Month: February 2015

Clark Terry was welcome everywhere and I don’t think that will have changed now. The only difference, perhaps, is that the limits will be gone. Just to think of him is still to more than smile. To think of him in passing is to stop passing and to enter a an intermission of the heart. Updoc did an almost all Clark Terry show not too long back, and now that he has moved on to other venues at the age of 94, the show reprises some of that and adds a few new tunes, Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, New York City Mumbletime. And then? Well, there was an article about the British composer Thomas Adès in the Times, his general stunningness and his influence on contemporary musicians of all kinds, so the show reprises what is evidently his signature work, his symphony in all but name, Asyla, and chases it with one song from mandolin wiz Chris Thile’s band The Punch Brotherss and one from Gabriel Kahane. This was to have been a longer segment of tribute and emulation, but CT’s departure intervened. In compensation there’s a song composed and sung by Joanna Wallfisch from her forthcoming CD The Origin of Adjustable Things. It stunned me with its intelligence and intimacy when I heard it on Bob Rogers’ show last week and it may well stun you now. The world just keeps on blossoming with fresh new work, doesn’t it, even before the rites of spring have begun to stir. While it’s still cold out, Updoc shivers to a finish with Jean Sibelius’ symphony in all but name, The Lemminkainen Suite (Four Legends from the Kalevala): our hero romps with the maidens of Saari, descends into the underworld, then joyoussly returns to hear Clark Terry and the Duke Ellington Orchestra puckishly lead the mortals up and down, up and down, in a dream of summer immune to mortal chill.

After the last couple of weeks, things are back to normal on the porch which means, of course, that nothings normal. This week Howling back to providing information but not finding any, skipping continents for the roots and shedding a tear for a master. All in all the usual nonsense mixed up with an hour of some of the finest blues ‘n roots music you’ll find on the net.

David Maxwell – Genius – RIP

I’ll try to break it to you gently, but if you want to hear my impression of the dovecall of the European wood-pigeon you’ll have to wait until the end of the show—8-10PM Friday and noon to 2PM next Tuesday, NYC urban pigeon time—when I perform it, possibly in too low a key, in reference to the climactic theme of Sibelius’ 3^rd Symphony, which in my opinion he lifted from a local Finnish specimen, without attribution. At least the Canadian TV Western, Bordertown, that lifted the opening theme from that same Sibelius symphony and orchestrated it in a manner suggesting Mike Post in his Rockford period had the good grace to say so in the credits. All three versions will be on offer toward the end on the show, which opens with the music of the late and well-loved Butch Morris. I’ve seen other musicians—Roscoe Mitchell and Karl Berger for two—lead large improvising ensembles in a manner approaching Morris’ ‘conduction’, but no one employed it as extensively or for that matter as internationally as he, shaping music out of the air of the moment with a highly cultivated vocabulary of gestures, with or without previously composed material offered into the whirlwind: a music that could play fast and loose even when it was slow and brooding. The show starts off with The Long Goodbye, not the John Williams tune wittily deployed in the Altman movie of that name, but Morris’ own memorial piece for pianist Don Pullen, and after some torch ballads, one of them featuring a Frank Sinatra at once definitive and phony, Butch Morris music resumes with his three-movement Conduction #31. After that you can sing along with Cecil Taylor and Max Roach until Sibelius skiis into the border town all the world’s music lives in, and sampled for you here.

Ian’s still on the porch* this week rapping about his heroes, his guitars and his tattoos. He also picks the  playlist and finds time to pick up the guitar and get back to his roots. Absorbing and entertaining, this an hour for those out there who listen without prejudice.

* Actually on Barry Marshall Everitts porch to be precise!

Little Richard – “Yeeehaaaa!”

It is, it isn’t, it is, it’s not. Well, if it’s not another Lee Konitz show, how come there’s so much Lee Konitx in it—at 8PM Friday and noon next Tuesday, Greenwich Village time—can you tell me that? Well, things sort of fell out that way because there were a couple of Konitz tracks I didn’t get to on last week’s real Lee Konitz show and I wanted to catch up. But then Konitz’s . . . um . . . aesthetic indeterminacy kicked off a number of associations and suggested interesting contrasts and—yes, okay, aesthetic whateveracy I said is probably not the ideal phease. I read an interview the other day in which Konitz said that he likes to come to a gig ready but not prepared—which is pretty much how I do this show—so why wouldn’t I go from Konitz the Saxophonitz on a ballad to the piercing music of Himalayan and Ladakhi double reeds? Natural high-mountain music, a world in which the veil of air is thin and the next world is just a breath away, whether via vision or a misstep on the scree. Besides, this music comes courtesy of my colleague Brian Cullman, who is curating the immense catalogue of David Lewiston’s extraordinary recordings of music from almost everywhere, and once we’ve travelled that far among the reeds, why not Akagündüz Kutbay, Djivan Gasparyan, Ornette Coleman visiting Joujouka, Paul Desmond, Iqbal Jogi, Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton, Branford Whatsisname, but how come I left out Bismillah Khan and what is Dutilleux’s 1^st Symphony doing there? We’re lost in the stars. Big stars, little stars. Whisper not. Or whisper. Come as you are.