April News 2002 New Releases reviewed by Dan Warburton: Hugo Roussel / Norman D. Mayer John Latartara Jeff Song & Lowbrow Walter Horn On Eremite: NEW WORLD PYGMIES VOL. 2 On Mutable: Randy Weston Screaming Headless Torsos Book review: Essential Cowell Stefan Dill Last Month Next Month

ROCK ? N ? ROLL MOTHERFUCKER

Hugo Roussel / Norman D. Mayer
Pricilia P:REC 017
www.zone51.com/pricilia

A friend recently told me of how, while training to be a nurse, she once had to treat a girl who'd come screaming into the hospital Out Patients' at 3 a.m. complaining of excruciating pains in her inner ear. When the nurse took a look inside the girl's ear, she saw two eyes staring back at her: a tiny cockroach had crawled in there while the girl had been sleeping and was unable to get out (the nurse finally had to suck it out with a large pipette). Since I heard this story I've tried on numerous occasions to imagine what that must have sounded like, and the first track on "RnRm" is probably the closest I've got so far. Put this one in the "French Dog Torture" bin along with Fred Nogray's "a!meushi?!" (La Belle du Quai 00108) - high frequencies abound and unless you enjoy them you should probably steer well clear. It's less linear, however, than recent work by Toshi Nakamura and Sachiko M (both of whom these lads must adore); Roussel (mixing desk) and Mayer (guitar), working out of Nancy (France), have some nasty surprises in store for anyone expecting yet another static high-pitch dronescape, including presumably themselves, as they seem to be pushing their technology to its limits. The results are somewhat uneven, but at times genuinely inspired and easily as good as the revered onkyo role-models (who can, after all, sometimes turn in decidedly substandard work). Maybe Roussel and Mayer should send off their work to a hip avant-garde label using a Japanese alias - I wouldn't be surprised if someone offered to release it.

PENETRATIONS

John Latartara
Sachimay SCA 9354

Though I'm no fan of the program music aesthetic, there is a general consensus on the part of most listeners to Western art music that certain types of music are capable of communicating happiness or sadness, while others can cause considerable distress; humor is clearly possible, be it intramusical (the subtle in-jokes of Haydn..) or extramusical (i.e. where music is supposed to represent / depict: examples are legion). But what kind of music arouses us sexually? In entitling his album "Penetrations: Sonic Explorations in Sexuality", John Latartara invites us to ask the question; superimposing recordings of people talking openly about their sexual practices or describing various sex acts over his original music invites us to respond to the latter in a manner radically different from how we would if the music were presented alone. Latartara's music is elegant, mildly piquant with its microtonal inflexions, cool and detached - music software makes several intrusions into the fabric of the pieces, as a kind of "this is just a recording" alienation effect - and could probably stand on its own without the sex connection ("Ripe" is the most convincing piece on offer here). However, rather than causing me to reflect on sexuality (mine or anyone else's), the question that inevitably comes to mind here is to what extent "Penetrations" is a calculated marketing stunt. Unlike the chilling erotic monologue of Robert Ashley's "Purposeful Lady..", or Heiner Goebbels' touching montage of phone sex lines in "Landscape with Argonauts", or, the ultimate sexual metaphor, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "You're All I Need To Get By" (which goes from foreplay to shattering orgasm in a mere 2'47"), Latartara's spoken extracts have a bald documentary feel to them that might be of mild interest on a first listening but brings little new to bear on the matter second time round. Sexuality is mysterious, dark, sometimes tender, sometimes frightening, but above all intensely personal, and listening to Mr X blandly relating how he's fucked three guys but never been fucked himself, or Miss Y describing how one of her clients jammed a screwdriver up his ass quite frankly doesn't amount to much. Halfway through the central track "Hitotose" you find yourself wishing the girl would stop rapping and get on with her $80 "BJ" if only so we could actually listen to some music, for a change.

DIASPORAMA

Jeff Song & Lowbrow
Stellar STL 1012

"Diasporama" presents a highly original line-up featuring two cellos, one acoustic (Matt Turner), one electric (Song, except for two tracks on acoustic), violin (Jason Kao Hwang), flute (Michel Gentile), trumpet (Taylor Ho Bynum, and Dean Laabs on one track) and percussion (John Mettam) tackling highly original material using a system of guided improvisation devised by Song. The twelve tracks each have a strong structural identity, but achieve at the same time a refreshing plasticity of form. "Amerikoritalish", for example, is propelled forward more by the cello's post-flamenco strumming than by Mettam, whose sparingly used and discreet work - percussion as color rather than pulse - leaves plenty of room for expansive and lyrical soloing by the other players (Hwang and Turner are as impressive as ever, moving effortlessly between straight singing lines and crunchy extended techniques). Ed Hazell's notes invite a listening that calls into question "the diaspora of Asian cultures [..] turning over ideas about immigration and identity" - a valid enough approach, but one that might tend to read into the music a level of irony that otherwise might not be immediately apparent (except explicitly, in Song's vocals on "Monday School"). The limpid freshness of tracks like "Siblings" and "The Third Wave" needs neither explanation nor justification.

SADHANA

Walter Horn
Saxofonis SM 20011

"O Colossus He" (the title comes from some experiments running tapes backwards that Walter Horn and Gary Lucas amused themselves with at high school together), is an extended, spacious lyrical tone poem layering Horn's keyboards and Lucas' guitars (imagine the Arkestra playing Charles Ives with special guest slots for Jaco Pastorius and early McLaughlin..). Ives' influence is also evident in "She-Haw", a song that Horn apparently dreamt back in 1995 and delivers with disarming charm. Both these opening tracks, recorded at the Knitting Factory in 2000, were originally intended as parts of a five-movement "Old Testament Suite", along with "Sh'ma", which eventually found its way onto Lucas' Tzadik album, "Street of Lost Brothers". "Beauty and Sadness" was recorded back in 1992, and apart from some wistfully enigmatic saxophone from a certain Mr. Castiglione, is another multi-track synth piece for Horn with atmospheric background percussion from long time playing partner Gary Kendig. The three remaining pieces, from 1993 and 1994, feature Horn's late lamented power trio with Kendig and guitar wizard Hugh Dickey (who later disappeared to California - forget Buckethead folks: if you're out there, Hugh, give us a sign). The group released only one album, "Screwdriver!" on Leo Lab in 1999, a truly magnificent piece of work that ought to be on every self-respecting record collector's shelves. In case you think the three tracks here might be inferior outtakes from those sessions, think again: "Mildred's Umbrella" comes blasting in with terrific power and doesn't let up. Only the original Tony Williams' Lifetime trio with Larry Young and John McLaughlin comes close (and to my mind "Screwdriver!" can stand up to "Emergency!" any day of the week). "I Told You Not To Do It and You Did It" is a scary eleven-minute thriller with a distinct sense of foreboding and latent violence threatening to erupt at any moment (we never find out what the person in question did either). The final "Parrot's Last Flight" features more ecstatic guitar soloing from Dickey and wild keyboard work from Horn, with Kendig's flexatone going into overdrive. Check it out.

NEW WORLD PYGMIES VOL.2

Jemeel Moondoc / William Parker / Hamid Drake
Eremite MTE030/31

Running a record label is a constant search for music that's pushing the envelope, taking the genre concerned and moving it to the next level, onwards and upwards. It's a joyful adventure, but a frustrating one: no sooner has one batch of discs made it to the CD player before a new package appears in the mailbox. Eventually, there comes a time when choices have to be made - for Eremite's Michael Ehlers that means concentrating on championing a generation of musicians who came screaming forward in the early days of free jazz, and who are still playing superbly today despite the rise to prominence of a second generation of young lions which has grabbed the attention of the media (not to mention a few juicy awards and prizes). In his liner notes to the recently released "Bob's Pink Cadillac" (also on Eremite: see elsewhere), William Parker writes: "When life is on the line nothing can be left up to chance. We rehearse and practice daily so when the angel of music comes we know what to do." This recalls Sunny Murray's line in his interview in STN #23: "I'm here to practice or to do something spiritual with my life as a musician. I'm constantly training, fortifying, feeding my spirit so that the lack of work won't beat me." Unlike Murray, William Parker isn't exactly short of work: in November 2000 he and alto / soprano saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc took to the road with "the New Eremite Mobile Unit" (Ehlers, his gear, and his Volvo station wagon), playing Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge in Chicago on the 4th, and the Spotlight Room up the road in Madison, Wisconsin the day after. "New World Pygmies Vol. 2" documents those two evenings.
There's an integrity to Moondoc's music that is all too often lacking in the work of younger saxophonists, who seem to be more concerned with running all over the instrument, or even blowing it to pieces (ironically, a display of "chops" not so far removed in spirit from the technical preening of the much-maligned Marsalis). Firstly, when you've got a sound on your horn as full and round as Moondoc's, you don't need to run through a whole book of scales and arpeggios to impress. Even in the most active pieces on offer here (and these lads can slap and swing like crazy when they get going), you get the distinct impression that Moondoc can always find the necessary breathing space. Like Steve Lacy, he teases ideas out of the horn, letting them develop at their own pace, secure in the knowledge that Parker is right behind him every inch of the way. His bowed work on Moondoc's "You Let Me Into Your Life", with its affectionate nods to "My Darling Clementine" (compare with the sumptuous reading of the same piece on Moondoc's "Revolt of the Negro Lawn Jockeys", Eremite MTE 028) is magnificent, and on the title track, though his technique on the bombard and gralle (both European double reed instruments) may not be as advanced as Jemeel's on sax (meaning that Moondoc lets Parker lead the way most of the time, embellishing his lines with dazzling arabesques), the interplay between the musicians is exhilarating.
With Hamid Drake sitting in on drums on the second disc (from the Velvet Lounge), "New World Pygmies" heads off to the African interior in a joyful explosion of power and light. Drake, as we all know, is a veritable one-man Gnawa orchestra, but his solo on the title track is amazing even by his standards. Following without a break, Moondoc's "Blues for Katie" begins with a meaty six-minute Parker solo, before Moondoc takes his soprano sax on a guided tour of the entire history of the blues until Drake returns, swinging as hard as Dannie Richmond. The closing reading of Parker's "Three Clay Pots" (which makes for an interesting comparison with the version of the piece on In Order To Survive's "The Peach Orchard") rounds off a memorable set. There must be quite a few young cats out there who'd love to have an album out on Eremite, but they'd do well to remember music as fine as this only comes from many years of playing, training, fortifying and feeding the spirit - and you know it'll still be sounding just as great many years from now.

ANCIENT FUTURE / BLUE

Randy Weston
Mutable Music 17508-2 2CD

If the reissue of "Blue" - originally recorded on Tom Buckner's 1750 Arch label in 1983 when pianist Randy Weston was already nearly 57 years old - is cause for celebration, the accompanying "Ancient Future", dating from just two years ago, is even more so: it's not that Randy Weston has been "unjustly neglected", but, like Ahmad Jamal, he's an elegant stylist rather than an iconoclast, and they don't grab as many headlines these days. Though already well versed in Fats Waller, Basie and Ellington before his stint in the US Army, it was Monk who crystallized Weston's playing into shape at the end of the 1940s. After a handful of fine albums at the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Africa in 1961 as part of a delegation including Langston Hughes, Lionel Hampton and Nina Simone, and eventually settled there in the mid 1960s (he ran a club called African Rhythms in Tangier, Morocco, right across the street from the legendary Parade Bar). As a result, Weston managed to miss out on the seismic revolutions of free jazz, seeming to be more influenced by the music of his adopted continent - his son Niles even changed his name to Azzedin and took up with the local master musicians.
All these elements are on display in "Blue", from the solid grounding in stride and swing on "Penny Packer Blues", via the angular turns of line culled from Monk and the tribal rhythmics of "Lagos" to the smoky late night piano bar lyricism of "Blue in Tunisia" and the powerful anthem of "Mystery of Love" (which is just crying out for the full Ellington Orchestra). "Ancient Future" takes advantage of the CD format to include nearly an hour's worth of music, and for once I'm not complaining. The title track, which segues into "Roots of the Nile", is a superbly understated study in chiaroscuro, Jay Newland's June 2001 stunning recording of Weston's Bösendorfer capturing every nuance of the pianist's touch. At times introspective ("Portrait of Oum Keltoum", "Isis"), at times incisive ("Ballad for T"), at all times acutely conscious of the history of jazz piano (Robin Kelley's right to point out that "Ellington is everywhere", but Bill Basie and Thelonious Monk are hanging around too), it's a total triumph. And if you thought there were enough superb readings of "Body and Soul" out there, you'd better think again.

Screaming Headless Torsos

SCREAMING HEADLESS TORSOS 1995
Fuzelicious Morsels FUZE 8990-2
LIVE!!
Fuzelicious Morsels FUZE 8901-2

Guitarist David "Fuze" Fiuczynski's background is as diverse as his playing style ("my father's from Berlin and my mother from South Carolina, and I grew up in both the US and Germany - there's definitely a cultural mix"), and that nickname inevitably invokes the dreaded word fusion (a much-maligned term, with its associations both of cheesy 1970's guitar heroes and the hi-energy cavorting of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine), but it's worth remembering that fusion doesn't just happen by slamming things together in the vain hope they'll stick, but rather by being in an environment where the temperature is high enough for constituent elements to become one. New York City has long been such a hotbed of activity, and the original Screaming Headless Torsos album, reissued at last for those who'd forgotten that SHT were the hottest thing in fusion when this exploded on the scene back in 1995, still kicks butt. Dean Bowman's versatile vox populi - he can rap as hard as Chuck D, ballad as low and rich as Gil Scott Heron, out yodel Leon Thomas and scream his torso off - is supported to perfection by Fuze's tasty guitar licks and the dynamite rhythm section of bassist Fima Ephron and percussionists Jojo Mayer and Dan Sadownick. If the tight, rhythmic intricacies of "Free Man" and "Cult of the Internal Sun" don't get you tapping your feet, there must be something wrong with you. OK, some tracks have dated slightly (remember Sarajevo?.. it was in the news back in 1995), and some are, well, over the top (the hysterical take on "Blue in Green" has never been my favorite version, preferring as I do Cassandra Wilson's fragile delicacy on "Point of View"), but the pyrotechnics of "Word to Herb" and "Smile in a Wave", which sends Miles' "Theme from Jack Johnson" roaring down the expressway to your pelvis at 200mph, amply make up for any reservations you might have (Fuze completists will also appreciate the two previously unavailable covers of Hendrix's "Little Wing" and George Harrison's "Something").
The live album recorded at the Knitting Factory in September 1996 shows that the Torsos were just as tight live. Mayer is replaced by Gene Lake, beaming in from planet M-Base, and Blood Ulmer's "Jazz is the Teacher" (from his wondrous 1980 Rough Trade album "Are You Glad to be in America?"), crossbred with Defunkt-heavy grooving and occasional bursts of hyperactive Fishbone ska, sends the crowd ballistic. It seems the sky's the limit for these guys: in "Word to Herb" Bowman even dares to take on Chaka Khan's legendary reading of "Night in Tunisia" and comes away smiling. Fuze's wicked wah pedal sleazes up "Darryl Dawkins' Sound of Love" a treat, and the band rips through "Kermes Macabre" with reckless abandon, before digging Lennon and McCartney's pony to perfection. Go lose your head.

ESSENTIAL COWELL

Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell, 1921 - 1964
Documentext McPherson & Company 347pp, $35

Henry Cowell was born in 1897 in Menlo Park, CA, the son of an Irish anarchist poet father and a novelist mother, Clarissa, with whom he lived after his parents' separation when Henry was five years old (she died in 1916). He bought his first piano at age 13 with money saved from odd jobs, and, as early as 1912, was writing experimental music: his piano piece "The Tides of Manaunaun" is the first known piece to use large tone clusters (we have Cowell to thank for the use of the word to designate such blocks of adjacent semitones), and by 1916 he was experimenting with complex rhythmic procedures in his "Quartet Euphometric". From 1914 onwards he studied with Charles Seeger, who was then teaching at UC Berkeley, before reading English at Stanford with Samuel Seward. Cowell performed his music at Carnegie Hall in 1924, joining the board of the International Composers Guild and founding the New Music Society in the same year. A lifetime of teaching followed, first at The New School for Social Research in New York (an institution he remained associated with until 1964), and later at Columbia University (from 1949 to 1965) and Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory (from 1951 to 1956). His "New Musical Resources", originally published in 1931, was enormously influential: Kyle Gann, in his Preface, provides an impressive list of composers who studied the work, including Harry Partch, La Monte Young, John Cage, Ben Johnston, Mauricio Kagel and (arguably) Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. His writings on music, ranging from straight journalism to music theory and musicology reveal a deep knowledge of and love for all musics, from the Irish folk of his youth via the pioneers he knew and championed, both American (Ives, Ruggles, Seeger..) and European (Varèse, Bartók, and a whole host of lesser-known figures) to ethnic music from all over the planet, from Indonesia to Tierra del Fuego. Why then, asks Gann, does Cowell remain a "background figure", albeit "one of the most important background figures any culture has ever had"?
The answer to this question is to be found in this collection of writings, edited and introduced by composer and former HC student Dick Higgins, which is divided into several parts, each worthy of detailed study and comment. Part One, "HC In Person", consists mainly of a 1931 article "Playing Concerts in Moscow", an amusing account of a concert tour Cowell undertook in the Soviet Union just as the heavy hand of Stalinism was beginning to fall. Illustrative of Cowell's insatiable appetite for new music is his demand to be paid royalties on his music (which the Soviet State Edition wished to publish) in scores of new music rather than in cash ("We pay ten kopeks per quarter note for all music!" an official informed him). The other brief article, "Music Is My Weapon", is a personal manifesto whose date, 1954, which might explain why Cowell "abhors communism".
The meat of this fine book is contained in Part Two, "Contemporaries", containing HC's insightful anecdotes and cogent observations on a generation of composers who form the backbone of twentieth century American music: Ives, Seeger, Varèse, Ruggles, Thomson, Harrison, Sessions, Antheil, Partch and Cage. His 1932 article on Charles Ives - whom he only met as late as 1927, when Ives had all but given up composing - portrays the composer's innovative incorporation of popular music and unconventional notation as "typically American", and provides brief and illuminating extracts from Ives' music to explain his compositional method. The 1933 article on Varèse makes some telling points ("there is a dramatic and incisive element about Varèse's music which causes it to stand out on a program, and 'kill' any work standing next to it by brute force"), and his 1955 review of Varèse's "Deserts" was one of the first to recognize the work's stature (though comparisons with Luening and Ussachevsky may raise a few eyebrows). His brief "Note" on Carl Ruggles tells the wonderful story of the craggy old Vermont Yankee banging hell out of a piano ("giving this chord the test of time!"), while a brief piece from 1950's "Musical Quarterly" tends towards the descriptive rather than the analytical. The 1933 article on his former teacher Seeger is rather long on praise but short on facts, and his championship of largely-forgotten (today) composers such as Amadeo Roldán, Aléjandro Garcia Caturla and John Becker (who unfortunately didn't "make Minneapolis and St. Paul into leading centers of contemporary culture" as HC predicted.. that honor fell to Prince half a century later) are mere Music History curiosities, but his call-a-spade-a-spade pragmatism serves him well in his supportive if not entirely uncritical remarks on Schillinger's "System of Musical Composition" and Slonimsky’s "Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns" (which ends with Cowell wryly noting that publishers Coleman-Ross apparently own the rights to every scale in Slominsky's book).
Though Cowell's predictions that Colin McPhee's "Tabuh Tabuhan" would "prove to be an important landmark" and that Virgil Thomson's "The Mother of Us All" would "certainly remain in the standard repertoire" didn't come true, he was bang on the money in his 1949 review of Partch's "Genesis of a Music" when he wrote: "No singer is capable of holding a single tone so steadily that it does not waver through more than one of the forty-three intervals of Mr. Partch's scale. Why he persists in believing his intervals are vocally possible, while at the same he declares with some vehemence that our ordinary scale is never sung in tune [..] is a mystery." Dick Higgins, in his Introduction to this book, recalls how Cowell was fond of describing himself as "conservative" (but never "traditional!), and Cowell's insight into new music tends to come less from a need to promote a particular composer's ideology and more from a back-to-basics discussion of their scores - hence his taking Sessions to task on "puzzling" tempo indications in his "Symphony", and his ability to spot oddities of scansion in Stravinsky's "Cantata". From today's perspective, however, the article that really hits home is the 1952 piece from the MQ on John Cage (in typical Cowell fashion, he also wrote a feature on Ferrucio Busoni in the same issue!), which includes a lucid presentation of Cage's "Music of Changes" (1951) and a revealing description of his "Imaginary Landscape" for twelve radios. Though Cage's philosophical position was presumably something his "conservative" teacher didn't share (hence HC's description of the performance of "Imaginary Landscape" as a failure), Cowell was one of the first to recognize the younger composer's importance and influence on his contemporaries. Amusing in retrospect is the following: "Boulez's rhythmic process has been described by a non-believer as 'dividing two rhythmic units into as many small notes as possible, tossing the notes into the air, then taking them the way they light and calling it a composition.'" One wonders, given Boulez's later violent repudiation of certain aspects of Cage's use of chance procedures, who the non-believer was.
Part Three, "Music of the World's Peoples", kicks off with a fine 1935 article, "The Scientific Approach to Non-European Music", which references Erich von Hornbostel's work in comparative musicology (Cowell studied with him in Berlin on a Guggenheim fellowship from 1931 to 1932), but also outlines the pitfalls of trying to notate pitch precisely ("The old description of music according to scale does not apply here at all, because the basic tonal units used in the music are not steady, level pitches [..] but rather curves of pitch which in turn are parts of the larger curve of the melodic line"). A less highbrow article on folk music dating from 1946 bemoans the lack of available recordings of authentic folk; the situation later which improved, thanks in no small part to Cowell's erstwhile teacher's son, Pete - here referred to as Peter - Seeger, and also to the pioneering releases on Moses Asch's Folkways label. Asch was also a friend of Cowell's, and asked him to provide liner notes for the label's "Music of the World's Peoples", which are included here (it's tempting to think that, through his liner notes, Cowell's thought also had an impact on the younger generation of Americans rediscovering folk music). However, most enthusiasts for and readers in ethnomusicology today are considerably more specialized in the subject and better-versed in the terminology than they were half a century ago - we could therefore have been spared the description of what a koto is - the inclusion of these notes is interesting from a historical point of view, but they add little to our knowledge of Cowell and the subject at hand.
Part Four, "HC on Works by HC" is rather thin, consisting of three brief articles, the most substantial of which regroups his working notes on the "Quartet Romantic" and "Quartet Euphometric" (described in greater detail in "New Musical Resources"), which essentially consist of a rather laborious explanation of the correlation between rhythm and harmony in the earlier piece. These observations, which relate more to music theory, could and probably should have been included later in the book, either in Part Six ("Musical Craft") or Part Seven ("Theory and Music History"). Part Five, "Music and Other Arts", kicks off with a 1930 article "Vocal Innovators of Central Europe", which shows that Cowell was on the ball when it came to spotting new talent: Higgins reminds us that it's the first American account of what today goes by the name of "sound poetry", and even if HC was incorrect in describing Eisler as Dutch, his discussion of Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate" is informed and intelligent (goodness knows what ever became of E.F. Burian, though..). Of the three articles discussing music and dance, 1937's "Relating Music and Concert Dance" is of great significance, as it presents Cowell's idea of "elastic form", the idea that a composition could be conceived in blocks of varying length that could be extended and repeated to adapt to the demands of the choreography. As a purely musical concept, this later became one of the central features of American experimental music.
"Tonal Therapy", which appears at the beginning of Part Six, is an early piece (1922) which finds Cowell discussing the psychoacoustic healing potential of sound. (We learn to our amusement that B flat and E flat might be used to treat tuberculosis, and E and B for syphilis, while a high C was "found to have a general negative effect" - maybe someone should tell Terry Riley..). "Our Inadequate Notation" (from 1927) finds HC musing idealistically on the potential problems of traditional staff notation, referring en passant to some wacky ideas to improve it (as suggested by Nikolai Obukhov). Cowell's suggestion that note heads could be extended horizontally to correspond to the length of the sound looks potty on a stave, but fast forward twenty-three years and use graph paper instead, and there they are in Morton Feldman's "Projections". If "The Nature of Melody" finds Cowell at his most conservative, "The Joys of Noise" looks forward to the invention of "scales of percussion sounds, with each 'key' determined by some underlying quality such as drum-sound, cymbal-sound, and so on", which anticipates not only Pierre Schaeffer's concept of a generalized sound solfège, but also the advent of that most commonplace instrument these days, the sampler.
Part Seven, "Theory and Music History", is where he runs into trouble. These days, the disciplines of Music Theory and Musicology are strictly different in definition, especially in the US, and while musicologists can still find much to appreciate in Cowell's writing, music theorists will tend to scoff at his rather primitive analyses - not without reason: the advent of atonal music theory aka set theory since the 1950s and 1960s, with seminal texts by Babbitt, Forte, Lewin and Morris has finally provided a coherent and powerful set of analytical tools with which to approach twentieth century repertoire. "Harmonic Development in Music", written when Cowell was a mere 24, is a curiously romantic attempt to chart the development of Western music through the progressive incorporation into its language of intervals derived from the overtone series. Not a new idea in itself, but Cowell's anecdotes of Guido d'Arezzo and Palestrina's excommunication (and the former's execution - totally untrue!) serve more to bolster up the time-honored myth of the misunderstood, suffering visionary than to elucidate any coherent theoretical development. His championship of microtones, clusters and polytonality places him firmly on the side of the moderns, allowing him to ignore important mainstream theorists such as Rameau, Riemann and Schenker (whose work he probably was unfamiliar with anyway at the time), but his continued use of expressions like "the common chord" reveal clearly that he was (and would remain) theoretically hamstrung. "The Impasse of Modern Music" goes over the same ground six years later (correcting the Guido story en route), but passages such as "nothing more perfect than Beethoven could be written" will jar with those who more readily subscribe to Cage's view of LVB. "Towards Neo-Primitivism" finds HC taking a stand against neoclassicism ("easy to compose, easy to understand, easy to forget") while leaving a loophole open for Stravinsky to crawl through. Of the "neo-primitives" he cites, only Mosolov and Shostakovich are names we recognize today: Weisshaus, Adomyhan, Heilner, Engel and Moross have slipped into obscurity (maybe they had the misfortune to play their works in Hawaii, where, Cowell informs us, "among certain tribes, to sing a tone out of the proper scale is an offense punishable by death"..!). "Shaping Music for Total War" and "On Programming American Music" are well intentioned but somewhat ranting, but Higgins saves the magnificent late credo of "A Composer's World" until the end. It's as eminently readable as all the articles included in this book (even HC's digressions on music theory don't need much prior knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader), a heartfelt and sincere document from a man who devoted his life unstintingly to music, and whose influence will continue to resonate in it for many years to come.

Stefan Dill

Stefan Dill
FLOWER AND SONG
Zerx029
Stefan Dill Trio
RUN FOR HEAVEN
Falçata-Galia FALC-0028/0117

"Flower and Song" is a satisfying and eminently listenable set of duets featuring the 6 and 12 string guitars of Stefan Dill with drummer Dave Wayne, bassist Dave Nielsen, saxophonists John Dikeman and Jack Wright (whose supple flurries on "Circle of Skies" work beautifully with Dill's flamenco guitar) and fellow guitarist John Jasnoch (recorded in a pub in Sheffield, England, in a quietly busy but relaxed atmosphere - there's even a brief reference to "Baa Baa Black Sheep" halfway through "The Serpent Mat"). The pièce de résistance of the album is the splendid "Zakil Amak'El (Light That Lasts)" with Dikeman, a beautifully crafted nine and a half minutes, after which the duos with drums and bass come as something of light relief. These latter, as well as the set of nine totally improvised trios with Nielsen and Dave Wayne that make up "Run for Heaven", were recorded in bassist Dave Nielsen's home studio in Canoncito, New Mexico, "where the mountains loom large and vibrant, full of ancient life and ancestral thunder". "Run for Heaven" finds Dill returning to the "primal voice" of the electric instrument (though he does use the acoustic on "Fire Garden" and the beautiful "Morning River"). There are - perhaps inevitable - echoes of guitarists as diverse as Sharrock and Blood Ulmer, but the urban savagery of the former and the claustrophobic heat-energy of the latter chill out in the high desert air of New Mexico, and nobody's watching the clock in case the band overruns its studio time. The musicians really stretch out - perhaps even too much at times: Nielsen has the sense not to follow Wayne into the treacherous canyon of straight jazz-rock in the title track, while "Nightpath"'s percussion is just a little too spaced-out for this listener (though maybe that's because I'm bang in the middle of a big city). Stefan Dill, well-versed in classical, jazz, flamenco and rock, is a licks man, meaning not that he throws them in willy-nilly in a display of empty virtuosity, but rather that he knows just the right place to insert them as logical natural developments in his long, unfolding solos.

Copyright 2002 by Paris Transatlantic