Jazz
I don't think I've ever done something quite as bonkers as trying to cover an entire genre of music, but wtf. These aren't all my Jazz records, but nearly. What kind of criteria is that for a piece on Jazz? Well, I'm a ridiculously choosy buyer and also a greedy one. If I'm after something by hook or by crook I'll get it. This should, then, double as a good guide for the uninitiated.
Everything I've learnt about Jazz over the past twenty years I've worked out on my own. This probably translates into a very personal taste. There was a brief period in the early nineties when I fell in socially with a number of Acid Jazz fans (the dark ages, titter) and I suppose that informed me a bit about Jazz-Funk, but in the main my friends avoided the Free and Electric Jazz which exposure to Lester Bangs's writing meant I was more aware of. Sure they paid lip-service to that stuff, but it made a lot more sense within the context of Rock (me, bashful Indie kid at this point of time) than on the dance-floor at The Wag.
DUKE ELLINGTON
Why isn't there a bigger cult of Ellington? It's superficial to have him down as a conventional figure, because he wore a suit, was at one time rendered anachronistic by be-bop/Modern Jazz/Rhythm and Blues/Rock'n'Roll and composed and performed for Presidents (Truman and Nixon). Let's not forget Mingus wept when he was honored by Jimmy Carter!
It's accepted knowledge that his 78rpm-era recordings are what really distinguished him as a colossus songs recorded between 1930 and 1940 like "Mood Indigo", "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", "Sophisticated Lady", "In A Sentimental Mood", "Caravan", and "I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart". His longer suites, with the exception of "Black, Brown and Beige" met with mixed reviews and slow sales. These four LPs though are exceptionally lush. No-one does bruised sorrow like his band, the term "Gutbucket" was practically invented for his sides.
Unlike a lot of Jazz where the soloist is over-indulged and the individual's worst excesses are actually celebrated (often staining the music with cheap, fashionable inflections) with Duke's work the orchestration is tightly managed. Furthermore the "Downtempo" quality of it gives it an added relevance. Ellington's music would appeal to fans of the deep-space astral melancholia of Techno or the hollowed-out wallow of RZA's productions.
Before anyone else in Pop music Ellington had a Fourth-World vision. Surely I'm not the only person to be taken off-guard by the phantasmal Ska of "Caravan"! Who knows what went down when Ellington visited Count Ossie in Jamaica, Ossie whose African-styled drumming was the corner stone of Reggae; or indeed when Mulatu jammed with him in Ethiopia?
MODERN 10
Essentially ten records from my collection that don't fit anywhere else in the schema.
I suppose if there's one Bebop record to own it's this. When Oscar Pettiford broke his arm Mingus joined the other performers at the Massey Hall cementing this super-group. Of all the major figures in Jazz Parker's discography has survived the least well, unlike Coltrane or Miles Davis's work there isn't the discretely organised series of 33rpm LPs available to schematise his career; something which makes it harder to get a handle on him.
This disc, the first record I bought when I moved up to Glasgow, has possibly my favorite liner notes ever. Including this haunting anecdote: "...(Perhaps it's only of passing interest, but one sidelight of the trip is that, having arrived at LaGuardia airport, they discovered that only five of their party of seven, swelled by the presence of Mingus' wife and Birdland's Oscar Goodstein, could take the pre-arranged flight, that two would have to wait for a later plane. By some process of figuring they decided to leave to leave Chan and Gillespie behind, then spent many anxious hours in Toronto wondering if they would ever come. For those who knew him, the fascination in the story lies in wondering what Dizzy and Charlie did at LaGuardia airport for those several hours...)
Wasn't Parker supposed to have met Edgar Varese? And didn't Varese offer to tutor him and compose a little something for him? That's up there with the all-time pub discussions I guess. This is a nice record, but it's not one I get a huge amount of pleasure from, its pyrotechnics seem a little mannered. I get that Bebop was the lava which erupted through the tectonic plates of Benny Goodman's swing, and that its wildly deconstructive energy, cult of personalities and embrace of dissonance was the source of pretty much everything that we embrace in music today but even so, there seems something tepid about it- as if by making outrageousness its criteria it was only ever going to be upstaged again and again.
Most of Dameron's milieu, the Hard Bop-era and Swing Bands (other than Ellington) I have a bit of trouble with. They just seem a bit musty and anachronistic; centered around social situations which have long-since dissolved. Today if one arrives at the same junction between Blues, Dance Music and Soul one takes every-which left and right through time and space to one of those other destinations rather than dwell there. However, Tadd's low-key tightly organised charts, like a stripped-back Modernist command-unit division of one of Ellington's orchestras, run counter to the drift of the times.
This is one of Kirk Degiorgio's records. It's a shame the ART hall of fame isn't online any more (for a period it was zipped up and bundled at the foot of someone's web-space) because it was a sine-qua-non snapshot of the best in Jazz-Funk, Fusion and Avant-Garde Jazz. I suspect Kirk's taste has moved on into deeper territories but entry-level surveys (pretty much like this one) are extremely useful.
Tjader was at the height of his career in the late 1950s making Mambo which was (essentially) Jazz played by Latin American musicians and knowingly inflected with the flavors they brought to it. Mambo is interesting because it was an authentic mirror-image of the Exotica of Lyman/Denny/Baxter. It's a passing thought, but perhaps Dubstep is a kind of contemporary Exotica foundered on recycling old Jamaican music? Just swap the Tiki cocktails for hydroponically-grown grass. "Breeze from The East" was Tjader's experiment in incorporating Asian elements in place of Latin American ones. Apparently it wasn't a huge critical success at the time, and ironically pushes him into Exotic territory (especially given the slightly flimsy colorings) However, like Emil Richards and The Microtonal Blues Band's "Journey to Bliss" and Addis and Crofut's "Easter Ferris Wheel" it succeeds in spite of itself. "Black Orchid" in particular is a wonderfully insouciant tune.
I have very mixed feelings about Mingus. His auto-biography "Beneath The Underdog" tells of his life as a pimp, however there's dissent as to whether there's much truth to the story, furthermore it's one of the most tortuously-written, indulgent crocks of shite I've ever struggled through. Mingus, who is also described as "The Angry Man of Jazz", once so badly beat in his sideman trombonist Jimmy Knepper that he broke the poor man's embrochure, effectively ruining his career. This at a time when beatniks like Norman Mailer were proud of their drunken street-brawls and "boxing like men".
I'm also not particularly enamored with much of Mingus's recorded output either. Records like "Ah Um", "Mingus, Mingus, Mingus" and "Oh Yeah" are tedious traditionalist dirges which speciously seek to sanctify and gentrify Gospel and Blues by setting them in Jazz's context of art and sophistry. However, though he might be my Holy Cow, "The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady", notably one of Lester Bangs's favorite discs is truly wonderful and astonishing. The considered fruit of his life-long obsession with Ellington it is one of those utterly essentially discs that sounds astonishing in its own right; a second-line symphony enswarmed by malevolent spirits.
These recordings are from 1942-43 when Monk was still a cult within Jazz. He didn't really make a splash until 1953's "Brilliant Corners". Interestingly his career was more alive than most of his contemporaries by the time of the late sixties, when I suppose it's fair to say wacky was hip (after all this was the generation that tolerated Tiny Tim). Monk wasn't about to "lay" for any horn player, reputedly falling out with Miles who couldn't deal with his discords and wide-open rhythms. If people like Ra for being more than Cosmic Emblem then why isn't Monk hipper?
I'm surprised to hear that in 2007 Sonny is still alive. Coltrane is to the belts of Jupiter in my mind, what Rollins is to Manhattan. Escaping fame in 1959 he spent three years practicing on the Williamsburg bridge.
The remarkable, churning "Turkish Mambo" off this record, piano abstraction built in multi-tracked layers atop what sounds like a wooden drum-machine (but isn't) cropped up recently on a Robert Wyatt-curated compilation. The blind Tristano is sometimes credited with pioneering Free-Jazz a whole decade before Ornette, and if I remember correctly was obsessed with the teachings of Wilhelm Reich, running something of a cult himself. I should very much like to hear "Descent into the Maelstrom" by Lennie which Piero Scaruffi rates very highly.
Not exactly another one-track wonder but "The Plum Blossom" is the track here, played on a Chinese Gobular flute "about the size and shape of a grapefruit" with accompaniment by plucked-strings (the "Rabat"?) and a tambourine-player on tip-toes. One of those utterly exquisite, time-less pieces of music. The rest of the LP is very nice too, very clean and spare.
I'm not usually pre-disposed to the Gospel and Soul-inflected quarters of Jazz, but it's done here with such pathos and cool that you couldn't help be swayed.
Coleman Hawkins was long in the tooth when it came to release this record in 1957 and credited as the inventor of Bebop by Bird (who learnt his technique by copying the Hawk's sped-up solos from records, unaware of the mechanical intervention). My favorite moment on this disc is actually Idries Sulieman's breath-defying solo at the front-end of "Juicy Fruit" a sustained note that contains the germ of The Theatre of Eternal Music.
BLUE NOTE
These two are the sweetest of the Blue Note Soul Jazz records. In the past I've had copies of Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" (which blew me away when I first heard it) and Dexter Gordon's "Go" but I've shed them in the course of time.
Highly feted, but I prefer Evans's work with LaFaro and Motian. This is just a bit wine-bar-ish isn't it?
It's probably recommended that people check out the lovely "Grass Roots" or "One for One" (which includes "Illusion") before "Point of Departure", Hill's supposed-masterpiece. This is a very strange record. His is a music which is impossible to pin down. It's not emotive, never diverging into the genre's honored avenues of wistfulness or romanticism. It's not Free, quite to the contrary it's tightly organised but then again there's nothing vaguely conventional about it. It doesn't seem to be about zoning on the pleasure centres either. There's a giant question mark hanging over proceedings as gears shift and cogs turn on this organic machine.
Although they gradually side-lined their Free-Jazz (see also Ornette's "Empty Foxhole"), with Alfred Lion and Rudy Van Gelder Blue Note had the two most sensitive studio presences. No other recordings in Jazz sound as fantastic as theirs. Drums and cymbals (in particular) are crisp and rich, the mix is spatially wide-open and the differing timbres of horns are deliciously audible. While this served more generic recordings very well, when applied to Free dates the recordings, arguably a more difficult listen, the pay-off is immediate.
Dolphy's "Out to Lunch" was once described as The Wire magazine's favorite recording (and this in a period when it had moved from its Jazz Rag periphery to being more catholic). It really is a magnificent record, at once funny, serious and strange. Bobby Hutcherson's vibes, an unusual instrument in the "Free" context, might just be the best thing about it.
SUN RA 31
I was surprised to discover I had more records by Ra than anyone else in my entire collection. However, I suppose it's fitting that they form the core of my various scurrilous activities in sound. I'm not going to attempt to summarise Sonny's career here. If you're interested in finding out more about Ra you'd do as well to check John F Szwed's excellent biography "Space Is The Place" or Harmut Geerken's sumptuous "Omniverse". However I would like to attempt a record-buyer's history of Ra.
Mine isn't a particularly impressive Ra collection in many ways. That would be a collection like Thurston Moores's made up of 100% original Saturn releases. Mine discs are a scraggy collection of originals, reissues from various era and bootlegs, but actually I'm very proud of it, because it's the manifestation of twenty years sustained interest, not a weekend's Paypal bashing on the internet.
This one is interesting because it foregrounds the discomfort the Jazz community felt towards the eccentric Ra. Sonny had performed in a conventional capacity as an alumni of his hero Fletcher Henderson's band, but bizarrely enough here he is much later, at the artistic height of his career, not as a leader but sideman on a movie score. Blink and you miss mention of him in the extensive liner notes: "Sun Ra is the pianist and plays some exquisite celeste as well." How is that for being brushed under the carpet?
"Sun Song" an original slice of vinyl, on Delmark records a vehicle for the Chicago-based Jazz Composer Guild notable for "Brainville" and my extremely rare original copy of "The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra" on Savoy with its lovely Disney-esque artwork. Both are examples of how small labels might take a chance on Ra.
These five are all original Saturns acquired ten years ago. For those people who don't know already (who are these people!?) Saturn was Ra's own label.
I visited the Galerie Maeght this Summer. Nestled in the steep hills above the French Riviera it's a quite magical place. It would have been so lovely to see Ra play there. Too bad! These are also both originals, Volume Two is less free and quite brilliant. The context to these releases is France's whole-hearted embrace of the Free thing. See also BYG/Actuel.
In the early seventies, thanks no doubt to the small explosion in Avant-Garde Jazz and most particularly owing to Coltrane's interest in Gilmore, Impulse reissued these four original Saturns, "Fate In a Pleasant Mood" and "Angels and Demons at Play". The weird thing is that the deal must have fallen through in some way, or they may have lost their nerve, because these are all emblazoned with Promotional/Promo stickers. For a very long time these five reissues were the only way one could lay one's mitts on *the real thing*.
1970s Ra repackaged by Y records (home of The Slits and Pop Group), Charly (a cheap reissue of the first volume of Ra's recording for BYG/Actuel) and by the interesting French label Cobra (who also put out some great Lard Free records). You can see the trend here: out labels of the time buying a piece of the Arkestra legacy.
And one which continues into the 80s with Y's release of the totally awesome "Nuclear War" pronounced by Sonny as "Nookerer Wor" and by Blast First's cobbling together of recordings made around the time of "Nights of The Purple Moon". This latter release by Paul Smith from 1989 was my first Ra record, bought on the back of a recommendation by AR Kane in an interview they did. Funny how something like the Blast First release has ended up being more valuable than the now ubiquitous reissues of the original.
The first wave of really proper Ra CD re-issues came in 1992 courtesy of Evidence records. Evidence did a great job, also putting together great liner-notes and finally making the original Saturn releases widely available. Sadly they ended up going bust. I slipped up when I bought the copy of "My Brother The Wind" listed above because it's not Volume 1 you want, but Volume 2. Even as I paid the shady dealer who sold me this copy in the road itself on Berwick Street I was cursing. However Evidence presented the opportunity to score what I was really after.
Hot on the heels of Evidence's collapse at the end of the 1990s, in a climate in which it seemed the vinyl bootleg became wholly acceptable, came a whole string of Ra bootlegs. The quality of the pressing on these is often mixed but nevertheless I was keen to pick them up.
Suddenly it seemed like the sluice gates were opened. I can't think of a more apposite example of the devaluation of a musician's worth than the glut of original Saturn bootlegs that happened in past five years. Are these bootlegs or not though? I can't believe they're licensed! Flashback to original copies of these records framed on the walls of the Honest Jon's shop on the Portobello Road, then flash forward to Ra discs flooding the Music and Video Exchange.
If there is a happy ending in this tale it comes in the form of the quite magnificent Art Yard records who have done the most amazing job at making some of the most in demand Ra rarities, "Sleeping Beauty", "Disco 3000" and "On Jupiter" available once more.
MILES DAVIS 12
This is my favorite of the five LPs recorded with the Coltrane/Garland/Chambers/Jones quintet and I suspect the last. I picked these up in whilst traveling in Nepal and wandered round South-East Asia listening to them. "Relaxin'" is where "cool" strung-out vibes ever so slightly melt into the cosmic jazz trip. The Africanate cover is the first give-away.
The underlying principle of Modal Jazz was to restrict improvisation to a pre-ordained scale. This was a leap forward from the Hard-Bop and Bebop technique of blocking out the available chords for musicians in the introduction of a tune, and greatly increased the options available to musicians. I think Miles, the most technically-understated player of all the famous Jazz musicians, was more comfortable with systems like this than having ideas of instrumental prowess at the centre of his music. With "Kind of Blue" he explored this dual concept of restriction (for example Bill Evans's proto-minimal vamping on "All Blues") and freedom (the empty, wide-open, rolling sound of "So What?") it created.
Modal Jazz was composer George Russell's concept and I suspect, in part, it's a permutation of Schoenberg's 12-tone serialism. It's very much a crude contraction but somehow Minimalism is a negotiation of the two. La Monte Young, whose maxim "draw a straight line and follow it" seems to contain the germ of both concepts, had well-documented roots in Jazz. When based in Los Angeles he played with heavyweights like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman (who has praised La Monte's saxophone playing) and Don Cherry. "In a Silent way" must be the most perfect imagining of a Minimal Jazz.
"Filles De Kilimanjaro" was made with the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams band. Particularly lovely is Ron Carter's electric bass on the title track, like burnt sugar on cream. Miles's band was practically the academy for Electric Jazz-niks, just as before it had been where Coltrane, Gil and Bill Evans started out.
Two beautiful Mati Klarwein covers (I have a book of Mati's paintings somewhere which I must dig out) and the utterly brilliant "Jack Johnson" LP. "Right Now" off this disc is unhinged straight-for-the-jugular funk rock, and it's a shame that neither John McLaughlin or Billy Cobham really managed to surpass it with Mahavishnu.
The syncretic pinnacle of Miles's music. The "On The Corner" sessions mega-reissue looks interesting enough, but like Holger Czukay's work on Can, it's Teo's edits that form the 21st element. Somewhere floating round the interweb there's a nice little promotional film for the reissue that puts Dave Liebman, Michael Henderson and Pete Cosey in Miles's garden for a seance over the LP. It was Miles's instruction that these cats not play Jazz, and it's mean to cool old dudes, but when they jam at the end of the clip, eek, that's Jazz sure enough. They certainly needed the Dark Magus to hone their chops.
My own memory of encountering "On The Corner" for the first time are crystal clear. I broke out of school aged seventeen and cycled into Slough where I found a copy in Our Price. It clean blew me away and the next day I dragged my Art School buddy round to listen to it. We'd both sunk back, closed our eyes and were floating on its ineffable voodoo. I looked up after side one, ready to high-five, and he'd disappeared having scrawled "demon vibes" (or some such phrase) on the sleeve, as though he'd been sucked into the music's vortex. I suppose experiencing this kind of music in 1988 put me on the right track for Acid House.
The electric Miles LPs were extremely difficult to find in those days, and like Ra the ubiquity of it has now damaged people's ability to take it on spec. I found me cherished copy of "Get Up with it" (both records raved about by Lester Bangs) whilst Eurorailing in Spain.
These last three were the trickiest to find at the time, and all three of my copies are Japanese imports. Actually I side slightly with the Jazz traditionalists over them; a little goes a long way. "Dark Magus" is the greatest (you can see why Jah Wobble liked it, Michael Henderson's bassline on "Wili" is heathen).
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The following four artists form a Miles Davis subsection:
JOHN COLTRANE
Other Trane discs I've had include Africa Brass (sorely missed as a matter of fact) and Ascension (which I could never really dig). Each of these I've picked up for differing reasons. "Coltrane" and "Live at the Village Vanguard" came from my father-in-law's collection. Professor Tony is/was a serious Jazz fan, his other passions being Bartok and Britten. Tony played me his copy of the wondrous "Ole" (with the original cover, unlike my shitty copy, which his son purloined before I had the chance). "Giant Steps" replaces a cassette I bought in India. "Impressions" is a David Toop fave for its shimmering post-ecstacy hymn "After The Rain". "Infinity" I bought for its superb cover and because of wife Alice's profane over-dubbing, communing with dead John.
Trane is a little like Beethoven or Mozart, impossible to critique.
HERBIE HANCOCK
"Sextant" along with Miles's "On The Corner" surely earns the title of most relevant Jazz LP to today's music? "Flood", a Japan-only release should be more widely heard- especially the awesome version of "Chameleon" which throws the tidy version from the Headhunters LP from the bay-door of an orbiting space ship and watches it burn apart in re-entry.
GIL EVANS
The records Gil made with Miles Davis are also excellent: "Miles Ahead", "Porgy and Bess" and "Sketches of Spain". Miles Davis seemed very open to working with white Jazz musicians. Besides Gil, there was Bill Evans, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland and Dave Liebman. I think it goes some way to making clear that (unlike post-"Do The Right Thing" dogma) that Jazz wasn't exclusively a Black music. There were plenty of interesting, authentic voices within Jazz that were White.
BILL EVANS
Miles said of Bill's piano sound that "...the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall." And this may be the key to enjoying Evans's work, listening past the "Jazz" flavor and into the sound itself.
PHARAOH SANDERS
Pharaoh is, like Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, one of these in-betwixt characters. In our loose family tree of Jazz he relates to Coltrane in the way that Trane related to Miles, with the exception that Trane was strongly influenced by playing with Pharaoh (a nickname he got from Sun Ra). Starting out as an adherent of dissonance he also shows a fondness for the mantra. "Thembi" is practically schizophrenic the way he jumps between the two modes. Later on with vocalist Dede Bridgewater he even laid down some smoky R'n'B sides!
ORNETTE COLEMAN
For my money the most interesting Ornette records. "Change of the century" is nice because it has some recognisable melodies and song-forms to hold on to. "The Empty Foxhole" has a typically crisp Blue Note production as well as (take note Punk Rock fans) the talents of his ten year old son Denardo on drums. "Dancing in Your Head" has a great cover and features a snatch of Ornette jamming with The Master Musicians of Joujouka. "Virgin Beauty" is just plain gorgeous. If you get the chance to see Ornette live jump at the opportunity as everything becomes clear upon hearing him play.
DON CHERRY
Check out these wonderfully gaudy covers! They perfectly describe the pungent Fourth World patchwork sounds contained within.
JAMES BLOOD ULMER
SOUTH AFRICA
WHITE FOLKS 13
Well you gotta admit it, that's a pretty serious case for the validity of the contribution of White Folks to Jazz.
FREE 10
RAMSEY LEWIS
These two records on the Chess subsidiary Cadet are essentially vehicles for the greatest Jazz orchestrator there ever was, Charles Stepney. Other Ramsey Lewis releases on Cadet like "Up Pops" sorely disappoint. "Mother Nature's Son" a whole LP of cover versions from The Beatles "White Album" is lovely but "Maiden Voyage" is indisputably the one. I can't think of a record I get more pleasure listening to.
THE LAST POETS
They might have a rep as proto-rappers but The Last Poets were practically Jazz incarnate; parts Calloway/Nordine/Gaillard/Baraka/X. In 1994 I went to an interesting gig, portentously described as a "Living History Special" and featuring Jalal Nuriddin of The Last Poets alongside Linton Kwesi Johnson and managed to smuggle my way backstage. I've no idea what I chatted to Jalal about.
STRATA EAST
Jazz proper was supposed to have died at the end of the sixties but in truth that a number of iconoclastic musicians had decided to call time-up didn't mean that a whole movement could be extinguished. There can't be a better example of its rude health than Clifford Jordan's utterly magical "Glass Bead Game".
BYG/ACTUEL
One of the real collectors labels. I've done something on the label before but I'm proud of these discs, the fruit of France's prolonged love-affair with American Free Jazz, most of which I picked up for a few Francs in Paris.
The stand-outs are Don Cherry's lovely "Mu Part Two" and Gracan Moncur's "New Africa", however "monkey-pockie-boo" by Sonny Sharrock (a "Free" electric guitarist who caught Jimi Hendrix's attention, "Hmm sounds familiar" remarked Jimi) is a classic if "difficult" LP.
ROY AYERS
These records are consistently excellent. I think some people find Roy's vibes an acquired taste, an overly pungent symbol of (adjusts beret) Jazz, but when you hear them on "Red, Black and Green" riding up the side, raining over the top and bubbling up from beneath rock hard breaks, literally ringing with possibilities, then you'd be hard-pressed to dismiss them. Ayers also had a knack for dark, strung-out ghetto funk as on the epochal "We live in Brooklyn."
ELECTRIC JAZZ 13
Previously whilst disrespecting my Jazz dance buddies I reinforced the boundary between Jazz Funk and Jazz Rock, but really the distinction is tenuous. In the same way that Funkadelic and even (yes!) James Brown often had a hard rock edge to their music the boundaries are not hard and fast within Electric Jazz. Some discs are funkier, some are more experimental some are more hard-rocking. Some are little more than straight jazz, baubled and modernised through recontextualisation.
The deep Jazz-funk end is best represented by the Mizell brother's productions for Donald Byrd's seminal "Blackbyrd" and Johnny Hammond's "Shifting Gears". Byrd, who by this stage was ensconsed in Academia, took the view that Jazz was originally Dance music and therefore by re-aligning itself with Funk, in adjustment the form was being true to itself. This was heresy to Jazz snobs at the time, though certainly consistent with the soul and gospel-inflectections of his earlier work. Bob James's "One" seems to belong righteously in this context, but cast your mind back to Bob James's first wildly experimental LP on ESP (for a time home to Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, Albert Ayler as well as the Godz and Fugs) and the picture becomes less clear.
Billy Cobham's excellent "Spectrum" LP and Weather Report's "Sweetnighter" (easily their best incidentally) seem to offer up a Hard Funk take on Jazz, but actually there's an almost undisclosed hefty dose of Rock to both of them. William S. Fischer was a staff arranger at Atlantic records and worked for heavyweight talent like Wilson Pickett, Roberta Flack, Eugene McDaniels, Les McCann and Herbie Mann. On this LP of deep, spaced-out funk and electronics he was given a very long lease.
More Electric Jazz of the highest calibre, this time drifting into the shadow of "Bitches Brew".
Marion Brown has LPs all over the shop in this monster break-out! Free records, records with ECM, straighter Jazz etc etc. That's not so uncharacteristic of musicians of his era. Archie Shepp, whose music I've always found quite ugly leaps around stylistically in the same manner. "Vista" is remarkable for Brown's take on Minimalist Harold Budd's "Bismillahi 'Rahmani 'Rrahim" a tune which first appeared on the Eno/Budd record "Pavilion of Dreams". "Sweet Earth Flying" earns distinction as my buddy Gwen's favorite Marion Brown LP.
As for this! One of thee most difficult records to categorise. A Tim Gane of Stereolab fave I suppose it lays the foundation for ECM's early records
ECM
There was a good Dissensus thread about ECM the other day. Before then I always took the line that the early ECM releases were where it was at. However according to Phil Sherburne the Minimal guys are very into the label. Villalobos's recent stuff does have a pellucid low-key quality to it and I've even sought out the Cobblestone Jazz "23 Seconds" LP, Matthew Johnson's recent project and yes it's undeniably there. Proving, if nothing else, that that the later output has a charge. Other ECM Jazz records that are on my shopping list are Bennie Maupin's "The Jewel In The Lotus" (my friend Flashos has advised me that it's "very clean") and Dave Holland's "Conference of Birds", though I suspect rather than more of these early releases, it's sultry Euro-Jazz like Eberhard Weber that's where it's really at.
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And that's it! To my mind Jazz stops being a meaningful term with ECM. There's a sense that eventually, and finally what is being termed Jazz bears no relation socially, culturally or even musically to what it was in the beginning. It's interesting to try and work out which sort of people were making Jazz (most typically the greatest Jazz musicians were not working class but the educated Middle-classes) and see what sort of music they are making today. So for instance Strata East alumni bassist Bill Lee was Spike Lee's father, Avant-Jazzer Olu Dara's son was Nas and Don Cherry's daughter was Neneh. Nuff said.
