Charles Mingus "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus" (Candid, 1961 reissued in 2022)

The business related to reissues, both on CD and vynil, has a significant impact on the realm of improvised music, experimental music and jazz nowadays, since many of the great masters are passed away or anyway have seen their fluorishing period passing by. Not all the reissued material is always good, but many things reprinted, usually in the jazz fields, are enormous records. It is the case of the first reissues of the 1960s records released by Candid, a label led by the jazz critic Nat Hentoff, one of the great US liberals of those times, along with drummer Max Roach and bassist Charles Mingus.

During those times many were the hidden dangers a jazz cat or a real ‘hip’ could run into. You could record some sessions being payed only for the sessions themselves, I mean with no royalties for the copies the albums would sell, as an example; that’s the reason people like Giuseppi Logan and Henry Grimes, or later on Charles Gayle, decided to play at the margin of the business, which means along the roads asking for alms in exchange of few melodies played in solitude: after all, they were gaining almost the same amount of money.

It is hard, after all, to try to earn a living in a racist country, and now that we know that racism is systemic in our societies, there’s no surprise that such cultured and cultivated musicians had to live in such bad ways for so many years. Obviously people like Mingus and Dolphy, Roach and his wife Abbey Lincoln were very fierce guys, and they decided to create a label, called “Candid” because they were playing with racism, and the first record issued by the label was the masterpiece “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite”, an album echoing in the title the famous Sonny Rollins’ ‘Freedom Suite’ and featuring musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Julian Priester and Booker Little. 

Highly praised for its artistic merits by such enlightened intellectuals as Amiri Imamu Baraka in his notable book “Black Music”, who underlined how the record had one foot in the African tradition – two percussionists were accompanying Max Roach as a drummer – and the other in the avant-garde – the vocal lines by Lincoln seemed to predict those of a Diamanda Galàs – “We Insist!” is not the only notable record issued by Candid. Other titles include, as far as the interests of the followers of this blog, “Candid Dolphy” by multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, Abbey Lincoln’s “Straight Ahead” and this “Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus”.

The idea for the record, as we can deduce reading another good read, John F. Goodman’s “Mingus Speaks”, has probably come to Mingus thanks to Eric Dolphy. In Mingus’ words, Dolphy, who at the very beginning of his career, as a member of the Chico Hamilton band, was playing ‘just like Charlie Parker’, at a certain point started to fluorish as an individual voice, the one we are accustomed to hear thanks to his beautiful records, and at a certain point he started attending Mingus’ house and reading his music sheet guided by his own curiosity. 

Eric Dolphy at a certain point started to note some details, like a couple of compositions written following ‘All The Things You Are’ and ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’, a couple of jazz standards often played by Charlie Parker and other bebop masters. The new compositions were ‘All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’, a complex piece of music originally written for Buddy Collette, and ‘What Love’. These couple of compositions underlined Mingus’ debt with Charlie Parker and bebop, a music that in the same words of the bassist has a spiritual quality that pertain to the men who created it, as if they had a spiritual mission through music.

But the album starts with ‘Folk Forms No. 1’, that, according to Mingus, is a song based on what he was playing with his bass: if Mingus would change, the other musicians had to change. Not only the piece has a characteristic interplay between trumpeter Ted Curson and Dolphy, but it shows the telpathic interplay between Mingus and Dannie Richmond on drums, the musician that thanks to his playing made Mingus believe in God – according to his own words, since he could not understand how he would be able to read his mind and answer musically to him, if not by divine intervention. 

The other enormous piece of music included in this album is ‘Original Faubus Fables’, with Mingus and Richmond reciting an ironic text dedicated to governor Orval Faubus, who ordered the army not to let the black folks enter the school as according to the newly approved national law. Originally recorded for “Mingus Ah Uhm” a year before, without the text and with a less expressionistic approach, this piece is the base for the many live versions recorded by the various Mingus quartets and quintets during the year. A longer and incredible version, mixing ‘Faubus’ with fragments of compositions taken by the masterpiece ‘Tijuana Moods’, is available through the double album “The Great Concert Of Charles Mingus”, but there are many to tell you the truth worth listening to.

Those were the years of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the years of the beginning of the black avant-garde in music and the various attempts to create a more equal, advanced and creative society. We all know what happened then, but the music comprised in this record is, as Marc Ribot said about some of the earlier Albert Ayler stuff, similar to some strange sacrifices in the room near you. A true time machine, in other words. We cannot but thank Glenn Barros, the new proprietor of Candid Record, for these reissues, and the sound engineer Bernie Grundman for his work on the original masters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Francisco Lopez “Inner Sound”, Milano, Auditorium San Fedele, 04.04.2022

Those of you who are familiar to this blog are still aware of the interesting even if somehow bothering parade of electronic music and musicians that takes place every year at the San Fedele Auditorium in Milan. Bothering because sound is not always perfect, some choices – not only about the musicians involved, but also about how music is presented, acoustically speaking – are questionable and if you want to know more you can read my review of Eliane Radigue concert last year at this link.

But more important, yesterday night I attended a couple of performances one of which less interesting and the other one very cool. Let’s start with the worse: Mattia Loris Siboni, born in 1996, winner of a San Fedele prize in 2019, presented his work “In Memoriam Hieremiae Prophetae” (i.e. “In Memory of the Prophet Jeremiah”). For those of you who don’t know the story, and trying to make it as short as possible, Jeremiah opposed the political power of his time during the war against Babylon, and for that reason was immersed in the mud into a tower.

Siboni mixes in this work field recordings and ascensional melodies, indicating the prophet was saved by the pity of an Ethiopian councillor of the king, Ebed-Mèlech and taken outside the mud. So we heard for half an hour the ascensional melody interspersed with the field recordings: a not particularly brilliant solution to be honest, a little bit boring and lacking a dynamic development. Even the use of the field recordings is too simply descriptive, to be honest. I believe Siboni deserve to be recognized as a composer, but sometimes the urgency to communicate a story or a message kills the music or affects the way a given musician tells his own story.

Luckily, the same didn’t happen with Francisco Lopez. Another disciple of Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of ‘musique concrète’ (i.e. concrete music), Lopez presented a work titled aptly “Inner Sound”, where the field recordings taken into the Amazon forest were interspersed into an industrial sonic landscape. Here the dynamics of sound were not only interestingly realized, but also imagined. As an example, for a couple of times (e.g. the passing from the industrial to the equatorial lanscape) we faced a sound that was increasing its volume not vertically but horizontally, in the face of the audience.

For the sake of the record, I have to admit that at the end of the performance part of the audience were discussing about whether Francisco Lopez was developing a way of thinking about the music or presenting a mere reproduction of past glories of concrete/industrial music. I really believe that the grace and the mastery we heard were solid gold, and that Lopez deserves to be taken as one of the most intriguing electonic composers nowadays.

Francisco Lopez for almost forty years has developed his own sonic universe, trying with success to destroy the boudaries between industrial music and environmental sounds creating a sonic world of his own. Working in almost seventy countries of all the continents, he realized works, many or which are available through his Bandcamp page, including music created with sounds taken from both artificial (i.e. human-built) and natural environments, and his idea of music is so open that the listener is taken as the last but not the less important ring of the creative chain, so to speak.

In fact, Lopez believes, as Ludwig Wittengstein, that every work of art need an end-user, a listener, who will give the work its final but partial meaning thanks to his senses and connections he’ll be able to create between what he’ll listen to and a possible sense. Wittengstein is more explicit than that: he declared that every work of art changes meaning thanks to every user every time it is enjoyed. I believe Lopez wouldn’t disagree with that.

As far as me, the sense I gave last night to Lopez’ work was that of a discovery: in fact, I was more fascinated by the industrial sounds, with its far echoes, the circular and slow rhythms, than by the analogic and natural ones. Not a surprise since I live near a big city, but I really asked myself if the first group of sounds, the industrial ones, are more interesting to be manipulated while the animals and the rain are in a way more penetrating.

That is to say, maybe, that industries are part of a fascinating trip nowadays, as if the dream of the contemporary composers has become true, while the nature is still wild and indomitable, more dangerous for us as individuals and maybe as species. That’s why not all we are implied in fighting against the global trauma of the climate change: we have relocated ourselves during the eras, so as far as we are from nature, we can’t really understand her. At least, not the majority of us.

More prosaically, obviously the industrial sounds are more regular and dark than the sounds of nature, more organic but also more accidental. We do know what to expect in an abandoned factory, and that’s part of its charm, but we don’t know what to expect in a rainforest, and that’s why it can be really scary. So, many of us will continue to live in alienating cities instead that in warm nature. A pessimistic message, but don’t bother Francisco Lopez for that: blame it on myself only.

The review “Inner Spaces” will continue on April 8 with Syntax Ensemble and on May 2 with Otolab and Marta De Pascalis. There is also space for the Responsories of the Holy Week on April 10 – we’re talking about a review promoted by the Catholic Church after all – and for cinema, with the projection of the movie “North by Northwest” by Alfred Hitchcock. 

 

Misha Mengelberg “Berlin Solo 1987“ (self released, 2021)

In Italian and other languages, differently from French and English, the terms to indicate a musician ‘playing’ are different from that of an activity implying a game. Same with acting. This, in a way, is a distortion. Misha Mengelberg is a musician that, as Cecil Talyor would have put it, “can play”. But Mengelberg is a serious musician or one of those who love to come back to childhood as each one of us should?

During a concert in Italy, at the beginning of the new millennium, Mengelberg was, at a certain moment, singing like a child, almost out of tune – or indifferent to tune. You can find an interview about that performance at the following link – even if unluckily for you the interview it’s in Italian, but it’s only because I don’t want to be perceived as disrespectful.

Fact is that, Misha Mengelberg believed in music as John Cage believed in it. Music has a childish quality in itself, that is the sound of freedom. If Lou Reed said once that listening to music is like to be in your mother’s womb, with the drums mimicking your mother’s heartbeat, for centuries in the western world the rules of music were almost at the point of destroying the mother and the children, suffocating them with rules. 

Do you remember Chopin’s Nocturnes? I own a beautiful double CD with Maurizio Pollini playing that incredible music. But for Chopin’s contemporaries, that music was really only shit. Because it was music for piano, and the piano was the instrument where women were performing music at home. So, how some culturally evolved men were supposed to loose their time with things more suited for women?

Things are different nowadays, but even if concerts for piano solo are held in my city in prestigious theatres, there is a sacred quality with (classical) music that makes people like John Cage and Misha Mengelberg wanting to play with it, to disrupt that facade, that mask, and go deeper to the heart of both the musician and the listener. 

More prosaically, as I wrote four years ago one week after Misha Mengelberg died aged 81, our pianist was born in Ukranie in 1935, son of the Dutch conductor Karel Mengelberg. His family moved to the Netherlands in the late 1930s and the young Mengelberg started taking piano lessons at the age of five. Subsequently he studied architecture briefly before entering the Royal Conservatory at the Hague.

Influenced by Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and the above mentioned John Cage, Mengelberg in 1964 participated to a session of music with, among the others, drummer Han Bennink – who will become one of his lifetime collaborators – and multireedist Eric Dolphy, for the record of the latter titled “Last Date”. It’s like the perfect joining link between the US and Europe, as far as improvised music. 

As many of his peers and colleagues, Mengelberg recorded a huge variety of live performances. The one we refer in this review is a solo performance at piano coming from a cassette labeled as “17-18-4-88 berlijn solo”, but in fact it has been established that the record comes from a solo performance in 1987. The music is different from the assertions of the US free jazz and avant garde music from the 1960s and 1970s, you can smell something coming from Fluxus or european avant art and theatre. At the beginning.

The record is divided in four parts, two parts per set for a couple of sets, to be accurate, from 15 to 23 minutes each. At the beginning we can hear the piano has been prepared as Cage would do, but the music, spanning from the lower to the medium registries, becomes after a brief introduction a little excited just to come back to what it seems to be an attempt to create assertions who are interrupted, hammered, deconstructed. 

Finally the hummed monologue becomes like pearls whose fall resonates on the floor, then the perpared part of the piano comes in the foreground, with the strings hummed and dragged, then again we hear a small melody reminiscing some baroque music, just before an attempt to deconstruct the melody itself, just like Marc Ribot does sometimes with his guitar – it would be interesting to track how the two banks of the ocean have influenced each other and how.

At about minute 8 Mengelberg tries to mix some assertive chords with more subtle excursions on the keyboard, then for quite a while silence fill the room just before a come back to this mix of melody and humming, giving us that feeling possibly Roland Barthes was referring to in his La Chambre Claire when talking about the “punctus”. We go on with many permutations until the end of the first part of the section, not without some nice occasions to hear Mengelberg pressing, pushing and crushing, so to speak, his keys. 

Second part of the first section opens with a series of violent strumming on the lower registry of the piano, like we’re accustomed to listen to in Diamanda Galàs playing in her beautiful but haunting Defixiones, but instead of adding a raucous and grasping voice, at a certain point we hear another deconstructed melody – in fact it seems like a mix between a blues and a classical tune, which is no surprise since as a muisicologist pointed out in a recent number of the magazine Musica Jazz, Thelonious Monk himself was keen on taking inspiration from classical music for the blues pieces he wrote.

Obviously Mengelberg music isn’t devoid of more intimate, reflexive moments, but if the influence of Monk in these moments is clear and goes well beyond the quotation, which is present anyway, straight to the feeling of that music, one wonders, at a certain point, if it’s true that there are differences between the Western and the Eastern banks of the Atlantic, since the elements put to cook together seem to be almost the same. 

We’re at almost half of the second part and a deconstructed ragtime appears, magnificently interspersed with a strumming on the medium and upper registries. As far as it seems, the music of Mengelberg from the beginning of this album hits us because of the ability of his creator to put together different styles and different emotional temperatures giving us the feeling that something almost new is coming from that clash.

After a brief applause, the last ten minutes of this section are dedicated again to the music of Monk, but it’s a Monk that we still know revisited by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, and so it’s a Monk who lives of different interpretations, as his music would have gone well far beyond his creator’s death. Strumming on prepared chords occupy a consistent part of this section of the record, just before coming back to a deconstructed melody. 

If the first set was equally divided into ‘decostructing Baroque’ and ‘deconstructing Monk’, the second set sees Mengelberg engaging in an attempt to put his hands on the living matter of classical music interspersed with more modern experimentations, using a similar ‘method’ to the one described above – that’s why we don’t describe it almost second-by-second as we did before.

My advice today is to listen carefully to these sets, available through Bandcamp, because if it is true that on a first level the European Avant Garde music from the 1970s on is more keen on playing with the sound matter and how it has been hystorically defined, while the US Avant Garde is more keen on creating new shapes and forms – think about Braxton and Mitchell, at a deeper level you will find in fact similar concept in both – aren’t Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy from the US? 

And if there are different temperatures and general architectural concepts to differentiate the two currents, on a deeper level the bricks are the same, even if layered differently. I won’t loose time in affirming that, being mostly African-American the music coming from the US, it is more keen on illustrating how to survive in an hostile environment finding out the inner strenght to survive, while the European musicians find themselves more at ease with playing with culture and ideal constructions putting them out of context in order to see what they can become.

Because, in fact, in both cases the nucleus is an attempt to say something different from the mass thinking, the thinking of Power, in order to establish a new, spiritual order, that of freedom. And if Don Cherry encouraged Peter Brotzmann to go ahead with his music, we cannot let records like this unlistened, because their story is, mostly, our own story. A history of freedom, an attempt to a better life for each one, the search for new forms of music and life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

John Coltrane “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle” (Impulse!, 2021)

October 2, 1965, a Saturday night. The place is The Penthouse, a club held by Joe Brazil where people like Roland Kirk and Chick Corea played many times. Mr Brazil won’t be very happy of the performance of that night, but not because of the music: the deal is, ‘Trane lovers drink only one beer, then they listen to that demanding music with almost religious concentration. But they’re right. That night, John Coltrane enlarged his historical quartet in order to welcome a bunch of other musicians, so it was worh to listen to them carefully.

It wasn’t the first time for the multireedist, this kind of enlargement of his quartet. Few months before, during the sessions leading to the album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, he hosted bassist Art Davis, along with Jimmy Garrison, for a mournful version of the classic song Nature Boy. Also, the same year, Coltrane recorded his pivotal album Ascension, released only the following year, where he led his classical quartet plus Art Davis again, trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson, altoists Marion Brown and John Tchicai, and tenorists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.

This period, from 1965 until the end of ‘Trane life in 1967 for a liver cancer, is my favorite in the saxophonist career. Les schizophrenic than the previous years, where Impulse! managers were constantly asking him to produce a hit song like Atlantic’s My Favorite Things, forcing the musician to issue records like Ballads, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, while it was clear listening to his less commercial stuff like Africa/Brass, India and the live versions of My Favorite Things what Coltrane’s real direction was, the 1965/1967 period marks the end of the classic quartet and an attempt to follow more experimental paths. 

Unluckily the extraordinary machine of the classic quartet in the end disbanded. Pianist McCoy Tyner declared more than once how unable to listen to the music he was with the passing of time, due to the volume of the two tenors – Coltrane took Pharoah Sanders as a permanent member of his band, and for a short amount of time tried to set a couple of drummers, putting Rashied Ali and Elvin Jones side by side – the latter also said farewell not knowing exactly how to manage with the uncertainties of ‘Tranes experimentations.

But with Alice Liddle, further also Coltrane’s wife, on piano, and Jimmy Garrison as the only member of the previous group remained as pivotal contrabass, the music went on for that short amount of time leaving some masterpieces like Meditation, the above mentioned Ascension, Kulu Sé Mama and the drums/saxophone duets contained in the beautiful Interstellar Space. 

Anyway, that night, the second occasion we know in which Coltrane played the A Love Supreme suite in its entirety, was for sure a special night. Just to start, Carlos Ward on alto and Pharoah Sanders on tenor and percussions are present in this concert/record, as well as Donald Rafael Garret at a second bass. Ward has been mostly a sidemen for people like Coltrane, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim and Cecil Taylor if we refer to jazz, but for the most part of his life the man played also funk.

Donald Rafael Garret has been one of those rare musicians whose career is difficult to put in a box and to label. A collaborator of Muhal Richard Abrahms and his Experimental Band, he played also with Sun Ra, Coltrane – he is present also on the double album Live In Seattle, on Om and on Kulu Sé Mama –  Johnny Griffin and Roland Kirk between the many others. 

This version of A Love Supreme is very far from the original, even if the themes of the four sections are all expressed in their entirety and clearly distinguishable. But the variety of musicians involved and the different intros before every part of the suite make this album one of those products of research you can also be disappointed with, if you’re not that much adventurous. Another characteristic of this record is that the use of small percussions by Sanders and the presence of Ward make this rendition of the suite more keen on the experiments of the AACM, building a bridge between the wave of NY free jazz and the Chicagoan avant garde movement.

Those who are familiar with the Juan-Les-Pins version of the suite – played on July 26, 1965 by his classic quartet – will be not particularly swept up by ‘Trane performances on this Seattle date, since he was careful in order to leave the correct amount of space to his many hosts. Ward solo on Pursuance is possibly the most interesting part of the record since it is completely unheard before and Ward himself is not an overrepresented musician – unluckily – but for sure he has something to say: his solo is flamboyantly obliquous but clear and meaningful in his statement. 

Pharoah Sanders solo on Pursuance is something every Coltrane fan wanted to hear in a clearer recorded environment since the release of the Olatunji Concert in 1999. There, the noise of the poor recording wasn’t helpful in making us concentrate on Sanders honks, squeals, parodistic marches, while here his solo, that for some parts is not that much different from that on My Favorite Things, is finally clearly audible.

And it is an important statement. Apparently, Pharoah is not matching with the rest of the band and seems not consequent to what John previously have played, but if you listen closely it makes completely sense. Hazardous as it is melodically, harmonically and chromatically, Sanders’ solo is one you don’t forget quickly and that in a way change emotionally at every listening, depending on the feeling it moves in you, that can be different every time. 

In his liner notes for the album, Ashley Kahn writes that maybe there can be other live versions of A Love Supreme to discover. We hope so, and we hope they will be different the one from the other, in order to touch with our ears how different even a perfect music can be while involving other human hearts or the same in different occasions. Quick note for the listener: this live version is recorded with the drums and the piano on the foreground and the saxophones and the bass on the background. Disappointing as this can be for some of you, some people say that listening to it in mono, if your stereo gives you this opportunity, is a good correction.  

 

 

Alvin Curran and Walter Prati "Community Garden", Milano, La Fabbica del Vapore, 10.15.2021

I’ve been in the Monumental Cemetery zone in Milan many times in the past. I love to take pictures of the statues in the cemetery with my camera. I have experimented with natural, harsh light, so I suppose sooner or later I’ll came back with a simple direct flash in order to obtain a different effect. But yesterday night I’ve gone to the Fabbrica Del Vapore which is near the Cemetery, in order to see one of the cornerstones of improvised music, Alvin Curran.

Alvin Curran was in the 1960s one of the founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, that hosted musicians and composers as Frederick Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Steve Lacy, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and John Fetteplace during his various decades of activity. MEV was one of the very first groups of musicians to experiment with the sound of synthesizers, giving life to what, in the following years, would have been called “electro acoustic improvisation”.

Friends of John Cage with whom MEV played a composition titled Solo For Voice 2, where Plantamura voice was trasfigurated by a Moog synthesizer, the group featured many collaborations with master improvisors – there’s a beautiful record from 1976 titled Time Zones featuring Teitelbaum and Anthony Braxton. But the main point with EAI is that it helped widen the concept of composition. 

Preparing a piano is, per se, a compositional gesture, as an example. And this is what I have seen first yesterday night as I entered the room where the concert of Alvin Curran with his longtime collaborator Walter Prati would have been played. Curran had at his own disposition a prepared piano (with cardboards, a small plastic bottle half full of water, a ligther, etc.) and a keyboard previously programmed with many sounds (human voices in English and Japanese languages, the sound of many different musical instruments as trumpet and saxophone, natural sounds like water falling, but also many manipulated sounds).

On the other hand, Walter Prati had a couple of laptops and a small electric viola enriched with a couple of pedals and an arco. Even if the concert was presented as a celebration of a recent CD published by the duo and titled Community Garden, disposable both physically and on many streaming platforms, the music the people filling the room with me listened to yesterday was completely new. The musicians themselves, in fact, didn’t knew what they were creating. So, the listener was attending to the music on the same side of the musician.

The more analogic sounds of the prepared piano were interspersed with samples, electronic sounds, manipulated sounds, the electric viola (both pinched and arcoed), giving life to a multilayered effect from whom emerged some curious moments like the sensation of attending to a music blob and more melancholic reminiscences of Ellington blues. But it is really difficult to describe every moment of the music, and maybe it’s also pointless. 

We can say to our readers that all dynamics of sound and silence, of flux and interruptions, and the sonic ranges have been experimented with success. Creating a music is not only a matter of playing, but also of listening and halting, sometimes, as Prati stated at the initial little speech before the concert. As far as me, I can obviously saying this was the most intense and interesting concert I attended this year, between the ones I wrote a review for this blog.

Community Garden has been for sure an intriguing live performance. The prepared piano, historically meaning the attempt to deconstruct bourgeois music as part of the values of one small but imposing part of society, the idea that composing doesn’t mean only to write down a bunch of notes on a piece of paper but creating an environment for creativity, the mix of sound and noise as part of a sound environment, the blurring of the line between the conscious will of the musician and his unconscious or physical response to the partners, is all we heard and saw yesterday night. 

It is important to testify these little moment of creativity and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of our ideals of what music is, because we all are living in a very conservative period, where music is mostly entertainment or a mere wallpaper for different environments, while in fact the sound world is a recall to our first environment and, this way, an important tool to create a new, collective meaning to life. And so I’m grateful to Curran and Prati for sharing with us their thoughts and feelings under the shape of beautiful music. Don’t miss them, if they’re around to play.