Night After Night

Time Out New York: Live preview, ErstAEU Showcase.

Anne Guthrie and Richard Kamerman (Photograph: Billy Gomberg)

ErstAEU Showcase
Issue Project Room; Sat 25

For some time now it’s been possible to labor under the impression that electroacoustic improvisation (or EAI) is exclusively available on import, primarily the domain of Japanese, German and English performers. Actually, that’s never been the case; Americans have contributed to this outlier scene and its constantly morphing aesthetic from the start. But the arrival of ErstAEU—a new imprint of genre-defining mainstay label Erstwhile Records, operated by Jersey City tastemaker Jon Abbey—brings a fresh focus on a groundbreaking wave of homegrown talent.

Like AMM, the intentionally vague name used by a seminal British forebear to the current scene, AEU is meant to be amorphous. A clearly stands for American, Abbey readily admits. But E could be Electroacoustic or Erstwhile, and U might represent Union, Underground, Umbrella, Unlimited…U name it. Conjoined under the mysterious moniker is a growing band of outward-bound composers, improvisers and collaborators—“who may or may not yet know of their involvement,” according to the shadowy collective’s sole public statement.

Performing in this inaugural splash at Issue are the three duos who recorded ErstAEU’s initial trio of releases. Joe Panzer and Greg Stuart connect Gerhard Richter’s slathered, scraped canvases to Merzbow’s assaultive sonic discharge on Dystonia Duos. Anne Guthrie and Richard Kamerman palpably convey sensations of space, dimension and unrest on their rich, enveloping Sinter. Graham Stephenson and Aaron Zarzutzki hew closest to recognizable shades of EAI interplay on Touching, while neatly avoiding predictability. Don’t expect anyone to “play a song from our latest album” here.—Steve Smith

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This event took place at Issue Project Room on May 25, 2013. Since previews on the Time Out New York website now disappear from view once an event is passed, I'm preserving it here for personal posterity. Sadly, I was unable to attend, but warmly recommend the three CDs mentioned in the text.

Jazziz: Illuminating Downtown's Dark Years.

Charles Gayle in 'Rising Tones Cross'

Jazziz
July 1999

The early 1980s were a period of transition for the avant-garde fringe in New York. The loft scene – the days in which Ornette Coleman's hom on Prince Street and Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea provided workshops for experimenters to develop their art –was drawing to a close, and the arrival of the Knitting Factory and its explosive impact on the Downtown scene was still a few years away, it fell to the artists themselves to create new opportunities.

As chronicled in Ebba Jahn's 1984 [sic – 1985, actually] documentary, Rising Tones Cross (just released on video), two such motivated visionaries were bassist William Parker and dancer Patricia Nicholson. The film centers around the Sound Unity Festival, a precursor to the couple's current Lower East Side bash, the now four-year-old Vision Festival.

It was German bassist Peter Kowald, on an extended sojourn in New York that included a hefty formative role in Sound Unity, who convinced Jahn to make a film about the upstart festival. "It was clear to me that I wanted to have a German protagonist and an American protagonist," Jahn says. Her friend Kowald was the German of choice, naturally, but America's representative had yet to be confirmed. "Originally, I had thought of Ornette Coleman. But on the day I arrived, first thing in the morning I met Charles Gayle, the most un-famous saxophonist at the time in New York City." That meeting, combined with a choice encounter with a cameraman who was working on Shirley Clark's Coleman documentary, Made in America, led Jahn to shift her focus "from the most famous avant-garde saxophonist to the most un-famous."

Instead of simply a compilation of festival footage – though performances by musicians like Jemeel Moondoc, Don Cherry, and Peter Brötzmann abound in the film – Rising Tones Cross was intended to be a tool for music education. "For many people who saw the film in Germany, it was the first time they ever heard this type of music," she says. "They said in the beginning they had difficulty. But after a while, they could, all of a sudden, hear it 'click' in their ears, and something opened up."

To help facilitate this reaction, Jahn put the most difficult music at the end of the film, easing the audience into it gradually. She also included a number of scenes intended to dispel common myths about free jazz. For example, when Brötzmann's strapping 11-piece ensemble – boasting a tenor phalanx comprised of the leader, Gayle, David S. Ware, and Frank Wright – seems to be blowing chaotically onstage, Jahn's camera pans across Brötzmann's diagrammatic score to reveal an extraordinary amount of careful detail, planning, and scripting – the architecture girding the maelstrom.

And having overcome an initial distrust and some reluctance to take part in the film, the enigmatic Gayle is revealed to be affable, erudite, and quite well-versed in jazz history, a far cry from his dark public persona and stage presence. "He was perceived as a philosopher in Germany," says Jahn.

Now that the film is available on video – through Jahn's Website (http://members.aol.com/FilmPals/store.htm) and through NorthCountry Distribution – Jahn looks forward to her film reaching new viewers. "I would like it to be in colleges," she says, "where people learn about jazz. I think it's a good tool for people wanting to learn a little bit about this music. Nobody else has made a film about this music. And at the end of the century, the time is probably right for it."

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The Vision Festival, now in its 18th season, will be held June 12-16 at Roulette. Rising Tones Cross was issued on DVD by the FMP label in 2005; I have no idea whether it's still available, but you can watch the first 26 minutes of it here. Below, the Peter Brötzmann scene I described in the article, mistakenly labeled as the Vision Festival (which was launched in 1996).

Jazziz: Order Up… Burnt CDs for Five.

John Shiurba

Jazziz
May 1999

Bay Area guitarist and free-improvisor John Shiurba hit upon the idea of his new Limited Sedition record label soon after buying a CD burner last year: "I just wanted to put out CDs of my music, and music that I think is worthy," he explains. "But the idea of shopping tapes of this kind of music to labels seemed like a dead end. When the CD writer opened the door to small editions, it just occurred to me that here was the perfect medium for improvised music. If you have an audience of five people, then you can make five CDs and not have a closet full of aluminum coasters."

Free improvisation and the recording industry have endured a troubled union from the beginning. Improvisation is a fleeting mode of musical communication, felt by many to exist purely in the moment of creation, and to be resistant to documentation. And the audience for the music is so comparatively small that it renders recording improv too costly for most record companies, anyway.

But the falling cost of home-recording technologies has enabled less marketable musicians to document their work and to sell it to enthusiasts in a creative and cost-effective way. Shiurba's Limited Sedition (www.sfo.com/~shiurba/sedition.html), for instance, documents his own music and that of his fellow Bay Area improvisors with extremely limited-edition runs on recordable CD (or CD-R).

Such a D.I.Y. approach is not without precedent. In 1973, British guitarist Derek Bailey released a series of four solo-guitar recordings on reel-to-reel tape, making individual custom copies to order. (These rare recordings were issued on CD as Incus Taps on the Organ of Corti label in 1996.) But Shiurba is among the first to devote an entire record label of strictly limited, numbered editions of well under 100 copies that will never be re-pressed. He has released eight hand-designed recordings since founding Limited Sedition last July. His production costs average around four dollars per disc. This, coupled with grassroots promotion via the Internet, helps him turn modest profits into new recordings quickly in order to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the music and its creators.

Already, Shiurba is not alone. Saxophonist David Gross has begun to release limited-edition CD-Rs of music recorded live at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on his Tautology label (members.aol.com/Tautology3). And Splatter Trio percussionist Gino Robair, who runs the more conventional Rastascan label (www.rastascan.com), has taken the notion a step further, creating individual "private concert" releases on CD-R. "They're more than just a live improv," Robair explains. "I do a bit of digital hacking on the material before burning a CD-R. They're one of a kind, and I've made them to order. I think this is the way that many improvisors will be working very soon."

Beyond the obvious benefit of low overhead, this approach to recording allows an artist to explore even the most unlikely creative impulse. Saxophonist Dan Plonsey gave Shiurba a whimsical solo-oboe recording made on the day he purchased the instrument. And Robair, who has played on two Limited Sedition releases and compiled a disc of Splatter Trio rarities for the label as well, has plans for an album of music performed entirely on…Styrofoam? "A handful of Styrofoam and a bow and that's it," says Robair. "You can see why we need a label like Limited Sedition."

Jazziz: Kenny Kirkland's Unanswered Promise.

Kenny Kirkland

 

Jazziz
February 1999

Word leaked over the Internet before any official sources were heard. But in the end, the stories were the same: Pianist Kenny Kirkland was found dead in his Queens home on Friday, November 13. He was 43. At press time, no apparent cause of death was revealed.*

Kirkland came of age in the 1980s in Wynton Marsalis' band. He played on Marsalis's first four albums, up through the electrifying Black Codes from the Underground, an album that powerfully evokes the storm with which Marsalis and his bandmates took the jazz world. Black Codes set the popular standard for mainstream jazz in the mid-’80s, and Kirkland's contributions as pianist and composer were sizable and eloquent.

"When I first got to Juilliard," Marsalis remembers, "vibraphonist Mark Sherman played these really difficult chords for me, these complex bi-tonal chords. I was about 17 at the time. He said, 'You dig these chords? These are Kirkland's chords. You've got to hear Kirkland.' So when I met Kenny later, I already knew I wanted to play with him. We would rehearse at his house. He had great ears, he could really hear. And he had a truly deep grasp of theoretical knowledge, a great sense of harmony, a sophisticated sense of rhythm. You only had to play something for him one time and he got it right away. And he was the best soloist in the band; each note had a vector, its own direction, all leading somewhere, and everything swinging. We learned a lot from him, my brother and I."

Kirkland recorded and toured with Branford Marsalis throughout the ’80s. When the saxophonist joined Sting for his Dream of the Blue Turtles album in 1985, Kirkland accompanied him and went on to continue working with Sting for some eight years and four further albums.

Kirkland made only one album as a leader, an eponymously titled release for GRP in 1991. It was as a versatile and dependable sideman that he left his mark on music. When Branford became musical director of the Tonight Show in 1992, Kirkland joined the band. In 1997, he returned to Branford's quartet (with drummer Jeff Watts and bassist Eric Revis) for well-received live performances and for the recording of Branford's next album, due for release in March.**

Tonight Show bandmate and current musical director Kevin Eubanks summed up the esteem in which Kirkland was held by his peers: "In my heart, I've always felt that Kenny Kirkland really embodied the essence of a generation of musicians, bridging the past and the future while taking no bows. He always left us wanting more."

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My first article for Jazziz, from 1999. Not the most pleasant subject with which to start a new career path, but a serious assignment – and the only time to date that I've interviewed Wynton Marsalis. The official cause of Kenny Kirkland's death was congestive heart failure, though some obituaries reported that drug paraphernalia was found when his body was discovered. Requiem, the final Branford Marsalis album to feature Kirkland, came out in March 1999.

Swing shift.

Sometimes the road ahead is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time…and knowing the right people. Back in the spring of 2000, with my illustrious public-relations career at an impasse after BMG Classics eliminated almost everyone in the department, I got an interesting offer from Larry Blumenfeld, then the editor in chief of Jazziz magazine.

Jazziz was and is based in Palm Beach County, Florida, but Larry worked from New York City, coordinating his labor with another editor, R. Dante Sawyer, down at the home office. The magazine, which started out as a smooth-jazz-friendly vehicle and always retained a place for commercial sounds, flourished under Blumenfeld and Sawyer. Major articles on artists like John Zorn, David S. Ware and Dave Douglas became newly prominent under their watch.

The reason Larry approached me in 2000 was that Dante was leaving Jazziz, en route to India and a spiritual trek. Would I be interested in taking on his position as associate editor of Jazziz, with the understanding that Larry himself would be leaving the company in four months' time?

The answer, of course, was yes. Not just any magazine editor would have taken a former publicist on board as an editor. But Larry, who'd done P.R. work himself in the past, had been assigning me freelance pieces for some years by the time he hired me outright, and trusted my objectivity. Having been laid off by BMG, I was unemployed only for a single weekend.

This, then, was my bridge back to journalism, from which I'd stepped away in 1993 for the sole reason of finding my way to and in New York City. Larry was a terrific colleague and guide, and I got to work with some extraordinary writers: among them Neil Tesser, Steve Dollar, Harvey Pekar, Ed Hazell, Steve Futterman, Lee Jeske and a new face on the scene, Lara Pellegrinelli.

Larry reasoned that when his time to depart arrived, Jazziz might invite me to stay on and perhaps even replace him. An invitation like that did actually come, with the stipulation that I'd have to relocate to Florida to take it. The notion was tempting, but I'd worked far too long and hard to get to New York in the first place; leaving after seven years didn't feel like a viable option. Happily, Billboard magazine came calling, and with it, a return to classical music after a five-year hiatus.

I bring all of this up not only as a wallow in pleasant nostalgia, but also because Lara and I are digging through piles of Jazziz back issues retrieved from an emptied-out storage unit, and I'm about to start posting some of my old odds and ends here for safe keeping and convenient retrieval.

Thanks for everything, Larry. And hey, does anyone know what became of Dante?

Ken Thomson goes bang.

Ken Thomson, by James Hirschfeld

Ken Thomson and I first crossed paths back in 1997, when I was the publicist for the Knitting Factory and its first-annual [sic] Texaco Jazz Festival (formerly What Is Jazz?), and he was part of an intrepid team broadcasting multiple events for Columbia University's invaluable radio station, WKCR-FM.

Since then, I've eagerly and admiringly followed Ken's exploits as the force-of-nature reedist who fronts avant-skronk jazz quartet Gutbucket; in the new-music all-star aggregate Signal; with the composerly chamber-jazz combo slow/fast; and in the riotous Bang on a Can street band Asphalt Orchestra – the last of which you'll see tearing up the pavement anew at Lincoln Center Out of Doors this summer.

All of which makes it a distinct pleasure, if hardly a surprise, to congratulate Ken on his new status as clarinetist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, announced mere moments ago. No question, Evan Ziporyn is a tough act to follow…but if anyone can do it, Ken can.

Watch Ken in sax-dervish mode, fronting Gutbucket in his "dOg Help Us" at Le Poisson Rouge:

Kindest thanks.

To everyone who surfed into Night After Night yesterday after news of my winning an ASCAP Concert Music Award became public – including the many who came via a supremely kind citation on my brilliant colleague Alex Ross's blog, The Rest Is Noise – thanks very much for stopping by.

I'm thrilled by the recognition from my friends and colleagues at ASCAP and the vital constituency they represent; humbled to be cited alongside genuine heroes like Jon Deak and Tania León, as well as the numerous worthy winners of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards who will share the stage at a ceremony this Friday afternoon; and grateful beyond words about the response that flooded my social-media feeds yesterday.

Suffice it to say that I never knew you could win a prize simply for demonstrating an ongoing concern for the health and well-being of living composers and their work – the primary thing that has motivated this line of work I've been pursuing, on and off, since college in the late ’80s, and in earnest since taking jobs with Time Out New York and Billboard around 12 years ago. Whatever small part I've played in the rude health of contemporary music has been my privilege, my pleasure and, frankly, my obligation as a grateful listener whose life has been enriched and given focus by the work of so many others – many of whom I've been fortunate to meet, and most who I will not.

Of course, anyone who cruised in here yesterday might have wondered just what's going on – or isn't, as the case may be. Truth is, I've been in a bit of an unannounced hiatus here since mid-March, when I went into overdrive planning for a recent trip to London and Reykjavik. (Were I as gracious a host as Alex, I might simply have mentioned this…)

Believe me, it's time and other obligations, not a lack of interest, that have kept me from posting here more frequently. Hyperactive as I tend to be on the social-media front, and inundated as I clearly am with work from my two chief employers, I have never lost interest in blogging even for a moment, nor faith in the freedom and creative space blogs still represent. I'm never short on ideas I'd like to explore here; it's just that life and sleep get in the way. I'm working on it.

Thanks kindly, everyone. The Rest Best Is Still to Come.

Playlist.

King Crimson - Larks' Tongues in Aspic (DGM)

Travis & Fripp - Follow (Panegyric)

Ashley Paul - Line the Clouds (Rel)

Antoine Beuger - Méditations poétiques sur quelque chose d’autre; Lieux de passage; Jürg Frey - Canones incerti - Ensemble Dedalus (Potlatch)

Günter Schlienz - The Dalmation Tapes (self-released > download)

Günter Schlienz - The Sardinian Tapes (Earth Mantra > download)

Navel - lunokhod (Partycul System > Bandcamp)

Perspectives / Coyote Dream Exiles - split CS (Hooker Vision)

Motion Sickness of Time Travel - Eclipse Studies (Hooker Vision)

Sootskin Pearls - Highlark Again (Permanent Nostalgia)

Fallen Axe - As the Sun Reached Eternity (Permanent Nostalgia)

Reefer Tree - An Army of Some (Permanent Nostalgia)

Microflvrscnce - I (Patient Sounds)

Xiphiidae / Venn Rain / Digital Natives / Journey of Mind - split 2CS (Sunk Series)

Innercity / Tidal - split CS (Sunk Series)

Glass Smoke - Noctilucent (Sunk Series)

Hildur Guðnadóttir - Without Sinking (Touch)

Steindór Andersen and Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson - Stafnbúi (12 Tónar)

Keith Rowe/Graham Lambkin - Making A (Erstwhile)

Grant Evans - Dappled with Mock Orange (905 Tapes)

Bermuda Link - Passed Lives (Housecraft)

Digital Natives - Closest to the Rose Is a Thorn (Housecraft)

JD Emmanuel / Evan Caminiti - Contrasts (Preservation)

Loren Connors / Chris Forsyth - Contrasts (Preservation)

Pimmon / Deep Magic - Contrasts (Preservation)

Steven Wilson - Grace for Drowning (Kscope)

Morton Feldman - Violin and Orchestra - Carolin Widmann, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Emilio Pomàrico (ECM New Series; due Jun 18)

Jörg Widmann - Violin Concerto; Antiphon; Insel der Sirenen - Christian Tetzlaff, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Harding (Ondine)

Franz Joseph Haydn - Piano Sonatas, Vol. 5 - Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (Chandos)

George Jones - The Definitive Collection 1955–1962 (Mercury Nashville > MOG)

Apparat Organ Quartet - Apparat Organ Quartet (12 Tónar)

Ghostigital - Division of Culture and Tourism (Smekkleysa)

Rökurró - Í Annan Heim (12 Tónar)

Trabant - Emotional (12 Tónar)

Yui Onodera - Substrate (Mystery Sea > Bandcamp)

Celer - Rags of Contentment (Dronarivm >  Bandcamp)

Chubby Wolf - Envelope Petals (Bandcamp)

The League of Gentlemen - Thrang Thrang Gozinblux (DGM)

Robert Fripp - Let the Power Fall (Editions E.G.)

Joe Panzner/Greg Stuart - Dystonia Duos (ErstAEU)

Anne Guthrie/Richard Kamerman - Sinter (ErstAEU)

Graham Stephenson/Aaron Zarzutzki - Touching (ErstAEU)

David Tudor - The Art of David Tudor (New World)

King Crimson - Lizard (DGM)

King Crimson - Red (DGM)

Celer - Salvaged Violets (Bandcamp)

Thoughts on Air - January Man (Worn Habit)

Hemosis / Emuul - split CS (self-released)