Month of November , 2007

There's something universally recognizable about an opening invocation. Centering around a drone note, a sense of warming up, tuning, intoning; all signs point to a beginning. Melody is emergent and seems to sprout organically from the primordial stew of sound. There's a beautiful mix of timbres and rhythms, with a relaxed intensity to the groove and the focus revolves around the orbit of the singular drone. The album is called Two Rivers, referring to the historic tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the land that lies between.

It could be considered politically relevant to make an album that combines the form and instruments of traditional Iraqi Maqam with the improvised spirit and instrumentation of a jazz combo. I use the word "could," because apart from the relevance of this meeting of musical traditions in today's world, there is a beautiful recording here with music that is pertinent and worthwhile listening.

However, to ignore the state of the world surrounding music is to perpetrate a great injustice to the relevance and agency of music to reflect, to create Utopian musical spaces where barriers are broken down, and to bring to the forefront underlying beauty that otherwise might be lost amongst violence and destruction.

There's a patience in the proceedings here that I find extremely rewarding as a listener. Tension is built and brought to peaks, but it is never in a hurry to do so, and the slope happens so subtly and gradually that it's easy to forget it's  going somewhere until it has arrived. Amir ElSaffar's trumpet playing is fantastic throughout, utilizing scales and timbres that are certainly referential to the musical heritage of Iraqi Maqam while also incorporating the language and phrasing of jazz.

Santoor, oud, doumbek, buzuq, frame drum.

Trumpet, alto sax, bass, drums, violin.

A meeting of musics. Can musics meet? What happens when they do? Do they shake hands, retain separate identities and commingle? Or do they do dirty things like fuse into a fusion? There, I said it. Let's be honest though, fusion is only dirty if jazz is fusing with profane musics like rock and roll or pop music. If it fuses with folk musics from around the world or other art music, that's perfectly acceptable. Right? Musics meet in individuals whose identities are able to span continents. It's interesting to note that the shifting of intervallic preference and timbre can lead to denotation of musical culture and locality.

Don Cherry once said: "When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them."

Amir ElSaffar, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Dafer Tawil, Tareq Abboushi, Carlo DeRosa, Nasheet Waits. It really sounds like a band, great chemistry and interplay, and everyone plays with bravado and gusto.

What good is a word like jazz if it can't let music like this into the shade of its stylistic tree? If it can't give shelter from the storm under its genre umbrella? In the liner notes, ElSaffar talks about similarities between the heterophony native to maqam music and Cecil Taylor's music. Cecil Taylor! Maqam! Heterophony! There's something going on there, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Have I mentioned that this music is hip? Because it most certainly is. Khosh Reng features a groove in 17/8 that cries out to be danced to, joyously. Blood and Ink begins with a poem that is moving without knowing anything about its translation.

All in all, this is a great album from Mr. ElSaffar and his band. and comes highly recommended. It's an album of music that spans borders, incorporates seemingly disparate elements that end up comfortable bedfellows, and comes out with an end product that doesn't feel forced in bringing it all together. The feat of apparent effortlessness is a cherished quality in the music I enjoy, and this fits the bill.

If this sounds appealing, you can find out more here. You can also buy the record directly from Pi Recordings on that page.

Recently, Mwanji posted a short but provocative piece about so-called music criticism, and in doing so raised a host of issues about music writing in general.

It's an issue I've raised before in regards to my own views about so-called music criticism specifically, and more broadly the issue of writing words about music.

My basic view is this: I do think there are serious barriers to writing about music descriptively, but that those limitations  are best confronted creatively. I confront them through the occasional misuse of vocabulary to convey feeling and connotation rather than meaning and denotation. If I'm writing a review of a concert or recording, I'd rather end up with a piece that described what I heard and how it made me feel than what I heard and what my opinion of that was, or what I thought of it. I'm more interested in writing about what I find value in, instead of attempting to determine if something else actually has value in any objective sense.

With that said, while I believe transparency is a good thing, it can also be crippling.

I find value in the notion of creating a relationship between author and reader where the reader comes to know the taste of the writer enough to develop a sense of their tastes, and as a result engage in something known as trust. This shouldn't be confused for being predictable, and that's where the job of the writer comes in, to have an open mind so that they can surprise their readers by finding value in someplace unexpected, and explaining that value to the reader.

Does a writer also have to pan a few pieces of music to develop that trust? Don't we have to say something is worthless in order to create a sense of worth?

I don't think so.

Then again, I'm not a critic, and nor do I have any interest in becoming one.

A reader of this blog might notice that I don't write about all the music out there. I listen to lots more music than I write about here, that's for sure. I only take the time to write about music that I:

• Enjoy enough to listen to regularly, and believe that I will continue to listen to in the future.
• Believe that readers of the blog, based upon their repeated readership, might enjoy as well.
• Believe that I can write about cogently enough to convey some of its essence to the reader.

I'm also of the opinion that negative reviews of music are of less value than any piece of music ever made. So there. At least a mediocre musician is putting themselves out there to get a crappy review.

It's not that I believe that there's no such thing as bad music. There is. I've heard it, and I don't like it. I just have no interest in devoting any energy into spreading the word about bad music. I'd much rather spend my time and energy talking about music that I think is worthwhile and engaging. Similarly, I'd rather be pointed in the direction of transcendence than be told to stay out of what someone else believes is the musical gutter.

I do believe that there is a fruitful method of writing about music, and for me that involves putting music into some kind of social and cultural context. I find that to be an extraordinarily illuminating practice, and one that simultaneously allows the music to speak for itself while also enriching our experience of it through better understanding of its context. I find more value in this style of music writing than in blow by blow analyses.

What do you think?

Is there a more beautiful male vocal jazz album in the history of recorded music than the one John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman made?

If there is, please let me know, as I'd be more than willing to let another album of that caliber into my regular listening rotation.

Despite my avant proclivities, this album gets frequent listening time in my house. There's an unhurried calm that pervades the proceedings that I find soothing and soul-baringly gorgeous.

What are the qualities of the sound produced by these men that makes the album strike such a chord with me?

What separates the sincere from the saccharine when dealing with balladry such as this?

We all know that a ballad can head into Velveeta-ville rather quickly if put in the wrong hands. I'm not quite sure, other than the obvious reasons of skill and expressiveness, what makes John Coltrane and his quartet, with the addition of Johnny Hartman, so able to avoid swimming in the seas of cheese.

But they do.

There's a minimalist quality to the accompaniment that shows the utmost restraint. It's this understanding of the most basic underpinnings of what makes a song that also makes Coltrane's Ascension such an interesting and incredible achievement.

When asked about his collaboration with Hartman, in a Franz Kofsky interview, John Coltrane said:

"There was something about his voice."

Maybe that's as specific as we need to be in explaining beauty such as this.

Divided up into to two distinct but related programs of music, The All Seeing Eye + Octets finds percussionist, composer, and fellow blogger Harris Eisenstadt tackling two bodies of music: the first 5 tracks are septet arrangements and interpretations of Wayne Shorter's 1965 album The All Seeing Eye, and the final 6 tracks are octets, augmented by a conductor and penned by Mr. Eisenstadt himself.

I've been listening to the album for a few weeks now, and before I wrote about it I had to go back and listen to the original Wayne Shorter album so I could hear how Harris has interpreted Wayne Shorter's music. First, the instrumentation: the numbers have basically remained the same, with Wayne Shorter leading a septet through most of his disc, with his brother Alan Shorter making it an octet on the last track. The instruments and timbers have changed however, with Eisenstadt employing a vibraphone, two clarinet/bass clarinetists, trumpet, bassoon, bass, and drums. It's certainly a reedy sound, with the bassoon and two clarinetists, and the vibraphone, an instrument I am particularly fond of, adds an important sound to the mix. The lineups of Shorter and Eisenstadt have in common an absence of a traditional chordal instrument like piano or guitar, and although the vibraphone could fill that role, it doesn't tend to do so in the arrangements. I find the result to be sonically different in ways that are complimentary to the original; he's taken a different palette to paint the a similar picture, the old forms recognizable but transformed in the new product.

The All Seeing Eye portion of the program has a remarkable flow and continuity between tracks. There's a mood that pervades the proceedings that I'd rather not attribute to any specific emotion or association, but there is definitely a thread that binds it all together. Part of it is the mix and production which is very consistent throughout, bringing the winds up front and keeping the drums more distant, lending some depth to the sound. I think the other part of it has to do with the sound of the arrangements that Eisenstadt has created; it's clear that he had a very specific sound in mind for this ensemble and project. I find the end result to be complimentary to the original without having so much overlap that comparison becomes preoccupation. Covering a song can be a thorny proposition, let alone a whole album, and Eisenstadt has managed to do it with marked success.

The second program on the album is a series of Octets, Without Roots I, II, and III, and What We Were Told, I, II, and III. There are inevitably going to be comparisons made with chamber groups, given the presence of a conductor and the instrumentation and sound. To my ears, the presence of a conductor was probably necessary for some of the cues given the fact that the leader was behind a drum set with both hands occupied during the proceedings. And while there is a harmonic quality that certainly evokes more chamber-y contexts, there's an underlying rhythmic thrust and groove that pops up throughout that distinguishes it from the chamber pack. It's obvious to my ears that Harris Einstadt is the kind of composer and listener who doesn't care much for genre boundaries, knows what his ears like, and isn't afraid to pursue that sound, even if someone might use dirty words like hybrid or fusion to describe the result (not that I would ever use the F word in my own descriptions). Whatever you want to call it, the Octet portion  of the album comes across as thoughtfully lush.

You might notice that I haven't delved into the particularities of each player's sound and musicianship on the record, and I think that's because it's really got a strong ensemble sound that doesn't end up feeling like a blowing session where the individual voices are at the center of the sound. This isn't to say that the album lacks in strong individual moments or players, but it's not the first thing that came to mind when I sat down to write about the music. Ultimately, The All Seeing Eye+Octets is a gorgeous body of music that I think will age well. Highly recommended.