As Marc Ribot, author of a project around
Albert Ayler music titled Spiritual Unity in 2005 with fellows Chad Taylor on
drums, Roy Campbell on trumpet and former Ayler’s bass player Henry Grimes,
said in an old interview for an online jazz magazine, listening to Ayler’s
music on record is like to hear a strange human sacrifice happening in the room
next to yours.
Obviously he was referring to some of his
favorite Ayler records like Spiritual Unity, recorded in 1964 by a trio
featuring Ayler on tenor saxophone, Gary Peacock on bass and Sunny Murray on
drums, who has this haunted quality: in particular the drums are dusty enough
to seem coming from another world, the world of spirits, and the saxophone honks
and squeals during the solos in a way that gives the listener this idea of
suffering, at less until you don’t become confident with this sound and idea of
music.
Last decades were great in order to know better
Ayler’s music: ESP rereleased all of his back catalogue, including many of
Albert Ayler masterpieces like the one sided Bells, in 2004 a 10 discs boxset
titled Holy Ghost was released by Revenant, comprising music not published
until that year coming from 1962-1970, amongst which the incredible performance
held at the John Coltrane funeral march.
In addition to these, saxophonist Peter
Brotzmann reissued in another boxset all the recordings by his Die Like a Dog
Quartet in 2007, an hommage to the incredible life and death of Ayler narrated
musically by Brotz with Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker on bass and
Hamid Drake on drums. Something delightful for all the Ayler fans scattered
into the world. Unluckily all this material is limited editions, and in 2022
they’re quite unavailable for the masses.
Imagine my joy when I found out this 4CD boxset
titled Revelations was issued this year by the label Elemental: I had to grab a
copy myself, and I did. All around the web but also on paper you’ll find a
division of Ayler career in two parts: the early years and the Impulse!,
commercial years of rock fusion. Nothing more false. To tell the truth, there
are three periods in Ayler music: the first formative years, full of changes in
his style, a period comprised between the release of Spiritual Unity and the
first live albums on Impulse!, where Ayler’s music passed from that haunted
quality we talked about to a more innodic shape, and then another third period
in which he tried new music as he always did.
In this last period, Ayler tried to reimmerse
himself in his first rhythm and blues roots, mixing them with electric guitars
but also with pipes, Mary Mariah – his wife – voice, and different musicians
behind them. In the concerts you’ll find in this box recorded during the Nuits
de la Fondation Maeght, featuring for the first time ALL the music played by
the quartet the first night and the quintet enlarged thanks to the presence of
pianist Call Cobbs, old pioneer of Ayler’s first days, it is as if Ayler was
trying to summarise all his different periods in order to gain momentum for a
new adventure.
Obviously all the criticism for Mary Parker
appereances on records, and the guitars completely absent from these live
performances, fade away in front of such compact, spiritual driven, epiphanic
material. From the beginning of Music is The Healing Force of the Universe,
taken from the Impulse! same-titled album, the sacred fire of the performance
is clear, as clear is the direction of music, that of the ‘classic’, which
means ‘innovative’, Ayler free music. But this four CDs are full of surprises:
Mary Maria plays soprano saxophone, and she’s a not completely refined player
as his husband, but anyway able to impress.
On the other hand the rhythm section,
comprising Steve Tintweiss on bass and Allen Blairman on drums, is a synthesys
of every rhythm section Ayler had in the past, suitable for the present shape
of Ayler’s music. You’ll hear also Albert Ayler imitating the sound of his sax
with the voice, in a strange scat that anticipates more elaborated forms of
avant garde singing in the next decades, and classic tunes as Spirits Rejoice
(the famous ‘Marseilleise’), Spirits, Ghosts, and the more recents Holy Family,
Zion Hill and Love Cry in new suits.
Differently from other boxes issued in these
last years, as Eric Dolphy’s Musical Prophet 3 CD boxset or the flamboyant 4 CD
boxset Sun Ra – Egypt 1971, this box is a little bit more expensive. But the
price worth not only because it was remastered completely from the original
sources for the first time, but also because of a beautiful booklet of 100
pages full of essays, notes, photos, and testimonies by peers, mostly modern,
like John Zorn and Bill Laswell.
Ayler was a true innovator, and also, maybe, a
tormented soul, we don’t know clearly even after many years, but his music is
here for us to stay after all these decades as something talking to our souls
and ears, and it is full of ideas for younger players. Those who will listen to
it carefully during time will be captured for life.
Rob Mazurek is for sure one of the emerging
instrumentalists and composers of contemporary jazz music, but not only. Famous
at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of 2000s for his collaborations
with musicians related to post-rock as Tortoise or Jim O’Rourke, after a while
Mazurek started becoming involved in improvised combos like the Chicago
Underground Duo and Trio, with fellow drummer Chad Taylor and guitarist Jeff
Parker.
At the same time his love for electronic
composition and large ensembles gave shape to the Exploding Star Orchestra. But
his love for contemporary composers led Mazurek to pay hommage to, only to make
a name, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris and his music in a solo performance held in
2015 at the S. Anna Arresi Festival “Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz” where he
played trumpet, piano and electronics alone in an intriguing and intimate
hommage to one of the greatest conducers of all times.
But this evening the little gallery Intermezzo
11 in Milano, instead of offering a live set by Mazurek opened up the doors to
an exhibition of sculptures made of fabric by Mazurek himself. In his own
words: “Amplitudes in space time continuum. Pieces of material. An arc equals hotizontal/latitude.
Another arc vertical/longitude. Pure color space. Layers. Amplitudes. Combining
and shapeshifting we realize a place in pure space.
Layers. Amplitudes in the astronomical sense.
These lines or arcs are not a boudary but demarcations in a pure space. As we
discover more and more galaxies the idea of boundaries become even more absurd.
We are beings on one on millions of planets in this pure space. Discovering my
own limitations through the medium of physical making, I try and conjure thoughts
of the infinite with these pieces that have no beginning nor ending.
It is these places between thought and the
action I am interested in”. As you can see by the photos accompanying this
post, the fabrics are a space between another space, where different lines and
shapes intertwine themselves without limits nor end. The same space between
them is a continuation of the works. This way, we are compelled to experience
visually – but almost tactily – this absence of boundaries Mazurek talks about
in his small writing.
In a way this fabric sculptures are not quite
dissimilar to his own music. If you listen to it carefully, in effect, you can
feel the same sense of continuity from one instrument to the other, both in
solo and in group performances. Being in between the thought and the action
means possibly that while you play, you are compelled to feel yourself and
transmit yourself under shape of music. This gives you this sensation of being
without borders because borders happens, even if under an illusion, because of
yourself being disrupted, forced to belong to the realm of thought totally, or
to that of action.
If you belong to the first realm, you are
closed into your own mind. If you act without the thought, you possibly do
mistakes, or something not related to yourself and what’s behind you at the
same time. Being in this place in between the twos is the only opportunity to
unite the two realms and ... flow. Flow as a person, or let the music flow if
you are a musician. In any case, don’t miss the opportunity to see this
exhibition while in Milano this week.
During these days I’m a little excited since on
September 18, 2022 Terry Riley will perform in a small church in Milano with an
ensemble of chosen musicians, and I have heard the concert will last 2 hours
and a half. So it came to my mind that this year I Dischi di Angelica, a label
devoted to document the most important concerts of the Angelica Festival, has
released an album of solo organ and voice by Riley himself, an important album
since it is devoted to a departured collaborator of the composer: the Italian
excellent cellist Stefano Scodanibbio.
Terry Riley started playing piano during the
1950s studying in various conservatories, and during the following decade he
toured in Europe with some jazz musicians. But even if Riley was keen on
improvising, he wasn’t keen on closing himself into a given format, and wanted
to experiment something different, something more. That’s why with his friend
La Monte Young he gave life to the first performances of what was called after
‘minimalism’: a music made of musical cells repeated through a phase shifting
in order that with the proceeding of the time the music itself would become
slightly different from what it was at first.
Later Riley took singing lessons with the
master of indian music Pandit Pran Nath, doing many tour with him at the voice
and tablas. In 1968 and 1969 Riley released through Columbia Records his most
famous albums, highly influentials not only in contemporary music, but also on
rock music, electronic music and a vast land of unclassified sonorous objects.
Riley was aware of the music around him, and as far as jazz he praised the
likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans and Charles Mingus as the most
influential figures on his own music, even if indian music, that at least was
so important for Davis and Coltrane between many other genres, is clearly
audible between his many sonic roots.
Luckily enough we had the opportunity to hear
this Organum For Stefano on record, since I’m told that the real concert was
affected by a bad acoustics especially in the side aisles. But the recorded
performance is excellent, so the document of that particular night maintains
his crystalline purity, his moving intention and beauty. Organum, titled from
the instrument Riley played that night in the church, is partly a composition
and partly full of improvised parts.
Obviously if Terry Riley is so highly praised,
it is because his music has evolved during the years and not only he and his
friend La Monte Young had an important role in constructing the sound of some
of the very first pieces of the seminal band Velvet Underground and other
peculiar ‘rock’ bands, but differently from other mimimalist composers they
didn’t rest on their laurels, so to speak, but emerged as innovators even when
they had to abandon the musical shapes they forged.
The first 3 minutes movement is introduced by a
series of organ drones, evolving into a solemn melody. Something many lovers of
rock music from the Seventies would like to listen as an introduction to some
granitic riff of guitar (as The Who did in their Baba O’Riley). But it’s not
the case: the music evolves in the 8 minutes second movement, where Riley
accompanies the organ with the voice and we can clearly hear his Pran
Nath-influences. India is alive in this performance, and we can see it as in a
beautiful sonorous landscape depicted by the voice and the organ for us all.
Not having seen the sheet of this music I
cannot know for sure what part has been written and what have been improvised,
but I can guess that the melodic chant was the point of departure for the
successive sonorous manipulations. I imagine you the listener lost in this
beautiful song for a long time collaborator as Stefano Scodanibbio was, and so
I can believe that the people who will enjoy this album will lost themselves
into the depth of the feelings Riley has experienced while playing for his
friend.
It will be like that for all the third 8
minutes part, featuring some kind of fugue-like movement, while the fourth,
lasting 11 minutes, is full of reference to carnatic music and singing again.
This blending of different traditions, from east to west, is a characteristic
of many music from the Seventies. In a recent interview to Giampiero Cane, an
important and interesting Italian critic author of the seminal book Canto Nero,
Riley himself have told that in that period music was a tool to expand the
consciousness, while during the decades after it was all locked inside academia
or the media trends.
The 3 minutes of the fifth movement see the
organ dominate in a beautiful melancholic but again solemn hymn, while the last
7 minutes are a hint at the hystorical minimalism, with two different melodies,
composed both by few sonic cells but the second becoming here and there a
drone, are intertwining the one into the other. The effect is highly dramatic,
and it is the best closing for a farewell piece of music. Obviously the
textures implied here are of different consistencies, and this add to the music
another level of tension.
Don’t miss this record, and if you’re in Italy
don’t miss Terry Riley live on September 18, 2022 at the Churc of San Vito al
Giambellino, with the Orchestra Cantelli and the participants to Riley’s
workshop of collective improvisation. I imagine it will be a intriguing night
and another step into the career of a master musician in his own right.
Possibly this tuesday I’ll report you another concert, that of Rob Mazurek
again in Milan presenting a new project.
So many months have passed since I attended
some interesting concerts (you can find my reviews on this blog) and since
MITO, a review spanning through Turin and Milan this year is dedicated only to
classical music, I was about to ask myself if it would be not interesting to
open my writings to other types of music, as the montly magazine The Wire did
many years ago.
Luckily enough, this wednesdey I was into a
cinema to enjoy a horror movie, and there I found out a flyer of this new
review of classical contemporary music called Milano Suona Contemporanea.
There are many appointments, with music played by the New MADE Ensemble (Cage,
Feldman, Scelsi, Bussotti, amongst the others) and less known composers of the
contemporaneity, plus a spectacular exhibition by Terry Riley.
This afternoon I attended to the third
panel/concert, the one dedicated to Sylvano Bussotti, in this space near the
Railway Station of Lambrate, a borough of Milan described online as
multiethnical, proactive, full of young people and so on. Actually, I smelled a
bad scent all along the road from the Station to the site of Spazio Lambrate
where the concert happened, all the activities were closed in all the streets
and there were only a bunch of young guys waiting to enter into one youth
hostel.
Suburbs they call them. And they’re right. In a
way so, it’s interesting that people can come across from other parts of the
cities to attend to a concert of contemporary music in this ghostly
environment, but I advice you: I’m leaving behind me the ideal of music as a
can full of colours ready to enlighten everything around it. This doesn’t mean
I’m becoming an adult. I’m only becoming more angry.
On one hand, effectively, one wonders why
people devoted to such a niche genre like contemporary music need to be tossed
around the four angles of a modern metropolis in order to satiate their hunger
for good music. But it’s Milan nowadays that works this way, and I’m quite
happy not to live in a town where you count only if you can move a huge amount
of money. That said, let’s move on to music.
Sylvano Bussotti (1931-2021) is one of the
major composers, painters, poets, novelists, theatre directors of Italian
culture during the XX and XXI Century. He starts as a young guy to play violin,
then he switches to composition and studies at the Florence Conservatory. In
1956, after a period in which he is self-taught on composing, he becomes pupil
of Max Deutsch in Paris, where he starts to frequent Pierre Boulez, who invites
him to attend to the famous Darmstadt courses.
His first works are executed in Germany by
David Tudor, pianist devoted to John Cage because of a great and deep personal
friendship. Not only a composer, but also interested in costume designing for
opera, poems, novels, Bussotti goes through our last two centuries as one of
the pivotal figures in Italian musical culture.
The four pieces introduced by Luigi Esposito
(visual artist, performer, writer and musical critic who wrote an interesting
book about Bussotti in 2013) with the help of electronic slides (photos, music
sheets, etc.), were played by the New MADE Ensemble, an ensemble of musicians
in residence of the Centro Musica Contemporanea of Milan born in 2009 and
praised for their tours in South America and Japan where they bring pieces of
music as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
This afternoon the Ensemble was a
quintet featuring Ilaria Torciani (soprano voice), Mauro Sironi (flutes),
Edoardo Lega (clarinet), Luca Maggioni (viola), and Rossella Spinosa (piano). The concert introduction was Un
Poema Del Tasso, for voice and piano, where Bussotti put in music some verses
by Torquato Tasso, a poet from the XIV Century we Italians have studied at
school since its importance.
First executed in 1991 but whose composition
began in 1957, the piece is crystalline both as a composition and in tonight
execution, giving the right introduction to the musical afternoon. In Memoriam
for viola, flute, piano and voice is, differently, a composition dedicated to
Cathy Berberian after her departure: we had the opportunity to approach a
richer texture, with the flute, the piano and the viola supporting the voice.
La Donna for flute, voice and clarinet, is a
piece where the spoken part, or, better said, the part acted by the voice is
interspersed with the parts played by the other three instruments: the music
sheets are becoming more complex, until the last piece, Solo (from La Passion
Selon Sade) for voice, piano, flutes, viola and clarinet where every musician
can choose what part of the sheet to play, according to the sound parameters
signed on the paper: every execution, this way, is completely different from
the others.
Visionary as every contemporary composer, Sylvano Bussotti deserves to
be deepened with new articles about his music in the future. For the moment I
want only to add that my impression after some hours have passed is to have
attended an interesting concert but that the musicians involved were too much
worried to reproduce or interpret the scores since their difficulties, I
suppose, and need to further develop their musical vision. Nothing that can not
be done in the future.
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.
A couple of years have passed since I grabbed
my copies of three records I wanna review even if some other years are passed
after their release. The point is that these albums have marked the passing of
time and maybe they have put the word ‘End’ to the possible evolution of a
musical genre like jazz. A jazz contaminated with both contemporary music and
tradition, but it’s not by chance that this backlash comes from three aged
musicians – one, Taylor, died four years ago.
In fact, I can’t hear novelties in the world of
free and contemporary jazz, even if there IS interesting stuff – search in this
blog for any – from younger musicians, but they are quite often incomplete.
Some are missing the developing of a personal language, some are missing the
developing of a structure that can sustain their personal language, some lack
vision. So, since these three discs have collected enthousiastic reviews, I
wonder if by chance they are the last word on a world of sound, on a vision, on
a musical practice.
Let’s start with Cecil Taylor’s At Angelica
2000 Bologna. I’ve written extensively about Taylor’s music through
this post so I ain’t gonna repeat myself. Taylor was the most important
pianist to mix contemporary music and jazz music, and still is nowadays. Every
contemporary pianist, from Andrew Hill to Matthew Shipp, owes him something,
even indirectly. Angelica, instead, is an important and renowned festival that
takes place in Italy since 1990 and that hosts the most interesting music in
the fields of contemporary jazz, contemporary music, experimental music.
I remember when I had the opportunity to listen
to the precious music by Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury and
Wadada Leo Smith in 2011 on May 8, on various combinations. Angelica not only
gives us the opportunity to hear such music, but also releases on CD and vinyl
some of the most intriguing performances. In 2020, the I Dischi di Angelica
label released an intriguing double album by Cecil Taylor. The first disk
features the solo performance held at Angelica 2000 by the maestro, while the
second features a one hour long interview with Taylor.
The music in this album is Cecil Taylor at his
best. Not only you can hear the melodic and the strumming phrases he is well
known for, but also the structure of the music – do you remember when Taylor
talks about Calatrava bridges? – is quite audible and comprehensible. Obviously
one pays the price for Taylor fire, for his poetry, for his mastery in mixing
hints of stride piano and contemporary structures, but this is in my opinion,
after hearing many of his records and having seeing him also live with his Feel
Trio (with Tony Oxley on drums and William Parker on bass), his best
performance ever, his spiritual and musical will.
To accomplish this mission there’s also a
beautiful libretto with the text of the interview, for those of you who don’t
understand english as native language and can have difficulties in listening to
an american man talking. The second album for this collective review is another
solo, Peter Brotzmann’s I Surrender Dear. Apparently less iconoclastic, noisey
and harsh than his usual outputs, this solo album released by Troast Records in
2019 with a beautiful cover by Brotmann himself with crayon on cardboard is
like an intimate confession.
I still remember a concert I attended in Oslo
in 2011 where he played with pianist Masaiko Satoh but leaving us with a
beautiful coda of solo tenor with all our tears spread along the road of our
listening experience. This album is different because in a way we can hear, as
someone wrote in another review, Brotzmann in an intimate situation, playing
standards of jazz but giving them new shape and blood, on the other hand this
operation will push us to ask ourselves what is an intimate act – this is, in
fact, the Fluxus side of Brotzmann.
In fact we all are accustomed to listen to solo
standards as something personal – paradoxically: as far as it seems, in jazz
you are yourself the most when you play other people’s music, and the oldest as
possible: it is a true topic or it is a convention? – and this is what Brotmann
tries to do, but transcending the pieces of music in a personal way, even if
renouncing to his usual confrontational approach. Surprising as it can be, a
similar attitude will leave the listener with many questions more than with the
pleasure of a ‘beautiful’ sonic experience. And this is Brotzmann at his best,
conceptually and practically.
And now for the third album, another
double: Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side, released by ECM in 2017.
The oldest of this trio of albums, is also possibly the most fascinating. I
still remember when I was reading in my own language the books by philosopher
Davide Sparti, who was applying Foucault theories to jazz music. According to
him, jazz music is the music of musicians who know where they start but don’t
know where they will arrive to, and who they will be at the end of the
performance.
But in listening to this trio performances of
compositions by Mitchell, who sometimes acts as a musicians and sometimes lead
the trios, you don’t hear such trasmutation, but something new: like a Zen
quality of being, immutable and eternal, like the definitive expression of a
pure soul. Described by some critics as the best compositions of music after
Beethoven’s last quartets – I ain’t joking, the review is available through the
internet although written in Italian – Mitchell’s pieces of music represented
here were mysterious to me at a first listening, but they have this quality of
reproducing sound cells and expressions in a way that really remind me the Zen
meditation process.
This way, Mitchell pushes jazz faraway over its
boundaries. From a research for a new identity to the affirmation of pure
being. Pianos, trumpets, reeds, electric guitars, percussions, drums, noise,
all is worth to create a realm of sound that give the listener the sensation of
being absorbed in something that is out of time or fully in time, for what is
worth. We will not hear easily music of such beauty as the one contained in
these three records. So I really believe they are a milestone in contemporary
jazz and it’s time for youngest musicians to get over it but starting from it.
Unluckily it’s not time for enthousiasm in the realm of music, I can hear more
struggle to tell the truth ...
I have to confess it: I have a bad memory for
books and movies. With the passing of the years, I tend to forgot about
everything I read or everything I see. When I see again a film, or a read again
a book, my memories tend to be dissimilar from what I reread or I resee.
Sometimes I remember more something that occurred in that period of time: as an
example, I can remember the feelings in reading the final lines of Saramago’s
Blindness or the fact that when I started reading Tropic of Cancer I wanted to
regain possess over my instincts, that my catholic education repressed for so
many years.
This is also the case with Beneath the
Underdog, the beautiful and meaningful autobiography by bassist and composer
Charles Mingus, one of my all time favorites musicians. Mingus is luckily so
recognized today that his birthday, April 22, has been taken as the
International Day of Jazz. His autobiography starts with a confession by Mingus
himself to his psychiatrist (the famous lines “In other words I am three” ... )
and, this is what I remember, it ends with Mingus taken into the mental
hospital who hosted him for some weeks after a little crisis during which the
bassist was completely unable to sleep.
What I was missing is the fact that during that
period Mingus was at risk of being lobotomized, and that he was saved by his
friend the jazz critic Nat Henthoff. I was made aware of this circumstance by a
beautiful graphic novel titled simply Mingus issued in my country and in my
language, Italian, by Coconino Press/Fandango last year, a novel created by
Squaz with texts written by the music journalist Flavio Massarutto. A novel I
have bought today and read during the train trip to home. The graphic novel is
terrific. You’ll find the dance for The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, the
recording session for the song Original Faubus Fables for the album Charles
Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, the period passed at the mental hospital and
other episodes of his life, interspersed with interpretations of Mingus’ covers
for some of his most famous albums.
As an example you’ll find the cover of
Pithecantropus Erectus followed by a story of primates discovering how to
extoll life from their counterparts (very Kubrickian), using tools like spears
and stones, then you’ll find the photo for Blues and Roots with Mingus
transfigured in a thorns-crowned Christ. But you’ll find also Mingus
threatening Shafi Hadi after he composed the score for John Cassavetes’
Shadows. So you have basically all the three Minguses: the one full of music,
the one who was at risk of harming himself, the one who endangered to harm
others. This is, to tell the truth, the Mingus I like the less. When I think of
an interview with one of his musicians in the interesting book Mingus Speaks, written
by music journalist John F. Goodman, where Mingus is reported to have almost
broke the hand of a pianist and punch on the mouth a saxophonist because they
weren’t playing his music as it was intended, I would love to pass the buck.
But it’s impossible, because I do love Mingus’ music.
The reason I love jazz is because it’s more
than music to me. Coltrane, as an example, made me understand that creating
(music) is something related to (universal) love, and so an artist has to
pursue the goal not only to improve as a creator, but also as a human being. I
talked many times about this issue with friends of mine who are artists
(actors, musicians, etc.) and I had different answers to the same questions.
One told me once that it was so compelling to him to improve as a musician he
didn’t had the time to become also a better person, on the other hand another
friend, an actress, told me that she was afraid by people who wouldn’t become
better as persons as they age as artists.
My dream, so, was to unify the uman being.
Studying acting and a little bit of painting myself, I have this urge to become
one, not separating the artist from the man I am. On one hand, so, you have
Coltrane who was an example for everyone (there’s also a church devoted to
him!), on the other you have Mingus. But who knows, maybe Mingus would have
been a worst person without the art he was creating. After all, who am I to
judge? One of the problems you can enucleate in reading books such as the three
this post is dedicated to, is how Mingus was trying to play with his so-called
madness, having this documents he talk about in the interview book where it was
written he was unable to understand and want.
Thanks to these documents, he was able to trick
some clubs he initially signed an exclusive contract with. So in a way he
started profiting about his mental condition and instability. I think this is
an enormous confusion for everyone, because it helps you overcome your
responsibilities since of your defaillances. Add some episodes from his life
like the psychiatrist who wanted to practice electro-shock on him, because the
doctor took him for a “paranoid as every black person (is)”, and you obtain a
confusion and a certain amount of instability in the life of a man.
As Anthony Braxton wrote many times about
Charlie Parker, another jazz cat who had troubles with psychiatry, and to whom
Mingus dedicate the composition Parkeriana, people who taste how bitter is the
hatred from societal norms, tend quite often to hate themselves. And not only themselves.
Mingus was one of the greatest composers, but his social and personal
funcioning was compromised by racism and I’d say ‘capitalism’, thinking with
this term to the way the music industry was going on during those days in the
U.S. After all, one of the reason Mingus hated free jazz and the avantgarde,
was the fact that this music was not appealing to the majority of people,
leaving the field free for white musicians to consolidate their robbing of
rhythm and blues in the form of rock music.
So, if Mingus was ‘paranoid’, he was in the
sense William S. Burroughs gave to this word, as ‘a paranoid is a well informed
person’. Having treated the issue of Mingus’ violence against some of his
friends, musicians, etc., another topic is religion. Mingus’ music is many
times the music of a man of faith (Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, the opening
of Blues and Roots, is a good testimony of this). But possibly, as stated by
Mingus himself on Mingus Speaks, the man who helped him believe in God (and ESP
perceptions) was drummer Dannie Richmond, a long time collaborator of the
bassist and one of his best friends. His way of playing with Mingus was in fact
almost telepathic. Sometimes the bassist tried to hide his instrument from the
view of the friend, but he was always imagining what he would play.
As far as Mingus’ style of music instead,
he was to me for free jazz like Thelonious Monk to bebop. Monk wasn’t a bopper,
he was a world on his own. But he used to meet boppers because their sense of
musical creation was the most free in his own time. Same with Mingus. Far as he
was from freejazz (read the firts
interviews contained in Mingus Speaks to better understand the topic) he
sometimes used musicians coming from that milieu, like multi-reedist Eric
Dolphy, because of their attitude to be precise but instinctive as players. In
fact, as Mingus himself tell to Nat Henthoff in a beautiful table of the
graphic novel Mingus, the bassist was writing all the scores for his own music
but didn’t wanted the musicians to read the sheet: he would have preferred to
explain the music verbally, and because jazz musicians are always imaginative,
Mingus would have obtained more spontaneous rendition of the music in
comparison with the written notes. A risk, but a risk in name of the beauty.
How to conclude this little writing? Obviously
with some advices. Here below you’ll find some of Mingus finest records and the
three books I have talked about in this piece. It’s up to you to enjoy and
deepen the music of a true genius through listening and reading. Enjoy.
Books about (?) Mingus
Charles Mingus/Nel King, Beneath The Underdog,
New York Vintage Books, 1991
John Goodman, Mingus Speaks, University of
California Press, 2013
