Remarks on Wynton Marsalis

The shame of it all is that Wynton Marsalis has come to represent everything a public considers to be the 'art' of jazz, and as he continues to proffer tame music, the adventurous stuff, the "out" playing that keeps the music alive remains unheard and alien to the curious listener. That there is a Jazz Canon that needs to be preserved is not disputed, it's just that Marsalis acts as if all the innovation is now past tense. He believes it is. His style is conservative and chiseled after his heroes, Miles, Clark Terry, Clifford Brown. Their music, though, came as a result of extending their technique into areas that were unknown in the culture. Marsalis has done none of that. He is cheating himself and boring the rest of us to death. The distinction between an ongoing spotlight between jazz musicians defining musical sensibilities among themselves, at work, and that of Marsalis discussing such things is that Marsalis has the spotlight, the media, and the audience goes to him, and it is there where the debate, this debate begins. We disagree as to the role of critics, but I think the ghettoization of jazz is too laid precisely at the feet of white writers and intellectuals. 

Amiri Baraka is a great man and an important critic, and presented jazz as a continuous aesthetic of liberation, and correctly defined African American music as music about freedom and struggle, and the search for new knowledge, the extension of the voice, the exploration of the soul into new knowledge. As Baraka socialist, a brave and lonely vantage in a culture that thinks a free-market can resolve permanent problems in the human condition, I don't think it accidental that his views are ignored, and frankly unknown to most. Marsalis William Bennett-ish view, that jazz should embody virtues conduce to conduct in a democratic society, is a valid one, and we may understand it's broader appeal, but really, bebop purism is needed in an art like jazz, as art, any art, cannot remain a living thing, generation-to-generation, if the past is not known. Simply, Marsalis is part of a generation of artists and intellectuals in the African American community who are no part of the mainstream dialogue in America. Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, Cornell West, bell hooks, Gerald Early--these are actually first-rate thinkers, agree or not with their conclusions, but the fact of the matter is that we require more high-profile cats like Marsalis, from every facet and corner of the black community, to debate, to clamor, and to insist on jazz being a great American art form they created, and thus claim their rights Americans. Again, Marsalis is not my favorite player, and I think his dalliance in two camps, classical and jazz, dilutes his performances in both, but he did get us arguing something that really matters. I will say it again, for that much, he deserves our thanks. The issue for is that though jazz is a quintessential American creation it is the creation of Black-Americans, who forged the music, who have been its prime movers, and who continue to be the innovators who define what the music will be. 

Someone with the high visibility of Wynton Marsalis who takes it upon himself to speak for jazz is a resentment waiting to happen, but doubtlessly Marsalis knew this, and went ahead and ran his mouth anyway. But his project is a noble one. He recognizes that jazz is the premier American contribution to world culture, and that it is a black art form as well, but also that the black community, it's young people, were forgetting about the culture that is their right to claim. Leaving specific utterances aside, specific feuds unmentioned, let's just say that his insistence on the black accomplishments in jazz, technical, social, moral, spiritual, have made numerous white people nervous, as we white people tend to become whenever educated black men and women take back the discourse about black culture.Marsalis is something of a cultural conservative, a William Bennett sort who has his own 'Book of Virtues' agenda in his educational projects and with his directorship of the jazz program in Lincoln Center, and that I view his music as less than the fiery blaze of Freddie Hubbard (a better trumpeter than Wynton, really) and a less composed texture than Ellington. But who says there has to be a consensus in the debate. To the degree that Marsalis has opened up the discussion to the larger culture, he has rendered a service to the state of jazz. To the extent that he has gotten many people's dander up, well, I think that is a good thing too because in the hands of dusty musicologist moon lighting as critics, jazz has seemed a gasping, brittle artifact, like old furniture in a museum display, that one appreciated for its former glory, for all it's accumulated history. Whatever stripe you happen to be, Marsalis implies, jazz is not past tense, it is not a thing of history, it is a living thing that has history. 

Like anything else in this world of manufactured concerns, jazz has many streams, rills, eddies and currents, all of which keep the pulse alive and relevant, breathing right along with us as we hear it, and in turn become inspired to create it anew. No one that I've read here has come close to saying anything like that, and to think anyone is paranoid, I am afraid. But we're not here to re-write the history books, nor even to indulge in the fetishism revolving the arguments of well-fed men, white and black. Rather, the original topic seen at the top of the page, the final question, really, was about our take on Wynton's promotion of the music, and the word promotion is the key. Because really, before his being on the scene and making a racket over jazz, bop or otherwise, the topic had been as dead as shoe leather. But now as to what jazz is or is not having become something for a wider debate, and into this debate, it draws whites and blacks into conversations with one another more so than they have been in years. And it is, by rights, one that blacks are at last debating in the larger arena. It is no longer a white man's game to define anymore. 

JEAN LUC GODARD, DEAD

 

It was always more fun to talk about Godard's movies than to actually watch them. The discussions seemed to be very intelligent exchanges on what the director was attempting to do rather than what he accomplished as a filmmaker. Often times it seems theory was the alibi that attempted to make the makeshift quality of his products permissible. It was wishful thinking in large part, I think, but I did take particular enjoyment being part of the various campus beer bar bull sessions where each recent author we've read came to play in trying to get a collective grasp on this filmmaker's work. He talked a great movie.

MARILYN AND NORMAN

Taschen has published an expensive"art edition" re-issue the long out of print controversial Norman Mailer biography of Marylin Monroe, 1973's Marylin. It will, I think, make available what is one of the most underrated of Mailer's books. The book was controversial indeed when first published in 1973; charges of plagiarism and an attendant lawsuit from the authors of biographies used in his research put a pall over Mailer's interpretative accomplishment, and feminists and progressives were particularly at arms by the fact that Norman Mailer, of all people, had written anything at length about Monroe. Mailer had, shall we say, a problematic relationship with women, personally and philosophically, during his public life, and it was easy enough to accuse the late author of indulging in a kind of literary onanism, projecting his ego on the public perception of Monroe, the actress and superstar, and inflicting those results on to us? I think it took courage on Mailer's part who, fully aware of his infamy regarding women's rights, birth control and his insistence on a cult of masculinity, to take on the subject of Monroe anyway (even, as Mailer has admitted, for the money) and to investigate his own conflicted perceptions of Monroe. Mailer is an arch romantic, and allows his prose to soar and swerve and swoop from great heights in an attempt to capture something about Monroe the cultural force that film criticism, fashion commentary and sociological analysis couldn't get near. This book contains Mailer's Private Marylin Monroe, and at the time it was published it was a florid, beautifully written, occasionally interpretation of the dry facts about Monroe's life and career. Monroe is one of the central icons of 20th century American culture, no less than Elvis or JFK, and one ought not be surprised that dozens of smart writers like Mailer have taken their turns re-imagining, recasting, reinterpreting the life of historic figures. Mailer's interpretative biography, I think, is a well written, occasionally brilliant piece of speculation about the source of Monroe's persona and the effect she had on a generation of male psyches. He does the splendid trick of bold speaking of her as a sexual creature who honed her limited craft into an Art that could not be ignored, the notion that Presence itself sometimes suffices as a legitimate aesthetic gesture, and then qualifying his pronouncements that what he proposes, based on other people's facts, is his conjecture. Monroe's' career as an actress was entirely fascinating. Mailer's public musings on what she meant beyond the films she made is not less intriguing, even now.

A later book Mailer wrote on Monroe was published in 1980, Of Women and their Elegance, which combined Mailer's latest interpretations of the actresses' life along with the photographs of Milton H. Greene. This time eschewed doing further interpretative biographical work and instead composed a fictional portrayal, an imagined first-person narrative Monroe that can be taken by the reader either as readings from a secret journal or a long conversation with an unnamed confidant. It's a short novel, generally unheralded when discussions of Mailer's fiction arise. I think it's a bit of a minor masterpiece. An underappreciated Mailer work, one which, to my mind, debunks the general charge that Mailer couldn't write complex or compelling women characters. The controversies involving Mailer and his feminist critics is likely to remain current for the foreseeable future, but his fictionalized account of Monroe presents the troubled actress--part naif, part fighter, smarter than likely men and women film goers and critics preferred to think--as someone caught between different personalities that constitute the Hollywood snake pit. Mailer allows her a first person narration and creates a voice and personality that attempts to be a serious artist and to do good work and also, please bosses, boyfriends, husbands, friends real and doubtful. The accusation might be put forth that this merely more male fantasy stuff that Mailer was given to composing when he sought to discuss the dynamics or difficulties of men and women relating to each other in a consumer culture --his previous "Marilyn biography, a marvelous and occasionally beautiful tribute to the actress did, at times, veer off into the most purple of prose stretches this side of Cornell Woolrich--but I think here the author allows the actress to address her narrative, in a clearly plain-spoken and sympathetic tone. It's a product of Mailer's imagination, I admit, but it is an intriguing read, a fine short novel. 

To that point, let me add that I wish Mailer had written larger number of shorter fictional works. Why Are We in Vietnam?, Tough Guys Don't Dance, An American Dream --these novels are controversial and have been subject to great praise and red-hot scorn, but it's been my feeling that he functioned as a fabulist engaged in outrageous notions when he was pressed for time and wrote feverishly, his language loose, nearly chaotic, brilliantly conveying the fevered spirit of Mailer's best and worst thinking. Of Women is one of those novels that introduces its ideas quickly and explores them vividly, daring to tweak the conventional thinking , willing to be assumed the fool for doing so, and willing as well to have his best writing and his worst ideas exist in in concise firepit of linguistic experimentation and ersatz mysticism. 

AMERICAN ENNUI

New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg fretted the other day that our nation is in the gross depths of cultural stagnation, which is another way of saying that no one is getting excited by much new music, new authors, new movies, new visual artists. It's gotten to the point where we could say that "boredom" is the new cultural condition of things, the unintended consequence of the consumerist boom of the post-war period that never ended, despite what varied social scientists would have us think. Increased consumer demand intensified the research into more brutally efficient means of technological expertise and application to manufacture, distribute and deliver goods to consumers. The internet accelerated all this, to be sure, availing us of goods, nearly anything we desired, in quantum leap time. Now, in a pandemic that is still not over and with a population that had to spend unnatural amounts of time at home, the millions of us sought to distract ourselves with impulse shopping, insane amounts of streaming, the whole shot. Materials that used to amuse us and stand as symbols of how up to the millisecond we were now becomes evidence of the psychic entropy each and all of us became embroiled in. More than mere muscles had gone flabby, and our toys began to depress us.  Boredom settles in surely when everything is available to you at the instance you want it. There is no adventure in seeking new music anymore, there is no sense of actually discovering something obscure that's very cool, dangerous, going against the grain and mores of the time. We are in a situation of Marcuse's famous idea of "repressive tolerance", that by allowing the marginal voices, the dissenting notions, the philosophically malcontent full rights of expression and indeed making it easier for the nonconformist's works are easily available under the guise of a free press, they are revolutionary potential of these cranky, experimental, iconoclastic to inspire an audience to effect change in the System is neutralized. Punk rock, polka, country western, rap and The Last Poets become genres, matters of taste, not as vehicles to inspire and enliven the imagination. All the digital access to every book, movie, TV show, record album every created, instantly, creates the ennui of availability. Too often when getting the full of run of albums by Gunther Schiller, say, interest dissipates and the attention span requires something else to distract it for a moment. It seems to be the case that what we're talking about is commodity fetishism, which is the mere acquisition of things for having them and no more.

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'BUGSY" starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening

 

Had a fine time watching Bugsy recently, a near gem of a modern gangster film. A 1991 effort starring Warren Beatty as Ben "Bugsy" Siegel and a then-unknown Annette Bening as a fast talking , smart woman Siegel takes up with when he comes to 1940s Los Angeles to muscle on the local organized crime boss.  Beatty is effective here as a man of  great charm and sudden violence, a man desiring to be a hard boss, enforcer , gentleman, and lady's man; the sudden swings in his moods and the turmoil that ensues are convincingly conveyed--little tell-tale signs in facial expression, a tilt of the head, a growing escalation in volume and intensity of questions being asked a character Siegel suspects of having stolen from him--are well-played signals that Bugsy is about to go off. This was a break through role for Bening , and she brings a sharp tongue and a quick wit to her portrayal of a lone woman alone in a town full of predator men who are liars, cheats, thieves, and killers all who falls for the charming if erratic Siegel. The recreation of Los Angeles of the period is very well done, and I rather enjoyed the dark tones used to suggest a noir quality--this has an aura of quality black and white photograph that was hand-colored especially well. The film does drag in the middle, but it picks up well, and the casting of Ben Kingsley, Harvey Keitel, Joe Mantegna  and Bebe Neuwirth is very fine. We must mention a small role for Elliot Gould as a lumbering, likeable , dumb oaf of a thug who is doomed .Directed by Barry Levinson, screenplay by James Toback, cinematographer Allen Daviau.

GARY MOORE WAS THE ERIC CLAPTON WE DESERVED

 The more cynical among us might dismiss this effort by bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker as a blatant money-grab to secure filthy lucre from nostalgic fans of Cream, replacing founding member Eric Clapton with stalwart blues—rock specialist Gary Moore. Two parts Cream is better than no Cream at all? But hold on a second, Moore's guitar work matches and very often exceeds the admittedly early brilliance of Clapton from those studio and live discs; Moore is technically far more advanced as a musician than Clapton, but what saves the Irish fret lord from being merely another wind-up virtuoso is his retention of the raw aggression, emotion, power of the blues.

 In this video, you'll note that he pretty well recreates Clapton's tone from the period and reveals great evidence of having spent hours, hundreds of hours playing EC with guitar in hand learning his phrasing, his timing, his dynamic sense. This is likely to be the best Clapton tribute that will ever come to be.Moore presents the particulars of EC's style that make me think that this was his (Clapton's) the best era as a guitarist. The timing, the tone, the frantic unpredictability of his blues intonations as the self-taught guitarist battled with the jazz-trained Bruce and Baker in those extended improvisations that were Cream's stock-in-trade.

 Moore brings all that to this performance, and effortlessly incorporates this fiery and swift riffing as well to remind you who's controlling the wah-wah pedal. Bruce and Baker, of course, are in fine shape as aging rock musicians, each improving and goading each other to different rhythmic emphasis, all of which Moore elaborates upon with inspiring blues improvisational escapades. It's refreshing that Moore seems to refuse to treat Cream's canonical songbook with any over reverence. He makes the material his own, and though Clapton's shadow looms over all of his flights, the Irish guitarist takes full possession of the solo spaces allotted and fills with a superbly honed manner, a gregarious aggression you might say.

A question posed to me on Quora

 

Charles Bukowski is generally recognized as one of the great modern poets, but his personal life would be described as a disaster by most people. What is the merit in living such a life?

Bukowski is one of the best known modern poets, but not as a “great” poet. Charles Bukowski spent several decades writing about three or four things, which were drinking, staying drunk, screwing drunk women, playing the horses, and drinking. His was not a large world, and after reading a raft of short stories,three novels and five of his plenitude of poetry collections, it's safe to say that he'd run out of things to say about the redundant activities of his life. Hence,his redundant themes and the waning energy of his work as his life wore on, with he waiting for it all to be over with. Young people love him because Bukowski is as close to an actual nihilist any of them are likely to encounter in American fiction and poetry. His principle failing is his unwillingness to think harder or differently about the world of drink, cigarettes, whores,race tracks and flop houses and bad sex. This poem, as it goes, goes through the typical moves and ends on some winsome sigh about lost opportunity, faded youth, mauling over of some psychic pain that is somehow aimed at making us understand why he is such a luckless asshole. Ironically, few writers have been as lucky as this guy, lucky in that the game he ran on us held up all these years, and that it still has enough allure to sucker yet another acolyte who just entering their drunken -

THE WOODSTOCK MALAISE

 

I had enough trouble maintaining an even keel when the film Woodstock was released in 1970. Even as a 17-year-old poet wannabe who loved the idea that Youth Culture, The Counter Culture, the new poetry found in the New Music would be of great transforming value for the world to yet to come, something about the famous account of the 1969 rock festival in upstate New York—something about the documentary concerning the famed rock festival had an off-putting hubris. All those hippies gathered for no good purpose, catching a ride on the swells of a collective ego, seemed a massive wallow in self-congratulations for being groovy beyond redemption. I remember mostly maintain my cool about the hype around the mythos of the event and the overpraise for the film, only to lose it finally in the matter when in 1981 NBC opted to broadcast the film on the concert’s tenth anniversary. Typical of a ratings grab, the network overkilled the entire enterprise. Rather than showing the film as it was (already noteworthy for its sense of self-congratulation), the powers that be at the network instead whittled it down into something safe and defused, entitled Woodstock Relived. In their production, NBC managed to change Woodstock from an historical footnote where pleasant memories can be derived and gave it the substance of a daydream. Woodstock Relived became, literally, naught but the magic land of Oz. and the audience, a gaggle of Dorothies stranded in a metaphysical Kansas of the soul, became suddenly transported to a land where dreams come true, and all endings are happy. NBC's purpose, I suppose, was to make the surfeit of long-hair, strange costumes, loud music, hints of nudity and free-love in the original motion picture somehow acceptable to the mainstream TV public by contriving a method that would "explain" the phenomena to an audience who might still be bewildered by the fête ten years hence. 

The primary proof of this is their choice of hiring Beau Bridges to provide a running commentary. Seated on a set equipped with a TV monitor, Bridges exuded the authoritarian calm of Walter Cronkite, seeming to adjudicate over a political convention. Where the first version of Wood51ock trusted the editing and the sequence of scenes to form their narrative—perhaps they had a better sense of who their potential audience was—the NBC editors would often flash the beginning of a musical act as Bridges would fit the film into a strained metaphorical context, as evidenced by two principal scenes in which the wishful thinking interpretation of the event belies its banality. In the first. Joe Cocker's head appears on the screen as the first strains of "A Little Help from My Friends" are played while off to the side, looking mellowly certain of his line. Bridges waxes poetic ~t: 'II on the spirit of cooperation that distinguished the event, citing the music as proof positive of his thesis with the words "When Joe Cocker began to sing. He told the world what Woodstock was all about." My response and others as well, was a loud "oh come on now." not because Bridge's analogy sounded stupid but because even a cursory examination of historical fact brings the whole notion of\ what the counter-culture actually was into question .ln fact, "what Woodstock was all about" was a matter of too many people showing up for an event whose producers expected less dense crowds, an alarming strain on existing food, toilet, sleeping and medical capabilities. And the remarkably benign response of surrounding townspeople. The National Guard and the Army to alleviate the hazards of overcrowding. 

And Cocker himself, being less than the spokesman for anyone, was a scheduled performer with only one US hit who had to play under the most unusual of circumstances. Wood - stock, in other words, was an accident of circumstances, and the fact that the crowd was more or less peaceful was little else but a fortuitous fluke. The NBC folks, though, wanted a structure in which to place the fair, a coherent "theme" with which to make the film an item one could stand, so they exercised their kind of historical revisionism, a revisionism intended to give the illusion that Woodstock can be understood in the most banal set of generalizations. More insidious than forcing the image of Cocker into a cheap, glittering cliché was the way they represented Country Joe McDonald. If memory serves me correctly. McDonald and his group The Fish were the mo t straightforwardly political of all the Bay Area rock and roll bands, going beyond the then trendy politics of the anti was movement and involving themselves with many new-left causes, including various benefit concerts for the Black Panthers, SDS, and other militant groups whose rhetoric frequently called for a "revolution" of a usually unspecified sort. 

The sensibilities at NBC, though, were either afraid of the depth of McDonald's obvious activism or were just plain ignorant of it, and chose instead to reduce him, like Cocker, to little more than evidence for a foregone conclusion. Completely sniping out McDonald's "Fish Cheer" ("Give me an F," and so on, until everyone is deliriously yelling FUCK). McDonald is first shown half-way through his son~ "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die' on the set's TV monitor while Bridges, his eyes puppy-wide his voice dripping a honey toned sincerity, generalized about the turmoil of the period, mentioning the dissent over the Vietnam War as a demonstration of "thousands and thousands of young people who deeply loved America who had something to say about the quality of life in this country, not just for them, but for generations to come." Then almost as an afterthought. The rest of McDonald's tune is played uninterrupted. Other examples abound endlessly throughout the run of Woodstock Relived of the way the producers of the show sought to make the original film presentable: the excising of all nudity, the elimination of all strong language that formerly peppered the soundtrack, only a cursory depiction of the drug use and most galling, Bridges' insistence that Woodstock was nothing more than "kids letting off steam." During a sequence of shots that show kids mud-sliding after a heavy rain. 

Bridges literally said something to the effect that they were engaging in "not good clean fun , but what's the difference?" The festival sounds positively wholesome, all-American, like going on a weekend retreat or sending one's son off to Boy Scout Camp. By implication, the 60s are made to sound wholesome and good clean fun, just a period of rowdy behavior no more deadly than a fraternity panty-raid. The implication, though, goes deeper, hinting that the Woodstock festival itself can be held up in the light of history as being the quintessence of what the 60s were "about." All the Prepare for variegated strands that marked the cultural and political atmosphere of the decade had merged to a head at the festival, and that each had found its fullest expression. This revisionist arrogance galls me to not end - the assumption being that Woodstock can be called representative of the 60s - but the fault in this case must fall to the TV producers and not the original filmmakers. The original Woodstock was, to its credit, a documentary of a specific event that did not attempt to generalize a world view. Even with the paucity of good music, the cretinous photography of the acts and the inane good vibe banter of the concert goers, the original Woodstock is nonetheless an accurate, if obviously biased representation of the festival, treating the event as something in and of itself, within context, without any pretense of imposing an overall "meaning." Though, the film has dated badly. 

One can still see it and retain a perspective that keeps one's sense of propriety in order: something similar to people recognizing the follies of unrepentant youth. Woodstock Relived, however, denies the original film's generic integrity and transform into an effective additive to the cultural epidemic of nostalgia, a condition that has us believing in false Edens. Like an evangelical preacher citing Bible passages over the airwaves to legitimate their political stance in terms that transcend the machinations of human being, the how's producer composed for themselves a bill of good as to what the 60 meant and used the festival the Irrefutable Truth. Woodstock thus become romanticized to the point that excludes perspective for analysis. The 60s become trivialized with no attempt to take the longer more comprehensive view of the decade, and ultimately, all of our experiences of the period become cheapened, having fallen victim to a corporate reductionism whose ideology demands a narrative style that deliver us to a horde of dollar-eyed advertiser. The larger pity of this is that anything anyone was struggling for - a better world, peace, a society free of exploitation—become part of the mainstream, the birthday ribboned package of lies we tell ourselves to have the nerve to trudge ahead into a future with something like hope. Under the shoulder-to-the-wheel bravado we drape our waking lives in, our dreams tell us what we won't speak of over breakfast, at work, or even sitting alone minding our own business, that the future is not a destination legitimated with greater and finer purpose, but merely a station of merely passing through the days with what we've learned from being alive so far. The idea is that life in -the -moment exists in what we bring to it, our experience and the eventual gathering of personal knowledge sometimes called wisdom. The real terror of this life is we wonder if we've learned anything at all up to this point. 

Short Take: LOVE AND THUNDER IS A SHAPELESS MOB SCENE

 

The comic book fan website CBR.COM argues that director Waititi deserves better treatment than what he's gotten after the release of Thor: Love and Thunder, his second at-bat with the character. He’ll get a better treatment when he makes a better movie. His first turn on the Thor franchise worked because of a couple of smart decisions, the first being turning the film into a Hope-Crosby style road comedy and developing an effectively humorous relationship between the two. Moreover, it was very cool and effective to bring some Jack Kirby influenced designs to the look of the film. As far as story lie, line it was complete and with a satisfying resolution, Thor's hero's journey in learning what it means to be "worthy" of his mantel. Love and Thunder undoes by making the return of Jane Foster into a romantic comedy, a genre that generally requires the hero, Thor in this case, to be a self-centered, preening, emotionally immature dolt whose intellectual capacity is as dismal as his powers are impressive. The newly matured and worthy Thor of Ragnarök is erased. The film is overcrowded with too many characters, far too many gags that are essentially all set up and dud punchlines, tangents, spectacles, abrupt and unearned shifts in tone. It starts as a romantic comedy, wanders deep and far into Clash of the Titans territory, becomes a superhero version of a PBS kiddie show by the movie fourth quarter, tries to redeem the rioting themes, tones, and battalion of one-dimensional characters by turning it into a three-hankie weeper with the death of Jane. Worse, though, is the shallow grasp to keep fan loyalty by holding out the chance that we'll see more of the Jane character by showing in Valhalla, an afterlife I'm sure writers will no doubt contrive to enable Jane to leave and enter again as the franchise rolls forward. Waititi is a talented writer, director, and actor and one can expect good things from him again, but he overplayed his hand on his second go around on Thor. It was an unmitigated mess in all respects, as most of the Phase films have been so far.

RECENT JAZZ CDs

 City, Country, City-- Jason Ricci and Joe Krown

Jason Ricci is easily one of the greatest blues harmonica players in the world, a master of the difficult "overblow" technique that allows this New Orleans-based musician to produce full chromatic scales on a modest folk instrument that's usually limited to the diatonic range. Briefly, through modification of the harmonica reeds and practiced application of novel approaches to em brochure, Ricci transcends the limits of blues structures and improvise with a particular complexity and brilliance and melodic invention that brings his playing closer to a good number of fleet jazz masters from who Ricci takes inspiration. Jason Ricci, make no mistake, is a blues harpist with both feet solidly in the tradition of Sonny Boy, Little Walter, Paul Butterfield, or Blind Owl Wilson (of Canned Heat), a gritty player who makes the harmonica howl, growl, yowl, cry, and moan. There's the sweat and urgency of blues feeling, but one also notices on his frequent extended improvisational extravaganzas a fluidity of ideas, quotes from Coltrane and Django Reinhardt, high-octane bluegrass riffs alternating with Parker-era bebop flourishes, dense chord constructions, rapid fire train patterns. Ricci is a supremely fast player, to be sure, making the diminutive harmonica in his harmonica thunder ahead with the instrumental command of a spotlighted lead guitarist or divinely blessed jazz trumpeter.

 But like the best musicians noted for technique, speed of ideas and precision of performance, JR's long improvisations are master classes in solo building; he builds mood with a few notes, a partial duplication of the melody, and then ventures forth, filling out the ideas, playing  on, before and after the beat in playful investigation, surely moving toward a wondrous and prolonged stretch of cadenzas that deconstructs and reassembles the composition at hand. It's the stuff of wonder to behold Ricci start with bluesy aggression before eventually venturing off in various musical side roads to see if he can produce musical moments no one expected. Classical phrases, jazz chromaticism, fleet bluegrass pentatonics, hard power-trio blitzing, softer, lyric acoustic interludes are the elements this player has mastered, and which give his harmonica power. Jason Ricci, incidentally, played on Johnny Winter's Grammy  Award-winning album Stand Back in 2014, was invited by former David Letterman band leader Paul Shaffer to play on "Born In Chicago" for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in   2015 (broadcast on HBO), and has released twelve albums with several  musical alliances including the scorching New Blood, with singer-songwriter J.J. Appleton, and most recently with the visceral Bad Kind. 

All that said, Jason surprises us again by stepping back momentarily from the manic tones that are his usual fare and brings now the superb City Country City. His partner in this endeavor is organist and fellow New Orleans resident Joe Krown, the sound rear is something of a throwback to an early jazz era of hard-bop, and organ trios, a domain of jazz grooves characterized by a solid rhythm and blues feel, a music grounded in funk. Bolstered by the unfailingly swing and verve of Big Easy drummer Doug Belote, this is a trio well grounded   in all the traditions, have all the right moves and add moves of their own to keep this gumbo percolating, popping and jiving. The title track “City Country City” many will recognize as being the instrumental from the band War for their 1972 The World is a Ghetto disc. The Ricci/Krown reimagining picks up the pace from War’s original, smooth and mellow inspiration. Ricci plays the supple intro figure as Krown supplies gorgeous chords, swells, and swelling tones, and each take steadfast, sharp solo breaks over Belote’s tight, on the note beats. It’s a terrific hook into a session of ancient school playing with a very contemporary edge. Soon enough, Krown and Ricci give themselves license to show their wares in full on the sexy and savvy strut of “Down and Dirty.” Krown takes the first chorus, blending gospel phrases and swift, skidding runs that make you think of Jimmy Smith in his bluest mood. Ricci then takes up the cause after his partner hands it over to him, making his serpentine harmonica work resemble at times other horn instruments; the angelic high notes of a clarinet, the throbbing undulations of a baritone saxophone, the hard and rapid cadenzas of a feverish trumpet player are suggested  Ricci mixes up the ideas, varies his attack, modulates his tone and his pacing as the solo progresses through its conventional blues progression. He keeps it intriguing; he brings you in, he keeps on the hook. The tune rocks like nothing else. From the opening bars, a jaunty theme that could be used as a jazz march, drummer Belote keeps things tight and moving along. The record as a whole is like this, full of Southern fried funk, edgy city blues, jazz fantasias of all sorts. “Jimmy Smith Strut,” “Don’t Badger the Witness,” “Good Clean Funk” are other highlights from this inspired trio. Jason Ricci is very much the best of the best in the blues harmonica world, and this trio collaboration with the estimable Joe Krown and Doug Belote is a grand place to become acquainted with the grace, power, and beauty of this artist’s playing.

Those intrigued about Ricci's other music should additionally seek the 2008's  Rocket # 9, credited to Jason Ricci and New Blood. Anyone with a strong need of hearing some of very fine and blistering blues harmonica work by a player dedicated to extending that small instrument's capacity to surprise a listener, I'd recommend getting the new disc by Jason Ricci and New Blood, Rocket Number 9. Ricci is one of those musicians where you can hear the influences of players he's "gone to school" on (sounding to me like a sweet blend of Paul Butterfield, Little Walter, Sugar Blue, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howard Levy, and a smattering of mainstream saxists ala Paul Desmond)who has blended what he's learned into a vigorous, original style. Rocket Number 9 is a glorious and tight blues rock album, with plenty of sharp guitar work, a rhythm section that balances tightness and an appealing, shambling looseness, all of this highlighting Ricci's serpentine harp improvisations and ragged-but-right vocals. What becomes obvious is that young Ricci is not stuck for an idea, and it's a wonder to hear his solos rage and soar and then transform into jazzier lines; one would have a hard time to finding another harmonica player with a better grasp of his technique and imagination or who makes as much of an effort to present fresh notions, configurations, and twists into his playing. There's a naturalness to what he brings forth, a sensual joining of his lines that is remindful of Butterfield at his most prime; rather than seeming like an upstart perfunctorily playing his warm-up licks before launching his super chops too soon and too often, Ricci, like Butterfield, has a jazz-players of dynamics. They're the rare skill of building and releasing tension that keeps on the edge, motivated by the band's virtuoso rhythms and the lead man's sober unpredictability. New Blood, as I said, is a tight, rocking, funkified band.

 Jump Children --the Scott Silbert Big Band

Little else existing gets the blood pumping faster than the pulverizing rhythm of big band swing. Limbs twitch, hands beat a tempo on table tops, feet tap then turn and then twist in acrobatic dervishing as the ballroom floor fills with the righteous joy of dancers moving to the galvanizing pace of trombones, trumpets, and saxophones galore joined in a righteous 4/4 stride. In its prime in the 30s, 40s and up to the 50s, it was the music supreme. Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Harry James, the Dorsey brothers, and many others filled the ballrooms, the concert halls, and  radio airwaves coast to coast. 

It was rebellion, rhythm, pot, secret hooch in pocket flasks, riffs romance, the music of a Nation on the go on the dance floors, in the factories, on the march in the War to End all Wars as America seduced the world with the sweetest sounds this side of heaven. I'm nearly 70, born too early in 1952 to remember what monumental big deal the big bands were, but decades of speaking to elders kind enough to share their memories and record collections with me, I think it would be safe to assume that collectively those telling me tales of big bands, tour buses, and bandstands thought that this was a glorious thing that would never end. But it did. The eventual ascendancy of Elvis, Chuck Berry and rock and roll in general in the 50s, to make a complicated tale too brief in the telling, was a principal reason the Big Bands were pushed from the center spotlight. Though never completely out of the public mind, jazz in general and big band jazz in particular became marginalized. Efforts over the years to restart interest in the Swing Era brand of brassy sass have mixed results over the years. In a general way and in the interest of keeping this review concise, suffice it to say that college big bands, various sorts of revivalist ensembles and especially that faddish "Swing Revival" of the late eighties-early 90s, to varying degrees, struck me as academic recreations at best, gimmicky opportunism at worst. You couldn't help but wonder if anyone would happen along, unexpected, with a blazing take on this grand tradition, not as an ancient thing that needed to be refurbished or rehabilitated instead as a life force that can make the nervous system jump again in an age where modern music seems determined to deaden our wits.  

Jump Children by the Jeff Silbert Big Band is a choice step in that direction, a session of hard-rocking swing music, fueled by propulsive drums, two fisted piano chords and sharp, superbly textured, rapidly applied horn and reed arrangements. Silbert, a jaunty and fluid tenor saxophonist and arranger and a member of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, proceeds here as though Big Bands never went out of style. He's assembled a formidable fourteen-member band, players who lock together in common cause to move the listener through deep, brash colors, and intricate time signatures. There's abundance of ensemble electricity here. Or, more like an embarrassment of hot, very hot jazz.

A bold statement, but the music's galloping swagger is  evidence that enthralls and rattles the senses. The album opener and title track "Jump Children", a tune recorded in 1945 by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm (an all-women and integrated unit that found a measure of international acclaim) is  given a blasting, endearingly fidgety treatment here, with fine solos from trumpeter Josh Kauffman on trumpet and Grant Langford on tenor sax swiftly and lightly darting over and around the cut time horn arrangements, all of which boosts Gretchen Midgely's already animated vocals to heights of finger snapping jive. This collective of virtuosos through a rich swath of known and less known tunes from the period, performed with a superb rhythm section that makes the music move with a youthful flair you might not have expected. There is nothing dated here. There are many sweet spots, but I would point out two especially catchy numbers, the first being an intrepid  iteration of  1939's "In a Persian Market" by Larry Clinton indulges in magnificent stop-time fun after the main theme is stated. Second, the Silbert Big Band's treatment of Mercer Ellington's "Jumpin' Punkin" from 1941 is an elegant jaunt, a spare set of horn charts laced together with sublime statements from multi-reedist on clarinet and Leigh Pilzer on baritone sax. The album concludes on a stratospheric note, the warhorse tune "Stompin' at the Savoy" (composed by Chick Webb and  Edgar Samson), the trademarked horn charts soaring over a brutally effective swing section while a round house of soaring and succinct solos from Kauffman (trumpet), Jen Krupa (trombone), Silbert (tenor sax) and Ken Kimrey switch off with the unison horn lines in a melee of musical chatter.

Blue Kind of Miles --Peter Sprague

It's an odd situation when there's a jazz artist giving tribute to history's most acclaimed jazz trumpeter who proceeds with a band lacking what you'd assume is the  most essential instrumentalist. Yes, we're speaking of a Miles Davis commemoration that exists and moves forward without a trumpet player in their ranks. Odd, yes, but no quandary need apply here. In Guitarist Peter Sprague’s recent offering, Blue Kind of Miles, the absence of a trumpeter is strategic artistry. A reinterpretation of Davis’ music from his landmark 1959 album Kind of Blue, Sprague and longtime comrades (brother Tripp Sprague on sax, flute, and piano; Mack Leighton on bass; and Duncan Moore on drums give themselves the luxury to play with Davis’ seminal compositions. Anyone awaiting the chance to distract with useless complaints about how a younger horn player goes about playing the music of someone whose oeuvre many think invaluable can take the day off. Blue Kind of Miles, highlighting Sprague’s delicate arrangements of Davis’ mystical, modal, and near minimalist tone poems, allows the music to breathe with the fresh breath of this quartet’s sublime collective personality. 

Far more than compensating in place of a trumpet is versatile reed man Tripp Sprague as the album’s secondary soloist, and throughout the disc he reveals what he knows about tone, phrasing, and constructing a soulful message. He fills his solo space with a bevy of melodic ideas on the album’s opening number, a high-stepping rendition of the Davis classic “So What.” His sound is warm and full. His relaxed yet agile playing commands close attention. Peter, as always, combines a precise lyricism to his guitar work; his ensemble work approaches a world-beating classicism, but as those who’ve followed his diverse career since he first appeared on the scene with Dance of the Universe in the seventies, there is an innate swing to his playing. Samba to bop to a bluesy funkiness, all embodied in this improviser’s statements. The haunting flamenco inflections of his spotlight section on Davis’ “Blue and Green” moves you in a way usually reserved for the saddest lyric poets.

“Freddie Freeloader” is a funky conversation among Tripp, Peter, and bassist Leighton—short, bluesy phrases and clipped riffs, something said, a pause, a quizzical response, an emphatic reassertion, another pause, and a musical shrugging of the shoulder. The band then finds the shuffling groove and makes it move steadily with sway and sass, led by Leighton’s fleet bass outing, making the bass run and skip through its walking paces and maintaining the feeling of a rag shop boulevardier seen in all his street corner majesty. Tripp and Peter provide their solos in seamless order; Tripp’s reed work is a moaning blues mosaic of deep-toned exhilaration, laying down a rhythm and blues inflected hard-bop grit he manages with  dexterity and lightness of touch. Peter’s foray into sharp notes, deft runs, and graceful octave work, following the bass line closely, hewing close to the spare theme, but lacing fleet lines at unexpected intervals. The proverbial sound of surprise. “All Blues,” likely the most covered Miles Davis composition, gets a shrewd modification in this outing, with a brisker than usual pace and some additional and tricky changes before the improvisations commence. It is to be expected, I’d say, given the universal familiarity of the original motif. Odd, but most of the versions I’ve come across over the years don’t alter Davis’ spare construction very often. This arrangement provides the atmospherics for a twisting pair of extemporization from the Sprague brothers, followed by a remarkable, rich bowed solo from Leighton. Drummer Moore, a champion on all the tracks as he performs wonderful rhythm section duties with Leighton, cannot be praised enough. Pulse, groove, flawless shifts in tempo, the man behind the traps keeps this session grooving the particularly provocative paths that Miles Davis laid out. Blue Kind of Miles is an intriguing and innovative tribute to the man’s singular vision as an improviser and composer.

 

SOME NICE WORDS FOR THE FIRST PETER GABRIEL ALBUM

 

I wasn't and remain no great fan of progressive rock as a genre, although there were significant  stylistic enclaves hither and yon that gave me more than a few hours of enlightened distraction. Genesis, with Peter Gabriel as vocalist and contributing songwriter, were an  ensemble that provided some of those hours because, I suppose, these able musicians viewed themselves songwriters first, virtuosos second. Which meant, you see, far fewer meandering solos and classy art-moves, musically, to bolster what happened to be catchy, appealing, haunting, sad and beautiful songs underneath the occasionally overwrought arrangement. Pacing, spacing, self-editing, and sense of literate restraint enabled these guys, initially, to tell a tale through two album sides, four album sides, and pretty much give the world through the eyes of characters you didn't know could be imagined and come away disbelieving none of it. And their tunes could be hummed or sung with relative ease by a listener. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, to use a cursed term, is one of the very, very, very few rock operas to work entirely. Gabriel was no small part of that success. The first album, the first of a string of discs to be called Peter Gabriel with no sequencing qualifying the release title, is a masterpiece, a joyous and contagious bringing together of theatrical art rock, guitar chord burnishing, art-song, odd tales from Dark Forests--something very British, very Lewis Carroll, very C.S. Lewis. The melodies and the hooks get you and keep in their hold--"Here Comes the Flood", "Salisbury Hill", "Moribund the Bergermeister" morph, ascend and descend in pitch, mood, and modulation that your mind is pretty reeling with hooky riffs, phrases and the quotable yet enigmatic bits of lyric that is crazy making on sleepless nights, so much so that you feel compelled to play the disc again and yet again. Such was my case, sometimes thinking that I was delving into some library of forbidden journals, esoteric poetry or the keys to all metaphors that would, with close reading, unlock the qualities of the universe even the bravest poets trembled before. Peter Gabriel's has one of those voices that  puts its power and range int the service of his muse's highest standards. He is less a vocal personality that a set of personas that makes this album a joy to ponder, wonder about, scratch your head over while your ears behold some marvelous art rock that lifts the spirits to try harder and to feel deeper, more profoundly.