HELLO, FRIENDS OF DEST: OUT. You may have noticed that we recently experienced a power outage here, with about two days of down time. We are relieved to be back in any capacity whatsoever, and though it will take some time to get things exactly as they were (or better), we hope you will continue to trust in our ongoing existence. Given the lack of access, we are extending both parts of the contest below into next week; please try to get us your entries by Wednesday, 14 May. Many thanks.

SONG
Artist
Album
Label : year

Welcome to the fourth Destination: OUT contest — brought to you by Ethan Iverson!

Take it away, Ethan:

This piece doesn’t sound like the rest of this artist’s output in the slightest, which makes it a rather unfair blindfold test. Probably the only way to guess it correctly is to know about it already. Two big hints:

1) There is multi-tracking involved.

2) It’s a tone poem based on a famous piece of literature.

Next week at Destination: OUT I’ll host the answer + a bonus track and short essay about this musician’s contribution to free jazz. Over at Do The Math I’ll have a longer essay about the same musician.

& & & & &

Thanks, Ethan. As before, this will be a two-part contest. Part One is the blindfold test above. Write us at destination.out { AT } gmail { DOT } com with your guess of the name of the tune and/or the musician responsible. You have until this Friday at midnight EST to get us your answers. We will throw all correct and partially correct answers in a hat and draw one lucky winner. (Note: out of fairness to others, do not place your guess in the comments.)

Part Two: This contest is simple: We’e thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Leave your guess in the comments section of this entry; one number only per entrant, please. You have until this Friday at midnight EST to make your guess. Please be sure not to duplicate anyone else’s number. The lucky person who gets it right – or comes closest – wins.

Feel free to enter both!

OUR FABULOUS PRIZES:

Each winner will receive a CD copy of Mike Osborne’s Force of Nature, along with Echoes of Duneden, a deep collaboration between G. F. Fitz-Gerald and Lol Coxhill. The discs are provided courtesty of the wonderful label behind these releases, Reel Recordings. All of Reel’s discs sound amazing, are packaged beautifully, and are well worth hearing. 

THE WINNERS:

The winners of the contest will be announced by next Monday morning. Good luck!

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NYC (AND VICINITY) RESIDENTS AND VISITORS:

Iverson is appearing at the Village Vanguard this week, Tuesday through Saturday, two sets nightly, with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Anyone who has read Iverson on Haden and/or Motian knows that these evenings will be steeped in history and cross-generational beauty-making. And anyone who has previously heard any combination of these three fellows knows that they’re in for a memorable night.

HOWARD BEACH MEMOIRS
THE PRESIDENTS NAP
Powertools
Strange Meeting
Antilles : 1987

Bill Frisell, electric guitar; Melvin Gibbs, electric bass; Ronald Shannon Jackson, drums.

We’re writing this post in the aftermath of New York City’s latest racially charged judicial debacle. We were planning on posting something from Powertools anyhow, but the trio’s political tracks flared up with an added urgency. “Howard Beach Memoirs” revisits the infamous winter 1986 hate crime where a mob of racist Queens thugs assaulted three black men and killed one of them. Several defendants received light sentences and the rest were acquitted. The photo above immortalizes some charming Howard Beach locals shouting obscenities and epithets at civil rights leaders marching against racism.

“The President’s Nap” turns out to be an all-too-correct assessment of Reagan. But the phrase also applies to Prez Bush who continues to sleep his way through various national and international crises. Wonder what he dreams about? Perhaps because these two protest tunes don’t sport lyrics, they still sound ferocious and relevant. That’s also partly due to the finger-in-the-socket interactions between Jackson, Gibbs, and Frisell, which are never less than riveting. Witness the compelling lurches of “Howard Beach” as the trio builds to a blistering and unstable climax. It’s a shame this eccentric supergroup only made one studio album.

The aggro-sludge guitar attack on “Nap” also serves as a potent reminder of Bill Frisell’s heavy metal chops, and how he used to routinely scour the enamel off listeners’ teeth. (For more recent work in a heavy and metallic vein, check out Frisell’s contributions to Earth’s excellent “The Bee Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull” on Southern Lord.)

As for the occasionally hackneyed ’80s production effects and flourishes — you’ll have to listen past those. At least some things have been left behind.

KARYOBIN, PT. TWO
KARYOBIN, PT. FIVE
Spontaneous Music Ensemble
Karyobin
Island : 1968

Kenny Wheeler, trumpet, flugelhorn; Evan Parker, soprano sax; Derek Bailey, electric guitar; Dave Holland, bass; John Stevens, drums.

Karyobin: “A rarely performed part of the repertoire of dances of the Japanese Imperial Court. Karyobin is a dance in which two young boys represent the mythic bird, kalavinka, which appeared when the Buddha attained enlightenment.”

With its free-flowing six-part structure, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s Karyobin could be the soundtrack for a modern dance suite. We’d love to have seen the sets chosen to bridge the gulf between the ritualistic story and the free improv music; to see the dancers’ movements as they reacted to the weedy wash of Bailey’s guitar, the intricate and assaultive chirps of the brass section, the skittish and rolling rhythms. There’s not much obvious Eastern influence in this music, but plenty of enlightenment is delivered for anyone willing to listen closely.

At this juncture, John Stevens was the only original member of the SME. The band had boiled down to him and Evan Parker in a duo. Specifically for this album they added some interesting young players who happened to evolve into the brightest lights in British jazz history. The flabbergasting line-up pretty much speaks for itself. As for the music, it’s hard to even describe what the tempo is like. There is a patience to the way the tunes are rolled out, but the ideas are passed back and forth so quickly, and which such brio, that the predominant vibe is one of speed. A standout recording if you want to demonstrate just what is meant by the notion of jazz musicians having big ears.

And just how did this uncompromising document of free improv end up on Island Records? According to Evan Parker, in one of those bizarre twists of the ’60s, you can thank no less than Steve Winwood for that.

ZIG ZAG
THE EMPTY FOXHOLE
Ornette Coleman
The Empty Foxhole
Blue Note : 1966

OC, alto sax, trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Denardo Coleman, drums.

On Christmas night, 1962, Ornette Coleman presented a self-promoted concert at New York’s Town Hall, a cozy, old-fashioned theatre that is something like a very compressed Carnegie Hall on the intimacy-o-meter. As Coleman told Howard Mandel, that evening there was a transit strike, a taxi strike, and a newspaper strike. The night nevertheless survives, brilliantly, as the ESP-Disk recording Town Hall 1962, just reissued in a remastered edition.

STONE GARDEN
Tony Oxley Quintet
The Baptised Traveller
Columbia : 1969

PART ONE
Leroy Jenkins and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra
For Players Only
JCOA : 1975

LJ, violin, composer, conductor; Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet; Sharon Freeman, French horn; Charles Brackeen, soprano sax; Joseph Bowie, trombone; Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, tenor sax; Bill Davis, tuba; Dewey Redman, clarinet, musette, banshee horn; Anthony Braxton, contrabass clarinet; Becky Friend, flute; James Emery, guitar; Romulus Franceschini, synthesizer; Jerome Cooper, percussion, drums, piano; Diedre Murray, cello; Dave Holland and Sirone, bass; Roger Blank and Charles “Bobo” Shaw, percussion, drums.

A classically trained violinist whose seemingly quiet demeanor disguised a revolutionary spirit (and led to a Revolutionary Ensemble), Leroy Jenkins is yet another figure whose very existence reveals the multiplicity of jazz. Under-recorded in the extreme, Jenkins here fronts the massive Jazz Composer’s Orchestra in a one-off live gig from 1975. From Gary Giddins (Riding on a Blue Note) we learn:

In 1975, Jenkins composed and conducted a stirring piece for 18 musicians, under the auspices of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra; For Player’s Only seemed an early summation of the AACM’s influence in New York. The players were apportioned by sections – reeds, brass, rhythm, and strings – to the four corners of an auditorium, with the conductor situated in the middle, and the audience in circles around the podium. In conducting collaborations throughout the room, devised not in notes but in improvisational personalities of the participants, Jenkins was the ultimate contrapuntist.

A wonderful snapshot of New York’s waxing loft scene circa ‘75, For Players Only  showcases Jenkins’ large-form leadership skills and compositional acumen. Essentially the Revolutionary Ensemble augmented by fifteen additional musicians, it combines the AACM’s emphasis on sound and spatial detail with the blazing energy and solo-centricity of New York.

Jenkins died a little over a year ago, a great loss. Likely his last public performance was a brief turn that you can watch here, a solo recital given at the memorial concert for Dewey Redman, who also appeared on this album.

There are two very good interviews with Jenkins that you can read: this excellent one with “Blue” Gene Tyranny also contains video footage; and this one from ‘93 with Ted Panken on WKCR is also fine (presumably there is audio somewhere…).

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IN PRINT: If you like to read about jazz (and if you got this far, chances are good you do), do yourself a favor and search out the latest issue of Stop Smiling magazine. It is their jazz issue, and it contains many wonderful articles and images, including some great Eric Dolphy remembrances; one of the more on-point Ornette interviews we’ve read in recent years; a sweet catch-up with Olu Dara; and a fantastic feature by Mats Gustafsson called “Five Albums I’m Going to Steal from Your Collection,” directed at John Corbett. Dan Melnick noted this issue some time ago. If for some reason you didn’t heed his (always) good advices, please listen up now and check out the mag. (D:O received their copies via the good graces of the fine folks at Stop Smiling.)

IN TIME: If you’re wondering what’s up in here, we’ll be rolling out new material at a rate of about one post per week for the foreseeable future. We’re not less interested, just less available. Hope that’s cool with y’all.

WEST SIDE STORY MEDLEY
MARGY PARGY (A.M. RAG)
Dave Burrell
High
Douglas : 1968

DB, piano; Norris Jones (Sirone), bass; Bobby Kapp, drums; Pharoah Sanders, tambourine.

It’s 1968. Trane’s gone, Miles is adding electric piano to his ever-changing group, jazz is in a state of flux, what’s a pianist to do? Why, record a marathon West Side Story overture and some ragtime, and follow it up with a take on Puccini’s La Boheme, of course. Not a snap decision by Dave Burrell, either. From Clifford Allen’s wonderful 2004 interview, we learn that this group had been working with Bernstein’s material for over a year, something of a response to Oscar Peterson’s 1962 trio version of the WSS score. As a result, there is a confidence and authority in this long medley that just radiates out of the speakers. Where Peterson tromps along, swinging dutifully, Burrell offers a flexible, digressive investigation of Bernstein’s melodies. (Those following the Oscar Peterson/Miles Davis exploration at Do the Math may wish to chime in on the Burrell/Peterson comparison.)

As for “Margy Pargy,” from the same great Burrell-Allen interview we get:

Anyone who has listened to any Burrell at all knows that this worry has been translated into a remarkable ability to express that tradition, refract it, and bend it to his will. Hank Shteamer, in a great and cogent blog post from a while back, refers to Burrell as a TOTAL pianist, offering up Windward Passages as his example. We find no fault with that label.

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–The Shteamer post was, in its larger context, about a couple of jazz greats, one of whom was continuing to play wonderfully — Burrell. As evidence, we offer Burrell’s recent trio records out on High Two: Momentum and Expansion. Highly recommended, particularly the latter.

–Burrell will be reprising his Puccini performance at the Bordeaux Jazz Fest later this year. And in October, a full production of his jazz opera Windward Passages will go up in Italy.

–There’s a fine Fred Jung interview with Burrell at AAJ.

–Somehow, you can read the Gary Giddins chapter on Burrell from his monumental Visions of Jazz here. In it, we hear Burrell say, apropos his interest in stride, “I listened to Monk all day, every day.”

–And the curious may also find much at daveburrell.com of interest.