Category: Recommendations/Reviews

A few weeks ago, I heard about a podcast from RedJazz.com. I randomly picked an episode to explore, and was greeted with excellent large-ish jazz ensemble writing. As an added bonus, there was a great trombone solo on the tune as well. The host back announced the track as coming from the Alan Ferber Nonet’s CD Scenes From An Exit Row. Shortly thereafter, I ordered the Cd from CD Baby.

I figured that Ferber was the composer/arranger, because it sounded like it was a writer’s CD. It turns out that he is also the trombonist. The band is made up of talented young players from the NY scene. John Ellis is featured on tenor sax, and David Smith is listed on trumpet. I am pretty sure this is the Dave Smith that I worked with in a cruise ship band some years ago. Besides being a great musician and a nice guy, Dave was one of the founding members of the Bahamian Deck Hockey League.

Scenes From An Exit Row is full of great playing and writing, and cuts a pretty wide stytlistic swath. Ferber makes compelling use of less often heard colors like wordless vocals and bass clarinet. The tunes range from modern sounding multiple meter grooves, to Mingus flavored textures, and even pretty straight up bebop. Despite the stylistic range, this recording doesn’t sound like a demo or an aural calling card. It has a nice flow as a larger unit, and is an enjoyable and rewarding listen.

I first read about Robert Bachner‘s CD Heart Disc about a year ago, I guess. It caught my attention because he was mentioned as a member of the Vienna Art Orchestra. I wasn’t really familiar with Bachner’s name, but the one VAO disc I had at the time was one of my favorite large ensemble discs. I made a mental note that I should pick up Bachner’s CD. A few months ago, I actually noted my intention to buy the disc on a computer desktop stickie note (along with a reminder about a novel I wanted to buy, and a note to call my insurance adjuster).

Well, last week, while on a CD Baby surf fest, I finally ordered it. I’m glad I did, it is a great CD. The compositions are all by Bachner. He is joined by Christian Maurer on tenor and soprano saxes, Reinhard Micko on piano, Uli Langthaler on bass, and Christian Salfellner on drums. The music is often fiery and aggressive, and it swings. It is well crafted music that seems familiar on the first listen.

Bachner’s trombone playing is marvelous. He expresses himself confidently in every tempo, and we never hear any deficit of chops, yet he doesn’t play anything simply because he can. His range and facility are used to very musical ends. He takes full advantage of the trombone’s more aggressive and raucous capabilities (check out the title track) , lets the beauty and sensitivity flow when needed, like on “For Gary,” and always maintains his spark and urgency. The rest of the quintet matches Bachner’s musicality and spirit.

Cool titles are usually a sign of an open mind. Harris Eisenstadt’s The Soul and Gone has some cool titles, like the opening track “The Evidence of Absence is Not Necessarily the Absence of Evidence.

Canadian born percussionist and composer Eisenstadt enlisted some of Chicago’s more interesting improvisers for The Soul and Gone. He is joined by Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone, trombonist Jeb Bishop, Jason Mears on alto sax and clarinet, guitarist Jeff Parker, and Jason Roebke on bass. The music is often about textures and grooves. It swings in places, gets noisy at times, and takes advantage of the available instrumentation. At times the combination of guitar and vibes yields a sounds that is evocative and absorbing. Bishop and Mears each provide memorable solos, and also do a fabulous job as ensemble players. The compositions frame and guide the improvisations successfully.

The Soul and Gone is released on 482 Music, and is available from CD Baby.

There is so much good music out there, that real gems can elude discovery for long periods of time. The high noise floor of well marketed but mediocre stuff available doesn’t always make it any easier to find the gems. Sometimes the hidden gems are musicians or groups that are emerging from, or wallowing in obscurity. These are gems that are hidden from much of the world of music lovers. Other times the gems are simply hidden from individuals, while being well known (or at least known) to the listening public at large.

One of my recently unearthed gems falls into that latter category. I had heard about the early 1960’s Steve Lacy/Rowell Rudd Quartet that performed the music of Thelonious Monk, but I had not heard it until recently. I ordered the hatOLOGY reissue of their 1963 session School Days, while exploring the Cadence website. It is amazing to me that I hadn’t sought out this recording earlier in my life. I have a great affinity for Monk’s music, as well as piano-less quartets fronted by trombone and sax, so this CD is right up my alley.

The back of the CD lists no composer credits, but under the title offers the sub-title “Improvisations on compositions by Thelonious Monk.” This doesn’t feel like repertory treatment of Monk’s material. It feels more like the compositions are the fifth member of a free improvisation. Monk’s tunes have an organic order that creates an inescapable gravity, that both keeps the performers in the spirit of the tunes, and allows them to wander about, knowing that they will be held in orbit around the core of the composition.

The performances are buoyant and animated. I can hear the comfort and confidence that come from regular working relationships amongst the musicians. Lacy and Rudd set each other off in beautiful stylistic distinction. The rhythm section of Henry Grimes and Dennis Charles swings hard, and captures the spirit of the soloists and the tunes.

As soon as I heard the first few notes of this CD, the music grabbed me. I’m glad I found it, or it found me, or however that works. Keep looking for those hidden gems.

There are so many approaches to musical freedom. Some free music is very noisy and cacophonous. I have a marvelous drummer friend who was once told that he “wasn’t playing free enough.” From the context he took that mean that it wasn’t noisy enough. Many music lovers are scared of the noise in free music. Freedom doesn’t have to be noisy, but noise is usually at least one component of the gumbo that makes up good free music.

The free music that usually moves me is the music that keeps everything on the table all the time. Noise, swing, bebop lines, funk grooves, pretty chorales, and pointilistic squeeks and squonks are all available if not all employed. Musical freedom is not complete freedom if any sound is disallowed by stylistic convention or performer’s preconception. In the same way that political freedom is incomplete if the voter’s only choices are democrats or republicans. The green party, libertarians, communists, and the local nut that wants to be on the city council, along with any one else who wishes, must be on the ballot for the voters to have real freedom of choice.

I just picked up a CD called Several Lights by Chicago Luzern Exchange, which is a group made up of Chicago based cornetist Josh Berman, saxophonist Keefe Jackson, drummer Frank Rosaly and Luzern based tubist Marc Unternährer. There are 19 tracks on the CD, several under 3 minutes. It is noisy in spots, but more often it is subtly melodic. It is sonically dense in places, and quite sparse in others. It is the kind of free that I find rewarding as a listener. Check it out, it is a Delmark release.

Being a professional musician has many benefits and a few drawbacks as well. One drawback is that it is hard to listen to music simply as a music lover. I am often analyzing music as I listen, or making judgments about aspects of what I am hearing that I want to incorporate or avoid in my own music. It is rare that I hear something that really hits me in a visceral way, and makes me want to listen just for fun, but when I do hear that music, it reminds me why I play music.

The first time I remember hearing (actually reading) about Ken Vandermark was shortly after he was awarded the Macarthur Grant. Downbeat did a story about a Brotzmann Chicago Tentet tour. A year or more later, I downloaded a couple of Vandermark 5 albums from eMusic. Sometime after that I heard Jeb Bishop’s trio, with Kent Kessler and Tim Mulveena, at the Blue Nile in New Orleans. They were playing Jeb’s music, not Vandermark 5 material, but it was 3/5 of that band, and hearing people make music live usually connects better than recordings.

One of my initial reasons for wanting to explore the music of the V5 was the presence of trombone. After hearing Jeb in New Orleans, I began to search out recordings that featured him. (Full Disclosure: Jeb has since become a friend and he has been invited to contribute to Scratch My Brain. So if you are thinking that I am just writing nice stuff about my friends, you are right, but I was digging the music before we met.) This led me to a number of V5 albums, and the music hit me in that way that makes me want to just listen and enjoy.

Much of what moves me about the V5 is the variety. At times it swings really hard, and at other times it can be funky or noisy, or sound like a punk band in 7. I like having any style or vibe available at any time. As a listener, I love not knowing what will come next.

There are a couple of recent releases by the Vandermark 5 that I am really enjoying these days. Their new studio CD is called Color of Memory. There is another recent release called Alchemia that is a 12 disc limited edition box set of a week’s worth of live performances in Krakow. These two releases are great companions. There are several tunes on Color of Memory that were written during the week in Krakow, and on Alchemia we get a chance to hear these tunes develop.

Ken Vandermark has been very outspoken about that fact that the best way to experience the music of his bands is through regular live performances. Hearing the band a number of times in close proximity allows the listener to hear developments that would be missed in any single performance. That is hard to do unless one lives in Chicago, because even in major cities it is rare that the band would play more than one or two nights consecutively. Alchemia gives us all a chance to hear every note the band played over the course of 5 consecutive nights. The V5 staples, the new tunes, a jazz standard or two, and the free jams with local guests are all there. It is a musical listening experience that is unheard of via recorded music.

I think that tradition is an oft-misunderstood concept in jazz. Too often, sounding like the past is mistaken for respecting the tradition. I believe the spirit of the music is the most important part of the jazz tradition, and that spirit is exciting and honest and probing, and musically inclusive. These new Vandermark 5 recordings have that spirit.

Both Color of Memory and Alchemia are available from the Atavistic website.

I love the chain of events that can lead to discovering new music.

A few weeks ago NPR did a story about a trombonist named Jay Keyser. I’m not exactly sure what the story was about. I didn’t hear it. The story was discussed on the trombone-l mailing list, but I didn’t really read the discussions. Dave Gibson did, and he ended up in contact with Jay Keyser. Jay sent Dave a couple of CDs by the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, which is one of the groups Jay plays with. Dave was telling me about these CDs, and the fact that they were nothing like what he expected. They were way farther out. That made my ears perk up. It also made me go to iTunes and buy an Aardvark Jazz Orchestra album. I chose a 1997 release called Psalms & Elegies.

One of the cools things about buying music on iTunes is that you have to deal with the music almost solely in terms of the music. There are no liner notes, no personnel list. No clue to the performers’ intentions other than the sounds they made. Listening on those terms is a great way to remove prejudice and preconception.

Throughout Psalms & Elegies the AJO makes great use of variations of space and color. It is a large ensemble, but they often pare down to small combinations and very effectively add and remove voices so the listener gets very organic transitions from spacious open sonic landscapes to densely intense ones. The large dense sections are also very powerful because of their comparative scarcity in relation to the more sonically spacious sections.

The various colors of the orchestra are also used successfully. Contrasts between brass and woodwind choirs, and the presence or absence of overt groove are common devices on this album. On the almost 30 minute “Psalms” the singer does very modern classical sounds and then later goes bluesy. There is wandering free stuff and fairly straight ahead swinging, and pointillistic squeak and squonk both with and without backbeat.

Even on the parts of the album that don’t have overt grooves being played, I find myself moving my body. There is a sense of pulse that moves throughout the music, even when it isn’t directly articulated. I think that is one of the things that draw me to this. I have a hunch that some of their other albums may be very different from this one. I’ll have to check a few out and confirm that hunch.