Everything One Does

A Poem by Saigyo

2012-01-29T15:20:00.000-08:00

My dilemma:

That deep realization will

never come to

My mind, the truth of which

My Mind realizes all to well

Sort of comforting to relate to the insecurities of someone who wrote in the 12th century.

Now if I could just kick this damn injury everything would be cool.

Phosphor album review

2012-01-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

This was one of two titles I procured taking advantage of Potlatch records sale on its entire catalogue this past summer. Phosphor is: Burkhard Beins, percussion; Alessandro Bosetti, soprano saxophone; Axel Dörner, trumpet and electronics; Robin Hayward, tuba; Annette Krebs, electro-acoustic guitar; Andrea Neumann, inside piano and mixing desk; Michael Renkel, acoustic guitar and Inaz Shick, electronics. I knew that this ensemble was at the genesis of the movement of what has variously been called “reductionism” “lower-case.” That knowledge in no way prepared me for this album. The music contains none of the extreme sparsity or stretches of silence I had imagined. Their improvisation is actually quite busy, and shifts texture frequently. The names that have been applied to this style are most accurate in describing the nature and quality of sounds used more so than the overall structure of the improvisation. The performers all use deliberately limited means of sound production, including a preponderance of non-pitched sounds. These often make the instruments difficult to differentiate from one another, especially the breath tones that are prominently used by Dörner, and Bosetti. Similarly, Andrea Neumann uses her “inside piano” which is a custom-built piano soundboard, without the casing or keyboard of the instrument, to produce sounds difficult to identify as a piano, or even as recognizable extended piano techniques. It seems as if no individual idea presented in the improvisations develops or really changes much of its own accord. Each gesture simply enters the musical space for awhile, remains largely static and eventually disappears. All of the performers have a remarkable and admirable ability to sustain a sound or texture with no overtly expressive qualities, and almost no variation. The result is a foreign landscape of sound that alternately accumulates and subsides, constantly changing without ever latching onto a “direction” or predictable outcome. This music sounds fresh, and contemporary, it suggests that there are still further challenges in improvised music to be tackled.

Milton Babbitt: Composition for Guitar (1984)

2012-01-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

A piece I have been enjoying very much regularly. I think this flies in the face of a lot of the pre-conceptions people have about Babbitt and his music.

Tom Rainey Trio at Cornelia St. Cafe, Dec. 30th

2012-01-08T12:43:00.000-08:00

Tom Rainey performed a set of engaging improvised music with Ingrid Laubrock on Tenor and Soprano Saxophones and Mary Halvorson on Guitar. I was unfamiliar with Rainey as drummer and came away from the concert very impressed. He plays very few things that drummers play, focusing on a timbral approach reminiscent of Tony Oxley, or Paul Lytton, but unlike those drummers, his playing is always rhythmically propulsive and time-oriented. Laubrock and Halvorson both played with conviction and nuance in a set that often dipped into extreme, noise oriented blowing but also contained a great degree of subtlety and musical surprise. Rainey also made a touching tribute to the lately departed masters Paul Motian and Sam Rivers.

Recital!

2011-12-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

Hello Oberlin-located folks. My Junior Recital will be on Tuesday the 13th at 6:30 at the Cat in The Cream. Will feature Jules Verne and the debut of my trio with Nathan Swedlow and Ian Mccolm (also known as the rhythm section of Jules Verne) I've been hampered with very poorly timed playing injuries, however I hope it won't stand in the way of having an excellent concert. The program features music of mine from my high school days up to the present, and some other favorites of mine (Bud Powell, Arnold Schoenberg etc.) Please come out! For those of you on the east coast, there will be a show in princeton later in the month, more to come on that soon.

David S. Ware Planetary Unknown Album Review

2011-08-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

I almost couldn’t get my head around the idea of there being a new David S. Ware Quartet. Ware has made a more than impressive return to form after having a kidney transplant a few years ago, but nevertheless, how could any group ever rival his classic quartet? This group, with Cooper-Moore on piano, Muhammad Ali on drums and holdover William Parker on bass succeeds by sounding like an entirely different band, not a replacement for the old line-up.

All the signatures of Ware’s sound are here: the rapid and blurred flurries of notes, keening altissimo cries, bleating low-notes and occasional traces of Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins hidden inside the swirling abstract lines. Cooper-Moore has a bond with Ware that goes back to their early days in Boston, and his playing avoids obvious modes of accompaniment, while still complementing the band perfectly. Parker mostly acts as the anchor of the band, something he always does wonderfully. His handful of steps into the musical foreground are highlights of the record. Ali brings echoes of the tradition into the music, with drumming that often verges towards straight swing, but also recalls the free-time of older brother Rashied and others.

The material is all freely improvised, which is expectably significant in making this different from the music Ware recorded with his previous Quartet. Whereas the other band could charge with conviction down a straight path to exalted realms of music, this band is wilier, and darts into many unexpected directions. The 20+ minute opener Passage Wudang rises and crashes like waves without ever fully settling until the somber repeated chords played by Cooper-Moore at the ending. On the saxophone-drum duet Duality is One Ware opens with soft, motivic playing before quickly moving into rushing gusts of notes against Ali’s driving swing. The balladic Divination shows the very tender side of Ware, with delicate and beautiful interplay of sopranino and piano. On Divination Unfathomable, Ware plays shrill and swirling repeated line on sopranino that blend with Parker’s aggressive and growling arco bass while Cooper-Moore and Muhammad Ali paint a splattery, pointillist accompaniment in a moment of refined group interplay.

Ware’s recovery and return to performing and recording is inspired and inspiring. Perhaps this will lead to a personal renaissance for him, bringing with it some of the recognition and respect that this master musician has earned two or three times over now. In the meantime, those in the know have a hell of an album to listen to.

Injury

2011-04-24T12:35:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I resolved that I should actually invest sometime in practicing my extended techniques for piano. It has only been something that I do when improvising with others and I have never taken the time to work on it by myself. I reasoned that devoting a little time to that could really help develop the things I have been doing inside the piano into a more mature musical language.

The result is that I have badly hurt my hand from twisting into uncomfortable positions in order to achieve interesting combinations of piano harmonics.

There are also some recordings. Since this is still in a developmental stage, I'd appreciate feedback of any kind.

Lester Young Live and Private Recordings

2011-03-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

ubu roi, one of my favorite music blogs has posted what is almost all of the existing live recordings of Lester Young.

http://ubu-space.blogspot.com/2011/02/lester-young-live-and-in-chronological.h

Highly Recommended. Lester Young is one of my favorite musicians of all time. Something about his sound is totally captivating to me. Even when he was playing a busy solo over a fast tempo, there was still a certain of inward-looking wistfulness to his playing. There a appearances by many other great players here, Sweets Edison, Teddy Wilson, Hank Jones, Barney Kessel and others. I do hope you get the chance to hear some of this great music.

Concert 3/19/11

2011-03-12T10:13:00.000-08:00

On the 19th of March ( a week from today) I will be performing with a new project that began this winter, a trio with Danny Kamins on reeds and Ian Mccolm on drums. While I've played with Ian a lot before, working with Danny is new and this has been an exciting group so far. We will also be joined by Alex Cohen on guitar for part of the set, and percussionist Ryan Packard will be playing a set before ours. Show starts at 9:30 p.m. Expect awesome.

Spring Semester 2011

2011-02-11T16:42:00.000-08:00

A new semester is underway. I am undertaking several projects this semester that I am very excited about

The first is the continuation of Jules Verne, formed this fall with Carl Mitchell on Saxophone, Ian Mccolm on Drums and Dan Pappalardo on Bass. Due to an unfortunate and ongoing injury Dan is not currently playing with us, however the equally capable Nathan Swedlow is now acting in his stead. Of particular interest to me is further exploration of American Folk Music as a source of material. Our first foray into this was a rendition of the Charley Patton song "Some of These Days I'll be Gone" which we rendered in a free expressionist fashion. If you are not familiar with Patton's music I strongly urge you to give it a listen. Fewer people are as crucial to the blues and the roots of American music, and few could put a song over with as much honest soul and down to earth grit. Anyway, that number became a mainstay of our repertoire, and we are now looking for other songs to follow it with. While I was first attracted to the blues, I've also recently grown interested in appalachian area folk music, or old time. Accordingly, I brought in the folk tune "He Rambled," recorded by Charlie Poole and Fiddlin' John Carson, to the quartet. Hopefully this interest will be developed further. We also have plans to make studio recordings in the near future.

Another semester of the Oberlin Improvisation and New Music Collective is also promising. The ensemble is much larger than it was in the fall, which will be a very good challenge. During my time in that ensemble, we have been struggling with the immense difficulties of large group free improvisation. Our last two performances in December were certainly the most cohesive and convincing that we have played so far, and I hope to continue in that direction. I also look forward to improvising in small groups with some of the individuals I have been working with for some time now, Matt Chamberlain Jessie Downs and Doug Farrand, and also with some new collaborators.

Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard 8/31/10

2010-09-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

My return to Oberlin has found me to busy to do any writing. I am therefore currently using my recuperation time from this unpleasant cold as a chance to catch up.

Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard 8/31/10

Okay so maybe this was the best show of the summer. Tough call. I have heard Motian's trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano live before, and it was quite a show. This show blew that one away.

While Motian's recordings for ECM in the past decade have generally been about restraint and gentle subtlety, they were out for blood this night; it was the most aggressive I have ever heard Paul Motian play. Bill Frisell was the shy guy that night, in the shadows towards the side of the stage, hunching over his guitar. His solos were brooding and introverted but full of dark energy. He mixed jarring dissonance and rhythmic akwardness with twangy folk-like passages. Lovano was the extrovert, gushing tremendous post-Coltrane lines at high speeds, sometimes breaking into his melodic altissimo, one moment holding his saxophone off to the side like Lester Young, the next moment lifting it above his head like Albert Ayler and all of that history there in the music. Motian's playing was typically cryptic and fragmented, giving only the loosest and most round-about references to time. As always, it somehow managed to swing like mad. The trio played through three of Motian's pieces and three by Thelonious Monk. It is my belief that they are one of the very few contemporary groups who bring anything original to Monk's music. The set highlight was was Misterioso. After a very loose and collective take on the theme, Lovano took the first solo- mostly post-Coltrane knotty and sophisticated lines. Frisell followed, still introspective, but bringing in a lot of bluesy grit. Lovano then returned to take a second and longer solo. Halfway in he began referencing the blues heavily too, stomping it out like Illinois Jacquet. Motian's playing became uncharacteristically funky in response. While never playing any really obvious backbeat feel, he communicated his own unique sense of funk. This was a very rare moment for this group, I think.

The Paul Motian Trio is still one of the most innovative groups in contemporary jazz. Motian has nothing left to prove, he's just doing his thing.

America

2010-08-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

The tea party is the biggest threat to America. I mean more dangerous than terrorists, more dangerous than illegal immigrants, I mean even more dangerous than gay people getting married.

Until this week I was familiar with them mainly for their anti-immigration rally on the Arizona border, in which they gathered in the belief that the solution to the immigration crisis was to tell Mexicans how little we like them and how little we want them in our country. For a while I wondered if this party stood for anything other than blind racism. After reading their website, jointheteapartylus, I found an answer.

The party that held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream Speech" has claimed themselves to be the heirs of many great figures, citing not only King but also Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. I have found a historical figure however, who is a much better choice for them: John C. Calhoun.

The tirades against the over-reaching federal government found on their website employ the exact same rhetoric as 19th century states rights secessionists, who were ultimately responsible for the civil war.

The Tea Party claims,

"The US Constitution was written by our founders to limit the powers of the Federal Government and instead give the power to the people and the States."

However, we who know our history remember that America gave the idea of independent states a go under a document entitled "The Articles of Confederation." This system worked very poorly. The founding fathers saw the need for some sort of centralized system of government in order to unify the states. The constitution was ratified in order to create a sovereign power whose authority superseded that of the states.

More: The tea party lists among there priorities " a strong military"

They also roll out a lot of the standard anti-taxes propaganda, to the effect of "the people know what to do with their money better than the government" and accuse the Obama administration of ramm(ing) Government run health care down American's throats."

Which leaves us with this:

These people do not have a problem with their tax dollars supporting two endless wars which will ultimately accomplish nothing.

They are adamantly opposed to spending the ultimately not-that-substantial amount of money that it would take to buy into Obama's health care program.

A tea-party ad states that America became a great country "Not by hope but by self-reliance."

To me this is emblematic of how fundamentally these people misunderstand what America represents. While hard-work and determination were certainly important values upon which this country was built, America was never meant to be every man for himself. The founding fathers wrote the constitution because they believed in cooperation between individuals and between states. The American democratic system depends on a balance between the powers of the states and the Federal government. If the Federal government does not sovereign power over the states, we are not a country.

The Tea party is willing to go down the same road that Calhoun traveled in years leading up to the Civil War. They are gaining momentum as a viable political movement. Their anti-government rhetoric is a very grave danger to American Democracy. It is our responsibility as Americans to stop them.

"In order to justify secession as a constitutional remedy, it must be on the principle that the Federal Government is a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties. If this be so, the Confederacy is a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks which cost our forefathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish."

-James Buchanan

Improvisation and Sound

2010-08-29T18:30:00.001-07:00

Had the opportunity last week to play some music with Mark Michelli, Jessie Downs and Doug Farrand. After surrounding myself with hardcore jazz all summer it was refreshing to play in a completely different direction (Non-idiomatic improvisation I guess, but I have always thought that that was a stupid term.)

I remember after a solo piano improvisation I played for a friend some time last month I commented to myself "I need to respect the sound more." I felt a need to remove the personal ego from my music. Some thoughts I had been sitting on- the music of Morton Feldman, and his idea of "sourceless sounds" also the work of artist Yves Klein, who I had beliefs that would be the visual art analogy to Feldman's ideas. Klein wanted his works to be about more than himself creating a piece. He wanted to depict the immaterial.

In any case, the music we played that day left me very satisfied. In all cases, the sound triumphed over individuals. The result was evocative as a whole, but was not stamped with the intent of any performer, something which can ruin music.

Look forward to more of this when I return to Oberlin in a week.

Hermeto Pascoal e Grupo-Damrosch Park Bandshell

2010-08-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

This was it. It was the best concert of the summer AND YOU MISSED IT OSCAR! YOU MISSED IT!

I'm new to Hermeto Pascoal, having heard only a smattering of his music. When I heard that he was giving a free concert as part of Lincoln Center's summer series at Damrosch Park Bandshell, it seemed like an opportunity I shouldn't miss.

I have a very hard time describing what happened on stage that night, but it was an incredible experience. The influence of jazz and brazilian samba and bossa nova music where evident, but to call the music a mere fusion of those two styles would be a great oversimplification. The music was thickly layered and polyrhythmic. As a listener, I could feel a pocket, but when I tried to count out time, or tell where one was, it became totally confusing. Every so often the band would settle down, and a clearly discernible meter would emerge. Only several seconds later they would depart again in a completely different direction.

The hour long set was played with very few pauses. The band would only stop playing for a few seconds at a time. The effect was overwhelming, like reading a novel in one sitting. Although I didn't have any time to think about what I was hearing, it was a really great effect. After the show I was left with incredible impression of the music I had heard, without being able to put together any of the smaller details in my head. Also, special recognition is due to Aline Morae, Hermeto's wife and vocalist in the group. She sang for an hour, while performing incredibly complex music with such intensity that the whole audience was awed.

I had come across some very cynical philosophies about this country and life in general this summer, for reasons I won't get into now. Basically, I was very frustrated with living in an increasingly conservative and consumer driven society. This concert really cleared my head out. After seeing Hermeto e Grupo on stage I was left with an important but very obvious revelation- "Right. That's why I am a musician."

Performance Announcement

2010-08-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

I will be playinfg music at a farmer's market held at Princeton Public Library on Thursday the 26th at 12:30. The band is myself on piano, Dan Filipak on bass and Theo Lebeaux on drums. We will be playing music by Theo, myself, Miles Davis and Carla Bley among others. Come check it out.

Christian Marclay Festival

2010-08-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

This festival, held at the Whitney Museum lasted about a month between July and August. One the third floor of the Whitney, There was an exhibit devoted to his visual art. The exhibit also served as a performance space for his conceptual music pieces. The two performances I caught were "Ephemera" performed by Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori and "Wind Up Guitar" performed by Mary Halvorson.

Ephemera is a strange take-off on the concept of the graphic score. Marclay collected a vast array of items featuring musical notation in non-functional form (i.e. as a decoration or design, not meant to be played.) He then wove images of these items together into a musical score. The result is a graphic score that, well... also has musical staves in it. The players are free to musically interpret both the musical notation and other parts of the score, and to elaborate freely on any of the melodic ideas presented there.

I can't be certain what effect it had on the musicians. Although the musicians did seem to pay attention to the score and were honestly devoted to the piece, the result mainly sounded like Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori improvising. Of course that is something that those two do very well.

Perhaps no one has done as much to realize the potential of extended piano technique in improvising as Sylvie Courvoisier. She has developed a variety of techniques, including the use of chinese exercise balls and duct tape. Furthermore, she has really studied them to the point of being able to incorporate them into improvisation flawlessly. She can fluidly switch between the keys of the piano and it's insides and sometimes even plays both at once. This way, the use of her extended techniques is never forced; she can access them at exactly the necessary moments. She also has a phenomenal conventional technique with which she produces some brilliant figures that sound totally alien to any sort of conventional jazz.

I know less of Ikue Mori as a musician. I have always had a little bit of trouble relating to music coming out of a laptop computer. This performance sold me on her a lot more. Her and Courvoisier have a tight-knit musical relation, and hearing the interaction between them helped me to appreciate Mori's skill in improvisation.

The piece "Wind-Up Guitar" consists simply of having a guitarist improvise on an instrument built by Marclay. This instrument is a small acoustic guitar with about ten wind-up music boxes built inside of it, and the wind-up keys protruding from the instrument's body. Each of the boxes played typical music box fair, but when several of them were started at once, the result was a dissonant and surreal fog of ringing sound.

Hearing Halvorson play solo (fairly unusual, as I understand) revealed a lot about her as a guitarist. She proved herself to possess a more impressive technique than I had believed. Power-chords were a pretty frequent facet of this performance. I guess come to think of it, I can imagine her at a young age being just another kid who took up the guitar to follow after their rock idols. (I'd imagine that next she discovered Sonny Sharrock or Keji Haino and then...) These rock-like chord riffs would then develop in complexity until they became dissonant and thrashing waves of noise. At other points, she played twisted and harmonically angular vertical lines.

The music boxes inhabited a very separate world from the guitar playing. Halvorson's improvisation evolved alongside the music box melody, but with only the faintest hints of any relation. At some points, when she played her loudest chordal figures, the music boxes would be totally obscured. When she subsided, the audience would catch a few seconds of tinkle-tinkle before she launched another attack- a very effective technique. As simple as the concept of this piece was, it worked very well for me.

A Rant

2010-08-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

Political dissent is integral to American culture. Where did it go?

During the Bush administration it was portrayed as dangerous. Standing behind the president was the patriotic thing to do, and criticizing him made you a threat, a potential terrorist. This was even turned into the main platform of Bush's reelection campaign- "Vote for the President because he is the president. If you want someone else to be president you are an enemy to democracy" A lot of Americans actually bought that shit. Manipulating fear of outside threats is a common method used by dictators for keeping control of the populace. this is how Fidel Castro stayed in power for so long. It is also how Kim Jong-Il has stayed in power for so long. It also kind of happened in our country for eight years.

What has happened during the Obama presidency is almost as bad. Dissent and criticism of the president has largely been hijacked by the lunatic fringe, who propagate ridiculous conspiracy theories and blind anger as a thinly-veiled form of racism. They prey on Americans misguided concept of American individualism (that everyone should stand on their own two feet, and that the poor don't need aid programs they should get fucking jobs,) their reactionary fear of anything that smacks of socialism, and in many cases their inner fear of having a black man in charge of the country.

As a result, legitimate political dissent has become marginalized. I supported Obama wholeheartedly during the election. That said, I have very luke-warm feelings about his presidency so far. I feel that Obama supporters feel challenged by his far right critics to defend the president, to the point that they do not point out his real flaws. For the American model of democracy to work, the country needs real, de-politicized, de-polarized constructive criticism of the government. We can't let this get pushed aside because of the agenda of an absurd faction.

I do not blame the American people. the American people are not stupid. have you ever seen one of those programs on TV where interviewers go out into the streets to prove how stupid Americans are? "You see, they didn't recognize a picture of Hu Jintao, but they did recognize this motherfucking pop star." Of course, they are the media. It is their job to educate the public about these things. It is their fault if Americans are ignorant about world politics. The marginalization of legitimate political dissent is the fault of the media. It is also the fault of our politicians. Americans are not stupid. They just need to wake the fuck up.

Summer Concerts: Mary Halvorson

2010-08-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

I guess I kind of chose guitarist Mary Halvorson as the artist I was going to follow this summer. It wasn't a bad choice at all. She is the antidote to every bad association guitars have for me; she plays with enough originality to offset the the negative effect on the universe of every kid from my high school who bought a guitar and tried to impress his friends by sitting in the hallways and cranking out weak-assed renditions of nirvana tunes.

In any case, I managed to hear her three times this summer.

The first was with a quartet lead by saxophonist Ellery Eskellin also featuring bassist Mark Helias and drummer Tyshawn Sorey at the Stone.

The entire set was freely improvised, and felt like completely democratic music, with no one leading too much. As with the best free improv, the players did not confine themselves to traditional instrumental roles; Sorey's playing was as much in the forefront and as melodic as anyone else's contributions. In this setting, Halvorson's playing is even more free than in her own groups. she played a lot of excellently gritty chordal lines made frequent use of a pitch bend pedal. I should like to hear her incorporate open ended situations into her own groups a bit more. (You won't find it on her record, but if you seek out a bootleg of her trio that was recorded in London, you can hear a more of this kind of playing. It's out on the interweb somewhere.)

In July I heard the first night of a three day run at Roulette with her quintet featuring Tim Berne on alto sax, Kirk Knuffke on cornet, John Hebert on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. The quintet really brings out her writing skills even more than the original trio did. The compositions that night featured complicated and very engaging polyphonies and a a full use of the possibilities which the larger ensemble provided.

This was the first time I been to Roulette and it really was a nice experience. Like the stone, the focus is all on the music, and it isn't at all a tourist spot like most of the mainstream jazz clubs have become. It is great to be at a concert and know that everyone around you is a dedicated and passionate listener.

The third time I heard Mary was at the Christian Marclay festival at the Whitney Museum. This really deserves it's own post, soon to come.

If you haven't checked out Halvorson's record Dragon Head yet, I strongly recommend it. Also, a quintet album is due in the fall, keep a look out.

Summer Concerts: Ahmad Jamal

2010-08-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

I have been absent for very long. I will try to play catch up with reviews of the shows I have seen this summer. Also stay posted for news of shows I'm playing this month. First up is a trio hit with Noah Baum on violin and Theo Lebeaux on drums taking place at Thomas Sweet ice cream shop in Princeton (the site of my first gig ever) on Sunday the 15th of August at 3:00. Should be exciting.

Ahmad was pretty much at the top of the list of the old masters who I had yet to hear in concert. I caught him at a late set at the Blue Note in June with James Cammack on bass, Herlin Riley on drums and Manolo Badrena on percussion. Beyond how impressive Ahmad's playing is for his age, he's become a much more aggressive player, an incredible contrast to his Pershing Lounge- era playing, where he was a perfect model of the philosophy "less is more." No matter which era of his playing you prefer, he still sounds excellent and his sound is still recognizable. The beautiful tone, delicate but incredibly solid swing feel and perfect precision and execution are all still there. Music is an amazing thing, that so many players are able to keep in such great condition into there elder years (Try hearing Cecil Taylor or Roy Haynes in concert some time.)

The rest of the group was deeply engrossed in the music. Seeing Ahmad live really helped me to appreciate his group concept. His bands are truly not about democracy in the same way that most jazz groups are. HIs band is an extension of his own playing, and he uses it to fill out his personal musical vision. Witnessing the dedication, focus and pure joy that all three sidemen put into this performance assured me of the merit of this group concept. Herlin Riley basically played simple time for the entire concert, but it was the baddest shit just because of how deep his pocket is. Jame's Cammack also grooved hard throughout. His solos showed a lot of technique and finesse. I'm still not entirely convinced about the place of an auxiliary percussionist in a straight-ahead jazz combo. I do not mean to diminish Badrena as a musician. At many times he added something great to the band, and he had a few very interesting solos. But for all that there were also times when his contributions seemed out of place and unnecessary.

Towards the end of the set the quartet played two classics from the Pershing Lounge album- But Not for Me, on which Ahmad repeated his exact solo from the recording (I sang along quietly from my seat) and the popular arrangement of Poinciana. It was a fun moment for all of the fans and die hard musicians who have been through that record so many times. Good to hear that the man hasn't slowed down at all.

Improvisation 12/22

2009-12-22T15:55:00.000-08:00

I feel that this piece more or less represents my current approach to solo piano improvisation.

End of Semester Recap

2009-12-21T13:52:00.000-08:00

I went through a lot of artistic change during my first semester at Oberlin. I couldn't even say what the net result of it is. If anything, I may have returned to where I started at the beginning of the semester. But if I have no more answers than I had in the fall, I sincerely believe that one can achieve meaningful personal growth through the process of asking and exploring the questions. Here is a summary of some of my important experiences and thoughts from the first semester.

Listening: My musical tastes have gotten all over the map, both literally and figuratively. A couple of the recordings that have had the most impact on me lately:

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar: Marwa and Bageshree

A recording of the great vina player live in Seattle, accompanied by two tampboura players. Dagar eschews dazzling virtuosity for a very slow, drifting, spiritual type of music. His sustained tones and long, beautiful glissandi are entrancing and deeply evocative. The music moves at an almost imperceptible pace, but when it reaches its peak, you'll feel it.

Paul Bley: Open, to Love

Bought this solo piano record a year or two ago, but never listened to it that much until recently. I've been deeply affected by the way Bley uses space in his music, letting a single note or chord hold out against nothingness and silence for what can be almost and excruciating interval of time. I've really taken to heart the way he combines subtle abstraction with poignant, melodicism.

Koachiro Miyata: Shakuhachi-The Japanese Flute

A release of solo shakuhachi music form Nonesuch record's excellent explorer series. Although it is in a very foreign musical language from mine, I found that this music really adhered to the same aesthetic that I was trying to follow, of simplicity and directness of emotion. This is beautiful and unpretentious music.

Thoughts on music:

-Anything can be an influence on you as an artist if you will let it. This does not always have to take the form of concrete musical ideas that one learns from listening to music, it can be merely an aesthetic or mood that inspires you to create art.

-Sometimes there is value to simply trying to do something different from everyone else. It is more important, though, to be yourself. If you let your art be an honest reflection of your natural self, then you will have a product that is original and different from anything else.

I should also mention again my work with the experimental music collective (a name we are considering changing, but it'll do for now.) Functioning in this group demands listening on a level beyond any other music I had previously played. Trying to fit in to the pure sound focus of the improvisations has forced me to develop many new extended techniques on the piano. The group had its first performance several weeks ago. Hopefully there will be more in the future.

I'll be spending the month of January in Oberlin (there are no classes that month.) I'll be playing my original jazz compositions with a trio featuring Zach Hobin on Bass and Zaire Dearden on drums. I'm very excited to be working with these two excellent musicians. I also hope for a lot of collaboration and experimentation with whichever other musicians will be around. It should be an extremely interesting month.

Hiatus

2009-10-19T09:18:00.001-07:00

As of two days ago, I decided to take an extended break from any type of long-form composition. This decision may come a little late as I have already not written anything of that nature for over a month anyway, but it helps to make a declarative statement like that. Spending a lot of time with various composition students at Oberlin made me do some serious thinking about the way I write. I have never developed any kind of methodology to composing. I tend to begin at measure one with only a vague idea of what I want to write, and I keep going from there. This approach can be successful. I've written several pieces this way that I am quite proud of. My discussions with fellow students who have devoted themselves to being full-time composers has shown me that these people have a thought process that I don't have, the ability to hear music on a much more developed level before writing it. The process of writing is merely a realization of their ideas, rather than the process by which the music is created. Is this the only way to write music? I don't think so, but when I decide to resume long-form composition, I want to deeply reconsider the way I go about writing music. I will restrain myself from saying anything more about this right now, as I feel I have become maybe a bit too analytical about my artistic process lately. I already have enough to think about as I dramatically reconsider my approach to playing the piano, and my friends are probably getting tired of hearing me bitch about this stuff by now.

I will say, that I have exempted jazz composition from this hiatus. I feel comfortable doing this because it is really quite different. For the jazz musician, writing and playing are really two parts of the same process. Jazz composition has been quite fruitful for me lately, and I'm producing a body of work that I'm very happy with. I am currently hoping to explore this material as well as many of the pieces I've written over the last six months or so over January term at Oberlin, ideally making a recording of original music.

Practicing Freedom

2009-10-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

I've recently had to seriously reconsider and adjust my attitude towards playing "free."

The most important accomplishment was to adjust a misconception that I had let take root in my mind, that playing free was not real piano playing. This does not mean that I didn't take the music seriously. The jazz avant-garde is a very large part of my identity as a musician, and I have nothing but reverence for the great practitioners of this art form. I merely thought that free jazz did not demand the same things from me as a pianist that more conventional playing did. When playing free, I was so concerned with spontaneity that all idea of technique was pretty much lost. I would whip my fingers carelessly around the keys wherever the moment took them.

Another problem was that it had never really occurred to me that one ought to practice playing free. To me that seemed to defeat the purpose of a medium that so heavily relied on intuition and the inspiration of the moment. I did sometimes improvise freely during my practice sessions, but when I did this I always tried to create one coherent piece of music, as if I were improvising in a performance. I would never stop to examine what I was playing or develop on any of my ideas the way I would practice navigating the changes of a jazz tune. This does not actually constitute practicing.

As of the past week, I have started finding ways to develop a vocabulary for free-improvisation and make this a part of my regular practice sessions. So far this has meant devising atonal "licks" and practicing them the way I would a jazz lick. Memorizing licks does seem very much contrary to the nature of free improvisation. I thought to myself however, that when I practice a line taken from Miles Davis or Bill Evans, the eventual goal is not to be able to use that musical idea in one of my own improvisations, but merely as a way of developing the dexterity and knowledge of jazz vocabulary necessary to create my own lines while improvising.

For a long time I resisted practicing this way, thinking that doing so would make my free playing more contrived, and not true free improvisation. Hopefully, developing some amount of consistent musical vocabulary to use in free improvisation will actually help me gain a greater level of freedom in my playing.

On Influence

2009-09-27T16:25:00.001-07:00

The subject of influence has been a big one for me lately. There are a number of questions that I have been asking myself that I would like to throw open to all of my fellow musicians/artists/thinking individuals.

It seems that we spend our early, formative years as artists assimilating information from many different sources. For jazz musicians, such as myself, this tends to consist of listening to records by the greats, figuring out whose sound you like, and learning how to imitate those sounds. There have been countless musicians who have made great impressions on me, and whose work has affected the way I approach music. To become an artist, one must be able to synthesize all these sources and put them to use in creating original art.

An anecdote: In my first week here at Oberlin, I attended a jam session with some of the other jazz students here. While I was waiting for things to get started, I sat down at the piano to play a little bit. Without thinking much, I dove into a modal improvisation, using typical McCoy Tyner-style stacked fourth chords. Another musician heard me and said something to the effect of "It's good to have a McCoy Tyner guy hear, everyone else is into Bill Evans." I know he meant it as a compliment, but it raised a lot of problems for me. Certainly we don't train ourselves as musicians (or in any other discipline) merely to fit into one established school of playing. I don't want to be identified as a Bill Evans follower or a McCoy Tyner follower or any such bullshit. I must admit though, that a lot of this was on me. I had essentially sat down to the piano on that particular occasion and intentionally decided to imitate McCoy Tyner. I could not deny the influence that he has had on my playing, but I don't want to let myself fall into something like "Okay, now I'm doing my McCoy thing, now I'm doing my Herbie thing, now I'm doing my Cecil thing. "

The problem that I now confront is how to synthesize these influences into one cohesive approach to making music. How do I use the things I learned from Mccoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor and everyone else all at once, without sounding like any of those people?

This gets even more problematic if you view influence in broader wider terms. There are a lot of figures outside of jazz who are equally important to my music. Composers such as John Adams and Morton Feldman, for example have had a huge impact on me. How can I reflect this in my approach to playing jazz?

I know that I am not the first person to raise these questions. Nor are they questions that necessarily have answers. Perhaps this synthesis of styles and influences is a process that one undergoes innately as one continues to study. In any case, recently it has felt necessary for me to put more deliberate and conscious thought into the matter. So anyway, I'd love to here all of your feedback, anecdotes, asides or completely unrelated comments.

2009-09-11T17:39:00.001-07:00

I have been too busy to do any proper writing lately. This will hopefully change eventually.

The Experimental Music Collective (for more on this read Doug's july 20th post over at stainonsilence.blogspot.com) has regrouped in Oberlin with several new members. Besides the warm fuzzy feeling it gives me to see our little family grow, there are a lot of new possibilities and challenges that this expanded line-up brings. In freely improvised music, a greater number of musicians calls for even greater levels of focus, self-control and communication amongst all involved. The larger ensemble means a greater number of ideas are brought to the musical table. Although this is clearly a good thing, it can also make it more difficult to find a common ground in an improvisation. Think of how two people can carry on a continuous and thoughtful conversation while absorbing everything the other person says. If there are say, seven people in the room, the conversation can split into factions, and topics of discussion sway uneasily and chaotically.

Nevertheless, the challenge has been a welcome one for all of us. This Sunday, a somewhat reduced version of the collective convened for what has been one of our best meetings. The music had a level of continuity which had been very elusive. This had been the subject of an argument amongst several of us over the summer, whether "form" and "continuity" were possible or desirable in this type of music. On this particular night though, there seemed to be a natural flow in the transition between various sections of the music. Solos and duets emerged naturally out of the ensemble for very effective contrasts. It was a very satisfying night of music.

Hopefully there is much more of this to come.

Evan Parker's Marxist Revolution

2009-08-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

I recently rediscovered the Evan Parker album The Topography of the Lungs, which I bought a few years ago. Over the course of a couple of listenings, I tried to sort out the logic and arc of the jagged interplay between Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Han Bennink, with much more success than when I first heard the album. It was like a revelation to me, to hear that in the midst of the atonal, pointillistic improvisation, I occasionally heard snatches of melody and tonality (See the end of Dog Meat) as well as some passages that even loosely suggested the type of interaction between members of a more standard jazz combo.

The liner-notes that Parker penned to the album also were elucidated to me on this second appraisal. A great focus of his notes from 1970 was the importance of musician owned record labels, as a means of staying in control of ones artistic output (this record was released on Incus records, co-owned by Parker and Bailey.) The first time I read this, I didn’t quite know what to make of Parker’s seriousness on this matter. To him, the need to be in control of recording his own music was as vital as basic human rights. As I have matured as a musician over the past few years, and encountered other dedicated artists, I am starting to understand Parker’s mentality. This time when I read his liner-notes, to me it struck an obvious parallel to the ideas of Karl Marx regarding labor and capital. Marx believed that those people who had the skills necessary to produce things should be the owners of the machines they used, and that the class of people who created nothing but owned the means necessary for production should be eliminated. Similarly to Marx, Evan Parker sees it as equally imperative that musicians should own the means to record and distribute their own music. There are no direct mentions of Marx, however Parker does quote a passage from Aldous Huxley’s forward to Brave New World, “Only a large scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency towards statism.” According to Parker, there is in this music “a clear motivation by essentially the ideas stressed by Huxley.” As examples of musicians who have moved toward decentralization by founding there own record labels, he cites his own label, Incus as well as Sun Ra’s Saturn Records, the Instant Composer’s Pool and others.

Today there are even more artist owned record labels: Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf, Ornette Coleman’s Sound Grammar, and Jack Dejohnette’s Golden Beams to name only a few. However, there has been no revolution. The record business is still controlled by the big players. The main problem that I would point out is that most artist-owned jazz labels have been primarily self-serving. Most jazz musicians who opened there own labels did so to promote their own music. Of course in this competitive business no one can be blamed for doing that, however many isolated efforts will not bring about any real change. Perhaps the best role-model is John Zorn’s Tzadik record label. Through this label, as well as his venue, The Stone, Zorn has tirelessly promoted experimental music, including a large number of artists with very little wider reputation or commercial viability. Considering what Zorn has done through his own efforts, one can only think that a greater coalition of creative but business-wary artists could accomplish It is cooperation between many that will change the outlook of artists today.

It’s quite possible that I am overreaching in my interpretation of Parker’s liner notes. It’s true that he makes no direct reference to Marxism of any sort. But, whatever his intent was, the idea inherent in this writing is a beautiful one: music as an affirmation of freedom.