Coming Through Slaughter

Hi
I need an information. Does someone know something about the Basement Tapes by Ric Colbeck? tracks, musicias, year…

http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/raeburn/rivboatintro.htm is todays gift to you all. It is a story slide show of the Riverboat Jazz world prepared by Bruce Boyd Raeburn, a curator of the Hogan Archive at Tulane. It includes a photo of a very young Louis Armstrong on a riverboat gig with King Oliver.

You hit a home run with this linkage between Air and Early Jazz. The early phase shared the freedom of the Iconoclasts with experimentation on every level, Bajo’s comped chords instead of piano’s. Tuba’s covered low end or huge bass saxophones. Improvisation was collective rather than the division of labor chart based work of the big band era.

God, I loved Air and mourn the passing of Steve McCall and Fred Hopkins. Everything they ever did has merit and Henry also suffered through a combat stint in Vietnam.

I used to go for walks with Frank Wright, my surrogate father figure, back in the summer of 1980 when we needed a break from the goofy record store we ran on Carmine street and we’d go see Henry and find out what his day was up to.

Another great post, thanks. The multiple layers that obscure the way so-called “free jazz” emerged organically out of the whole spectrum of what came before are very difficult to parse. (almost as difficult as that sentence). Racism, shame, mis-hearing, the endless search for validation, the winding road from clubs to concert halls, the over-applied and shallow idea of “progress,” the deliberate use of “new” as a marketing tool, classism, murky attempts at revisionist regrouping, you name it. It’s complicated. But when I hear so-called avant garde composers and improvisers revisiting the roots of improvised music. most often I just hear love.

peter

What a treat! My copy of this disappeared a long time ago (flood in the basement) so this brings back great memories. I, too, got to see the original trio live in concert (Battell Chapel, New Haven, CT) and it was a marvelous and challenging experience. McCall and Hopkins played with such freedom allowing Threagill to create magnificent shards of music. On these tracks, McCall reacts to what he’s hearing with such inventiveness.
Anyway, thanks much for this great posting (the addition of Jelly Roll Morton’s track was a brilliant surprise.)

props to godoggo and chris rich in this forum. you both puzzle me at times, but props go to you for the above. i hope FRank Wright is well. i’ve been in your store, i would bet.

Threadgill is great great great!! AIR was one of the best combos you could ever hope for. swinging pretty hard there!

EVERYONE: read ‘Banjo’ by Claude Mckay. [pub. 1919]. it is THE essential piece of early jazz literature, even if it was written by a Jamaican. so what? Jazz is something that is understood by all races at first meeting. where were they all meeting? in every port in the world where international musicians met and drank and smoked who knows what, and played wildly all night with dancing and fun and thousands of years of history of such activity in ports…………….. you will thank me when we are ghosts.
Threadgill goes for this concept judging by the international flavor of many projects.

”all music is folk music. i ain’t never heard no horse sing a tune” -Louis Armstrong

hey destination out guys: whattaya think about turnin some of these old guys on to some…. soft machine [live with Robert Wyatt singing and drumming- maybe warm em up with some michael mantler stuff with Robert vocals.? or maybe …. ‘Marquee Moon’? i wonder what they would think of Coltrane/Ayler influenced punk rockers with jazz chops ? anyway, thanks!!

BTW, another nice album of similar type, also with Hopkins and McCall, (plus a piano; might’ve been more interesting without one): Arthur Blythe’s In The Tradition.

Incidentally, I see a pretty clear line from this sort self-consious historical referencing that was so fashionable in the ’80s avant garde and the pre-bop influenced music that became fashionable among neocons in the ’90s: Crouch.

Crouch does allow one to connect the dots, I suppose, but I’m not really clear on just how fashionable the backwards look was in the ’80s avant garde. Do you have other albums in mind, godoggo?

Oh, and Lester Bowie and Olu Dara both also come to mind as a couple of musicians who referenced pre-bop influences in a very explicit and stylized way, at a time when I guess the overwhelming influences for young trumpeters were Miles and Freddy; I’m even thinking for example of that tune with the banjo on Mandance, for example.

I hear roots of this in Shepp, in Into the Hot, and, a bit towards the center, in Mingus and Kirk, and more of it in the first AACM generation, but, again, not having a big enough collection to provide a huge amount of empirical evidence, my impression is that it became both more widespread and somehow more self-conscious in th 80s.

The sense I’ve evolved of it all over the years and many conversations with the artists back in the 70′s and 80′s would be that two phases of ‘Free’ jazz occurred. The earlier period from, say, 1960 or so was a determined move away from the constraints of chart based improvisation with its division of labor of horns and rhythm section toward other inventiveness.

I remember those U Mass Classes with Archie Shepp and Marion Brown and the emphasis on scholarly research into commonalities with Africa and aspects of music from the African Diaspora not generally connected to Jazz.

Both cited Kwabena Nketia’s work, The Drum and the Hoe as an essential text for understanding African music aesthetic elements. Much of George Russell’s research into the Lydian Chromatic Concept was intended to find the most appropriate mode basis for building on ‘blue notes’.

Having made a stunning number of breakthroughs, innovations and extensions over the first phase, the artists then began a more deliberate focus and looked at the entire range of jazz before them and began to celebrate it all, in part inspired by the life work of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

I call this part 2 a ‘Neoclassical’ period of invention and incorporation.

Now while all this occured, the music biz dissed all this as inaccessable noise because the biz game was pandering to culturally conservative baby boomers.

The major labels were pushing grubby fusion noise or trying to con geniuses like Hampton Hawes into stupid stuff under the premise it would ‘sell’. It was a very ugly time.

http://baystatements.blogspot.com/2006/12/horrors-of-70s-jazz.html was the first of a series of blog essays I’ve been doing that describes the problems of a time I lived through as I’m 51 years old.

Somewhere along the line, an obscure and not terribly exciting drummer turned colorful writer, Stanley Crouch, decided that this slop wash must be fought and by buying into the accessability myth, tossed many of the amazing babies out with the fusion bathwater in a parade of polemics that gave rise to the mistaken notion that Cecil Taylor, (his favorite target) and others didn’t care about an audience that was fading anyway.

Gen X was showing up and they were more inclined to like Cecil Taylor and so on. Just look at the support Thurson Moore has always given to the most adventurous artists in the idiom.

We ended up with a sort of neo con lionization of the Marslis family with Stanley thumping the tub louder than anyone.

A couple of notes. The reverence for the past was always present in the AACM philosophy. The AEC may not have directly covered any jazz classics early on (am I forgetting something?) but pieces like “The Spiritual”, “Old/Quartet” and “Boogie Stop Shuffle” all lovingly referenced earlier ideas. Braxton covered “Donna Lee” on one of his first albums and recorded the “In the Tradition” pair in, iirc, 1974, also covering rags in duo with Muhal in 1976 on their Arista album. I recall seeing him play things like “Ornithology” on contrabass sax around the same time.

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….)

Y’ALL SHOULD read the book i recommend above……………………….. and check into Eugene Chadbourne the avant country musician . his first LP of solo Dobro was called ”Anthony Braxton” down home y’all. has anyone else heard the George Gershwin Piano rolls recordings? good stuff

OK, I found that book review I mentioned before – it was by Rafi Zaborwas actually from Musician magazine, 1981, for God’s sake, the issue with that “Violence under the Palms” article about L.A. punk.

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.

this was a great post, you guys, even by your high standards. the music is carefully chosen and you write about it succintly and extremely well.

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

Great post. I posted some tracks off “Air Lore” on my blog a while ago, but you have more readers than me and it’s lovely if your post helps spread the sounds and knowledge of this great band.

C

Quote from the Mike Westbrook website:

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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?

[...] posted 10 January [...]