Daily best music in the world: Art Ensemble of Chicago - 1983

While I figure out how to work Musescore, here's some Art Ensemble of Chicago. My German friends told an interesting story last year about how they got all of this Paiste gear... by some rather ruthless means. Not all musicians are real nice guys. Still, I enjoy the music. 

Daily best music in the world: Ornette Coleman in Berlin - 1971

Newly uploaded video of Ornette Coleman playing Berliner Jazztage in 1971, with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell: 

h/t to Hank Shteamer, uploaded by Bay Area drummer Jay Korber.

The Wizard

More music in that 90s zone, from my personal archives. This really captures the spirit of my whole attitude towards playing the drums for that decade. Recorded in 2000, I think, when my group Flatland was recording our record Origin of Species. We played this tune twice in a studio in skinhead territory in southeast Portland. Using my 12/14/20 Gretsch set that was my only instrument for about 15 years. I like the performance, but the melody didn't come off the way I wanted, and it didn't really fit with the rest of the record, so we didn't release it.  

The tune is The Wizard by Albert Ayler. Here's the chart I transcribed for it:

And the recording. It's short. If it sounds like noise to you, listen to it a few times, there is direction, and order:  

That's a type of playing we don't talk about much on the site, because what can you really say about it? I think people need to do it some, whether or not they want to play that kind of music, because you can get to some things that you can't get from normal deliberate practicing and playing.   

Free playing now has gotten really preoccupied with sound— playing around with unusual timbres— but what this is about is pure energy, and listening. People hear this kind of thing as “emotional” or angry/angsty, or expressionistic, but it's really not. There is probably some kind of will to kick ass happening, but we're just playing music.  

Reassessing some free jazz drummers

There was a period of about five years where I was listening to a lot of early free jazz— Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp. Ornette (and his circle) is the only one I still listen to with any regularity. As an aesthetic and way of playing free music is still very much with me— a lot of it has been assimilated into mainstream modern jazz— but it's just one thing I do, and I don't listen to a lot of real out music. 

Here I want to revisit some players I listened to in that period, and decide if there's anything there that's for me, now. I'm only making judgments for myself. I'm looking for people who do this kind of playing effectively, in the traditional sense, and who have some kind of musical personality that is appealing to me, and who have something special to say on the drums. I'm not an avant-gardist— I don't listen to music for the purpose of processing my negative feelings about it, I don't accept absolutely anything as legitimate art. 

Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins
The first players to do what was termed free jazz, with Ornette Coleman. Both solid mainstream bebop players doing real gigs outside the avant-garde— they're almost not even thought of as avant-garde. I don't think Blackwell ever really breaks away from being a groove player. Higgins may be the most humane voice in drumming— he always sounds like pure music. I talk about them both amply elsewhere on the site.   

Ornette Coleman - Art of the Improvisors / This is Our Music / Change of the Century
 

Sunny Murray
Sunny is a strange case— I feel like there's some kind of personality disorder at work. He's the originator of that no-time white noise approach to free playing. There's some warmth there, I get a feeling of Baby Dodds around some of his later playing. See the record I posted yesterday.

Albert Ayler - Spiritual Unity
Cecil Taylor - Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come  

Andrew Cyrille
A great presence as an artist and creative percussionist. I've mainly listened to his old records with Cecil Taylor and a few newer things, and seen him play in person, but I don't have a real good idea of what he sounds like. It's strange. He's done a ton of creative music and I need to listen to him more. Cecil Taylor's Conquistador! is a free jazz classic. 

Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures, Conquistador! 

 

Milford Graves
Uses the tom toms a lot, with a strong African, polyrhythmic feeling— that's a feeling you can actually try to copy, and I do. 

Paul Bley - Barrage
David Murray - Real Deal 

Playing here with John Zorn in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock:

Daily best music in the world: Sunny Murray

Getting ready to head to Germany in a week, so content will be a little light. Here's a cool record by Sunny Murray— usually the outest free guy in the world, here doing some swing tunes and some free stuff with some great, unique players. Monnette Sudler is an interesting guitarist I had never heard of. She's still around, making music.

I always assumed everyone was working together and feeling good when playing this kind of music, and in agreement that it is what it is— that effect they're getting is what they want. Or at least they accept and embrace it. Now I wonder more. The swing grooves here have a unique, loopy kind of feel, but not everyone enjoys playing with that— it would be hard frustrating work for a lot of people. 

Daily best music in the world: Ronald Shannon Jackson with Albert Ayler

Ronald Shannon Jackson playing with Albert Ayler on the Live at Slug's Saloon album, recorded in 1966. Jackson wasn't recorded a lot at this stage of his career, and it's really interesting to hear him do the same relentless rolling thing we heard him do on a giant Sonor set in the 80s. Clearly he's more technically able than some other avant-garde drummers of the period— people who may have been going for an emotional intensity that was beyond their capabilities. Jackson also has a stronger sense of pulse than most of them— it's like listening to a mediocre bass player with weak harmonic sense play this music (another common situation), and then listening to Gary Peacock play it. It's like oh, this guy is playing off a pulse. He's a real drummer.




Jackson plays with real power, and he's obviously a strong listener. It reminds me a lot of Jack Dejohnette playing avant-garde. There's just a different quality when a real technically and musically able drummer does this kind of thing. There's more energy and more evident creativity happening; more melodic awareness.

He is awesome playing with Cecil Taylor a dozen years later, too. Cecil can be kind of punishing to me; Jackson humanizes him.

Paul Motian podcast

Here's one you're going to want to follow: Uncle Paul's Jazz Closet. The caretaker of  Paul Motian's recorded archives has made a podcast that includes selections from his recordings— released and unreleased, live performances, rehearsal tapes, other people playing his music, and miscellaneous items from his collection.

There's a lot of music here— they've been posting weekly since early 2016— but I'm most excited about the rehearsal tapes with Charles Brackeen and David Izenson, and with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, and the home recordings with Masabumi Kikuchi. There's seriously a ton of stuff. Go there now and download it all. There's also a blog connected with the podcast, and a book of Motian tunes available. 

Playing free

“No chaos, damn it!” —Jackson Pollock
responding to a critic who called his work chaotic.

Here at CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! there are some subjects we don't talk about much— not because they're not important, but because it's hard to talk about them. It's hard to say anything real specific about how you go about playing so-called free jazz— totally improvised music. But that type of playing has been a a big part of my thing for many years, and I think all players should learn how to do it, so I'll give a few guidelines.

While there are areas of free playing where the drummer plays similarly to regular “non-free”  music, the way of playing I'm talking about is largely textural, unmetered, without a defined tempo, and— here, just go listen to Interstellar Space. We're talking about how to play that vibe. Following are some suggestions for how to approach it, think about it, and how to actually “execute” it.


GET SOME RECORDS
“Free Jazz” is not supposed to be a style, but it is sort of a style— people expect a certain ballpark thing. You're not supposed to go in and play a Polka beat or clave all night. Get some records and get an idea of the parameters of the music historically, at least. It helps if you actually try to like the music and get excited about it.


MOVE YOUR LIMBS
What's going on? How to I sound like that? Start by playing the drums, moving your limbs in an uncontrolled way. Make a mess. If you dedicate some time to that, eventually the stuttering racket will begin to organize itself, and you'll be playing some things you couldn't have arrived at any other way.

Try to copy the vibe of some free playing you like. If you look at videos of those players, you can see that many of them will use a kind of naive technique at least some of the time— they play like they don't know how to play. You can do that too.

The “Action Painting” concept— that results didn't matter,
and that painting was all about just the physical action of it
— was bullshit. De Kooning spent a lot of time looking
between every few strokes you see here. The goal was always
to make a painting in the traditional sense.

LISTEN
Listen to the people you're playing with more than you listen to yourself. Listen more than you think about what you're doing.


TEMPO ZONE
This music is usually considered to be “tempoless”, but that's not right— the things you play, together with the other musicians, create a kind of tempo feeling— a sense of velocity. You can't avoid it, so it's best to understand that it's happening, and work with it. Like with normal, metered music, you can do certain time-stretching things that will sound like cross rhythms, creating musical tension; also, if you violate the implied velocity too much, things break down, and you begin to sound directionless, meandering, boneless, and you're on your way to an unsatisfying musical experience.


PHRASING
Normal rules of phrasing apply— by which I mean, the audience is going to perceive phrases, so as you play you may as well be aware of the occurrence of the free jazz equivalent of two, four, eight, or sixteen measure phrases. The length of the horn player's breath is a natural phrase length that happens even if there are no other structures in the music.


REPEAT
A good strategy for developing ideas, as well as cohesion and coherence, is to repeat whatever you play until you have a reason to change to something else. Whatever first random thing you do, keep doing it, allowing little changes happen to it— if you've gotten comfortable with that type of semi-controlled playing I described above, that development will happen on its own.


SPONTANEOUS COMPOSING
You should realize, as you and your friends are going bananas, that in doing this type of playing, you are actually composing a normal piece of music with a beginning, middle, and end. It's happening whether you intend it to or not. Everything you play = the composition. Do what you will with that information. You can use normal composer tactics of repeating and developing motifs, contrasting sections, intros and codas, whatever.

Pointillism: making a
painting out of discrete dots.

CHANGE VIBES
There are some drummers who make a career out of the full-time hell-of-a-racket approach, but most will be bored by that. You can change things up between “tunes” by switching to brushes, or mallets, or hands, or to mainly-drums, or mainly-cymbals, whatever. You can also suggest broad approaches to the other players— let's play long tones, or let's play pointillistic, or let's try to sound like a bird attack*, or a gladiator fight*, or like pleistocene megafauna*.

* - All ideas used by me. I'll play you the record sometime.


AVANTE-GARDE
Free improvisation is not a new way of making music, and it is no longer avant-garde.  Avant-garde refers to a form of expression that the artist understands before everyone else— the artist gets it now, soon everyone will get it. In 2017, everybody gets it, and no sophisticated or sympathetic listener will be affronted by it. There are some anti-social types in the free music community who seem to think that being deliberately hard to listen to is the same as being avant-garde, and it is not. Avant-garde is a term used by historians to describe an artist's personal expression that was out of step with the taste/standards of the time, and turned out to be historically significant.


THERE'S NOTHING TO KNOW
There's no special significance to this music, or to this way of playing, and nothing to know that you're not already learning in other areas of music. It exists for your playing and listening pleasure. There are books you can get (kof  FREE PLAY) that tell you how great free improvising is, and what a rich, wonderful world of exploration, freedom, and self-discovery it is. I advise that you never open books like that more than a few running steps from the nearest bathroom. You don't need those books and no verbal explanation or theory will help you get it. Please just listen and play.

Here is some listening to get you started:

Han Bennink practice tips

Not a lot of action on the other drumming blogs these days, but Ted Warren of Trap'd has this amazing thing for us, courtesy of Jon McCaslin of Four On The Floor, courtesy of some guy who saw Han Bennink do a workshop, and wrote it down. I figure the more people reblog this kind of thing, the more it becomes a set part of the literature of drumming.

These are Bennink's suggestions for practicing the drums:

“Play as fast as you can for 5 minutes without repeating yourself.

Same thing goes for slow, loud, soft and any combination of them.

Play one piece of your drumkit for 5 minutes and try to keep it interesting, do this untill you have played all pieces.

Repeat the same beat for 5 minutes and try to keep it interesting.

Play a crescendo lasting 5 minutes ending as loud as possible.

Play solid time for 5 minutes, check with metrone before and after, repeat untill your time is really solid.

Play completely free for 5 minutes, no time is allowed.

When you think you have become good at these exercises extend them by 5 minutes each. etc. These exercises should last you a lifetime.”

Daily best music in the world: Leo

Rashied Ali's band playing my favorite piece from Interstellar Space. With Carlos Ward.

Daily best music in the world: Andrew Cyrille with Grachan Moncur III

Just a nice track from a record I've never heard, by Moncur, a famous trombonist, with Andrew Cyrille on the drums:

Ornette live in '58

Here's something remarkable: Ornette Coleman recorded live in LA in 1958, just before his big national exposure in New York. The band includes the musicians in his famous quartet: Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins, plus Paul Bley on piano. They had all been playing together a lot at this point, but like the album from '58, Something Else!, it does sound on-the-cusp; after the famous, long-running gig at the Five Spot in 1960, the band just sounds bigger and more confident in their thing. Or, hell, maybe they sounded amazing in '55 and just started getting recorded better. Don Cherry sounds great here.



Tunes are:
1. Klactoveedsestene
2. I Remember Harlem

3. The Blessing
4. Free
5. Ramblin' (possibly my favorite Ornette Track ever, from Change of the Century)
6. How Deep Is The Ocean?
7. When Will The Blues Leave?
8. Crossroads

Daily best music in the world: Ornette live — 1973

I'll be out for a couple of days here— playing at the Jazz Station in Eugene tonight with flugelhornist Dmitri Matheny, attending a memorial service for my partner/wife's mother, and having my own birthday with family in Eugene— that's Monday the 27th, an excellent day to do something nice to support the blog, if you're so inclined...

...so here's a little listening for you: a bootleg recording of Ornette Coleman, from 1973. The band includes Ed Blackwell on drums, Dewey Redman on tenor, and Charlie Haden on bass. Ornette often had a second bassist, David Izenson, with him during this period, but I can't hear him here.

Part 1


Part 2

From the zone: The Wizard, by Albert Ayler

I've been preoccupied the last few days whipping into shape the 2013 Cruise Ship Drummer! Book of the Blog (available for order next week), so here's a quick little something from my old notebooks: a transcription of the tune The Wizard, by Albert Ayler, which I made in 1999 or so:

Here's the original audio, if you want to check my work. The album is Spiritual Unity, with Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock— if you're going to play free jazz, you need to have a smoking bassist with some classical chops:

Sunny Murray, the bebop tradition, and Milford Graves

“Take it easy, now... there's no work in this shit, they're gonna jump on your ass...” 
— Sunny Murray to a young, interested, Hans Bennink


 Here's an interview by Dan Warburton, with one of the original free jazz drummers, Sunny Murray. It's most interesting to me as a piece of archeology into the attitudes of these players, who seemed at the time to be making such a large break with previous music, and who are often regarded as not maintaining, shall we say, traditional technical standards. But Murray clearly feels himself to be part of the same tradition as some more mainstream players (even if McCall and Blackwell were thought of as avant-garde at the time) and having less connection to another great early free player, Milford Graves, who he felt was coming from someplace else:

[...] I like Milford a lot, but basically I have the attitude of a bebop drummer regarding what I feel about music and other drummers. Milford didn't come from bebop at all. I love Roy Brooks, and Louis Hayes with those beautiful mahogany-looking hands, Eddie Blackwell that could just swing your head off, Steve McCall was the best surprise with the left hand I ever heard, Dennis Charles he'd just chug-a-lug you for ever. [...] You know, it's traditional for a drummer to be opinionated about other drummers, because there are some basics and roots in jazz drumming and there's a whole generation today that hasn't had to deal with those rules or laws, aesthetically or spiritually, or go through the kinds of pressures I had to go through, Louis Hayes, Dennis Charles, Eddie Blackwell, Steve McCall had to go through... It wasn't something unpleasant, it was an education.

More after the break:

Transcription: Ed Blackwell solo — Tarik

Oh, what the hell, happy Saturnalia— I went ahead and transcribed the solo from the GOTD of a few days ago, Tarik, by Ed Blackwell, from Dewey Redman's album of the same name. It's a real study of hand independence, and not very readable, but at least roughing it out measure by measure or phrase by phrase should give you some insight into Blackwell's way of playing. At least into this tom tom thing of his, which you should recognize right away if you've heard much of his playing. The tune is basically just a drum groove, with Redman improvising freely on the musette, along with Malachi Favors on bass. Possibly the opening phrase on musette was composed.

Throughout the piece, there are many times when the snare is played with both hands in unison, or nearly so, which I've indicated with a B. I included them based on the sound, and haven't worked through them on the drums prior to posting this, so if you hit anything really unplayable, probably one of those both-handed notes is in the wrong spot. Definitely write in your own additional stickings where needed. Blackwell basically plays quarter notes with both feet in unison all the way through, though often one or both may drop out for a few beats. It doesn't matter— the main thing is the hands. The repeated lick at measure 36 gets a little sloppy, and ends with an accidentally dropped beat, hence the single measure of 3/4.

Get the pdf

Audio after the break:

Everybody digs the same stuff, part eleventy

I've decided that one of the immutable laws of the universe is that everybody digs the same stuff— well, I've felt that way for some time, and it keeps getting confirmed. In this latest case: if you're listening to any Ornette Coleman and, oh, Paul Bley, maybe looking for tunes to play, you're going to end up with the same selections, partly because only some of them are transcribable and playable by normal musicians, but partly because everybody digs the same stuff and everybody knows the same stuff. 

Call it the Have-You-Met-Miss-Jones? effect. Everybody loves Roy Haynes's opening rim shot on that tune, including Roy. If you've heard this record, it's instantly your favorite thing on Earth:



Interviewed by Alan Jones in Portland recently, Haynes is still bringing it up, 50 years and many millions of notes later:



So anyway, in today's reletively minor case, I was slapping together some new things for next week's tour, I stumbled across a site, a blog called Jazz Transcript Authority, sharing a bunch of the same damn things I was working on: Mr. Joy by Annette Peacock, Street Woman and Macho Woman by Ornette Coleman, plus some other things I had written up in the past— not exactly well-known stuff, from little-heard albums. We'll see how usable his charts are, but there's a bunch of other interesting stuff in the same ballpark: late 60's Miles, Collin Walcott, some Don Ellis. Worth checking out if you have any interest along these lines.

Milford Graves

Hey, there's more of pioneering free jazz drummer Milford Graves up on YouTube than there used to be. I think he's my favorite of the early way free guys, and I wish he was on more stuff. You sometimes get the feeling with that music that there's not much going on beyond the massive expending of energy, but there's real music going on with Graves. He's got a special kind of pulse, and melodic sensibility you don't hear in the straight wall-of-sound guys. There's some fairly difficult listening here, but be sure to check out the very last thing, at least.

A nice track from his 1977 record Babi, which I had never heard before:




For years, this solo album was just about the only thing I could find with him on it— well, this, and Paul Bley's Barrage, which I found as a random lucky score. He tends to do a lot of vocalizing as part of his thing:



More after the break:

DBMITW: Art Ensemble of Chicago

I've got several things brewing-- including, but not limited to the rest of the series on playing in 5/4-- but they're all taking their sweet time getting finished, so in the mean time, here's some Art Ensemble of Chicago for you. I've always loved Famadou (that's FAmadoo) Don Moye's playing: deeply swinging, with a beautiful, clean and big sound. And he's the world's coolest free jazz drummer-- as someone else said about Kenny Clarke, he's not going to bust his butt "for nobody."

Here AEOC plays Dreaming of the Master, from the record Nice Guys:



The rest of this concert is after the break:

A treasure trove: WKCR Soundscape project

I just googled this up, from the WKCR 89.9 New York radio site: a duo performance by Ed Blackwell and saxophonist Charles Brackeen, recorded in 1980 at:

Soundscape[,] a New York performance venue founded and curated by Verna Gillis. Between 1979 and 1983, Soundscape offered specialized programming of Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban music, avant-garde improvised music, and “world music” performers from many nations. Many Soundscape shows were recorded and the library of recordings has been donated by Gillis to the WKCR permanent archives, for broadcast on air and to be made available on the web.

There are a bunch of other interesting things- a group called Commitment, featuring Denis Charles, who we talked about a few days ago, a Sunny Murray solo performance, a Rashied Ali duo concert, a very cool Tito Peunte concert, and more.

And digging a little deeper into the WKCR site, there's also a page of interviews and in-studio performances by people like Don Cherry, Milford Graves, Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz, Dewey Redman, and others. Definitely worth spending a bunch with this one.