Richard Meltzer – “Ten Random Discs”
An undated (as far as I can tell) article from Meltzer. Not sure where this was originally published, or when. I would guess that it is from sometime in the 1990s or 2000s though. If anyone knows the exact date and source, please let me know…
When I first started listening to jazz I had this friend a couple years older, couple years’ head start on me with the music, who used to insist you could enter a record store blindfolded, have ’em direct you to the jazz bins, and select five albums, ten, some number, and they’d maybe not all be great but f’r sure they’d at least be good . The premise being, his premise, I imagine in retrospect, that the basic unit of jazz is the whole damn thing, that in its stalwart specificity it’s still idiomatically expansive enough to contextualize (ad hominemize) anything done under its aegis (or on its periphery), that whatever it is that in fact jazz does it always does more or less.
Anyway, he never actually tried it, I’ve never tried it, I’m not sure how satisfied either of us would’ve been (in 1963) with the blind acquisition of some mambo junk by Cal Tjader or Brubeck’s Disney album or Andre Previn’s West Side Story , and I know how I’d feel today stuck with nonreturnable copies of Harry Connick or Marcus Roberts or Andreas Vollenweider. But I’ve gotta admit there remains something appealing about so specious a venture. Wouldn’t wanna waste your time and mine with certain obvious clunkers, so how’s about I just go buy and review the first album I see in the racks by, oh, let’s see… Warne Marsh, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Bobby Bradford, Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, Derek Bailey, Albert Ayler…oh, I already said him? Well, alright, the first two by him just some chance releases by a random sampling of, y’know, jazz guys.
And so I don’t get distracted from the task at hand so I don’t in fact fake it, falsify the whole biz by making actual (pshaw!) selections I believe I’ll send my young intern Woosni, give her the list and half an hour, 45… okay, let’s see what she’s got. Looks like she got us some good’uns.
Warne Marsh, Posthumous (Interplay)With Stan Getz finally dead, every principal white disciple of Lester Young is now dust, at least on tenor: Zoot Sims, Al Cohn is Allen Eager dead yet? Brew Moore certainly is. And Marsh, five years gone, is the least well-known if even that well-known, classed usually as an acolyte of pianist Lennie Tristano rather than of Lester, but may well have been the greatest of the bunch. He’s easily the greatest tenor player over 50 I ever saw perform. Lester gave the world much, including easy swing, cool cerebrality, the technology of direct access to previously remote (or submerged) emotional motherlodes, a sonic redefinition of the tenor in the pantheon of jazz saxophone on a par with Kant’s retake on the Copernican Revolution, an unprecedented narrative intricacy (the first, Coleman Hawkins notwithstanding, to really “tell stories on his horn”), and more. But maybe the most elusive gift is his rethink of song form before the fact, his insistence that even a familiar ballad, especially a familiar ballad, be different, be totally fresh, totally new, the first time you play it. That includes the theme, y’know, the head not merely come improv time. White Lestorians have tended to get lost in the pretty, and if part of the pretty is the tune qua tune… Lester’s musical muse demanded more than that.
Marsh, meantime, was a whiz at coming up with revised melody lines, and I don’t mean he played “on the chords.” His lines at times sounded almost like Burroughsian cutups of the original themes, delightfully playful exercises on one hand, but most importantly they worked. They were as pretty, heck, as downright “lovely” as it gets. Sometimes he’d give ’em interpreter-friendly titles. For instance, in this ’85 set, “Second Hand Romance” for “My Romance,” “Things Called Love” for “What Is This Thing Called…”but even without such hints, or any semblance of identifiable source melody at all, there was always this sense of melodicality that ran at least as deep as Lester’s, occasionally rang a tad more free than Ornette’s, and even (at odd moments) gave Cecil Taylor a run for his money as melodist… a really far out, modern fucking guy. Not quite as great as his duo LP with Susan Chen from six or so months after this one. That LP reeked of an apparent (boy-girl?) chemistry far in excess of the standard vinyl encounter, but it was plenty good enough.
Cecil Taylor, Looking (Berlin Version) Solo (FMP)The greatest musician I’ve seen live, and here he is live in ’89, a couple months after the recording of In Florescence for A&M. Like a goddam force of nature, a veritable Season unto himself, he starts off slow, deliberate, takes four to five minutes to work up a full head of weather-systemic steam, then: PHOOM. Storms, floods, cascades all that shoats no other pianist, any genre, has ever delivered. No better, no worse, than 99% of his recorded outings, which is to say fab, incredible, there is nothing else remotely like it on musical earth, though still nine or ten notches down, acoustically, from an actual live performance. At full tumult, he’s gotta be a tougher recording prospect than the 1970 Stooges. A slightly different configuration than he’s dealt us before on disc: two half-hour segments followed by five real nice shorties of two-three minutes each.
Bill Dixon, Son of Sisyphus (Soul Note)Nine mega-vital, mega-quirky sound pastiches (totaling less than 40 minutes) by a former Taylor co-conspirator, on trumpet and some piano, accompanied by tuba, bass, and drums. Unlike Taylor’s, Dixon’s is not a room-filling music too many silences, too little bombast nor could you exactly call it meditative, not with the tuba farting all over the place, but it does find and fill myriad gaps in a still unfulfilled pre-postmodern jazz agenda without which, I dunno, the world will crumble or something. Minimalist? Okay. Music reinvented from the ground up? Sure. ‘S also the last brass-concepted creative music to reflect concerns Miles Davis all but abandoned, to the detriment of it all, in ’61 or ’62.
Some astounding breath stuff breath-of- life stuff on “Schema VI-88.”
Steve Lacy, Futurities Part I (Hat Art)Ten Robert Creeley poems set to music by another self-effacing Cecil alumnus. Arguably the ablest living soprano saxophonist, the man who essentially rediscovered that horn for jazz, and in the process introduced Coltrane to the instrument, Lacy here augments his more or less regular mid-eighties sextet with guitar, harp, and the underrated trombone of the “real Ray Anderson,” George Lewis. The album contains pleasantly complicated writing and playing, with far more interesting, and interestingly executed, ensemble textures than Gunther Schuller pulled off with Charles Mingus’s Epitaph f’r instance. Even the normally nettlesome voice of Irene Aebi, a sterner, less “existentially correct” Nico (when she wants to band here she frequently is), is bearable.
Roscoe Mitchell, Songs in the Wind (Victo)It isn’t humor, it isn’t “weirdness” it’s just Mr. Mitchell at work-equals-play. In the hands of anyone but Roscoe, the pedal-driven wind wand couldn’t help but seem like some cornball Wyndham Hill bullshit or John Zorn novelty shtick. However, this here’s a man with an ear for oddsound as sound, as auditory function , not merely as expedient tripwire for the grand (or not so grand) musical pratfall. Which is not to say it isn’t also that, the latter, nor that it ain’t really “funny.” Compared to the dotted-line silliness of Chicago colleague Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, these tracks to me are more no-holds-barred hilarious, while much less bathetic. Compared, likewise, to recent waxings by the forcibly experimental but these days rarely funny Anthony Braxton, a sound-for-sound-saker if ever there was one, this 1990 whatsis gets the nod there too. In the biophysics of left-field mammal noise, Roscoe takes the cake.
Derek Bailey & Barre Phillips, Figuring (Incus)The writing equivalent of British guitarist Derek Bailey’s basic line would be something like
YUH YUH thisisn’t um
Which is to say his single-note placement is all over the map. Barre Phillips, meantime, is one of the great masters of volume-modulated squeaky arco bass. This is two-man free improvisation till you puke, which is to say it’s some kind of wonderful.
By turns jarring, soothing, oothingsomewhere between cacophony and…and what?at some stages it sounds sort of like folk music, or at least like folks warming up to play folk music. At other times it’s like a disembodied sci-fi soundtrack, or chamber music on acid, or two kids throwing Tinker Toys around the garage. But the music never follows any variety of dotted, y’know, or even not so dotted, line. Goes great with a tea kettle whistling in another room.
Albert Ayler, The First Recording Vol. 2 (DIW)Dig this one: four thoroughly fantastic ’62 performances, previously available (or maybe not) only in Japan, by the man who took saxophone madness (e.g. expression) as far as it has so far been taken. The fact that he died in ’70 prob’ly says something about the level of courage in jazz-at-large ever since. Is Ayler the most sorely missed of all the ’60s trailblazepersons who failed to survive that still, if anything, underrated decade?
Well, yeahhim and maybe Eric Dolphy. Coltrane’s legacyauthentic astral reveler side by side with willful colleague of Alice McLeodis just too jumbled.
Anyway, Albert’s riffs here seem a lot more Ornette-like, if that’s the operative historical plug-inSonny Rollins-like??than they would later sound. He takes a pair of pop warhorses” Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”and some jazz neo-standards”Moanin’,” “Good Bait” and just fucking eviscerates them.
Of more than mild archaeological interest: the same Swedish bassist and drummer (Torbjrn Hultcrantz, Sune Spangberg) that Bud Powell used on the club date of six months prior that would posthumously appear on his five-LP set for SteepleChase, At the Golden Circle .
Albert Ayler, In Memory of Albert Ayler (Jazz Door)Sixty-five minutes at Slug’s, New York 1966: the sheer ferocity of Albert at his peak with a working unit including brother Donald. Recorded, it would seem, with a concealed, or perhaps not so concealed tape machine on somebody’s lap, complete with bar conversations. Land shark with a machine gun meets kosmic hoedown meets Irish wedding/funeral meets a herd of wildebeests meets the tricentennial of the French Revolution. The last time, or close to it, any such gamut was run for real with so much impugnity.
Plus: drumming by Ronald Shannon Jackson from before he’d figured out how to “do it;” he wasn’t up to Sonny Murray yet but was trying . Notes by multi-reedist Peter Brtzmann, Europe’s loudest living overblower.
Ornette Coleman & Prime Time, Jazzbhne Berlin ’88 (Repertoire)Brion Gysin used to tell this story about Ornette’s early-nineteen seventies trek up the mountains of Morocco to play with the Joujouka, these musicians who’ve been wailing all sorts of magical etc. for the last billion centuries. Gysin was there for the umpteenth time. It was Ornette’s first, and I believe last. The story, the punchline, was there’s this sequence of notes that’s supposed to induce in the listener a given olfactory experienceanybody who hears it will actually smell thus and suchbut Ornette, to Gysin’s satisfaction, did not appear to have smelt it. Meaning: he may have been blowing alright, wailing even, but he (the goddam FATHER, certainly one of ’em, of modern collective improvisation) wasn’t really listening .
It’s always been my contention that Ornette has never exactly listened to Prime Time, the backup group which according to some interviews (but not others) was originally conceived as an electronic counterpart to the Joujouka, either. Lots of people disagree with me, claiming to hear this subtle interplay, all this rhythmic and harmonic foreground and background blah blahbut I just can’t hear it. To me it’s just a third- rate rock band playing one thing, shilling for youth sales underneath, and in lame support of Ornette’s still quite Promethean something totally other. This release, from an East German radio broadcast, is essentially more of same. Prime Time drone on like a field of trained insects while Ornette, all but ignoring them, plays the fire that if they were flammable would instantly engulf and immolate them. He, considered in isolationas opposed to heard in samehas rarely sounded better, working up to a pretty good froth and fury on the last couple cuts. ‘S a good thing we’ve at least got some documents of him in such tiptop form, and, who knows, he finally might be earning a middle-class living.
Bobby Bradford with the Frank Sullivan Trio, One Night Stand (Soul Note)A title fraught with more than its share of irony. On one hand you’d expect maybe one of those funk-era type LP’s by Lou Donaldson or Baby Face Willette with titles like “Sow Belly Blues” and “Good ‘n’ Greasy” which this really ain’t in the same planet system as. On the other, aside from being a master trumpeter and cornetist in the shadow of whom Wynton Marsalis (et al.) can just piss in a hat and forget it, former Ornette accomplice Bradford is this educator, see, based in the L.A./Pasadena area, teaching music is his frigging livelihoodwhich doesn’t afford him much op to leave town for one night stands. When he does, thoughwell, this one (with a pickup trio in Florida, 1986) is a beaut of a showcase of basic, honest, meatlife-affirming, no-frills, jus’-do-it.
Preferable to Comin’ On , Bradford’s live CD from ’88 with John Carter, if only because there’s no synthesizer this time to even momentarily disrupt the sonic urgency. (Fuck meI’m a freaking purist.)
Good’uns…yep . On the evidence of which jazz must look incredibly healthy. Hot stuff is being released , alright, but if you check the bios of these people, everybody’s over 50 or dead: not too many jazz newcomers, or even guys under 40, say, are as visionary, or adventurous, or experimental, or even just flat-out as good or half as good. Or if they’re good (the Marsalises and the Courtney Pines and the Harper Brothers and their pop-star kind are not in fact “bad”they’re just pop stars), they themselves would be hard put to acknowledge any past or present umbilical connectedness to the nurture tube of the Whole Previous (And Still Ongoing) Goddam Thing.
Fire is not something they wanna breathe and fire doesn’t sell and the biophysics of sound is something for biophysicistsand the biophysical workings of the human (under 30) nervous system have been undermined and enfeebled by Stand it’s much, much too easy to play for an audience of stupid fucks who don’t know or care two shits in hell for anything that happened before they were 15who don’t even know and certainly wouldn’t if told care that the competent-but-so-what pap they’re being served is naught but a cheap retread of that which was SUPERSEDED BY the jackjoes in this review and their kind ten years before they the stupid fucks were fucking born.
Bruce Springsteen and Wynton Marsalis are both on Columbia Records: think about it. Each knows not the diff between the ’50s and ’60snot to save his life but still knows far more of history than he chooses, wishes, judges safe to “share” with his respective heap o’ partisans. Give ’em a xerox xerox of a xerox of a xeroxed tell them it’s originalaboriginalwho’s to clue ’em otherwise? If somehow they get wise to the number, in five yearslessyou’ve got a whole new tubload of dopes back at zero. Jazz, a 70-year-plus open-book slab of ongoingness, now shares with rock an aversion to ongoing anything but strategic deception. Diversion. Sooner or later it ain’t just the audience that’s diverted… distracted. False becomes the norm if it isn’t already. History equals instant revisionism. And once we lose sight of the true germplasm of etcetera, we will sooner or sooner LOSE IT ALL…true. Noneno more!of this “in the tradition” bullcrapeat shit, those who once knew better: Archie Shepp, Arthur Blythe, David Murray: you know who you are.
I’m a crabby old crank.
Richard Meltzer
The Beat Patrol 
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