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Mike Westbrook
1994 – Coming Through Slaughter
An opera based on Michael Ondaatjeâ??s novel about the life of the New Orleans cornettist Buddy Bolden. Libretto by Michael Morris. Script consultant Kate Westbrook. Music by Mike Westbrook. Scored for seven classical voices, string quartet and valve trombone.

World premiere of concert version, featuring Wills Morgan as Bolden, conducted by Odaline de La Martinez, Q.E.H., London, Summer 1994. BBC Radio 3 broadcast produced by Derek Drescher 1995.

No commercial recording available.
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Anyone seen/heard this live or recorded/broadcast after all?

C

i’d never heard the morton tune until this week. is “jimmy jazz” by the clash just a rewritten version of “bbb”? maybe not.

I was going to type out a bit, but it’s a long review, and hard to excerpt. Worth reading in an of itself. My reading interests have of late been swinging back in the direction fiction/lit, so perhaps I’ll get to it eventually.

Regarding Chadbourne, I really really like his country music reviews. I blogged about this before, and I’ll post the contents of the post below, in case anybody might find it useful:

Like a large proportion of what I post here, this is mainly for my own benefit. Anyway, a few posts back, I posted a google search for Eugene Chadbourne’s posts on artistdirect, but I’ve decided I’m mainly interested in his album reviews, not so much in his numerous biographies, so…I know the following seems disturbingly obsessive-compulsive, but, you know, what can I say, I find this useful, or something.

Here’s a new search for “country” album reviews only, including the odd John Cage album review that includes the word “country” for whatever reason (57 hits), and also a search for all his reviews i.e. w/o key word “country” (171 hits). I could do this all day…

Here’s the old search, including bios (107 hits)…and another one, including non-”country” stuff (427 hits).

Hmm…not getting any of Eugene’s Dolly Parton reviews (4 unique hits if I include the “very similar” results…hmm…) in the above results. Not sure what’s going on.

Okeydokey…answers.com seems to be the place to go for Chadbourne’s reviews and stuff: all results (good God, that’s 1,670 hits!), no biographies (111 hits), “country,” no bios (just 34 hits?!?).

I also experimented with some other fancy search terms, and even some other engines, but these were the best I could come up with.

Also, Al Barger seems to be fixing up his internal links…I notice he also links to a zine called Angry Country. I’ve barely heard of any of the artists covered, but how can I resist a title like that? What am I, insane?

Incidentally, you know who I like? Greg Brown. Greg Brown’s got the voice.

Thanks Chris Rich for your analysis.

peter

So within and among the musicians, “Air Lore” wasn’t so much a conceptual breakthrough, just a really strong recording of an existing tendency, the first such by Air and one that broke through somewhat more to the public and critical consciousness than earlier efforts had. I wonder if Threadgill had practiced rags with Muhal back when he was a member of Muhal’s band in the late 60s? fwiw, as much as I enjoy the “Air Lore” recording, I like their subsequent rendition of “Chicago Breakdown” on “80 [degrees] Below 82″ on Antilles even more. (there’s one you guys might consider for the future….)