Dave Liebman Plays the Blues a la Trane

With a long and exceptional career already behind him Dave Liebman shows no sign of flagging. Quite the opposite. His latest, Lieb Plays the Blues a la Trane (DayBreak 75978), is a sax-bass-drums trio in a live setting, an ideal way to hear Lieb. And of course he returns to his roots on this album to re-examine his debt to the Master, John Coltrane, and the blues in-and-out that Trane pioneered.

The bass and drums are handled well by two players with whom I am not familiar: Marius Beets provides the deftly executed bass underpinning and Eric Ineke puts the swing on solid footing with an assertive post-Elvin drumming style.

The program touches on some key pieces with which Trane was intrinsically linked. You get Miles' "All Blues," Duke Ellington's "Take the Coltrane," plus Tranes' own "Up Against the Wall," "Mr. P.C.," and the less-often-played "Village Blues."

As has thankfully been the case in the last few years, Lieb is back on tenor as well as soprano. In both he shows his own great mastery. It is a fitting tribute to one of the major forces in music of the past 100 years. It is also a tribute to Mr. Liebman himself--who has so vibrantly created his own exceptional improvisational brilliance over the edifice that Trane built for all of us.

Beautiful listening to you!

The Kronos Quartet Performs "Uniko" with Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen

There are musical works that come along now and then that go beyond what categorical pigeonholing comfortably handles. Such music is all-the-more welcome in the sense that it expands the boundaries of possibility for music as we understand it in the present tense.

Such is most assuredly the case with the new Kronos Quartet offering Uniko (Ondine 1185-2), featuring the music of Kimmo Pohjonin and Samuli Kosminen. First of all, this neither sounds like or is a typical string quartet-chamber music suite (there are seven contrasting movements or segments involved). That is because the quartet is augmented by Pohjonen's accordion and voice and Kosminen's string & accordion sampling and electronic manipulation. What you end up with is something that sounds orchestral in texture, though with a quartet component that is central to the music.

Secondly, the music itself. It has some of the drive of rock, a minimalist element that does not rest on repetition so much as it makes use of it in passing as a way to flesh out structural moments (again sometimes in the manner of progressive rock, but also sometimes in the way of the more traditional classical use of ostinato). The variations that appear in parts of the work have a kind of fusionoid thrust meets dance-folk ornateness that gives the listener a new plane on which to hear the music. There are also (as implied above) Northern Euro-vernacular strains very much a part of the music--allusions to dance forms, folk melodies, etc. This is especially apparent in the accordion parts, but generally permeates the entire work on a number of levels. Thirdly there is a deeply resonant sound achieved in the electronic processing of the initial live signal and a sometimes attractively horizontal soundscaping that comes into play--not, though, in a consistently obvious or formulaic sense. That brings us to point four: the music most definitely eschews the formula as standard operating procedure. They throw out the book on what constitutes the expected way to do things today. Pohjonen and Kosminen meld all the various aspects together in ways that in no way sound rote or programmatic.

Finally, then, it is a musical experience that delights with unexpected juxtapositions, invigorates with the excitement and drive of the powerfully virtual ensemble in tutti overdrive, and brings in a wealth of musical content and continually varying sound color.

This is one of the most interesting and unusual bodies of music I've heard yet this year. It is like the Kronos Quartet to come up with unexpected syntheses that help define the 21st Century musically. They've done it once again, thanks of course to the considerable compositional and arranging talents of Pohjonen and Kosminen. It's one of Kronos's very best! That is indeed something.

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!

Swing Revival Chicago-Style: John Burnett Orchestra

John Burnett's Orchestra (big band) has been holding forth in and around Chicago for a number of years. Their new, third album Down For Double (Delmark 596) comes out of two live and one studio session from 2000 through 2010. It's subtitled "Saluting the Best Bandleaders of Swing" and that's what it does. That doesn't mean that every important bandleader is represented, but Miller, Duke, Count, Goodman, Rich, Krupa and Slide Hampton (?) are each honored by one or more of their best-known charts. The last three cuts (and chronologically the first session) brings in clarinet powerhouse Buddy DeFranco. Otherwise, the soloists do their best but it's really about the ensemble giving the chestnuts the full sound that the early 78s lacked.

Not everything on this CD is in the realm of institutionally bonafide classics. "Cottontail," yes, but also Buddy Rich's "West Side Story" suite; "In the Mood." but also Slide Hampton's "The Blues."

Everything has the sparkle of a well-drilled and pretty polished unit. This no doubt is a band especially to appreciate live. If they don't really seem to be contributing much beyond the revival stage, it has to be understood that their objective is not to be "the new big band," but more "the revival band," much as, let's say, a doo-wop revival group is not expected to carve new territory in that genre.

They sound lively and they swing. What they do is what they do! Put me in a club with John Burnett holding forth, give me a drink or two and I'll be having a good time.

Dottie Grossman and Michael Vlatkovich Collaborate on Word and Music Project

Dottie Grossman puts together short prosaic poems dealing with Zen-like slices of everyday life, friendships and day-to-day reflections on it all. Michael Vlatkovich is a noted trombonist-bandleader in the avant improvisation realm. The two have collaborated on a CD project that alternates Dottie's short poems with equally short improvisations by Michael's quintet. Call and Response and Friends (pfMentum 060) is the intriguing result.

Each segment lasts from one to two minutes, Dottie then quintet in alternation. The constantly refocused, straightforward yet cognitively labyrinthine prose-poetry recitations set up an expectation that is realized in equally varied musical comments by the group. There is freedom; there is focus.

It works completely because Ms. Grossman and the Vlatkovich conflagration are well attuned to one another. Something like this could quickly become pretentious, over-reaching, self-affirming in a kind of conceited aren't-we-artists sort of way. The fact that it all is most certainly NOT has to do with the unprepossessing and almost casual (deceptively perhaps) image-weaving that takes place between the two creative forces.

It is NOT an uneasy melding of prose-poem and jazz. It is an EASY one. Very much recommended.

What is the Next Big Thing in Jazz?

The music scene changes and at what point do we wake up and say, “things are different?” Probably a few years ago. In strictly musical terms however, the hundreds of jazz releases coming out every month, some produced in quantities of 300 or less, make for an almost impossible task for one person to evaluate. None of us can hear all of them, nor I suppose would we want to. The possibility of missing something seminally important is real, but there is also no real trend if you take everything as your compass. Imagine being here back in 1958, let’s say? Hundreds of jazz releases every month like now, yet looking back, there were really important trends in the music—but those were exemplified in only perhaps 30 albums that year--of the 5,000 give or take--or even less. For the most part certain labels were where you best looked for the breakthroughs. You wouldn’t have expected Jubilee or ABC Paramount to be the ones, and they weren’t.

So many more almost non-label releases today though, so many more players spread out over the world, so decentralized a means to disseminate the music, so many gigs gone, so many teaching, it IS a different world. It’s hard to be totally certain where the “new thing” will come from, if it is coming.

And maybe it will stay where it is for a while, many styles existing side-by-side, nothing and nobody taking over the reigns of control. Perhaps that’s better anyway?

Mingus called jazz a folk music. Really, ALL music is folk music. What does that mean? Lots of contributions from lots of people making a music what it is, not some over-towering genius calling all the shots. Does jazz need its next Wagner? I don’t know if I am sure it does. Of course it’s nice from a marketing standpoint if people can say, “Right. So and so is the next big thing. Buy the person’s music and make money for us.” Is that a good thing? It is for that label. For the music? I don’t know.

Dan Block Plays the Music of Duke Ellington

Reedman Dan Block is cool with me. His Plays the Music of Duke Ellington, From His World to Mine (Miles High 8612) is cool too. It's not just another Duke tribute. For this one Dan obviously spent some time with the song list. It's not the well-worn blockbusters on display here, but instead some of the relatively under-recorded gems like the WWII era "Kissing Bug," the New Orleans Suite movement "Second Line," the Bigard-not-canard "Are You Sticking?" (he wasn't) and eleven other goodies. They are all arranged skillfully for an intimate small-group setting (reeds, vibes, piano, guitar, bass, drums, etc., in a shifting configuration) and approached from a modern mainstream point of view.

And Dan gets a chance to shine on tenor, clarinet, alto, bass clarinet, even the basset horn.

It is a definite treat to hear this one. Block sounds great, the band swings, the compositions and arrangements are excellent. A kind of swing-bop nirvana, a rare experience with today's confluence of styles, is something that is very possible, though hard to find. You can experience it by listening to this engaging and hip Dan Block album. It's an excellent tip of the cap to Ellington's music and to Dan Block as well. Enjoy it.