16.4.15
25.2.15
The Silence And Awe Of Arvo Pärt
An interview broadcast by NPR
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| Arvo Pärt |
Arvo Pärt is one of the few living composers to find popularity beyond the borders of classical music. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Bjork are big fans. Although the 78-year-old musician usually shies away from acclaim and the media, he is currently attending a festival of his music in New York and Washington, and he made time to talk about his music, bike riding and bells.
Pärt is a major composer, and I was a little nervous meeting him. So I brought along a bell for good luck. I set it on the table between us and gave it a little tinkle. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's music is celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a performance of his choral work Kanon Pokajanen at the Temple of Dendur.
"Oh, this is a good beginning, thank you," he said in his heavily accented English.
Pärt likes bells, literally and figuratively in his music. He also likes space and silence. Fans tend to use words like "timeless" to describe his contemplative music. But for Pärt, time has deep meaning. In conversation, as in his music, he takes his time to unclutter his thoughts. They come out like poems.
"Time for us, is like the time of our own lives," he says. "It is temporary. What is timeless is the time of eternal life. That is eternal. These are all high words, and so, like the sun, we cannot really look at them directly, but my intuition tells me that the human soul is connected to both of them — time and eternity." [Read More]
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26.12.14
Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939
A beautiful, fully-illustrated history of the legendary jazz label
From Thames & Hudson, what promises to be a fantastic (and beautiful) new book celebrating the pioneering jazz label, Blue Note Records: 'Released to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the coolest and best- known label in jazz, this book celebrates over seven decades of extraordinary music from a company that has stayed true to its founders commitment to Uncompromising Expression. Tracing the evolution of jazz from the boogie- woogie and swing of the 1930s, through bebop, funk and fusion, to the eclectic mix Blue Note releases today, the book also narrates a complex social history from the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany to the developments in music and technology in the late 20th century. Blue Note is not only known as the purveyor of extraordinary jazz but is also famous as an arbiter of cool. The photography of co-founder Francis Wolff and the cover designs of Reid Miles were integral to the labels success and this highly illustrated, landmark publication featuring the very best photographs, covers, and ephemera from the archives, including never-before-published material commemorates Blue Notes momentous contribution to jazz, to art and design as well as to revolutionizing the music business.'
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| ABlue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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| Blue Note: Uncompromising Vision: The Finest in Jazz Since 1939 |
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17.12.14
Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour Archive
An online repository of the eclectic podcast
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| Bob Dylan |
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16.12.14
Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks
Brad Dukes' volume offers an in-depth look into the making of the series
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| Brad Dukes, Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks |
Released just in time to coincide with the much anticipated Blu-Ray release of Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery and Missing Pieces, Brad Dukes’ new book, Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks sheds new light on the beloved cult TV series.
The book, which is done entirely in interview format, features cast and crew members speaking candidly about the filming of the show. With great nostalgia, writer Mark Frost rehashes the story of the show’s conception. Frost and auteur David Lynch originally met through their mutual agents and were in talks to do a biopic called Goddess about Marilyn Monroe. While that project never came to pass, Lynch and Frost nevertheless became friends. Legend has it, one unsuspecting day while sipping coffee at a diner, Frost and Lynch conceived Twin Peaks.
Originally titled Northwest Passage, Lynch and Frost were inspired by an old ghost story Frost had heard growing up. The character of Laura Palmer evolved from that story and allowed Lynch and Frost a way to, “peel back the onion” and go deeper within the layers of the seemingly innocent Pacific Northwest town. It should also be noted that Lynch and Frost, both huge fans of film noir, named the character of Laura Palmer after the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura. [Read More]
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Michael Stipe on Douglas Coupland and 9/11
Former REM frontman reflects on the images that haunt America
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With a small, powerful set of images, Douglas Coupland actually manages to playfully (how did he pull that off?) remind us of our collective 9/11 moment – the act that unzippered the 21st century in most of the world, and changed my notion of home and safety forever. Coupland’s at first seemingly Op Art paintings are just black dots – abstract, weirdly familiar. But then you look at them on your iPhone (because you’re going to take a pic and post it … this is 2014, after all) and you have the ahhhhhhh moment when a chill runs down your spine and you realise that it’s them: the jumpers. It’s him: the boogeyman. Doug offers us the choice to either see or not see these deeply internalised images. Having that choice is what enables us to survive from day to day without going nuts.
His images also remind me that nobody really knows how to look downtown any more without feeling, in some way, conflicted. Every time I see the Freedom Tower, I think of “freedom fries” – the term coined when the US wanted to invade Iraq, and France objected. Anything attached to the word “French” in the US was then relabelled with the word “freedom”: freedom toast, freedom fries, freedom kiss, for fuck’s sake. French wine was banned, French people were spat upon, their heads in photographs replaced with heads of weasels. Forget the Statue of Liberty and where it came from. It was a disastrous response—a horrid turn on the formerly leftist act of boycotting as protest. I’ve never been more embarrassed by my country, (except when we re-elected George W Bush and Dick Cheney). I largely blame the media for this egregious abuse of power and influence.
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| Michael Stipe |
The Freedom Tower was meant to inspire patriotism and instead embodies the darker sides of nationalism. The 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response, buoyed by the media, and our shock at having finally been direct victims of terrorism, paved the way for a whole new take on “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” There was no longer any need to explain or publicly debate militaristic power, or the police state mindset. To do so was to be the opposite of a patriot. [Read More]
21.9.14
Adorno, Benjamin and Pop Culture
From Alex Ross (New Yorker)
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| Illustration: Patrick Bremer |
In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,” a disgraced academic named Chip Lambert, who has abandoned Marxist theory in favor of screenwriting, goes to the Strand Bookstore, in downtown Manhattan, to sell off his library of dialectical tomes. The works of Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, and various others cost Chip nearly four thousand dollars to acquire; their resale value is sixty-five. “He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society,” Franzen writes. After several more book-selling expeditions, Chip enters a high-end grocery store and walks out with an overpriced filet of wild Norwegian salmon.
Anyone who underwent a liberal-arts education in recent decades probably encountered the thorny theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School. Their minatory titles, filled with dark talk of “Negative Dialectics” and “One-Dimensional Man,” were once proudly displayed on college-dorm shelves, as markers of seriousness; now they are probably consigned to taped-up boxes in garages, if they have not been discarded altogether. Once in a while, the present-day Web designer or business editor may open the books and see in the margins the excited queries of a younger self, next to pronouncements on the order of “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Walter Benjamin) or “The whole is the false” (Adorno).
In the nineteen-nineties, the period in which “The Corrections” is set, such dire sentiments were unfashionable. With the fall of the Soviet Union, free-market capitalism had triumphed, and no one seemed badly hurt. In light of recent events, however, it may be time to unpack those texts again. Economic and environmental crisis, terrorism and counterterrorism, deepening inequality, unchecked tech and media monopolies, a withering away of intellectual institutions, an ostensibly liberating Internet culture in which we are constantly checking to see if we are being watched: none of this would have surprised the prophets of Frankfurt, who, upon reaching America, failed to experience the sensation of entering Paradise. Watching newsreels of the Second World War, Adorno wrote, “Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.” He would not revise his remarks now.
The philosophers, sociologists, and critics in the Frankfurt School orbit, who are often gathered under the broader label of Critical Theory, are, indeed, having a modest resurgence. They are cited in brainy magazines like n+1, The Jacobin, and the latest iteration of The Baffler. Evgeny Morozov, in his critiques of Internet boosterism, has quoted Adorno’s early mentor Siegfried Kracauer, who registered the information and entertainment overload of the nineteen-twenties. The novelist Benjamin Kunkel, in his recent essay collection “Utopia or Bust,” extolls the criticism of Jameson, who has taught Marxist literary theory at Duke University for decades. (Kunkel also mentions “The Corrections,” noting that Chip gets his salmon at a shop winkingly named the Nightmare of Consumption.) The critic Astra Taylor, in “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” argues that Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their 1944 book “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” gave early warnings about corporations “drowning out democracy in pursuit of profit.” And Walter Benjamin, whose dizzyingly varied career skirted the edges of the Frankfurt collective, receives the grand treatment in “Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life” (Harvard), by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, who earlier edited Harvard’s four-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings.
The Frankfurt School, which arose in the early nineteen-twenties, never presented a united front; it was, after all, a gaggle of intellectuals. One zone in which they clashed was that of mass culture. Benjamin saw the popular arena as a potential site of resistance, from which left-leaning artists like Charlie Chaplin could transmit subversive signals. Adorno and Horkheimer, by contrast, viewed pop culture as an instrument of economic and political control, enforcing conformity behind a permissive screen. The “culture industry,” as they called it, offered the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” A similar split appeared in attitudes toward traditional forms of culture: classical music, painting, literature. Adorno tended to be protective of them, even as he exposed their ideological underpinnings. Benjamin, in his resonant sentence linking culture and barbarism, saw the treasures of bourgeois Europe as spoils in a victory procession, each work blemished by the suffering of nameless millions.
The debate reached its height in the wake of Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a masterpiece of contingent optimism that praises mass culture only insofar as mass culture advances radical politics. Many readers will sympathize with Benjamin, who managed to uphold a formidable critical tradition while opening himself to the modern world and writing in a sensuous voice. He furnishes a template for the pop-savvy intellectual, the preferred model in what remains of literary life. Yet Adorno, his dark-minded, infuriating brother, will not go away: his cross-examination of the “Work of Art” essay, his pinpointing of its moments of naïveté, strikes home. Between them, Adorno and Benjamin were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture—in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny, whether in tones of delight, dismay, or passionate ambivalence. [Read More]
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8.9.14
David Lynch's Industrial Symphony No. 1
Open Culture tracks down a copy of the 1989 musical play
From Open Culture:
It is time, I thought to myself just a couple weeks ago; time, I thought, to watch Twin Peaks again. How I had missed Leland Palmer’s crazed dancing/crying jags, Agent Cooper’s straight-shooting cornball savvy, Audrey Horne’s tongue-in-cheek slinkiness, and the absolute nightmare of Bob. How I had especially missed the haunting score of Angelo Badalamenti and the ethereal interludes of Julee Cruise. Immersed now in the second season, I already mourn the premature end. But you can imagine my delight when I discovered the film above, a Lynch musical play scored by Badalamenti and showcasing the otherworldly voice of Cruise, who appears as “The Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman.” Cast as the actual heartbroken woman is Lynch stalwart Laura Dern, whose heart is broken over the phone by then-young-heartbreaker Nicolas Cage. Rounding out the cast is another familiar face, Michael J. Anderson—Twin Peaks’ “Little Man From Another Place”—appearing here as “Woodsman/Twin A.” Logs are sawn, neon signs flicker, dancers writhe, and Badalamenti’s twisted cool jazz lulls us into bizarre Lynchian neo-noir terrain. [Read More]
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28.7.14
Spirit in Sound and Space: A Conversation Inspired by Arvo Pärt
An event held at the Museum of Metropolitan Art
From the Museum of Metropolitan Art:
New York's celebration of Arvo Pärt offers an opportunity to explore the spiritual content of his music, and to discover how the spaces in which music is performed can amplify its emotional power. In this program, neuroscientist Robert Zatorre explains how music can engage the reward system deep in our brains—the same system that responds to food and sex. Architect Steven Holl describes making spaces for music, and shows how music influences his work. Theologian Peter Bouteneff talks about the thread of spirituality that weaves throughout Pärt's masterpieces.
The Spark series explores vital ideas and issues through the lens of the Met's collections. Each cabaret-style program gathers artists, thought leaders, and performers from theater, film, politics, literature, science, and pop culture to engage in wide-ranging, fresh conversations and performances.
Spark is hosted by Julie Burstein, author and Peabody Award–winning creator of public radio's Studio 360.
Recorded June 11, 2014
Speakers
Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist, Montreal Neurological InstituteSteven Holl, architect
Peter Bouteneff, musician and Professor of Theology, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary
Credits
This event is a collaboration between The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Arvo Pärt Project at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. [Read More]Find on Amazon: US | UK
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Journal of Beckett Studies: ‘The Performance Issue’
Co-edited by Jonathan Heron (Warwick) and Nicholas Johnson (TCD)
First the body. No. First the place. No. First both.In April of 2014, Edinburgh University Press published a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23:1), ‘The Performance Issue’, which seeks to link the heritage of scholarship on Beckett and performance with current practices and methodologies. Noting the link between performance and associated discourses of phenomenology and embodiment, the edition attempts to treat performance as both an ‘issue’ subject to debate that has not been fully resolved, and an ‘issue’ in the sense of that which comes forth and flows out. The edition explores the tension between ‘the archive and the repertoire’, as articulated by Diana Taylor in 2003, which continues to ghost our memories of Beckett in performance, and has withstood both the theoretical and materialist ‘turns’ of the field. In doing so, the co-editors have drawn upon recent work in Beckett Studies and Performance Studies, including Catherine Laws (2007), Tracy C. Davis (2008), Ulrika Maude (2009), Anna McMullan (2010), Baz Kershaw (2011) and Mark Fleishman (2012).
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983
Following an introduction provided by general editors Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, the contents of the special issue include the first article on Beckett performance histories by the team of the Staging Beckett AHRC-funded research project (Anna McMullan, Trish McTighe, David Pattie, and David Tucker), complemented by studies of Beckett and Performance Art (Derval Tubridy) and Beckett and New Musical Composition (Catherine Laws). The first results from the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, a performance-based workshop held as part of the annual Samuel Beckett Summer School and facilitated by Johnson and Heron, are published in the form of a “Dossier,” including contributions from directors Gavin Quinn and Sarah Jane Scaife, as well as Summer School participants Burç Îdem Dinçel and Áine Josephine Tyrrell. Directors Ian Rickson and Robert Wilson were interviewed specially for the edition, and artists featured in a new “Practitioners’ Voices” section include Rosemary Pountney, Rieko Suzuki, and Barry McGovern. Obituaries of Frederick Neumann and Herbert Blau follow. The edition concludes out with production reviews of Peter Stein’s 2012 Krapp’s Last Tape and Pan Pan’s 2013 Edinburgh productions of All That Fall and Embers, as well as book reviews focusing on Beckett’s televisual work and laughter in Beckett. A full table of contents is available online at [Journal of Beckett Studies].
About the editors
Jonathan Heron, Artistic Director of Fail Better Productions and IATL Senior Teaching Fellow at University of Warwick, is a core member of AHRC Beckett and Brain Science and co-convenor of the IFTR Performance-as-Research Working Group. His writing has been published in Open-space Learning (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Performing Early Modern Drama Today (CUP, 2012).Nicholas Johnson is Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin and co-director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School, as well as a director and performer. His research has been published in The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen, 2013), Theatre Research International, Forum Modernes Theater, the Journal of Art Historiography, and the Journal of Beckett Studies.
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2.7.14
Sonny Rollins on Jazz and Improvisation
From an interview with The Washington Post
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| Sonny Rollins |
Mature, precocious, cultured and determined. Aside from a few summers in Maryland, Rollins spent his childhood in Harlem, a cultural epicenter that would shape him into a jazz icon who would steer the trajectory of the genre and the concept of improvisation writ large. As Rollins looks back, the chapters of his life often slice into neat little halves — separate realities where he toggled between success and struggle, renown and solitude. He apprenticed with the bop gods (Charlie Parker, Miles Davis) while battling the dark forces of addiction. At his highest levels of acclaim, he took mysterious sabbaticals that felt like vanishing acts. Today, Rollins says he gets through “this world full of problems” by reaching for higher spiritual plateaus that he “can almost touch,” but never quite does.
[...]
Rollins describes the mysteries of improvisation plainly: “You make what might seem like a breakthrough. And then . . . you have to take a step back. You take a step forward. Then you have to take a step or two to the side. The idea that, ‘Oh, gee, now I’ve got it, I’m right on the track’ — that never really materializes.”
He remains hypercritical of his own work, but says he knew at a young age that he was destined to be “prominent.” Born in Harlem on Sept. 7, 1930, Walter Theodore Rollins was the son of a working mom and a Navy dad, both born in the Virgin Islands. His grandmother often looked after him as a child, but in many ways, he was raised by the city. As a jazz-obsessed teen, he would hound saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and persuade Thelonious Monk to sneak him into bars.
“I think I was just born at the right time and the right place because everything around me was music,” Rollins says. As a young child, he listened to the blues records of his uncle’s girlfriend. He watched his older siblings practice violin and piano. He’d walk past the Cotton Club on the way to school. He took up saxophone at 13 and a few years later was playing alongside future jazz great Jackie McLean. His family remained skeptical.
“They didn’t think much of jazz,” Rollins says. “Later, when I began smoking pot and all this stuff, it really confirmed their views that music was really nothing and I wasn’t going anyplace.”
By 1953, he was proving them wrong and right. He had already served jail time for an armed robbery in 1950, but his star was rising as Monk’s prize sideman — all while nursing a heroin addiction that he managed to kick for good in 1955. “Saxophone Colossus” came the following year, the album that would cement his eminence in jazz. [Read More]
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There Will Be Blood (with Live Orchestra)
6-7 August 2014 · Roundhouse, London
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| A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) |
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| A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) |
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| A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) |
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| A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) |
By arrangement with Miramax and Park Circus Films, Roundhouse is pleased to be the home of a series of world-premiere screenings of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award-winning There Will Be Blood with Jonny Greenwood’s score performed live by the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt.
These live screenings will draw together an orchestra of over 50 musicians, including Jonny Greenwood himself, who will play the Ondes Martenot part.
Although widely regarded as one of the most influential soundtracks in recent years, There Will Be Blood was famously ruled ineligible in the Best Original Score category at the 2008 Academy Awards due to its use of pre-existing material. The score features passages from Greenwood’s compositions Popcorn Superhet Receiver and Bodysong (the latter used in the track Convergence), as well as works by Arvo Pärt and Brahms. All these cues have been collated into one ‘performance edition’, offering a complete representation of the original film, shown in a striking new light.
The London Contemporary Orchestra have been performing Greenwood’s compositions since 2008, and in 2012 recorded his score for The Master (Greenwood’s second collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson). This project will build on the LCO’s five-year-history with the Roundhouse, which has included live screenings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 2010, and a performance of Greenwood’s Doghouse at Reverb 2012. [Read More]
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1.7.14
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: 1963 Photoshoot
A selection of the photographs taken by Don Hunstein
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| The original artwork for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) |
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| Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo in West Village, New York City, February 1963. Photograph: Don Hunstein. |
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| Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo in West Village, New York City, February 1963. Photograph: Don Hunstein. |
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| Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo in West Village, New York City, February 1963. Photograph: Don Hunstein. |
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| Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo in West Village, New York City, February 1963. Photograph: Don Hunstein. |
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| Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo in West Village, New York City, February 1963. Photograph: Don Hunstein. |
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A Love Supreme: Rare Photographs of John Coltrane
Chuck Stewart reveals rarely glimpsed images of Coltrane in the 1960s
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| Left to right: McCoy Tyner, Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Bob Thiele, 10 December 1964. Photograph: Chuck Stewart |
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| John Coltrane, 10 December 1964. Photograph: Chuck Stewart |
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| John Coltrane in Rudy Van Gelder's recording studio, Engelwood Hills. Photograph: Chuck Stewart |
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| John Coltrane on a break in Rudy Van Gelder's recording studio. Photograph: Chuck Stewart |
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| John Coltrane in April 1966. Photograph: Chuck Stewart |
On December 9, 1964, saxophonist John Coltrane led a quartet that featured pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where countless jazz recording sessions were held in the 1950s and ’60s. For photographer Chuck Stewart, Van Gelder’s was a short drive from his home in Teaneck.
That day nearly 50 years ago the band recorded a Coltrane composition titled A Love Supreme, a profound expression of his spiritual awakening divided into four movements—“Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” “Psalm.” For its soaring ambition, flawless execution and raw power, it was hailed as a groundbreaking piece of music when it was released in February 1965, and it has endured as a seminal part of the jazz canon. The work and its composer will be highlighted anew this April during Jazz Appreciation Month, an annual event launched in 2001 by the National Museum of American History, whose collection includes Coltrane’s original manuscript for A Love Supreme.
For Stewart, whose photographs have graced thousands of album covers, from Ellington to Davis, from Basie to Armstrong, that session with Coltrane—a friend of his since 1949—was no different from countless others. “When I did a session I would go in and shoot the rehearsal before they did any takes,” the 86-year-old photographer recalls, sitting in his cozy, picture-filled living room in Teaneck. “I couldn’t shoot during the take because the recording equipment would pick up the clicks. So what I did was meander around the studio. When I saw a picture I thought worked, I’d take it.”
Stewart still has the Rolleiflex camera he used at the session, and the contact sheets as well. Many of the images he shot have been seen on CDs, as well as in numerous books and magazine articles. But 72 photographs from six rolls of film never made it beyond the contact-sheet stage, and so haven’t been published. Stewart’s son David recently rediscovered those images in his father’s collection, and now Stewart is scheduled to include some of them in a donation to the museum this month.
Looking over the contact sheets from those rolls, Stewart picks out two favorites. One finds Coltrane reclining on a staircase and talking with someone in the studio. The other, taken from a distance, shows him sitting at a piano, lost in thought. “I was looking for a decisive moment,” recalls Stewart. [Read More]
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Don Cherry on Jazz
A 30-minute audio interview
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| Don Cherry in 1966. Photograph: Francis Wolff |
His language like his life is free flowing, a stream that follows the lay of the land and rushes forward from a source of nature. He is full of joy and enthusiasm and his ideas often run ahead of his speech. Thus a conversation with Don Cherry is not a linear, organized event. It takes many contours, and it describes the journey of a remarkable mind and spirit. Just as his music encompasses the ethnic expression of cultures as far flung as the hills of North Africa and the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, the New York art scene of the ‘50’s and the free community of the diggers in Sweden during the ‘70’s, Don Cherry has always played his own way, a very personal music. Starting as a trumpet player and then moving to the "pocket trumpet" which he made famous while working with Ornette Coleman's band, Don moved on to flutes, double reed instruments, African string instruments (such as the "hunter's bow") and even became a singer in order to set free his musical voice. Don Cherry is s pioneer in the field of "world music", which, ironically, has lead him back to the classical jazz scene in the United States. [Listen]
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Ornette Coleman performs Naked Lunch soundtrack
27.6.14
Sonny Rollins on Philosophy, Yoga and Buddhism
Legendary jazz innovator talks to NPR
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| Sonny Rollins in 1957 |
There's a track on Road Shows, Vol. 3 called "Patanjali," and that's the name of the great Hindu philosopher of yoga. You studied Indian philosophy and yoga in India, right?
Yes I did, and I'm still studying Indian philosophy.
I can see how yoga, with its emphasis on breathing, could be useful even on a technical level for a saxophonist. What has yoga brought to your playing?
Well, it's the concentration level. A lot of people think of yoga as the exercises — hatha yoga — which is only one form. There are other forms of yoga, and they are more contemplative, introspective, meditational. The thing is this: When I play, what I try to do is to reach my subconscious level. I don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at the same time — believe me, I've tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast. So when you're into yoga and when you're into improvisation, you want to reach that other level.
When you went to India — this was in the late '60s — it was at a time when you famously took sort of a sabbatical from playing and recording. What was it that triggered you to reach out in these other directions in that way?
I was into many things. I was into Rosicrucianism, I studied Buddhism, Kabbalah, even — I was really into those philosophies of life, as were some of my compatriots. We were trying to find a way to express life through our improvisations. The music has got to mean something. Jazz improvisation is supposed to be the highest form of communication, and getting that to the people is our job as musicians.
I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.
It's hard to think of anything that you haven't accomplished, in terms of music. Is there something else out there that you still want to do?
I think there's always something to do. There are things that I've thought about — nature recordings, listening to new people coming up and being able to relate to them. Music is an open sky; it's vast. I wouldn't be so foolish as to ever feel that there isn't more music to be done, because it is out there. And I want to do it. [Read More]
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Angelo Badalamenti on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks
Film4 talks to David Lynch's long-time musical collaborator
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| Angelo Badalamenti |
How did you come to work on Blue Velvet?
One of the film's producers, a friend of mine, mentioned to me that Isabella Rossellini was having trouble with the song Blue Velvet in the film. He asked if I would come and coach her, so I did. We worked for about three or four hours and got one great take with her singing and me on piano. We took this to David Lynch – it was the first time I had ever spoken to him – and he listened to it and was just astounded. Then we collaborated on Mysteries of Love, my score and his lyrics, which was another great experience. When I first got David's lyrics, I was appalled because there were no rhymes or hooks. I mean, I'm a songwriter. I was looking for something to latch onto, and there was nothing. So I asked him what kind of music he wanted with it, because I had no clue. He said, "Oh, just make it like the wind or the ocean. Let it float and put a little plastic in it." I had no idea what he was talking about, but I wrote Mysteries of Love and he loved it.
[...]
Tell us about the score for Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The film was greeted with derision when it was released but now has a great following.
We had a few themes from the TV show, which had a really popular 1950s sound with little jazz overtones, but the haunting quality of the music in the TV series was the thing that captured everybody's imagination. The movie gave us opportunities to do other material which still has a lot of that flavour in it.
There is an extraordinary contrast in Twin Peaks between a cosy vision of 50s Americana and a postmodern sense of the world falling apart. This is reflected in your score, which is nostalgic but very brooding and unnerving. How did you achieve this?
There are two basic elements: melody and harmony. The melodies have a warm, simplistic feel, but then you take those melodies and you harmonise them in a certain way; I'm a sucker for suspensions, which are dissonances that are held over and rubbed, you know? A lot of times you think you're going to hear it go one way and then it jumps to someplace that is totally left field. I got into suspension by studying Bach. I fell in love with his use of suspensions. They have a kind of dissonance that resolves. The harmonies that I use are also dissonances that resolve, but sometimes as they resolve another dissonance comes up, and so you've got this weaving and overlapping that creates a beautiful tension. [Read More]
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Joe Henderson on Modern Jazz
An interview conducted in the mid-1990s
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| Joe Henderson in 1963 |
A broad freedom of expression was available in the jazz vocabulary. And Henderson says he misses it these days.
“I’ve done some free things because there’s a part of me that is a bit of an iconoclast and was especially so at that time. Part of the spirit then was just to reject all that stuff like bar lines and key signatures. We didn’t want to know about it.
“So part of the thing then was just to get up on the bandstand. I became a little self-conscious about people coming in with their own music and parts written out for everyone to play and totally displacing what others might want to bring. I just said, ‘Let's play' and didn’t want to interfere by even suggesting a title for a tune.
“We'd just start playing and see what came out of it. We'd be able to deal with it and figure out afterwards what we did. It was such an interesting time and I don’t understand why that spirit didn’t have a longer life.
"People like Albert Ayler [the seminal avant-garde tenor player who died in 1970] aren’t around any more, of course. But Ornette still is, although he’s much more traditional and conservative than he was . . . and I‘m surprised by that. I was asking someone just a week ago, ‘Whatever happened to ...’ and a whole list came out of people who were connected with that free movement who just seem to have evaporated ir vanished.
"Today there doesn't seem to be too much interest in that free spirit of jazz where you just play and you don’t have to have gone to this or that university to ensure we all know similar things so we can make music together.
“That idea of saying, 'If you play saxophone, come on up and we’ll figure out something’ seems gone now," he concludes ruefully. [Read More]
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26.6.14
On Miles Davis' Bitches Brew
Revisiting the seminal jazz/rock fusion record
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| Artwork for Miles Davis' 1970 album, Bitches Brew |
August of 1969 marked Miles Davis’ boldest venture yet into undiscovered country. This time there was no more holding back, no more tentative experimentation, no more “walking on eggshells.” The album that emerged, Bitches Brew, was groundbreaking, beginning with its stark title and Abdul Mati Klarwein’s memorable cover painting. Made on Miles’ personal invitation, Klarwein’s expressionistic work captured the zeitgeist of free love and flower power, depicting a naked black couple looking expectantly at an ocean, a huge vibrant, red flower beside them. The background of the title is unknown, but a clue is provided by the absence of an apostrophe at the end of the word “bitches,” making “brew” a verb, not a noun. Carlos Santana speculated that the album was a “tribute” to “the cosmic ladies” who surrounded Miles at the time and introduce him to some of the music, clothes, and attitudes of the ’60s counterculture.1 Gary Tomlinson, on the other hand, assumed that “bitches” referred to the musicians themselves.2 Just like “motherfucker,” the term “bitch” can be used as an accolade in African-American vernacular. Whatever the title meant, it sounded provocative. Teo Macero remarked, “The word ‘bitches,’ you know, probably that was the first time a title like that was ever used. The title fit the music, the cover fit the music.”
The music on Bitches Brew is indeed provocative, and extraordinary. For Miles it meant a point of no return for the musical direction he had initiated with the recording of “Circle in the Round” in December of 1967. Until August of 1969 he had remained close enough to the jazz aesthetic and to jazz audiences to allow for a comfortable return into the jazz fold. But Bitches Brew’s ferocity and power carried a momentum that was much harder to turn around. The hypnotic grooves, rooted in rock and African music, heralded a dramatic new musical universe that not only gained Miles a new audience, but also divided it into two groups—each side looking at this new music from totally different, and seemingly unbridgeable, perspectives. In the words of Quincy Troupe, these two groups were like “oil and water.”
Bitches Brew signaled a watershed in jazz, and had a significant impact on rock. In combination with Miles’ fame and prestige, the album gave the budding jazz-rock genre visibility and credibility, and was instrumental in promoting it to the dominant direction in jazz. The recording’s enormous influence on the jazz music scene was bolstered by the fact that almost all the musicians involved progressed to high-profile careers in their own right. In the early 1970s, Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (with percussionist Airto Moreira) were involved in Weather Report, Herbie Hancock and Bennie Maupin set up Mwandishi, John McLaughlin (with Billy Cobham) created Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea founded Return to Forever with Lenny White.
Bitches Brew was not a sudden dramatic move in a completely new direction for Miles, though. In line with his long-standing, step-by-step working methods, the recording was maybe a large, but nevertheless logical step forward on a course he had set almost two years earlier. In terms of personnel, musical conception, and sonic textures, the album was a direct descendant of its predecessor, In a Silent Way. Teo Macero remarked that with the latter album, the music “was just starting to jell. [In a Silent Way] was the one before [Bitches Brew]. Then all of a sudden all the elements came together.”
Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way are both dominated by circular grooves, John McLaughlin’s angular guitar playing and the sound of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. However, Miles related in his autobiography how he wanted to expand the canvas on Bitches Brew in terms of the length of the pieces and the number of musicians. While In a Silent Way featured eight musicians and was recorded in one single session, Bitches Brew included 13 musicians and was the result of three days of recording. On the third day the rhythm section consisted of as many as 11 players: three keyboardists, electric guitar, two basses, four drummers/percussionists and a bass clarinet. Miles had pulled out the stops in his search for a heavier bottom end.
Uncharacteristically, Miles’ live quintet also influenced Bitches Brew. Miles’ live and studio directions were strongly diverging around this time, with the studio experiments pioneering new material—incorporated elements of rock, soul and folk that only gradually filtered through to the live stage. But in July of 1969 Miles’ live quintet began performing “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Sanctuary,” all of which would appear on Bitches Brew. (“Sanctuary” had, of course, already been recorded by the second great quintet on February 15, 1968.)
Having broken in this new material, Miles felt confident enough to book three successive days of studio time. He began by calling in the same crew that had recorded In a Silent Way: Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin and Dave Holland; only Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock were missing. Miles gave preference to live-band drummer Jack DeJohnette because of his “deep groove,”6 invited Lifetime organist Larry Young instead of Hancock, and also added session bassist and Columbia producer Harvey Brooks. Together with Zawinul and McLaughlin, Young and Brooks had played on a session Miles organized for his wife, Betty Mabry, a few weeks earlier to record her first and ultimately unsuccessful solo album, They Say I’m Different. Miles also summoned 19-year-old drummer Lenny White who, like Tony Williams, is reported to have been brought to his attention by saxophonist Jackie McLean. Drummer/percussionist Don Alias had been introduced to Miles by Tony Williams, and brought along percussionist Jim Riley, also known as “Jumma Santos.” Tenor saxophonist and bass clarinettist Bennie Maupin was recommended by Jack DeJohnette. A finishing touch, and a stroke of genius, was Miles’ instruction to Maupin to play only the bass clarinet, adding a very distinctive and enigmatic sound to the brew. [Read More]
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| Miles Davis |
Miles' music continues to grow in its beauty, subtlety and sheer magnificence. Bitches' Brew is a further extension of the basic idea he investigated in his two previous albums, Filles De Kilimanjaro and In A Silent Way. In a larger sense, however, the record is yet another step in the unceasing process of evolution Miles has undergone since the Forties. The man never stops to rest on his accomplishments. Driven forward by a creative elan unequaled in the history of American music, he incorporates each successive triumph into the next leap forward.
The wonderful thing about Miles' progress is that he encourages others to grow with him. Within the context of his sound there is more than enough room for both his musicians and his listeners to pursue their own special visions. Looking back on the history of Miles' ensemble, we find the likes of John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, and Wayne Shorter. He always seems to select the best young jazzmen in the country and then gives them the freedom to develop their own unique modes of playing. Miles is known to be a stern disciplinarian, but never a tyrant. When a man has performed with the group long enough to gain a firm footing, he leaves as a recognized giant on his instrument.
[...]
The freedom which Miles makes available to his musicians is also there for the listener. If you haven't discovered it yet, all I can say is that Bitches' Brew is a marvelous place to start. This music is so rich in its form and substance that it permits and even encourages soaring flights of imagination by anyone who listens. If you want, you can experience it directly as a vast tapestry of sounds which envelop your whole being. You'll discover why fully one third of the audience at Miles' recent Fillmore West appearances left the hall in stunned silence, too deeply moved to want to stay for the other groups on the bill. As a personal matter, I also enjoy Miles' music as a soft background context for when I want to read or think deeply. In its current form, Miles' music bubbles and boils like some gigantic cauldron. As the musical ideas rise to the surface, the listener also finds his thoughts rising from the depths with a new clarity and precision. Miles is an invaluable companion for those long journeys you take into your imagination. [Read More]
On the Cover Artwork
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Mati Klarwein, a German painter, created the gatefold cover for the original LP, which works to not only represent the music inside, but also the thematic elements. There's the push and pull of the light and dark worlds Klarwein depicts on the cover, part examination of racial tensions, part illustrated depiction of jazz fusion, where seeming opposites are brought together to form a new whole. While it's easy to see this album cover as an exercise in contrasting opposites to expose contradictions and illuminate similarities, Bitches Brew, the music and the cover art, is more about tandems than dichotomies, about how shared experience coupled with the acknowledgement of individual perspectives can create an otherworldly experience — and what could be more otherworldly than the 20-minute "Pharaoh's Dance" that opens up this album? After all, jazz music has long been about (as much as a very broad genre label can be about anything) how disparate elements can be connected through creativity and imagination.
The contrasting images that adorn the cover — the heads, the hands, the scenery — also seem to foreshadow much of the critical reaction to the record. Some saw the album as Davis abandoning his jazz roots, adopting "white" rock music signifiers for commercial success. Others saw the album as a way forward, with Davis navigating the shifting political climate through bursts of electric guitar and piano. "Forward" may be the best word to describe what was happening with this album: There's a sense of movement and significance throughout the record, and Klarwein's cover hints at the creation (or destruction) of worlds and histories, of reinterpreting how we view boundaries, be they social, political, or musical. The art aims for monumental, as if Bitches Brew is a historical landmark, a reading made all the more poignant by that tiny byline above the album's title: "Directions in Music by Miles Davis." A fitting description for an album and artist that mapped out the possibilities of genre experimentation in the early '70s. [Read More]
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