At the urging of Vince Keenan (see the Q and A) I’ve finally enjoyed Christa Faust’s double sally at Hard Case Crime. Both of Angel Dare’s “cases” take place in fascinating environments: Money Shot is set in the world of professional pornography and Choke Hold takes on Mixed Martial Arts. Crime fiction is at its best when asking questions about society, and Faust lets us know exactly what is wrong and what is right within these extreme communities.

Faust is postmodern noir writer, with plot twists even darker than James Ellroy’s. But unlike many of those who go down those black alleys, there’s no heavy-handed introspection or philosophizing. At the end of the day, these are sweet fixes for pulp addicts, pure and simple. Faust even name-checks Richard Prather as an influence! That’s a hip reference. I get it.

Also more on the pulp side of the spectrum is Duane Swierczynski’s latest, Hell and Gone. I liked the first of the Charlie Hardie series, Fun and Games, but the second one, although absolutely more outrageous, seems to roll through even more smoothly. These books defy genre: what initally seemed like crime fiction has now embraced futuristic dystopia.

Swierczynski is keeping busy. Next week Godzilla launches. I seldom read comics but will have to pick this up, just to see him put the terror of Tokyo through some paces.  In a few more years, I won’t be at all surprised if the Swierczynski oeuvre is considered one of the most important pieces of the puzzle by a new kind of crossover fan.

Thomas Perry has brought back Jane Whitfield for Poison Flower. I read all of Perry with pleasure, but the Jane series stays with me less than the Butcher Boy books or standalones like Pursuit.

Poison Flower still satisfies, though. I didn’t do anything else while reading it.

Even though Donald E. Westlake has been dead a few years, his output hasn’t stopped! The latest discovery, The Comedy is Finished, has received quite a few accolades. Some even go so far as to say that it is a lost masterwork.

Certain things are indeed inarguably masterful, like how the FBI agent and crew are kept firmly in the middle. In the hands of anyone else, these enforcement officers would be mean, silly, or incompetent, but DEW just holds it steady without ever resorting to drawing a cartoon. Perfect!

But the book as a whole seems pretty dated, and not in a good way. In my opinion, many of Westlake’s books in the late 70’s/early 80’s (like Castle in the Air and Kahawa) aren’t his strongest. He was having trouble gaining traction in the industry. Eventually, this frustrating period inspired one of his authentic masterpieces, A Likely Story (1984). I’d rather that the buzz for The Comedy Is Finished went to A Likely Story instead.

For that matter, I’d prefer the buzz to pick up about the last book where Westlake oversaw publication. Get Real is a marvelous conclusion to a matchless career.

As a die-hard Westlakean I’m happy to have Comedy, and maybe my next go-around with it will bring new insight. But I don't think it is the right introduction to the canon for a newbie.

Several reliable franchises have recent entries available at airports. I’m impressed with how John Sanford and Lee Child keep Lucas Davenport and Jack Reacher fresh.  There may be occasional padding in the mega-bestsellers Buried Prey and The Affair, but the flights were over as soon as I started turning the pages. They are similar books, each documenting a past case formative for the hero. Buried Prey is especially good, with some underdone weirdo characters (like the suburban gun nut) worthy of Westlake.

Davenport and Reacher have no end game in sight, but Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander has come to a weary finish. At some point I’d like to re-read the Wallander series in order. Offhand I’d say One Step Behind was my favorite. It’s as tense and exciting as a police procedural can get.

The final installment, The Troubled Man, is not that kind of book, but rather a slow-moving tale of espionage. I much prefer this kind of “intellectual” or “realist” spy novel than all those hyper-tech thrillers that crowd the market. Mankell’s prose is refined and hypnotic, and the answer to the puzzle is satisfying.

The eternally flawed Wallender is easier to love than the eternally perfect Lucas Davenport or Jack Reacher. There's a good reason writing teachers tell their Lit 101 students “Give your hero a flaw.”  Our imaginations are engaged by imperfection.

Charles McCarry could have remembered that rule a bit more when he created his canonical spy Paul Christopher. With his latest book, the non-series sci-fi tale The Ark, McCarry forgets it entirely. Henry Peel is the smartest and wealthiest man on Earth, and every move he makes to save the planet from destruction is the perfect move. Eventually the billionaire is a kind of Jesus figure.

I think McCarry is one of the best writers of sentences American genre fiction has ever produced. But it’s hard for me to understand what he’s up to here.

At the other end of the spectrum, Charlie Huston’s The Shotgun Rule has nothing but flawed characters. It’s a dark and masterful look at youthful ennui in suburban California in the early 80’s. Huston has become one my favorites, he’s one of the best we’ve got. Shotgun Rule is not that recent -- I'm still getting his backlog -- but a new Huston should be out pretty soon.

It seems like Huston can write in any genre as long as it is dark enough. Could he do gothic romance? I don’t mind one of those once in a while as a palate cleanser, and Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison is a terrific example of a modern take.

I had kind of written Robinson off: A few years ago I tried an Inspector Banks novel and it made no impression. But Before the Poison seemed like the only possibility when browsing in Madrid airport and I’m glad I gave it the chance. Perhaps it excessively celebrates middlebrow culture (the long English Christmas scene is almost unforgivable) but the haunted house story is compelling. In its way, it is as feminist as Christa Faust. At the end, the chilling reveal has no unsightly reversals or extra knots in the plot.

05/22/2012

Alex Ross has some intelligent comments and valuable links concerning the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Last night, off the plane from Europe, I looked around for some of Lear on YouTube, and to my surprise found quite a bit of 1982 footage, including a mesmerizing last scene.  Aribert Reimann is one of my favorite living composers but I had never really listened to his most famous work created in collaboration with Fischer-Dieskau.

I don't know why I didn't look for this sooner. Reimann is one of the greatest masters of atonal vocal writing, and the regrettably rare collection of lieder on Wergo -- Neun Sonette der Louize Labé, Nacht-Raüme, and Kinderlieder by Liat Himmelhaber, Christine Schäfer, Axel Bauni, Werner Reinert and the composer (who is an excellent pianist) -- is one of my desert island CDs.

Now I must investigate all of Lear more seriously as well.  I hope a DVD becomes available. 

Watching these devastating clips, it's impossible for me not to think of the relationship of these Berlin-born artists to World War II.  Reimann would have been nine in 1945, around the same time that the 18-year old Fischer-Dieskau (serving in the Wehrmacht) was captured and interned for two years as a POW in Italy. The sound of Lear grieving is not made by single man, it is a whole society wondering what went wrong.

(Alex also has a post about Fischer-Dieskau's relationship to another composer, Benjamin Britten, and the celebrated premiere of War Requiem.)

Admittedly, WW II was on my mind anyway.  I ran across Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in France a few days ago.  I hadn't read it since high school, but was eager to look at it again after recently discovering the powerful letter Vonnegut wrote to his family in 1945 after surviving Dresden and the rest.

This passage from the novel is particularly fine:

It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...:

Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

After all, what is war but the wholesale murder of those with no connections?

Right at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut calls Slaughterhouse-Five a failure, because 

...There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"

There may not be might not be much to say, but there may be much to do. For example, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau turned out countless recordings, creating a beloved library of beauty. Might his determined fecundity and declaration of humane intent been partially motivated by what he had seen and felt as a teenager? 

05/20/2012

Pim van Tol (author of a DTM guest post) has presented me several books over the years.  I always love to get books! His first gift was sensational:  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I'm now overdue to re-read.

Last week in Rotterdam Pim handed me A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011. The prose is terrific, I was hooked right away.

So often with modern fiction, I wonder, "Why am I reading about the invented colorful lives of modern rich urban whites with dysfunctional parents?"  One of the reasons I read so much crime fiction is because I find guns and puzzles not just more entertaining, but less pretentious. 

Goon Squad was immediately compelling but I was worried about its possible snobbishness until the last third of the book, where the author gathers the threads and ups the stakes.  The final chapter is one of the best pieces of science fiction I've ever read. 

There's quite a lot about music and the music industry. I'm not a rock music insider but it all scans as plausible. In fact I learned a few things I should have known before...

An easy call:  A Visit From the Goon Squad will be an incredibly influential book.

05/16/2012

Interesting article by Kurt Ellenberger.  Interesting response by Patrick Jarenwattananon.

Mark-André Hamelin talks Busoni Concerto at The Rest is Noise.  I heard the performance last week was stunning, really wish I could have been there!

I also regret missing the ongoing Cecil Taylor festivities. Ben Ratliff did an excellent preview. In addition to all the music played by Craig Taborn, Vijay Iyer, Amina Claudine Myers and others, I've heard there was a fascinating panel with Amiri Baraka led by George Lewis.  (Hope that was taped and will be transcribed!)  Destination: Out! has two posts about CT, rare 80's and FMP 90's.  The man's own solo gigs are coming up this week.  It looks like there are still seats for the Harlem performance...

And Sarah Deming is in China.  HuffPost one, WNYC one, WNYC two.

05/14/2012

George Colligan wrote a nice post about sight-reading.  He name checks me as a good reader: Compared to some I don't think I'm so great (and I doubt George's claim that I'm better than him) but it's true the printed page has never been one of my big challenges. I can even play from a tonal orchestral score if I can look at it for a few minutes first. 

It's just doing a certain kind of math fast. As far as I'm concerned it is not intelligence-related, it is just a random skill like most humans have some example of. I don't have perfect pitch; some that do can't read that well.  I don't have a natural flexible technique; many pianists that do wouldn't know what to do with a full score.  (Honestly, I'd rather have perfect pitch or a natural flexible technique!)

George is dead on when he suggests that sight-reading can be misunderstood, and that written music can be a crutch.  I went even further in my analysis of Ornette Coleman:

The list of my favorite instrumentalists who couldn't read music well includes not just many jazz artists but apparently piano virtuoso Josef Hofmann.  Traditionally many opera and jazz singers can't really read (although that has changed over the years) and of course much of the great music made elsewhere on the globe has nothing to do with Western notation.

Indeed, I firmly believe that jazz today is overly committed to the printed page.  I miss the days of musicians like Thelonious Monk.  Monk had no problem reading or writing music but hardly ever gave his sidemen charts.  They had to learn his music by ear.  Monk thought it made for better art, and of course he was right.  When I see young musicians playing Monk with a chart I am appalled. The Thelonious Monk Quartet never used sheet music. 

Dewey Redman told me that Ed Blackwell once recommended him to Monk.  But when Dewey called Monk and asked to get together to go over the tunes, Monk merely said, "Do you know my music or don't you?"  If Dewey had said yes, he could have had the gig:  in other words, show up and play the book perfectly from memory, done and done.  However, Dewey was used to a situation like Ornette Coleman, where you rehearsed everything over and over in advance, and so therefore unfortunately never played with Monk.

It is extraordinary how little paper seems to exist from small group jazz of the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's.  Does anybody have handwritten Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane etc., etc., etc., charts?  There are bits and pieces around but really very little compared to how many songs and records there were.

The best music of Ornette Coleman needs to be considered in that tradition.  Like all those other composers, it never really existed on the page in the first place. 

In the George Schuller commentary there are two Coleman charts probably prepared by Don Cherry. (I can easily believe that Cherry penned them since they don't have Coleman's  unmistakable accidentals.)  I'm especially fascinated by "Bird Food."  This Cherry scribble has almost nothing to do with what is on the record!  The Schuller transcription right below it is closer but also misses the mark, especially with the chord symbols.  Since  Schuller's "Bird Food" was (probably) copped by one of those fastidious and omnipresent Chuck Sher fakebooks,  it has become pretty common currency.  But I assure you:  if you have a chart in front of you when playing "Bird Food" in public, you have already failed.  I don't need to hear a note of your performance:  I know it is not good enough for Ornette Coleman.  There is simply no way to learn "Bird Food" except by playing along with Ornette and Don's recording.

On the other hand, if there is the printed page to be dealt with, I like it to be correct.  I have never written a B-natural over an A-Flat minor chord, and never will.  It must be C-flat.  Some jazz cats say that B-natural is easier to read.  Really?  If you can read a chart with chord symbols, a C-flat is going to slow you down?  (I'm currently transcribing some McCoy Tyner -- talk about George Colligan's wheelhouse! -- and there's a lot of A-flat minor.  The thought of changing all those C-flats to B-naturals makes my blood run cold.)

You need C-flats because they are in the correct key. Bach would have been astonished if you tried out some B-naturals when using IV minor in E-Flat. 

McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Teddy Wilson, James P. Johnson, you name the canonical jazz pianist:  They all learned from playing traditional repertoire at the piano.  They didn't deal with chord symbols and chord scales, they dealt with the major-minor system of Western music. They all could make sense of a Bach chorale. Sometimes I run across a fluent student jazz pianist that has never read a chorale and have never written a melody with a key signature.  For what it's worth, thinking in terms of "key" has really helped my own development.

From another DTM essay, where I react to an anti-intellectual outburst by David Byrne:

But there is no good reason to reject Mozart even if he seems imposing or not culturally relevant. Perhaps the name is the problem.  In place of the overly-specific and awe-inspiring “Mozart,” I’m going to use the phrase “The major-minor system of common practice classical music.”   That’s the twelve notes of the piano keyboard moving in vocal-based counterpoint.  Understanding that may sound hard but it isn’t.  It’s certainly not harder than making a good groove on a beat machine.  For about 400 years every Western musician used it whether they were naturally talented or not.

But in our American culture, knowing “The major-minor system of common practice classical music” seems to get awfully short shrift these days.  It certainly gets short shrift in our current popular, culturally relevant music. 

If you charted the course of harmonic progressions in the biggest radio hits from say, Elvis to now you’d watch a steady shrinking of tonal movement.  There are good musical reasons for this!  I hasten to add.  But at this point, we can’t take any more harmonic information away.   Harmony that moves through keys is nonexistent in most current indie rock, radio pop, and hip-hop. 

What I’m talking about is quite obvious in Byrne’s 2004 solo disc, Grown Backwards. The pleasantly surreal versions of two 19th-century opera arias use the 12 notes of the chromatic scale.  His original pieces mostly use the 8 notes of the diatonic scale except when there’s a few blue notes borrowed from funk. 

Indeed, as far as I know, all of Byrne’s songs from any period of his career stay in one key.  They work -- and the best of them are, of course, immortal -- because he is a master of lyrics, beats, juxtaposition, and was born with one of the great singing voices. 

But there’s no reason for Byrne or anyone else involved in music, from beginners to professionals, to automatically dismiss the “The major-minor system of common practice classical music” as uncool, forbidden, or even very difficult.

Not too long ago I was listening to some indie rock radio while driving around in the Midwest.  Some of it was good (it's one of the strongest genres right now), but almost none of it related to the major-minor tonal system. Unless the track was really great, I ended up feeling like much of the harmony was pretty bland. Eventually, when The Who came on, they sounded like Schubert or Cole Porter in comparison.

05/12/2012

In the middle of his game-changing bestseller Miami Blues, Charles Willeford takes time out from crime and chaos in order to offer advice to would-be-authors. “Write simple sentences -- subject, verb, object...Use concrete words that convey exact meanings.” Most importantly, “Force your reader to reach for something.”

Willeford is talking about himself, of course, but also a certain kind of literary tradition. Kafka and Beckett. Twain and Hemingway. Hammett and Westlake. Authors who state things simply, but also force the reader to reach for images, ideas and emotions not on the page.

For my money the greatest stylist in Young Adult fiction is Daniel Pinkwater, who recently turned 70. He is funny and surreal. He selects each subject, verb, and object carefully, ensuring the audience must participate in getting the most out of the text.

From Lizard Music:

Anyway, Walter Cronkite isn't on very much in the summer because that's when he takes his vacation and Roger Mudd fills in for him. I watch the show anyway, because if something really big were to happen, Walter would come straight from his vacation to take over. Another thing I like about when Roger Mudd does the show is the possibility that Walter will die (not that I wish him any harm) on his vacation, and a news flash will come in while Roger Mudd is on the air. Or he wouldn't have to die--he could be trapped underwater in a Volkswagen bus with only enough air for two hours, and Roger Mudd could describe the rescue attempts. Then the Navy divers would get Walter out, and he would say, "That's the way it is," and sort of salute into the camera, and the news program would fade out into the coffee ads. Or it might be good if he did die after all, just after the Navy divers got him out of the sunken bus. Then he could say, "That's the way it is," as his last words. There are a lot of possibilities to the Walter Cronkite show. I used to try to get some other kids interested in it, and maybe set up a Walter Cronkite fan club, but they didn't even take it seriously, and I got a reputation as a crazy.

From Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death:

Everybody ate in silence until the Bullfrog Root Beer was served. Then the conversation at the table got started. Aunt Terwilliger began making a sort of speech about grand opera. She was against it. Later, Rat told us that her aunt had just about every opera recording ever made. Her aunt spent hours in her bedroom listening to them, but all the rest of her time was spent arguing that people shouldn't listen to operas, and, above all, they shouldn't go to see them performed. Rat said that Aunt Terwilliger makes regular appearances in Blueberry Park, where she tries to convince people to live their lives opera-free. She feels that operas take up too much time. Also, she has an idea that people who like opera will become unrealistic, and not take their everyday lives seriously. Most of all, she believes that operas are habit-forming, and once a person starts listening to them, it's hard to stop, and one tends to listen to more and more operas until one's life is ruined.

Aunt Terwilliger has pamphlets printed up that she hands out. Her most popular one is called "Grand Opera: an Invention of the Devil."

From Borgel:

The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant

Once there was a race between a rabbit and an eggplant. Now, the eggplant, as you know, is a member of the vegetable kingdom, and the rabbit is a very fast animal.

Everybody bet lots of money on the eggplant, thinking that if a vegetable challenges a live animal with four legs to a race, then it must be that the vegetable knows something.

People expected the eggplant to win the race by some clever trick of philosophy. The race was started, and there was a lot of cheering. The rabbit streaked out of sight.

The eggplant just sat there at the starting line. Everybody knew that in some surprising way the eggplant would wind up winning the race.

Nothing of the sort happened. Eventually, the rabbit crossed the finish line and the eggplant hadn’t moved an inch.

The spectators ate the eggplant.

Moral: Never bet on an eggplant.

---

At first I was pleased to see Pinkwater’s name in the New Yorker last week. He’s a cult figure but the literary establishment usually isn’t that interested in him. (The essential anthology 5 Novels is blurbed by a dozen readers and no critics.) Nor is he a particularly hot property in the business. (The modern YA “thriller” serves it all on a plate; the reader doesn't have to reach for much in J. K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins.)

After my initial gratitude that Pinkwater was getting noticed, I became astonished by the context. Briefly, the fable from Borgel above was recently mutilated by the New York Department of Education for their eighth-grade reading exam. After changing most of the words, they tacked on a nonsensical multiple-choice question that understandably confused the students. Since they left Pinkwater’s name on the “excerpt,” the author started getting calls and emails from students wanting to know about owls, sleeves, and pineapples -- three concrete words that weren’t Pinkwater’s.

The best line is by Pinkwater, who is understandably cranky. “If a pineapple were funnier, I would have used pineapple in the first place.” The rest of Ben McGrath’s piece is a contemporary and amused adult take on the vagaries of education. Nowhere does it say that Pinkwater is a great artist; indeed, McGrath seems a bit skeptical. Myself, I’d call Pinkwater a genius, but by any standard he’s not just any children’s author, or, in McGrath’s words, a “specialist in nonsense.”

Pinkwater’s own humble account of the brouhaha was posted by the Daily News. He’s devoted his life to making children laugh and think, and even under pressure he is more concerned with protecting them than himself.

Well, I’m concerned with protecting Pinkwater. In addition to changing his hard-fought subjects, verbs, and objects, there were other violations perpetrated by NYS Dept. of Ed.

The revision does away with the obvious satirizing of Zeno’s Paradoxes. The original sentence, "People expected the eggplant to win the race by some clever trick of philosophy," glows like a golden sunbeam. It’s simply glorious. You can almost see the centuries of accumulated argument slink away into dark corners. While you don’t need to know anything about Achilles and the Tortoise to enjoy Pinkwater’s fable, a youngster who reads Borgel before getting to Zeno (or Lewis Carroll's interpretation of Zeno) will come to the table just a bit more prepared. (I can’t understand how the New Yorker piece mentions Aesop, Mad Men, drugs, and Chomsky, but not Zeno.)

The revision appropriates the humorous side of Pinkwater without honoring his anti-establishment voice. Many of Pinkwater’s books are about surviving school. His lead characters are outsiders that never fit in with the masses. Those including Pinkwater in an average curriculum must respect that “otherness,” because Pinkwater has helped many students more than many teachers.

A common comment from fans to the author is “One of your books saved my life.” The relief and validation that washed over me from repeated readings of Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars was worth a thousand therapy sessions. Acting like Alan Mendelsohn at school also did wonders socially: I went from being a wimp easily hurled into lockers to an artistic weirdo that bullies thought best to leave alone.

(My wife was a bit younger when she discovered “her” Pinkwater, the picture book The Big Orange Splot, nominally for elementary readers but great for adults, too. The refrain of creative empowerment is still Sarah's song today.)

If putting Pinkwater into a test isn’t bad enough, the revision assigns Pinkwater to multiple choice. When you ask the reader to reach for something, whatever is found at the tip of that reach could be different for everybody. Certainly there are no right or wrong answers in Pinkwater! There aren’t even heroes and villains, just a bunch of unusual people. When Uncle Boris refuses to parse a cryptic home movie to Alan Mendelsohn and Leonard Neeble, he says, “It’s a work of art. You don’t have to know what it means.”

I could go on and on about the Department of Education’s misreading of Pinkwater. Presumably this is enough for now, but, fair warning: If you are the one responsible for “The Hare and the Pineapple,” make sure I don’t find out. Because if I do, I will be at your house bright and early the next day, with opera records and Walter Cronkite VHS tapes and the right equipment to enjoy them, and our interaction will last far longer than you want it to. I won’t threaten or hurt you, but you will be very uncomfortable.

It’s really too bad that Pinkwater says,"...After 40 years of authoring, and more than 100 books, I got interviewed by all the major newspapers in New York City...Everybody knows what Andy Warhol said about everybody getting his 15 minutes of fame. Is this mine? Do I need to ask that? Obviously it is. I think I’m happy about it. I feel like a real celebrity — real in the sense that I got a whole bunch of media attention, and I didn’t actually do anything."

Well, Mr. Pinkwater, this dumb test may have resulted in an unprecedented number of interviews, but this was not your fifteen minutes of fame. For many, you are immortal.

05/08/2012

New DTM page:  "Peter Lieberson on Record."

Thanks to several editors, especially my wife and JTM. But everybody I showed it to offered valuable comments.  This was a hard one.

---

It is also the first DTM page to have a single space after the period at the end of a sentence. As JE wrote to me, in a double-spaced email, "The easy part is deciding that it's time to switch to one space. The hard part is actually remembering to do that."

05/02/2012

Upcoming TBP gigs:

May 2012

01 Washington, DC -- Howard Theatre
02 Indianapolis, IN -- The Jazz Kitchen
03 Chicago, IL -- Old Town School of Folk Music
04 Baton Rouge, LA -- Listening Room
05 Houston, TX -- Da Camera of Houston **
09 Rotterdam, NDL -- Lantaren Venster
10 Madrid, ESP -- Teatro Lara de Madrid
11 Oviedo, ESP -- Centro Cultural Oscal Niemeyer de Aviles
12 Valladolid, ESP -- Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes
13 Santiago de Compostela, ESP -- Auditorio de Galicia
15 Paris, FRA -- New Morning Club
16 Troyes, FRA -- Theatre de Champagne
17 Malaga, ESP -- Auditorio de la Diputacion de Malaga
18 Murcia, ESP -- Teatro Circo
25 Belfast, IRL -- Maldela Hall **
26 Dublin, IRL -- National Concert Hall, Dublin **
27 Sligo, IRL -- Hakswell Theater **
29 Kildare, IRL -- Riverbank Theatre **
30 Limerick, IRL -- Belltable **
31 Cork, IRL -- Triskel Arts Center **

June 2012

01 Bergen, NOR -- Nattjazz
02 Bergen, NOR -- Nattjazz **

(** means the performance is On Sacred Ground: The Bad Plus performs Stravinsky's Rite of Spring)

---

Anthony De Mare's "Liaisons: Re-imagining Sondheim At the Piano" premiered in New York recently.  The New York Times review was unexpectedly nice about my arrangement of "Send In the Clowns."

Martin Porter blogged about a couple gigs I was on.

I'm not the only jazz musician from Menomonie, WI.  Woody Mankowski, a bit older than me, was an incredible inspiration.  There was some gig at his college -- maybe his junior or senior recital? -- that was just about the first time I played with a decent rhythm section.  I still remember some of what we played.  While I'm only 90% sure "Cedar's Blues" and "Autumn Leaves" were on the program, I'm certain about "Over the Rainbow."  Woody had faithfully transcribed the Tommy Flanagan intro to the Gigi Gryce/Donald Byrd arrangement for me to muddle through.

Woody has gone on to become a major transcriber for Hal Leonard, and the Green Bay Press Gazette recently wrote him up. 

----

RIP Teddy Charles.  Read Brad Linde.

RIP Levon Helm.  In the Keith Jarrett interview, he talks how he and Jack DeJohnette loved The Band.  "...There are times when we’re playing things like 'God Bless the Child' and he looks over at me because he knows that he’s just found the groove.  Jack and I have this thing about Levon Helm’s playing in The Band and whenever that’s happening, we both know it."

---

So, what is the diference between this paragraph:

I'm not the only jazz musician from Menomonie, WI.  Woody Mankowski, a bit older than me, was an incredible inspiration.  There was some gig at his college -- maybe his junior or senior recital? -- that was just about the first time I played with a decent rhythm section.  I still remember some of what we played.  While I'm only 90% sure "Cedar's Blues" and "Autumn Leaves" were on the program, I'm certain about "Over the Rainbow."  Woody had faithfully transcribed the Tommy Flanagan intro to the Gigi Gryce/Donald Byrd arrangement for me to muddle through.

and this one:

I'm not the only jazz musician from Menomonie, WI. Woody Mankowski, a bit older than me, was an incredible inspiration. There was some gig at his college -- maybe his junior or senior recital? -- that was just about the first time I played with a decent rhythm section. I still remember some of what we played. While I'm only 90% sure "Cedar's Blues" and "Autumn Leaves" were on the program, I'm certain about "Over the Rainbow." Woody had faithfully transcribed the Tommy Flanagan intro to the Gigi Gryce/Donald Byrd arrangement for me to muddle through.

That's right, I'm debating one or two spaces after the period in a sentence.  More soon.

05/01/2012

DTM will return in May. Until then, TBP is on tour:

13 Oakland, CA -- Yoshi's
14 Oakland, CA -- Yoshi's
15 Oakland, CA -- Yoshi's
18 Davis, CA -- UC Davis Mondavi Center
19 Davis, CA -- UC Davis Mondavi Center
20 Davis, CA -- UC Davis Mondavi Center
21 Davis, CA -- UC Davis Mondavi Center
24 New York, NY -- The Blue Note
25 New York, NY -- The Blue Note
26 New York, NY -- The Blue Note
27 New York, NY -- The Blue Note
28 New York, NY -- The Blue Note
29 New York, NY -- The Blue Note

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While I'm away:

Sarah Deming covers Women's Boxing American Continental Championships in Canada for the Huffington Post:  Day one, two, three, four.  China is next.

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JJA Blogathon.  Nice piece on Twin Cities Heroes by Andrea Canter.

JP on Spotify.

Andy Gilbert has more on the BHQ at the Boston Globe.  Thanks to everyone who came out to Birdland, the Falcon, and the Regattabar.  It was a really nice run.

The intrepid Sam Newsome has been interviewing other avant-garde soprano saxophonists on his blog: Bhob Rainey, Joe Giardullo. This YouTube of Sam and I together is not too bad.

David Valdez put up a great post about Charles McPherson.  The more I check out McPherson, the more underrated I think he really is. 

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NPR did a whole week on the Goldberg Variations.  It's all fabulous, especially the witty and brilliant Jeremy Denk.  Try his first post.

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David Rees just went us all one better.  The website is superb, but the TONY interview seems even more to the point.

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I'm meeting Don Herron in a couple of days. Herron knew Charles Willeford and became his biographer: Willeford has been absolutely invaluable as I plan an essay about this frequently misunderstood writer.

Willeford is simply the greatest author to be read aloud.  Recently I offered a poetic rendition of the following bit to my wife and she couldn't stop laughing.  It's from The Woman Chaser (admittedly not my favorite book overall):

04/12/2012

The BHQ is in Boston, but Billy and I both wish we could be at St. Peter's church for the Bob Brookmeyer memorial.  Doug Ramsey has details.

04/11/2012

I'm enjoying the New York Times today. Five articles are particularly relevant to DTM:

"Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter" by Alexandra Molotkow

Regular jazz seldom has a dynamic like "find the least known musician you can in order to be cool," but some of the more avant-garde styles have offered refuge for those needing unusual music for self-image.  That famous Thurston Moore list offers an example. 

I can be a little cynical about that mentality, but of course I love a lot of that music, too.  And it's certainly true that some of the rawest, grittiest avant jazz was made by artists who risked it all. 

"Giuseppi Logan's Second Chance" by John Leland

An interesting companion to Molotkow's article!

"Treasure of Golf’s Sad Past, Black Caddies Vanish in Era of Riches" by Karen Crouse

I know almost nothing about golf, but this is a great piece of reporting.

"Thomas Kinkade, Artist to Mass Market, Dies at 54" by Matt Flegenheimer 

What can I say?  "I'm glad he's dead" seems a little strong.  It's mind-melting that some people in the comments are still complaining about Jackson Pollock.

"Gil Noble, Host of Pioneering TV Show Focusing on Black Issues, Dies at 80" by Paul Vitello 

I never saw Like It Is, but Billy Hart was telling me about how important Noble was last night. 

04/08/2012

I'm about to take a blog hiatus, so even though things are rather hectic let's try...

Forumesque 10 is an opportunity to weigh in on recent posts and anything in the contents.  My response time may be slower than usual, so please be patient while your comment is approved.  Factual corrections are welcomed;  general questions are fine too.   The comments automatically close after a week.

Any topic is fine, but I'd particularly welcome thoughts about file-sharing.  My post "All Our Reasons?" was not universally approved of, some thought it was "whining." 

There's no going back, of course. But when I read people saying that record labels treated musicians shabbily and that musicians are better off putting out albums by themselves, I am mystified.  Apparently some big pop stars over the years had bad things happen to them with labels.  But in jazz? 

Ted Panken recently posted an interview with Charles Tolliver. Since Tolliver was a major part of the first Afro-American jazz record label, Strata-East, his opinions about earlier labels matter. Tolliver says about Alfred Lion and Blue Note:

Alfred Lion made the rest of the boys toe the line by just bringing out new, great talent all the time...

...Alfred and the musicians themselves put together different groups to play the repertoire of themselves to such an extent that you could almost bet that, no matter what the pairing of a particular group of musicians, this would be a first-rate recording for history. That happened time and time again, and hundreds of LPs issued in that manner. So the vocabulary that was developed through the Blue Note catalog – and to a certain extent Prestige also and Keepnews’ companies – were for the most part repertorial work played by great stylists.

Tolliver also discusses Creed Taylor, and even mentions Muse and Columbia and how these companies interacted with Woody Shaw's career.  I don't sense any resentment from Tolliver. Indeed, resentment towards labels is not something I remember reading too much from canonical jazz artists in general.  (Ornette Coleman is the only one that readily comes to mind, although there must be others.)

Tolliver's point that Alfred Lion offered a well-lit forum for the best and brightest to compete and excel in is an important one.  And when we talk about our love for all those Blue Note records, let's also remember that the musicians didn't do anything but play the music.  Hank Mobley did not tell Rudy Van Gelder how he wanted his saxophone to sound or Reid Miles what the cover should look like!   

I was thinking about Strata-East lately, because I interviewed Charles Brackeen over the phone for the liner notes of a Paul Motian ECM box.   Brackeen is a salty cat, almost an outsider artist.  From my notes:

Brackeen is from Oklahoma, and he shares something of that Southwestern cry that characterized Dewey Redman.  Motian loved playing with Redman with Jarrett, so hiring Brackeen was a logical consequent.  Brackeen remembers playing with this trio as “A fantastic experience.  We rehearsed at my studio in New York or on tour in Europe.  The music was accurate, simple, enjoyable, and interesting.  Paul was very experienced and was a spectacular arranger.  There were no questions.” 

During this time Brackeen was also becoming legendary for his street performances.  “That was an important part of my artistic expression.  I would play for anybody and everybody, and they called me the man who talked through the horn. I found some mechanical monkey drummers at Christmastime. First I made a costume and a hat for myself, and then I would dress the monkeys the way I was dressed, like a uniform. 

“People would ask, ‘What are you paying your band?’ or, ‘What kind of batteries are you using?’  It opened the history up.   At first I was playing standards like ‘Over the Rainbow,’ ‘Sunny Side of the Street,’ and ‘Summertime.’ But with the monkeys it was better to make up songs.  The police looked the other way, but it was against the law.  I worried sometimes about how much money I made. It was a lot! Fifteen years I did that!  They didn’t have drum machines yet, but the rappers later seemed to understand what I was doing. Nobody copied me while I was there, yet two years after I left New York they came out with rap.”

You can hear in Brackeen's music a stunning purity, a purity connected with living life so far out on the edge.  It's a kind of saltiness we could use more of from in the internet age in general.

The most exposed Brackeen on record is Rhythm X on Strata-East, the two ECM dates with Motian, and three Silkheart discs from the 80's.  (Silkheart seems to have been partially formed to document Brackeen's music.)

Suffice to say, without record labels, there would be no Charles Brackeen records!  He never would have "self-produced" anything.  But when I told him a few weeks ago that I had all his records and really dug them, he was delighted. 

UPDATE:  Comments running to two three pages.

55 Comments | 04/05/2012

All Our Reasons is out, and the Billy Hart Quartet with Mark Turner, Ben Street, and me is playing Tuesday through Saturday at Birdland. 

Then we move north to Live at the Falcon on April 10 and the Regattabar on April 11.  Bostonians! If you want to see us live, don't delay in booking an entrance:  At this point we are scheduled for one show only; a second show will only be added if there is enough demand.  (I'd hate to play one sold-out show and turn away fans that can't get in because we are done for the night.)

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There's been a lot of marvelous press about All Our Reasons.  I set up a new DTM page, "Billy Hart Quartet," to document the band's progress.  I particularly love what Hank Shteamer wrote about me and Billy in Time Out NY.  This is the first time anyone has looked at our weird relationship in any kind of detail, and I think Hank's piece has the right kind of juice to snag the casual reader.

That page also reboots the transcription of "Giant Steps" I did a couple of years ago for old DTM.

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Besides "Billy Hart Quartet," the other new DTM page is "Ethan Iverson," which gives a guarded and opinionated tour of this blog's central piano player.  

04/02/2012

Everyone in Kalamazoo, Michigan speaks of Curtis Curtis-Smith with a hushed tone of respect. I first met him while in town with Alex Ross for the Gilmore Keyboard Festival (he makes a cameo in "Touring Noise").  Curtis-Smith then sent me the score and recording of his Twelve Etudes for Piano.  I was taken aback by their beauty and the composer's own virtuoso pianism. 

With Curtis's permission, I'm offering a few amateur snaps and lo-fi excerpts to encourage further exploration of this major voice. His record of the Etudes is coupled with a hair-raising event called The Great American Symphony (GAS!), and the score is easy to find. 

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The cycle of twelve etudes begins with a rather jaunty canon.  It gets quite hard later on. I admire challenging composers who can play their own music! (Click to enlarge the pages.)

Curtis-Smith_ Etude I

The second is a lyrical effusion over a ground bass. The composer's marking, "....demands a non-legato cantablie/espressivo touch.  Surely, a singing, expressive line need not be limited to 'traditional' legato touch.  Bartok's parlando indication comes close to what is needed here, although the non-legato touch of the be-bop pianist may be a better model," is dead on.

Curtis-Smith Etude II

Track three has an astonishing sonority:  huge hits in the left leave a negative image of delicate dyads on top.

Curtis-Smith Etude III

The rest of etudes are all great, but I particularly like number seven, which reminds me of Jaki Byard a little bit...

Curtis-Smith Etude VII

...And number ten, the longest of the set, which has the kind of wide-spaced "blues" feel that Morton Gould repeatedly attempted, although I think Curtis is more sophisticated than Gould.

Curtis-Smith Etude X

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I'm afraid I committed a faux-pas at our initial meeting, asking Curtis if he was still bowing pianos.  Curtis winced:  he hasn't been doing that for many years, as the above excerpts show!  He's probably frustrated that reference books like David Burge's Twentieth-Century Piano Music and Maurice Hinson's Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire only discuss him as the inventor of this extended piano technique.  From his liner notes to CRI 346, Five Sonorous Inventions for piano and violin:

The bows are constructed of nylon thread of varying thicknesses and lengths, and of varying number of strands: some of the bows having as few as eighteen strands, others as many as forty-eight, depending on the register for which they are intended. These bows are threaded at various points through the piano strings prior to the performance.

This sounds like it could just be a party trick.  However, it turns out to be a genuinely valid:  the piano now can increase volume on a sustained note.  It's not out of style, either, as Barbara Lieurance is currently touring the early Curtis-Smith Rhapsodies.   

Of the "bowed piano" Curtis-Smith works I've heard, I'm particularly struck by Unisonics from 1976 (CRI 388) featuring Trent Kynaston on alto saxophone.  Yes, that's the same Trent Kynaston who is familar to jazz students everywhere as the author of excellent books of transcriptions. 

I need to learn more about Kynaston's jazz horn (Billy Hart has recorded with him).  But for now, I've always had a soft spot for avant-garde classical saxophone, and Kynaston is superlative as a youngster playing both lyrical and extreme vocabulary with Curtis-Smith.  The composer himself handles the tricky extended techniques with flair. This great recording must become better known.

More C. Curtis-Smith can be explored at his extensive and easy-to-use website, which includes a full page of mp3s.  

It is always a blessing when a major stylist of American music takes root outside the major cities.  Kalamazoo is lucky to have him; however, it's time that his voice was heard everywhere. 

03/27/2012

Sunday, March 25, 2012:  Cecil Taylor is 83.  Read Ted Panken's detailed post.

You can tell someone is truly a badass when, after being out here awhile and gaining devoted converts, some musicians still think they can't play.  Maestro Taylor is an obvious example: Eric Reed put him down in a recent blindfold test. 

Another shining example is Masabumi Kikuchi. A few days ago The New York Times ran a big feature on Paul Motian's favorite pianist by Ben Ratliff.  Will this terrific article start turning the tide in the inconoclast's favor? I certainly hope so.  If you care about improvised music, buy Masabumi's new record and demand to hear him on the bandstand now.

Previously on DTM: "Masabumi Kikuchi Benefit" and "The Paradox of Continuity."

Photo by John Rogers.

03/25/2012