Don’t Explain

Ross Porter
The Essential Jazz Recordings: 101 CDs
McClelland & Stewart, 2006.
Can. $24.99/U.S. $16.95. ISBN 0-7710-7032-2

The best jazz record guides have something for all listeners. Newcomers gain a useful shopping list to help them navigate the deep waters of the jazz canon; along the way, they learn about the music’s history, its major figures and (most important) what to listen for in a jazz performance. Experienced fans get to revisit old favourites, comparing their own opinions and personal ratings with the author’s, and also learn of records that have still inexplicably escaped their notice. Ross Porter, who has worked as a jazz broadcaster for many years, first as host of CBC’s After Hours and more recently as head of Toronto’s Jazz.FM, would on the face of it seem well-placed to write such a guide. The Essential Jazz Recordings, however, is a strikingly poor effort, which manages to offer equally little to the beginner or the committed fan.

Porter’s canon is a narrow one, emphasizing jazz as tasteful mood-music; smoky-voiced vocalists and the Verve catalogue take up much of the shelf space. Fair enough: one hardly expects him to favour noisefests like Bitches Brew or Nailed, and the mellower end of the music is certainly more likely to appeal to novice listeners. Yet Porter pushes his own biases to the point of erecting a jazz counter-history as bizarre as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (set in a world where the Axis won WW2). What would jazz be like if its “essential recordings” didn’t include Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Duke Ellington’s Blanton-Webster band of 1940-41, the Teddy Wilson/Billie Holiday sides, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Charlie Christian, Birth of the Cool, Art Pepper, Gerry Mulligan, Jackie McLean, Betty Carter, the Clifford Brown/Max Roach quintet, any Miles Davis recording later than 1959, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy…? Well, if you omit all that, then I’m not sure you’re listening to “jazz” exactly. True, there are many classics on Porter’s list — Kind of Blue, Giant Steps and the rest — but they hardly mean the same thing when they’re all that’s left of an otherwise thoroughly dismantled canon. Even his welcome inclusion of Canadian artists — Oscar Peterson and Diana Krall, inevitably, but also Lenny Breau, Guido Basso and Jane Bunnett — is soured by the indefensible omission of Kenny Wheeler and Paul Bley.

So one should ignore the book’s title and treat this as Ross Porter’s Desert Island Picks — a selection of personal favourites. And in all fairness, there are some good or intriguingly quirky picks here, such as Lennie Tristano’s self-titled Atlantic recording, Sheila Jordan’s Portrait of Sheila, Steve Swallow’s Home, and Bill Frisell’s Have a Little Faith. Yet some major flaws still limit the book’s usefulness and appeal. A minimum requirement of a guidebook is accuracy; yet the book is rife with typos, misspellings and factual errors. Some are trivial – “Paul Champers on bass” – but outright howlers crop up too, as when the entry for Giant Steps states that “Coltrane blazed new sonic trails on his alto sax in songs that still sound fresh and timeless.”

The other major flaw here is that Porter really has nothing to say about his favourite records. Miscellaneous names and factoids fatten each entry, but actual discussion of the music barely gets a look-in. Here — in full — are his comments specifically about the music on Monk’s At Carnegie Hall: “The nine tracks on this CD include the superlative ‘Monk’s Mood,’ ‘Evidence,’ ‘Crepuscule with Nellie,’ and ‘Blue Monk.’ Throughout, Monk and Coltrane are daring and innovative and shadow one another effortlessly. This group, which included Shadow Wilson on drums and Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, is swinging and adventurous.” Newcomers to jazz — if they desire more than a collection of classy background music — need to learn what makes a great jazz performance; a guidebook is only helpful if it indicates what the author finds noteworthy or moving in a performance. But Porter’s writing is so perfunctory and colourless it makes some wonderful albums sound dull.

This is easily one of the weakest and most superfluous books on jazz I have encountered; just about any other currently available guide is preferable. Ben Ratliff’s New York Times Essential Library: Jazz, in particular, features a near-identical format but is vastly better-written and -informed.

Coda

***

This was the nice version of this piece, believe it or not — it could have gone on listing errors & omissions for considerably longer. One curious thing about the book is the omission of many albums that used to be very popular even with people who weren’t hardcore jazz fans: for instance the book manages to omit Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea and Ahmad Jamal’s At the Pershing.

The book’s appearance was plugged by a feature interview in the Toronto Star by Ashante Infantry: this passage is blunter than anything in Porter’s book about his exclusions:

Q: What did you strive for in assembling this list?

A: I wanted CDs that people are going to listen to. A record like Louis Armstrong’s (1925) Hot Fives & Sevens is important to the development of jazz, but not something that you put in high rotation. I wanted a group of recordings that are entertaining and offer something musically — either move the genre ahead or redefine it. These albums have stood the test of time for me.

After a long dry spell I’ve restarted the small press I’ve been running since 1998. The latest book is Trevor Joyce’s What’s in Store, which collects his poetry of the last 8 years. The curious can read more about it here (there’s a link there where you can read a selection from it in PDF form).

Eddie Gale Now Band with William Parker, Vision Festival X, NYC, 2005 (self-released) — Trumpeter Eddie Gale (born 1941, in Brooklyn) remains best known for his work on some of Blue Note’s most experimental albums of the 1960s. A sideman on Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures and Larry Young’s Of Love and Peace, he also made two albums for the label as a leader, ambitious syntheses of the full range of African-American music. Gale has since settled in San José, California, and recordings have become infrequent and elusive; this new disc, recorded at last year’s Vision Festival, is a welcome exception. Four long tracks are evenly split between sober post-Coltrane modal pieces and raucous blowouts harking back to Gale’s days with Taylor and Sun Ra. The trumpeter sounds best in moments of whirling frenzy such as “High-Tech Emergency”; when he plays more coolly a certain aimlessness creeps in. John Gruntfest’s searing alto playing is terrific, Ismael Navarrete’s tenor and soprano sax much less so; pianist Valerie Mih hugs the ground on the modal tunes but is sparkier on the free pieces. The rhythm section of bassist William Parker and drummer Tee S. Holman is outstanding: this is one of those rare free jazz albums where you often feel like concentrating on the rhythm section rather than the soloist, though rough spots suggest rehearsal time was minimal. The performance isn’t the tour-de-force some initial reports claimed (the DMG newsletter: “the most intense and creative set of this year’s fest”), but it’s still a pleasure to hear Gale in congenial company back on his home turf. (Coda)

Dave Frishberg, Retromania (Arbors ARCD 19334) — Frishberg, like the great stand-up comics, is an expert at self-diagnosis: he is, he says, a sufferer from “retromania,” “fixated almost pathologically on the past.” But though it’s nostalgia that prompts Frishberg’s celebratory verbal flights around favourite touchstones (old-time ballplayers, above all), he’s too sardonic to quite fool himself into taking it straight. He is, after all, also one of our finest bards of self-deception, as witness “My Attorney Bernie” (a portrait of our desire to be professionally soothed and fleeced), or those mock-odes to trend-chasing, “I’m Hip” and “Useless Waltz.” This intricate twining of nostalgia and self-deception receives its fullest expression in one of his finest songs, “The Dear Departed Past.”

The centrepiece of Retromania, a solo disc recorded live last year at L.A.’s Jazz Bakery, is a walk-through of The Catbird Seat, a never-finished musical about a man who travels back in time and attempts to un-fix the 1919 World Series. Most of the Catbird songs have appeared on earlier Frishberg albums (though this is the premiere of “The Wife and the Kid”), but they take on new, rather darker significance within the loosely summarized narrative. Frishberg’s voice is getting leathery at this point, but his piano-playing is as spry and swinging as ever, full of wacky asides and surreal moments of dissonance. It’s a pleasure to hear his latest thoughts on evergreens like “Van Lingle Mungo” as well as some revivals from the obscurer corners of the Frishberg songbook, including a song on stock-investing written for children’s television. (Coda)

Jack DeJohnette and Bill Frisell, The Elephant Sleeps but Still Remembers (Golden Dreams GBP-CD-1116) — This latest release from DeJohnette’s Golden Dreams is an off-the-cuff concert encounter with Bill Frisell from the 2001 edition of Seattle’s Earshot Festival. Both musicians brought a pile of instruments and fancy electronic gear to the gig, and they’re in an experimental, playful mood, spinning out some very diverse improvisations across a widescreen electronic landscape (shimmering chords, layered electronic percussion and loops) that has been further extended by Ben Surman’s post-production. Bizarre one-offs like “Cartune Riots” and “Cat and Mouse” give the players a chance to throw their weirdest stuff at each other — warped banjo, car-alarm racket, African thumb-piano, drastic electronic processing — while elsewhere, DeJohnette sits down at the piano for a pair of dreamy slo-mo duets, including a version of Coltrane’s “After the Rain” (the album’s sole standard). The heart of the CD, though, is three long-haul rock-and-blues-drenched jams for guitar and drums — the title-track, “Otherworldly Dervishes” and “Ode to South Africa” — which together account for half the album’s running-time. These are extraordinarily intense and testing dialogues: Frisell has always thrived on this kind of stripped-down half-hallucinatory roots-music epic, and DeJohnette is in great form, laying down ecstatic backbeat-heavy grooves but also challenging the guitarist with some abrupt interventions. Not all the tracks here strike the mark, but the album’s best performances — the exhilarating “Ode to South Africa” in particular — make this an essential item for fans of either musician. (Coda)

Thomas Chapin, Ride (Playscape PSR#071595) — Chapin was one of the heroes of the New York downtown jazz scene in its 1980s and 1990s heyday — a saxophonist and flute player whose gutsiness, visionary extremism and technical command marked him as the natural heir to Jackie McLean, Roland Kirk and Eric Dolphy. His early death from leukemia in 1998 remains one of the saddest losses in contemporary jazz. Chapin’s recordings were mostly released on the now-defunct Knitting Factory Records, which makes the appearance of Ride all the more significant: indeed, this newly discovered tape of Chapin’s 1995 appearance at the North Sea Jazz Festival with his regular trio (Mario Pavone on bass, Michael Sarin on drums) turns out to be one of the most impressive items in his discography. The opening 17-minute blast through “Anima” (the title track of his debut album) starts things at an impossibly high level: Chapin’s unaccompanied alto introduction pays homage to Dolphy’s “Tenderly” while pushing it to paint-peeling extremes, and once the tune’s pummelling 7/4 groove kicks in he launches into a solo that’s at once flawlessly constructed and yet nearly apocalytic. Classic Chapin tunes like “Bad Birdie” and “Night Bird Song” receive focussed and intense readings rivalling the original versions, and the disc also turns up two previously unknown items: the devastating “Pet Scorpion,” and a thoroughly unexpected zoom through the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” As recent years have shown, some of the most exciting “new” releases are of archival material; this disc may date from the 1990s rather than jazz’s golden age, but it’s no less of a discovery. (Coda)

Further reading:
Chris May (AAJ)
Dan Warburton (PT) (scroll down a bit)

Chad Makela Quartet, Flicker (Cellar Live CL050804)
Brad Turner Quartet, What Is (Maximum Jazz Max 16972)

Baritone saxophonist Chad Makela makes his debut with Flicker, recorded live at Vancouver’s Cellar jazz club. He’s got a highly individual sound on an often cumbersome instrument: his light, quick-moving approach and corkscrew lines owe more to players like Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Joe Lovano than to the obvious baritone models. Without a harmony instrument in the group, Makela and trumpeter Brad Turner feed off the deft grooves set up by bassist Paul Rushka and drummer Jesse Cahill — Turner slicing pertly into the music like a stone skipping over water, Makela pushing at it hard from the inside. Two trio tracks take the music temporarily off the boil, giving each horn-player a chance to shine: Turner’s feature is a likeable if slightly cute and overlong “My Ideal,” while Makela’s original “Seventh Day Rain” is one of the disc’s finest moments: a gently-unfolding rubato ballad of the sort Coltrane used to include on his Impulse albums, though in Makela’s hands it almost feels like a blues. The rest of the album is fleet and buoyant, right down to the closing sprint through Lovano’s dizzy post-Ornette line “Uprising.” Makela is clearly a name to watch.

Turner’s new album, What Is, is his third with his usual rhythm section of pianist Bruno Hubert, bassist André Lachance and drummer Dylan van der Schyff; as it happens it too was recorded at the Cellar, though it’s been released by Maximum Jazz rather than the club’s house label. Turner has always been a chameleon: a trumpeter, pianist and drummer, comfortable anywhere from jazz’s mainstream to its outer edges, not to mention the deafening fusion of Metalwood. Even on the same instrument and within the idiom he can sound quite different depending on the context: the darker, more vulnerable sensibility of What Is seems the work of an entirely different character than the whimsical trumpeter of Flicker. On the surface the music is quite rhythmically active, but Turner’s originals nonetheless grow out of floating, lushly chorded harmonies and a slow-burning melancholy, the mood gradually warming and deepening over the course of the entire performance. There’s often a striking contrast between the leader’s long-lined solos, full of peals and throbs in the manner of Miles Davis or Booker Little, and Hubert’s more fragmented improvisations, constructed out of expansive lyric gestures cut down to emphasize rhythm rather than melody. Just to keep you on your toes, though, Turner dips into his free-jazz bag on “Second Son” in the company of van der Schyff, one of the movers and shakers of the Vancouver avant-garde scene. Both Flicker and What Is, different as they are, offer fine examples of Turner’s playing; followers of Vancouver’s fertile jazz scene will want both discs. (Coda)

In terms of sheer ability to get music out of just about anything to hand, TERRY DAY (People Band, Alterations, Four Pullovers, &c) is the UK’s answer to Han Bennink — or was, anyway, since he’s been only intermittently active on the music scene in recent years due to ill-health. All to the good, then, that Emanem has unearthed INTERRUPTIONS (Emanem 4125), a previously unreleased multitracked solo album originally put together in 1981 for a cassette release that never happened. The various pieces have been spliced together into an 80-minute torrent of d.i.y. frenzy: Day plays assorted saxes, cello, drums, mandolin, piano, toys, balloons, synths, electronics, and whatever else comes within range, sometimes layering them carefully, sometimes piling them up with let’s see-what-happens abandon. Peter Cusack and Davey Payne turn up for a few songs, which feature Day’s wonderfully snotty Johnny Rotten vocals. Not, perhaps, a major archival find, but pricelessly invigorating/irritating music nonetheless, as well as being a hitherto unknown milestone in the history of balloons as musical instruments. (Piano 1 / Toy Ensemble / Straight Bamboo Pipe Duet / Bamboo Solo / Drums — Altos — Balloons / Alto with English Plastic Reed / Alto with American Bari Reed / One and Two Cellos / Oriental Theme 1 / One and Three Cellos / Oriental Theme 2 / Two Cello Fragments / Bottleneck Mandolin 1 / Be a Good Boy / Theme Continued 1 / Theme Continued 2 / Theme Continued 3 / The Found Chord / Alto — Cello — Drums / It Ain’t My Cup of Tea / Alto & Cello / Piano 2 / Drums & Mandolin / Imperfection / What a Lovely Lad / Eaters / Soprano 1 & 2 / Crackle Box & Altos / Crackle & Bamboo / Spliced Balloons / Bottleneck Mandolin 2 / Eric (77:30). Day, assorted instruments as per track titles &c; on 14, 20: Peter Cusack, g, d machine, vcl; on 26: Davey Payne, ts. Amsterdam, London and Newcastle, various dates 1978-1981.) [Footnote: Day has since released a new album, also on Emanem, the excellent improv collection 2006 Duos. He plays bamboo pipes on it exclusively.]

[Further reading: Dan Warburton's review]

BILL WARE and SARA WOLLAN’s BACH SET (no label listed) features the Jazz Passengers crew, cellist Sara Wollan and friends tackling a genre-leaping mix of originals and classical repertoire. Bill Ware’s 14-minute piece “Das Juengste Kind” is awe-inspiringly dense and demented — one of the best things I’ve heard from the Passengers — and there’s also a memorable pell-mell take on the spiritual “My Lord! What a Mourning,” plus strong features for vocalists D.K. Dyson and David Cale. On the other hand, the series of quickie “Interludes” are inconsequential, and the Bach pieces that give the album its title are a disappointment: they’re done pretty straight, as duets for Pollan and Roy Nathanson, and are blemished by some slipshod playing and pitching problems. So, some excellent stuff here, but a lot of filler for a 44-minute album. (Introduction / My Lord! What a Mourning / Birds / Air / Interlude 1 / Interlude 2 / Hojas / Gigue / Interlude 4 / Interlude 5 / Salty Tears / Interlude 6 / Invention / Das Juengste Kind / Prelude in C (44:33) ["Interlude 3" is listed but not present]. Ware, vib, perc; Wollan, clo; Roy Nathanson, ss, as, ts; Curtis Fowlkes, tbn; Russ Johnson, tpt; David Wechsler, flt; Sam Bardfeld, Victoria Paterson, vln; Brad Jones, b; E.J. Rodriguez, Tommaso Cappellato, d, perc; David Cale, D.K. Dyson, vcl. New York, 2004.)

JOHN CAREY’s UNDEFINED PSYCHO-CHROMATIC G.R.I.D. (Planet Bass 8379) approaches improvisation from a rock/pop angle rather than jazz — not necessarily a bad thing, as it avoids many of the clichés of supposedly “nonidiomatic” free jazz and free improv. The liner notes’ earnest advice about “break[ing] down all preconceived walls, mental barriers and universal concepts (percepts) when listening to this CD” and so forth was enough to make me apprehensive — good music doesn’t need an instruction manual — but fortunately the music’s just fine, the hard-edged multistylistic jamming leavened by the unusual inclusion of cello and accordion. The self-consciously weird and disruptive moments are the least convincing — snippets of radio chatter, Rachelle Garniez’s wacky vocals, the Tom Waits parody that ends the otherwise lovely accordion/cello duo on track 7 — since these guys sound much better when the offbeat stuff is worked more subtly into the fabric of the music. (10 untitled tracks (68:58). Carey, el b; Oz Noy, g; Rachelle Garniez, acc, vcl, claviola, perc, g; Dave Eggar, clo, p; Frank Bellucci, d, perc. New York, 25 May 2005.)

I’m not quite sure what makes THE OMER AVITAL / MARLON BROWDEN PROJECT (Fresh Sound World Jazz FSWJ 031) qualify for the label’s “world jazz” subdivision rather than the usual “new talent” series: it’s in a retro 1970s bag, though it avoids the wilder shores of fusion to concentrate on groovy good-time music. Bassist Omar Avital, a familiar face from the New York scene, hails from Israel; this concert was recorded live in Jerusalem with New York drummer Marlon Browden and the Israeli musicians Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter, not the bassist) and Omri Mor (on Fender Rhodes). There’s plenty of excitement, both from the music itself and the loudly appreciative crowd, though the music is at once energetic and nearly static — sometimes the endless repetitions actually build up to something, but more often they just glide along self-sufficiently. Admirers of Avital’s straight jazz work will find the pickings slim, but he gets off a nice solo on “Asal.” Cohen’s overreliance on squawking electronic distortion is the only sour note in an enjoyable, if lightweight set. (Marlonious / Third World Love Story / Browden’s Thing / Song & Dance — A Suite in Three Grooves, Part 1 & 2 / Waiting / Me and You Tonite / Asal / Song & Dance — A Suite in Three Grooves, Part 2 & 3 (64:45). Avital, b; Browden, d; Avishai Cohen, tpt; Omri Mor, el p. Jerusalem, 13 July 2003.)

The power-trio JOHNNY LA MARAMA is a transatlantic affair, bringing together Finnish guitarist Kalle Kalima, American bassist Chris Dahlgren and German drummer Eric Schaefer. On “…FIRE!” (Traumton Records 4488) they plunder evenhandedly from rock, country, metal, dub, grunge, &c; the abrasive grab-bag aesthetic owes a lot to Naked City, though they’re generally more interested in song-form and extended jamming than in Zorn’s brutal jump-cuts. (They’ve also taken a page from Zorn’s fondness for evocative/violent images drawn from early photojournalism: the cover-image is a 1917 photo of Mexican counterfeiter/revolutionary Fortino Samano moments before his death by firing-squad. It’s said he gave the command to fire himself.) It’s a tremendously entertaining album, full of burning energy and guitar solos that range from sidelong wit to roaring distortion, and just when you think it’s going to settle for Frisell pastiche they pull out something different — a bit of African pop music or some sleazy/goofy lyrics. One of the best play-it-loud albums I’ve heard this year. (”Holy Shit, It’s Asteroids!…” / Earth Hole Party / Tschuessie, Juicy Susi / Low Fat Love / Billy Pilgrim / Dying Slowly Trapped in a Ventilation Duct / “If You Like Nuclear Waste…” / The Unendless Natural Resources of Asia / No Pipey, No Smokey / Flying Vegetable Society / Old Dutch Cheesepipe / “…Fire!” (73:29). Kalle Kalima, g, vcl; Chris Dahlgren, b, el b, vcl; Eric Schaefer, d, perc, hca, vcl. Weimar, Germany, Nov 2004 and March 2005.)

Trumpeter JEFF KAISER and clarinetist/saxophonist ANDREW PASK perform together as “The Choir Boys”; on their latest album, they’ve teamed up with guitarist G.E. STINSON and bass guitarist STEUART LIEBIG for THE CHOIR BOYS WITH STRINGS (pfMentum PFMCD037). Kaiser has a lively approach that makes equal use of acoustic and electronic effects — he’s one of the few players I’ve heard lately to make genuinely creative use of echo — and Pask gives the music plenty of bite with his distracted, angry-hornet alto and clarinet playing, reminiscent at times of Anthony Braxton. The guitarists are stranger and more elusive presences, whose activities are often responsible for shifts in the entire sonic environment: soundscapy bits where jazz horns stand out against abstract electronic backdrops, noisy four-way blitzes, passages of electroacoustic austerity, awesome pile-ups of distortion and reverberation, intricate on-the-hoof fugues created by means of loops and echo. Indeed, it’s the way that the disc steers a path between various genres of improvisation that’s particularly impressive: at one point, for instance, the electronics give way for a lovely passage of straight-up acoustic improv on “Frenchwoman Luggage Cart,” and there’s a nice, squelchy groove that comes into play on “Definitely Jack.” Excellent stuff all round, the quartet sustaining nearly 80 minutes of improvisation at a consistently high level of invention. (Needlework Alice / Impromptu Lateral Drop / Tobacconist from Rimini / Frenchwoman Luggage Cart / Adulterous Dishwasher / Definitely Jack / Rest of the Skeleton / Wir Sind Hier (79:46). Kaiser, tpt, flgh, elec; Pask, cl, bcl, as, bass pennywhistle, elec; Stinson, g, elec; Liebig, g, elec. Ventura, CA, 5 Oct 2005.)

ANNA HOMLER’s singing verges at times on the cadences of English, German, Italian and Chinese, but as far as I know it’s an evocative pseudo-language of her own. On KELPLAND SERENADES (pfMentum CD029), her duet with STEUART LIEBIG, her singing conveys a mix of excitability and lamentation, peppered with the occasional sounds of toys and found objects. Liebig’s minimalist soundscapes give her a dreamlike resonating space to work with: it’s as if she were babbling into the void or seeking to find some healing song. Not quite enough variety to sustain an hour-plus of music, perhaps, but this duo’s distinctively eerie sound-world is well worth sampling. (Winter Street / Limbic / Blasted Landscape / Sputtery / Sidpaho / Fantasma / Time of Great Cold / Case in Point / Secret Heat / House of Mars / Mothlike / Sehnsucht / Radix Vitae (64:36). Homler, vcl, toys, found objects; Liebig, el b, elec. Los Angeles, 15 Sep 2001.)

GOODBYE SVENGALI (Cuneiform Records Rune 223), British guitarist RAY RUSSELL’s first recording in a decade, is his homage to Gil Evans, with whom he worked throughout the 1980s. A few tracks end up rather glossy or soft-centred, but at its best the album combines boiling energy with an elegaic sense of loss. “Goodbye Svengali” is a deeply-felt tribute to Evans, lit up by the fine contributions of Evans’ trumpeter son Miles. There’s also a surprisingly effective posthumous duet with Gil on “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” an outtake from a 1988 Russell/Evans session on which Russell has grafted a new guitar track. Russell’s guitar-playing is in strong, passionate form throughout, even when he has to cut through some of the less promising group settings — in fact, some of the best tracks here are Russell’s solo features, like the haunting “Wailing Wall.” (Everywhere / Without a Trace / Goodbye Svengali / Goodbye Pork Pie Hat / Wailing Wall / Prayer to the Sun — The Fashion Police / So Far Away / Now Here’s a Thing / Afterglow / Blaize (66:12). Russell, g; Robin Aspland, p, org; Tony Hymas, Phil Peskett, kybd; Amy Baldwin, Anthony Jackson, b; Mo Foster, el b; Gary Husband, d, kybd; Simon Phillips, Ralph Salmins, d; on “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”: Gil Evans, el p; on “Goodbye Svengali”: Miles Evans, tpt. Sussex and Hertfordshire, UK, and New York, no date (Gil Evans’ part on “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” recorded in 1988).)

[Further reading: review by Jason Bivins]

Cadence

Don Menza, Menza Lines (Jazzed Media JM1009) — Menza Lines was recorded live in L.A. following a conference in honour of Menza’s former employer Maynard Ferguson, and features a number of other Ferguson alumni. The arrangements are as streamlined and powerful as the old-fashioned locomotive on the disc’s cover. Menza lets the soloists set the mood and pace of a piece, only gradually letting the full band slip in behind them and building patiently to a final shout chorus. His writing on ballads is exemplary, and often surprisingly sparse — the opening of “Prelude to a Kiss,” for instance, offers just a silken thread of countermelody beneath trumpeter Bobby Shew. Something eventful happens on every track — Mike Abene’s Monkish, poking-and-jabbing piano on “Gravy” and “Broad Bottom”; Lanny Morgan’s weathered, Bird-inflected alto solo on “Hark’ the Harold”; the demonic virtuosity of the trombone section on “T’n'T”; and above all, Menza’s deeply-felt tenor solo on the rarely-heard ballad “Nina Never Knew.” Menza has had few opportunities to record as a leader (his last big-band album was Burnin’, from 1981), which makes this excellent disc all the more welcome. (Coda)

Extremely distressing news just in: the poet Bill Griffiths died very suddenly at home. Just got the news sitting here at work waiting for the next proofreading job, & it’s the kind of news that makes you feel sick in the stomach. Bill was not especially old, & while he didn’t look exactly like the healthiest specimen I assumed we’d still have him around for years to come.

My one meeting with Bill was a sojourn in the Durham/Seaham area. Sat in Ric Caddel’s garden & chatted for an hour or so — this was in 2002, shortly before his death — and then took the coach to Seaham & spent a few days there at Bill’s place before returning to London. It was a quiet but pleasant time: Bill played Mozart on his horribly out-of-tune baby grand, spun countless CDs of his favourite symphonies, we discussed ghost stories (Bill, who at the time was writing a lot of ghost stories, was not an M.R. James fan, surprisingly), we fried up some fishcakes for dinner, he gave me a stack of his books on local dialect & many of his pamphlets & books (& I gave him a few Gig publications in return). Of the many books of his I own the one I treasure most is a chapbook publication of his translation of Guthlac B, & that’s what I’ll be reading tonight. (Another one to pull out of the stacks is his fine Coach House collection, the result of bp Nichols’ A&R work for the press.)

A post from Tom Raworth here.

Bill’s site here.

Anyway, as always, the lesson is: treasure these guys while they’re still around. & get their books — in their original, colourful, sometimes scruffy editions — while they’re still around, too. Bill’s work just isn’t the same in some stuffy collected-poems volume (though I do recommend getting hold of the o/p Paladin tripledecker collection Future Exiles anyway): you want to see those great old Amra Imprint & Pirate Press & Writers Forum editions.