Christian Wolff: Pianist: Pieces

Christian Wolff, who is still among us as he approaches his 87th birthday, has survived all of his compatriots in the so-called New York School of experimental composers centered around John Cage and his theories and approaches to sound and including Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor.  The exploration of the possibilities of expression of sound through prepared instrumentation, the use of indeterminacy and chance operations (using, for example, the I Ching to determine what to play next), and other aspects, can be understandably off-putting, though, with an open mind and ears, the ride can be quite intriguing and fascinating.

An example is the three-disc set issued by the Belgian label Sub Rosa called Pianist: Pieces and which provides the dramatic contrast between Wolff's early work during the 1950s heyday of the New York School and a slew of pieces issued between 2000 and 2010 after he retired from teaching from Dartmouth.  Perfomer Philip Thomas provided very useful and interesting notes, observing, for example, that Cage felt that Wolff was the most musical of the group and Thomas outlines how the experimentation and pedigree of musicality through Ives, Webern, Bach, Schumann, Hayden and others can be discerned in the music.

Most helpful is Thomas' evocation of how Wolff utilized discontinuity, silences, isolated and fragmented sounds and indeterminacy of notation. This latter involves indications of which fingers to use, but not which notes; unspecified duration of notes; playing notes in any octave or clef; leaving out instructions for tempo, articulation and dynamics and the "wedge," or a pause or breath of any length.  This allows tremendous freedom, along with significant challenges for the player in working towards a "meeting point" with the composer.  Thomas stated that the experiences of working with Wolff's work "provoke me to play in ways I would not ordinarily consider."

For the listener, at least this one, this also is the case, in that listening to experimentalists like Wolff leads to new ways of hearing music, though none of this is anywhere nearly as shocking and unnerving as it was to those confronting such approaches to sound back in the Fifties.  It is also apt that, when the set was burned to my computer, the pieces were not arranged in the order by disc, but, rather so that the three track 1s are followed by the three track 2s and so on.  This discontinuity and a sort of indeterminacy seems more than fitting and does not, in the least, affect the enjoyment of hearing Wolff's particularized approaches to composing for the piano.

The Hugo Masters: An Anthology of Chinese Classical Music, Volume 2

Aik Yew Goh, who hails from Singapore but moved to Hiong Kong, launched the HUGO label (the word is a play on his name) to record and release a wide range of incredibly broad spectrum and history of Chinese music, classical and contemporary.  Eckhart Rahn, a native of Germany who started the Celestial Harmonies label based in Tucson, Arizona, approached Yew Goh about a "Hugo masters" concept, in which the latter would select tracks from his voluminous HUGO library for a four-disc series.  Each disc focuses on instrument types, so the first, highlighted here previously, concerned bowed strings.  The second, featured in this post, takes in plucked strings, while the others are for wind instruments and percussion.

These amazing recordings were not released outside of Hong Kong and the representative material and excellent performances are complemented by the latest recording technology available in the early 1990s.  The instruments here are from the lute, zither and dulcimer families, with the former including the main example of the p'i-p'a, as well as the luiqin (a smaller version of the p'i-pa), the zhongruan (a medium size lute), and the san-hsien (which has a longer neck and three, instead of four, strings.  The ch'in, another popular mainstay of Chinese music, is a zither with seven strings and thirteen studs, while the cheng is smaller with higher pitches and has generally sixteen strings.  The dulcimer is the yanh ch'in and there are two bamboo sticks used to strike the strings along five sound bridges.  There are fast and dramatic pieces representing battles and war, gorgeous melodic excursions evocative of nature like "Petrel," suites with ranges of emotion and elegant courtly works.  Virtuosos performing on ths remarkable album were mainly from Shanghai, with others from Nanjing, Guangzhou, Suzhou and Beijing and the entire series is phenomenal, with the third and fourh volumes to be highlighted here in the future.

Front Line Presents Dub: 40 Heavyweight Dub Sounds

The Front Line series of reggae recordings from Virgin Records had a short, but remarkable, life of a couple of years at the end of Seventies, when the music was at its peak.  This blogger first heard some of the Front Line albums in the very early 90s, including amazing recordings by such figures as U-Roy and I-Roy.  But, then there's the dub material and it was great to find a few years back the great compilation series put out by Virgin of two-disc sets presenting some of the greatest examples of dub available, including 40 Heavyweight Dub Sounds, issued in 2014, and packed with mind-blowing excursions into the studio wizardry of that storied era.

There are so many great reggae performers on this set, including U-Roy, Linton Kwesi Johnson (Poet and the Roots), The Gladiators, The Twinkle Brothers, Prince Far I, Culture, The Mighty Diamonds, Gregory Isaacs, and Johnny Clarke, AND, crucially, for the dub element, such remarkable musicians like drummer Sly Dunbar and his bassist partner Robbie Shakespeare and guitarists, keyboardists, horn players and drummers and percussionists who were part of "stables" of prominent studio players on the scene.  Some of the tunes here were recorded by these musicians and released under such names as "The Aggrovators" and "The Revolutionaries" while two were by Dunbar.  This is a treasure trove of prime dub from 1975 to 1980 released in just two or so years by Virgin and is a great complement to the 37 Classic Roots Cuts that will be highlighted here in the future.

Ornette Coleman/Charlie Haden: Soapsuds, Soapsuds

While Ornette Coleman was creating some fascinating music with his electric ensemble, Prime Time, he took a detour and engaged in a side project with Charlie Haden, his long-time bass playing colleague, and recorded Soapsuds, Soapsuds, a series of absorbing and revealing duets, in January 1977, released the next year on Coleman's Artist House label and later reissued on his Harmolodic label through Verve.  In his long, remarkable career, Coleman didn't record a lot of duet albums, but they can be among the most amazing of his projects, such as when he worked with pianist Joachim Kühn or with guitarist Pat Metheny, when the interplay between the two musicians reflects that they are truly listening to each other.  This was certainly the case with Coleman and Haden, who first played together two decades before, and who would continue working together occasionally after the bassist left Ornette's band about this time.  

There is an intimacy to many duet performances that draw the listener in as if you're hearing the performers in a private concert and this is one of those examples, all the more striking given the dense and usually exciting Prime Time performances of the era.  Haden was always a master of supporting the other musicians, never feeling the need to overplay or over-impress, and he was particularly brilliant here in giving Coleman the space to play some of the most beautiful tenor work (Ornette primarily being an alto player) he'd recorded.  In his rare, but typically cryptic notes, Ornette does say simply: "this music . . . has . . . a very simple message: these performers are playing for the sake of making music for people to enjoy their own concept of hearing."  Those last few words are particularly noteworthy.  As for Haden, he observed "most of what I have learned about the art of listening can be directly attributed to playing with Ornette. In order to contribute totally to his music, one must listen to every note he plays . . . and then come the endless possibilities."  This really is an immersive experience when focused concentration is directed to what these two masters brought to this stunning recording.

French Sacred Music of the 14th Century, Vol. 1

This time of year seems particularly appropriate and, with the trying circumstances of this period especially, listening to early sacred music is both relaxing and renewing.  The Early Music Series by Lyrichord Discs Inc. has a large selection of great recordings, this one dating to 1994.  Recorded at Emmanuel Church in Boston, the seventeen pieces are performed by Schola Discantus, comprised of a quintet including two countertenors (a tough range to achieve for men), a pair of tenors and a baritone, and the director and producer is Kevin Moll.

As Moll explains in his lengthy and detailed notes, the earliest pieces are likely from about 1320 and some are early in the next century and come from a collection of roughly a hundred Mass settings from the era.  Moreover, he explains that "many, perhaps most, of the Mass settings on this disc were presumably sung at one time or another in the papal choir at Avignon during the so-called 'Babylonian captivity' of the papacy (1309-1377) or under the succeeding anti-popes there during the period of the papal schism (1378-1417), when there were popes at both Rome and Avignon."  So, there is historical context of interest along with the intrinsic beauty of the polyphonic singing by the quintet, mainly performed in trios, and greatly enhanced by the setting of the 1861 Gothic Revival church, albeit Episcopal, just off the Boston Common.  This is a beautiful recording for contemplation during the Christmas season, whether or not the listener is a believer.

Mohammed Aman: The Tradition of Hejaz (Saudi Arabia)

Having just read Karen Armstrong's history of Islam, this was a good time to revisit this excellent recording of the traditional music of the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia by the powerful singer and oud player Mohammed Aman and ensemble, released by the French label Ocora in 2001. Aman is said in the very informative liners by ethnomusicologist Jean Lambert to be "the last exponent in a long line of hijazi style musicians" and performs pieces both a capella, accompanying himself on the oud, a lute-like instrument, or with an ensemble utilizing the qanun, or zither, the violin, and a variety of percussion instruments, like the tar, darbuka, masga and naqrazan.

The first piece, sung solo by Aman and a prime example of his mastery of melisma (the singing of a group of notes for one syllable in a lyric), is a religious poem about the holy city of Mecca, while songs concern pilgrimage sites including Mecca, love poems, and a paean to the prophet Mohammed, some of these including lines dating back to the 8th century, whereas the "Ya ahi al-hawa" or "To People of Passion," has a poem written by Ibrahim Khafaji (1926-2017,) who composed the national anthem of the country.  As stated by Lambert, the history of music from the Hejaz has not been well documented or known but "thanks to the generosity of Mohammed Aman and his musicians, music-lovers in both the Levant and the West now have access to this heritage."  The Ocora label has many amazing releases of music from around the world and this is an excellent example from the Middle East.

King Crimson: THRAK

In 1994, while poring through the stacks at a Tower Records store (seems like ancient history), I picked up the VROOM EP by a reformed King Crimson and, while I enjoyed the preview of the "double trio" lineup that marked the return of the band after a decade of inactivity, I did not keep up with the band's following work and did not return to listening to KC for another fifteen years.  It's too bad I didn't follow-up, because 1995's THRAK is a stunning and powerful album, reflective of Robert Fripp's admirable determination to keep the band thinking and moving in a decidedly forward direction.  His decision to double the instrumentation— for guitar (with the great Adrian Belew on vocals and co-lead guitar), bass (having the underappreciated Trey Gunn on Chapman stick paired with the sublime Tony Levin) and drums (where Pat Mastelotto provided innovative percussion with the phenomenal Bill Bruford)—created a sonically stunning version of KC that, ultimately, proved unwieldy and impossible to maintain, for a variety of musical and personal reasons, beyond this recording, some really great live work, and a failed attempt at producing a second studio album.  The decision at the end of the decade to "frakctalise" into sub-groups to seek the next direction for the band was innovative and intriguing (more on that in a future post), but the next iteration proved to be the more practical, if less exciting, quartet format of the early oughts.

THRAK is a combination of monster metallic workouts, like the title track and bookends "VROOM" and "VROOM VROOM," atmospheric instrumental interludes with the "Inner Garden" and "Radio" pieces, the great "B'Boom" drum feature, and some of the best songs penned by Belew and Fripp, including "Dinosaur" and "Walking on Air."  The result is a well-sequenced and paced album that never flags and features some of the best performances and presentations in the long annals of KC.  The approving AllMusic review of the 40th Anniversary release of the album on Fripp's Discipline Global Mobile label calls it "high-quality prog," but Fripp had long before steered the band away from that long-derided label, starting with the truly new directions of Larks Tongues in Aspic and the following records, as well as the early 80s incarnation, beginning with the startling Discipline and THRAK was still another dramatic shift in emphasis and orientation, reflecting the greatness of this incomparable band. As expressed years later by Bill Bruford in the liners for the remixed 40th Anniversary edition from five years ago: "it just seems to have so much musical information on it in comparison to a standard rock record that you would think of today.  It's oozing hot spices and extra special gravy.  A rich meal indeed!"

Lennie Tristano: Intuition

Lennie Tristano (1919-1978) is another of one those tragically unheralded musical masters, a pianist and composer who was the first to use "free improvisation" in jazz in seminal late Forties recordings.  Born in Chicago, his sight was severely impaired from birth and he was totally blind by the time he was ten.  Despite this, he had immense musical talent, playing horns, guitar, drums and piano, the latter becoming his main instrument.  He studied at the American Music Conservatory in his hometown, finishing the course in three years but denied his diploma because of a financial dispute and continuing with graduate work and he performed and taught, with one of his students being saxophonist Lee Konitz, later a major figure in jazz and who died this past spring at age 92 from COVID-19.  While Tristano achieved some recognition during the full ferment of the bebop years of last half of the 1940s and into the next decade, he moved further into teaching and less with recording and performing.  Tristano died at age 59 and was largely forgotten, leading, it was said, to bitterness and disappointment on his part.  His aversion to commercialism and his dedication and devotion to his musical vision left him underappreciated and under-recognized over the years, though he was greatly admired by Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Anthony Braxton and Charlie Parker, among many others.

This great four-disc overview of Tristano's work between 1945 and 1952 issued by the British label Proper Records in 2005 shows just how forward-thinking this amazing musician could be, but it can also be understood (sorta) why his innovations did not connect with a wider jazz-loving public.  It wasn't just the revolutionary free improvisation employed in tunes like "Intuition" and "Digression" recorded in spring 1949 and which definitely prefigured what Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor would do years later, but Tristano's approach to harmony and tonality were distinctive, even if, usually, the rhythm sections played very much "straight-ahead," leading to the critique that the music lacked swing and was cold and formal.  The first two discs have plenty of interesting material, including some great piano solo work and fine trio recordings, with the excellent "Out on a Limb" and a series of tunes, some with an added clarinet, recorded on the last day of 1947 being standouts for this listener.  

It is disc three, though, that astounds, with an all-star workout from 3 January 1949 including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Fats Navarro on trumpet, Parker, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding on trombone, Shelly Manne on drums, Charlie Ventura on tenor, and Tristano blowing through "Victory Ball;" some great work with a quartet and quintet session about a week later, featuring Konitz; a sextet with Konitz and Marsh in March with "Wow" named for a reason as the sax players play a phenomenal intertwined passage; and that free session in May, also with the two sax masters.  Disc four has the great benefit of mainly consisting of live material offering greatly extended renditions of tunes with much longer soloing, including a Christmas Eve 1949 performance with Konitz and Marsh of two tunes at a Parker-headlined concert at Carnegie Hall, and a half-dozen tunes recorded in Toronto in summer 1952, again with his primary soloists.  There are also a couple of pieces recorded in the trio format in fall 1951 for Tristano's short-lived label and including a young Roy Haynes—a master drummer who is still with us and who will be 96 in March.

With a four-disc set, there's a lot more that could be said, but, generally, as was the case with the long-neglected Herbie Nichols, given some of the great material, innovations, and beautiful playing found throughout, the one word that stands out, with Marsh and Konitz melding their horns together so excellently is: Wow.

Philip Glass: Koyaanisqatsi

Philip Glass is one of those "classical music" composers who defies easy categorization.  Though Julliard-trained and identified with the so-called "minimalist" school, Glass largely worked outside of conventional, even for modernists, formats and venues for the presentation of his work.  His work with the great sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar while studying with Nadia Boulanger along with a desire to work with theater, opera, dance, pop, film and classical worlds reflect a truly admirable multi-disciplinarian approach that bridges normally segregated musical genres and has had a tremendous influence over the decades.  One of his best-known adventures tying sound to the visual image of film is the amazing Koyaanisqatsi, which first appeared as a soundtrack and then redone as a longer album.  It is also the first of five discs in the set Philip on Film, released by Nonesuch Records in 2001.

Released in 1982 and produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi eschewed dialogue and traditional narrative, including aural, to present images and music that, as expressed on Glass' website, "is an apocalyptic vision of he collision of two different worlds—urban life and technology versus the environment."  Yet, it is added that the film "is not so much about something" as much as it is a provocation "to raise questions that only the audience can answer."  There is no assigned meaning, which would be propaganda, but an encouragement for the viewer to find a meaning that is "whatever you wish to make it."  The music, heard apart from the visuals of the film, is tightly constructed and played, and often stunningly beautiful, with brass punctuating the continuous flow and vocals accompanying the hypnotically repetitive rhythms, but there is a strong emotive element not often associated with the "minimalism."  On its own terms, the music here is remarkable, but the obvious next step for this listener is to actually watch the film.

Chocolate: Peru's Master Percussionist

 Among the most impactful aspects of "world music" is the syncretic nature of so much of it, with influences from one or more places transmuting the music of another.  An excellent example is that of Chocolate (Choco-LAH-tay), the nickname of Julio Algendones (1934-2004), a percussionist of great skill and high renown in Peru.  The descendant of Africans brought to work in the horrific conditions in the silver and hold mines of the Andes Mountains of Peru and later on haciendas where cotton and sugar cane were grown, Chocolate devoted his musical life to maintaining the traditions of African drumming in the context of the Cincha area of the southern part of the country or in El Carmen a suburb of the capital Lima, both being areas predominantly inhabited by Afro-Peruvians.

Chocolate, the liner notes tell us, was born in a poor black farming community, where his mother picked cotton, but his talent led him to perform in the capital, where he achieved fame as "the most faithful representative of the cajon [a wood box-shaped drum] and this tradition of ritual drumming which a very people in Pery have maintained and kept alive in its purest form."  The religious elements of santeria and makumba, events like baptisms, weddings and funerals, and everyday opportunities for music and dance permeate the music, with percussionists like Chocolate "seen as a short of shaman who calls or evokes the spirits" and who "is a mediator between heaven and earth since the spirits are expressed through his rhythms."  It is this aspect, the core of rhythm in human life (the heartbeat most fundamentally) and its most basic accessibility to even the poorest of people for "a music for which all that was needed was your body and the nearest objects from which to make sounds," that comes through in the hands of a master like Julio "Chocolate" Algendones, who performed the three pieces on this album, released by Lyrichord in 1993, in 1990 under the auspices of producer J. Blue Sheppard.

Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser: The Moon and the Melodies

The composer Harold Budd, generally celebrated for his "ambient" works and best known, probably, for his collaborations with Brian Eno, died Tuesday from complications of the COVID-19 virus at age 84.  Budd, a native of Los Angeles, was fascinated by jazz heard in the clubs of South-Central Los Angeles and took a course in music theory at Los Angeles Community College.  During a stint in the Army, he played in a band with Albert Ayler, who went on to a gloriously noisy, joyful, and sadly short-lived career before his untimely drowning death in 1970.  Budd then studied at Cal State Northridge and the University of Southern California and, while he influenced by such modern "classical music" figures as John Cage (in attitude if not compositionally), Morton Feldman and Terry Riley, he was profoundly affected by the immense spiritual qualities of the great saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.  After an avant-garde period in his composing, Budd, by the early Seventies, taught himself piano and moved into his ambient avocation, which included his association with Eno by the later part of that decade.

In 1986, Budd moved to London and found he could make a living with his music there and in Europe, rather than in America.  That year, he met the Cocteau Twins, a group ubiquitously labeled as "etheral" and this "unlikely collaboration," as expressed in Budd's website bio, was also his "first foray into popular music."  Purportedly, the composer's admirers were dismayed, but I bought the album when it was released on 4AD in fall 1986 and was very impressed with the merging of Budd's piano and the atmospherics generated by the band, especially on a track like "The Ghost Has No Name" where Richard Thomas (Dif Juz) plays a haunting saxophone accompaniment.  My later interest in ambient electronic music has only added to the appreciation of this fine recording.  It helps, perhaps, not to think of this as a Cocteau Twins album, no more than it is a Harold Budd record, but as a true collaboration.  In fact, Budd and Robin Guthrie, the sonic architect of CT, went on to work together on several subsequent projects and the composer collaborated with such "pop" figures as Jah Wobble, David Sylvian, Andy Partridge and Hector Zazou in addition to his own works.  His eager embrace of other music and musicians, outside of his "genre," was particularly admirable and The Moon and the Melodies is an especially notable example.

Eric Dolphy: Iron Man

 Another of many musical masters who left this world far too soon, multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy was a phenomenal performer, writer and arranger who was so underappreciated and over-criticized for his stunning innovations in the first half of the Sixties.  Yet, some of the most far-seeing of jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus, George Russell, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Andrew Hill recognized his brilliance and encouraged him to pursue his singular path.  Sadly, Dolphy, who like so many American jazz musicians was embraced far more by Europeans, died from the misdiagnosed complications of diabetes in Berlin in June 1964 and who knows what he would have gone on to do if he'd lived beyond the mere 36 years he had.

Iron Man is one of two albums, the other being Conversations, recorded in early July 1963 under the guidance of producer Alan Douglas, who worked at United Artists and later had a controversial association with Jimi Hendrix.  While the Conversations album was issued the same year, it was decided to shelve Iron Man, purportedly because it was considered more experimental, and it did not see the light of day for five years.  This album, however, is one of the best Dolphy recordings out there, with his signature angular melodic statements, unusual arrangements, and complex band interplay on the title track, "Mandrake" and "Burning Spear" juxtaposed with the beautiful duets with the stunning bassist Richard Davis (still with us at age 90!) on Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday," where Dolphy's amazing talents on the bass clarinet are again highlighted, and Jaki Byard's "Ode to C.P. [Charlie Parker]" with the leader playing with great sensitivity on flute.  The band, including Davis, drummer J.C. Moses, bassist Eddie Khan, alto saxist Sonny Simmons (credited as "Huey Simons" that being his given first name and who is also still living at age 87), flautist Prince Lasha, Clifford Jordan on soprano sax, the young Woody Shaw on trumpet, and the great Bobby Hutcherson (apparently the "iron man" of the album and song titles) on vibraphone, is just great, as well, in handling the leader's challenging and highly rewarding compositions, which so richly deserve more hearing.

Works of Johann Sebastian Bach, Volume 2: The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings

It is hard to overestimate the effect Johann Sebastian Bach had on the shaping of so-called "classical music," though in his lifetime (1685-1750) he was known as a master on the harpsichord and organ and as a builder of the latter.  As a composer, however, he was all but unknown, a status that, remarkably, did not change until the onset of the nineteenth century, even as he was acknowledged by such masters as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to have had a profound influence on their development.  The other pervasive legacy left by Bach is equal temperament as best laid out in his The Well-Tempered Clavier works for keyboard.  Even though his tuning system is not reflective of the natural harmonics generated by the vibrations of strings, the tempered scales became and remain standardized and allow for considerable freedom in transposing keys on an instrument like the piano which has a fixed pitch orientation, despite attempts by some, including the remarkable Harry Partch, to convince the world otherwise. 

This five-disc set, the second volume, issued as the "Smithsonian Collection of Recordings" provides a taste of the remarkable diversity of Bach's composing during the first half of the 18th century.  The solemn, stately, dramatic and highly affecting "St. John Passion" concerning John's version of the crucifixion of Christ, was written in the 1720s and are performed, either on period instruments or modern ones modeled after them, by the Smithsonian Chamber Players and Chorus, recorded in the Renwick art gallery at the Smithsonian in March 1989.  A beautifully and richly composed set of three sonatas and three partitas for violin were composed just prior to the "St. John Passion" and was performed by Jaap Schröder in the Oltingen, Switzerland church in the mid-80s.  Lastly, there are two concertos and an overture on harpsichord, where the counterpoint comes across more strongly than on a fortepiano, which did not displace the former in superiority until later, recorded by James Weaver on a contemporary instrument based on a 1730s harpsichord, exactly 33 years ago at the National Museum of American History.  These are excellent recordings reflective of the diversity of a towering seminal figure in European music and, with a new lockdown in place here, this music provides some relief from renewed restrictions.

Shahmirza Moradi: The Music of Lorestan, Iran

This very impressive recording by sorna (a double-reed wind instrument) master Shahmirza Moradi and his son Reza, accompanying on the dohol (drum) includes the performance of a half-dozen dance pieces, recorded live in early 1993 in Paris, from the long tradition of this fascinating music from the Lorestan province in western (or south-western, as stated in the liners) Iran.  Moradi (1924-1997) was from Dorud, a county seat and was a member of the Lur peoples, who number about five million in that area of country.  

Renowned for his amazing skills in maintaining circular breathing, a powerful projection of sound, and his considerable improvisational skills, Moradi displays all of his immense talent and ability on these lengthy tracks and, with concentrated listening and the following of his assured, flowing and technically brilliant lines, the pieces don't seem to go as long as they are.  This is all the more remarkable given that the sorna has a limited range of one octave and one note above, but that's a testament to Moradi's awesome playing.  His son's accompaniment also keeps an excellent rhythm over which the master weaves his stunning lines.  Moradi was a wonder and this album is a distinct pleasure to hear and to appreciate the incredible performance, which must have been quite an experience to hear live.

Chris Watson: Weather Report

After leaving the experimental electronic group Cabaret Voltaire in late 1981 for a job as a sound engineer for television and then a several years tenure another unusual group, The Hafler Trio, Chris Watson settled in to his ongoing avocation as a sound recordist working primarily with natural environments, including with Sir Richard Attenborough on televised nature programs that took him throughout the world.  In the mid-1990s, Watson began recording albums of natural environments with this work usually issued by Jon Wozencroft's Touch label, with one of these, Outside the Circle of Fire, highlighted here before. Using high-quality field recording equipment and placing them and him in extraordinary and varied locations has given Watson the opportunity to capture fascinating sound worlds relating to animals of all kinds, wind, water and other elements.  Edited judiciously, these albums are incredibly immersive, especially on decent headphones, and, at least to this admirer, musical, with all kinds of natural rhythms, harmonies and melodies. 

Whether it is defined as "music" is obviously left to the listener, but Weather Report, released in 2003 is a remarkable aural journey and experience with three 18-minute tracks taking us to the Masai Mara region of Kenya in east Africa, a glen in the Scottish highlands, and the amazing moving of the ice in and weather and animal sounds around an Icelandic glacier.  A brief statement by Watson observes that "the weather has created and shaped all our habitats.  Clearly it also has profound and dynamic effect upon our lives and that of other animals.  The three locations featured here all have moods and characters which are made tangible by the elements, and these periodic events are represented within by a form of time compression."  Watson's work is a reminder that, just as it is a good idea to occasionally take our focus off our earthbound existence and look up and ponder the wonder of the universe, it is equally important to reduce our sense of listening of music to first principles--the basic organization of sound.  Rain, the cries of birds, wind, the chirping of insects, and much else are elements of primeval music and our abstracting ourselves from our environment leads to a false and, when it comes to climate change, dangerous impression that humans are somehow removed in a privileged realm from other forms of life.

Miles Davis: Agharta/Pangaea

When it was decided in 1990 to delve deeply into jazz, there had been a bit of previous toe-dipping through the music of Miles Davis, including his music of the mid to late Eighties (which had some interesting elements) as well as the sublime Kind of Blue (1959) and the phenomenal Bitches Brew (1970).  When it was time to take that headlong dive, one of the first recordings purchased was Pangaea, issued in 1991 for the first time in the United States.  As testament to how powerful the impact of this album was, the recollection, thirty years later, of where the long box double-disc set was purchased is still crystal clear, even to the exact location on the south wall of the store.

Taking Pangaea home and listening to it was, simply put, a mind-blowing experience.  The septet of the leader, Sonny Fortune on saxes and flute, lead guitarist Pete Cosey, guitarist Reggie Lucas (co-producer of Madonna's first album), Michael Henderson on electric bass, drummer Al Foster, and Mtume (James Forman, the son of the great saxophonist Jimmy Heath before he became a pop success), was an incredibly tight and powerful band as they traveled to Japan early in 1975 and performed afternoon and evening concerts in Osaka on 1 February that yielded the albums Agharta, released the following year, and Pangaea, which was withheld for fifteen years.  So, while the latter has more of a visceral memory and is now viewed as a classic, because it was the first purchased, the former is generally accounted the better of the two, with the reasoning being that the band had more energy and intensity in the afternoon and showed some fatigue, especially Miles, in the evening, where the playing was somewhat more restrained and with darker and edgier passages reflective, perhaps, of some flagging of energy.

While that debate about which is better is interesting, this admirer doesn't see that much difference, with perhaps more up-tempo, high-energy playing, including by Miles, during the earlier session.  There are times during both performances where the band is locked into what seems an eternal groove, with Henderson and Foster (whose stamina and power are something to behold) holding down the steadiest of rhythms, Mtume creating all sorts of fascinating percussive effects, Fortune wailing away on the sax, Lucas keeping his rhythm guitar solid and steady and Cosey, when soloing, elevating his guitar cries to the heavens with some amazing playing.  Much of the music on these two albums, however, goes into quieter spaces, almost ambient at times, with stabs of synthesizers and drum machines influenced by the likes of Stockhausen as a counter to the insistent rock and funk elements that pervade many other moments.  There are even moments of "old-fashioned" swing and times when Fortune beautifully plays the flute.  As for Davis, it was once said that his playing and soloing didn't change even as the music around him did, but he still, at an age much older than his bandmates, had to keep up a terrific and demanding pace to direct and perform with the young ones and he still sounds strong for most of these recordings.

Once Miles and the group returned to the United States there were a few more performances, but in great pain with a variety of physical ailments, hobbled by chemical addictions, and exhausted by a relentless pace going back some thirty years, Davis withdrew from music for five full years.  After a haze of drugs, drink and other diversions and hardly leaving his home, Miles returned in 1980 a very different musician.  In a creative sense, Agharta and Pangaea were an end of an era and the culmination of three decades of a constant need to change course and pursue "new directions in music," as his albums once proudly stated.  Hearing these records remains a powerful experience and definitive statements of an era by a master musician and his stellar band.

Gloria Coates: Symphonies Nos. 1, 7 and 14

At 82, Gloria Coates, even after decades of work as one of the finest composers around, is woefully underappreciated.  One wonders if her gender is among the biggest reasons why.  Coming across her name was one of those numerous happy accidents that are more common than we sometimes realize and, hearing this 2006 Naxos release of her work spanning from the early Seventies to the early Oughts (it's always a pleasure to use that archaic word), is another reminder of just how much great music is out there waiting to be discovered.  A native of Wisconsin and a long-time resident of Munich, Coates has managed, without little fanfare, to amass a remarkable body of work, including sixteen symphonies, ten string quartets, and a great deal of other compositions with a distinctive style best known for her frequent use of glissandi.  

Among the works on this recording, performed by three German orchestras, the first symphony, originally titled "Music on Open Strings" before the composer decided to use the word "symphony," is her most recognized piece. The tuning includes a first movement to a Chinese scale (provided by her teacher, Alexander Tcherepnin, to whom the work is dedicated) and the finale is a staggering aural experience of great glissandi intensity. The seventh symphony was "dedicated to those who brought down The [Berlin] Wall in PEACE" and the use of brass and percussion with those glissandi in the strings (especially in the first and third movements) is striking, even if the piece is not conventionally celebratory.  The fourteenth symphony was new at the time and was an homage to early American hymn writers Supply Belcher and William Billings as well as to another mentor, Otto Luening, and is subtitled "Symphony in Microtones" because of extensive and impressive use of quarter tones.  This album, with cover art by Coates, was a revelation when first heard and is a powerful sampling of the work of a great composer who deserves to be far better known and recognized.

The Music of Uzbekistan

Thirty years ago, when it was decided to expand musical horizons by listening extensively to jazz, classical and world music and less so to "rock," or whatever seemed to fall within that increasingly irrelevant term, it was the exposure to music from all parts of the world that easily became the most exciting element.  Much of what has been collected over those three decades is broadly given the designation of "folk music," as distinct from "classical music," and which generally seems to mean performances outside of concert halls and other venues and more likely to be found at community events, like ceremonies, festivals, weddings and other gatherings, or at work, play and elsewhere in daily life.  In much of the world, that's how many people experience music and that is often the most fascinating to hear given how "professionalized" music is in most of the "West."

Ask 100 people to point out Uzbekistan on the map and it seems certain that all but perhaps a very few would have no idea.  Yet, this Central Asian country, a part of the Soviet Union until the early 90s and north of Iran and Afghanistan, has an amazing history, much of it tied to its central location on the fabled Silk Road, the ancient trade route between the Middle East and China (a previous post here, in fact, was of a two-disc recording of music from points along the Silk Road) and the control of this area by many empires and states.  What is heard on The Music of Uzbekistan, re-released in 2002 by ARC Music, are fourteen pieces reflecting native styles but heavily influenced by the instrumentation and music of other places on that trade route or from controlling empires.  Persians, Turks and Chinese, in particular, left their stamp on the region, both in the "folk" and "classical" music senses with instruments like the ney, chang, tanbut, and surnai, among others being introduced from outside sources, yet stamped with the Uzbek manner of composing and playing.  Recorded in 1970, during the Soviet era, by Deben Bhattacharya, a remarkable figure from Benares, India, who developed a great expertise in ethnic music, poetry and dance, this album is a fascinating window into an ancient culture and its stunning music.

Cabaret Voltaire: Red Mecca

The release last week of Shadow of Fear, the first Cabaret Voltaire album since 1994's The Conversation, has led to much discussion about whether Richard H. Kirk's decision to reassume the moniker on his own without original bassist and vocalist Stephen Mallinder is fair or reasonable.  Given that Mallinder moved to Australia in the early 90s, it seems perfectly understandable that Kirk, who has also carefully curated a number of CV archival recordings, re-releases and re-imaginings, the remarkable 2011 Johnny YesNo set being most notable with the latter, and who built a staggering portfolio of diverse released under many monikers over that roughly quarter-century, decided about a decade ago to carry the mantle once again.  The new album, pre-ordered back in August, arrived just after the release date and has been listened to many times, so it'll be featured here at some point.

Meantime, this post concerns 1981's amazing Red Mecca, released by Rough Trade and the last full recording made with Christopher Watson, before he departed for a television sound engineering job and other projects, including field recordings covered here previously, though he did appear on half of the transitional and amazing 2x45, released in spring 1982.  This third full-length, after 1979's Mix-Up and 1980's Voice of America, along with other releases, such as the very interesting Three Mantras (also from 1980), reflected a crystallizing of what the early Cabaret Voltaire did so well.  The fantastic melange of electronic and acoustic sounds, with Watson handling the Vox Continental keyboard and tapes, Mallinder on vocals and bass, along with a bit of bongos, and Kirk on synths, guitar, clarinet and other horns and strings, is a better conceived, more ordered, better performed and more richly developed package of material than the previous albums.  Everything is strong here, with favorites being the too-short "Landslide," "Red Mask," and "Black Mask."  With Watson's subsequent departure, Kirk and Mallinder wisely decided to refocus and retool the CV sound, so Red Mecca stands as the high-water mark for the first phase of this remarkable group.

John Coltrane: My Favorite Things

In 1990, when it was decided to explore jazz beyond the few recordings heard from the great Miles Davis, the two names that came up when figuring who to hear were the amazing Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane.  As much as Coleman astounded with his unusual approaches to harmony and time, hearing My Favorite Things, particularly its widely known title track in which the leader's soprano sax, rarely heard in those days, was a revelation.  As great as that tune is, there are also the exceptional covers of "Summertime," "Everytime We Say Goodbye," and "But Not For Me."  While I bought a number of Ornette albums at that time, I became obsessed with Trane and acquired as many recordings as my pocketbook would allow.

It wasn't until I acquired the box set, the strangely named The Heavyweight Champion: John Coltrane, The Complete Atlantic Recordings that the realization hit that there were just six days between 21-26 October 1960 when the saxophonist and his band of McCoy Tyner (who just left us in March) on piano, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Steve Davis (Tyner's brother-in-law and a largely unknown figure) churned out almost two dozen songs that included those on My Favorite Things, released in March 1961, as well as pieces for Coltrane Jazz, which came out just a month prior, Coltrane Plays the Blues, issued in July 1962, and Coltrane's Sound, released in June 1964—the latter two hitting the shops well after Trane signed with Impulse and took his music to another level of brilliance.  That was a remarkable week, with the peak being the quartet of classic renderings on this still-astounding album.

Franz Joseph Haydn: The Erdödy String Quartets

Reading Daniel Boorstin's fascinating The Creators has just included a chapter of the innovators of 18th century classical music, including the great Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809), whose phenomenal portfolio includes over a hundred symphonies, more than eighty string quartets, an immense number of piano works, and much else.  As Boorstin observed and echoed in the liner notes to the Naxos recording of the composer's string quartets, published in 1799, and dedicated to the Hungarian Count Josef Georg von Erdödy, Haydn was long-blessed with an enthusiastic and generous patron, Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, and he was able to generate the massive quantity and superlative quality of work over nearly thirty years.  When the prince died in 1790, his successor and brother was not musically inclined at all, so Haydn left and enjoyed two fruitful periods in London.  He then returned to work for the new prince of Esterházy, both at the family palace at Eisenstadt, as well as at Vienna, where Haydn lived until his death.

In 1797, he completed a half-dozen string quartets, dedicated to Count Erdödy, and the first three of the set comprise this disc, recorded in 1989.  They are performed beautifully by the Kodály Quartet, formed in Budapest, Hungary in the mid-1960s, and which has recorded the complete string quartets of Haydn, as well as those of Beethoven and Schubert.  The last of the trio of pieces, known as the Emperor Quartet, is the most widely known because of its quiet, stately and gorgeous second movement melody, written from the composer's "Emperor's Hymn" for the Emperor Franz of Austria and inspired by Haydn's hearing of "God Save the Queen" when in England. Also impressive is the first quartet with its sprightly first movement, its gorgeous and understated second movement, and its uplifting finale.

Music of the Bansuri: A Flute of Rajasthan

As noted here before, when, in 1990, world music became a prime area of interest, the JVC World Sounds sampler ordered from a magazine ad was a true eye-opener, revealing not just an enormous range of music from all over the planet, but an exposure to a wider world beyond the miniscule one experienced day-to-day.  Not much later, the purchase of Venu, a Rykodisc World 360 release from the amazing Hariprasad Chaurasia, who is still with us at age 82, was the first hearing of the bansuri, a bamboo flute with tremendous expressiveness, and his prodigious technique was a wonder to behold.

This album, recorded in New Delhi in June 1989, from the JVC series features the brothers Rajendra and Ajay Prasanna, whose father Raghunath was a legendary performer on both the bansuri and the shehnai, this latter often described as somewhat akin to an oboe.  The two tracks here include the "Poorbi Dhun," a folk song running over 17 minutes, followed by the "Raga Marwa, a tour-de-force of some 36 minutes duration with the usual gradual development leading to a powerful and dramatic conclusion.  Rajendra plays on the left channel and Ajay on the right and their playing is gorgeous, in synchronicity, in trading phrases and in soloing.  They are accompanied by Ratan Prasanna (another brother?) on the tabla and Onkar Nath on the tambura and enhanced by the delicate plucked string tones of the surimandle and these performances are excellent throughout.

Mike Watt: Ring Spiel Tour '95

It's still a bit of a marvel that Mike Watt, master of the "thunder stick" (that is, bass) who, with his Minutemen mates, drummer George Hurley and guitarist and vocalist D. Boon, refined the art of "jamming econo" (i.e., creating maximum musical effect with minimal trappings), worked for about fifteen years with the major label Columbia.  It began in the early Nineties with fIREHOSE, the brilliant trio including Hurley and guitarist and vocalist Ed Crawford, and continued with Watt's solo career, including three albums, the first of which is the remarkable Ball-Hog or Tug Boat? which was released in 1995.  That album had a staggering list of guest performers, from Iggy Pop to Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, the Kirkwood brothers, Petra and Rachel Haden, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Nels Cline, Henry Rollins, Flea, Bernie Worrell, and, most memorably, Kathleen Hanna with a hilarious diatribe on the phone about sexism in music.

In April and May of that year, Watt, who was on the road a ton for years, embarked on a tour, with this great recording done at the Metro Theater in Chicago on 6 May.  The band included Grohl on drums and guitar, Vedder and Pat Smear on guitar and vocals, and William Goldsmith also on drums, and they tear through 16 tracks, most from the album, though a new Vedder song "Habit", a Blue Oyster Cult cover with "The Red and the Black," and the great Minutemen tune "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" are also on the set list.  Vedder and Pearl Jam were massively popular and Grohl soon would achieve great success with The Foo Fighters after the tragic end of Nirvana, so there was probably a significant draw through them, but everyone plays together really solidly and truly "jams econo."  This is a great live disc from one of the true unsung heroes of whatever it is people want to call "rock 'n roll".

Cecil Taylor With Tristan Honsinger and Evan Parker: The Hearth

In summer 1988, Cecil Taylor, always, as so many experimental jazz musicians have been, more highly regarded and appreciated in Europe than at home in the United States, spent an enormously productive month in Berlin, just a few years from German reunification, as part of a month-long residency which led to many concerts.  A result was an 11-disc box set, issued by FMP (Free Music Productions), called In Berlin '88, which was then reissued by Desintation: Out in 2015, with two additional CDs as The Complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88.  This blogger doesn't have either set, but does have several of the discs that came from them.  One of the more interesting is The Hearth, a slightly-longer-than-an-hour excursion into amazing improvisation between the titanic pianist, tenor sax giant Evan Parker, and the lesser-known, but very impressive, cellist Tristan Honsinger.

There are moments where the trio works together really well, especially during Parker's well-constructed and brilliantly laid-out solos, and there are duos between Taylor and the sax player and then between Honsinger and the maestro that are also superlative.  While Taylor was known in duos, especially, for overwhelming his partner with his dazzling display of keyboard pyrotechnics, and there is some of that here, he does interact beautifully with Parker and Honsinger in some of the most exceptional passages of this phenomenal recording.  It's hard to believe he's been gone for two-and-a-half years, but, with a prodigious output from the 1970s and for years afterward, with the Berlin residency yielding so much remarkable music, there is no shortage of material to turn to when the mood is there to hear an iconoclastic master pour out his astonishing performances.

Harry Partch: The Bewitched

With his system of monophony and its 43-unit "microtone" set leading him to build his own instruments to play the strange and wonderful music he created, Harry Partch was a musical iconoclast of the highest order.  He was also remarkably contrarian, dismissive of the "abstract" practices from the Middle Ages onward that tore music away from dance and drama as was and is still done in other societies, and not at all shy about condemning those who differed from his views.  Still, while he worked largely in obscurity, Partch had a small devoted coterie of supporters, followers, and musicians who did what they could to present his music where possible when he was alive and do so today nearly a half-century after his death.

In 1955, when The Bewitched was completed and soon performed at a music festival at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, it would hardly be expected to be on the radar of all but the most devoted of alternative music lovers.  65 years later, it would certainly sound bizarre and out of tune to newcomers, but, with some exposure to the music of other parts of the world, including gamelan from Bali, so-called "Peking opera" from China, and so on, what Partch was doing does make more sense.  

It isn't opera, but has a structure somewhat reminiscent of it, with twelve scenes bearing wonderful titles like "The Romancing of a Pathological Liar Comes to an Inspired End" (hmmm . . . ), "Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room," and, my favorite, "The Cognoscenti Are Plunged into a Demonic Descent While at Cocktails."  Instruments included standard ones such as clarinet, piccolo, and cello, though there is also a Japanese koto, as well as Partch's bamboo marimba, or "boo," cloud-chamber bowls, harmonic canon, kithara, spoils of war, bass marimba, and chromelodeon.  Percussion is central to the music here, as in much of Partch's remarkable work.

Here are some excerpts from Partch in the liners about this amazing musical journey: "The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre.  It is the opposite of specialized . . . it is a seeking for release—through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry—from the catharsis of tragedy.  It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity . . . each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease . . . we are all bewitched, and mostly by accident: the accident of form, color, and sex; of prejudices condition from the cradle on up, of the particular ruts we have found ourselves in or have dug for ourselves because of our individual needs."  Given that the nation had just emerged from the McCarthy "witch trials" and the "man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit" mentality was very much holding sway, Partch's jeremiad against conformity is striking if not specified.  This 1990 release on CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc., a non-profit for the promotion of contemporary music) is a stimulating, if very challenging, example of Partch's stunning music.