lindy quick 'n dirty blues

so i been going swing dancing tuesday nights for some time now at LaB, as they call it; something i don't think of as having much to do with my musiclife, but of course it is related. come to think of it i'm surprised at how little attention i pay to most of the music (beyond the requisite attention for dancing to it, that is) because i'm not familiar with it (except that by now i more likely am) - i think it's often contemporary swing and blues musicians as opposed to older recordings, though there's definitely both. well anyway i'd been meaning for some time to offer them my services as a dj, and i've finally gotten the ball rolling. i was asked for a sample playlist (given my 'limited prior experience') and i was (a little defensively) mentally composing a showboaty e-mail discussing the various types of things i'd want to play, but then i realized that it would be nearly as quick, and much more productive and helpful, just to put together a CD.

so that's what i did, yesterday, in just about 20 minutes or so (gotta be a record), plus intermittently throughout the day pawing around in various corners of my collection. i was gonna set up a compilation constraint, something like: chronological order, 1920s-2000s, two songs per decade. and i think that would be an interesting challenge, and work out well (for recording quality consistency, if nothing else), but i scrapped it due to schedule crunch and came up with this instead:

title: {...could you eLaBorate?}
format: cd-r
date: 4 march 2008
package: meh. folded paper. olive sharpie.
made for: jesse and the LaBtechs.

1. don byron - the dicty glide
2. benny goodman - feathers
3. paris combo - obliques
4. roy milton - the hucklebuck
5. sister rosetta tharpe - that's all
6. patsy cline - seven lonely days
7. louis jordan - knock me a kiss
8. ike & tina turner - you should'a treated me right
9. percy mayfield ft. joy hamilton - sugar mama - peachy papa
10. jazz passengers ft. e. costello and d. harry - doncha go 'way mad
11. oscar brown, jr. - humdrum blues
12. ramsay lewis - day tripper
13. dusty springfield - live it up
14. etta james - my mother in law
15. jackie wilson - baby workout
16. billy boy arnold - rockin'itis
17. hank ballard - sexy ways
18. james hunter - talkin' 'bout my love
19. los lobos - evangeline
20. art blakey - eleanor
21. ella fitzgerald - please don't talk about me when i'm gone
22. jimmy castor bunch - southern fried frijoles
23. stevie wonder - tuesday heartbreak
24. devon sproule - old virginia block

came out pretty good i think. a few things i might change around if i were gonna make a more "official" version, in the interest of flow, variety, and (primarily) adherence to rule #3. (actually, i confess, i did switch around the running order so that patsy comes after rosetta instead of before.) gets me pretty psyched to have an excuse to delve into this music, including many songs that i wouldn't usually be able to get away with playing for dancers. especially that great underplayed stuff from the fifties before soul and rock'n'roll and blues diverged and it was all r&b (or 'race records'), which i'm only just beginning to explore (h/t to specialty's cheap-o profiles series, which has hepped me to the oeuvres of percy mayfield, roy milton, and larry williams.)

this mix reminds me of what alyssa said about liquid crystal slivers, that it's not trying to prove itself - except this one does have something very specific to prove. (that i can be a competent a swingdanz selektor.) but maybe i can accomplish that handily enough that it can still come off as off-handed. anyway, i tried to steer clear of obvious, or even readily recognizable, picks and artists (louis jordan, oscar brown, & ella are probably the only ones that might get regular LaB play), in a bid to show i've got something different to offer - though that could theoretically backfire, a la baking a vegan sample cake for the "um...we use butter, eggs and sugar in our cakes..." bakery. well.

you may download it here. (as a zip file of tracks, not in sequence)

(i'm on a) kick against modern jazz

...getting back to my irregularly scheduled deprogramming. in the post-valentino genre-fest, we're up to:

5 with love Y charles tolliver big band

not too much to say about this, really - it's big and brassy and exciting, pleasingly complex and contrapuntal but hardly groundbreaking. it sounds but exactly like (i)'d expect from modern big band jazz, which is this funny thing because i'm not sure the definition or sound "modern" jazz has changed all that much since the 1960s. i guess the touchstones are thad jones/mel lewis, and before that maybe mingus, though it's really that out there.

so, unlike the moran album, this one doesn't offer very much conceptual content to talk about. i guess the thing would be solos and musicianship, but that kind of thing - instrumentalism in general - doesn't tend to interest me very much at all, on an intellectual level anyway. well, if there's something especially noteworthy going on in the solos here, it's not jumping out at me.

not that there's anything wrong with any of this - well-executed renditions of familiar forms are perfectly fine in my book, in fact it's nice and maybe even necessary to have some (but not too many) of them around; more than anything for the possibility of seeing them live. (and i'm sure tolliver's band would absolutely smoke live.)

but at what point does the making a "normal-sounding" jazz album (something that, again, has not changed very much at all since the early-mid '60s - pop-jazz and fusion aside - hence the phrase "post-bop," which as far as i can tell denotes the era we're still living in) become tantamount to performing a "genre exercise." and(/or) at what point does that phrase take on its negative connotations? on the surface, a straight-ahead modern big-band album like this wouldn't seem to entail the knotty theoretical concerns of someone like sharon jones. (for instance, would we ever get nick s. referring to a jazz artist as semi-fascist? possibly, but only if they were aping, like bix beiderbecke or something.)

possibly because jazz - so far out of the main stream of contemporary socio-cultural concerns - seems likewise to be in a sense outside of history. or rather, it's because lack of formal innovation has become the overwhelming norm in the jazz of the past few decades; that is, not sounding new is hardly news.

i should be careful here, because this argument is veering dangerously close to "gee, all jazz sounds the same to me" territory. except...well, it sort of does. and that's not because i haven't listened to plenty of it. it may be because i don't have a lot of patience for gleaning individual players' soloing styles and what-have-you, unless they're really striking (like bill frisell, for instance - but in that case it's more of a sonic/textural issue.)

[actually, there is something else going on - a bigger question, which i can't start to tackle right now, about how much i conceive of music metonymically, as it were - listening to/considering albums as exemplars of their particular genre/style, rather than in and of themselves. it's sort of an art/craft distinction, and sort of an issue about the individuality/specificity of artists/performers. mmmm...remind me to talk about it later.]

so what we're left with, perhaps, is two possible directions for "modern jazz," exemplified by the jason moran record (high-concept, self-aware, gimmicky) and the charles tolliver record (musically "pure," straightforward, unoriginal.) i happen to like both of these albums, or in any case i actively enjoy listening to them, which amounts to the same thing. but i'm not necessarily crazy about either of these as primary moduses operandi for contemporary jazz, and i have the sense that i might not actually like them as much if i was more familiar with lots of other records that i presume are out there doing similar things. can't say for sure though. and in any case, there are other things going on in jazz. maybe i'll get to that in another week or two.

a marriage made in arts non-profit heaven

i do know a fair amount about jazz - at least, a fair amount considering that i'm a pop-obsessed, indie-rock-bred music blogger. and i've got some things to say about it - but i know they're going to get bigger and hairier than i feel like dealing with right here and now, so i'm going to try to limit my scope to this perfectly lovely jason moran album, and more specifically to this song:

6 milestone Y jason moran and alicia hall moran

it was an easy valentine's choice, because it's an artistic collaboration between husband and wife, and it doesn't get much more romantic than that. alicia, who wrote the tune, sings as the "jazz wife" (as jason puts it in the liner note, "musing about the whereabouts of her traveling husband.") there's a nice little self-contradiction in that she's not actually sitting home and waiting, she's participating performance.

back when she was just alicia hall, she wrote a rapturous treatise on love as the "soul of genius" for the liner note of moran's 2002 solo piano album modernistic: "listen and you will do more than sense his genius - you will hear his life." [she also says that "it is the element of love that ciphers the query on genius"... but i'm not going to go there.] along these lines, "milestone" might be construed as not just about their marriage (presumably) and a function of their partnership, but actually literally constituting their marriage.

certainly, more broadly, it's a stylistic marriage of jazz (his milieu) and classical (hers), through the juxtaposition of classical vocal technique and a jazz quartet setting, with his pianistic approach containing aspects of both traditions. of course, in the contemporary art music world this recording absolutely inhabits and exemplifies, and very probably in their respective artistic careers, the boundaries are hardly that well defined. there are other elements of classical and academic music throughout this "jazz" album: in the nostalgically respectful reading of carl maria von weber's "cradle song," in the self-conscious avant-gardeism of "break down" and "artists ought to be writing" (both of which sample the voice of art theorist adrian piper, and, for me, resonate strongly though probably unwittingly with the work of the books, similarly intellectually-inclined musicians who tend to travel in rather different circles), and in the minimalist compositional structure of "RAIN" (a piece inspired by african-american slave culture.)

moran's piano-playing itself (at least as i've experienced it) tends to reside fairly far from the fluid, earthy vernacular we're used to hearing from more traditionally-oriented jazz pianists.
still, it doesn't feel overly clinical or dispassionate. there's plenty of personality discernable even in the less conceptually-anchored pieces, and the intellectual components of the album are nicely tempered by a distinct, sentimental emotional aspect. this is significant - it lends "milestone," for example, a warmth and tenderness that's mostly absent from don byron's similarly-minded but rather glib album a fine line. [a fine line is a sort of conceptual record about arias and lieder, for which byron collected melodies from the likes of roy orbison, puccini, and leonard bernstein, setting them for various small jazz ensembles, some instrumental but in several cases with a classically-trained vocalist.]

it is extremely pertinent that artist in residence is an album of material culled from three separate commissions by prominent arts organizations; which is to say this music is fundamentally borne of the institutional, non-profit arts world. i take the "in residence" of the title to suggest that moran is a resident of that community, and in a more permanent sense than the phrase usually indicates. this isn't to say that he or this record are entirely divorced from a/the more "pure" jazz community: especially these days, there's an awful lot of overlap.

whether that overlap is a good or bad thing for jazz (as an art form? as a cultural tradition? as music?) is an open question - without attempting to address it, i would hazard that it opens up certain possibilities while limiting others. in some ways moran seems to be doing something analogous to how i described matmos vis-a-vis contemporary electronica a few posts down - that is, he's taking a conceptual approach to his parent genre - or maybe better said, using (in his case) jazz as a tool to explore concepts outside of its normal ken - in a way that, while technically remaining within the parameters of the jazz tradition, challenges those parameters to the extent that he sometimes seems to be more properly situated on the outside looking in.

"how can an abstract jazz artist say clearly how they feel and make an audience understand?" in his liner note, moran poses this question and asserts that this work "centers around exploring possible answers to the question." adrian piper provides one possible answer in her sampled speech - "artists ought to be writing about what they do" - and moran takes this to heart, offering a fair amount of explication in the booklet. but there are bound to be even more satisfying answers out there as well. his choice to cover the "negro national anthem" hints at another possibility, one based as much in culture resonance as it is in intellectualism. regardless of how adequately he feels he's been able to address these concerns, it's pretty clear that he's got a firm awareness of something which is vital to remember in the highly theoretically convoluted context of contemporary arts institutions - that to be intellectual doesn't have to and shouldn't mean to be unemotional or impersonal, and that art can and should strive to be both.

jazz and silence

how come nobody told me about the clipse ripping off (interpolating?) geggy tah? (oh, i guess that song isn't really on the album.) that's soooo adorably lame of them, i love it. of pharrell really, the nurd.

if you care, the sidebar mixylinks will be fixed soon - in the meantime, i got a hott new setup over @ mymymyspace, with an old-school player that i may just have to install over here as well.

well. well, the whole december-january accounting period is through, fairly enough, and we're fullspeedahead into a whole new thing, which is to say the presentfuture. january is high time to relax, and the entire music community, producers, consumers, and facilitators alike, aptly tends to take things pretty chill this month (even as the movie folks are amping up the apeshit), despite the strong lingering awareness of the annual cycle that we're headed inexorably back into.

this munificent pause in the new-music machine provides a good opportunity - if one can give up continuing to try to catch up on the previous year's muchados [this one's a no-brainer, but futuresex surely deserved a listspot...] - to listen to some old music. (i.e. more than 12 months old.) take last year, when i celebrated the return drive from new years' weekend by creating a mix cassette of '50s-'60s tunes i mostly hadn't really thought about in years. that was something of a jumpstart to a resurgent '60s pop and soul interest i maintained for the rest of the year, and still into now, as you'll have seen below.

so if that's the cycle, i'm coming back around and trying to scratch that little bit deeper this time - i'm not only reading guralnick's book, but trying to follow along with the discography - MR. ROSS O. LOVE just ordered some percy sledge, clarence carter, etta james, jackie wilson, jr. walker, and boxtops from BMG (durnit "multi-unit sets" no longer qualify for free selex, hence no w. pickett, b. bland, r. brown); and meanwhile i've managed to acquire most or all of the tracks on the "r&b: the transition year" segment of PG's dream discography of (pre-internet/reissue boom) hard-to-find classics. kind of miraculous that. so anyway, i'll have plenty to report on. (currently grooving hard on ivory joe hunter's "i almost lost my mind")

meanwhile there's still ample contemporary noisemaking going on: already this year - this week even - i've been to more concerts than i'd seen in the last month and a half of oh-six (well, i guess there was a reason for that). friday it was girl talk @ johnny brenda's, absolutely the most lovely venue i've ever had for waiting 2+ hours to get into a sold out show. so homey and communal, especially running into so many folks there. [hat-tip to the south orangutan crew, john (no relation i presume) the bouncer, (no longer) green-haired katie and friend (sister?), allie chav whom i saw on stage just as gg flipped lady sov, the other allie, and of course steadfast stoic stangoni]

i had something to say about the show in the comments box for this awesomely titled but rather glibly snarky article in stylus (thanks to bedbugs for the nudge - i see neither nick nor anyone else has elected to respond), and i may have more to say later, as i have another bone or two to pick with mr. sylvester. basically, it was everything i'd have expected and hoped for, even though greg didn't get naked. (best bit, hands-down: the guitar rockout from the end of "digital love" over a number of things but most notably "hustlin'", before it got sped up in a rather daft manner.)

the next night was the great and probably late sun destroyers at the tritone, their putative swansong, and easily their best live performance to date (and i would know, i saw all three!) seriously, i found it very affecting, and not just because my roommate's leaving town, or because i'd just had two beers and a jack'n'ginger, or even just because of the alienating and inescapably allegorical effect of the two bright (albeit soundless) TV screens playing goofy commercial outtakes and distracting much of the crowd from the (poorly lit) band on stage, but also because gabe writes some pretty heartbreakingly bleak and unhappy songs. good ones too - check out "bust my face" and especially "objects" at theirspace, though for the full pathos you'd need to hear "dictionary" (which has my favorite SD lyric - "i hold the belief/that i can achieve/more than i can") and the new song about leavings. hokay guys, now you've officially been blogged about. guess you can break up now.

before they played i djed, which was a last-minute surprise because whoever else was going to do it had backed out - thanks to jason painchiller, who organized the evening and also djed after the band's set (hey, that's a pritty nice mix he's got on hisspace too. yay, lovefest@oursspaces!) it's a monthly do (named after probably my favorite fall song too, unless it's "spoilt victorian child") and looks likely i'll stay involved, possibly even help author it into something bigger dancier and more drawful. anyway, i enjoyed my surprise set, which jumped from mostly instrumental funk to a bit of microsomething, and then re-explored a number of choice moments from ¡OhSiX!, with alterations of course. "robot song" worked real nice with whatever i played it into. somehow abba slipped in there too.

and all of a sudden i've got all these other dj gigs coming up - one this friday, then three in february and another two in march (that's counting the mascher monthly, but not further t-t-t-tritone action.) so if you're in philly, you've got no excuse; if not, c'mon and visit! and/or get me to come play your town (i'd like to work on light-travelling laptop gigging capabilities, with the goal being a party in seattle EMP weekend.)

of course, there's really never a total lull in the media cycle. soon as i finish this i'm heading out to pick up the "new" (to you?) shins and of montreal records - in an attempt to demonstrate that downloading doesn't actually hurt record sales, the theory being
that even though i've now actually confirmed that i like both enough to own them eventually, i would have likely bought them on or near the day of release if i hadn't already heard them. something like that. maybe i'll even snag the the good the bad and the queen, which i actually am genuinely excited about, and i need to not let danger mouse make me forget that i'm not allowed to be party to the general damon albarn ambivalence, especially when nasty people are suggesting (rather counterintuitively) that his whole problem is not being able to move past blur. (since when did it become okay to talk about blur like they were uncool? you'd never get away with that about pulp.)

and while i'm at it i'm also gonna pick up some of montreal tickets (because, whoa!) though probably not ylt, not yet. looking forward too to jonada richman, maybe some of the other johnny b's shows, and ... the whole david byrne/fatboy slim/imelda marcos/carnegie hall thing (how can one resist?)

the title of this post, in case you were curious, refers to yet two more forms of sound-preoccupation that are presently forthcoming in this new year of newness. the jazz courtesy of this cat, a publicist for blue note (among others) who's been hooking me up with many more-or-less "modern" records to explore (more or less jazz too - hopefully he's also about to help me out in my soulquest with some sweet stax and specialty sides), getting me unexpectedly pumped up about jazz, and may or may not end up being my neighbor very soon. this-all does bode well for me actually getting back into jazz in the 007, as i've imagined i would sooner or later (free jazz even?) should be some good gristle there. [as side-note - who knows when i'll get around to (mod-)cunchry, but i have been listening to the new keith urban album, randomly, on the basis of thom jurek's perhaps rightly glowing recommendation.] i better hold off for now and save discussing actual music for a future post(s).

as for the silence...looks like that may be one of the few downsides to the brand-spankin'-new (job) i'm about to commence (!)...or who knows, maybe it'll be a blessing in disguise. hey, i could get into silence.