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.

Gagaku: The Imperial Court Music of Japan

This recording issued in the late Eighties by Lyrichord Discs was recorded by the Imperial Court Music Orchestra in Kyoto and represents the traditions of gagaku, or elegant/refined/correct, music accompanying dance dating back nearly 1,500 years ago with origins from China, India and Korea and which, then, is the oldest orchestral music existing on the planet.  Notably, this music was not played publicly until the mid-1950s and there are occasional new pieces composed for such events as a royal wedding, with about a hundred pieces and over fifty dances in the repertoire.

Instruments include the koto, a well-known Japanese zither, the taiko drum, which is also recognizable to many, other percussion pieces including bells, a bamboo flute called the hichiriki, and the sho, which is a group of seventeen bamboo pipes in a wind chest shaped like a cup.  While most of the eight pieces accompanied dances and the visual impact of both must be spectacular, the music is striking, being majestic, solemn, stately and otherworldly.  It has an ethereal beauty that is redolent of ancient history retaining its power in the modern world.

The Durutti Column: Valuable Passages

When this retrospective issued on Factory Records was purchased as a cassette back in 1986, not long after I saw The Durutti Column open, along with The Fall, for New Order, it was listened to a great deal.  Looking in recent years to buy the CD proved challenging because they're rare and, naturally, expensive, but I was able to get one recently for under $15.  These seventeen tracks from 1979-1985 and covering albums from The Return of the Durutti Column to Circuses and Bread, along with other other releases (samplers, a 7" single, an EP, etc.), represent an excellent overview of the finest work Vini Reilly and his varied compatriots had to offer.

Everything is here is excellent and, while some may favor the earlier material, such as the sketches for summer and winter, or others lean towards "The Missing Boy" or "Tomorrow," which were among the better-known, if such applies to TDC, tracks, I'm still very partial to the haunting and heart-breaking "Never Known.  Again, though, all of these pieces are great and I find myself returning to the album again and again.  Reilly, whose health was always fragile, suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago, and has not been very active at all since then, but this early-stage music and the often-remarkable work that followed remain as the enduring work of a totally underappreciated musician.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Urban Bushmen

I was very fortunate in being able to buy the massive box set, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles, released by ECM Records in 2018 and containing 21 discs from the group and side projects involving various members.  The set was missing the box and the first CD, comprising Nice Guys, the first ECM album by the group and released in 1979, but the cost was only $50 plus tax and I soon after bought a used copy of Nice Guys for $5, so this was a spectacular deal.

The music is pretty amazing, including some excellent AEC studio work, such as Full Force, the first album of theirs that I heard thirty years ago, live albums, and the wide-ranging "associated" material, including solo albums by members of the ensemble and recordings by others, like Jack DeJohnette, which featured AEC personnel.  As great as the studio albums were, the live recordings are remarkable, including 1982's double-disc Urban Bushmen.  It features all the hallmarks of the Ensemble, including dense percussion, atmospheric soundscapes, blistering horn playing, and one of the best rhythm teams around with chaos, joy, tradition, innovation, power, beauty and many other adjectives all fitting the bill at various times.

As Joseph Jarman's notes about the group preparing for this performance at the Amerikahaus in Munich, Germany on 6-7 May 1980: "They arrive, without name nor form but as the personators of GREAT BLACK MUSIC—ANCIENT TO THE FUTURE; as it flows from the then to now, the beginningless beginning to the endless end, from the center of the center to the unlimited bounds of the universe."  Listening to this phenomenal album, it really does feel that way and it is, ultimately, uplifting music, especially in the strange year of 2020.

Antonio Vivaldi: Violin Concertos, Volume 2

During these trying times, it has often been important to listen to music that is melodic, harmonically rich, and, frankly, uplifting and relaxing (though, at other times, turbulent and roiling music is what is wanted!)  Often, baroque music, whether it be Bach, Handel, Monteverdi, or any number of other great composers of that era, is a tonic and balm to help maintain a positive mood in the face of so many trials and tribulations.  Today's featured recordings fit the bill to a T, these being the five-disc set comprising the second volume of violin concertos recorded by the Israel Chamber Orchestra conducted by Shlomo Mintz and reissued by Nimbus Records in 2009 from an early 90s release by MusicMasters.

The so-called Red Priest, Vivaldi (1678-1741) was a violin maestro as well as a master composer and these pieces are really a pleasure to hear.  They are often laden with emotion, including with contemplative as well as uplifting elements, filled with gorgeous melodies, and with tight and unified harmonies.  The playing of the chamber orchestra, formed in 1965 and led for a few years by Mintz, is excellent.  I've run through the entire set of five hours a few times lately because this music really is a great way to help navigate the troubled waters in our uncertain world.

Souad Asla: Lemma

This is a great recording, issued in 2018 under the Musique du Monde series from Buda Musique and Universal France, and comprises a remarkable ensemble of eleven women, led by Souad Asla, from the Saoura region of southwestern Algeria not far from the border with Morocco, with most coming from the city of Béchar or the nearby town of Kenadsa.  This is a harsh region of the Sahara, but occupied with people who have a rich culture among trade routes and, more lately, coal mines, which drew a diversity of workers and others from southenr Europe, as well as Berbers, Jews and sub-Saharan blacks.

The word lemma refers both to the ensemble and to gatherings that, as the very informative liners states, the purpose of which "is to meet and together ward off the spell that threatens to spoil the unity of the moment."  This music is very much a unity, the tightly devised rhythms for percussive instruments and hand-claps, the chants and singing, and the lyrics which are largely tied to everyday activities and events.  It is hypnotizing, mesmerizing and evocative of deeply-rooted tradition, which Asla and her troupe are devoted to preserving amid dramatic change and for which they are to be thanked and commended.

Pete Namlook/Klaus Schulze/Bill Laswell: The Dark Side of the Moog VII

This fascinating series of excursions deep into the realm of ambient electronic music comprising eleven volumes from 1993 to 2008 from FAX Records impresario Pete Namlook (Peter Kuhlmann), Klaus Schulze (briefly in Tangerine Dream), and, on four of the albums, the ubiquitous bassist and producer Bill Laswell, is not only given an excellent punning title, but the word play continues with individual tracks further playing off the output of Pink Floyd.  In this case the 50-minute piece in this seventh volume released in 1998 is called "Obscured by Klaus" in reference to that band's seventh album, Obscured by Clouds.  Namlook noted, though, that there was no connection or homage to the British group, other than having fun with puns.

There is plenty of diversity in the sound elements when listening to this recording, either at high volume (as in the car) or, even better, with headphones.  Washes of sound, varied textures, often strong rhythms, found voices and other components work well over the course of the six parts, which are well organized and programmed.  There is often a beguiling beauty in the more ambient sections, but the variety with more percussive sections and a range of electronics with the Moog as the backbone make this an excellent entry in the series.

George Russell: Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature

This is an amazing work by a remarkable theorist, composer and arranger who had a tremendous influence on many musicians, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, who are big favorites of this blogger.  George Russell, however, never received the recognition he deserved and this stunning album is likely the best example of why.  It's ambitious, complex, innovative, expertly composed and arranged and well-played, but it was far afield from the commercial world, especially as jazz was becoming less popular.

Composed in 1968 with a fascinating merging of jazz, classical, electronics, field recordings and other elements, Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, takes the attentive listener to an alternate reality that is of its time, but doesn't sound dated a half-century later.  While Miles definitely deserved plenty of kudos for his audacious leap into new directions of music with Bitches Brew, released not long after and which sold well (even leading to absurd claims that Davis "sold out" by using electric instruments and pop and rock rhythms and effects), Russell's masterpiece, released in 1969 on producer Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman and remastered and reissued almost fifteen years later on the great Italian label Black Saint, and his work generally should be better known.  Let's hope some day it is. 

Krzysztof Penderecki: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 (Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4)

Note: This post was intended to be uploaded on 1 April and here we are 7 1/2 months later.  We'll blame it on COVID and demands on time, but the intention is to resume sharing interesting music, but even more concisely than before.  So, here goes:

Another towering figure in modern music died in late March when Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer whose remarkable career engendered controversy in its earlier, more experimental days and more recognition during his more straightforward later period, passed away at age 86.  The latter is emblematic with the two symphonies, the Second and Fourth, in this third set of orchestral works released by Naxos.

The second and fourth symphonies show a range of emotions through passages that express intense emotions, a tense ominousness and calming pastoral interludes.  The liner notes state that the turbulent and roiling dynamics refer to the turmoil rocking the composer's county of Poland at the end of Soviet domination and Communist control (though now the nation is dealing with the rise of right-wing politics and protests over such issues as the access to abortion procedures.)

This is powerful music from 1979 and 1989 when Poland was experiencing traumatic political periods and Penderecki, formerly a young lion of the avant garde, was moving into a different phase of his composing, merging the old and the new.