Performance Review

John Corbett recently published a nice summary of Ken Vandermark's career to date. Section #4 is of the of most interest to me, since it covers the time when I was living in Chicago and discovering both Vandermark's music in particular and free jazz in general. I feel very fortunate to have been there during the so-called "golden age in Chicago", when I had the chance to hear the Vandermark Five and other groups play on a weekly basis, if not more frequently. Simpatico is one of my favorite V5 recordings and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I was at the Empty Bottle nearly every Tuesday night during the summer of 1998 listening as the songs that were recorded for that album were being rehearsed and developed.

Sports' Fans

Huey Lewis and the News were my first favorite band. I hopped onto their band wagon sometime around the Back to the Future Soundtrack/Fore! days and rode it for a good two years through the Small World album. In retrospect, that doesn't seem like much in the way of devotion, but when you've just barely cracked double-digits in age, giving a single artist two years on the top of your personal billboard chart is pretty significant.

Huey Lewis and the News were the first band I ever saw live in concert (Meadowbrook, 1988, Small World Tour). I don't remember the first tape that I ever purchased. I doubt it was one of Huey's, but I definitely owned all three of the aforementioned albums as well as their chart-topping 1983 album Sports. If you were never into Huey Lewis and/or the News, you might not get as much enjoyment out of this several thousand word dissection of Sports, but you will probably agree that it's the most insightful analysis of Lewis' career since American Psycho. If all of this hasn't piqued your interest because you never liked Huey Lewis and the News in particular or saxophone-heavy pop music in general, you should appreciate that the only two members of the band, past or present, that have their own Wikipedia pages are Huey Lewis, of course, and saxophonist Johnny Colla.

Power Rankings

We spent yesterday afternoon at the 56th annual Newport Jazz Festival. I was very excited about this year's lineup, which was even more adventurous than last year. The first concert that we checked out was the Dave Douglas Brass Ecstasy quintet. I saw Douglas play with his Tiny Bell Trio about 12 years ago and I was really impressed, but with the exception of a couple of Masada records, I haven't paid too much attention to his work since then. I really liked their show, and especially liked the songs where Douglas really got to shine. My favorite numbers were a couple of original compositions dedicated to and in the style of two great jazz trumpeters (Enrico Rava and Lester Bowie).

Next up was the most anticipated show of the festival, Powerhouse Sound. I wasn't sure which version of the band was going to be appearing, but I was excited to see Jeff Parker walk out on stage, as I've been an admirer of his work for years but have never had the chance to hear him perform. Ken Vandermark lead the band along with longtime collaborator Nate McBride on electric bass and John Herndon on drums. While this was my favorite show of the festival, I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped. The first problem was the sound. It was really hard to hear Vandermark (who played tenor exclusively for this show) over his electrified colleagues. As Vandermark tweeted earlier today, the entire set was very intense. I thought it got to be a bit much at times. They did mellow out a bit in the final third of their set and delivered a stunning rendition of the trippy dub-inspired "Coxsonne".



The crowd was sparser than last year's Vandermark 5 performance (I'm sure overlapping with the Wynton Marsalis show on the main stage this year didn't help). I was a bit disappointed that Ken didn't take any breaks between the songs to announce their titles or the band members. It also pains me a bit to admit that I wasn't a big fan of Herndon's work on the drums. Until I sat down to write this post, I didn't realize that he's the drummer for Tortoise, one of my favorite bands. His drumming took the music into a more rock-oriented direction, which I felt was unnecessary with Parker and McBride already pulling the band that way. Powerhouse's other lineup features Paal Nilssen-Love on the drums and I think I would have enjoyed his sound better.

The final show, pianist Jason Moran was most pleasant surprise. His band played a good mix of originals and reinterpretations, including a stellar rendition of Monk's "Crepuscule With Nellie" to close their set. It was good, solid jazz and Moran's work on the piano was always compelling and even a bit unconventional while still staying inside of a fairly conventional straight ahead jazz framework.

Deer Crossing

Deer Tick
Lupo's - Providence, RI
July 16, 2010

I finally got a chance to hear Deer Tick play live. They play in Providence a lot, though not as much as you might expect for a band from Providence. For whatever reason, I always seem to be busy or out of town when they're in Providence. The show was hosted by Lupo's but it took place outdoors on Union St. between Washington and Worchester. The acoustics weren't the best and it was oppressively humid even at 10pm, but it gave the show a more raucous vibe. It was an all-ages show (perhaps because of the outdoor venue), which skewed the crowd to the young side and made me feel even older.

Deer Tick put on a good show. They played for almost two hours straight and it was pretty obvious that they were having a lot of fun up on stage. They played a good mix of songs from all three of their albums as well as a number of covers. Hearing a good band play covers really makes you realize how bad most cover bands are. They covered "Maybelline" by Chuck Berry, "Break Down" by Tom Petty, "Twist & Shout" by the Beetles, and "Cheap Sunglasses" by ZZ Top. Their "Break Down" cover was incredible - I liked it better than the original (and I really like the original). "Cheap Sunglasses" has always been a favorite of mine, and their uptempo, de-funkified, borderline psychobilly rendition of it was sublime.

I was also pleased to see that they recently added an organ player to the band. In my opinion, there are very few bands that wouldn't benefit from the addition of an organ player. The only real disappointment, and it was a minor one, was that the band brought a special guest on stage to sing "These Old Shoes". The guest was the author of the song, a local musician who was also part of the opening act. A magnanimous gesture no doubt, but I really missed hearing Jack McCauley's raspy vocals on one of my favorite Deer Tick songs.

Into This World We Are Thrown

I remember listening to WRIU late at night a few years ago and catching the end of an hilarious uptempo, latin style cover of The Doors' Riders on the Storm. I decided to figure out who was behind this delightful piece of nonsense tonight and quickly found my answer - it's from Señor Coconut and his orchestra. Here's a homemade YouTube tribute to the song.

Jazz Hands

The 2010 Newport Jazz Festival lineup was just announced. I'm pleased to see that last year's nod to the adventurous side of the genre wasn't a fluke. I'm very pleased to see that Ken Vandermark was invited back, this time with his Powerhouse Sound ensemble. I'm really looking forward to seeing them live in concert for the first time. Some other notables are Marshall Allen-Matthew Shipp-Joe Morris, the Matt Wilson quartet, and Herbie Hancock (all slated to perform on Sunday, along with Powerhouse Sound). I know where I'll be on August 8th.

Eureka

The AV Club featured a good interview with Jim O'Rourke yesterday. I've been aware of O'Rourke for a long time, but I never really gave any of his work a good listen until I picked up a copy of Eureka earlier this year (at Jive Time Records, a store that's joined Jazz Record Mart and Downtown Music Gallery as the record store that I visit whenever I'm in Seattle, Chicago, or New York, respectively) and I've really been enjoying it. Even though O'Rourke says in this interview that Eureka is "the one record I can’t fucking stand", I still think it's worth a listen or 20.

Broken Dreams

A few months back, I raved about a newish band on the scene called Alberta Cross. I just finished listening to Broken Side of Time, their first full-length album, on lala and my enthusiasm has waned considerably. The album is thoroughly overproduced, robbing them of the hard-edged blues rock sound that drew me in to their music. Another downside of all that studio polish is that I never found their song lyrics very good, but it was pretty hard to decipher a lot of them on their debut EP. No such luck on Broken Side of Time. I still really enjoy their debut EP and I suspect that they might put on a pretty good live show.

Newport News

More thoughts from the Newport Jazz Festival.

I was disappointed to see that RIPTA has discontinued their seasonal bus service from the Newport Visitors Center for Fort Adams. Even in these times of challenging state budgets, it's an embarrassment for city like Newport that relies so heavily on tourism to lack a public transport option from its downtown to one of its most popular attractions.

That being said, the water taxi that I wound up taking from Perrotti Park to Fort Adams was quite nice.

This was my first visit to Fort Adams, and I was really impressed with it. I'll definitely be going back some weekend when it's not playing host to a music festival to check it out.

There was no shortage of booths selling handicrafts at the festival, but I didn't see any selling recordings. Jazz fans are notorious record collectors so I was surprised to see that there wasn't even a tent selling recordings of the featured musicians.

My favorite show other than the V5 was the Christian McBride trio, which kind of surprised me. It wasn't anything earth-shattering, just really good and straight-ahead jazz. I was looking forward to Vijay Iyer's show, but with the exception of their last number, I couldn't really get into any of their tunes.

NPR music was at the festival and has made many of the concerts available for download (not the V5's set, unfortunately)

The ProJo mentioned the V5's set in their review today:

The Vandermark 5, a group of young Chicagoans, started the process with a mix of wailing horns, cello and bowed acoustic bass, completing the demolition on their final song as the second-stage crowd roared. “Some people probably hated it,” said cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, “and some people have told us it was their favorite thing of the festival so far.”

Ken's take on the V5's set, via twitter.

Here's a link to some pictures that I took of the V5 before their set.

New Thing at Newport

Vandermark 5
Newport Jazz Festival - Fort Adams State Park - Newport, RI
Saturday, August 8th

I've never bothered making the trip down to Newport for its iconic jazz festival because, like most big jazz festivals, it tends to feature lowest common denominator acts that play the same old tunes year after year. Newport Jazz impresario George Wein decided to do something about that this year, as this article from the Boston Globe back explains. This year's line-up is fairly impressive, but the Vandermark 5 alone was worth the price of admission for me. Alas, I was not disappointed.

One of the great things about Vandermark is he never talks down to his audience. When I saw him play with School Days at SXSW in 2001, they played a couple of old Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd songs and he dutifully announced the song titles and composers to the crowd despite the fact that most of them were there for the punk rock act that followed them and most certainly had never heard of Shepp or Rudd (or Vandermark, for that matter). The Vandermark 5, as far as I know, only plays original tunes, so there was no free jazz history lesson going on, but their song selection was in no way pandering to the audience in Newport.

Simply put, their set rocked - literally and figuratively. I don't think I've ever heard them play a set as hard-hitting as the one they played in Newport. The first number that they did started out on a rocking note with Fred Lonberg-Holm playing a great serpentine cello solo against the bass and drums before Vandermark and Rempis joined in on tenor and alto saxes, respectively. Vandermark played tenor for most of the set. He occasionally picked up the clarinet, but his bari was not on stage. His most impressive solo was during the most subdued number of the set, Early Color, but all of his solos were strong. The band sounded really tight. It probably helped that most of the songs were from their forthcoming album, but still, it's pretty amazing to watch a band playing music that is both highly improvised and very precise at a breakneck pace stick together as well as they did.

I was quite impressed with the crowd; at its peak, it was standing room only. Vandermark appeared to share my sentiments, as he spent most of his time between numbers thanking the crowd and George Wein himself, who was on hand for most of their set. The biggest crowd pleaser of the day was Cement, a cacophonous song that was let off by Tim Daisy and featured some devastating hooks in addition to a Vandermark-Rempis tenor sax tête-à-tête.

The few times I've seen Vandermark play in front of a so-called crossover audience, he's been incredibly well-received and this show was no exception. While it's never going to be considered mainstream, this is music that adventurous ears are ready for, even if they aren't particularly attuned to jazz. Hopefully, the Vandermark 5's first US jazz festival appearance won't be their last.

Cross Product

For those who weren't aware, the SXSW festival has been kind enough to take a ton of music from the artists who play at the festival and make it available for download (all gratis). Some kind souls have collected all of the downloads and packaged them into multi-gigabyte torrents for easy downloading. I've been slowly digesting the first torrent from this year. I was so impressed with one of the bands included in the torrent that I picked up their debut album and continue to be impressed by it. The band is Alberta Cross and they hail from Sweden and the UK. Those of you who have been burned by my music recommendations in the past take note, these guys are a serious blues rock outfit, not some kind of weird experimental noise unit. I've been making a conscious effort to listen to more accessible music recently because while I still like free improvised music, listening to it can be somewhat demanding and even I am not always in the mood to be challenged by the music I'm listening to. Check these guys out if you get a chance. They're slated to play at a number of festivals this year, including Coachella and Bonnaroo.

Musician

I received a copy of the documentary film Musician for Christmas and I finally got around to watching it. As I mentioned before, it profiles Ken Vandermark, my favorite musician currently on the scene. The movie is shot in a very direct style; there are no interviews or narration. It begins with Vandermark alone in his basement composing and working through some writer's block and ends with concert footage of him playing a solo show at an art museum (or possibly an art gallery). In between, it's an unvarnished look at the day-to-day life of a musician operating well outside of the mainstream of commercial music. The entire film is summarized in the final scene. It begins with a close-up of him addressing the crowd, his humility and humanity on full display, before launching into a Japp Blonk-inspired solo. As he starts to play, the camera pans back to just beyond and above the audience, revealing the modest crowd. The camera holds that shot until the song ends, and the movie fades out with the applause. It shows the loneliness, sacrifice, humility, creativity, strength, and elation that the uncompromising artist must endure, posses, and hopefully, receive.

I've always felt that Vandermark was an amazingly humble artist. Every time I've seen him play, he always seems genuinely touched that people bothered to pay money to listen to his music. That humility is on display in Musician, and while a lot of it is just his personality, the occupation that he has chosen certainly reinforces his humility. As a fan of his music, I really enjoyed the concert segments and I also enjoyed the way that they were shot. The rehearsal segments were even more interesting, both for the behind the scenes look that they offered and for the insight they offered into Vandermark as a composer and bandleader.

Musician is obviously a must-see for fans of Vandermark's music, but it's also a movie for anyone who is interested in watching the creative process in action.

Hub Cap

The great jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard passed away yesterday. He hadn't been very active recently and I haven't listened to his music in a while, but he was one of my favorites back when I was first getting into jazz. I don't have any of his recordings as a leader and I thought that Out to Lunch was the only recording of Hubbard that I owned until the LAT obit reminded me that he played on Coltrane's Ascension sessions, but my old college radio station had a lot of Hubbard's recondings on vinyl and I spun them regularly. One my favorites was Live at the Northsea Jazz Festival 1980, which is the only post-Blue Note Hubbard album that I've listened to extensively. He was truly one of the last of the great hard bop players.

Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia...

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra was in town last week. Michelle has been interested in seeing their show for a couple of years, so we decided to check it out. I went in with pretty low expectations, but I still managed to leave disappointed. The Christmas portion of their show is built around a "true meaning of Christmas" narrative that is borderline nonsensical and difficult to follow. Mixed in with the narrative are heavy metal interpretations of popular Christmas carols and original songs. The original Christmas songs, with the exception of a couple that they played near the end of the Christmas portion of the concert, were awful. I don't understand why they didn't make better use of the existing body of Christmas music and fables that are already known and loved by the majority of western world. Creating new and compelling holiday music and stories is a pretty tall order. Based on the legion of fans who go to see their show every year, I guess the TSO has created a Christmas story that resonates with some people, but it didn't do much for either of us.

Flat Earth Society

The Flatlands Collective
Lilypad - Cambridge, MA
Thursday, December 4th

The Flatlands Collective is a group of Chicago musicians and the Boston-based Dutch saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra. I'm pretty sure that this was the first time I've ever seen Dijkstra live. I've certainly had plenty of opportunities to see him play, but for whatever reason, it never worked out until yesterday. Dijkstra impressed me more as a composer and bandleader than he did as a soloist last night. In his defense, the music was structured in a way that didn't give the musicians as much of a chance to stretch out as a normal free jazz unit and the ensemble had a tendency to drown out the soloists, which may have been due to the acoustics of the room.

I really like the sound that larger ensembles are able to produce and the pieces that I enjoyed the most at this show were the ones that really made use of the entire group, especially, the horn section. It was also great to hear Frank Rosaly play again, after being so impressed with his playing the last time I saw him. I felt he shined as an accompanist the last time, but this time, I was more impressed with his solos. He used a lot of dynamic and rhythmic contrasts, which gave his solos a real lyrical quality. I was most impressed with clarinetist James Falzone. I had never even heard of him before the show so I had no idea what to expect, but I was really blown away by both the quality of his phrasing and the consistency of his tone.

I really enjoyed some of the tunes the band played and some of them didn't do anything for me at all, there wasn't very much middle ground. Most of the time, however, it was a really good show.

I Voted For President and All I Got Was This Stupid MP3

In case you weren't planning on voting in next week's election, perhaps Wilco's offer of a free song download is enough to entice you to head out to the polls. I'm not a Wilco fan per se and I was planning on voting in the election before I heard about this offer, but I like a couple of their songs and I've been meaning to listen to more of their stuff for a while so I decided to partake. I don't like the tune (a Dylan cover) as much as the couple of Wilco songs that I'm familiar with, but it's still a pretty good song.

Whole Classics

I tend not to notice the music that they play at grocery stores. Occasionally, you hear something unexpected, but it's usually so bland that you don't even realize it's playing. I was at my local Whole Foods tonight and my ears perked up when I heard "Hey Baby" by Ted Nugent. Classic rock at the grocery store is strange enough, but The Motor City Madman at Whole Foods is a whole nothing thing. I kind of doubt that The Nuge would shop with the liberal elitists at Whole Foods even if they were offering a half-off sale on all bow-hunted wild game. As it turns out, "Hey Baby" was only just the beginning of a Whole Foods classic rock block, which I have immortalized in playlist form. After the Nuge, they got proggy with Yes' "Yours is No Disgrace", a veritable deep cut, and capped it all off with the J. Geils Band and "I Must Have Got Lost". They switched back to some more Whole Foods appropriate indie folk after that, but for about 15 minutes tonight, the store was rockin'.

Beyond Compare

I had a friend in high school who was a Dinosaur Jr. fanatic. In fact, he was such a huge fan that he refused to call them anything but their original name (Dinosaur). So while I've been familiar with Dinosaur Jr. and many of the original member's side projects for a long time, I never actually got around to listening to any of their music until recently. I recently picked up Beyond, which I later learned is result of the band's recent reunion after 19 years apart. It's a great album, and it's the first time I've really gotten excited about anything new in the rock/alt rock genre in a long time. I think that one of the reasons I've never been too big on a lot of the alt rock/indie rock bands is a lot of them don't rock all that hard. The stuff on Beyond rocks pretty hard. It's generally more of a punk influenced sound than the blues rock sound that I really dig, but I've never had a problem with punk rock, providing that it actually rocks.

As an aside, in addition to just getting around to discovering Dinosaur Jr., I'm also still getting my feet wet in the digital music world. I was considering just purchasing a single track from the album (This is All I Came To Do), since it was the only one I was familiar with before making my purchase, but I decided against it. While I like the idea of being able to pick and choose songs individually, I still think that for any reasonably serious artist, the album, while it may be a completely artificial construct in the digital music world, is still an important artistic statement.

IZSM

I've been listening to a lot of IZSM lately, a band that I recently discovered on last.fm. I'm particularly enamored by a tune called Izmus, which you can download (legitimately) here, if you're interested. I don't really know a whole lot about the band, other than that they're from Venezuela. The have a MySpace page, of course, but it's in Spanish. Two of their MySpace friends are Living Colour and Vernon Reid, which is a strong endorsement, at least in my book.

Love Is

I've been using last.fm's "love" feature to flag songs that I love in order to inform their music selection algorithm about my tastes, but I've also been using it as a way to keep track of interesting artists that I've heard for the first time on last.fm so I can go back and explore more of their music at some point in the future. Needless to say, I was kind of bummed when I learned that last.fm doesn't provide a feed of your entire loved music history. Fortunately, a fellow named Jamie Thompson is hosting a little last.fm loved music feed service that anyone with a last.fm account can use to create a feed of their entire loved music history. Here's my feed. I've also added it to the right-hand side of this blog underneath the blogroll.