William Parker, Centering, Unreleased Early Recordings 1976-1987

Box sets can go a number of ways. For years the typical set contained all released material by an artist on a label plus a number of "bonus tracks," unreleased numbers and/or alternate takes. That was and is fine if you are a devotee of the artist, must have it all, and don't mind paying. Otherwise it can be a lot of money if all you really wanted were those few extra tracks.

Of course there are box sets of other sorts. Today's set is that. William Parker's Centering (No Business CD 42-47), as the subtitle makes clear, is composed entirely of Unreleased Early Recordings 1976-1987. It's six CDs in all, with booklet and attractive slipcase.

What makes all that important? It's William Parker the superb bassist, jazz composer and bandleader at his very best. It's avant "jazz," free expression, new music in quite decent sound quality, covering some of Maestro Parker's significant associations and performances in and around New York during the period. It is an ear opener.

First I need to give you a rundown of who does what and when. There are some fine duos and trios from the early period--with Daniel Carter, with Charles Gayle, and a trio with John Hagen and Arthur Williams. There is a lot of music from the Centering Dance Music Ensemble with David S. Ware and Denis Charles (that for the performance included Patricia Nicholson's dancing). That's one of my favorites of the set, but there are many high points to be heard.

Then there are the mid-to-large ensembles: a vocal trio of Ellen Christi, Brenda Bakr and Lisa Sokolov with Parker on bass and Rashid Bakr on drums. From there, the Big Moon Ensemble octet of Jemeel Moondoc, Carter, Williams, Roy Campbell Jr., Parker, Jay Oliver, Charles and Rashid Bakr. There's the music for dance with a Septet including Billy Bang and Ellen Christi. Finally there's the full blown Centering Big Band for a full disk. That's Carter, Moondoc, Ricardo Strobert, Ware, Charles Tyler, Raphe Malik, Campbell, Alex Lodico, Masahiko Kono, Zen Matsura, Sokolov, Christi and of course Parker himself.

The point of the rundown is to show the wide variety of groupings and the presence of lots of avant masters.

In the end, after hearing this entire set several times (and I will surely be listening much more), I am left with a deep sense of the importance of William Parker's music on the scene in those days. He became increasingly widely known as an avant bassist of the very highest tier, sure, but as is clear from these recordings, he was an important force on the scene as band leader and composer-conceptualist as well.

There is a rather huge amount of great music in the set. Yes, there are some free blow-outs of a high order, with Carter and Gayle, and the trio of Ware, Parker, and Charles really moves along.

The mid-to-large ensembles and the vocal-oriented sounds show us a complex music that surely is free in many ways. But there are some great writing and blowing frameworks too, and all of it hangs together very well.

Space and time don't permit me to comment at length on each cut, six FULL disks worth, but I am left after hearing the set in some ways a changed man. I mean that I am very, very impressed with this music. It puts his early years in a very significant light. He was making important music then, as now. And the music of the set is endlessly rewarding to hear. A treasure trove is what it is, something that will delight, stimulate and enthrall anyone with an interest in and love of the new in improvised music. Highly recommended.

Michael Bisio Matthew Shipp Duo, Floating Ice

Not everybody can be at the top. Among the very best of the improvisers today. The most creative and inventive. The most consistent. Michael Bisio, acoustic bass, and Matthew Shipp, piano, belong to the group of those very few, special players active in avant improvisational music, what is often called "free jazz." But the category doesn't mean anything when they play. Because they are playing what they hear and feel, not "category music." They have been playing together in a trio with drummer Whit Dickey for a couple of years now, isn't it? And now they pair down to a duo for some adventurous music on the about-to-be-released Floating Ice (Relative Pitch 1005).

It's the two of them thrusting the music forward as they continue to bring the history of the style to bear as reference and jumping off points. So you'll hear some themes that bounce and bop like Monk meets Nichols, references to the ragtime era, and other pre-epochal glances.

And throughout this disk, as is apparent in all they do lately, there is improvising of high originality. Michael is a thoughtful bass tornado whether playing pizzicato or arco, and brings deep feeling and deeply charged energy into the mix. He plays lines that you don't expect, pretty much all the time. Matthew is a lickless pianist. He creates out of a large imaginative palette of musical sounds and he virtually plays what he hears one-on-one with the imagination of it. So you hear him in all his immediacy, in all his various creative moods and channelings of the music and what it means to him.

The two together as a duo do not disappoint. But then I don't believe anything either has done in the last decade has let me down in any way. They play music with the structure and heft of composition, but it's spontaneous. That is remarkable.

These are two at the top of the era and they behave like it on this wonderful disk. It's beyond category. Avant, sure. But essential no matter what you call it. Piano-bass duets? Call it that. This is our music today and they are making some of the best!

Francois Tusques, Noel McGhie, Topolitologie

Pianist Francois Tusques was one of the early, pioneering avant-free jazz practitioners in Europe in the '60s, yet not much of his music made it to the States. I confess that I am just catching up with some of those early recordings, and they are revealing.

Like his contemporary pianist colleagues Dave Burrell and Burton Greene, he has ofttimes turned to original compositions in song-form (minus vocals) freely realized, as opposed to completely extemporaneous ventures.

The recent album Topolitologie (Improvising Beings 02), with drummer Noel McGhie, finds him in this mode, improvising around a series of originals along with a couple of bop-to-out standards.

It seems to me one can say many things about this music, because it covers a lot of ground and is realized very freely. What hit me after a number of listens was the expressive creativity unleashed. McGhie gives a nicely loose accompaniment. Tusques covers a wide spectrum of historical influences, as I hear it, from Jelly Roll to Monk to calypso and beyond, but in completely original, idiomatic ways.

He never was a pianist who capitalized on whirlwind technique or capacious harmonic sophistications and he isn't that today either. He communicates directly, soulfully, very freely and loosely and the program is filled with interesting music.

I find in the performances on this disk a very human endeavor that brings on good feelings whenever I listen. Maestro Tusques today is playing the essence of the music as he feels it. And it comes across warmly, openly, expressively. Listen to this one a few times and you may find yourself a budding Tusquesologist. And you will no doubt be smiling all the while, perhaps.

Jessica Jones, Mark Taylor, Live at the Freight

Here's something a little off the usual path: a quartet with the front line of tenor (Jessica Jones) and French horn or mellophone (Mark Taylor). Live at the Freight (New Artists 1052) gives you a generous program of Jones and Taylor originals recorded at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, Berkeley, California, in 2011.

It's music that shows the oblique influence of everything from classic Tristano to Mingus's Jazz Workshop units, Wayne Shorter to the wide world of post-bop modern at large.

Jessica and Mark show a highly developed personal sound on their instruments, in part a product of interesting and varied backgrounds and in part sheer talent. Their writing is no less distinctive.

John Shifflet on bass and Jason Lewis on drums have a plasticity that goes well with the frontliners' vision, helping things come together well throughout the set.

It's thinking person's jazz. And it's very good. Recommended.

Wally Shoup and Paul Kikuchi, Aurora Distillations

Drummer-percussionist-conceptualist-leader Paul Kikuchi has been devising some remarkable explorations of the free-ambient spectrum in years past. Many of the releases I have covered in the various blogs. There's a new one, for limited release on LP and as a download. It's saxman Wally Shoup and Paul in a series of duets, Aurora Distillations (Prefecture 005).

First thing to note: the entire session was recorded in a 2.6-mile-long cascade tunnel built in 1900 and abandoned in 1928. The environment provided the date with a natural ambiance that frames all the music in a most unusual way. There are long reverberences more than echoes, stimulated by where the musicians set up, and the drums and percussion benefit from it especially. Shoup's alto, too, gets much from the natural cavernousness. In fact Wally often seems to be playing the tunnel as much as the alto. Or rather, he plays to the tunnel, like how the JATP sax soloists would often project to the balconies with crowd arousing honks and squeals. The content of the playing-to and the results, understandably, are quite different here. But there is a kind of parallel.

There are four relatively short works, all filled with a free evocation, almost a ritual sense of sonic purpose. The third segment is by far my favorite, for Kikuchi's remarkable play of metallic bell-like percussion, but it's all worthwhile. This may not be Wally Shoup's greatest performance and this may not be Paul Kikuchi's most impressive ambient outing. But in both cases one must remember that it is spontaneous music to sound the old tunnel, and so it is not as much a performance as a paean to that space.

It's something to appreciate and zone into. It may not be absolutely essential but it is absolutely a world of its own. Explore.

Tony Monaco, Celebration

In the ongoing "Great Organ Trio Revival" we have been experiencing for more than a decade now, Tony Monaco may well be the one to take the "popularity crown". The innovation crown or the artistically most subtle crown are other considerations.

His special 2-CD set Celebrations (Chicken Coop 7016) gives you a vast assortment of the sorts of things he's been doing. Half of the compilation covers highlights from the seven albums he's put out previously. The other half has him settling in with some of his current playing partners.

Monaco went right to the source by studying with Jimmy Smith. His playing reflects that very much--he is a Jimmy Smith on steroids. A man of monster B-3 chops and an insatiable appetite to make that Hammond sound. What he isn't is especially subtle. You wont hear an awful lot of Larry Young or Charles Earland's post-Smith-iterations, though he can do funk right up there with the best of them. Like Jimmy Smith, his music bypasses mostly the Mingus-Trane-Miles phase of the music and locks in with blues licks up the ying-yang and lots of minor sevenths. You do know the drill I suspect.

But the fact is, he's a man of huge energy and drive. He does this sort of thing so well and in the process, takes the strictly Smithian ethos a few steps further.

There's so much music in this set, I can only point towards it. Yes, there are the bluesy things, the soul things, the Blue Note boogaloo things, the grits and gravy, then there are some cuts designed for radio friendliness--a number with a gospel group, a less than successful Monaco Sinatra-ish vocal on a ballad. . . . and others.

When he's got the soulful bluesy thing happening, he's very much in the groove and no doubt in the handful of Hammond exponents that can nail that like a manic carpenter. He's less successful with harmonic sophistications or with bopping hard.

You don't expect everybody to do everything, I suppose. And when you remove mentally the couple of excessively commercial cuts, this is an impressive testament to Monaco's Hammond mastery. He's a crowd pleaser but he sure can play!

Bad Luck, Bloodroot EP

We've been coming across tenorist/composer Neil Welch a bit lately (especially his Sleeper). Here's another one of interest. It's Neil and drummer Chris Icasiano under the name Bad Luck, in a twenty-something minute EP Bloodroot (Table and Chairs). It came out in May but would be worth talking about if it came out 10 years ago or yesterday.

It's a free duet of tenor and drums of the avant free variety. Lots of dynamic free drumming of the heftier sort, with almost a rock density of attack. Neil's tenor covers lots of sonic ground, with color being at the foremost but energy happening nicely at times too. But that would be fine if rather unexceptional if it wasn't for what Neil does with his tenor and the digital delay.

He manages to get delay effects that overlap tenor parts and repeat them like some kind of unearthly gamelan, which when combined with Chris's energetic drumming put one in another zone altogether. So in the end there is something haunting and avant pleasing happening. You can get a download of this one for very little but it will send you to a place very much more great than little!