Most saxophonists play with their mouths and fingers.
Not this guy—he uses his whole body.
Mats Gustafsson, baritone saxophone, live, Romania (Bucharest), 2010
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Sunday afternoon, at an art gallery on Chicago’s west side (Corbett vs. Dempsey), I heard Gustafsson, who lives in Sweden, perform with the Chicago-based reed player Ken Vandermark. One-word review: mesmerizing.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Sometimes discaholism is taken to its most further borders when the “holy 4″ is fulfilled:
When a vinyl has the holy 4 qualities: great music, great title, great rarity and an AMAZING cover and design!!!
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‘one piece of vinyl per day keeps the doctor away’
What I love about the ’net is that sometimes, like yesterday, when I happened upon this, you find yourself being lifted out of your seat by something you didn’t even know existed two minutes ago.
Ned Rothenberg (clarinet, alto saxophone) & Samir Chatterjee (tabla), “Interstellar Duo #3,” live, New York, 2009
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lagniappe
reading table
The more I read, the less I understand.
—Charles Simic, “Serving Time” (New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012)
Ornette Coleman Quartet (OC, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums), live, Spain (Barcelona), 1987
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.
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It’s not that I reject categories. It’s that I don’t really know what categories are.
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You take the alphabet of the English language. A to Z. A symbol attached to a sound. In music you have what are called notes and the key. In life you’ve got an idea and an emotion. We think of them as different concepts. To me, there is no difference.
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The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.
Kidd Jordan Quartet (KJ, tenor saxophone; Billy Bang, violin; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), New York (Vision Festival), 2008
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
We tend to take musical instruments for granted, as if their existence were inevitable. But the fact that something exists doesn’t mean it had to. We could’ve been born into a world that never heard a violin.
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reading table
“What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?”
Miles Davis Quintet (MD, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano, Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums), live, Europe (Karlsruhe, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden), 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Miles may not be the greatest trumpet player in the history of jazz, but he’s arguably the greatest bandleader. Only someone with supreme self-confidence could do what he did. A brilliant judge of talent, a leader who expected, and enabled, others to flourish, he could seem, at times, the least interesting player in his own band.
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reading table
Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
—Matsuo Basho (1644-1694, translated from Japanese by Robert Hass)
Butch Morris, who created a distinctive form of large-ensemble music built on collective improvisation that he single-handedly directed and shaped, died on Tuesday in Brooklyn. He was 65.
The cause was cancer, said Kim Smith, his publicist and friend. Mr. Morris, who lived in the East Village, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Hamilton.
Mr. Morris referred to his method as“conduction,” short for “conducted improvisation.” He defined the word, which he trademarked, as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.”
He would often begin a performance by setting a tempo with his baton and having his musicians develop a theme spontaneously and then seize on the musical ideas he wanted to work with, directing the ensemble with a vocabulary of gestures and signals. An outstretched upward palm, up or down to indicate volume, meant sustain; a U shape formed with thumb and forefinger meant repeat; a finger to the forehead meant to remember a melodic phrase or a rhythm that he would summon again later.
He introduced this concept in 1985 and at first met resistance from musicians who were not willing to learn the vocabulary and respond to the signals; he was often in a position of asking artists to reorient themselves to his imagination and make something new out of familiar materials. But he demanded to be taken seriously, and he was. After 10 years he had made enough recordings to release “Testament,” a well-received 10-disc set of his work. After 20, he had become an internationally admired creative force, presenting conductions at concert halls worldwide and maintaining regular workshops and performances at the East Village spaces Nublu, Lucky Cheng’s and the Stone.
Mr. Morris, who also played cornet, began his career as a jazz musician in Los Angeles. After settling in New York in the early 1980s, he took his place among both the downtown improvising musicians of the Kitchen and the Knitting Factory and the purveyors of multidisciplinary, mixed-media art flourishing in the city.
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In decades of workshops around the world, and for a stretch, from 1998 to 2001, at Bilgi University in Istanbul, he taught his signals and gestures. Some of these were common to all conductors; some were adapted from the California jazz bandleaders Horace Tapscott and Charles Moffett, whom he had known early in his career (he also cited Sun Ra, Lukas Foss and Larry Austin’s “Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists’’ as influences); many were his own.
He said he didn’t care whether people thought his music was jazz or not, although he himself saw it as derived from jazz but not beholden to it. “As long as I’m a black man playing a cornet,” he reasoned, “I’ll be a jazz musician in other people’s eyes. That’s good enough for me. There’s nothing wrong with being called a jazz musician.”
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