Joseph Spence: The Complete Folkways Recordings, 1958

The liner notes description by Samuel Charters, who recorded this music while in search of traditional folk music in the Bahamas in 1958, tells it all.  He and a colleague were on the sparsely-populated island of Andros, which had fewer than 900 residents, and he continued:

We went out one day about noon  . . . some men were working on the foundation of a new house, and as we came close to them we could hear guitar music.  It was some of the most exuberant, spontaneous, and uninhibited guitar playing we had ever heard, but all we could see was a man in a faded short and rumpled khaki trousers sitting on a pile of bricks.  He had a large acoustic guitar in his lap.  I wsa so sure two guitarists were playing that I went along the path to look on the other side of the wall to see where the other musician was sitting.  I had just met Joseph Spence.

Charters went on to note that

his playing was stunning.  He was playing simple popular melodies and using them as the basis for extended rhythmic and melodic variations.  He often seemed to be improvising in the bass, the middle strings and the treble at the same time.  Sometimes a variation would strike the men [working on the house] and Spence himself as so exciting that he would simply stop playing and join thyem in the shouts of excitement,

The unheralded guitarist then walked over to the house where Charters and his future wife Ann Danberg were staying and was followed by quite a crowd.  Unable to squeeze everyone into the small dwelling, Charters decided to do "the recording on the porch."  He then reeled off enough material for an album and a half, combined into one disc here, for the Folkways label, now Smithsonian Folkways.

After Spence "played as much as he wanted we paid him the little money we had" and then the musician headed off for animated games of Bahamian checkers until his friends finished their construction work.

Charters talked about attempts to get Spence more attention during the "new folk" scene in New York, but there were other musicians who were more popular and one visit in which the Bahamian guitarist was accompanied by religious family members led to a much tempered sound when he played.

These recordings are remarkable in that a guitarist with such stunning command of his instrument and with the inventiveness and creativity of a master improviser was found by happenstance.  Spence accompanied himself with a steady tapping of a foot to keep the rhythm rock solid and growled lyrics and hummed to keep in place with the song.   But, it's those variations and his use of all the strings of his instrument that make these recordings so amazing.

Arcana: The Last Wave

Bill Laswell has made it one of his stocks-in-trade to bring together musicians who have not or would not likely be found together in the studio or on stage and give them the leeway to do their thing.  While such experiments may not always be successful, they are almost always interesting.

After the death of the staggering guitarist Sonny Sharrock put an end of the pounding, uber-loud quarter Last Exit, which intermittently performed from 1986 to the early 1990s, Laswell put together the Arcana project, centered around the remarkable drummer Tony Williams and the idiosyncratic guitarist Derek Bailey with Laswell, as always, keeping the bottom line with his bass consistent and accommodating to the other instrumentalists.

In April 1995, Williams, Bailey and Laswell entered the bassist's Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn and recorded The Last Wave, a churning, boiling, blasting and freely chaotic collection of improvisations that, when it works, is astounding.

This is especially true in the opening "Broken Circle," in which Bailey wails away with his angular approach to the electric guitar, while Williams pounds away with hard washes of cymbals and aggressive snare attacks.  Laswell wisely plays it cool and doesn't try to match the power and propulsion provided by his bandmates.

"Cold Blast" starts out slow and atmospheric, with Williams using his cymbals as a wash of sound, Bailey picks out bits of discordant notes and Laswell lays out undertones of bass.  When Williams starts hitting paired notes and occasional long fills, which is common on this recording, on his snare and Laswell plays with heavy rhythms on his eight-string bass, Bailey is all over the place coaxing strange and wonderful sounds from his axe.  About 4:45 in the piece really comes together with Williams hitting his stride with great fill and cymbal work to correspond with Bailey's always restless explorations and Laswell holds down the bottom end admirably.

The lengthiest track is "Pearls and Transformation" with Bailey's jagged and trebly riffs underlaid by Williams' polyrhytmic approach that is familiar to those who've heard the drummer's music from Miles Davis to Lifetime and elsewhere.  Again, Laswell keeps his bass playing simple and in control to allow the others to riff accordingly.  The piece goes quiet and atmospheric about 2 1/2 minutes in and again at about 6  and then 11 minutes and then goes into some interesting exploratory group improvising that might sound like aimless noodling, but, to this hearer, is a cohesive journey taken by three musicians that do listen to each other even while pushing and prodding to move in several directions during the long piece.

Produced by Laswell with assistance from longtime collaborator John Zorn and his Japanese partner in the Tzadik label, Kazunori Sugiyama and released on the Japanese DIW/Disk Union label, the recording, by Laswell stalwarts Robert Musso as engineer and Layng Martine assisting, is clear and crystalline and makes the most of cleanly distinguishing the instruments.

Electric Masada: At the Mountains of Madness

After putting on an excellent performance as part of John Zorn's 50th birthday celebration in 2003, and their set released as volume 4 of the many recordings emanating from that lengthy series of concerts at Zorn's Tonic club in New York, Electric Masada embarked on a European tour.

Clearly Zorn was buoyed by the octet's telepathic interplay and collective and individual power when he launched the tour and this 2-disc set capturing performances in Moscow and in Slovenia reveal a band that was louder, more intense and transformative in terms of taking familiar Masada tunes into another sonic realm.

Key to the expansion of volume, power and intensity is the use of two drummers, Masada stalwart Joey Baron, who never fails to impress and amaze, and Kenny Wollesen, another remarkable talent, and the great percussionist Cyro Baptista.  Trevor Dunn is left to anchor the bottom with his stellar bass playing.

Keyboardist Jamie Saft is another integral component to the ensemble, providing both phenomenal soloing and propulsive accompaniment and then is augmented with the electronic touches of Ikue Mori.

When it comes to Marc Ribot, it's hard to not overdo the superlatives.  It isn't just that he is a remarkable soloist in terms of speed, precision and power, but that his creativity on the frets is so marked.  Throughout the recording, his playing is simply amazing.

This, of course, applies to Zorn, who regularly astounds with his alto sax work, but he seems particular energized, motivated, and pushed by his top-notch colleagues throughout these performances.

It is telling that several of the pieces rendered from the Masada book are given extended treatments, with even the shortest tune going 5 and 1/2 minutes.  Six of the fifteen pieces are 15 minutes or longer, giving ample opportunity for everyone to showcase their talents at length during the course of the recording.

Extra kudos have to go out to Heung-Heung Chin, who has created remarkable cover art for Zorn's Tzadik projects over the years, but this one is especially interesting and eye-catching with the individual art works and the font used for the titles.

To this listener, it isn't even about the individual tunes, but about the individual and collective performances that make this such a tremendous album.  At the Mountains of Madness is testament to what makes Masada one of the great jazz ensembles ever and certainly one of the top groups of the last quarter century or so.

Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphonies Nos 1-20

A recent reading of a biography of the remarkable composer Charles Ives by the equally distinctive composer Henry Cowell and his wife Sidney, included some interesting perspectives by Ives about the "pretty music" made by composers of bygone eras.  This also came out in a reading several years ago of Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music.  In both cases, highly idiosyncratic composers seeking to exercise their creativity in breaking molds and expanding ideas outside traditional areas of melody, harmony and time offered pointed criticisms of "pretty music."

For this listener, music is usually about mood.  In other words, what do we feel like listening to today based on a number of factors?  Where Ives, Partch and many others felt the need to make a clean break, at least theoretically, from their precursors, there may be times for this blogger in which their music, say, Ives' "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" or Partch's "The Bewitched" sounds really appealing.

Then again, there are those times when "pretty music" is best suited for a certain frame of mind.  As often as we may have heard Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and other purveyors of "pretty music," those composers and their works just happen to fit a mood at a given time.

The reasons are not entirely clear from a technical standpoint to this amateur, but the music of Franz Joseph Haydn is particularly appealing a great deal of the time. It stands to reason that his brilliance in perenially writing beautiful, flowing, lilting melodies with a steady and confident handling of harmony in a consistent and reliable sense of time make his music so attractive that it is easy to go back regularly to indulge in the richness and emotionally uplifting dynamics of his work.

An excellent presentation of the master's 104 symphonies is through the Esterhazy recordings by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra led by conductor Adam Fischer on Nimbus Records.  The orchestra was built to play the composer's music with a conductor and performers deeply committed to performing these works with the passion and feel that shines through on these recordings.

The only reason that this initial set of the first numbered symphonies, which are not necessarily those in order of actual composition, though they are all early (meaning around 1760), is the subject of this post, rather than some other set in the series, is that, eventually, the whole run will be featured.

Basically, for this admirer, the work of Haydn is full of "pretty music" that will be uplifting at just about any time. As much as more atonal and dissonant work has interest, given the mood at the moment, it's hard to go wrong by listening to Haydn's symphonies at any time, especially when they are as well performed as they are by the orchestra on these recordings.