end of 2009 ... references are Jazz Times, Nov. 2009, and Spinner, Jan. 2010] … I think that the problem is related more to the space that is given to well know musicians and the difficulties in dig in …

M.S.: I think I was talking about jazz in the stream in general, more than on writers, and I was talking firstly about people that played with Miles Davis that kind of had a monopoly, but I don’t have anything against jazz writers, they are very kind, but the jazz in the stream in general is still really behind here, in a thirty or forty years cycle and that’s the problem. That’s because you’re spending your own full life trying to get to a certain level when you can work regularly and by the time you get there your best music is already behind you, and go yet that when you get playing ordinary things and there is that young people coming along, you know, it’s good but that’s where electronic music go, and that’s where everybody catches up (laughs), kind of a weird tablet, that’s the way whole jazz in a stream operate, and it’s only twenty years behind itself, and I find that interesting.