Trying to capture jazz in standard notation can be like trying to translate poetry into another language—what you wind up with is everything but the poetry. So composer/trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith (who, like many of his peers, eschews “jazz” as a label for his music) invented his own system of graphic notation.
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Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) with his Golden Quartet (Vijay Iyer [piano], John Lindberg [bass], Ronald Shannon Jackson [drums]); Eclipse, 2005
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Part 8
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lagniappe
art beat
Earlier this month, when I mentioned the exhibit of William Eggleston’s photographs that’s currently at the Art Institute—posting an album cover that you’ll find in a display case there—I didn’t expect that Big Star would appear here again before the month’s end. But then I didn’t expect that Alex Chilton would pass away, either.Alex had more than simply an artistic interest in Eggleston and his work. He’d known the photographer, who was a good friend of his parents, since he was a little boy. Here, again, is the image Alex chose for that album cover, followed by a couple more from this exhibit.
Excerpt, recording (Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble)
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Part 3
Excerpt (ending), live, Tokyo, 2008
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I first encountered Steve Reich’s music in 1971, while in college and living for a few months in New York. At a concert at New York University, I heard Reich and his ensemble perform his then-new piece “Drumming.” Stunning, mesmerizing, it was unlike anything my 19-year-old ears had ever heard.
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lagniappe
The other day, I watched as Steve Reich walked away from Carnegie Hall, where celebrations of his seventieth birthday were under way, and out into his native city. Trim and brisk, he darted into West Fifty-seventh Street, fell back before oncoming traffic, bopped impatiently in place, then darted forth again. He soon disappeared into the mass of people, his signature black cap floating above the crowd. Perhaps I should have lamented the fact that one of the greatest living composers was moving around New York unnoticed, but lamentation is not a Reichian state of mind, and I thought instead about how his work has blended into the cultural landscape, its repeating patterns and chiming timbres detectable all over modern music. Brian Eno, David Bowie, David Byrne, and a thousand d.j.s have paid him heed. On Fifty-seventh Street, Reich-inflected sounds may have been coursing through the headphones of a few oblivious passersby.
Three decades ago, New York’s leading institutions would have nothing to do with Reich. A riot broke out when Michael Tilson Thomas presented “Four Organs” at Carnegie in 1973: one woman tried to stop the concert by banging on the edge of the stage with her shoe. Now uptown is lionizing the longtime renegade.
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Reich changed music, and he also changed how music relates to society. In the face of early incomprehension, he took a do-it-yourself approach to getting his work before the public. Nonclassical musicians were among his models: he saw John Coltrane some fifty times, and marvelled at how the great man would unleash mind-bending sounds, pack up his sax, and disappear into the night. With his namesake ensemble, Reich performed in galleries, clubs, and wherever else he felt welcome. The effects of this paradigm shift can be seen on any day of the week in New York, as composer-led ensembles proliferate.
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The Reich ensemble retains most of its original members, and they remain an awesome force, even as shaggy hairdos have given way to dignified shocks of white. At Zankel Hall, they played Part I of “Drumming,” a phase-shifting tour de force in which bongos are struck with sticks. I was curious to see how they would compare with two sharp young ensembles who had performed the same stretch of music in recent weeks—So Percussion, at Symphony Space, and four Juilliard percussionists, at Carnegie. The youngsters drummed with effortless grace, as if the score were written into their genetic code. But the veterans more than held their own, bringing to bear a kind of disciplined wildness, in the spirit of the Ghanaian drummers with whom Reich studied before he wrote the piece. The energy that blazed up at climactic moments could have powered the hall in a blackout.
The Loose Marbles is a sort of Amalgamated Jazz Corporation that creates subsidiaries around the city, to maximize tips and minimize boredom. The fifteen musicians play clarinet, trumpet, banjo, washboard, accordion, trombone, guitars, sousaphone, standup bass, and guitars, but you’re likely to see only seven or eight performers at any given gig. And since you rarely see the same configuration of instruments twice in a row, you rarely hear the same kind of jazz. If Patrick McPeck is there with the accordion, you’ll hear the Marbles’ repertoire of spooky, minor-keyed, Gypsy-influenced songs. If Alynda Segarra is there, with her banjo or washboard, and Jason Jurzek is on string bass instead of tuba, they’ll be playing songs that sound as if they were first performed in a hobo jungle during the Hoover Administration. In Washington Square, in New York, they split into two groups, one anchored by the tuba and the other anchored by the bass, and they play on opposite sides of the park. Halfway through the day, they’ll mix up the configurations to give both the musicians and the crowd a change of pace. At the end of the day, they pool all the tips and divide them equally. I’ve seen days here in New Orleans where they have a stack of bills that’s so thick it can’t be held in one hand, and that contains a lot of portraits of Hamilton and Jackson.
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The Loose Marbles look like street urchins, and at least a few of them are. The goat-bearded guitar and tuba player, Barnabus Jones; Ruth’s boy, Kiowa Wells; and the banjo and washboard player Alynda all come from a subculture of rail-riding, outdoor-living hobos that was beautifully documented a couple of years ago by the photographer James Heil in Time. . . . But the trumpeter Ben Polcer is a University of Michigan music-school graduate, and the clarinetist Mike Magro, from suburban Philadelphia, is a virtuoso who can hold forth at length about the rare and antiquated Albert fingering of his clarinet.
In addition to their song selection and their remarkably tight and vibrant musicianship, two things particularly excite me about the Loose Marbles. One is how carefully thought out their act is; their inter-war, Mitteleuropean flavor is somehow more than accidental and less than shtick. The other is how much, and how obviously, they all love each other.
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I asked Ben why he and his friends aren’t playing rock and roll like proper twenty-somethings. What is the attraction, I wanted to know, of music his grandparents listened to?
“I’ve played in a lot of rock bands,” he said. “I like rock and roll. We all like rock and roll. But jazz is special. To play it well, you really have to listen to each other.”—Dan Baum
Omar Souleyman is a Syrian musical legend. Since 1994, he and his musicians have emerged as a staple of folk-pop throughout Syria, but until now they have remained little known outside of the country. To date, they have issued more than five-hundred studio and live-recorded cassette albums which are easily spotted in the shops of any Syrian city.
Born in rural Northeastern Syria, he began his musical career in 1994 with a small group of local collaborators that remain with him today. The myriad musical traditions of the region are evident in their music. Here, classical Arabic mawal-style vocalization gives way to high-octane Syrian Dabke (the regional folkloric dance and party music), Iraqi Choubi and a host of Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish styles, among others. This amalgamation is truly the sound of Syria. The music often has an overdriven sound consisting of phase-shifted Arabic keyboard solos and frantic rhythms. At breakneck speeds, these shrill Syrian electronics play out like forbidden morse-code, but the moods swing from coarse and urgent to dirgy and contemplative in the rugged anthems that comprise Souleyman’s repertoire. Oud, reeds, baglama saz, accompanying vocals and percussion fill out the sound from track to track. Mahmoud Harbi is a long-time collaborator and the man responsible for much of the poetry sung by Souleyman. Together, they commonly perform the Ataba, a traditional form of folk poetry used in Dabke. On stage, Harbi chain smokes cigarettes while standing shoulder to shoulder with Souleyman, periodically leaning over to whisper the material into his ear. Acting as a conduit, Souleyman struts into the audience with urgency, vocalizing the prose in song before returning for the next verse. Souleyman’s first hit in Syria was “Jani” (1996) which gained cassette-kiosk infamy and brought him recognition throughout the country. Over the years, his popularity has risen steadily and the group tirelessly performs concerts throughout Syria and has accepted invitations to perform abroad in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Lebanon.—Sublime Frequencies
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art beat
Album covers and art museums rarely mix. But in a display case at the Art Institute’s William Eggleston exhibit (which just opened), you’ll find this:
It used to be that music came from a particular place. No more. Whether it’s Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi (the Iranian saxophonist who’s lived in Germany, in Japan, and now in New York City [2/18/10]), or Burkina Electric (whose members come from Burkina Faso, from Germany, and from New York City [by way of Austria] [2/22/10]), or this singer, who’s lived (and has homes) in Nigeria and in Germany, much of today’s most intriguing music has its ears and heart and feet on more than one continent.
1. Take a singer whose range includes about as many notes as he has fingers (on one hand).
2. Add a saxophonist who’s renowned for his melodic and harmonic inventiveness.
3. Mix?
Leonard Cohen with Sonny Rollins, “Who By Fire,” live (TV broadcast), 1989
These two mostly sound (to these ears) like, well, what they are: two distinctive artists whose musical worlds couldn’t be more different. But when Sonny finally leaves his world and enters Leonard’s—a world where melodic invention counts for nothing and subtle changes in inflection count for everything—the results are breathtaking (5:47 and following).
Do you know about my music on-line mag Doo Bee Doo Be Doo (which is looking for writers. What about you?)? Please visit http://www.doobeedoobeedoo.info
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Hope that sometime I will play in your city to have a chance to meet you.
music clip of the day 