Daily Listen by Brian Brock

The Real Ambassadors (hear “Remember Who You Are”)

This is a mostly out-of-print collaboration between Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, along with a few other people.  The liner notes claim that this is a musical written by Dave and Iola Brubeck, but many of the high points consist of Armstrong singing very Satchmoey tunes - I suspect he contributed compositionally.

He was clearly the kind of guy who turned any group of people into “Louis Armstrong and a bunch of other people”.  It’s amazing to witness myself growing agitated listening to the chorus/Brubecky parts, only to be pulled right back into it by Louis.  I love Brubeck, I used to listen to Time Out, Time Further Out, Quiet as the Moon (Brubeck playing the Peanuts music), a live album or two.  It’s not that Brubeck fails (although the chorus does offer some screechy cacophonies), but that Armstrong is just such a bright light he casts shadows off everyone around him.

“Remember Who You Are” (side 1, track 4) is a killer.  I love the drums.  There’s so much reverb on the vocal, sounds like a plate reverb to me.  Trombonist Trummy Young sings the second verse.

Side 1: http://www.mediafire.com/file/jyzdgqfdlji/real_ambassadors_side_1.mp3

Side 2: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yi5ogohxzmj/real_ambassadors_side_2.mp3

Dominic Duval’s String Ensemble - Live in Concert

It’s a spider web of extruded aluminum.  Minnows and geese are caught up, bubbling and squawking while the Mrs. winds them up, and the goose tries to eat the fish.

Listen to this stuff loud, if possible.  The amount of attention you give to good free jazz is directly proportional to the enjoyment you can reap from it.  It sounds like shit if you don’t pay attention.  This is only true up to a point - the good associations developed from listening to it eventually overwhelm the disorienting squall and you can do the dishes or cook while it plays.

The texture changes clearly from track to track in this music, which signals that they are not just hacking away at “free jazz” but actually doing something specific in each piece.

There’s some odd dated liner notes in this CD (from 1998) about cyberspace.  Check it out in the next post.

Robert Wyatt - Shleep (listen to “Maryan”)

Even in a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would not be at the Toppermost of the Poppermost.  Beck and Cat Power have far more immediately satisfying music, lyrics, and production; and of course Miles Davis - Kind of Blue would be perpetually hovering around number 10 with a bullet.  (See, it’s funny, because the bullet is specifically placed next to fast-rising albums, hence “perpetually with a bullet” is an oxymoron.)  People like to dance, so put Tom Ze and TV on the Radio up there too.  Robert Wyatt is not everyday music, but he is everyperson music.

In a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would still be making his compelling, complete and complicatedly comforting music, but he would release an album every year rather than every five.  Five hundred thousand people would come to depend on his filling the void left by the waning of his last album.  Maybe he would have a TV show, on cable I’m sure, where he would talk to a friend for half an hour each Monday.

So Wyatt’s music is deeper than but not as broad as, say, Wilco.  They map a similar part of the possibility of music.

Wyatt’s lyrics have a wordplay which I imagine is at first off-putting to many, but which actually breaks thoughts apart and reassembles them with real care.  He calls a song “Free Will and Testament” and in it asks,

So when I say that I know me, how can I know that?
What kind of spider understands arachnophobia?

There’s a certain common approach to Bill Callahan’s lyrics in Smog, especially on Supper, where for example in “Feather by Feather” he says,

It’s Ali vs. Clay
Both pummeling away
A champ always fights themself
And you are a fighter, you are a fighter, you are a fighter

Callahan was brutalized in Rolling Stone as like the guy at a college party who rests on the back of a couch saying things that sound insightful for a moment but which you later realize are meaningless - an only mildly deserved criticism.

Robert Wyatt rather comes off as a natural, a peak-sitting guru who could make your cerebrospinal fluid boil simply by transcribing his everyday conversations with eagles and tailless whipscorpions, but instead looks inward and works over his own vertebral column. (Take that sentence as my submission to the code that “all persons writing about Robert Wyatt must mention that he is paralyzed from the waist down.”  Really, why do record reviewers feel the need repeatedly to reacquaint us with their talking points for each musician?)

To seal the deal, he harnesses a team of jazz musicians, free- and otherwise, to a cart filled with great melodies and cool rhythms.

Osorezan - Mimidokodesuka

This is a Jim O’Rourke free jazz show from 2005.  I was excited to see him and Darin Gray collaborating again after Brise Glace’s When in Vanitas…, one of my favorite albums.  That album rocks.  Recorded with Steve Albini, it’s a cut up and mashed through tour of dark corners of the backwoods of the music of the people.

Mimidokodesuka is really just a straightforward free jazz trio.  Electric guitar, bass, drums; they go at it for 40 minutes or so, then it stops.  Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear, they try the various bowls of porridge before going to bed.

The thing about free jazz, it’s so easy to make something that superficially resembles the best efforts of the best players.  I mean, go to a construction site.  Go listen to babies crying.  Go listen to the Minutemen when they first picked up their guitars and didn’t know you had to tune them and thought it was just preference: “hey, I play with the strings loose, man.”

So the difference between an intentional success and an apparent success is very difficult to perceive.  The music needs to develop and carry forth a common vision which responds instantly to any aberration, intentional or otherwise.

A Tribe Called Quest - Peoples’ Instinctive Travels & the Paths of Rhythm You don’t really get to hear jazz bass outside of solos, until you start hearing it in hip-hop. This kind of recontextualizing sampling should be encouraged, since it doesn’t take from listeners’ prior love of something else. The music is woven together so well in this album that at one point I found myself wondering if it wouldn’t be just as good or better without the rapping, which is mostly goofy or oblique. But really, the words don’t cause any pain, and the music alone might seem too loungey. I guess the experimentation in this stuff seems a little heavy handed by today’s standards, but then, today’s standard is written out on the backs of A Tribe Called Quest’s record sleeves.

Louis Andriessen - De Stijl (hear a sample)

Wow. I totally forgot how much I like this CD. I originally got into Louis Andriessen from my favorite Bang On A Can CD, Industry. In the original BOAC series of recordings each CD has a collection of tracks by different contemporary composers, played by the “Bang On A Can All-Stars”. I kept acquiring their collections year after year, although each only had one or two pieces I really connected with - for example, “Failure: A Very Difficult Piece for Upright String Bass” on the first volume, involved a bassist reciting prose, playing a very difficult bass part, and then improvising in the same style, all at the same time. Industry is the first one on which every track really blows me away. The title track hit me first. It is a solo piece for an Electric Cello modified by Ibanez Tube Screamer distortion pedal - kind of the epitome of Bang On A Can’s early esthetic, I think. But the Andriessen is what I think about more and more. The piece there is interesting because it features a double-ensemble, each playing the same tune, but off by one beat.

This piece, “De Stijl”, also features a double ensemble, but it’s much less conceptually defined. It is basically a long, structured exposition of one rather rythmic, jazz-harmonied theme.

At about 15 to 18 minutes in (out of 25), a trash-percussion solo totally surprised and excited me. Basically they’re playing the theme fairly straightforwardly, but the sound is just incredible. I need to write some percussion music.

Only one part of “De Stijl” nonplusses me. At about 22 or so, maybe a little earlier, the band suddenly plays a rather banal straightforward blues-rock riff. I’m sure analysis would teach me why this is the best part, but as it is, as a listening music, it seems out of place. Maybe Andriessen just wants to give some thematic contrast for those whose attention has waned.

(old dailylisten import)