Grego Applegate Edwards Talks About his New Two Volume Suite, Rust Belt

Once again I beg your forbearance as I use this blog space to talk about my latest music, Rust Belt I and Rust Belt II (Ruby Flower Records), which are now available at Amazon.com under Grego Applegate Edwards. As before the "discussion" takes the form of a phony interview of self with self.

Blogger Grego: What made you do this music?

Artist Grego: I guess that's a story in itself. In the past decade I've been doing a lot of reflecting on the area I live in (just outside of NYC on the Jersey side, a once thriving industrial zone) and where I grew up (west of this area in Jersey, just outside a major factory town, Butler). I was taught in college to look at how economic forces help shape the culture that exists in any area and time. I accepted the idea but did not feel it as directly as I have in recent years. Recently I've spent a fair amount of my time in Hackensack, NJ, a very old town that formed as many towns did on the edge of a body of water (the Hackensack River), mostly because of the possibility of shipping-based commerce. Nowadays the town has shown much evidence of the blight of rust belt transformation...seen in the ruins and re-purposing of factory buildings that still dot the landscape. It's no accident that an old Salvation Army headquarters still stands, though perhaps ironically now a real estate office. It was built in the '20s on the eve of the Great Depression, when the beginning of industrial decline first made a real appearance in the area.

Anyway it got me thinking of my early youth. Butler was at one point one of the world's centers for the manufacturing of rubber goods, with the Butler Rubber factory there a major producer of hard rubber items like Ace combs, bowling balls, etc. There was also until 1958 and its fatal destruction by fire the Pequonnock Rubber Reclamation Center--an industrial complex that received endless shipments of scrap rubber--old tires, etc--by rail and melted it all down to create sheets of rubber which then were purchased by rubber manufacturers to make new goods. Between the two of them, Butler employed thousands to work the factories. The entire area centered around the manufacturing of rubber goods economically and socially. My dad made his living selling rubber goods himself--o-rings. Most people in eastern Jersey existed because of manufacturing, one way or another.

When I was four years old I remember one of my first shopping trips to downtown Butler with my mom. It was a god awful inferno of the smells of melted rubber, the thick smoke and the loud industrial sounds coming from both factories, but it was then the principal shopping area, too. So I remember walking down the sidewalk on Main Street with the huge block of wall-to-wall rubber factories going full tilt and giving me a very nauseous feeling, yet on the right of me the many shops. I had ten cents in my pocket and entered the local five and ten--now long gone as are the two factories. That time in 1957 was the end of the road for 78-rpm records but they still could be found, and so in one big bin at the five and ten there was an assortment of cut-out 78 recordings that were on sale for nine cents each. As it turns out they had a Roulette 78 of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross with Count Basie doing "Jumpin at the Woodside" b/w "Rusty Dusty Blues." I bought that one because it looked interesting (mostly because of the visual design on the label) and it turned out it was my first jazz record in what ended up to be a very long line of them.

So thinking back I realized in the last several years that the record existed, that the 5 & 10 existed, we living there existed because of the backbone of industry that thrived all over the region. Without it, everything I did or did not directly experience would have not been possible in the form things took. No job for my father, no 5 & 10, no jazz players making a living, no network of clubs offering music to people, none of it would have existed as it did then.

And now the factories are gone, industry has moved elsewhere, the local 5 & 10 is long gone, the jobs people had for better or worse in industry have disappeared, and the clubs, the record industry that fully thrived on people having spending money for things like jazz recordings, all of it has disappeared in the form that I took for granted as a kid. And looking back in this decade I relived that process lasting some 50-60 years, the process of the making of the rust belt. There was a story there, there was the sound of the factories, the music the factories made possible, the sound of everyday industrial life punctuated by church bells on Sundays, school bells, factory bells, railroad crossing bells, all gradually fading in their own ways and their place taken by whatever it is that makes the Eastern US support a population now, built over a set of crumbling factory foundations, bowling balls, combs and all the other accretions of the local historical industrial world becoming buried in time and space.

That was how I entered into a long sort of aural and mental meditation that culminated in the music of Rust Belt. I pictured the house I live in at the moment, an old one, as no doubt a house occupied by factory workers in the mid-last century. How was it to live there then? I looked around at the changes, felt very directly the economic recession and wondered what it was this part of the US could do now to support the population. Will we all work at fast-food restaurants? Wal-Marts? How can we support life if this is our future?

So it was a period where I suddenly GOT IT--that feeling of time and change and the economics shifting and de-creating a huge complex of lifeways that was the industrial Eastern US. And it gave me sounds and musical ideas that would express the time then, the disappearance, the ghost town of empty or reused factory buildings and the ghosts of the lifeways and the people that toiled and somehow made a living, ate those pancakes and hamburgers, went to high school football games, shopped in the stores, celebrated the war victories or mourned the war dead, listened to radios and TVs that told them something about their lives, raised their kids, did the everyday things we now feel exist a little less and a little less.

By now we know it all changed or is changing and now its all about texting, cell phones, making cell phones in China and selling them here, a life all seemingly centered around those phones. I started feeling vividly all the differences between then and now, for good and ill. I wanted to make that into a musical suite, though at first when I started making the music I had that gotcha enlightenment but did not give name to the music it produced. Only later as I got into it did I see the relationship of the realization of time and process into its direct creative transformation. And then it all really came together. Or I hope it did, anyway!

Blogger Grego: All that as an introduction...I see. Do you always talk/write so much?

Artist Grego: No. But this whole complex of feelings and thoughts I also envision as a novel, where there's going to be even more words, so you should be grateful I don't just spring that on you!

Blogger Grego: OK, OK. So let us get to the music. I heard you mumbling the other day how the music contrasts bell sounds with rust silence. What is that about and how did that come about?

Artist Grego: The image in my head and the sounds that grew in my head have to do with the story--of how the music then filling the world mingled with the sounds of all kinds of bells and the sounds of industry. What I was hearing I set about intuitively to create. For this project it was very much an additive process. I started with bell sounds from various sources and started to manipulate them electro-acoustically. Once I had created some of that I went into the basement studio and tried out some things that might layer atop the sounds, so I grabbed my various guitars, keyboards, drums, percussion and bass guitars that had by then congealed as instruments of choice. One thing lead to another and after trial and error and lots of time playing, listening back and thinking, a suite began to take shape. There were bell sounds, both free and composed elements all falling into various sections. The free and new music elements took shape with a bunch of sections that dealt with rust belt locations, factory rhythms and human rhythms, the punctuation of all the time with bells, the life of the workers and residents centering around periods of work, rest and break time, the ghostly feeling of the loss of all of that and the silent sound of architectural and cultural ruins.

Blogger Grego: Why do you start with "Music on Mbuti Themes"?

Artist Grego: I can't rationally answer that. The Mbuti peoples of Central Africa make some extraordinarily beautiful music and at the same time as this rusty industrial buzz was playing out in my head, there was the contrasting elaborately primal beauty of the Mbuti music that seemed to flicker back and forth in my mind with the music of industry. We all come out of Africa, ultimately, and the Mbuti music symbolized a very different life that we all must have experienced in some way, that we all carry with us in the deep recesses of our DNA and our unconscious music minds. So that seemed like a way to begin--to go back to a beginning and then shoot forward to the industrial revolution, skipping agricultural byways I know, but kind of making a point about the industrial world and how it changed us all quite radically, while also musically giving us other things in response. So that I guess was why. But I just HEARD it as a starting point. I wasn't thinking then WHY I was doing it.

Blogger Grego: And then there are some sections that are more obviously rock oriented, psychedelic in ways.

Artist Grego: Yes--again that all just fell into place because I felt that the music contrasted, gave punctuation, that those passages were like time marking bells of their own, since that style of rock was a big part of my upbringing in this pre-rust world, too.

Blogger Grego: So you ended up with this two-volume suite of music. Is it supposed to show off your being able to play a bunch of instruments?

Artist Grego: No, not really. It has some leeway for just playing, yes, but in no way am I putting myself forward as a guitarist, a keyboardist, or an anything-ist. I play composer's instruments. It was a way to create an orchestral blanket of sounds, to think pretty carefully about sound colors and electric-acoustic blends that expressed the tolling of the bells and the coming of the rust. I hope that each section tells a sonic part of the story, which the song titles pretty much explain. It probably doesn't make sense to talk about the music much further, as the listening will I hope have a kind of narrative beyond my words.

Blogger Grego: "No Putt-Putt for Pop-Pop?"

Artist Grego: Well, yes, at the end Pop-Pop is unemployed, or can't have a car, or is making a hasty retirement from the work world, like it or not!

Blogger Grego: So these albums are out now?

Artist Grego: Yes, happily. I thank Ruby Flower records for putting them out and all who have encouraged me in the last rather tough year I've had. They are priced at $10 per volume, not to make money but to make the music available so that people can hear it. The Amazon link is http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Grego+Applegate+Edwards Copy and paste the url into your browser to get to that page.

Blogger Grego: Anything else you'd like to say?

Artist Grego: Sure, but I think I've said enough already. I humbly put this music out in the hope that it will express something of how I have felt over the last few years about how it is to live through huge changes in your world, OUR world, and what that might sound like. Thanks to everybody out there who reads my blogs and, I hope, might listen to my music, too!

Giovanni di Domenico, Alexandra Grimal, Chergui

I won't say there will be a time when I "know it all." Doing these reviews can be a humbling experience because there are so many excellent players-artists out there that I would probably know nothing about unless otherwise exposed, thanks to the labels and artists who send their work. And each has a musical world, some are very unexpected, some familiar, some in between.

An excellent example is the duo of Giovanni di Domenico and Alexandra Grimal and their 2-CD set Chergui (Ayler 141-142). I reviewed something with Giovanni on it a while ago. This is my first brush with the duo.

Alexandra is on soprano and tenor sax; Giovanni plays piano. These are compositional-free pieces, most written by di Domenico, one a collaboration, and a few by Ms. Grimal. Most are for the two together; a few are solo showcases for each artist.

The music has jazz inflections but in many ways is in a new music zone that reflects modern avant classical without necessarily embracing it. It is the "in betweenness" that sets the music off in part as exceptional. That and the fully formed qualities of the playing.

It is music to listen to closely--not background music in any sense. And the more you listen, the more there is to appreciate. There is much that is atmospheric; all has spirit but it is not a "blowing session" so much as it is a carefully thought-out articulation of musical worlds.

I must say this set impresses me greatly. If you are looking for the new and the very good-excellent, this set is that! Listen and ye shall be rewarded.

Grego Applegate Edwards Talks About His New Second Album "Collage for Jack Kerouac"

Self: So you are doing another self-interview on your music, like you did for your first album "Travels in Tyme"? (http://classicalmodernmusic.blogspot.com/2014/09/grego-applegate-edwards-talks-about.html)

Grego: Yes I guess I am. It's not like I am trying to climb on some high-horse as much as I want to interest people in my music and since I am more or less a nobody this seems like a good way to do it.

Self: So your new album Collage for Jack Kerouac is out? You say it is a bit more rock oriented than the last. Does that mean you are selling out?

Grego: No, not at all. Nowadays real, hard-art rock is not especially commercial, if it ever was. This album, as all my music, expresses the musical influences I have internalized since I was young. And really five main influences stay with me: one is classical and especially modern classical, one is jazz and its legacy, leading up to, third, the ultra-modern and avant forms, fourth is what unsatisfyingly is called "world" or "ethnic" music, and last there is rock--not just anything but the art rock that affected me in the later '60s and early '70s, the psychedelic and experimental bands of that period and anything else which partakes of that in the years that followed. Rather than experimenting with time structures as I did in the last album, I am looking for various orchestrated rock sounds that are informed by song form at times, and have mesmerizing qualities that come out of world trance and minimalism.

Self: So are you on drugs?

Grego: That question raises a mind set that has been destructive to avant progressive music, though at one time it helped promote the popularity of weirdness. I find drugs irrelevant to my own creativity. I do not get involved with them. I don't think they are a solution to anything. Hard drugs mess people up. I am indifferent to whether people do them in a legal sense. I don’t think people should go to jail for using them. And I don’t design my music to get high with, though some may do that and that is not my business. When the conservative reaction to the '60s set in, the "say no" hysteria somehow got attached to serious musics as well as substance re-education. There are some who still profit by the traffic while they pay lip service against it. Others don’t. But music and drugs do not have anything to do with each other on a cultural level, not these days. Do people say that Picasso was meant to look at when high? No. So why music? To me the legacy of the earlier days has to do with consciousness raising. Some found it in various places but there was a change in perspective in the Western world in general and part of that has to do with the rise of the Beats and Jack Kerouac in the '50s. And that's why I am coming out with this album, Collage for Jack Kerouac, as a kind of tribute to what he accomplished and his influence on me as an adolescent and young adult, and even now.

Self: Tell us what Jack Kerouac has meant to you, then.

Grego: I will try to do that as briefly as I can. My parents' generation got a quadruple whammy of two World Wars and the Depression, followed by Cold War paranoia. If any generation should have felt the shock of change, of the need to question deep-seated beliefs, it was them. And yet for the most part many emerged from all that, if they survived, with a "can-do" optimism. Perhaps the sixties started to puncture that feeling, but it was rather late in the game for them. On the other hand the Beat Generation came up out of WWII and into a post-war world with a feeling that the values of the past needed reconsidering. Suburban America did not satisfy their search for happiness. And that search became what they were about. I think some day historians will look back and see the Beats as prophetic of a change in "Western Civilization." They questioned middle-American consciousness of normalcy and rootedness, and sought instead an alternative lifestyle and way of thinking that would be more enlightened. They in part embodied a restlessness but also a decreasing attachment to one place, exemplified in the suburban town where many lived most their lives, worked and raised children. After a while economic change made changes in residence from time-to-time a necessity. There was the move of some from city to suburbs, then from one town to another, and there was an influx of southern Afro-Americans from rural to urban landscapes in search of a livelihood. The Beats came to be aware of the hipness of Afro-American immediacy in music and word, and in part incorporated both the idea of jazz's ever present there-ness with the verbal creativity of Black America. Beyond that there was the discovery of Zen consciousness, of a search for experience above permanence, an appreciation of the landscape of America as a totality, from urban hipness to car culture and the ability for anyone to traverse the land from coast-to-coast rather easily. There were other things too, but the most literate like Kerouac expressed this feeling, this restless longing in eloquent terms. It was about a liberation from Puritan values, from a strictly sober-minded industriousness, an embrace of life as a form of art, a liberation of personhood from the strict controls of the past, a celebration of personhood and creative living in all its various aspects. Kerouac's novels may have embraced something that was already in the air, but he did it in a way that was compelling and aesthetically pleasing. What followed was the '60s in all its tumultuousness--an appreciation of Black culture and values, an embrace of diversity and the joy of everyday living, a questioning of the surety of middle-America and its emphasis on economic success, and so on.

Self: Wait, stop! You are saying much there. But how does this relate to your personal experience and how you express it in musical terms?

Grego: By the time I came of age Kerouac and his Beat buddies had already had influence on my older siblings. The rise of rock and its Afro-American rootedness on purity of expression, soul if you will, and the increased presence of expressionist jazz that in an obvious way was embodied in bebop and what came after, all that was coming to be in my early life. And a lifestyle revolution was underway that complemented the new aesthetic. The immediacy of that had already affected me greatly by the time I was a teenager. Then I read Kerouac's books and what he expressed made sense, hit a nerve, made me want to explore my own creative possibilities too, made me initially conscious of a Zen such-ness to living. I tried to express that musically on some tape collages I was working on in high school that included some recitation from Kerouac's "On the Road". That went well in terms of what I was trying to do but when I went off to Berklee in 1971 I pretty much left off on that, though I was still working on electroacoustics then and after for a while. The idea came to me after 9-11 had run us all amok to return to what I was trying to do on that Kerouac project. I resurrected what I felt was the most interesting part--which featured altered piano tapes accompanied by recitation. I laid the track down as it was in my studio as I had left it and began to compose music on top of it that worked outwards from that point, paraphrasing the words to "On the Road," turning the recitation to a sung melody, trying to create a rock-avant soundscape that followed the curve of the original but added more orchestral rock elements. I tied that into a reworking of a song I wrote in 1971 and reworked the whole into what became on the album "Opposite Directions - The Spirit of Kerouac." That became the twenty-something-odd centerpiece for the album as it ended up. It is in that way a kind of travelogue about the collapse of old ways and the creation of a new consciousness out of the ashes.

Self: OK, stop again! There are three other pieces on the album. Where did you get the idea for them and how do they relate?

Grego: I wasn't consciously trying to build around the "Spirit of Kerouac" as much as I was looking for different sounds in the studio and they happened to fit as I listened back. "Last Night Constantinople" was a punky sort of thing about the last night before the fall of Byzantium and the dance residents did at the city gates, a sort of dance of ecstatic desperation. That fit because the rise of the Beats in some ways I believe heralded a change in how America thought of itself. Then the third cut was more mesmeric, both ecstatic and a return to the land, symbolized by the Paiute Indians and music I imagined to accompany their periodic gathering of Pine Nuts. The last number is my adaptation of a Dream Song by the Temiar of Malaysia. They are a tribal group still active today and the songs they sing are in response to dreams the villagers have. "Agin" or "The Spirit of the Tiger" is one of their songs from the 1930s. It fit to me because the Beat/Kerouac revolution gave importance to dreams, as can be seen in Kerouac's "Book of Dreams." Plus the heightened post-Kerouac consciousness takes dream imagery seriously and in a way the future of what has been is like a dream right now. We can’t be sure where we are going but we can have intimations of it in dreams. Kerouac and the Temiar have that in common and I wanted to leave on an open note of uncertainty and expectancy.

Self: OK, I think we have plenty from you on the "back story" behind the music. What can you say about the music itself?

Grego: There are none of the time simultaneities of the first album. The music tends to pulsate with a rock feeling and the music uses mostly standard rock instrumentation--guitars, bass, drums, keys, some percussion and vocals. The "Opposite," Kerouac and Constantinople pieces were more carefully arranged than the concluding Paiute and Temiar Tiger pieces, which in many ways were improvised into being layer after layer, though Paiute has an electroacoustic foundation that in part shaped the outcome of the music. There is some amount of tension in the first half of the album. In the second there is a kind of great release.

Self: So what is it you want people to take away from this music? That you are a multi-instrumentalist of supreme virtuosity?

Grego: Not at all. This one, like the last, is about the totality of sound, the layering, the music as expressive yet not soloistic. One advantage of doing all the instruments and vocals myself is that it was easy to resist the temptation to try and have a particular part stand out in some kind of performative way. Other albums will have more of that and consequently more of a jazz-orientation than this one does. Listening to this one, you will not go away with a feeling that any one instrument is projecting a well-played appearance. It is the layering and complexities of a virtual orchestra. With a symphony orchestra you cannot ordinarily single out, say, a second violinist and say, "wow, he or she is really good." Whether I am accomplished or not is irrelevant here--I don’t care right now--because it is the totality of music that is meant to be heard. Not to compare but early Pink Floyd was designed that way, tribal music is often presented that way, and so orchestral music. I am trying for something a little new that comes out of all those roots. My hope is that the listener, after a number of listens, will come away with the feeling of having experienced music that in many ways feels familiar but maybe also departs from what people expect.

Self: So is that why you say you aren't trying to grow your audience or become more commercial?

Grego: No musician wants to be unheard, so sure I am always concerned that there will be an audience for the music, the more the merrier. But I did not set out to make music that would appeal to a large number of people, because that is not realistic given the demands the music makes on a listener. If I can please a few out there I will be content. And this #2 is part of a long developmental musical arc that I hope I can bring to listeners before I meet my maker! You can get further info and buy the album at Amazon. The link is http://www.amazon.com/Collage-Kerouac-Gregory-Applegate-Edwards/dp/B00U35YM88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425328621&sr=8-1&keywords=gregory+applegate+edwards

Self: That's great. Thanks. What comes after this one?

Grego: I hope I can release a disk of integrated electro-acoustic works on a mythological-astronomical theme. It will be called I think Aurora Dreaming.

Self: That sounds interesting. Please don’t forget to feed me and provide shelter!

Grego: That's another problem entirely, I guess. I'll be working on that, too.

Self: Some chicken might be nice!

Grego: Chicken? Hmm... We’ll see.

Tesla Coils, Blaise Siwula, Harvey Valdes, Gian Luigi Diana

The world of improvised music continues to evolve. There are those ensembles that favor an acoustic "purity" and there are those that incorporate electronics. Today we have a great example of the latter, Tesla Coils (Setola di Maiale).

It is a potent threesome of Blaise Siwula on soprano-alto-tenor sax, Harvey Valdes on electric guitar, and Gian Luigi Diana on laptop doing real-time sampling and sound manipulation. The advantage to this set up is that the electronics are integral and part of the live performance/improvisation.

Blaise and Harvey lay down a carpet of vivid improvisations and Gian transforms the sounds in various ways, adding a third instrument which is a direct consequence of the other two sound generations.

Anybody who reads this column knows I cover Blaise Siwula and his smart yet torching reedwork. He sounds excellent as ever here. Harvey Valdes plays in an out, fragmented and sometimes psychedelically inspired guitar style that works well in the ensemble. Gian Luigi Diana adds varied textures and densities that form an organic part of the proceedings.

In short, it all comes together. This is first-tier experimental music that once again shows the way to Brooklyn, a world hotbed for new music.

If you like well-executed, fertile-free soundmaking, this one is for you. Now if they used me on drums/percussion...no, just kidding. This is the dope.

Sonny Simmons, Delphine Latil, Symphony of the Peacocks, 2011

This is not your typical Sonny Simmons album. It's him on cor anglais and alto, Delphine Latil on harp, a little studio manipulation of the sound at the beginning, and a cosmic approach in general. Symphony of the Peacocks (Improvising Beings ib04) is so well done that you don't miss the "other" Sonny of fire and heat.

And after all, he's done similar excursions on Manhattan Egos and Burning Spirits, just not in such concentrated form as here.

Latil's harp and the kind of quasi-eastern sound of the whole at first brings to mind classic Alice Coltrane. And such comparisons are not out of place. But ultimately there is a LOT of pure Sonny here, and Delphine Latil has her own, somewhat more linear melodic approach on harp.

Symphony of the Peacocks occupies a singular place, so far as I know, in Sonny Simmons' output. It is quite beautiful and there is much to explore here. Go to a new world with this one and stay for a while. You'll come back refreshed and rejuvenated, I will be willing to bet.

Nate Wooley, Christian Weber, Paul Lytton, Six Feet Under

Since I write all the reviews myself for my three music blogs, I sometimes find the task of listening, evaluating and writing up the articles (usually 15 per week) rather taxing and, when the wolf is at my door as it is at the moment, a huge amount of time that might be more productively spent on survival attempts. My partner gives me those looks, which mean "why are you still doing this?" and I cannot blame her. But I am of course devoting enough time to the survival front in all truth. And I do know that the discipline of this rather rigorous regime reaps quite considerable dividends in terms of my understanding of the current situation regarding "serious" musics of various genres. I have the remote hope also that someone might once again be willing to pay me for my efforts not too far down the road.

And when an LP like the one at hand appears, I remember why I listen. We have today a thoroughly outside trio adventure. Trumpeter Nate Wooley, bassist Christian Weber and drummer Paul Lytton kick up plenty of dust on their Six Feet Under (No Business LP16), a spontaneously open set of trio improvisations that situate the three on the nether fringes of avant invention.

Nate is in an all-sounds, many notes and the notes and tones in-between those notes and tones mode. He is afire with ideas throughout.

Christian is in a complementary mode. He plays a great deal of bass on these sides and what he does supports, cajoles and sets the trio off in good directions.

Paul Lytton too is in a highly creative mood, with his wonderfully busy, acoustically distinctive free sound-sculpting in sharp focus.

This LP is printed up in an edition of only 300, which tells you something about what "No Business" means these days. It's a very good trio outing, with Nate Wooley in great form. So grab one if you are inclined.

Narada Burton Greene, Live at Kerrytown House

Narada Burton Greene has been a part of the new improvisation music scene for so many years, he has been such a singular presence within it, he practically has become an institution of one. The Burton Greene of today is flourishing, a pianist-composer-improviser of many facets, a creator who thrives in his embodiment of tradition and change, freedom and structure, the past and the future.

Or so it seems to me as I listen to his solo performance Live at Kerrytown House (No Business NBCD 39).

Maestro Greene is like a coral island, each piece of what it is to be Burton Greene remains, the earlier conjoining with successive waves of later developments, nothing left behind but everything coming to bear on the present now of what he plays today.

So on this solo set you hear some of the "free" elements of early Greene, the more composed avant elements, the expressively improvised tonalities, melodic originality, harmonic movement, a hint of stride and bop, all a part of who Burton Greene is today.

It is no-frills Burton Greene, an essentialist pairing down that is decidedly NOT generic. He sounds satisfyingly, undeniably like himself. Unpredictable, not reducible to a set of influences because he has gone his own way all this time. And here he is, in the present-day, giving us almost 80 minutes of who he is.

It might surprise even the most well-versed Greene aficionado. He goes to places unexpected at times, but he brings it all together for us in the end, in the middle, the beginning.

This is serious music that lifts you up and sets you down in another place. Each segment hits you like a wave on the beach, ever different, no two exactly alike, but once you know what's coming (or rather you know you don't know) it gives you musical satisfaction.

This isn't a summing up, for there is no doubt much more to come. It is a summing in, a faithful portrait of part of who Burton Greene is today.

So listen and I think it will put you someplace nice.

Kali. Z. Fasteau, Making Waves, 2004

From time to time in the past months I have been covering some of the more interesting releases of Kali. Z. Fasteau. She is an multi-instrumental artist and music leader who deserves more recognition, and her rather extensive body of recorded examples equally deserves to be heard.

Today we have her 2004 release Making Waves (Flying Note 9010). It's a formidable four-artist lineup of Kidd Jordan on tenor, Bobby Few at the piano, the late Sirone on bass and Kali on synth, soprano, cello, drums, vocals and mizmar. The album is comprised of several sessions recorded in 2000 and 2004.

The flow of the music is fast-paced, thanks in part to the 15 relatively short to very short improvisations and thanks to the great variety of instrumental combinations and moods addressed. Not everybody plays at all times, and so there are varying configurations of personnel as well--with much in the form of a series of duet exchanges.

This is cosmic music, as you come to expect with Ms. Fasteau, free new improv of genuine interest.

Kidd Jordan sounds fantastic, as does Bobby Few. Sirone is a fine lower presence when he is in the mix, and Kali gives the music lots of texture and torque with her very appropriate synth work, her atmospheric electronically enhanced vocals, post-Trane soprano, skittering cello, very respectable free drumming and droning mizmar.

It's a fascinating, very listenable exploration of the free zones Kali often dwells within, with a few new twists besides. And this one has the added attraction of a miniaturization that makes time go by quickly. Recommended!

Alvin Curran, "Electric Rags II" with the Rova Saxophone Quartet, 1990

Alvin Curran composes music that confounds and conflates genre-al expectations. Most of what he does has improvisational aspects, but also vivid aural sound painting and new music qualities. He is unique. I found his Electric Rags II (New Albion 027) a few years ago used and am now finally getting to a more intense series of listens. It features the Rova Saxophone Quartet along with Alvin Curran's templates for live electronic and electro-acoustic elements.

It is not music for pigeonholing. There are pre-arranged melodic events adroitly handled by the quartet, there is improvisational avantness, and there are sound colors and electronic transformations of various sorts as well. As is often the case with Curran, the sequence of music has a strongly narrative quality without there necessarily being a textual equivalent.

The electronics were derived from a special program that allows Curran to transform the sax quartet sound at any time. The notation for the quartet is sometimes standard, sometimes aleatoric (involving choice and chance on the part of the performers). Each of them is able to pilot one or more MIDI controllers that react to the sax utterences in variable ways. Plus the sections are to be performed in a random order. In the end there will be a different version every time the work is performed.

It's one of those Curran works that you must hear at least several times to absorb. And it is another good example of how Curran and the Rova Quartet make music of enduring vitality and impact. You can no doubt find this on the internet if you look for it. It may be out of print but it's worth finding! Like a Zen rock garden, the music has a plasticity that may bring you to another place in how you view your world. That depends on how you listen I suppose.

Scott Fields & Multiple Joyce Orchestra: Moersbow/OZZO

According to the Clean Feed website, Scott Fields wrote Moersbow/OZZO (Clean Feed 236) as two works that could be performed by at least 19 musicians, all of whom could improvise and read music. He recorded both works with a large outfit he calls the Multiple Joyce Orchestra. The CD at hand presents the fruits of that labor.

This is challenging music of an avant sort. It combines textured soundscapes, collective soloing and worked-out sequences that have a post-Braxtonian edginess at times.

No single instrumentalist is meant to dominate the proceedings. Instead a great variety of instrumental combinations come in and out of play more or less continuously.

It's a fascinating, successful, large-scale new music recital where the jazz and open elements combine and create a sonically rich result. It may not be a masterpiece of the new music, but it most certainly makes for a welcome addition to the scattering of existing works of its kind. Well worth a hearing if you follow the latest developments in the improv/new music nexus.

Skuli Sverrisson, "Seria," Beyond Category. . .

Blame Skuli Sverrisson if his music does not fit neatly into any category. Which blog should I post this review on? I posted my review of Seria II on my gapplegateguitar.blogspot.com site. It fitted there, I reasoned to myself, because there are guitars in the ensemble, and in some ways it is a world music. His music could equally be defined as no-new-age classicism, or post-ECM jazz composition. It's new music. That's as specific as one needs to get, I guess.

Seria (Seria Music) is quite obviously the first album in the series. It uses a mid-sized ensemble of stringed instruments, winds and such, and also a female vocalist, to present a music that has a certain connection to Indo-Pak classicism, the music of Oregon, and any number of elements, including some relationship to tonal classicism. But all that is only like saying that pizza uses flour, cheese, tomato sauce, etc., to get to where it is. The "getting to" is what counts. In the same way Seria goes beyond its individual components to lay something on us that sounds different.

There is some very interesting music happening here. Beyond that at this point I would suggest you listen to it and hear for yourself what it is about. It is lyrical, mellow, but in a spaced out kind of way. A good use of your time, I would think.

Andrea Centazzo, Deep Space Adventure Soundtrack, 2011

Many readers will know Andrea Centazzo as that monumental drummer-percussionist who made so many interesting albums with Steve Lacy and a slew of European avant jazz artists for Ictus records. He has another side, however, that you may not be familiar with. He is also a composer.

It is in this latter guise as well as the percussionist of stature that we encounter him on the soundtrack to the Adler Planetarium's new extravaganza, Deep Space Adventure (Ictus 210). I'll admit I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I first put this one on. Knowing the cosmic nature of planetarium shows I knew it would have some sort of space element. Beyond that I was clueless.

It turns out there is a great deal of substance going on. It's Andrea on a battery of percussion instruments, orchestral instrumentalists, and some MIDI synth and sampling production for a large-scale orchestral sound. The result is not jazz or improv, nor is it intended to be. It is a very appealing, spacey-symphonic new music excursion.

At times the percussion leads the music into minimalist-pulse directions, at times there are droning soundscapes, mysterious long notes, rich orchestral largos, spaced out gong envelopes and resonant altered tones. Sometimes the music sounds "progressive" (minus ELP or Jon Anderson). It is tonal centered for the most part, but modern sounding at the same time. And quite lyrical as well.

This is music that holds its own as music in and of itself, as composition. It is very engaging and no small feather in Maestro Centazzo's hat. Check it out.

Mark Applebaum and The Metaphysics of Notation

Mark Applebaum has entered a new world of his own making with his The Metaphysics of Notation project. It is documented on a recent DVD of the same name (Innova 787). Only a DVD could begin to cover the scope of the project with justice, because the work combines visual art, installation, performance art and musical execution as a totality.

The central raison d'etre for the work was the creation of a 70-foot linear pictographic "score" (w/several hanging mobiles) that Applebaum created on paper by hand, black symbols proceeding from left to right as in a conventional music manuscript. The "score" is without the usual staves, and the notations Applebaum has made are in the form of a varied and elaborate series of pictographic images meant to flow from one to another as would standard notation. The symbols and graphic images sometimes approximate musical notation in the sense that they utilize note symbols on occasion, but graphically enhanced and without the staves as context. For the rest the score is filled with images that suggest a visual representation of an open-ended musical sound-world. Some of the images are abstract, some representational, but all sequence together in ways that suggest a series of musical events. The score is as much a work of visual art as it is a quasi-prescriptive set of abstract visual analogs to guide and direct individual content decisions made by musicians in any given performance.

The score was installed as a number of large horizontal panels (plus mobiles), on view for a year at the Cantor Arts Center Museum of Stanford University.

The DVD addressing Applebaum's work is in three parts. The first is a documentary about the project, with commentary from the composer and a number of composer-musician-musicologists either involved in the project's realization or familiar with the work's parameters. The documentary also introduces you to the score itself and its installation context.

The second part consists of recorded one-minute excerpts from the 45 performances held at the museum on a weekly basis, accompanied by stills of each particular performance. The musicians involved vary from a single soloist to a moderate sized ensemble. Each performance group was left entirely free to make whatever musical sounds they deemed appropriate in realizing the musical implications of the score.

The third part of the DVD consists of two slowly scrolling panoramas of the score itself, one lasting eight minutes, the other sixteen.

In the end I was left with an appreciation of the imaginative scope of Applebaum's project. The documentary raises questions about the borders of legitimacy or even intelligibility when it comes to such work. Is it music? Art? Installation? Improvisation? Performance art? It is all of that. The difficulty perhaps in this is that, since there is no right or wrong way to realize the musical potential contained in the score, since Maestro Applebaum does not provide anything in the way of specific musical directives or suggestions, anything goes in a given performance. There is no "proper" or "improper" performance, no "good" or "bad" version. That is problematic only in the sense that the status of the work remains completely open and ultimately neutral. It does not exist in some tangible sense aurally. This will bother some people. Essentially though, at least the way the project is set up, it is the interaction of visual stimulus of score as visual art, the natural reverberant ambiance of the museum setting, and the free improvisations of the respective musicians that work in tandem to create a kind of totalized art-music gestalt. The 45-minute series of excerpts of the various musicians at work affirm how different any given performance can be from another. It's fascinating to hear and see.

I find the DVD quite illuminating, Applebaum's project thought-provokingly beautiful visually and conceptually, and the music absorbing. I recommend this one very much. By the way you probably don't want to miss the one-minute excerpt of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra tackling the music!

Jexper Holmen's Oort Cloud: Sustained Sound-Poetry at a High Level

What is an Oort Cloud? It is a massive cloud of comets that surrounds our part of the universe, a great distance away in human terms, but local presumably on the infinite universe level.

Danish composer Jexper Holmen has composed an hour-long work based on the contemplation of that formation. It is entitled Oort Cloud and has just been recorded and released as a Dacapo Records CD (8-226562).

When I worked at Scientific American books, the then-president referred to comets in a launch meeting as "those snoozy things." True. Get one of them in isolation, they are rather just "there." Put them in an Oort Cloud surrounding our friendly neighborhood universe-space and they become rather mysterious and at this point, ineffable.

The same might be said for Holmen's composition. One minute of it will not bring you to your feet with shouts of "Bravo!" An hour of this music very well might. That's because it's the cumulative effect of the musical cloud, hovering over our aural world, that becomes increasingly mystical, as it were, in its ever-presence.

The nuts and bolts of it are as follows: there are two accordionists and what sounds like an alto or soprano sax, situated in a resonant performance space. The accordions play continuous key-less tone clusters that shift gradually note-wise and vary in dynamic levels. The saxophonist gives out periodically with long multiphonic blasts and quieter soundings of same, as well as overtone-rich sustain notes. The key operative here is "sustain." The music is a continuous series of long tones that form collectively a kind of musical equivalent to the Oort Cloud.

It's ambient. It has patches that are fairly dissonant. The resonance of the performance chamber and the continually shifting blocks of unusual sound clusters make for an aural experience that has a kind of expansive effect on the perceiving hearer. It can become a kind of meditation on the mysteries of the universe and that cloud of comets that ring our world. That was what I began feeling as I listened over time.

There is nothing quite like this piece out there.You may love it, you may hate it, but you cannot ignore it. That says something. In that way, as in other ways as well, this music is a ringing success. Don't go near it, though, if you expect some kind of entertainment. It is rather more serious than that. It's almost a form of knowledge. For all that, it is unparalleled among works being produced today.

Anthony Braxton at Victoriaville, 2007

People outside of the United States, people who haven't spent time here lately, have a conception of America as a land of soft luxury, of abundance, of a glamorous and hedonistic existence. If you watch some TV shows, that's the view you get. Fact is, here on the ground, especially in the New York Metro Area where I dwell, it takes an enormous amount of money to live a plain, unadorned, near-poverty-level existence. A paradox? I guess. Sure somebody might have an HD-TV or a cool pair of sneakers, but they can't meet their monthly expenses as a result, and the TV throws out non-stop distortions and even outright untruths, cajoling the unsophisticated and unwary into believing all kinds of things that are not in their best interests, which in turn leads them to make decisions that further undermine their security and well being to the advancement of certain other interests. Excuse me, but it does need to be said.

OK, so that's what it feels like here right now. And then you look at a guy like Anthony Braxton, who might have been the jazz poster-boy of the past 20 years if he had diluted his music in certain ways or cow towed to older forms of improvising. Not only has he not done that, he continues to create ever more advanced and uncompromising music, music that is a little difficult for many people to understand. He is a man of courage and determination.

His long Composition No. 361, recorded live at the famed Victoriaville new music festival in 2007 (Victo 109), is a good example of the high level of his recent music, and also a good example of why he'll probably never appear on an MTV video (yes, they still do that).

It's music for 13 players. . . a sort of big band? Well, the musical result is not what you'd expect from a big band. It's more a large chamber ensemble of improvisers, including Taylor Ho Bynam, Nicole Mitchell and Mary Halvorson, to name a few of the more well-known people.

The 70-plus minute performance of the piece shows Braxton in a rather abstract mode. There are jagged-edged contours to the music, ever-shifting in ever-evolving combinations. There are moments of "free"-sounding soloing and there are moments that bring the music closer to a modern classical stance, and there are many moments where the two ways of proceeding are conflated. And always in a way that is recognizably Braxton-like. It takes a fair number of listens to latch onto the sonoric flow and logic of the piece. But in the end the listener is rewarded with music that opens up an aural pathway into the musical consciousness of the listener in ways that are very stimulating.

America. Not a place where a Braxton can thrive these days. Yet he has the courage to BE. To be himself. I consider that a high form of musical heroics. The results you can hear on Composition No. 361. I thank Mr. Braxton for staying with it. My world is a better place for it. Yours can be too.

The International Street Cannibals Deliver Their First, "Ballets and Solos"

When a new label emerges that is run by a group of composers of new music, it cannot but be a good thing. Especially if those composers are dedicated to realizing music that will benefit from the greater depth of coverage that such a cooperative venture provides. That's the case with Composers Concordance Records and their first release (COMCON001). This is a grass-roots NYC uprising of an iconoclastic bunch who have been influenced equally by contemporary classical compositional stances as well as rock and other modern-day musics.

Ballets & Solos is a product of the composer-driven ensemble International Street Cannibals, conducted ably by Dan Barrett. They juxtapose three chamber ensemble pieces with a number of solo compositions. The group pieces have in common a rock insistency, especially Joseph Pehrson's "Good Time" and Dan Cooper's "Dance Suite." The latter piece even begins with a kind of heavy metal riff transfigured and extended in a contemporary classical mode. Gene Pritsker's "A Challenge in the Dark" has a mellifluous quality combined with the contrapuntal complexity of a post-Stravinskian sound world.

The solo pieces provide interesting contrast. Pat Hardish's "Solo for Pete" gives Peter Jarvis and his drum set a rock workout. There are two pieces by Otto Luening, both worth hearing, well-performed and spiced with a bit of vernacular and dance-music qualities, so they fit in well with the rest of the music.

The album concludes with Greg Baker performing Gene Pritsker's piece for solo guitar, "Dead Souls." This too has some clear and captivating references to dance music, echoes of some ghostly fandango of a lost age.

So here we have an auspicious beginning for Composers Concordance. Ballets & Solos is an agreeable, provocative and ultimately quite enjoyable excursion into territories both well-explored and unfamiliar. It bodes well for future offerings and I wish all involved much success in this venture!

Paul Hartsaw with Trio, "Matter and Memory"

Paul Hartsaw, Chicago avant tenor and soprano, has been making very interesting music, quietly but definitively. We've covered several of them on these pages (see below) and continue today with a trio recording he made with bassist Andrew Young and percussionist Jerome Bryerton. Matter and Memory (metastablesound 013) is dedicated to the philosopher Henri Bergson. That seems fitting because the music consistently flourishes on abstracted, conceptual grounds. It's available as a download-only album from the usual sources (Amazon, i tunes, Napster, etc.)

It was recorded in 2007 and released this year. Like the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and others before them, they construct timbrally exploratory sonic worlds that envelope the listener with ever-changing densities, freely presented. All three players meld into one as they find means of expression that avoid the obvious combinations and rhythmic regularities to create a more "meta"-oriented approach. And so of course the name of the label for this release (metastable sound) seems as much descriptive and emblematic.

Each player contributes a thoroughgoingly original musical personality on these improvisations. They are deliberative in a high modernist realm; there are no mis-steps or quotations from the vernacular. This is very well-executed, rather pure music of the modern age. And it's really quite good. Don't plan to unleash it at your next dance party. It's not a music of overt pulsation. Or perhaps you SHOULD, if you have friends who have a sense of adventure. Nevertheless, this tends to be more contemplative than visceral, though generalities can be misleading, since Matter and Memory does have a highly expressive component.

Give this one a listen. It's good for your ears.

Propulsive Electric-Acoustic Jazz From Mikrokolektyw

When the sound of the unexpected is expected, yet what you get remains unexpected, it is a reason to sit up in your chair and take notice. Such was the case with the Polish duo Mikrokolektyw and their Delmark (591) CD Revisit when I first listened. Kuba Suchar is on the drums; Artur Majewski plays the trumpet; they both activate electronic parts, seemingly Moog derived.

What's cool and interesting about this music is the well conceived fullness they develop throughout. There are trumpet motifs that form thematic pivot points for the numbers and Artur plays within and without these motives in the course of his improvisations. Kuba plays some advanced and thought-out drum parts that have propulsion but also show a non-standard approach to the set. No unmediated backbeating on this! He's extraordinarily inventive in his pattern making and it contributes in no small part to why this is unusual music. The electronics are well conceived and in all cases add integrally to the music.

Mikrokolektyw play music of high adventure. Revisit takes the latter emanations from someone like Tomasz Stanko and builds a new edifice on top. Highly stimulating, highly absorbing sounds well worth hearing.

David Borgo's "Chance, Discovery and Design" DVD

David Borgo, musician, composer, conceptualist and educator, has much going for him. He plays fluent sax and flute in the jazz-improv-new-music mode, he combines at various times electronics, electro-acoustics, his "metric" music (which has an African sound to it), improv, modern jazz and modern classical. He also has a flair for visual video creation. All of these facets of his art are well in evidence on his DVD Chance, Discovery and Design (Circumvention).

The visuals: they are extraordinarily interesting. They actually go completely with the music. There's animation, computer graphics, and altered visuals of the musicians in action. They enhance the experience of the music in palpable ways.

There is a cast of some 16 musicians that come in and out of play on any given piece.

Chance runs the gamut from quasi-tribal to avant-fusionesque to high-impact improv. The vibrant visuals ought to help those who might not be familiar with these musical styles because they give them a "total art" context. But even if you know about these sort of sounds the package makes for a very stimulating foray into new music today.

Excellent.

Yuganaut Return with Second Release

The three-man cooperative Yuganaut returns this month with a second offering, Sharks (Engine). As with This Musicianship (Esp, 2008), Yuganaut provides a musically choreographed soundtrack to a three-way free exploration.

Stephen Rush, Tom Abbs and Geoff Mann play a variety of instruments to create episodic, thoughtfully contrived musical events that hang together in a new-music-meets-free-improvisation sort of hybrid. It's not a particularly aggressive sound that they construct. The music does not have a bursting-with-energy denseness that characterizes much work by others in this genre. Rather they use the air of no-sound to contrast with the particular sets of timbres and textures being evoked at any given point. It is this sort of framing that sets the music apart, like many of Tom Abbs' fine earlier efforts under his own name.

Yuganaut plays trio music with narrative thrust. It is winningly crafted. You can get it as a download or a CD at ESP Disk's website, among other outlets.