Downbeast - music blog

Before we disappear into this holiday weekend, some unfinished business:

Multiple review of new collaborative CDs from Nels Cline and friends: Acoustic Guitar Trio's Vignes and Red Feast from Cline with Stephen Gauci, Ken Filiano and Mike Pride. Also, a multiple review of several of Myra Melford's recent efforts: Under The Water with Satoko Fujii, Continuation with the Alex Cline Ensemble and Andrew Drury's My Fingers Will Be Your Tears.

Both Nels and Alex made the Avant Music News list of "the albums released so far in 2009 that have garnered the most listens":

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society – Infernal Machines
Henry Cow – Vol. 1: Beginnings
Nels Cline – Coward
Univers Zero – Relaps: Archives 1984-1986
Quartet Offensive – Carnivore
John Zorn – Filmworks XXII: The Last Supper
John Hébert – Byzantine Monkey
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey – Winterwood
Land Of Kush – Against the Day
Maurizo Bianchi – A M.B. Lehn Tale
Michaël Attias – Credo
James Blackshaw – The Glass Bead Game
Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone – Thin Air
Gerald Cleaver, William Parker, Craig Taborn – Farmers by Nature
Kayo Dot – Blue Lambency Downward
Alex Cline – Continuation

Of interest to all L.A. free jazz geeks, Nessa Records' 2-CD reissue of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, a meeting of minds between L.A. free jazz pioneer Bobby Bradford and a group of British musicians led by the drummer John Stevens. Recorded over a long holiday weekend on July 9, 1971, SME represents a breakthough period of sorts for Bradford's composing and bandleading. "I was still nibbling away at writing some chordal stuff, bop-like stuff, some free pieces, but I didn’t have a handle on the free style yet at first," Bradford told an oral historian in 2000. "I don’t think it hit me until 1971, when I really started to go crazy writing...when I went to in England for the first time. I don’t know what hit me…I was writing stuff on the plane going there….I stayed for awhile and did some recordings with some British musicians…Everything we did was out of new music I’d just written and all of it was free-form. The Spontaneous Music Ensemble was John Stevens' band, but when we played together we played my music.” Bradford also recorded two consecutive live sets from Chat Qui Pêche in Paris with the same band that was reissued in 2003 under the title Love's Dream.

Sunday, June 12, 2009, 2:30-6:30pm. Crypto extended family member Bennie Maupin will be conducting his 24-piece Ikeda Kings Orchestra for "Jazz Explosion III," a fundraiser sfor the California Jazz Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports California jazz musicians in need. The emcees will be K-JAZZ DJ (and host of the Angel City Jazz Festival LeRoy Downs and our pal "Dr." Jeffrey Winston. Joining them will be Ernie Andrews, Llew Matthews, Richard Simon, Roy McCurdy, Bill Cunliffe, Janis Mann, Gerry Gibbs and many more to be announced. At All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena, CA.

The next week in Eagle Rock, Open Gate Theatre will present a screening of Buster Keaton's classic The General with live-music accompaniment by percussionists Brad Dutz, Joe Berardi and David Shafer, woodwind player Jasper Dutz, oboist Camille Liu and voila player Alec Santamaria. Staycation admission price: $5! A plethora of free parking! At Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, 2225 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, CA (one block east of Eagle Rock Blvd.).

Nice looooong interview with Tim Berne from The Bad Plus' website. Berne has been a frequent collaborator with The Cline Boys, and will be playing at The Stone at the end of this month with Nels and drummer Jim Black in a trio dubbed "The BBC."

The next night across the continent, Alex Cline will join visual artist Carol Kim, trumpeter Dan Clucas and Butoh master Oguri for "a hallucinatory mix of live-feed video and layered projections form an immersive installation that refracts the live performances." On the same bill will be the mysterious "all-girl feminist cock rock" ensemble Jennifer The Leopard, who will "stage a multimedia event featuring songs about celebrity sightings and knife fights while it pits an on-stage 'audience' against the real one in a show that is part bitchin' rock concert and part post-studio pep rally." Both are part of the aptly named New Original Works Festival at REDCAT.

Allright, that's it. We're outta here!

MONA and CRYPTONIGHT Present

Dorothea Grossman & Michael Vlatkovich: "Call and Response"

Dorothea Grossman - poetry
Michael Vlatkovich - trombone

Tom McNalley Group

Tom McNalley - guitar
Michael Vlatkovich - trombone
Steuart Liebig - contrabassguitars
Joe Barardi - drums

Friday Night July 3rd - 8PM
Museum of Neon Art
136 W. 4th St., LA 90013
Tel. (213) 489-9918
Tickets are $10 at the Door
Parking available on the street and in two adjacent parking lots 1/2 block away

Dorothea Grossman - The late Allen Ginsberg called Dorothea (Dottie) Grossman's poetry, "clear, odd, personal, funny or wild-weird, curious and lucid." The award-winning poet lives, works and writes in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in numerous poetry journals and magazines. In 1988, Tango Press published her book, "Cuttings: Selected Poetry 1978-1988." "Poems From Cave 17" was published in 1996, and "Museum of Rain" was published by Take Out Publications in 2001. Her latest chapbook, The First Time I Ate Sushi, was published by Zerx Press in January, 2008. The CD, "Call And Response," on the pfMentum label, features her in live performance mode with Vlatkovich. Her poems were featured in a live performance at Wichita State University in 2006, in a piece commissioned by the school for theater arts majors, singers and musicians under the direction of flutist Ellen Burr. In August, 2006, she was invited to exhibit poems at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Galleries as part of a FLUXUS salute called "Broom Events: Sweepings."

Michael Vlatkovich - trombonist, composer and arranger, is based in Los Angeles, CA, and also tours extensively in the United States, Canada, and Europe. In addition to leading his own ensembles, Vlatkovich has performed and recorded with a variety of singers and instrumentalists, including ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Bryan Adams, Bobby Bradford, Gerry Hemingway, and Rob Blakeslee. The "call and response" format in which the two will perform was born about seven years ago in Albuquerque, NM, on a jazz radio program. This format solves the problem of one medium overshadowing the other, plus, says Grossman, " it avoids the old 'jazz and poetry' trap, with its cliché-ridden stereotype of angry, beret-wearing, bongo-playing bohemians." The CD, "Call And Response," on the pfMentum label, represents Grossman and Vlatkovich in live performance mode.

Tom McNalley - the guitarist presents his new group featuring longstanding cohort Michael Vlatkovich on trombone performing all new music. The past year saw McNalley playing with Ornette Coleman and studying music in Haiti, and it all comes out somehow. Guitarist Tom McNalley has been recognized as a major force on the creative music scene, working as both a sideman and a leader. He has performed (and can be seen) with a wide variety of musicians, including Rob Blakeslee, Michael Vlatkovich, Rich Halley, Nels Cline, Bert Turetzky, Mark Dresser, Jeff Kaiser, Alex Cline, Bert Wilson, Adam Diller, Tad Weed, John Stowell, John Gross, Jason Mears and John Zorn, as well as with his own groups.

"Follow pianist Larry Karush around the musical world; it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than American Airlines, and he won’t lose your luggage."
Greg Burk, MetalJazz

“I’m basically a boogie-woogie piano player,” Larry Karush told the crowd gathered last summer for a Q&A session at his undergrad alma mater, Portland's Reed College. “And sometimes I think that all the stuff that I’ve developed goes back to that root of rhythm or energy, and how you work with that. Over the course of the last number of years I’ve tried to expand the vocabulary of what I can spontaneously play with.”

Yet to call Karush merely a “boogie-woogie” pianist would be like calling Salman Rushdie merely a typist. An interpreter and absorber of a startling array of world music textures, Karush is the Left Coast musician incarnate, representing the state’s diverse cultural stewing pot by synthesizing sounds from North India, West Africa and Brazil with jazz, classical music and 20th century minimalism.

Kaursh entered Western music history on April 24, 1976 at New York’s Town Hall as one of the four pianos providing the expansive vistas for the debut of Steve Reich’s seminal minimalist masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. It was an auspicious gig a young pianist—he had recently earned a master's degree in musical performance from New York University—and a prescient one. Under Karush’s fingers lies the whole history of American piano, from Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Erik Satie to James P. Johnson and Bill Evans, from angular experimentation to breathless lyricism, from deep blues and country twang and tabla-fueled drone. The fact that he weaves all of this into a thoroughly original musical approach brings to mind Reich’s famous quote: “All music turns out to be ethnic music.”

Larry Karush with fellow composers/Californians/beach bums Alex Shapiro and Terry Riley

Karush calls his richly textured, often epic musical etudes “comprovisations,” and like Keith Jarrett and Cecil Taylor before him, they are journeys that begin on the pulse of an idea, a theme, an image, and travel into moment-by-moment adventure, evoking the wide spaces and contemplative wind tunnels of a long desert car ride through the Mojave. Oh, and he swings, too.

Karush's list of collaborators is as extensive as his sonic palette: John Abercrombie, Jane Ira Bloom, Scott Amendola, Glen Moore, David Schiff, Kendall Kay, Glen Velez, Dan Morris, Dave Carpenter, John Bergamo, Junior Homrich, Bob Fernandez, Eddie Gomez, Jay Clayton, Dave Friedman, Chris Colangelo, Bennie Wallace, Oregon, Kanai Dutta, Francisco Aguabella, Geetha Ramanathan and Terry and Gylan Riley. But for this year's Angel City Jazz Festival, Karush will be premiering a brand new solo “comprovisation” entitled “The Salsa Way,” which explores the interplay and juxtaposition of linear and rhythmic counterpoint, salsa and afro-cuban rhythms, open thematic improvisation, piano ostinati, and 20th century harmony. The piece was composed while Karush was a Alpert/Ucross Foundation artisty-in-residence.

Listen to Larry

Larry Karush Quartet with Chris Colangelo on bass, Kendall Kay on drums and Miles Shrewsbery on percussion (Live at LACMA, Dec. 29, 2006, podcast)

Mountains & Rivers: Larry Karush and David Schiff pay tribute to Terry Riley.

Larry playing with Steve Reich

MARK YOUR CALENDAR:
Larry Karush will give a live performance/interview on John Schneider's Global Village (KPFK 90.7-FM, Sept. 3, 11am). Larry''s ACJF set is at 9:15pm on Sunday, Sept. 6, 2009.

Tonight on TV there are two music-related offerings that we'll be queuing up on our DVR:

The Music Instinct: Science and Song, a PBS documentary about the physical and emotional effects of music on the human body. Heady stuff. Read the LA Times review of the program here.

And our pal Nels Cline will be running the changes with Das Vilco on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien or Jimmy Fallon or Craig Ferguson or whatever...

Wilco (The Album) isn't even out in physical form yet but it's streaming has yielded all sorts of reactions: from Rolling Stone's thumbs up to Nels' guitarwerks on "Bull Black Nova" to these crotchety seniors at Sulimay's diner in Philly:

Read the LA Weekly's review of Wilco's first night at the Wiltern here.

Wilco, with special guest Leslie Feist dueting with Jeff Tweedy, perform "You and I" at the Wiltern Theatre (6/25/09)

Well, no, no of course not. Just kidding. But wouldn't that be awesome? He could start with Larry King and then move right on to a one-two of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

"I'm baaaaaack"

Just a reminder: tomorrow (Sunday, June 21) there will be a screening at the Watts Towers Art Center of Charles Mingus: Past, Present, and Future, a new documentary film by Rosie Lee Hooks and Paul S. Rogers. The film will be shown in the Center's Noah Purifoy Gallery at 1:30pm and is free to all. From the L.A. Dept. of Cultural Affairs: "The film features an all-star line-up of world-class musicians, singers, dancers, and artists who come together in an exceptional, jam packed hour of television that not only entertains and informs, but inspires as well. Interviews and performance excerpts from many notable musicians, include world renowned Patrice Rushen, the luminous Nedra Wheeler, the extraordinary Ndugu Chancler, the Center for Celebration Arts amazing Giant Puppets, and jazz great Buddy Collette who discusses his life-long friendship with the legendary Charles Mingus. In addition, Nedra Wheeler's Bass Choir will perform live in the Mingus Gallery, playing Mingus, Mingus, Mingus!!!"
Well, we were going to go to a condo open-house tomorrow, but FERGET IT NOW.

Hank Jones holds Hank Jones at the 2009 JJAs

Also, the verdicts are in from the 2009 Jazz Journalists' Awards at the Jazz Standard in New York City this week past. Go here to view all the winners.

Greg Burk's Live Jazz Picks for June 19-25
Brick Wahl's Live Jazz Picks for June 18-24

REST IN TEMPO
Bob Bogle
Dini Clarke
Andy Hughes
Michael Joseph Jackson
Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy
Ali Akbar Khan
Charlie Mariano
Jack Nimitz
Sky Saxon
Steven Wells

Here This, Here This! Ye Newe Angel City Jazz Festival, Los Angeles' only alternative non-commercial jazz festival, has announced its 2009 artist lineup for concerts taking place Labor Day weekend (Sept. 6-7, 2009) at the intimate (and affordable!) John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood. The Angel City Jazz Festival is a two-day outdoor event featuring innovative and original jazz musicians from the west coast and around the world. The 2009 festival -- expanded from one to two days -- presents established jazz artists as well as lesser known emerging talent, with a focus on west coast creative jazz. The Angel City Jazz Festival was founded in 2007 by jazz promoter Rocco Somazzi (pause for applause), and the first event was held last year at Barnsdall Art Park in Hollywood. Co-Producing the festival this year is Los Angeles based Cryptogramophone Records (pause for riotous ovation).

Headlining this year's festival will be veteran woodwind player/composer Bennie Maupin [pictured] and Dolphyana, with an all-star band performing west coast premiers of newly discovered compositions by the great Eric Dolphy. Also headlining will be world renowned trumpeter Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy, a recently formed band with the unique instrumentation of trumpet, french horn, trombone, tuba, and drums. Other artists appearing at the festival are Grammy award-winning pianist Billy Childs' Jazz-Chamber Ensemble, The Nels Cline Singers with Jeff Parker of Tortoise, Nels' percussionist bro Alex Cline leading his cheekily named Band of the Moment, The Larry Goldings Organ Trio, The Satoko Fujii Four, Seattle-based pianist Wayne Horvitz's Gravitas Quartet, pianist Motoko Honda with Butoh master Oguri, Jesse Sharps' The Gathering featuring vocalist Dwight Trible, and many others.

Here's the schedule:

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th
4:00 PM Plays Monk (Ben Goldberg, Devin Hoff, Scott Amendola)
5:15 PM The Satoko Fujii Quartet
6:30 PM Jesse Sharps' The Gathering with Dwight Trible
Intermission
8:00 PM The Billy Childs Jazz-Chamber Ensemble
9:15 PM Larry Karush - solo piano
9:50 PM Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy

Drummer Nate Wood, bassist Edwin Livingston and vibraphonist Nick Mancini perform at ACJF 2008

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7th
4:00 PM Alex Cline's Band of the Moment
5:15 PM The Wayne Horvitz Gravitas Quartet
6:30 PM The Nels Cline Singers with Jeff Parker
Intermission
8:00 PM The Larry Goldings Organ Trio
9:15 PM Motoko Honda & Oguri
9:50 PM Bennie Maupin and Dolphyana

Nestled in the Hollywood Hills, the 1200-seat John Anson Ford Amphitheatre is one of the oldest performing arts venues in Los Angeles. But there's more to this choice of venue than just it's rustic and endearing location. ACJF hopes to resurrect the Ford as a nexus for west coast creative jazz. The Ford Theatre was originally known as the Pilgrimage Theater, and in the 1960s and 70s the "Jazz at the Pilgrimage" series on Sundays was a destination for many Left Coast artists like Art Pepper, Mundell Lowe, Chico Hamilton, Henry Franklin, Harold Land, Oscar Brashear, Buddy Collette, Barney Kessel, Shelly Manne, Don Ellis, Sonship Theus, Charles Owens, Oscar Brashear, George Bohannon, Kemang Sunduza and Bill Henderson. In fact, many -- if not all -- of these concerts were attended by young musicians who would make up the next generation of LA's postmodern creative jazz scene, including two blonde twin teens named Alex and Nels Cline. So, in many ways, it's some sort of spiritual homecoming.

For tix (you know you want them), log-on to www.fordtheatres.org, or call the Ford Box Office at (323) 461-3673. Tickets are priced at $35 for adults, and $12 for full-time students with ID and children 12 and under. Through the Ford's early buyer incentive, adults who buy tickets on or before August 30th pay only $30!

And, as an added bonus having nothing to do with ticket prices, Downbeast will be doing in-depth non-press releasey profiles of each of the 12 acts that will be performing Labor Day weekend. So stay tuned!

Free improv between virtuoso harmonica player Gregoire Maret and pianist/composer Andy Milne at ACJF 2008

First off, let's celebrate our endlessly classy First Lady for hosting a series of jazz workshops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, the Marsalis family was well-represented. Oh well, it's a start -- at least they performed "A Night in Tunisia." As Mrs. Obama is a sophisticated city sista from Chicago, here's hoping she'll bring in the AACM for some truly 21st century noise. Check out NPR's podcast of the event, as well as their A Blog Supreme.

Not to be outdone, the L.A. Times's Mark Swed summarizes the new sounds heard last week at the Ojai Festival.

CHECK(IT)OUT: via Tim Niland, a link to WBGO's The Checkout podcasts....HEAD IN ARMS MUSIC: Mark Geelhoed essays Josh Haden/Charlie Haden/Johnny Cash....UNDER YOUR SKIN ON YOUTUBE: interviews with Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers, Yusef Lateef, Satoko Fuji, Gary Lucas, and recent Vison Festival Lifetime Achievement Award winner Marshall Allen....FINALLY: LA Weekly profiles Busdriver....ONE GREAT NIGHT: Free Jazz reviews new Ellery Eskelin/Andrea Parkins/Jim Black live CD..."HOW LONG, OH LORD?": impassioned jazz rant from Graham Collier...REALLY??!!: Pop & Hiss stops short of admitting the Playboy Jazz Festival sucks....PASTE PULLS ONE OUT: "Six Gateway Jazz Albums for Rock Elitists"....TAPE CHANTS: Peter Margasak on Oakland electro-experimentalist Greg Kowalsky....UPPER-CLASS TWITS: Sounds & Fury wrings its hands over Twittering during classical music performances....FROZEN MUSIC: Of no musical interest except to those who spent time in Minneapolis from 1986 to 1991....THE MEMPHIS MAFIA: David Brent Johnson on Memphis’s little known jazz legacy....THEY CALL ME MISTER RHODES: requiem for an Angeleno....AND SPEAKING OF REQUIEMS: Kris Tiner’s photos of the last night of the Jazz Bakery....HAPPY ENDINGS: Anvil get their due after how many years?!!!....THE NUTJOB: Ornette Coleman’s “Meltdown”....POINT OF DEPARTURE: New issue is out....THE TALIBAN CAN'T: David R. Adler on Sufi music in Pakistan....THIS PRETTY MUCH EXPLAINS ITSELF: "A Musicologist’s Companion to American Idol"....SUBBACULT: Will Friedwald on the arcane world of jazz discographers.

And if between these three obsessives you can't find a head's up on great music in L.A. this week(end), we don't know what to tell you:
Greg Burk’s Jazz Picks of the Week (June 5-11)
Don Heckman’s Jazz Picks of the Week (June 9-14)
Brick Wahl’s Jazz Picks of the Week (June 11-17)

CURRENTLY LISTENING:
Albert Ayler - Holy Ghost (Revenant)
Arctic Monkeys - Live in Texas (Domino)
The Bird and The Bee - Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future (EMI)
Iron & Wine - Around the Well (Sub Pop)

Is Jazz Times magazine dead? Howard Mandel and Marc Myers weigh in....Thurston Moore interviewed by Decibel magazine (posted by a "J. Bennett," hmmmm)....Sonic Youth is in the middle of a unique residency over at Pitchfork TV and is also featured along with Carla Bozulich, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Devendra Banhart and Explosions in the Sky in Yeti Publishing's new Art of Touring, "a book of art, photographs, and writing reflecting life on the road, plus a DVD of live footage." (Why should we care? 1/3 of the profits from the sales of the book will be donated to the Musicians' Emergency Fund administered by the Jazz Foundation of America)....If that isn't enuff SY 4 U, check out Sashe Frere-Jones' New Yorker article on their 30th anniversary....Nostalgic thoughts on new Jane’s Addiction DVD....Peter Breslin listens to Trout Mask Replica
....Hilarious: “Jazz, A Drug” via Soundslope....Rust Never Sleeps: L.A. musician rescues Lester Young’s horn....Dave Douglas' new Spirit Moves now streaming....AVN plumbs the recently discovered 1957 recordings of Edgar Varese conducting a free jazz workshop that included Art Farmer, Teo Macero and Charlie Mingus....AAJ's Tom Greenland reviews the new John Zorn bio....The Bad Plus announces a sh*tload of summer dates....John Kelman summarizes of awesome anti-Burns jazz documentary Icons Among Us and Eric Benson documents its making....Word from the BBC on another another jazz doc 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz....Kyle Gann on Morton Feldman book....NPR’s A Blog Supreme profiles Jazz Icons DVD series creator Hal Miller....Salient thoughts on the Jazz “Tradition” from Pi Recordings....Bela Fleck’s banjo tour of Africa is documented in Throw Down Your Heart, which just opened in LA (read a review here)....Missed the Harry Partch tribute at REDCAT last week? Greg Burk reviews it here.

REST IN TEMPO
Jeff Hanson
Hugh Hopper
Kenny Rankin
Koko Taylor

CURRENTLY READING:
Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum (Berkeley Books)
The Birth of Bebop by Scott DeVeaux (University of California Press)
Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold (Hyperion)
Lowboy by James Wray (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)

MONA and Cryptonight Present
"THE GENTLEMEN"

Friday Night June 5th - 8PM
Museum of Neon Art
136 W. 4th St., LA 90013
Tel. (213) 489-9918
Tickets are $10 at the door
Free parking is available on the street, or in two paid lots 1/2 block away.

Jeff Gauthier - violin, effects
Joel Hamilton - bass
David Witham - piano, keyboards, effects
Andrew Pask - woodwinds, effects

Cryptonight and the Museum of Neon Art present an evening of electric and acoustic improvisation featuring violinist Jeff Gauthier, bassist Joel Hamilton, saxophonist Andrew Pask and pianist David Witham. These musicians have collaborated in a variety of contexts over the years, but on Friday night they will create musical soundscapes on the spot, drawing inspiration from each other and MONA's unique collection of neon art. Cryptonights are curated by Cryptogramophone Records, which was voted #4 Jazz Label in the 2007 Downbeat Critics Poll.