Ghost Blues: Loren Connors at ISSUE 9/11/10
Ghost Blues: Loren Connors at ISSUE 9/11/10
In honor of ISSUE’s upcoming Thursday, Nov. 18 sets with Loren Connors, High Aura’d, Tom Carter (solo guitarist from Charalimbides), and Barn Owl, fma is giving a shout-out to the fantastically haunting improvisational performance Loren Connors shared at ISSUE last September. Solo with his guitar and pedals, Loren brought a piece together from a series of quiet, speculatively bluesy chord progressions. If you’re familiar with Loren’s music, the performance should remind you his excitingly weird structural experimentation from the late ‘70s.
Loren’s September performance is a set of extreme cycling: he goes from shaping cerebrally minimalist themes to saturating nervously large chord progressions with reverb. Its introduction sounds like heavy clouds rolling off the guitar until the volume fades, reverb clears away, and the theme takes a step back into quiet blue delicacy, like watching an insect walk on water and bargaining with the surface tension. The most basic motif that shows up here is a diminished second –a classic blues chord– but Loren gives it such abstract, melodically disparate variations that you can only compare this performance to a ghost of the traditional blues.
But it’s a lovely ghost, even in its murkiest and most frantic moments. Towards the middle of the piece, the atmosphere thins out until a sparse, precise melody slips into harriedly chasing itself among reverb and volume, so that colossal shapes materialize and disintegrate before fading back into abstract space, all the more eerie for the climax’s recent urgency. The pattern resurfaces: the piece is schizophrenically saturated and then eerily quiet, but this is the blues, never blissed out pop or myopic sound art. No matter how disparate or dense the piece gets, Loren plays it like a folk musician, experimenting with a traditional vocabulary. He improvises beautifully, keeping the piece self-contained while making every movement a step forward.
Kaze (Fujii/Tamura/Pruvost/Orins)
Kaze (Fujii/Tamura/Pruvost/Orins) / Polly from Peter Orins on Vimeo.
Kaze (Fujii/Tamura/Pruvost/Orins) / la malterie / 18 avril 2010 from Peter Orins on Vimeo.
Really recommend listening to Kaze - Rafale and Christian Pruvost - Inpteravox both on Circum Disc
Maryanne Amacher speaking at Ars Electronica 1989 - Linz Austria
Maryanne Amacher speaking at Ars Electronica 1989 - Linz Austria from Additional Tones on Vimeo.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Roy Harper’s tribute to the late Bert Jansch
Bert Jansch and I arrived at the same club in London within three months of each other in 1965. We’d both had very separate journeys to get there, we knew nothing of each other, but we arrived at Les Cousins in Greek St, Soho, for the same reason. We were both inspired to play music to people. I was introduced to the club by Peter Bellamy of The Young Tradition.
Within a week I realised that this was going to be my new home. There was lots to take in. There were so many fantastic young musicians. I can remember being absolutely blown away by a young American called Danny Kalb in the first week. Going home and thinking that as far as the blues was concerned, I was miles behind where I could have been. I’d been in my own vacuum, it was time to get involved.
The young players were all very gifted but very different people. It was an amazing place to be. Among the many I saw in that first week were John Renbourn, Alexis Korner, Paul Simon and Alex Campbell, oh, and yes, someone called Bert Jansch. Bert who? How d’you spell that then?
At first I didn’t know what to think about Bert. He was very softly spoken and obviously very shy, with hair that fell in waves across a gentle but strong face with kind eyes. His Scottish accent was only just discernible, but his playing, and his delivery, were both immediately stunning. Some of his words weren’t always that decipherable, but the combination of the guitar and vocal together were truly a perfect and unique fit. The one thing you knew was that this guy had really found his medium. And it looked like he’d been there for years.
For a young man of 20, his songs were astounding. Things like The Needle Of Death, Running From Home and Strolling Down The Highway, as well as his own version of Davy Graham’s famous Anji were truly magic pieces of their age. He was a humble powerhouse whose honesty was so obviously unquestionable.
Bert was always such a very private man. Getting him to respond was sometimes an undertaking. It was often a struggle for him to speak, but then again, his songs spoke for him. They were often among the most eloquent pieces of musical folk art imaginable: plaintive, intricate and beckoning, with seemingly an ancient root reaching back across centuries of seemingly pure earth knowledge.
As a presence, his effect on his friends was beyond description. He was unfathomably and instantly attractive. I will never forget that. He gave love in such a gentle way that it was impossible not to immediately identify with that and be forever enraptured by one so gifted in that respect. From the heart Bert, the way it always was with you. Your friends will never forget you. Ever.
By Roy Harper
John Coltrane Live In Germany And Belgium
John Coltrane concert: ‘Live in Germany (1960/1961) and Belgium (1965)’
The three performances on this DVD show in dramatic relief the most important phases of his career. These newly discovered 1960 performances with Miles Davis’s rhythm section find him near the end of his ‘sheets of sound’ period. Coltrane was anxious to form his own group and this final tour with Davis was a favor to the trumpeter. His restlessness shows through in his playing here and elsewhere at the time. It is fascinating to hear him with one of his early idols Stan Getz and his playing seems to challenge Getz to a new level.
The 1965 Comblain-La-Tour (Belgium) performance, providing some great visuals, allows us to see the group at the peak of its powers and near the end of its run. By the end of the year, McCoy and Elvin were gone and one of the most innovative and exciting ensembles in jazz was no more.
Concert 1: Germany, March 28th, 1960
John Coltrane - Tenor Saxophone
Wynton Kelly - Piano
Paul Chambers - Bass
Jimmy Cobb - Drums
Also featuring Oscar Peterson on piano on ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ and ‘Hackensack’, as well as Stan Getz on tenor saxophone.
Concert 2: Germany, December 4th, 1961
John Coltrane - Tenor Saxophone / Soprano Saxophone
Eric Dolphy - Alt Saxophone / Flute
McCoy Tyner - Piano
Reggie Workman - Bass
Elvin Jones - Drums
Concert 3: Belgium, August 1st, 1965
John Coltrane - Tenor Saxophone / Soprano Saxophone
McCoy Tyner - Piano
Jimmy Garrison - Bass
Elvin Jones - Drums
Thelonious Monk Documentary: Straight, No Chaser
The story behind ‘Straight, No Chaser’ began in West Germany in 1967 and ended more than two decades later in Kansas City, Hollywood and New York. It had its beginnings in 1967, when the film-maker Michael Blackwood was commissioned by West German Television to make a film about Thelonious Monk. Over a six-month period of time that stretched into 1968, Michael and his brother Christian Blackwood, acting as cinematographer and co-director, followed Monk around, capturing him on and offstage, in the studio and on the road, at work and at rest in New York, Atlanta and several European cities.
In total, fourteen hours of film was shot and edited by the Blackwoods down to a film that was broadcast only once in Germany and never again anywhere else. From time to time, talk would surface in the jazz community about the existence of this precious footage, often described as ‘the Dead Sea Scrolls of Jazz’.
In 1981 the Blackwoods, joined with director Zwerin and producer Ricker, planned on turning all this material into a film. But they had to wait until 1987 for their (financial) breakthrough. Clint Eastwood, a lifelong jazz fan, was producing and directing the movie ‘Bird’ about Charlie Parker and heard about this project.
After viewing the samples, he was prepared to step in as executive producer, arranging for the financing to complete and for its eventual release through Warner Bros in the summer of 1988.
Charlotte Zwerin - Director
Clint Eastwood - Producer
Dick Hyman - Composer (Music Score)
Christian Blackwood - Cinematographer
Rudy Van Gelder - Sound Design
Fela Kuti - Live at Glastonbury 1984
BBC documentary: Sun Ra, Brother From Another Planet
Sun Ra was born on the planet Saturn some time ago. The best accounts agree that he emerged on Earth as Herman Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, although Sun Ra himself always denied that Blount was his surname. He returned to Saturn in 1993 after creating a stunningly variegated and beautiful assemblage of earthly and interplanetary music, most notably with his fervently loyal Arkestra.
Sun Ra and his Arkestra were the subject of a few documentary films, notably Robert Mugge’s ’A Joyful Noise’ (1980), which interspersed performances and rehearsals with Sun Ra’s commentary on various subjects ranging from today’s youth to his own place in the cosmos.
Today’s documentary, Don Letts’ ‘Sun Ra, Brother From Another Planet’ from 2005, reuses some of Mugge’s material and includes some additional interviews.
(via norbertschiegl)
In Between The Notes: A Portrait of Pandit Pran Nath (1986)
In Between The Notes: A Portrait of Pandit Pran Nath (1986) from Maxime Guitton on Vimeo.
R.I.P. Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011)
Sun Ra on WXPN, Christmas Day, 1976
1. Side A
2. Side B
Sun Ra reading his poetry to the accompaniment of the Arkestra.
On Christmas Day 1976, Sun Ra read a selection of his poems accompanied by music on the program “Blue Genesis” over the University of Pennsylvania’s radio station WXPN. The choice of poems and their sequencing offers what Sun Ra thought was most important in his writing. Here are key words like “cosmos,” “truth,” “bad,” “myth,” and “the impossible,”; attemtion to phonetic equivalence; the universality of the music and its metaphysical status; allusions to black fraternal orders and secret socities; biblical passages and their interpretation; and even a few atuobiographical glmipses. The poems were read softly, with little expressions, the music punctuating the words, with the heavy echo and delay in the studio sometimes reducing the words to pure sound without meaning. — from “Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra” John Szwed.
(via UbuWeb)
(Source: ubu.com)
DJ Pierre - FACT Mix 272 (Download) (8.8.2011)
Download the Mix over here:
(via notforpublicconsumption)
