Mudslinging Birds Debate #1: The Best Trumpeters Are Always Short (and often Kinda Funny Lookin')

Arguing "No" is Buck Clayton. In her autobiography and elsewhere, Billie Holiday referred to Buck Clayton as the most handsome man she ever met. In the video, he's the tall gentleman who looks like Billy Dee Williams' father. A distinguished man, Mr. Clayton would be at ease in the Huxtable living room discussing the virtues of the New Negro.

Arguing "Yes" is Charlie Shavers. His fans call him fire. His critics call him a show-off and grandstander. He's the short dude with the cap. He used to son Colt 45's on the regular while discussing the virtues of Notre Dame with his bookie.

Beyond the key debate, there's alot going on here. Does Buck hold his own? Is Shavers a show-off? Do short trumpeters have a chip on their shoulder? Do tall trumpeters have their hearts in it? You decide.

[As a neutral party, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King has agreed to referee from the drums.]

jazz sex album covers: addendum

Although too controversial to make the cut, this subversive cover from Verve Records further underscores the storied record label's important contribution to the continual evolution of the music we call jazz.

From the website:

"Although Verve would play a substantial role in popularizing the LP format and stereo recording, the quality that really set Verve apart was [Norman] Granz's open-minded musical philosophy. Granz's refusal to recognize artificially imposed stylistic boundaries helped to create an environment in which the musicians could fulfill their artistic potential, and resulted in a series of inspired collaborations between players with widely divergent backgrounds."

Word.

(shout outs to k. woodson on the help out)

Blue Note Records: Jazz Music's Class Act

five awesome jazz sex album covers

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1. cannonball adderly -- love, sex and the zodiac

a breakus nerdus classic. the seventies saw alot of suspect shit from good players. this album is example A.



2. j.j. jones -- saxually romantic

don't you hate it when you go out with a girl, take her to a nice restaurant, set a romantic mood, candles, incense, all that good stuff. you're being your usual suave self. then, at the end of the night, she doesn't want to get saxual.

j.j. jones never has that problem.




3. the women of blue note

blue note always kept it classy. two personal favorites.



4. anything by eliane elias

the brazilian singer/pianist steams up anything she appears on. she can actually sing and play really, really well too. diana krall eat your heart out.



5. peter brotzmann -- nipples

really, what else is there to say?


------------------ BONUS BONUS BONUS -------------------





6a. jimi hendrix -- electric ladyland (original cover)
6b. fela kuti -- shakara

even though we like jazz, its better to be a rock star. this original cover for electric ladyland was killed by the label. jimi was a little too far ahead for 1968. fela let his girlfriends out of the compound long enough to strip and spell out his band name (africa '70). both are killer albums to boot.

two albums

kids -- hank jones (p), joe lovano (ts). blue note 2007.

there’s a great piece by gary giddens on hank jones in last week’s new yorker. lost track of giddens since the weather bird column in the voice ended. but in a two page spread, he confirms the subtlety of perception, depth of knowledge, and command of language that make him the ace of jazz writing. paragraph two.

‘Jones is perhaps the most venerated of contemporary jazz pianists, and not just because he has outlived so much of the competition. Jazz taste oscillates between decorum and expression, usually favoring the latter. In the years when jazz piano was dominated by obdurate, percussive modernists like Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, Jones was often perceived as a genteel professional, and admired more for the reliability of his technique than for his wit. In today’s more ecumenical musical climate, in which pianists like Bill Charlap and Jason Moran tend to mediate percussive dynamics with lyricism, Jones’s approach seems almost prophetic.’

there’s something really exciting and important about the appearance of the piece. usually at least glance through the new yorker, and can’t remember them running a jazz piece in the culture section, except maybe keith jarrett at carnegie.

it would be a mistake to think that refined nature of hank jones’ playing makes it prim or stuffy. just purchased and spent some time with the recent kids album hank jones did with joe lovano. the album is great. pretty without veering anywhere near sentimental. alternately lyrical and dense, lighthearted and meditative. and very modern beneath the traditionalist veneer. giddens called jones prophetic, and while I don’t feel competent to address his influence on individual players (new york is dominated by piano players right now), jones’ individualism- his sense of style and touch is very now. particularly the combination of historical mastery, harmonic depth, and the inclusion of elements of both harmonic and rhythmic freedom. here evidenced by jones’ percussive left hand clusters, and lovano’s use of harmonics. jones’ sense of rhythm is rooted in the vertical bounce of stride piano (rather than the linear pull of walking bass lines and ride cymbals), but he’s willing to play fast and loose with time. for his part, lovano tends to slur rather than articulate individual notes on his sweeping runs giving the album a sly, slightly unbalanced feel. and both are willing to let fairly straightforward tunes drift towards dense, dark harmonies.

but the album isn’t dark, its masterful with a touch of raucous. aside from the horrendous packaging (illegible scrawl matched to a third rate art fair cover illustration -- really, i’m embarrassed to post it), five stars.

check out the reharmonization of oh what a beautiful morning.


ask the ages -- sonny sharrock (g), elvin jones (d), pharaoh sanders (ts), charnett moffett (b). axiom 1991.

not sure what made me put this disk back in rotation. liked it when I copped it (my copy says j. padro. uh, thanks justin), but a couple of spins and it's been killing me. and also noticed that it was named the best album of the nineties by destination out. sharrock’s tone is big and overdriven with lots of sustain and harmonics. he plays intense, repetitive modal motifs, bopish runs, and noise in equal parts. the tunes tend towards modal vampish things. which is not a bad way to go when you’ve got elvin and charnett moffett holding you down. and the sound is really rounded out and given depth by pharaoh sanders and the guitar overdubs (the album was produced by bill laswell). pharaoh also plays alternately pretty, spiritual and out, and you forget how pretty his tone is until you catch him blending background phrases into the mix. but all of this doesn’t do anything to capture the depth of the album, both in the full recorded tone, and the vibe that these guys have. five stars.

listen to one of the best tracks, as we used to sing.

ornette addendum

was talking to the e last night. he hashed out an episode from one of the ornette biographies where ornette asked a doctor to castrate him. the idea was to free him from distractions so that he could more myopically dedicate himself to music. settled for a circumcision as a symbolic castration.

the only web evidence i could find is here. if anyone can source this, please let me know.

ornette's day at the grammies

where was i when ornette won a pulitzer prize and a lifetime achievement grammy? i like ornette. not as much as some (note to self, harangue russell into writing something on ornette), but a lot more than most people. and i know that he’s been winning big prize money and that his infrequent shows have become events. still, smells like an apology for something. for the fact that people said he couldn’t play in 1962? that recorded jazz (and music in general) is so crappy (check out the billboard top ten jazz albums of last year. who the hell is michael buble)? probably both the grammies and the pulitzer decided to confront their image problem-- stale and out of step. so some oldster in charge said to himself ‘who’s that guy who plays saxophone all crazy that the stoned kids in college liked? yeah, lets get him.’ anyway, this is really funny. but not nearly as bugged out as ornette's actual grammy remarks. bonus ornette weirdness here.

pics -- jazz party two

jazz party two!!!

its the second jazz party. this wednesday, may 23rd, 9pm on at lolita on broome and allen. ejike and ben play their favorite jazz records. five dollar cosmos are back. i know everyone has a busy week, but hope to see you there.

john tchicai with strings

want a chance to highlight an album that’s been in heavy rotation for the last several months.

not going to lie, i stumbled accross the tchicai with strings album in downtown music gallery because of the shiny gold leaf animals on the cover of the treader albums on display. asked the sales dude about them- it turns out that the treader guys used to be in this popular british drum and bass outfit called spring heel jack, but had renounced all of that to make freer music. i copped the tchicai with strings album and also an evan parker with birds tribute to steve lacy album (had just seen the evan parker at the stone show).

but the tchicai with strings album is just great. its just really pretty and serene. even my girl likes it, and we ended up listening to it on the beach in mexico. i'm always wary of describing musical qualities in writing, but i'll give it my best shot. the background soundscapes are a mishmash of lush repeating strings, more discordant pianos and various clacking percussive effects. and tchicai is gorgeous. his tone is full but focused, with only a slight twinge of the acerbic that comes with alto (charlie parker to jackie maclean), and a small amount of reediness/breathiness.

about half the tracks are relatively in- in that they have clear tonal centers and slowly undulating rhythms. and tchicai generally lets longer tones and lines sit on the out sections while he tends to dart in and out of the more harmonic pieces. there are a fair number of chromatic lines that accentuate the interplay between the in and the out. his playing is spacious, generous, and avoids any obvious atonal honking and screeching. and while the backgrounds are clearly prerecorded, you get the real feeling of a coherent vibe that tchicai is responding to. he’s always aware and reactive to the musical embankment that surrounds him.

the last track is tchicai reading a poem. all i can say is that in diction and sound, he’s like barry white as a jedi master rather than the love walrus. clearly a very spiritual dude. i mean, you can just tell. i am usually totally against poetry in jazz, but pink roses fits the quality of the album, despite the tonal differences between tchicai's deep voice and the alto.

i was curious enough that i emailed the guys at treader. john coxon was extremely gregarious in getting back to me. rather than post a composite of our emails, i’ll just post them directly.

----------------------------------------

hey john, thanks a ton for getting back to me. hope you don't mind mind doing this in a discursive way, but any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

i guess most of my questions have to do with how you guys hooked up with tchicai and what the process of working together looked like. how did you and tchicai hook up? i guess you guys played a show with john and evan parker before the album was recorded? what was that like, and how do you guys play live? once you decided to record, was it strictly a process of you handing john prerecorded tracks to play over, or was there somehow more interplay or (for lack of a better or less pretentious term) 'collective improvisation'? how did you decide how to sequence the individual tracks- in that did you just let the tracks run until john was done playing, and then turn them off?

okay, enough rambling, a couple more specific points i'm curious about,

the album is pretty serene- is that the sound or vibe that you had in mind when going to work with tchicai? i can't help but think that its a response to his personality more than anything. dude is pretty mellow.

there are a couple of tracks that are relatively 'in'. i'm thinking of the repeating G/C/D of Lied, and the Ab minor to G major of Hymn. were those tracks approached differently, or just a natural part of the vibe of the entire experience? did john have anything to say about some of the harmonic elements or character of the album?

i love the fact that you included the poem. john definitely has a beautiful voice and cadence, and a voice that fits so well (despite the disparity between the deepness of his voice and the register of the alto) with the overall tone of the album. how was the decision to include the poem made?

how did you guys decide to do the gold leafing and animals on your album packages? is it real gold?

someone told me that mathew shipp approached you guys about making a more groove based album (i'm not really familiar with the spring heel jack stuff, except that it exists) and that you flatly refused. at what point did you guys decide to go in the free noise direction? are you guys totally dogmatic about it on some 'jazz is freedom music/ayler lives!' type shit? or is it just something that you guys fell into a little more organically?

what else is on the plate for you guys and the label?

---------------------------------

well..........we met john @ the coimbra jazz festival 3 years or so ago.i sat next to him at a dinner before the show we were doing with wadada leo smith et al.
we talked about all sorts of stuff,but i liked him a lot and on the way back to the uk on the train ashley and i were discussing what next for treader and we came up with the idea of john tchicai 'with strings'.........we emailed and sent a couple of the thirsty ear cds,spoke to 'jazz on 3' here to get some help with studio time and arranged for evan parker to interview him for the programme.
meanwhile we worked on the tacks.sent them to him couple months later and arranged a gig @ ashley's monthly 'back in your town' concert.we liked his alto playing and arranged to borrow an old 1920s buescher alto for the sessions.
we did 2 recordings at the time- a duo with evan,then the strings one over a day and an evening.
the interview on the day of the gig,then the gig at the red rose.it was completely packed.....jtch hadnt played uk for over 30 years.
the duo record we gave to the bbc to cut into the interview.
there was no collective impro. on this cd although mark sanders added some drums.
john brought the dalachinsky poem with him and had said enough sax wise,and we had 2 tracks left.actually there is another poem piece unreleased.
the order of the tracks is different from the recording order.
the serenity comes from the intial idea,but john's extraordinary charismatic playing was just what it needed............actually we enjoyed the tracks so much before he played onem that we were quite apprehensive...
john's initial response to the tracks wwas that they all sounded a bit similar,and there was a certain amount of '...well that's the point....'type discussions.
we also had some pretty straight arguments about improvising vs composition,particularly re the duo.
harmonically 'in' or 'out' really doesnt exist for us-know what you mean,but there is never any discussion of this kind of stuff betwween me and ashley-only if someone pushes us......
the packaging is designed by our freind frauke stegmann who has complete creative control.
we have no historical or cultural connection with jazz and we cant play jazz in any sense whatever.
there are elements of jazz history we are both interested in,and individuals we will go far out of are way to play with.the thing about beats is-well,practical.......mainly drummers are used to pushing,not being pushed......nothing against programmed/sampled beats at all.....but i suppose if you have a han bennink,then you want space for him and not to just try to push him with metrical mechanics.
we have just got series 3 delivered...............
john coxon/wadada leo smith-brooklyn duos.....harmonica/guitars:trumpet
han bennink-amplified trio with me and ashley.....really intense
evan parker/matthew shipp-abbey road duos......lovely sounding

we are currently doing a record with roy campbell jr. et al for thirsty ear.....

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five stars.

hymn and these pink roses

miscellany

a couple of random things to knock out. highlight of my (jazz related) week, i got yelled at by marc ribot yesterday afternoon at the kinkos on east houston. i was running in to knock out a couple of quick copies and the only free, working copy machine had all this really beat up, ruffled sheet music everywhere and a open guitar case leaning against it. i went to sneak in quickly, from across the room, ‘hey don’t touch that!’. ‘excuse me?’ ‘it’s broken, but i’m still working there!’ ‘okay.’ that’s weird, i think that’s marc ribot. he was clearly agitated and rushed, got someone to fix the copy machine, duplicated a couple more parts and grabbed all his stuff in a bundle in his arms as he started to run out. ‘excuse me. umm, pardon me. are you marc ribot?’ ‘yes.’ ‘oh. I’m a big fan.’ he smiled, lightened up, and ‘thanks man’. ‘kinkos is the worst, huh?’ ‘yeah,’ and he ran out. it was pretty awesome.

went to the jazz standard the other night with my girl and a couple of friends. the show was the elio villafranca trio- strong but not spectacular modal cuban expanded things. but, ate the blue smoke barbecue for the first time. it was really, really good, and no less of an authority than my lady (she’s from dallas), identified it the best barbecue in new york. can’t recommend it enough. however, i made a huge ordering faux pas by getting the texas beef ribs, which were a little dry and flavorless. spent the rest of the evening begging for pork from my girl’s combo plate.

andrew hill passed the other day. definitely a major hitter and, from all accounts, his recent albums on blue note are great. i don’t feel qualified to write about andrew hill- never really got him, don’t own a ton of the classic albums (think i only have point of departure and judgement), and haven’t heard the new ones. so i’ll leave it to richard davis to eulogize (thanks brian for passing this to me).

there was a great response to the hancock youtube clips that i figure should be block quoted and posted. eric, i’m not sure who you are, but this was pretty cool.

‘Funny thing about that... I used to work at E-mu systems and they made and still make some of the finest digital sound manipulation equipment around (even if CreativeLabs swallowed them up)... anyways I sat around the corner from some of the hardware developers and they would talk about how in the 80's Herbie would come up to Santa Cruz and just pop into the factory, snag the latest prototype right from the testing stations and then it was all Future Shock... He was really at the cutting edge of that stuff... George Duke too he was another player on E-mu team.’

also, we’re setting up another jazz party at Lolita on the 23rd. rearrange you’re calendars.

we ran the eighties

a couple of clips groused off youtube that pretty much speak for themselves. originally caught these on music thing (a great site for musicus nerdus technicus). the first is herbie hancock rocking on his fairlight which you'll see is basically the baddest synth ever. watch him rock out starting around 2:30, and check cool q chilling with his glass of wine.



here we get more herbie hancock fairlight action. for the babies. peep the cameo. more cool jamming at the 5:50 mark.

jazz party in stereo

we're throwing a party. wednesday, april 25th 9pm on. lolita bar on the corner of allen and broome. a chance to play our favorite records. five dollar cosmos. ladies. hope to see you there.

james spaulding on blue note

by the way, james spaulding is playing with his ace homie freddie hubbard at iridium april 26 through 29.



we’ve always wondered about jimmy spaulding. he was blue note’s in house alto and flute player on tons of great and seminal recordings for the label during the peak of its sound (most of the recordings by hubbard, morgan, shorter, et al). additionally, while blue note and mainstream jazz as a whole was starting to go in an increasingly spiritual and free direction, spaulding had come up with sun ra, and was down with the pharoah sanders and archie shepp camp (and plays on some of their records). and he always kills it. huge fan of his alto playing especially. but while seemingly every other major player in the blue note roster appeared as a leader on the recombinant sessions, spaulding is conspicuously absent from the leader board. we set out to figure out why. the internet provides.

found this interview with all about jazz from february 2004.


AAJ: You made so many appearances as a sideman on Blue Note. Did they ever ask you to do a record as a leader during that time?

JS: Well, Alfred Lion took me out to dinner and he asked me if I would like to record for Blue Note, if I would like a contract. I said sure, and he said [Spaulding does his best German accent] �well, you know you have a family (I had just had my first daughter) and you want to write some music for the jukebox!� He said �you want to write some �Watermelon Man.�� At the time he wanted something like Lou Donaldson�s Alligator Boogaloo, and as I was eating I said �okay Alfred, I�ll be talking to you later.� I never got back with him; I had all this stuff I�d written up, and that just killed all of that.

AAJ: What kind of stuff had you written?

JS: Well, some bebop, some swing, some traditional kinds of things. Hopefully it would�ve introduced me on the label; it was around �65. He told me that, and I love Lou Donaldson, but I didn�t want to play that stuff all night long. I wanted to play free and I wanted to play bebop all night. If I did play something with a backbeat, it would be at the end of the set where people would get up and dance. I�d go to the club and people would say �play that fatback, man!� One guy told me �play some Herbie Mann� and I thought, well� Another guy told me to play �Swing Shepherd Blues� and I thought �okay, I�ll play �Swing Shepherd Blues�� and the guy handed me a ten-dollar bill [laughs].


later in the same interview


AAJ: So how did you go about starting your label?

JS: Well, everybody�s saying �shoot, man, get your own label.� You can do what you want to do, get the musicians you want, you don�t have the record companies telling you who to use or what to play. It�s like Alfred Lion telling me what to play. The money wasn�t that great anyway for a sideman. For me, it was $250; at 12:00 they�d pick us up at the Empire Hotel and take us out to Rudy van Gelder�s studio in a taxi, and we�d be out there from noon to sunset. We�d be doing all these takes and he�d give each of us a check and we�d have to rush back to Manhattan before the check-cashing place closed (it was on the corner of 50th and Broadway), try to cash our little check and have enough money to get home and buy some groceries. I began to record a lot, my phone was ringing and I was thankful. I got married in �63 and after that we did Hub-Tones, and Duke Pearson (he was the A&R man), he liked me and started calling me for other dates, and I am thankful for that. But I wish I had recorded for Blue Note with the music I wanted to play!


a couple things jump out from these excerpts. from a historical perspective, blue note is thought of being the cream of 60s jazz. its crazy to hear spaulding talk about being broke because the label didn’t pay sidemen and that, given that these guys all played on each other’s records anyway, there was a large discrepancy between the bread you made as a leader and as a sideman. same thing with spaulding talking about an audience that wasn't hip to what was taking place on the records.

also, never really heard alfred lion or francis wolf talked about in a disparaging way. always understood that they were considered sortof saviors, or at least had a better rapport with blue note’s artists, because they were uncompromising about allowing musicians to record what they wanted. and provided such a successful financial platform. its not like everyone on blue note at that time was making groove records (andrew hill’s records aren’t easy to listen to). got to wonder what spaulding’s music would have sounded like. especially given that he was the preferred alto player for hard bop, groove, and free-ish records. ask him if you see him.

peter brotzmann at tonic 4-11

didn't know much about brotzmann other than he’s supposed to be one of the vanguard noise/out players of the sixties european generation. the context was brotzmann reeds, marino pliakas electric bass, and michael wertmueller drums. these guys make a lot of noise. Between the uberbass, fitted with a brass nut and a brass bridge to make the sound more percussive, and the double bass pedal, there was a lot of collective low end rumbling/pounding for most of the show. while brotzmann did his part- i would describe his playing as all of the harsh, reedy, guteral shouting of ayler minus the folk melodies (and like ayler, brotzmann has a rep for playing LOUD)- he was hard to distinguish above the din. Not sure if that was a conscious decision on his part, or if tonic couldn’t turn his mic up loud enough to outpower the rhythm section. probably the point that these guys get together and just turn into a machine. yes, they're german.

it sounds like I’m being critical when i’m really just trying to be descriptive. everyone in the audience thought the show was great. i give it an Awesome minus. but you have to like loud and cacophonous. they did a bunch of very on time stop start things where the sound just hit you. bass and drums blazed to the point that their appendages were a blur. these guys would slay your favorite death metal band. there was a short segment where brotzmann solo did a low, breathy modal thing on soprano that was great. russel and will told me that they saw him play with william parker and hamid drake a couple years ago where there were a lot more dynamics and brotzmann played really great, beautiful melodic passages.

on a related note, tonic is closing its doors. There was a minor crisis a couple of years ago when their septic tank broke and they suddenly had to raise a lot of cash quickly. both artists and audience came out in droves. This time, the ownership is heeding the continued escalation of rents in the les, embodied by the blue condominium building next door, and relocating. you can vote on the new location on the website.

Grade: Awesome minus.

check the timex

we first ran into the clip below at a jazz at lincoln center film series evening on louis armstrong a couple of years ago. came across some background info in a dan morgenstern catalog of jazz on television. turns out that it was part of an hour long special sponsored by timex from 58 or 59 and released on vhs in 1980. timex originally produced three of them, and this is from the last one. check it out.

its on son.

check one two. check one two.