Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Electroacoustic improv, coming or going? (Herb Deutsch, RIP; synths forever?)

As the year ends/begins, I’m thinking electroacoustic music is a wave of the future. But maybe it’s been superseded by other synth-based genres — synth-pop, EDM, soundtracks a lá Stranger Things. Is Prophet, the just released 1986 weird-sounds bonanza from Sun Ra with his Arkestra exploiting the then new, polyphonic and programmable Prophet-5 synth, timeless or passé?

Herb Deutsch (glasses) with Robert Moog and his synthesizer

In February, I saluted Herb Deutsch, co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer, on his 90th birthday. Deutsch died on December 9, with synthesizers ever more present in music creation of all sorts, and a notable if slow trend towards electro-acoustic improvising ensembles, which he pioneered. Is the trend taking hold? Or a thing mostly of the past?

As I wrote in February:

[Deutsch’s] recordings collected on From Moog to Mac sort of a best-of, with “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” (1965 — credited as the first composition for a Moog) featuring bluesy piano and (overdubbed?) horn intersected interwoven with thick and thin electronic lines, unnaturally long fades, whirling sirens, white noise, delays and maybe backward tape. A Christmas Carol (1963) his prescient mix of found sounds, spoken word and haunting ambiance, was a contemporaneous response to the Alabama church bombing that killed four young girls and also drew profound comment from James Baldwin, John Coltrane and Dr. Martin Luther King. Deutsch’s composition still has power . . .

To celebrate that aspect of Deutsch’s work, here’s a view-list of mixed acoustic instruments and electronics, old and new, analog or digital, in-studio or live.

XXXX – Michael Wollny with Emile Parisien/Tim Lefebvre & Christian Lillinger

“The Prophet (abridged)” — by Sun Ra

“High Speed Chase” — from doo-bop — Miles Davis

“Patriots” — Zawinul Syndicate

from Streaming — Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell

“Raindance” from Sextant, Herbie Hancock (with Dr. Patrick Gleeson)

Evan Parker ElectroAcoustic Ensemble

“Message” from Leave the City — Music Electronnica Viva

“OBA” from Human Music — Jon Appleton and Don Cherry

“Babel” from Avant-noir — Lisa Mezzacappa

“You Know, You Know” — Jan Hammer with Mahavishnu Orchestra (John McLaughlin)

Gil Scott-Heron, hard-eyed realist, dead of self-inflicted escapism

Gil Scott-Heron, dead at age 62, was a poet, prophet and spokesperson of the black urban American experience. A merciless and unsentimental truth-teller when he emerged on the scene in the ’70s, by telling Afro-identified kids dancing to Motown and grooving on psychedelic rock that “the revolution will not be televised” he meant that the real revolution in Civil Rights and human conduct was not a show, that those who wanted to make it happen or enjoy its results had to liberate themselves from sitting on the couch zoning out, that there was dirty work ahead.


I heard him in 1970 at Colgate University on a bill with the Last Poets — one reason why the rise of poetry slams and rap didn’t seem like anything new to me when they came along a decade later. I didn’t listen to him much, but I heard and mostly respected what he had to say — and anyway, Scott-Heron’s message wasn’t aimed at me. I admire that he reached his target audience, without compromising his vision.

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Big fun news: Santana weds Blackman, Herbie & Wayne play

The rare notable jazz wedding to celebrate: Beyond-jazz, rock & Latin guitarist Carlos Santana to drummer Cindy Blackman, who’s had a

nicer couple.jpeg

Artists’ promotional photos

great recording year, issuing Another Lifetime, her smashing tribute to the late Tony Williams) and driving Organ Monk, Greg Lewis’s trio album that made my top 10.

Santana’s best albums after the first one always have had a outward reach — Abraxis, Caravanserai, his spiritualized rave up Love, Devotion and Surrender with John McLaughlin and organist Larry (Khalid Yasin) Young, and 1990’s Swing of Delight, featuring ex-Miles men Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter (who made music at the wedding), Ron Carter and, yes, Tony Williams. Carlos and Cindy — play hard and prosper!

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Seasonal electricity: jazz “fusion” in NYC

Fusion, fission, energy and virtuosity reign supreme over coming holiday weeks as jazzers beyond genre constraints fill New York clubs. Starting tonight (Dec. 9) double-necked guitar madman Dave Fiuczynski fires up Iridium with ripping alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and jam-band idol John Medeski on keybs; jazz sambas and tangos, ex-Milesian Mike Stern and smooth trumpeter Chris Botti, soul-drench organist Dr. Lonnie Smith and the Bad Plus follow. Details here, at my new column for City Arts-New York. And below — Fuze, vocalist Dean Bowman + Roy Hargrove knock out Miles Davis’ “What It Is” from Decoy (1984, and still state-of-jazz-funk).

Miles’ beyond jazz, today and tomorrow

Miles Davis is still at it — in Prospect Park, the Highline Ballroom, (le) Poisson Rouge, Carefusion Jazz Festival’s Carnegie Hall concerts, also overflowing the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, as per my City Arts – New York column and enriching the glorious Festival International de Jazz de Montreal (June 25 – July 5).

Though he died of exacerbated living at age 65 in 1991, the influence of Miles’ trumpet and his breakthrough “directions in music” vibrates through urbane international cultural as strongly now as ever. Bitches Brew, which launched a jazz-rock revolution, and Tutu, his most ambitious late-period album, are inspiring high visibility concert performances that are exciting in their own rights, unveiling a potential future rather than reviving the past.
This Miles wave isn’t nostalgia-based: it’s a wake-up call for a world short on  sharp melodies, harmonic exploration, rampant rhythm, full-force interaction. Audiences I’ve encountered seem eager to hear again or for the first time Miles’ many modes — from aching fragility to hippest cool to surrealistic phantasmagoria to imperious swagger, all conveyed with surprising, original lyricism.

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Mike Zwerin, jazz journalist, musician, bon vivant dies at 79

A trombonist in Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool band, memoirist whose The Parisian Jazz Chronicles set a standard for wit and candor in self-examination, and writer for the International Herald Tribune and Bloomberg News, Mike Zwerin died April 2 in Paris, where he’d lived since 1969. Recipient in 2009 of the Jazz Journalists Association’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award, Mike was an inspiration ever since I read his reports from the jazz scene in the Village Voice in the 1960s, and I’m glad to say I got to know him as a friend.

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George Avakian, jazz records hero, at 91 speaks of Miles

George Avakian is a jazz hero who’s done more than anyone else in the record business ever to ensure America’s greatest music endures. Inventor of the reissue, the jazz album, the liner note, producer of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, among others, on his 91st birthday March 15, Avakian gave a fascinating interview to Marc Myers, posted at JazzWax.com, Much of it’s about re-launching Miles’ career. Also, here’s Doug Ramsey’s report on Avakian from last year.

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Cecil and Miles in NYC (and India)

Taylor, the pianist beyond genre (age: 80) and still-groundbreaking music of Davis, the trumpeter/conceptualist (dead 18 years) are at major Manhattan venues this week, continuing to provoke and gratify. Cecil Taylor performs at the Blue Note tonight (Thursday, May 28) while “Miles From India,” mixing veterans of Davis’ electric bands with South Asian improvisers, has a four-night stand at Iridium. And last Monday, Davis’ prophetic On The Corner was revisited at Merkin Concert Hall.

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On The Corner program notes, Merkin Hall concert 5/25/09

Miles Davis
intended On The Corner to be a
personal statement, an esthetic breakthrough and a social provocation upon its
release in fall of 1972. He could hardly have been more successful: the album
was all that, though it has taken decades for its full impact to be understood.

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PBS fundraising week: jazz & soul tv abounds

What gets New Yorkers to watch and/or contribute to PBS? Jazz, blues, r&b — American vernacular music, of course.

I assume it’s time for WLIW‘s spring fundraiser, for instance, because “New York Public Television” has scheduled for one evening (March 11) of prime time the smooth r&b couple Ashford and Simpson in performance at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency; photogenic trumpeter Chris Botti

Chris Botti – promotional photo

performing with John Mayer, Josh Groban, Steve Tyler and the Boston Pops, and the 1959 broadcast “The Sound of Miles Davis,” featuring music from the trumpeter’s classic album Kind of Blue, now 50 years old and satisfying as ever.

This tv show, produced between the album’s two recording sessions, has kerchief-wearing Davis leading John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb through “So What” (but not Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans, who also were key to the music’s success). Shot in black and white with an air of intensity and reverence, the show also includes Davis’ great friend and collaborator Gil Evans gently conducting a chamber orchestra. It has been available on various video collections for years, and of course can be viewed on YouTube, too.

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