Jazz At Lincoln Center Presents: The Fire Of The Fundamentals (1994)

So I'm in a groove (or is it a rut?) (sorry, Peart) with these Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra discs. Collect 'em all. This is their second, and it's not technically an LCJO disc; it's a compilation of things that happened during three seasons of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the organization's home stand, and this means that some of the tracks are by the home team, and some are by visitors.

The only Orchestra pieces proper - the only big band numbers, that is, - are the Charlie Parker number "Hootie Blues" (nice) and the inevitable Ellington, "Multi-Colored Blues" (nice, too).

But the highlights are not the Orchestra pieces, but two numbers by what seem to me to have been subsets of the orchestra, an octet and a septet, both led by Wynton Marsalis and largely if not entirely filled out with Orchestra members.

The first of these highlights is the number that kicks off the disc, the Jelly Roll Morton tune "Jungle Blues." This is just a monster groove, is all. Drums, piano, guitar, and tuba all mashing on the beat, with brass and clarinet getting just as filthy as they can. This is true Storyville stuff, real bordello blues, and with the pristine recording technology and room of the '90s you can begin to understand just how and why the old records were supposed to work. I mean, it's still possible to appreciate Jelly Roll Morton records today, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and all the rest of those New Orleans gentlemen, but here things become clear in a different way. You can hear the space and balance between the horns, the rhythm section, the one woodwind. It starts to color in a picture that was only in sepia before, of a wanton woman, that licorice stick, dancing shrill and sunken in siren abandon, surrounded by the gruff, gasping growls of the horns. So that's what it was all about. Always was.

The second highlight is much more on the spiritual side of the spectrum, a cover of Coltrane's "Dahomey Dance." I confess I haven't heard the original of this yet, but the cover is brilliant. Marsalis's trumpet is cool and focused, the saxophones manage to evoke Coltrane without sounding too much like they're trying to ape him, and the bass duel sends shivers up the spine. It doesn't scale the hot heights of delirium that Coltrane was wont to; rather it brings out the cool '60s vibe that was always implicit in his work, and more explicit in contemporaries like Horace Silver.

From Jelly Roll to Coltrane and several points in between: the diversity of the disc is an eloquent testimony to the mission of the LCJO. Persuasive, and that's key this time around, because the trappings of this disc, from the PBS-y cover art to Stanley Crouch's even-more-pompous-than-usual liner notes, give the project the whiff of the textbook, or the school field trip. Y'know, it's Culcher, and you kids better appreciate it. Luckily, the music gets beyond all that.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis at the Hult Center, Eugene, September 17, 2009

Went to see the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (or, as Wynton Marsalis his very own self said from the stage, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra: is there a difference) last Thursday night at the Hult Center in swanky downtown Eugene.

Preamble: I don’t go to many concerts. I like music too much, and most concerts, at least of the rock variety, are pretty unmusical events, with lousy sound, noisy crowds, and harrowing atmosphere. Every once in a while I go to one, though, and as it happens this was my second time seeing the LCJO (or J@LCO). With Wynton Marsalis.

The first time was in 1995 or possible 1996, in the Marriott Center at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I was an undergrad there at the time. The concert, as I recall, was not very well promoted. I only found out about it a couple of days beforehand. I asked a couple of friends if they wanted to go, they said yes, and we bought tickets that afternoon. We got alarmingly good seats, for that late: not on the floor, but only a few rows up in the stands.

The warning signs were accurate, because when we showed up it turned out that almost nobody else did. In this college town of forty thousand or so, they hadn’t even sold out the floor. So everybody in the stands got to come down and sit on the floor. We got to sit in, if I recall, the second row. I was ashamed for my town, but also kinda glad.

And it was awesome. I didn’t know jazz from a hole in my head at that point, but I had a sort of ignorant worshipful reverence for it, particularly live, a seed that had been planted by reading Kerouac and watered by a summer full of jazz in Nagoya the year before (I saw Mukai Shigeharu, Yamashita Yôsuke, and Ônishi Junko in one glorious season). Tonight it… Well, let’s abandon that metaphor and just say it was a pretty damn electrifying concert that ended, if my memory serves me well, with Wynton and some of the other horns marching around the stage and the aisles in a sort of N’Awlins parade…

So, when Mrs. Sgt. T and I saw the ad for the performance in the Hult, we jumped on it.

A very different experience. The Hult is a nice place to see a concert: good acoustics, classy atmosphere, but with Eugene casualness and unpretentiousness. And the place was pretty full; not packed, but respectably populated. I didn’t feel alone, that’s for sure.

I know a little more about jazz at this point, but the tree is still kind of slender, not strong enough yet to really climb on to pick the higher-hanging persimmons. That is, I still managed to listen to them playing a slow bluesy thing in the middle and think it was a Mingus number, only to have Wynton explain afterwords that it was, in fact, a WC Handy blues. Dayum.

They were playing with us. In the first half, they did a song written by Fred Rogers. They followed this up with a Mingusy (I swear!) arrangement of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” This was a highlight actually, marked by some really odd rhythms and intriguing combinations of instruments – piccolo and muted trumpet, for example.

But the climax of the show, inevitably, was when they pulled out some Ellington to end with. A magnificant rendition of “The Tattooed Bride,” particularly nailing the clarinet fantasia at the end – you think Eric Clapton invented that furious beginning/ethereal ending thing with “Layla”? Wrong. And they followed this up with “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson.” Sweet Jesus, that was nice. Pure gospel soul grind in the jazz idiom.

So: good show.

Little Eva: "The Loco-Motion" (1962)

Little Eva's original "Loco-Motion" is the song I've been high on lately. One of those things where you've heard a song a million times but never really listened to it. I really listened to it recently, and was blown away.

It's marked by a perfect musical economy. Not a note wasted, not one more instrument or lick than necessary. Which is not to say it's minimalist: in fact it's a very full and satisfying little record. It's just that it's put together with incredible craftsmanship. That's Goffin and King for ya.

I mean, listen to the drumming. Tough and snarey on the intro and refrain, insistently clangey on the verse, locking into the saxophones on the turnaround. Nothing fancy, but what's there is just right. And speaking of saxophones, dig how much release there is in that sudden sax solo, and how it then dies down into a tension-building stutter, setting up the renewed release of the refrain.

This is a very professional record, in the best sense of the word. But as with much great pop music, it's not any one thing that makes it a perfect record - not just the professionalism - but a combination of things - in this case the tension between the professionalism of the music (including the very solid songwriting, an argument in favor of formula if there ever was one) and something very amateurish.

Which is Little Eva herself. It's well known that she was Goffin and King's babysitter: a background almost too right to be true. She sounds like a teenager in this vocal, and of course that's just what the Brill Building loved in 1962. But she doesn't sound like a scared teenager, or an inept one. She's a great natural vocalist, in charge of the song from the get-go. The producers know it: they put her way up front in the mix, dominating the backing vocals. She's a primary color, not a delicate shade; a belter, if such a thing were possible in the girl-group milieu. She manages to sound both innocent (the unvarnished accent on "swang your hips now") and expert (the second "come on" that ends the verse), spontaneous ("yay-yay-yayeyay") and in control (same interjection).

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

Following up on this, we watched Meaning of Life the other night. Myohmyohmy but I laughed. So let's play a high school game and rank the Python films. For me it's Holy Grail and Meaning of Life neck and neck for no. 1, with Life of Brian a rather distant third. Which may seem odd; I think most people would agree that Life of Brian is Python's best film qua film. Hell, I agree with that proposition.

But it's not quaness that I look to the Pythons for. It's not professionalism or craft (at least not any craft recognizable to me) that made me videotape as many episodes as I could from MTV and WETA back in 1986 and 1987, lovingly label, name, and decorate the tape boxes, and then keep the damn things for twenty years despite layers of original static and growing tape fuzz. It was sheer demented genius, and philosophy.

Holy Grail is the former. It has some deeper meaning, some intellectual subtext, but mostly it's just surreal humor, enough to make you weep with laughter. I never tire of it; I'm not alone in that. Meaning of Life is the latter: it's almost desperately open about its ideas, as if the Pythons figured they may never get another chance to say what they really think with at least a few people listening. I listened. When I was in eleventh grade it felt like Python were the only ones in the world really thinking about stuff. Okay, sure, I was pretty full of myself - but they meant a lot to me.

Thing is, neither Holy Grail nor Meaning of Life are all that great as movies qua movies. Holy Grail makes a point of it, flouting any rule it can divine, of course; and Meaning of Life is, as John Cleese objected at the time (according to the DVD commentary), just a collection of sketches that has trouble justifying its running time.

Life of Brian, meanwhile, is a good movie. A tight film, well-told, with enough jokes to keep you laughing, but not enough to distract from creating characters and telling their stories. It's the perfect balance - some classic Python absurdity, some very focused subtext, all in the service of the story. But you know how I feel about perfection. And Life of Brian does that: it doesn't make me laugh as hard as Holy Grail, or think as hard as Meaning of Life. I admire it; but the others I love.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say was this. That Meaning of Life is clearly the most philosophical of the three Python films, but then right in the middle of it (literally) they place what just might be their most inspired bit of surrealism ever. Completely meaningless, and utterly, eye-poppingly, gaspingly funny. And it went wherever I did go.

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Portraits By Ellington (1992)

Picked this up because I'm going to see this outfit next week. Have one of the LCJO's albums, which I bought after seeing them once in '95 or so, and I always meant to pick this one up.

It was recorded live in 1991. It's old: back from when the LCJO was concentrating on (re)establishing Duke at the head of the classic jazz canon. Back when it was still concentrating on trying to (as Stanley Crouch put it in the notes to their next release) "create a viable jazz canon." I'm sure that's still one of their goals, but now they've moved on to include other composers. Duke's place is secure.

The whole album's good listening, but the centerpiece and masterpiece is the "Liberian Suite." Jaw-dropping, this. Twenty-seven minutes of slow-burn soul. What instrumentation! Solos for vocalist (Milt Grayson, sounding like a bow-tied version of Leon Thomas), clarinet, vibes, violin, and timpani, in addition to the standard saxes and brass (the best trumpet solo on the record, by the way, isn't by Wynton Marsalis: it's by Lew Soloff, in the suite).

And each one of these unusual instruments cuts deeper than the last. By the time you get to the timpani (yes, timpani) solo, you've been so worked over, body and soul, that the timpani doesn't have to thunder. It whispers. Who would've thought a timpani could make you want ot cry? This one does.

The only way to really judge this record would be with knowledge of Duke's original versions of these tunes. Not an easy thing, since many of these are rather obscure pieces, at least to a novice like me. I know I love what I'm hearing, but I haven't heard an Ellington recording of "Liberian Suite," so I don't know if what I'm loving is the performance or the composition. At this point I guess it doesn't matter. I think Duke's will be my next acquisition, which is probably mostly what LCJO was aiming for here.

Pizzicato Five: Darlin' Of Discothéque (1999)

Something happened, and now this record is ten years old. W, as the kids say, TF?

The version in the video is the short version, from the album known in Japan as either pizzicato five or perfect world and internationally as either pizzicato five tm or the fifth release from matador. (P5's discography is nearly impossible to truly understand. Take a stab at it here or here.) A longer version was released on an ep, and it's worth seeking out.

The song - well, you have to use that term loosely when dealing with Pizzicato, because their big weakness, especially after Takanami Keitaro left, was that they were short on melodies. They disguised this (or made it work for them, depending on how you view it) by reusing the same melodies over and over, tweaking them slightly, and making their genericness part of the overall texture of their art, just another element to be endlessly recombined and reframed. All of which is by way of saying that the tune here isn't too memorable (okay, the bridge is striking, and the "darlin, darlin, darlin discotheque" part is hooky). But that it doesn't matter, because Konishi has dressed it up in such an alluring mix of '60s British psyche, frantic breakbeats, Italian spy movie theme music, heavy metal guitar, and Bollywood that you hardly notice the melody. It's the total package that matters: and in that connection let's not forget the chameleonic Nomiya Maki, without whose ability to inhabit absolutely any style or image of the last fifty years Konishi would have been lost at sea.

For me the best moment is the harpsichord break.

Somebody else's thoughts on Inglourious Basterds

My post about Inglourious Basterds the other day didn't really do the film justice, I know. If you want to read something that does, check out this, by Jim Emerson. He's had a number of really excellent posts on the film over the last few weeks. I don't agree a hundred percent, but that's not important: this is real film criticism.