Month: March 2015

This week Howling’s recounting tales of poor royalties, corrupt politicians and some Son House in an underpass. You’ll be pleased to know that none of this nonsense  stops him playing an hour of some of the finest blues ‘n roots music you’ll find on the net.

Junior Wells “No fan of the mayor!”

This week’s selection from Jack DeJohnette’s season-making Made in Chicago record is a Muhal Richard Abrams piece called Jack 5 that is often as spare and stark as classical Japanese music and features some of the most oblique time-playing I’ve everh heard, and a lot of Henry Threadgill. It’s a marvel, but this week’s Updoc—Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, Brooklyn not Chicago time—leads off with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s orchestral salute to the goddess of night, Nyx, a virtuoso score of such richness and fun that I just had to use it as a curtain raiser. Later on, we’re back to jazz and duets, David Murray with Milford Graves and Jack, respectively, and Joe Lovano with the magisterial and gentlemanly Hank Jones. Which leads us back to the piano sonatas of Franz Schubert—last week’s sonata in A must have been habit-forming—this time the composer’s last, #21 in B-flat, which he premiered a few weeks before his death via syphilis at the age of 31, alas. The performance is by Sviatoslav Richter, the piano titan whose centenary year this is, and he slows the opening movement far enough down to provide the link to Beethoven’s late sonatas; but where Beethoven’s mystical inwardness leads him into further thematic compression, even at his most expansive, Schubert’s depth-dive opens the music outward into the epic scope of an inward Odyssey. To follow Richter on this journey is an extraordinary privilege that invites deep listening. Another thing to remember about Richter is that he needed to keep a red plastic lobster close to him at all times, and since it was never visible in concert we must assume that he hid it in his piano bench. This is a studio recording, so he might have been happy to have it where he could see it as he played. Takes all kinds, I guess.

This week Howling losing people in cyberspace, needing help in his love life  and finding an old Delta singer living up the road. Once again, this has nothing to do with an hour of very excellent blues ‘n roots music on his porch.

Son House ” Who needs a geetar to sing the blues?”

I first saw Jack DeJohnette shortly after he came to New York, at Slug’s with a John Gilmore band, on a collapsing drumset lent him by Roy Haynes, and he was a helluva drummer who sounded mostly like a follower of Tony Williams, then brand-new with Miles Davis; and then Tony Wiliams ambled in and sat in and fairly dusted Jack DeJohnette from Chicago; but Tony at age 18 played about as well as he ever would, while Jack put himself through maybe the most extraordinary development and evolution any drummer ever has, refining his musicianship and addressing every single element of his style and the possibilities of what Art Blakey called a “bastard instrument”, and these days watching and hearing him play makes me wonder if this is what it would have sounded like if Johann Sebastian Bach had been a drummer. Jack’s new album with an avant-garde Chicago cohort is one of the big events of the season, and Updoc—Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, Slug’s Saloon time—plays two more cuts from it, and the prominence and excellence of Muhal Richard Abrams’ contribution prompted intermissions from Bach and Schubert. The rest of the show is taken up with Jack playing with Miles Davis’ so-called “lost” quintet, one of the most intense bands ever to play anything, so please do tune in for the virtuosity, the taste, the touch, the lightningflash, the thunder, the delicate details turned out in the midst of a firestorm, the wit, the brilliance, the uncanny ear and comprehensive conception, the Sonors and Sabians and supernatural sapience of the one and only Jack DeJohnette from Chicago. Yes!