October News 2001 New Releases reviewed by Dan Warburton: Aki Takase Pandelis Karayorgis Ramon Lopez / Christine Wodrascka Jac Berrocal John Coltrane + McCoy Tyner IAMAPHOTOGRAPHER Evan Parker, Patrick Scheyder Björk: VESPERTINE Last Month Next Month

Aki Takase

LE CAHIER DU BAL
Leo CD LR 319

Aki Takase openly acknowledges the inspiration of dancer Anzu Furukawa, but Thelonious Monk is never far away (and is justifiably namechecked several times in Stuart Broomer's notes), and her pianism references the twentieth-century classical repertoire as much it does her jazz heroes. Not only Stravinsky and Bartok (whose "Mikrokosmos" often springs to mind): "Tango de Anzu" marks out a harmonic field with volleys of ultra-staccato chords, as does "Dance Parallax", whose extensive use of parallel triads and glissandi could easily pass as early Conlon Nancarrow. Takase's choice of titles such as "rigaudon", "gigue", "menuet" also implies a homage to an earlier tradition of solo keyboard music, the baroque suite (that said, her take on the rigaudon finds her playing inside the instrument, as do the three evocative "Inside Tales" which fill the piano with assorted objects and explore their resonances). Dance is never far away: the high-register flurries of "Gigue" and "Tarantella 2001" recall the piano writing in another celebrated ballet score, Stravinsky's "Petrushka", while the "Menuet Mozambique" — not in traditional triple time, of course — is as close to that Russian composer's early neoclassical pieces as it is to Misha Mengelberg's brilliant debunking of classical piano technique. The final "Pulcinella" — whose title, if nothing else, also pays homage to Stravinsky — is an action-packed romp through the world of Takase's pianism, impressive bop chops veering round Monkish brilliant corners (watch out for the ghost track, by the way..). Much of this music swings hard — it's a shame Aki's old rhythm team of Cecil McBee and Bob Moses isn't on hand in pieces like "Canarie" — even though the recording, coupled with Takase's extremely sparing use of the sustained pedal, can come across as rather dry at times.

Karayorgis Albums

Pandelis Karayorgis / Nate McBride / Ken Vandermark
NO SUCH THING
Boxholder BXH 018
Pandelis Karayorgis / Nate McBride
LET IT
Cadence CJR 1115
Pandelis Karayorgis
BLOOD BALLAD
Leo CD LR 325

I should say at the outset that Pandelis Karayorgis is one of my favorite pianists — he takes the instrument one step beyond the innovations of Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, while keeping the former's sense of space and the latter's dynamism and injecting a healthy dose of chromatic lyricism reminiscent of Andrew Hill. Not surprise then that the opener on "No Such Thing", "Skid Into The Turn", is dedicated to Hill, even though it's not a Karayorgis original, but by Ken Vandermark. It's one of three KV originals here — the other two are dedicated to Lee Konitz and Jimmy Giuffre, which, coupled with Vandermark's increasing use of the clarinet seems to reflect a shift of interest on the reedman's part away from the titanic paint-stripping free blowers towards the more discreet yet no less innovative horn players of yore. For my money though, Vandermark is still at his best when he really lets fly (the bass clarinet solo on "Disambiguation" sounds like a fantastic cross between Eric Dolphy and Charles Gayle); his cheeky tooty West Coasty moments are less captivating. Adding a drummer might have helped.
The duo set on Cadence is more satisfying, giving freer rein to the plasticity of the compositions (one aptly entitled "Rubber Time"), and revealing more of the synergy between two musicians who have been gigging solidly together for nearly a decade. McBride plays less walking bass here than he does on the trio album and yet the whole thing swings like hell. The album's finest track is a sinewy exploration of Monk's "Criss Cross", fragments of which resonate and surface throughout the rest of the session, apparently recorded in the pianist's living room — though the cameo appearance by his dog Haris on "Eyes and Birds" isn't all that easy to spot — presumably the hound was as enthralled by the music as the musicians were.
If your Karayorgis budget only extends to buying one album this time round, the one to go for is "Blood Ballad", recorded in April 2000 and following on from the excellent "Heart And Sack" (Leo Lab 048). The word "organic" comes to mind listening to Karayorgis's solo on "Coming Out of Nothing" — the suppleness of the rhythm section (McBride's meaty bass perfectly counterpointed by Randy Peterson's flexible drumming) allowing the pianist to follow his ideas wherever they lead him, Mengelberg-like (including several Misha-esque excursions down mysterious melodic back alleys). While "Heart and Sack" included devastating readings of 1960s Prestige gems by Ken McIntyre and Eric Dolphy, the bona fide cover version on this album is the final track, Coltrane's "One Up, One Down" (shouldn't that be "One Down, One Up"?). If the sixties are never far away, this album also looks further back to Ellington and Strayhorn: the title track is a homage to the latter, while "Centennial" — definitely my selection for Best Ballad of the year, in case anyone asks — looks at the Duke's "Frustration" through a melodic/harmonic kaleidoscope, with ravishing results.

AUX PORTES DU MATIN

Ramon Lopez / Christine Wodrascka
Leo CD LR 318

This fifty-minute set by percussionist Ramon Lopez and pianist Christine Wodrascka was recorded — as have been many fine albums of improvised music over recent years — at the Instants Chavirés just outside Paris in November 2000, in front of a (small?) audience whose presence we only become aware of at the end of the final track, when applause breaks out. Quite why the clapping couldn't have been edited out is something of a mystery — did the artists want to leave it in just to prove it was a club date? If so, they needn't have bothered: it's clear from the opening exchanges that this is 100% live — not because the recording is peppered with audience noise (far from it), but simply because the interaction between the players has that special sense of danger that no amount of studio takes nor overdubbing can ever capture. Lopez is an intriguing drummer, equally at home playing and teaching intricate tabla rhythms as he is thrashing it out with the likes of Charles Gayle and Ivo Perelman; if any other drummer comes to mind here, it's Han Bennink, if only for the nervous fluttery mastery of the brushwork. Wodrascka is also hard to pin down stylistically: on "Il sait mal ce qu'est la liberté" (roughly translated: "he doesn't really know what freedom is"), she moves from tight Andrew Hill-like lines to epic cluster smashes, while "Mirages" finds her jamming along with Lopez's complex meters with consummate ease. Her work inside the instrument is equally impressive, from the harpsichord-like "Ils jouent" to the zany Westminster chimes of the closing "L'heure de la danse" — just in case you thought only Sophie Agnel, among France's women pianists, was capable of imaginative prepared piano work.

Jac Berrocal

PARALLELES
Alga Marghen Plana B5TES 037

Jac Berrocal's "Parallèles" was recorded back in 1976 and is here reissued along with a few other 70s gems from the French underground trumpeter-agent provocateur. In his brief but revealing notes, Berrocal joyously admits that "we enjoyed recording in unusual situations" ("Post-Card" was recorded, it seems, in a pig farm, "Cryptéa IV" in a sumptuously reverberant church in Sens) and "we had no rules." Some of the tracks are positively inspired, especially the mythic "Rock'n'Roll Station", which features Vince "Brand New Cadillac" Taylor intoning a strange, repetitive cut-up text over an ultra-minimal one-note bass riff while Berrocal "plays" an upturned bicycle. The title track itself is a crazed, half-composed duet for two trombones, featuring Berrocal and Roger Ferlet, who, on "Villa Povera Naturale" (recorded back in 1972) is credited as playing "carafe, hammer, smashing a dish, window opened on the street".. All the tracks — with the exception perhaps of "Bric-a-Brac", a sprawling 22-minute homage to Russolo which descends into manneristic plonking and honking (and isn't saved by the slight return of "Rock 'n' Roll Station") — are thoroughly engrossing and another indication of how out there the French avant-garde was back in the 1970s. Nice to see this one out again.

John Coltrane + McCoy Tyner

John Coltrane
THE OLATUNJI CONCERT/ THE LAST LIVE RECORDING
Impulse
McCoy Tyner
PLAYS JOHN COLTRANE
Impulse

McCoy Tyner's live trio date from the Village Vanguard recorded back in 1997 with George Mraz on bass and Al Foster on drums is as good'n'wholesome as the pianist's playing has been ever since he left the Coltrane quartet all those years back. Foster and Mraz swing as big and hard as Tyner's block chord solos, and the state-of-the-art live recording picks up the squeals of delight from the Vanguard audience as clearly as it does the tiniest flecks of Foster's cymbals. “Plays John Coltrane" isn't strictly true as titles go, since the set also includes Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue" and Billy Eckstine's "I Want To Talk About You", but as both were standard rep for the classic Trane quartet I suppose we can let it pass. It's not only hard but also somewhat churlish to criticize such accomplished musicianship, but I find myself wondering once more what Coltrane would be doing if he were still with us—appearing at prestigious festivals as one of the proverbial Grand Old Men of Jazz to perform his grand old compositions to a grand old audience before leaving with a grand old check? As is the case with Jimi, Jim and Janis, such speculation may be tempting but is ultimately of little value—myth is often more powerfully seductive than reality, and that Coltrane myth is especially strong, the authentically heroic story of a man who, breaking down each door of perception only to find another in its place, hurtled fearlessly forward into the unknown until he literally wore himself out. It's certainly hard somehow to imagine him sitting in here: Tyner's album, though cogent, sincere and undoubtedly heartfelt, sits comfortably in the centre of the playing field called Jazz (with a capital J), while Coltrane's brief but intense career was all about pushing the limits of that field so far to the left (or the right, depending on your point of view, all puns intended) that it ceased to be a field altogether—let alone one called "jazz"—becoming instead a vast open space of almost limitless possibility. Maybe we should simply call it "music".
The release, then, of Coltrane's "last live recording" (well, at least until they turn up some other tapes from under the bed; one wonders where this one's been gathering dust for the past 34 years) is certainly an Event. Olatunji's Center of African Culture opened in Harlem on April 23rd 1967, and, according to Cuthbert Simpkins' biography, people were queuing around the block for the few seats available. From the first breath of the stupendous 28-minute reading of "Ogunde"—a symbolic choice of opener, given its titular homage to a Nigerian musician and the Center's pan-cultural aspirations—it's clear that Coltrane wasn't going to let bad health get in the way. Sounding distinctly Ayler-like, he barely manages to state the theme before he races off down one of the avenues opening up before him, handing over to Pharoah Sanders after an intense and extraordinary two and a half minutes. Sanders needs only a couple more minutes to work himself up into a veritable fury, after which Alice Coltrane's extended modal noodlings contain few surprises but serve to cool the temperature before the leader returns to the fray at the 17 minute mark. The return of the theme at 25'25" is positively astounding.
Coltrane reportedly said (to Sunny Murray): "I hear a thousand rhythms". He would probably have liked this recording then—though decidedly rough and ready compared to others from that final year, the triple-headed percussive assault of Rashied Ali, Algie DeWitt and Jumma Santos ("possibly", it says in the box.. surely to goodness somebody out there can confirm this?) is overwhelming. Garrison has to contend with some traffic noise during his monumental seven-minute opening bass solo to "My Favourite Things", but the street sounds of New York City are soon left far, far behind when Coltrane's soprano comes sailing in. And Sanders' tenor solo is.. no, I've put down my pen to listen—superlatives seem suddenly to have lost all meaning. I can only remember Coltrane's words: "You just keep going all the way, as deep as you can. You keep trying to get right down to the crux." This music is as close to the crux as you can get.
I read that Coltrane's group, also featuring Donald Garrett, performed two weeks later in Baltimore on May 7th 1967. If anyone out there has a recording of that concert, I'm going to need a damn good excuse for them not releasing it. If music is indeed the healing force of the universe — on the strength of this album, I am prepared to believe that—we need more music like this, right now.

IAMAPHOTOGRAPHER

Various Artists
Plain Recordings

This wide-ranging compilation of fair-to-middling material is supposed to be a tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Blow Up", but it's hard to see what the music has to do with the cult 1966 movie set in Swinging London (itself, by the way, based on a short story by Julio Cortazar set in Paris). A recent review in The Wire (I'm sure they'd have loved to release this as one of their freebie compilations, starring as it does members of the in-crowd such as William Parker, Mazzacane Connors and Arthur Doyle) suggested that Dean Roberts might have based his "A Yard of Birds" on the Yardbirds material briefly featured in the film, though I await confirmation of that hypothesis. Matmos' contribution shows once again that no amount of kooky samples and nifty programming can make up for their paucity of imagination when it comes to structuring a coherent piece of music, though at least their track's holier-than-thou PC title seems to indicate they've actually seen the film in question. The contributions from Mushroom, Birdsong's Air Force and Dorgon are limp, while the Sun City Girls, Parker and Connors offerings, though hardly providing any surprises, are strong enough to satisfy those completists who'll feel obliged to buy the album. (And that's perhaps the point: for all you struggling artists out there, here's a tip: the sure-fire way to shift all 500 copies of your limited edition album is to invite Jim O'Rourke or Thurston Moore or some such cult figure to guest on at least one track.). I speak as a completist myself—this disc is worth the price of admission for me if only to hear Arthur Doyle's "You End Me On The African Express", which interleaves his own composition "African Express" with a ravishing, punning take on Sam Cooke. (I am though prepared to wager a small sum that Arthur hadn't heard of Michelangelo Antonioni before Pat Thomas invited him to take part in this project.)

EVAN PARKER / PATRICK SCHEYDER

Leo CD LR 326

One of the reasons classically-trained pianists sound so twee and ineffectual when they try to play jazz is a question of touch; traditional Western classical music works with a wide variety of dynamic markings and nuances from fortissimo (ff) to pianissimo (pp), and beyond (Luigi Nono's late compositions frequently observed a difference between ppppp and pppppp). Jazz, and much improvised music—until relatively recently where it seems ppppp is often the order of the day—has tended to work within a more restricted dynamic range: the linearity and forward-driving motion of traditional swing, bop and funk rhythm sections doesn't lend itself to sudden variations of timbre and intensity. Thelonious Monk playing a Mozart piano sonata isn't an attractive proposition.
So when a competent classical pianist and well-known Chopin interpreter, Patrick Scheyder, expresses an interest in free improvisation and takes to the studio with none other than Evan Parker, you can expect something interesting, to say the least. Scheyder's touch is quite different from that of Parker's other piano partners (Schlippenbach, Taylor, et al.), forcing him to abandon the gruff Coltraney tenor sound in favor of a fluffiness closer to Stan Getz. The opening minutes of "Skrying in Mortlake" are decidedly strange, as Scheyder sticks stubbornly to the white notes, Parker dodging and weaving and trying to find a harmonic space he can move into. It's like having to spend a whole evening with a friend of a friend who doesn't speak your language well, nor you his/hers: conversation is limited to "please-pass-the-salt" niceties until a subject of common interest (the weather? football?) leads to something more convivial. Even if it sounds as if Scheyder is leading the way (in that Parker willingly takes up his ideas, almost as a gesture of reassurance), it's clear that the saxophonist is the more experienced improviser, allowing his playing partner to run with the ball more than he would a seasoned associate such as Barry Guy or Phil Wachsmann. The inclusion of a solo track for each musician is superfluous album-filling though. Scheyder sounds lost in his, and Parker's "Other (as it were) OPTICAL Science, for JZ" is a familiar head-spinning non-stop soprano solo. It's like a Cartier wristwatch—yes, this new one is as fabulously beautiful as we've come to expect, but the one I got twenty years ago is still working just fine This is a curious and intriguing album, hardly the best thing Parker's put out recently but nonetheless refreshingly different from some of the more predictable recent offerings.

VESPERTINE

One Little Indian 589000-2

Maybe it's just because la Björk has recently been eminently present here where I'm writing from (Paris, France), even performing in the Sainte Chapelle (more later), maybe it's because the M/M graphics remind me of another recent much-hyped French project (the latest Etienne Daho album), maybe it's because copies of "Vespertine" are literally all over the place, I'm approaching this album with the same sense of trepidation as many other recent major label overkills. After the spectacular success of "SelmaSongs", riding (or rather breaking) the wave of her acting triumph in Lars Von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark", it seems all Björk need do is call for more sumptuous arrangements from Vince Mendoza and Guy Sigsworth to cruise majestically behind her state-of-the-art glitchy programming and, of course, that voice to go platinum. It has to be said that, along with PJ Harvey and Beth Gibbons, Björk has one of the most instantly recognizable vocal instruments of the last decade — steering a middle course between Harvey's anguished hormones and Gibbons' desperate insecurity, she's invented the perfect pagan pixie diva sound, sensuous and sighing without being remotely sexy, at times trembling and fragile, at times volcanic (only Van Morrison hollers better). Stripped of the studio effects wizardry, she actually sounds pretty awful — there's one such revealing moment halfway through "Pagan Poetry" — but she hardly ever lets it happen. Every little gasp, click of tongue on teeth, rolled "r" and vowel sound (pulled deliberately out of shape as if she was trying to sing and chew gum at the same time) is sucked up and spat out in style by ProTools. The desired effect is supposedly intimacy (even case-hardened journalists who should know better — like David Toop in "The Wire" — have been falling over themselves to praise what they believe to be the singer baring her soul) but the result is, at worst, intensely annoying self-caricature. Hyped-up music boxes and heavy use of harp (Zeena Parkins pops up on no less than seven tracks) provide necessary comforting-childhood-memory camouflage, and Mendoza's orchestration (surely the most ravishing string arrangements since Clare Fischer's for Prince and Rufus & Chaka Khan) is almost irresistibly seductive — the lady clearly has both sound business acumen and reasonably good taste when it comes to choosing her playmates (and lyricists too: "Sun In My Mouth" sets some magnificent lines by e.e. cummings) — but for some reason, the hairs aren't standing up. It's hard to say precisely why, but there seems to be a sense of faux religion in those over-the-top choral arrangements — the fact that she should choose to perform in one of the world's most celebrated churches may be significant — when pop music strays too far away from the sweat of the bedroom or the dance floor and pompously summons forth massed ranks of angelic choristers, the enterprise is almost certainly doomed to failure. In search of intimacy? Soul? Spirituality? Heartfelt sincerity? You're welcome to try "Vespertine"; I'm off to play an old Al Green album.

Copyright 2001 by Paris Transatlantic