The Bad Plus - Suspicious Activity?

Hands down, one of the best recordings ever. The maximum expression of The Bad Plus (and I include Tchad Blake). This is one of the albums that keeps me interested in music. Enjoy.

Esto no es un link ni pal carajo

The Bad Plus - Give

The sophomore album shows how this "jazz" trio (in essence, not so much in the popular term) has grown together and established a signature sound, a large credit goes to Tchad Blake (producer and engineer). In my opinion, by the time Give came out, The Bad Plus had already established themselves as the "revitalizors" of the jazz world, always sending a clear message of what they want to do with music; with covers of Ornette Coleman's "Street Woman", The Pixies' "Velouria", and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".

The Bad Plus - These are the Vistas

The breakthrough first album from the trio that changed the game up for jazz musicians. Not only are they incredibly well trained musicians, but they make it a point to show their take on major influences with covers from Aphex twin's "flim", Blondie's "heart of glass", and Nirvana's "Smells like teen spirit" ( I would have much preferred "Lounge act", but it is what it is).

Ornette Coleman said there's something special that happens when these guys play together, and I agree.

Marc Ribot - Asmodeus: Book of Angels Vol. 7 (2007)

Been gone for about a month...
Time to start posting music more frequently.

This is a great album by Marc Ribot based on Zorn's Masada songbook. Raw and abrasive, Ribot blazes with his overdriven guitar.

i am the iron(ic) man

Albert Ayler - Witches & Devils

Albert starts to shake the foundations of Jazz and Music in general.

"...Here, though the trumpet chair -- Norman Howard, a friend from Ayler's hometown of Cleveland -- is a weak link in the chain, this situation allows Ayler's music to shine through, more or less. Needless to say, the quartet with Grimes and Murray, which yields two tunes here -- the title track, which also features Henderson, and "Holy, Holy" -- offers the first real glimpse of Ayler in command. His statuesque take on the tonal and timbral fronts comes from both Ornette Coleman and the honking R&B bar-walkers. And in looking inside the various registers on the title cut, he explores the emotions inherent in timbral modulation without refracting the notes themselves too much. He moves from a whisper of great tenderness to a bloodcurdling scream, and it all sounds natural. On "Holy, Holy," the arco bass work by Grimes complements the intensity with which Ayler is playing. He goes for the upper register buoyed up by Murray's triple time, timberline beats and cross-handed polyrhythms, screeching to the point of sounding like a crying child, quoting hymns and blues tunes throughout. Howard's trumpet playing is no great shakes, but he moves through note displacement very well, opening up the harmonic registers for Ayler and Grimes to break through unencumbered. This is a revealing if not completely satisfying recording". - Thom Jurek

Spirits

The Revolutionary Ensemble - Psyche

The RE were:

Sirone - Bass
Leroy Jenkins - Violin, Viola
Jerome Cooper - Piano, Drums

"The Revolutionary Ensemble were an extraordinary trio who unfortunately has a very limited discography, and what they did record is rather difficult to find. The Psyche is a case in point, released in 1975 on the small, self-produced RE: Records label and, as of 2002, unavailable on disc. It's a superb performance, however, consisting of three compositions, one by each group member, and can serve as a microcosm of what the band was about. Drummer Jerome Cooper was always the most concerned with extended and complex compositions. His lengthy "Invasion," which occupies side one of the album, is an episodic suite where the solos are integral to the piece's structure, not simply improvisations spun off of riffs. Even with the "limited" palette of violin, bass, and percussion (plus the composer on piano for a bit), Cooper is able to conjure forth a unique and fascinating sound world allowing both a clear exposition of his ideas as well as offering the personalities of the musicians to shine. Leroy Jenkins, the most soulful and bluesy of avant-garde jazz violinists, takes special advantage here in his extremely lovely solo feature. Sirone's "Hu-Man" is a freewheeling piece with an implied cadence as natural as rolling down a hill, but also with a melancholy theme once again driving directly to Jenkins' strength as he wrenches out another powerful, blues-drenched solo. Jenkins' own "Collegno" is a gorgeous and delicate work, giving lie to the notion that bands like this were only about screeching. Using the lightest of frameworks, the trio limns an exceedingly fine tracery of clearly etched yet breathtakingly fragile improvisations, never drifting very far from the feeling established at the outset until Sirone embarks on an arco solo that may threaten the integrity of one's woofers. The Psyche is a very fine recording by a wonderful and underrecorded trio; snatch it up if you're lucky enough to come across it."

Hu Man

Satoko Fujii Quartet - Minerva

Forceful free jazz with ferocious rock sensibilities. With Tatsuya of Ruins on drums.

"The Satoko Fujii Quartet's debut album, Vulcan, was something of a revelation, showing well-regarded free-jazzer Fujii in full-out rock mode, backed by a rhythm section worthy of Magma, or well, at least Ruins. Minerva, their second effort, mines similar territory — free jazz with a freewheeling, bashing rhythm section — but moves into spacier and, dare I say it, subtler ground. Fujii seems to exercise her will over the band to a greater extent on this album, with her piano coming to the fore in every piece. And luckily for the listener, her playing is impeccable.

Take "Warp," for instance: while it starts like Vulcan did, with Yoshida's bizzaro vocal noodlings that give way to some long, dreamy notes courtesy of Tamura's trumpet, the piece then breaks into an odd-time trot. Hayakawa's bass holds down a catchy (and mostly static) rhythm over which Fujii drops insistent cluster bombs, with Tamura joining only occasionally with brief mid-tempo stabs at half-melodies. Fujii's playing here is adventurous, delightful, and intense, making "Warp" the highlight of the album for me.

"Weft" and "Caught in a Web" are spacier, with Yoshida laying off his usual bang-bang style, to the point that in parts of "Weft" he might almost be mistaken for a jazz drummer. In fact, discounting structural considerations this song comes closest to a more "traditional" jazz-rock fusion aesthetic, particularly in Fujii's accessible solo two-thirds of the way through. It is followed by "Caught in a Web," which seems almost an exercise in ambience at times but closes with a real bang: a propulsive blast of fuzz-bass and then a flurry of notes from Tamura. Quite cleansing.

Minerva is the least immediately accessible of this quartet's three albums to date, at least to the listener coming from a rock background. But the rewards that it hides are greater than those of Vulcan, in my opinion, and come close to the even more spectacular Zephyros. In the end, though, if you like any of these, you'll like them all, and they all stand on their own merits." - Brandon Wu

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Don Pullen - Warriors

For Chokabert, who loves his work. One of the greatest pianists ever.

"Don Pullen developed an extended technique for the piano and a strikingly individual style, post-bop and modern, but retaining a strong feeling for the blues. He produced acknowledged masterworks of jazz in a range of formats and styles, crossing and mixing genres long before this became almost commonplace. By chance, unfortunately for his future commercial success if not for his musical development, his first contact on arriving on the New York scene was with the free players of the 1960s, with whom he recorded. It was some years later before his abilities in more straight ahead jazz playing, as well as free, were revealed to a larger audience. The variety in his music made him difficult to pigeonhole, but he always displayed a vitality that at first hearing could shock but would always engross and delight his audience.

Although Don was able to play the piano in almost any style, (the attribute that had made him so important to the wide-ranging music of Mingus) and sometimes gave the impression that there were two pianists at the keyboard, he caused most astonishment by his ability to place extremely precise singing runs or glissandi over heavy chords, reminiscent of traditional blues, while never losing contact with the melodic line. His technique for creating these runs, where he seemed to roll his right hand over and over along the keys, received much comment from critics, was studied by pianists, and heavily filmed and investigated, but could never be totally explained, even by Don who had developed it. His piano technique can be seen on the DVDs 'Mingus At Montreux 1975' and on 'Roots Salutes The Saxophones'. But it is better not to concentrate too much on his technique, especially now that he is gone from among us, and to pay attention to his depth of feeling and the intensity of improvisations, whether these were suggested by the song itself or engendered by the moment. It is easy to forget that those who come to love his music from his records may be totally unaware of his playing method. Even at his concerts, only a minority of the audience would be fully able to see his hands moving along the keyboard and be aware of exactly how he revealed the emotional outpourings of his soul." - All About Jazz

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Art Ensemble of Chicago - Les Stances a Sophie

Abe request. One of the best jazz albums ever.

Yoyo

Cecil Taylor - Conquistador!

More implacable Cecil-ness for the bearded folkie in you.

"More so than with any label, the greatest recordings on Blue Note, those that pull rank on the merely great and that we can most comfortably say will belong to all ages, seem to prove a burden for many listeners to embrace, no matter how enthralled they are by the sounds of Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Blue Train —the label's signature sounds, really. Consider Out To Lunch! and Point of Departure, often dismissed as acquired tastes, or worse, noise, and flouted as inspired nonsense—such chivalrous chicanery!—irrespective of the idea that applying whatever principles—"drawbacks" of shape and form—might lead one to this critique could likewise have at Finnegans Wake. And so too with Cecil Taylor and Conquistador!, another warranted entry in the Rudy Van Gelder series, with a bonus cut of "With (Exit)."

Odd as it may sound, if you are new to Taylor's music, and before proceeding to the Caf' Montmartre sessions, you're perhaps best off starting with this record, an avant-garde jazz walkabout of sorts, or at least a Cecil Taylor walkabout; here we can bear witness to the qualities, in different ideas, forms, themes and styles, that characterize an entire body of work—archetypes of interaction and by-play, suggestion and statement, however indirect, and then subversion of whatever feeling, emotion, idea, had been conjured up in the first place, and thus we continue on with the journey.

For the seasoned listener, the principal value of this release is naturally having it available again, and, more importantly, the alternate take of what was the original album's second and final track—side B for the vinyl lovers. Two minutes shorter, this "new" version of "With (Exit)" is even more disturbing and, frankly, invasive, than the official take, with Taylor creating textures that pulse and recoil, frantically trapped in one dark alley of a nightmare, and turning, alone, down another. Speaking analogously, it is though the happy version of "Dedication"—once titled "Cadaver"—had been chosen to close Point of Departure —instead of the proper requiem—or that we have discovered the lost soundtrack to Dementia, such is the gap between these two takes.

In terms of Conquistador! as a whole, note the by-play of Taylor and altoist Jimmy Lyons, foil and compatriot both, depending upon the composition, or the movements within the composition; and, let it be said, that along with Armstrong and Hines, Dolphy and Little, Coleman and Cherry, theirs is a partnership that seems so inevitably wrought and well-suited, one can scarcely imagine the sound of the one without hearing the sound of the other—that is, until spinning Jazz Advance or Burnt Offering."- Colin Fleming

Git

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Bap-tizum

"The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The group continues to tour and record through 2006, despite the deaths of two of the founding members.

The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz's entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed “little instruments” in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; “little instruments” can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects). The group also uses costumes and face paint in performance. These characteristics combine to make the ensemble's performances as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with each musician playing from behind a large array of drums, bells, gongs, and other instruments. When playing in Europe in 1969, the group were using more than 500 instruments. [1] Contents

Members of what was to become the Art Ensemble performed together under various band names in the mid-sixties, releasing their first album, Sound, as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet in 1966. The Sextet included saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut, who over the next year went on to play together as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble. In 1967 they were joined by fellow AACM members Joseph Jarman (saxophone) and Philip Wilson (drums), and made a number of recordings for Nessa.

As noted above, the musicians were all active multi-instrumentalists: Jarman and Mitchell's primary instruments were alto and tenor saxes, respectively, but they played many other saxophones (ranging from the tiny sopranino to the large bass), flutes and clarinets. In addition to trumpet, Bowie played flugelhorn, cornet, shofar and conch shells. Favors added touches of banjo and bass guitar. Over the years, most of the musicians dabbled on piano, synthesizer and other keyboards.

In 1969, Wilson left the group to join blues singer/harmonica player Paul Butterfield's band. That same year, the remaining group travelled to Paris [2], where they became known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The immediate impetus for the name change came from a French promoter who added “of Chicago” to their name for purely descriptive purposes, but the new name stuck because band members felt that it better reflected the cooperative nature of the group. In Paris the ensemble were based at the Théâtre des Vieux Colombier [3] and their distinctive music with percussion roles dispersed throughout the quartet was documented in a range of records on the Freedom and BYG labels. They also recorded “Comme à la radio” with Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem as a drummerless quartet before welcoming percussionist Famoudou Don Moye to the group in 1970.

In 1970 the ensemble recorded two albums with singer Fontella Bass, then Lester Bowie's wife. These were The Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass and Les Stances A Sophie. The latter was the soundtrack from the French movie of the same title. Bass' vocals, backed by the powerful pulsating push of the band has allowed the “Theme De YoYo” to remain an underground cult classic ever since.

The ensemble returned to the United States in 1972, and the quintet of Mitchell, Jarman, Bowie, Favors and Moye remained static until 1993. Upon their return to the States, they came to prominence with two major releases on Atlantic Records: Bap-Tizum and Fanfare for the Warriers. Members of the group made the decision to restrict their appearances together, allowing each player to pursue other musical interests. It seems likely that this has contributed to the longevity of the ensemble. Despite the self-imposed limitations the Art Ensemble managed to release more than 20 studio recordings and several live albums between 1972 and 2004.

The makeup of the ensemble changed in 1993, when Jarman retired from the group to focus on his practice of Zen and Aikido. Bowie died of liver cancer in 1999, and the group continued as a trio (featuring a number of guest artists in their performances) until 2003, when Jarman rejoined the ensemble. In January of 2004 Favors Maghostut died suddenly during the recording of the group's latest album, Sirius Calling. The group was joined for their 2004 tour by trumpeter Corey Wilkes and bassist Jaribu Shahid, but it remains to be seen whether they will become permanent members of the ensemble, though a 2 CD live release by this quintet from 2004 is scheduled for release in 2006 on Pi Recordings.

Ensemble members embrace the performance art aspects of their concerts, believing that they allow the band to move beyond the strict limits of “jazz”. Their operating motto is “Great Black Music: Ancient To the Future”, which allows them to explore a wide variety of musical styles and influences; the band's distinctive appearance on stage also reflects this motto. As Jarman describes it, “So what we were doing with that face painting was representing everyone throughout the universe, and that was expressed in the music as well. That's why the music was so interesting. It wasn't limited to Western instruments, African instruments, or Asian instruments, or South American instruments, or anybody's instruments.”

Immm

Alice Coltrane - World Galaxy

Another classic Alice album. Features Leroy Jenkins on strings, Reggie Workman on bass and Ben Riley on drums.

Turiya

Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz To Come (1959)

I've come out of my premature retirement mah bois! This one's for my boy Howard Roark. Highly influential album by the master Ornette Coleman. This guy's one of the most important jazz figures of all time, not only pioneering in the free jazz movement but also improvisation. Without a doubt, one of the most important and greatest albums of all time.

"The Shape of Jazz to Come was one of the first avant-garde jazz albums ever recorded. It was recorded in 1959 by Coleman's piano-less quartet. The album was considered shocking at the time, because it had no recognizable chord structure and included simultaneous improvisation by the performers in a much freer style than previously in jazz.
Coleman's major breakthrough was to leave out chord-playing instruments. Each selection contains a brief melody, much like the tune of a typical jazz song, then several minutes of free improvisation, followed by a repetition of the main theme; while this resembles the conventional head-solo-head structure of bebop, it abandons the use of chord structures.
The album was a breakthrough work, in that it helped establish the avant-garde & free jazz movement. Later avant-garde jazz was often very different from this, but the work laid the foundation for the format in which nearly all later avant-garde and free jazz would be played."

Link

Albert Ayler - Love Cry

"Of all the protagonists of free jazz, Ohio-born tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936) had the shortest career (he first recorded in 1962 and committed suicide in 1970 at 34), but he nonetheless managed to articulate one of the most radical aesthetics, second only to Cecil Taylor's. He often sounded like someone who wanted to create a virtuoso art out of anti-virtuoso playing. Ayler started out playing rhythm'n'blues. By the time he landed in New York, he had developed his idiosyncratic style (notably via an unrecorded European experience with Cecil Taylor in 1962). A quartet with trumpeter Norman Howard, drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Henry Grimes recorded Spirits/ Witches and Devils (february 1964), that contains four lengthy pieces: Spirits, the twelve-minute Witches and Devils, the eleven-minute Holy Holy and Saints. Each of them sounded like it was coming from a distant past, from a remembered childhood, as it incorporated simple, naive, catchy melodies. The performance was ferocious, though, as if Ayler wanted to contrast innocence and experience, or European order and African disorder. The live Prophecy (june 1964) introduced his trio with double bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, and added Ghosts (his most famous theme), Wizard and Prophecy to his exoteric canon. That trio was responsible for one of the most revolutionary recordings of the era, Spiritual Unity (july 1964), the (brief) album that made it explicit how Ayler was not interested in creating music out of notes but out of timbres, how his music was not a harmonic construction but a "soundscape". These new versions of Ghosts, Spirits and Wizard were delivered according to an apparently demented logic that mixed melodies inspired by folk tunes and nursery rhymes with emotional bursts of saxophone noises simulating the human voice. Murray's percussions (more cymbals than drums) had little to do with keeping the time: they produced a flow of disorienting noises that intersected and amplified Ayler's saxophone noises. By now, Ayler had refined his melodramatic vibrato. The "free" approach permeated the two side-long improvisations of New York Eye And Ear Control (july 1964), AY and ITT, with the trio augmented with trumpeter Don Cherry on cornet, Roswell Rudd on trombone and John Tchicai on alto, although the result was far less tight than on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1960), proving that Ayler was a different spirit from the free-jazz crowd. The trio and Don Cherry returned to a humbler format with Vibrations/ Ghosts (september 1964), that added Children (actually just a fast variant of Holy Holy), the moving ballad Holy Spirit (with a spectacular Cherry solo), Vibrations and Mothers to the canon, and The Hilversum Session (november 1964), that introduced Angels in a tense mid-tempo version. Donald Ayler replaced Don Cherry for the one-sided LP Bells (may 1965), containing just one 20-minute track (fundamentally a madcap medley of marches and nursery rhymes) also featuring altoist Charles Tyler and bassist Lewis Worrell besides Sunny Murray. Spirits Rejoice (september 1965), particularly its title-track (performed by Donald Ayler, Sunny Murray, altoist Charles Tyler, bassists Henry Grimes and Gary Peacock), marked a transition towards a more religious mood and a regression towards the collective improvisation of New Orleans' brass bands. Spirits Rejoice basically revisited the format of Bells in a more organic and structured way, picking up along the way an impressive amount of debris of musical stereotypes. Holy Ghost (july 1967) documents a live performance with Don Ayler on trumpet, Michel Sampson on violin, Bill Folwell on bass and Milford Graves on drums (particularly Truth Is Marching In/Omega and Our Prayer). Ayler considerably toned down his music on In Greenwich Village (december 1966) and Love Cry (august 1967), that featured Donald Ayler on trumpet, Call Cobbs on harpsichord, Alan Silva on bass and Milford Graves on drums, and eventually returned to his rhythm'n'blues roots. After some kind of hippie-like spiritual crisis, Ayler turned to jazz-rock, soul and funk music, adding lyrics by a vocal singer, notably on Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe (august 1969). By employing a virtually unlimited repertory of tricks and a rich vibrato, Ayler expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone, but, most importantly, he did so while staging a multi-dimensional regression to a simpler age of music (whether the catchy folkish melodies or the military tempos or the collective improvisation of the marching bands). Ayler seemed to fuse the musical background of the pre-industrial society with an impulse towards the expressionistic cacophony of the industrial society. At the same time, his saxophone often seemed to intone shamanic invocations except to derail into frenzied explosions of vitality. Underlying all these contradictions was Ayler's exploration of sound for the sake of sound, that accounted for a completely new idea of music, away from the pillars of harmony, melody and rhythm. That was, ultimately, an exploration of the human psyche. Thus, at several levels of introspection and metaphor, Ayler's art was a mirror of society. Ayler's was the music of the collective unconscious." - Scaruffi

He once said the patch in his goatee was evidence that God had marked him as someone who would change the course of history. He was right.

Love Cry

Sun Ra - Space Is The Place (1974)

"Why doesn't the earth fall? How can you walk upon it? Its the music...its the music of the earth, of the sun, of the stars, the music of yourself, vibrating... yes, you're music too. You're all instruments, everyone's supposed to be playing their part, in this vast orchestra of the cosmos."

The Flying Luttenbachers - Constructive Destruction

And thus, the Luttenbachers and their improv terror tactics were born. The Weasel Walter-led collective rumages through godforsaken landscapes of pure retina burning noise prog jazz abandonment that'll leave mouths agape and more than a few saying "stop that shit it's fucking obscene!". Xenakis meets Magma in Ayler's rehearsal space. For more about the great Weasel, go here.

I know some coffeehouses I would love to see become ashes

Young Nico

One of Arnaldo Lozada's (aka AJ Davila from the band Davila 666) side projects.  It mostly consists of avant garde, avant/free jazz, and Badalamenti/John Cage like experimentation sometimes with vocal samples and loops over it. Every instrument from sax, to piano, to percussion, ext.. was played and recorded by Arnaldo.

Young Nico is also part of a collective that consists of Isabel Borbon, General Jackson Jackson, and Yussef Aranasky.  I'll put up some of their albums later on. 

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Mu. - Arecibo Psycodelic Classics 17: Abortos Musicales

Compilation of work by Puerto Rican drummer (and friend to the blog) Nomar Díaz. Ranges from free jazz, to concrete, to noise, to overall sonic dementia.

Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures

More a force of nature than a musician, Cecil Taylor is the most advanced piano player in existence, in jazz or any other music. The innovations he has brought are so vast that only a few have ever been picked up by other players, and yet even those are not quite being grasped in full. This is "Unit Structures", one of his two Blue Note masterpieces of the 60s.

"...Taylor developed a radical improvising style at the piano that indulged in tone clusters, percussive attacks and irregular polyrhythmic patterns, a very "physical" style that required a manic energy during lengthy and frenzied performances, a somewhat "cacophonous" style that relished both atonal and tonal passages. The dynamic range of his improvisations was virtually infinite.

It took three years for Taylor to release another album, and it presented a larger ensemble and an even wilder sound, as violent as garage-rock, bordering on hysteria: Unit Structures (may 1966) featured (mostly) a septet with Lyons, Eddie Gale Stevens on trumpet, Ken McIntyre on alto sax, oboe and bass clarinet, two bassists (Henry Grimes and Alan Silva) and Andrew Cyrille on drums. These pieces (or, better, "structures") were conceived as sequences of polyphonic events rather than, say, series of variations on a theme. Nonetheless, Unit Structure, Enter Evening and Steps were highly structured compositions, and therein lied Taylor's uniqueness: his "free jazz" was also "free" of the melodrama that permeated Coltrane's and Coleman's music. Despite all the furor, Taylor's music always sounded firmly under the control of a cold intelligence." - Scaruffi

unit structures

Pharoah Sanders - Elevation

More Cosmic Spirit Jazz from Master Pharoah, released in 1973.

Saud