Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response Trio “Book of Stories” (True Sound Recordings, 2023)

It is almost a commonplace the fact that “fusion”, born in the middle of the 1960s, burned itself after a fist and beginning incredible, creative season leaving the most adventurous listeners dry and thirsty becoming a catchy and more pop-rock oriented (i.e.: simplified) style of music.

In fact, after the fist creative outputs by the like of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock as On The Corner and Sextant, after incredibly skilled musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, after creating a music that mixed the principles of improvisation with instruments coming from all over the world like Trilok Gurtu’s tablas and tampouras, “fusion” became a label for sometimes easy to create and to play music, sometimes cerebral and unproductive experimentations.

The same thing happened with post-rock at the end of 1990s, with band such as Tortoise giving originally life to a music that was funk but also hardcore punk – at least in spirit – but that degraded in few years into a mere juxtaposition of different elements in order to find out the most rare approach to various notes, instruments and styles of music. 

A complete different path, reminiscent of the famous Loft Era we talked about in the past, is that of a leader of those faraway days, violinist Jason Kao Hwang. While for more info on him we recommend another review of one of his last year works, one of the most important issued in these times, this new album titled Book Of Stories (True Sound Recordings, 2023) is played by the Critical Response Trio.

The trio features Hwang at electric violin, Anders Nilsson at electric guitar and Michael T.A. Thompson at drums. The music is flavored with funk and reggae hints and spices here and there, but the compositions, all by Hwang, are anyway adventurous enough to be interesting for all fans of improvised music, even non idiomatic, because the most recognizable parts are in a way ‘abstracted’ and conducted into climaxes or moments of rest that are fully dynamics and that can bring the listener a lot of fun, being a mix of the ‘mental’ approach of spontaneous improvised music and the more enjoyable characteristics of popular music without being ‘populistic’.

This way, compared with the previous Hwang release in duo with J.A. Deane, the album offers the listener another face of the instrumentalist and composer way of understanding and exercise creativity, likewise interesting and daring. Powered by the experience of the musicians involved (Anders Nilssen played guitar with William Parker, Paquito D’Rivera, Elliott Sharp and Ken Filiano among the many others, while Michael T.A. Thompson was a solid drummer for musicians such as Charles Gayle, Joe McPhee, Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and John Patitucci), the record is solid enough to make you want to listen to it more than once.

The album opens with The Power of Many in the Soul of One. Violin phrases, and subsequent silences, are interspersed with rhythmic outbursts while the guitar arpeggios embellish Hwang phrases. A sense of urgency and, together with it, a meditative quality, are mixing together in what seem to be an attempt to create a dramatic peak that abruptly diminishes into a more introspective, even if electrical, interaction.

A pedal change atmosphere leaving then space to a beautiful drum solo, after which electric guitar explodes in different rhythmic approaces on an atonal basis. After the guitar express itself in full, it’s time for the effected violin to recall all the musicians involved into a more meditative mood, played almost until the end of the track. Many nuances and the overall approach makes you think about the Loft Era music, but played through a more contemporary vision.

Music continues with Upside Circle Down, and more than of the Lofts it it reminiscent of the first AACM experiments – I’m thinking in particular to the first releases in the 1970s by Anthony Braxton with Dave Holland on cello or Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn. Brief assertions are interspersed with silence, inviting people to listen to the music and themselves more carefully, but the drums’ almost funky groove creates a first difference, almost a new idea of “fusion”, and a recontextualization of experimental music from the end of the 1960s.

Guitar arpeggios create a magical atmosphere, as you can listen through works such different but with a similar emotional approach as In A Silent Way by Miles Davis and Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba – notably with two pairly sensitive guitarists as Nilssen like John McLaughlin and Bill Frisell. A Silent Ghost Follows is a slightly shorter composition introduced by the colors of mallets and a contemporary claim by the violin, making us remember Anthony Braxton again or the AEoC.

This time the use of different pitches – the violin looks for very high notes, the guitar opens up to middle tones – captures the listener, again carried in a past era still harbinger of stimuli for the future – the violin creates almost modern electronic textures into the solid structure we depicted. Dragon Carved into Bone takes the same matter on another temperature, with violin soloing on higher pitches and drums depicting a more bustling sonorous landscape, while the guitar gently deconstructs a melody into parts and pieces so to rebuild them together in another, interesting shape.

More quiet parts are alternating with denser structures, while drums nod to some reggae/dub or blues rhythms. Last piece, Friends Forever, is an hommage to the musicians that in the past gave shape to the music here present, through ages and through all the difficulties that didn’t prevented anyway many of them from creating beauty. The piece is the most melodical of the lotto, even if doesn’t lack the blues scrape but also the sweetness typical of the genre.

Living on the other side of the ocean, I’m not completely aware of what Hwang and friends future steps will be. For the moment, enjoying this music is an unexpected gift that deserves to be shared with fans of improvisation. The album has been released on June 30 this year and is available also through the artist Bandcamp page. 

 

Tom Waits: The Island Years Remastered (1983-1993)

Twelve years have passed since Tom Waits’ last effort, the album Bad As Me (Anti-, 2011), was released. Never officially retired, the singer, songwriter, musical experimentator committed in these last years more with cinema than with music, appearing in such movies as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022). While rumours affirm that he is back to work on writing new music, is time for an engagement with his most daring and interesting period in my opinion, which are his 1980s and 1990s, that will be reissued in almost its entirety this fall.

During that period, after marrying his wife Cathleen Brennan, collaborator and sound designer for Francis Ford Coppola with a respectable background in contemporary music, Tom Waits, who co-opted his spouse in order to write new intriguing material, changed shape and skin definitely passing from the bluesman and the jazz crooner of the 1970s to a more interesting experimental musician, collaborating on records and in live concerts with people as avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, just to name one, in order to deconstruct rock music and give life to a new world populated by unlikely and absurd “American dreamers” like Frank, the main character of his triology as we will speculate in the following lines. 

This trilogy begun with the 1983 output Swordfishtrombones, first to be released by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. If the title, and the music, made hangry Captain Beefheart who felt someone has stolen his inspiration for the album Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969), we can praise it as one of the most interesting albums coming out of the NY – where Tom Waits relocated from Los Angeles with his family – experimental music scene of those days.

As every post modern music, Swordfishtrombones is composed by songs where melodies and structures are apparently mongrelized while at the opposite they are deconstructed and reconstructed in order to give the listener the feeling of being put into another, but yet familiar (thanks also to Ennio Morricone and Kurt Weill inspired melodies), world, as if the music itself would be an invitation to reconsider the place we’re living in with new eyes and, above all, ears. 

The purpose is to put Frank, the lead character of the songs of the trilogy composed also by the following Rain Dogs (Island, 1984) and the double Frank’s Wild Years (Island, 1985), under the light as an American dreamer who, thanks to his passiveness – he goes looking for a new life in a new land always by train – is destined to failure and to loose himself. And if the trilogy will culminate in a theatrical play put on the scene by the famous Steppenwolf company, the following albums by Tom Waits are nontheless interesting.

Bone Machine (Island, 1992) is Tom Waits’ album most dominated by strange and dangerous to play (in Waits’ own words, see Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, 2011, Chicago Review Press) percussions such as the self-built “conundrum” which dominates pieces like All Stripped Down and Such a Scream. The ghost of Harry Partch, an U.S. composer who built his own instruments (and the scales to play them over) dominates the album, possibly another gift from Waits’ wife Brennan who is clearly present as a co-writer through Ireland-influenced melodies like I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, a song covered subsequently by the punk band The Ramones.

And finally, last but not less interesting, The Black Rider (Island, 1993) is the album, co-written by Waits and Brennan with the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, which signs the beginning of the collaboration between the Pomona songwriter and the dramatist Robert Wilson. The story is similar to Carl Maria Von Weber’s (1786-1826) Der Freischutz and it narrates about a hunter who fall in love with a girl promised to a richer hunter. 

In order to gain her love, he will use on a competition some magic bullets given to him by the devil himself (“some of these bullets are for you and some are for me” the devil will proclamate) but one of the bullets will kill the young girl, and the hunter will get mad and lonely. Obviously influenced by the relationship Burroughs had with heroin and its being a double-face substance, The Black Rider was put on scene during the 1990s with a discreet success of public and critics, and it will be Waits’ last release with Blackwell’s label.

After almost a decade, Waits will sign with Anti-, a label created by Brett Gurewitz as a companion to Epitaph, more keen on experimental music than the latter devoted to punk rock, and his career will gain new peaks thanks to albums like Mule Variations (Anti-, 1999) and the collection of rarities Orphans (Anti-, 2006). But this is another story, and we will narrate it when new reissues will be released. 

Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years will be issued on September 1^st, 2023, on vynil and CD, while Bone Machine and The Black Rider on October 6, 2023. 

 

 

An Hommage To Peter Brotzmann

On June 22, 2023 multi reedist, composer, improviser and fluxus alumni Peter Brotzmann has sadly passed away. This article is our way, after a long interview released many years ago, to remember him. Peter Brotzmann during the 1970 was the true face of European avant garde jazz, and along with his partner and mutual friend Evan Parker one of the pivotal figures of improvised music.

A close friend of visual artist Nam June Paik and others pertaining to the Fluxus movement, Brotzmann tried to incorporate elements of this iconoclastic idea into his own playing. Brotzmann style at saxophones is assertive, violent, abrasive and a little bit ironic. In the following years, after being cherished by Don Cherry and other American avant-garde artists more than by European critics, he started playing with musicians coming from the other side of the ocean like William Parker, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell.

This is a quick introduction to his discography. The first album you have to listen is Machine Gun (FMP, 1968). Here Brotzmann is leading an octet featuring Willem Breuker, Evan Parker, Fred Van Hove, Peter Kowald and Han Benning among the others. The music is surprisingly violent, with at the beginning the horns section imitating the sound of machine guns, in an attempt to give life to an  anti militarist concept. But the music is texturally rich, with the various musicians giving life to a multi structured creature.

You can find the same assertiveness on subsequent records like Nipples (FMP, 1969) and Fuck The Boere (FMP 1970), an album dedicated to the South African musician Johnny Dyani who died in the same years. An album that is worh of attention and of deep listenings, a true testimony of creativity and fantasy, is Schwarzwaldfahrt (FMP 1977), in which Brotzmann and mutual friend Han Bennink recorded a live set of free music into a forest, with Bennink beating logs and other natural elements with his sticks and Brotzmann utilising his many saxophones so to create a site specific music inspired by nature.

During the 1980, a period not favorable for experimentations, Brotzmann gave life to the quartet Last Exit, with U.S. musicians such as Sonny Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell. The music here is even more heavy and dense, and in a way it anticipates what John Zorn at the end of the decade will create with his band Naked City. Now finally accepted as the uncompromising musician he is, Peter Brotzmann can finally manage to give life to various line up and various musical creations.

During the 1990s, his most important combo is the Die Like a Dog Quartet, an hommage to Albert Ayler that featured again U.S. musicians like William Parker, Hamid Drake and japanese trumpet player Toshinori Kondo. The quartet issued four albums of pure existential poetry, in which reflecting on life and death through notes is part of a project that is one of a kind. While in effect many musicians like Marc Ribot tried to hommage Ayler playing his own music, Brotzmann quartet gave life to new material instead of reproposing old tunes.

A second life, if necessary, was given to Brotzmann music during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century by the Peter Brotzmann Tentet, featuring musicians such as Ken Vandermark, Jeb Bishop, Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love and Fred Lonberg-Holm among the others. The tentet and his various combinations in duos, trios, etc. gave life to a live adventure that brought Brotzmann all around the world performing fresh and harsh music, making the old master known to younger generations of musicians and fans.

As every master musician, Brotzmann is particularly fond in the art of soloing, even if that part of his own work is not completely above the banner of his most recognised art. Two albums in particular can be advised to the listeners issued in recent years: No Nothing (FMP 1991) where Brotmann imagines a different concept for each of his instrument like e-flat clarinet, alto sax, bass sax, tenor, tarogato, and I Surrender Dear (Trost 2019) where he reinvents classics like Lover Come Back to Me or Con Alma at tenor saxophone.

Having toured extensively during the last years, Brotzmann has played with an enormous variety of musicians, among which Keiji Haino and many others coming from all over the world: from the East to the West, many artists payed a tribute to the complex art of Peter Brotzmann playing with him. Impossible to imitate, difficult to be inspired by, Brotmann was one of a kind for technique and vision. Possibly his leaving is the sign of the end of an era.  

 

Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles by Mark Archer, Milano, Ariosto Spazio Cinema, 05/11/2023

Filming music is easier than photographing it. Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.

Having a great film of a performance by a musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost bite.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself. It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain, Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and other people coming directly from the music business. 

Obviously the movie about the Idles was the most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to themselves, and about the present time.

We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become professionals.

This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an example.

This is obviously part of an old script, and if it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is not a critic.

The movie cover Idles since their beginning until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health just to name a few.

Hated by conservatives all around the world, even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their ‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself, Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.

Because of their approach to music, precise as a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being in the present times.

When Joe Talbot in an interview reported in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.

The fact that this approach to both reality and sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native Tahitians as good examples.

Far from wanting to create a Police of the morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we should not erase the importance of these attemps. 

 

Free Jazz on the tracks

Some time has passed since my last post on this blog. I haven’t listened to so much free jazz or improvised music in these last months or so, as long as I’m listening more to post-punk or other genres. Fact is that the only record I bought issued in 2023 so far is Algiers’ Shook, an interesting mix of electronics, hip hop, free jazz, soul, blues, dub, all played with a punk attitude.

Other artists I’m currently listening to are black midi, a band who plays punk with a progressive attitude – and some hot horns on it – and Idles, who are possibly the most important band to come out of Bristol in these last years. Ah, I wanna name also Fontaines DC, at least their first releases. Obviously all these musicians, along with others as Shame or Murder Capital – the less interesting to me, since they hide a lack of concreteness behind Flood production – are part of an interesting revival that remains such, even if with a lot of personality.

Anyway I can’t find not even such a thing as a revival right now in free jazz and improvised or experimental music. Obviously the great ancient musicians are still producing good stuff, but younger musicians, if there are some, are insanely hidden and I can’t find them. To tell the truth, some young or ‘new’ people is sending me music. A young guy from Italy sent me some audio files of what he calls an attempt to actualize Lettrism through electronics, but the final effect was sloppy and poor.

This is how younger musicians seem to me. But since I’m planning to write, as I did with Don Cherry, a retrospective on Anthony Braxton, I think it’s time to take some pause from wild experiments with a little bit of rock music tinged at various degrees with free jazz, and so here you’ll find some advices for your purchases. The first band I’ll talk about diffusely in this post are Algiers, from Atlanta, capital of the Georgia state.

They are a quartet composed by Franklin James Fisher (voice, guitar, piano, percussions, cello), Ryan Mahan (bass, percussions, piano, synthesizers, voice), Lee Tesche (guitar, loops, percussions, voice), and Matt Tong (drums, percussions, voice). Born as a trio at the beginning of the 2010s, Algiers are a politically conscious post punk band who in their career released four albums all under Matador Records.

Shook is possibly the most intriguing release you’ll find out this year. A shift in the territories of hip hop (Irreversible Damage) and electronica (Cold World), the music of this album is full of references to blues and gospel (Green Iris), free jazz (the sample of Nuclear War from Sun Ra with an electric bass superimposed), funk (I Can’t Stand It), and some incursions in the territories of punk music (A Good Man, 73%).

With a strong tie to the post-punk coming out of Bristol at the end of the 1970s as an interesting interview with Mark Stewart from Pop Group released before the death of the latter testifies, both as far as sound (as in the song Something Wrong) and as ideals, but with all the experience coming from decades passed to refine a sound, Algiers are the perfect act – you’ll find some intriguing live concerts captured on the internet – for those of you who’ll want to explore new territories until pure experimentations will come back to us again.

Far from being a music of pure rage, the songs contained in Shook will lead the listener to an inner voyage and to discover how creating a community can be the most assertive part of the work of a musician. The album is, indeed, also full of hosts, from Zack De La Rocha (Rage Against The Machine) to Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), from Patrick Shiroishi to Backxwash.

And if the so called post-punk revival started at the beginning of the new millennium with bands like Interpol, the acclaimed gurus of these last years are undoubtely the Idles, to whom even a movie, titled Don’t Go Gentle and directed by Mark Archer that I’ll attend to next week was dedicated in 2020. The same year Ultra Mono, in my opinion one of their most focused records, was published by Partisan, a label you’ll want to deepen as far as catalogue since PJ Harvey signed with them for her new release this July.

“How d’you like them clichés?” sings Joe Talbot in Mr Motivator and two things hit you: first, the band makes always the same music through their records – sometimes with more anger, sometimes more introspective – but second, it is always good music. Like the Ramones, never changing their three chords formula, Idles, composed by Talbot on vocals, Adam Devonshire on bass, Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan on guitars and Jon Beavis on drums, are able to build incredibly good songs without boring the listener. 

And if the previous Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018) featured a song against toxic masculinity like Samaritans and a beautiful cover of Solomon Burke’s Cry To Me, the purchase of Ultra Mono (2020) is mandatory for those who love hear Jamie Cullum (sic!) introducing a punk song with his piano (Kill Them with Kindness), the violin of Warren Ellis from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds duelling with Colin Webster’s saxophone (Grounds), and to end a punk album with a tight and anthemic cover of True Love Will Find You In The End originally written by Daniel Johnson aptly renamed Danke.

But in general if you are interested in hearing a band chatted by the likes of Pearl Jam and the rock’n’roll gotha, Idles are the perfect act for you. Possibly live – they’re adding dates to their rich list. And if Idles are making everyone come to an agreement, not the same is possible to say about our next hosts on this blog: black midi. After their debut Schlagenheim (2019) they were compared to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Steven Edelstone on Paste, and hailed as the next big thing in the rock industry; black midi in the meantime have released three records different the one to the other.

Their last album, Hellfire (2022) is a mix of post-punk played with a progressive approach (interestingly enough, not vice versa), with one of the singers more into David Thomas than into Don Van Vliet, and a good dose of horror vacui that can be handled only by expert musicians. So Geordie Greep (guitar, voice), Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin (guitar, voice), Cameron Picton (bass, guitar) and Morgan Simpson (drums) have created a concept album that depicts a dystopian future populating it with bass, guitars and drums weavings that are raising the bar of the listener expectations.

While we obviously wait for their future releases, we can report also how part of the reviewers, at least here in Italy, have tried to bite the brake of enthusiasm underlying the fact that this music features solutions that in a way are oddly blasé – there are also some references to some of the classical Decca songwriters with their albums full of orchestral arrangements – and that Hellfire can be taken to the utmost as a good alternative to bands like Porcupine Tree with their loose and limp, and always equal to themselves, records.

Last band I’d like to give you advice about are Fontaines D.C., a nice group of musicians coming from Dublin and that since 2019, year the band released their first album Dogrel, issued three albums that are always more and more a mix of pop music and folk influences, with some clear limitations in the singing – Grian Chatten is great as a punk singer but pop music requires a different attitude. We won’t talk diffusely about them since there are no jazz tinges in their music but if you have ever been into Joy Division and The Clash you’ll for sure have to give these guys a chance.

Post-punk, as Simon Reynolds stressed enough through his 2010 book Rip It Up and Start Again, was possibly the last effort, before Slint, Gastr del Sol, June of ’44, Goodspeed! You Black Emperor and others in the 2000s, to create a music coming from popular basis but open to contaminations with different elements, from free jazz to avant garde, from dub to ethnic tinges. It was also a music in opposition to bourgeois and conservative values. It is not strange this music is living a revival in our confused times.

Hope you’ll enjoy this music even if it is not completely bathed in free jazz because it is vital and interesting. I still remember how much protest letters came to the desk of The Wire after their interview to Sunn O))), but interestingly enough movie director Jim Jarmusch, for whom music is important throughout his movies and as part of his creative process, after using musicians related to the avant garde as The Lounge Lizards or Mulatu Astatké deepened the relationship of images and sound through the music of Wu Tang Clan and Boris, showing how overcoming close-mindedness can be a victory for creativity.

This is also why I’m happy to host these musicians on my blog. If you want to enlarge your discographies without completely betraying jazz, but widening its language, these bands are here for you. They will also help you to live more the present time and its tensions. Hope in the future they also will be of incitement for younger generations of free jazz and avant garde players not to loose both wickedness and self consciousness, commitment and fantasy. It is also a reminder to myself not to fossilize into a single genre since music is out there and it’s good in every shape and form. 

Don Cherry: the eternal theatre of fantasy and the sound of surprise

“[...] Being connected with children as I have in my life, I feel that it’s important to keep this alive, this fantasy. [...]What is reality? What is fantasy?” Don Cherry, March 12, 1970

Born in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) in 1936, Don Cherry is well known as the trumpet player of Ornette Coleman during his successful attempts to revolutionize jazz music. Mind, my readers: we won’t discuss here the principles of harmolodics, thing we hope we’ll face in the future, even if we’ll talk diffusely about the records our two heroes gave life together. For the moment it is important to stress that, if Coleman played a plastic saxophone in order to utilize the microtones – do you remember what we were discussing some months ago when talking about soprano saxophones and straight horns? – to create a freer music in comparison to bebop and the previous jazz music, Cherry used a pocket trumpet, an instrument with a nasal and a less chrystalline sound than an usual trumpet.

One thing that always hit me when I think about Coleman and Cherry’s instrumental choices, and an example I want to use to explain myself better, is that of those photographers who, in the digital i.e. in an extremely precise era, go back to Polaroids and toy cameras. Leaving some processes to the accident, to a form of creative chaos – as the saturation of colors, the impossibility to control contrast through different films and papers or, in the case of music, the difficulty in controlling instruments that are not thought to be heavily precise – is a good way to play a music in which there is no wrong note in a given process since it depends from what will follow.

So, what Coleman and Cherry were trying to obtain was an extreme freedom starting from extreme constrictions. If Something Else!!!, the first album by Ornette Coleman (Contemporary, 1958) shocked the audience of that time for its extreme freedom, it is true that it is an album full of beautiful, recognizable and memorable melodies. Mind about Jayne, third track of the album: trumpet and alto go at a nice unison before soloing, with Coleman producing himself in his typical ‘laughters’ before playing a melody with an undefined and mocking tonal center.

Things change a little with the following album Tomorrow is The Question! (Contemporary, 1959) where piano is excluded from the palette, which increases in tonal and harmonic freedom. Coleman is taking bebop revolution to its extreme. If Charlie Parker and his peers were playing with dissonances resolution trying to give life to a more and more complex game, defying the listener and the other musicians involved, the music of Ornette Coleman instead is prone to give into new directions.

Once John Coltrane, a Parker’s enthousiast during his younger age and a contemporary of Coleman,  told an interviewer that he was, during his ‘sheets of sound period’, trying to express one sentence going in two different directions at once; Coleman himself wanted to reach with his music every possible direction. What we have here is a conscious attempt to go beyond the limits of an intellectual experience as bebop became in the end, trying to open new paths to the musicians who wanted to follow this new road even if at risk of not being understood.

There’s in fact a huge tradition of musicians who not only did not dig Ornette Coleman’s idea and practice of music, but also a great quantity of musicians who imagined the jazz Coleman and Cherry were creating was only a sum of incoherent, unrepeteable melodic lines in which dissonance had the effect of destroying the musicians ability to change chords and play with different intonations. Coleman music was taken by many – by Charles Mingus as an example: take for instance his interviews contained into the book Mingus Speaks by John F. Goodman where the bassist and composer talks diffusely about the music of Albert Ayler and others – as an attack to the seriousness and complexity of music itself.

If we try to observe better how things happened, we will notice, instead, that a huge amount of musicians from the end of the 1950s until the end of the following decade dedicated their energies to sort out of the shallows of a more and more intellectual drift in order to obtain always more freedom of expression. Albery Ayler with his ‘speaking in tongues’ melodies, Coltrane with his ‘sheets of sound’ and then with his collaboration with Pharoah Sanders in order to obtain the unpredictability of a music driven by two different musicians instead of one, Archie Shepp with his rawness and fierceness, and so on.

Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry gave life to a music that conveyed different emotions, as one can feel listening to his most known composition, Lonely Woman, that opens his third album The Shape of Jazz To Come (Atlantic, 1959) where a simple and again memorable melody is played through a rough and raucous style in order to create some anguish, as in the famous picture The Scream by Edvard Munch. A nightmarish urban solitude is what we can approach through Coleman way of playing. Don Cherry, on the other hand, with his graspy and anti-crystalline sound is the perfect, crackling partner for the altoist and composer.

And even if tracks like Peace and Focus on Sanity are less anguishing, the unpredictability of where the horns will go was leaving the linstener of that time with a potent sense of disorientation. Things are going even worse – but we prefer to say: even deeper – with Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), an album where two quartets, one led by Coleman and the other led by his friend and pivotal figure of that time Eric Dolphy, are intersecting each other in a disorientating stream of consciousness of about 37 minutes.

Notably, the previous album This is Our Music (Atlantic, 1960) features a Coleman composition titled Beauty is a Rare Thing that in a way anticipates the trumpeter’s future enterprises as you can hear through Mu, a collection of two LPs issued by Actuel in 1969. But let’s keep on following the tracks in the right order. Obviously Ornette Coleman’s music not only encountered solid oppositions, but also arose curiosity at a point in which another contrasted innovator, the above nominated John Coltrane, in 1961 wanted to record an entire album of Coleman compositions alongside with his partners Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Percy Heath and Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums.

Listening to the album The Avant Garde released by Atlantic is a strange experience. One can hear Coltrane trying to fit Coleman melodies with his peculiar style, not following harmolodic rules – harmolodics is the name of the music theory Coleman gave shape through his playing and thinking – but his own path. In a way this is comprehensible since no jazz musician can play as someone else and everybody has to stay as close as possible to his or her world of reference, but in another way this album seem to me as a wasted opportunity since there is not a real encounter between Coleman and Coltrane worlds, only a juxtaposition of compositions and styles into one album.

Anyway, soon Don Cherry started figuring out how his own music would sound, and soon he signed a contract with Blue Note producing his own trilogy in which one can hear how playing with two giants saxophonists helped him developing his own conception of art. Cherry’s trilogy embodying Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1965), Symphony for Improvisers (1966) and Where is Brooklyn? (1967) is one of the most accomplished statements in the realm of improvised music.

The concept is similar for each of the three records: there is a theme introducing a ‘tutti’, a unison, and then there is place for every soloist in order to express himself. If Complete Communion, featuring Gato Barbieri on tenor, Henry Grimes (from Albert Ayler combos) on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, divided into two different parts, one for each LP side, it’s the most airy and catchy, relatively speaking, while the ending of the trilogy is left to the most newyorican, groovy and nervous Where is Brooklin?, where Cherry is supported by Pharoah Sanders, increasing his debt with Trane idea of sound and music.

Symphony for Improvisers, the album that stays in the middle of the trilogy, is possibly the most complex. The line up is comprised of Cherry on pocket trumpet, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri, Henry Grimes, Karl Berger on piano and vibraphone – possibly after the removal of these melodic instruments from the Coleman groups Cherry would love to know how they could be reintegrated into the music without loosing that peculiar stream of consciousness his pal gave life to – and the resulting music is aggressive, intimate and fluent at the same time.

Another couple of collaborations we have to mention are Charlie Haden project of the Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!, 1969), where Cherry is present with both his pocket trumpet and a flute, giving life to a melange between the songs the Hispanic anarchists were singing between their courageous battles against the army of Francisco Franco and more free jazz oriented parts, and the previous album recorded by the New York Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp (Sonet, 1964), where Cherry, Shepp on tenor, altoist John Tchicai, bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses give life to a music devoted to Coleman’s and Monk’s heritage.

But Cherry is the kind of person who don’t sleep on other people’s music theories, and by 1968-69 he starts exploring new territories in music, thanks also to a fruitful collaboration with Terry Riley, giving life to a previously unheard mix of improvised, ethnic music, art rock and psychedelia (not all the subgenres are always present together in the same project, but they convey into Cherry’s music as far as their essence, leaving every album and every project free to develop where the particular moment and musicians involved can make the sound fluorish).

More theatrical than his previous music, as one can see through different live performances recorded live and reproducible online, Don Cherry’s new path will be harshly absorbed by jazz intellighentzja, but important tracks will be visible in artists like Sergeij Kuryiokhin, a musician we talked diffusely last year. Mu – First Part and Mu – Second Part (BYG, 1969 and 1970) are possibly Cherry masterpieces, together with Symphony for Improvisers. Featuring the trumpeter accompanied only by Ed Blackwell on drums in a series of beautiful duets where Don Cherry plays time after time his pocket trumpet, a bamboo flute, piano, his own voice and a series of small percussions, this couple of records helped the musician in finding his own most personal voice.

Not ascribable exclusively to the realm of improvised music nor to that of exotic or world music but living a life of its own somewhere in the middle, this music is the higher point in Cherry’s career, not easily replicable as the less accomplished El Corazon (ECM, 1982) will show and an inspirational source for musicians to come, as the double CD Piercing The Veil (AUM Fidelity, 2007) by Cherry’s enthousiasts bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake will show you.

Don Cherry’s releases at this point in his career become discontinuous and sometimes repetitive even if in a way fascinating. Orient and Blue Lake (both BYG, 1971) are attempts to broaden the landscape adding tampoura – played by his wife Moqi Cherry – and other instruments to the palette of the two Mu, but partly for the repetition of some formulas partly because of a lesser compelling inspiration the result is discontinuous.

A fascinating result is, instead, Brown Rice (Horizon, 1975) where Cherry, at his own pocket trumpet and also at Yamaha keyboards is accompanied by Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Ricky Cherry at acoustic and electric piano, giving live to a music similar to the so called krautrock explored in the same years by Can – raised by Irmin Schmidt, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, where psychedelia and trance are scratched by Lowe’s statements and sweetened by Don’s caressing but at the same time determined voice.

During his last years, Cherry’s music was issued by Manfred Eicher’s ECM, a label famous for his peculiar sound design: Cherry encountered old friends like Charlie Haden and new accolites like percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, producing a less adventuros but better recorded music coherently in line with his Theatre of Eternal Music idea. Passed away on October 19, 1995, Cherry’s music is one of the most intriguing and personal statements of one of the most creative of XX Century. 

 

 

James Brandon Lewis "Eye of I" (Anti-, 2023)

One of the main reasons people love jazz is because it is a multi-layered music – since its tradition and heritage – and being so it offers a multi-layered experience of listening. Take for instance a multi-instrumentalist like Lao Dan from Dandong (China): he plays jazz with a post punk attitude, not mixing two different styles of music but bringing jazz out of the academia. In fact, he plays a music that is usually based on reflexion and inner listening into the realm of expressive urgency, even if what he plays remains jazz music (mostly and for the most part of it).

Something similar happens with the album Eye of I (Anti-, 2023) released by African American saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. In this case we have at least one ‘fusion’ of jazz with a completely different style – thanks to the Messthetics’ ‘jazz punk jam’ in the ending ‘Fear Not’ – but not only: all the album is a jazz album driven with the energy and the need to express something less elaborated than in the conservatory-trained musicians.

All is good until the moment in which you realise that Lewis, a solid player in the tradition of Coltrane whose –isms are unluckily solid as the tradition he echoes, is expanding his palette only to resemble others, clearly identifiable, hystorical musicians instead of try to find his own language. This way, you can run into the ‘Brotzmanisms’ of the 47 seconds of the machine gun-esque Middleground, or into the ‘Aylerisms’ of Eye of I – there’s also a guitar riff reminding the opening of Ayler’s The Last Album (Impulse!, 1969) – or again into the ‘Wareisms’ of the oblique melody of Womb Water (listen to the album David S. Ware released in 2010 by Amu Fidelity under the title of Onecept).

It is difficult to decide, after listening to this album in its entirety, if Lewis is only a true connoisseur/devotee to the history of the most innodic and/or confrontational free jazz or if the shadow of some craftiness is emanating from his personality, at this point in his career. Obviously one wants to believe that a musician who is trying to find his place into the jazz continuum, and not only into the market, making difficult choices like the one explained at the beginning of this review is something more than a smart guy. But playing jazz is also psychologically demanding since you don’t know where you will be at the end of your rhetorical constructions, so the need for solid ground can be tricky even if you are honest.

For the moment we can enjoy these pieces of music, and also the likes of Send Seraphic Being, a ballad tinged into the New York sound of the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, even if in listening to a piece like Within You Are Answers one can notice how much less adventurous JBL saxophone raids are in comparison to his models. Nonetheless this is an album that will be chatted, because Lewis is the kind of musician many people are wanting to hear in order to continue one of the most intriguing traditions into the jazz history, and because his aesthetic choiches are nontheless intriguing.