- Tomeka Reid — Tomeka Reid Quartet. A fresh, lively and generally fantastic recording that should have made it onto more best-of lists for 2015. The lineup of cello, guitar, bass, drums makes for a unique sound, particularly given that the guitarist is Mary Halvorson, hands-down the most interesting new guitarist of the early 21st century. But it’s not just an avant-garde workout: the compositions are strong and tuneful and the group is swinging. Highly recommended.
- Joe Lovano & Hank Jones — Kids. A 2006 duet session from two grand masters, whose subtle interplay is of the highest order. The title track, “Kids Are Pretty People,” is a particularly gorgeous highlight.
- Jason Moran — Soundtrack to Human Motion. The sound here is reminiscent of nothing so much as one of Andrew Hill’s classic 1960s sessions: the oblique compositions, the combination of piano and vibes. But that’s a great sound, and this 1999 session–Moran’s debut–is an impressive and enjoyable take on one of the more complex parts of the jazz tradition.
- Sidney Bechet — The Best of Sidney Bechet. The title is a bit misleading, as this is not a career-spanning overview but a selection of recordings on Blue Note. But the quality is indeed very high–Bechet has one of the great sounds in jazz, his huge tone is always modern, always unmistakable. I came back to these tracks after reading a nice interview with the Ben Goldberg where he singles out the track “Blue Horizon” as an early favorite: “I couldn’t believe the sound. It was as if he’d built the clarinet himself out of a big chunk of ebony that he’d split with an axe.”
- Kora Jazz Trio — Part Two. An old favorite that has popped up again on shuffle recently. The singing and kora playing of Djeli Moussa Diawara are the nominal highlight, but for me the group’s unique sound is really founded on the powerfully rhythmic piano playing of Abdoulaye Diabaté.
Category / Music
What I’ve been listening to lately
- Bud Powell – The Scene Changes. While I don’t always enjoy piano trios, this 1958 session is a great showcase for Powell’s percussive, vigorous playing, and has several of his catchy compositions as well. Along with Time Waits, this is becoming one of my favorites of his many recordings.
- Ornette Coleman – Complete Science Fiction Sessions. This took a while to grow on me, and would be hard to recommend to anyone not already a fan–some of the goofy 70s experiments, like the title track, no longer hold up well. But there is some classic small-group work with Don Cherry and other collaborators here. And the vocal tracks are a surprise and a treat: the singing is largely straight, but is set in very effective contrast to freer playing in the background.
- The Velvet Underground – The Complete Matrix Tapes. Some of this material was previously released on the Live 1969 albums, which I listened to obsessively in college, so it won’t be wholly new to fans. But oh, there is a lot of great stuff here. The sound of this edition of the VU makes them one of the great rock bands–Maureen Tucker’s perfect, minimalist drumming, and the clean, crisp interlocking rhythm guitars.
- John Coltrane – Transition. An often overlooked album, indeed I had overlooked it until now. But then current jazz phenom Kamasi Washington said it is his favorite Coltrane album, so it seemed worth checking out. This period of Coltrane is in fact usually very worthwhile: he’s testing the bounds of the classic Jones-Tyner quartet, but hasn’t quite gone off into his less-listenable free period. The long suite is quite good and surprisingly accessible.
- Oran Etkin – Kelenia. The one-line summary of this album–jazz bass clarinet meets Malian music–was enough to send it to the top of the Batson playlist. There are indeed some nice tracks here, and the general vibe is good. Yet I wish I liked this album more: it’s a little too soft around the edges for my tastes. But I will also investigate other things this guy has done.
What I’ve been listening to lately
A mix of new acquisitions and old favorites popping up on the playlist of late:
- Dave Holland — Conference of the Birds. The jazz avant-garde of the1970s produced a lot of inconsistent albums, but this is one is strong all the way through. I have long enjoyed the title track with its lovely marimba part by Barry Altschul, but the rest of it has steadily grown on me, with great interplay between Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton on horns.
- Icebreaker — Philip Glass: Music With Changing Parts. I am a sucker for classic minimalism, like Terry Riley’s “In C” and almost anything by Steve Reich, and it turns out that the Philip Glass that I like is his earlier stuff that is more in that mode. This contemporary recording resurrects a classic early Glass piece that is otherwise hard to hear.
- John Handy & Ali Akbar Khan — Karuna Supreme / Rainbow. A very underrated alto saxophonist, Handy made excellent use of violin and guitar in his rhythmically driving 1960s groups. This collaboration with Indian musicians is a change of pace but also very rewarding.
- Lester Young — The “Kansas City” Sessions. An unsung masterpiece, extraordinarily gentle and softly swinging small group jazz from the 1930s. Every track is wonderful, but those where Young plays his quiet, unvirtuosic clarinet are of particular note.
- John Zorn — Filmworks XIII: Invitation to a Suicide. An glorious showcase for the accordion as jazz instrument. The sound of the ensemble, filled out with vibes and guitar, is totally ravishing, and the tunes are in fact quite catchy.
The best music I heard in 2015
This is a list of my favorites among all the recordings I heard for the first time this year, not of things commercially released in 2015 (same rules as my books list). I commend you to Ted Gioia’s best of 2015 list for something more current; the list below is purely a product of my own idiosyncratic listening habits. Unsurprisingly, it’s heavy on the jazz, but I have a few other things in there to mix it up. Alphabetical by artist:
- Henry “Red” Allen – World On A String. One of the definitive statements of swing era jazz, never mind that it was recorded in 1957 rather than 1937. Incredibly creative solos from Allen and collaborators, including Coleman Hawkins and Buster Bailey.
- Gary Clark, Jr. – Live. A charming young man with a straight-up monstrous guitar sound; while his studio records feel a bit overproduced, this bluesy live setting is ideal. The ghost of Hendrix is definitely hovering nearby, but he would be smiling I think.
- The Gladiators – Studio One Singles. A long string of roots reggae classics; this collection is more consistent than either their album Trenchtown Mix Up, or the other widely-available collection Bongo Red.
- Ice Cube – Death Certificate. When the NWA movie came out this year I went back to the records, and the truth is that NWA’s songs don’t hold up that well these days. Ice Cube’s solo stuff really does, however. And somehow I missed this one the first time around: funky, slamming production and hard-hitting rhymes.
- Andrew Jaume – Merapi. A French jazz saxophonist and guitarist improvise with a Javanese gamelan orchestra in a rare but successful mixing of the traditions. A completely ravishing sound; I had been waiting for this album, without knowing it, for years.
- Thelonious Monk – Big Band And Quartet In Concert. Despite having been a Monk fan for many years, I am still discovering great recordings: the long, complex big band arrangements are unique and wonderful, and the quartet statements are definitive.
- Tiny Parham – 1928-1930. An unjustly neglected figure of 1920s jazz, Parham’s complex arrangements draw on the same well of exotic “jungle” effects as early Ellington.
- Ernest Ranglin – Jazz Jamaica From The Workshop. A 1962 session featuring several Jamaican giants playing not instrumental reggae but proper jazz. The guitar virtuoso Ernest Ranglin is the star; he would go on to fruitfully combine jazz with reggae on albums like Memories of Barber Mack, which I also enjoyed a lot.
- Moacir Santos – Coisas. Wonderful jazzy miniatures by a largish ensemble led by the Brazilian composer, from 1965. Far superior to his 1970s outings on Blue Note.
- Sly Stone – I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969-70. The mellow, minimalist funk of Fresh-era Sly Stone is one of the great sounds in pop music. This collection of singles is like discovering a whole new Sly album from that crucial period; essential.
- Taumbu – Encantado. My most random musical discovery of the year (heard it on the radio in Mexico), a really lovely and creative album of Latin jazz.
- Lucky Thompson – Tricotism. Thompson is one of my favorite tenor saxophonists, with a flat-out gorgeous sound. This classic session features him with minimal accompaniment, the better to showcase his tone.
- Hozan Yamamoto – Ginkai (Silver World). A Japanese shakuhachi master joins a jazz group for an atmospheric mixing of the traditions. Obscure but worth searching out.
For reference, here’s a link to my 2014 music list.
David Moser recalls the early days of the Chinese jazz scene
David Moser’s piece at The Anthill, “The Book of Changes: twenty-five years in Chinese jazz” is truly delightful and a must-read. Here is one excerpt:
One striking characteristic of Chinese jazz musicians was their uniform reverence for Miles Davis. Almost to a person they preferred the spare, cooler style of Miles to the rapid pyrotechnic displays of other jazz artists. They pointed to his use of empty space and understatement, “saying more with less”, all preferences that, it seemed to me, had a resonance with Chinese visual arts. The best selling jazz album of all time is Miles’s classic Kind of Blue. In the liner notes to the album, pianist Bill Evans compared jazz improvisation to the art of calligraphy. I remember at the time thinking that it was a gratuitous comparison, a trendy invoking of Oriental exoticism. But it turned out my Chinese musician friends also saw commonalities in the two disciplines. The calligrapher, like the jazz artist, spends a lifetime mastering the basic forms in preparation for a spontaneous moment of creation, during which the artist must act in a non-deliberative way to produce one continuous, expressive “line” – for the calligrapher in space, for the jazz player in time – without the option of revising, restarting or rethinking. Each time the result is a unique form reflecting the artist’s mental and emotional state at that moment. Miles’s philosophy of jazz seemed to echo centuries of Chinese aesthetics. He famously told his sidemen, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” If that’s not Daoism, what is?
And another:
Our group played nearly every Saturday for four years. The audiences were small but attentive, and I enjoyed the barrage of questions we received after. Puzzled by the long improvised solos, people asked me “How are you musicians able to memorize all those complicated melodies?” I told them that the music was completely ad-libbed, not memorized. “Well, without a score, how can you tell a wrong note from a right one?” Indeed. Or, “If the music is all improvised, then why bother to practice?” And, “How come the trumpet and saxophone all seem to take turns playing, while the drums, bass, and piano play all the time? They should be paid more!”
Many thanks to David for writing all this down. There are also a couple of nice photos showing some musical luminaries in their awkward youth.
Lost masterpieces of jazz-gamelan fusion resurface
One of my favorite musical genres is characterized by daring rhythmic complexity and an ethic of competition among top players, and has its origins in folk traditions but underwent a surge of innovation and modernization during the 1920s. My other favorite musical genre is jazz; I’m talking of course about the gamelan music of Indonesia, particularly Bali.
Jazz and gamelan do have some things in common, as I suggested, but it’s still true the genres are not particularly close. Yet right-thinking people enjoy them both, and there have been occasional attempts to bring them together. I just discovered that the famed German record label MPS has made its back catalog available digitally this year; among many other things, this means that two classic works that fuse jazz and gamelan are now readily available again.
The first is Don Cherry’s wonderful Eternal Rhythm, a long multi-themed suite of the sort he explored after leaving Ornette Coleman’s group. Cherry plays a few gamelan instruments, as well as flute and trumpet, on this 1968 concert recording. The late, great Sonny Sharrock makes an appearance with his crashing electric guitar, along with some other jazz giants, and the whole thing is generally wonderful. This period in jazz produced a lot of useless noodling but this is a masterpiece that seems to point the way to a whole new genre of music.
Next up is a new discovery for me, a session the great clarinetist Tony Scott recorded in 1967 with some Indonesian jazz musicians. On Djanger Bali the fusion strategy is different: rather than putting gamelan instruments into a jazz context, a traditional jazz quintet plays gamelan-inspired themes. The session also includes a couple of straight jazz tracks which are not as interesting, so overall the impact is not as deep as Eternal Rhythm, but it’s still a worthwhile listen.
Another great piece of jazz-gamelan fusion is Merapi, a 1996 album that has sadly not resurfaced and is not easily obtainable in physical or digital form. It features the saxophonist Andre Jaume and guitarist Rémi Charmasson playing alongside a full gamelan orchestra–yet a third strategy for merging the two traditions. There’s a lot more of the real gamelan sound here, and I think this is the most ambitious fusion attempt of the three. Again I am surprised that there have not been dozens more sessions exploring the sonic possibilities this collaboration reveals.
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(96)/discogs-images/R-2969112-1435352215-7051.jpeg.jpg)
The concept of progress: appreciating Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz
Somewhat against my better judgment, I’ve been desultorily reading Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz. These kind of books are dangerous, to me anyway, because in the minutes it takes to read a few pages you can come up with many, many hours of new stuff to listen to. But it has already inspired me to go back and listen again to some great early jazz recordings which have not been on the playlist for many years–in particular, rediscovering the sprightly chamber jazz of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang has been a real treat. And passages like this one lift the book far above the ordinary:
From its earliest days, jazz had been a forward-looking art, continually incorporating new techniques, more expansive harmonies, more complex rhythms, more intricate melodies. Sometimes this ideology of progress was stated explicitly, as in Beiderbecke and the Chicagoans’ oft-spoken praise of Stravinsky and other contemporary classical composers; in other instances, no words were necessary, as with the implicit modernism of Armstrong’s breakthrough recordings of the 1920s. But whether they expostulated about the future of music or merely announced its arrival through the bells of their horns, the leading musicians of early jazz were modernists in the truest sense of the term. They were admired—or chastised, as the case may be—as daring exponents of the new and bold.
It is easy to lose sight of just how remarkable this modernist bent was, given its context. The concept of progress has played a modest role in most ethnic music traditions. Those who draw connections between jazz and African music miss this important difference. The griots of West Africa, for example, aim to preserve their cultural legacy as it is handed down to them. This is not a mere aesthetic choice, but a cultural imperative: they are the historians of their society and must maintain the integrity of their precious musical heritage. …
Almost from the start, jazz players embraced a different mandate, accepting their role as entertainers and pursuing experimentation with an ardent zeal. This created a paradoxical foundation for jazz, one that remains to this day: for the jazz musician soon proved to be a restless soul, at one moment fostering the tradition, at another shattering it, mindless of the pieces. Even more striking, this progressive attitude of early jazz players came from members of America’s most disempowered underclass. Recall that this music was not only viewed with apprehension by much of the ruling class but was often belittled and derided even within black America’s own ranks. In the face of this hostility, simply preserving the African American vernacular music heritage—saving the legacy of a Buddy Bolden or King Oliver from the oblivion that obscures the early history of most traditional forms of music— would have been a major achievement. But advancing the jazz idiom to produce an Ellington or Armstrong was nothing short of miraculous—and all in the span of a single generation. One searches in vain through all the countries of the world to find another example of such a rapid and dramatic transformation from folk music to art music.
Books like these are a huge organizational challenge because the material can be approached so many different ways: chronologically, biographically, thematically. Gioia has done a good job of using all three approaches; the frame of the book is chronological, but when he introduces each figure they get a full biographical treatment, even when that requires going well outside the chronology of the rest of the chapter. For instance, the xylophonist Red Norvo is discussed early on for his 1930s recordings, but Gioia also assesses his 1950s work with Mingus and other later recordings (the treatment of Norvo is also a good example of Gioia’s generous approach to “minor” figures outside the standard jazz pantheon).
He is also, by the way, an excellent guide to more recent music: his annual best-of lists are wonderful, eclectic and huge.
