Enthusiasms (39) - William Parker Quartet ...

I bought this big box of live performances by The William Parker Quartet (augmented in numerous ways) last week and have been listening more or less non-stop. There is a lot of terrifically creative music here. The label is AUM Fidelity.(And lest you think I've gone off the deep end totally: "Wood Flute Song" is among Parker's compositions. The Quartet is Parker (bass), Hamid Drake (drums) Rob Brown (alto) and Lewis Barnes (trumpet).

Sunday! Music at Bop Shop Tonight

BOP ARTS presents
10³²K - Kevin Ray - Bass, Frank Lacy - Trombone and Andrew Drury - Percussion
Sunday November 17th 8pm
Bop Shop Records
1460 Monroe Ave
$15 donation requested.

This should be a great show. Highly recommended.

Enthusiasms (38) ~ Sam Baker

I learned about Sam Baker - and his devastating brush with Maoist terrorism - from this brief mention at NPR. Eventually I ordered the CD and is is simply fabulous. Spare production, literate, sparse, incisive lyrics. (OK, I have one complaint - the lyrics/credits for the recording are 'embedded on the disc,' making it impossible for tech-challenged old folks like me to find them! - But here they are from Baker's web page in pdf.) 

San Francisco as the Miner's Canary ~ And then the Rest of Us

"What do the U.S. government and Silicon Valley already have in common? Above all, they want to remain opaque while making the rest of us entirely transparent through the capture of our data. What is arising is simply a new form of government, involving vast entities with the reach and power of government and little accountability to anyone."

Rebecca Solnit, who as I have said here numerous times, is among our brightest, most insightful public intellectuals, has a new book.  You can find it here. This week I used my first trip to Literati, the new independent bookshop in Ann Arbor to pick up a copy. So, while I have the book, I've not read it yet. You can find an interview with Solnit here at NPR. And you can find an even more recent offering - an essay dissecting the insidious usurpations of high-tech corporations in Silicon Valley. For Solnit, San Francisco - the city were she lives -  is like the canary in the mine shaft. That said, her lament is not just for the ways money and privilege and cluelessness are undermining life in that city. At a more general level Solnit reminds us, as in the passage I lifted above, of Foucault's warning that visibility is a trap.

Literati Bookstore - Ann Arbor

I am getting ready for my annual summer teaching stint in Ann Arbor. Over the past few years the local ecology in that particular "College town" has seriously deteriorated in multiple ways - mostly due to the collapse of independent book and record stores. I've noted that decline here - often in an unflattering comparison with Rochester! But the collapse has been accompanied by the transformation of the downtown into a mall-like experience - all chained up. Well, here is a sign of hope - the imminent opening of Literati Bookstore. I'll drop by on my first day in town.

Local Event - Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at Lovin' Cup

TONIGHT!! - you really should, if at all possible, get out to Lovin' Cup and hear the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. This is a really fabulous  trio - Kahil El Zabar (percussion), Ernest Dawkins (tenor) & Corey Wilkes (trumpet). The EHE is among the longest running groups to come out of the AACM in Chicago and they play music that you will not likely hear, for instance, at the Rochester Jazz Festival (RIJF). Details on the show are available here. Two other reasons to turn out are (1)  that this part of the diverse series of shows put on by Tom Kohn at The Bop Shop and (2) the folks at Lovin' Cup work hard to bring good, off the equilibrium path music to town. Support them!

Finding Good Music in Out of the Way Places

Yesterday afternoon I paid a visit to Vaxkupan and discovered a bunch of releases from Ayler Records, an indy label I had never heard of before. I picked up a couple of CDs - live recordings by Henry Grimes/Hamid Drake/David Murray and Fred Anderson/Harrison Bankhead that sound promising. It just reinforces the realization of how much music is out there to be heard. And, of course, you don't find these sorts of discs at your local big box.

Local Event - Joe Beard TONIGHT

Joe Beard is playing tonight - six until eight - at Village Gate. Not only is the music terrific, but it is free! Details here. You definitely ought to go.

Enthusiasms (32) ~ Farmers By Nature

I have let this theme go for too long and will try to post periodically about music that has caught my fancy. I was in Washington DC last week and made a stop at the Melody Record Shop. Among the cds (how retro!) I found is this wonderful trio collaboration by Gerald Cleaver, William Parker & Craig Taborn. This apparently is the second release on AUM Fidelity by the trio, which calls itself Farmers by Nature. I've been playing it more or less constantly since we returned home. The title of the cd "out of this world's distortions" continues on the title cut as ... "grow aspens and other beautiful things." Just so. The phrase not only is true of the broader world, it succinctly captures the beautiful music made by this trio too.
_________
P.S.: I will note too that the cover photograph to this release is pretty amazing.

So, Which Waxed Male Chest is Offensive and Which Is Not?

The big box retailers Barnes & Noble and Borders reportedly have asked the purveyors of this magazine to wrap the cover before it can go on their shelves. The model, by the way, is male. I wonder if they demanded the same thing when this cover came out:

I recently cited the Rob Lowe cover here. Of course, Barnes & Noble and Borders are not serious booksellers, so the hypocrisy here is somewhat less than it might be. (Mostly, these outfits sell least common denominator crap.) But the local B&N store (in what I suspect is a corporate level campaign) has an annual "Banned Books" window display as though they are defenders of freedom of expression. Beefcakes? Yes. Androgynous types? Not so much.

Coming Soon to a Local Independent Music Store Near You

A new record by Buddy Miller and a bunch of his friends. You can find a little taste here - a cover of a George Jones tune. I posted about Buddy here a while back and things have not changed since then.

Passings ~ Fred Anderson (1929-2010)

Fred Anderson sits on the edge of the stage at the Velvet Lounge
before opening for the evening (February 2006)
~ Photograph © Jeff Robertson/AP.

Fred Anderson has died. You can read obituaries here and here and here and here. Anderson was a musician, entrepreneur, mentor and, by all accounts, a genuinely decent man. His passing is an immense loss to the jazz scene in Chicago especially, but very far beyond as well. I commented on a recent Anderson recording here just about this time last year.
__________
Thanks for the heads up!

Music Rochester

Every so often The Guardian runs a story about the disappearance - or at least precarious existence - of local record shops. There is another in the paper today. I often complain about Rochester as a cultural backwater, but there are at least three terrific independent record stores in town (compare that to supposedly hip places like, say, Ann Arbor, which seems unable to sustain any) - The Bop Shop, Record Archive, and Lakeshore Record Exchange. Each of the stores occupies a distinct niche - for instance, I try not to go the Lakeshore for fear that I will single-handedly dilute the hipness of the staff and clientele simply by virtue of my age. In any case, on this dimension at least our cultural ecology seems relatively robust.

Local Event ~ Cuong Vu 4tet

I have mentioned here a number of times that Tom Kohn - who runs the very cool local music store The Bop Shop - regularly brings interesting shows through Rochester. This coming Friday (10/9, nine p.m., Village Gate) he is hosting trumpeter Cuong Vu and his 4 tet (trumpet, drums and two basses). You can find Tom's announcement for the show here.

Enthusiasms (26) ~ Marcus Strickland

Many of my favorite jazz musicians are gettng on in years - Billy Bang, Archie Shepp, Paul Motian, Randy Weston, Dave Holland, Anthony Braxton, Tomasz Stanko, Charlie Haden, Fred Anderson .... and others like Max Roach or Andrew Hill have passed away in recent years. So I generally am on the lookout for younger people who are interesting and provocative. I recently read this review of a new release by Tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland in The New York Times:

MARCUS STRICKLAND TRIO
“Idiosyncrasies”
(Strick Muzik)

On “Idiosyncrasies,” the jazz saxophonist Marcus Strickland is in no hurry, and so much the better. Now 30, he’s been moving ahead for 10 years in New York as an absorbent and confident player, rooting around in different styles, sometimes obscuring what his best one might be.

Here, form helps drive style: it’s just saxophone, bass and drums. So Mr. Strickland, on tenor and soprano saxophones, with Ben Williams on bass and his brother E.J. Strickland on drums, has to be bold with his melodies and sparing with his improvising. He must be grounded because a chordal instrument won’t do the grounding for him. (He’s not on the high wire all the way through: he multitracks with clarinets on “The Child.”) He uses five of his own terse songs, as well as others by several kinds of popular musicians: Bjork, Andre 3000, Stevie Wonder, Jaco Pastorius, Oumou Sangare and José González. But he’s not giving himself up to the character of any of these songs. This record, honest and stubborn, stands its ground.

For some reason 2009 has been a big year for saxophone-trio records: this one, along with J. D. Allen’s “Shine!” and Fly’s “Sky & Country,” feel like enough for a new wave. Since Sonny Rollins more or less defined the saxophone-trio format in 1957, it has broadened in all the ways that jazz in general has broadened: rhythmically, structurally and in the oratory and rhetoric of soloing. But the basic attraction remains the same: physical challenge and harmonic austerity. And all three of these albums sound unusually self-possessed, as if they’re vying for place beside the small number of similar landmarks in the 50-year interim, which include “Dark Keys” by Branford Marsalis, “The Window” by Steve Lacy, “Triplicate” by Dave Holland, “The Hill” by David Murray and “State of the Tenor” by Joe Henderson.

Mr. Strickland can be a conventional writer, sounding at times in the past like an averaging-out of the advanced younger New York bandleaders. But these songs are different, and this album, with Mr. Strickland distributing his intensity carefully over a subtle, flexible rhythm section, is of a whole other order. Here and there it carries light echoes — of Mr. Marsalis, of Henderson or John Coltrane — but that’s not a problem. The melodies are unaffected, almost stoic; there’s a kind of nonidiomatic breeze blowing through them. You don’t necessarily hear the slow-and-subtle ballad “Rebirth” or Mr. Strickland’s even slightly slower-and-subtler version of OutKast’s “She’s Alive” and think, that sounds like a jazz song. (Even “Middle Man,” with the hardest swing of the record, doesn’t prompt that feeling.) That’s good. It’s a record you can give to friends who aren’t keeping score with jazz. That’s good too. BEN RATLIFF

Well, today I got Idiosyncrasies in the mail (via the nice indie-music purveyor cdbaby) and it really is quite a good record. And Strickland released the record on his own label (actually shared with his brother, drummer Eric Strickland) Here is a sample:

Marcus Strickland Trio "Set Free," from Idiosyncrasies
(Strick Muzik, 2009).

Elegy for a Bookstore

At the beginning of next week I will start my annual summer teaching gig in Ann Arbor. It is in many ways a nice town, (if not quite as special as many of its denizens seem to imagine. In particular it has, over the years been overrun by the same chain stores and restaurants that you can find in virtually every other city college town in the U.S.. This has meant, really, the demise of what is unique about the place. Two years ago I noted the demise of Schoolkids Records and just a few months back, I'd commented on the difficulties that the folks at Shaman Drum Books were experiencing. Well, I just read this post by Anna Clark at Isak that Shaman Drum will close at the end of this month. It means that I will need to find something else to do to decompress after teaching since I typically would spend some time browsing the shelves and spending money at Shaman Drum. It means too the town is now dominated by Borders and Barnes & Noble both of which are distinctly limited in their offerings of serious fare (especially non-fiction). This is sad news. It hastens the already rapid cultural homogenization in Ann Arbor.

Emergency ~ Shaman Drum Books

I have a longstanding connection to the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. My first wife went to graduate school there at the University of Michigan. So I have memories of the city in the early 1980s. Like today, that was a time of real economic hardship in Michigan. But the town was not yet overrun by homogenizing chain stores and eateries. This was before Borders Books, which started in Ann Arbor, matured into an anti-union, least common denominator, medium-sized-box national chain.

For the past decade I have spent part of each summer teaching at the ICPSR Summer Program which is affiliated with the University of Michigan. So, I have witnessed the slow creep of homogenization as chains fill every commercial nook & cranny in Ann Arbor. A while back I mentioned the demise of Schoolkids Records where I had been buying - actually discovering - music since even before it was driven into into exile. Now another invaluable cultural resource - Shaman Drum Books - is under severe stress. You can read about the problems over at Isak, a really terrific blog that Anna Clark keeps. I highly recommend Isak. In any case, Anna has written this post about ways you might help save this bookstore; she has run another more recent post by Karl Pohrt who founded Shaman Drum in which he sketches the current situation, how it came to pass and what he is trying to do to remedy it. Independent purveyors of books and music are crucial to our cultural ecology. If Shaman Drum goes belly up, Ann Arbor will be much the worse for the loss.

Elegy for a Music Shop

Each summer for about a decade I've spent a month teaching in Ann Arbor. And each sumer I have spent a bunch of time browsing the bins at Schoolkids Records, usually finding lots of things to buy that I'd never heard of or had heard of but never come across elsewhere. The shop has always carried discs by great musicians on relatively obscure labels. So, this summer I've picked up a couple of old Archie Shepp/Horace Parlan blues and gospel duets on Steeplechase, a brand new live two-disc release by Dave Douglas Quintet on Greenleaf, two Andrew Hill releases from a few years back on Palmetto, the Kaspar Villaume Quartet featuring Chris Potter on Stunt Records, Billy Bang w/ Frank Lowe live on JustinTime, and a Chip Taylor/Carrie Rodriguez cd on Trainwreck. You get the point.

Well, Schoolkids is closing as an actual "location" this Friday. They will continue to provide a web-based service which (according to their web site) says they will be able to get you any in-print title. That is terrific, except I probably would not have known any of the discs I bought this summer actually existed had I not physically been in the shop. So, while I wish the Schoolkids folks good luck, I worry about the prospects for a solely on-line endeavor especially at so small a scale.

Ironically, in the liner notes to his cd ("Live at Jazz Standard") Dave Douglas laments the demise of local record stores and the musical ecology they provided, especially for fans of non-pop genres. Schoolkids has offered just such a focal point here in Ann Arbor. When it closes the town will be culturally poorer.

"Plastic Fantastic"

I've added a link in the sidebar to this story in today's Guardian identifying 20 of the best independent music shops in Britain. Since any such list will predictably generate dissent the paper also started a thread on their culturevulture blog where readers can augment the story with suggestions of their own.