Mary Halvorson Octet: Away With You

This remarkable composer and guitarist, who'd played her instrument since she was 11 years old, was studying biology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, when she took a class taught by the great multi-instrumentalist and composer Anthony Braxton (oft-featured here, though not as often as wished) and decided to change her career course.

Like her mentor, Halvorson writes and plays in a dizzying array of styles even if she, like Braxton, is generally considered a jazz musician.  She has a clear tone, a clean sound and is a masterful soloist and sensitive accompanist to the wide variety of players with which she associates, but she can also unleash wild and unorthodox solos that are dazzling.

As importantly, she is a very interesting writer with wide latitude for the improvisation that makes jazz such a great musical form, though she brings rock, flamenco and other genres into her mind-bending works.  Notably, Halvorson recently commented that she had a tendency in the past to overwrite in her compositions, but 2016's Away With You, released on Firehouse 12 Records, which has featured Braxton and many other great musicians (Tyshawn Sorey, Myra Melford, and co-founder Taylor Ho Bynum) on its roster.

With four horns (alto and tenor sax, trumpet and trombone), a pedal steel guitar and bass and drums, Halvorson creates a diverse palette of sound in the eight pieces on the recording.  Like Braxton and another great composer/musician Henry Threadgill, she deftly orchestrates for the several instruments in ways that are richly creative, sometimes spiky, often contemplative and always interesting with an unerring eye for experiment.

Dave Van Ronk: The Folkways Years, 1959-1961

This amazing album documents a short period of time, 1959 to 1961, when Dave Van Ronk recorded for Moses Asch's Folkways label, and there's a great deal of remarkable guitar playing and singing by a man who insisted he was not a folk singer, but a jazz singer.

Undoubtedly, Van Ronk was heavily indebted to black musicians, including blues, jazz and gospel artists including Jelly Roll Morton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, and the Reverend Gary Davis, and it is great to have his recollections about those years generally and the songs on the record specifically.  He writes with great humor and irony, as well as affection for his influences and confederates.

He also was quite honest, noting that, with "River, She Come Down," the tune was "the only song I ever wrote that made me any money, and I hate it."  He considered the piece "as a guitar exercise" with lyrics consisting of "nonsensical doggerel."  But when Peter, Paul and Mary covered the tune, renamed "Bamboo," for their debut album, it "sold seven trillion copies."  Still, Van Ronk concluded, "I shared the royalties (and the chagrin)" with Dick Weissman, who came up with the chorus.

While Van Ronk also offered that he should have waited a year or two before recording the pieces and thought of the work "as a journeyman's progress report" who "starting to get the hang of it," the album is filled with some excellent fret work, distinctive singing, and potent mixtures of humor and activism.  It wasn't more than a few years before folk was passed by in favor of rock (note Van Ronk's friend Bob Dylan's decision to go electric in 1965) and Van Ronk became something of a forgotten figure, though he remained active until his death in 2002 at age 65.

This album, though, is a potent reminder of what an immensely talented musician Dave Van Ronk was and it's great that the Smithsonian put this together after its absorption of the Folkways inventory.

Sonny Sharrock: Guitar

Can't say why it's taken almost four years to post a Sonny Sharrock album here, following his masterpiece Ask the Ages, but, in any case, his pure solo album, Guitar, is not far behind on the list of favorite Sharrock records.

Released on Enemy Records in 1986, not long after Sharrock was tracked down by bassist/producer Bill Laswell and convinced to make a comeback in music, this Sharrock/Laswell production was a perfect way to showcase the unbelievable talent that the guitarist possessed.

This is true with his well-known and well-honed slide guitar technique, in which Sharrock ranged and raged up and down the frets like a madman, but it is also true with his affinity for the blues and his knack for melody.  It is all these facets and more that made him the master that he was.

So, yes, there is plenty of rapid-fire playing with the slide and without, but there are also some very beautiful sections with plaintive melodies, soaring soloing and a playful humor that goes far beyond the pyrotechnics.

"Blind Willie" has a memorable melodic statement with a drone-like background as well as soloing that demonstrates what Sharrock could be inventive not just fast, though there's some of that, too.  "Devil's Doll Baby" has a background howling using that slide, while he solos impressively on top to create a wild effect that maybe explains the the title.

"Broken Toys" starts off in a kind of ambient mode with a pretty theme and then solos over that mellower playing, but in a way that is perfectly complementary even as it has contrasting colors.  "Black Bottom" has an old-school rock rhythm motif with a strange, otherwordly background before the soloing takes on a blues direction and includes some of the finest on the record.  "Kula Mae" has another excellent example of a rhythm that supports the often-breathtaking soloing that Sharrock was known for.in the first 1:15, and then the tune changes gear completely into another rock rhythm and some blistering fret work.

But it is the "Princess Sonata" in four parts over thirteen minutes that is the centerpiece of this album, taking all those elements of Sharrock's playing mentioned above and crystallizing them into a fully realized piece of music.  The "Princess and the Magician" section shows Sharrock blazing away, while "Like Voices of Sleeping Birds" takes him into some "out there" slide work.  "Flowers Laugh" has a playful backing, while the guitarists works the frets in a short showcase.  "They Enter the Dream" has a pretty backing statement over which the solo soars majestically and shreds in equal measure, providing a great way to end a remarkable album.

Guitar is a perfectly understated title for this showcase of one of the greatest and most underappreciated guitarists in all of music.  While Sharrock is generally thought of as a free jazz guitarist, he developed a style that was all-encompassing, taking in rock, blues and other forms, as well as jazz, to the point where, to this blogger, there is no label that applies.

Instead, Sonny Sharrock blazed his own musical path from the mid-80s until his untimely passing in 1994.  This album is one of the best ways to appreciate Sharrock in his pure, undiluted artistry, though Ask the Ages is, to this listener, his best work.