record reviews - Important Records

NOVEMBER 07 | EXBERLINER55 | RECORDS 37
RECORDREVIEWS
BY D. STRAUSS, THE DECKS-BERLINER
William Parker/Raining on the Moon
William Hooker with E. King and B. l. Horist
Susie Ibarra
Fred Katz
Steve Coleman
CORN MEAL DANCE
AUM Fidelity
THE SEASONS FIRE
Important
DRUM SKETCHES
Innova
FOLK SONGS FOR FAR OUT
FOLK
Reboot Stereophonic
INVISIBLE PATHS: FIRST
SCATTERING
Tzadik
We let London die, then Paris.
And now New York has
croaked, if not from active neglect. In fact, neglect is what allowed it to once thrive, maggots
spilling off of fertile meat. But as
for London/Paris/NY: Every
journalist knows that three examples compose a trend, and a
trend often constitutes a pathology. New York City will soon be
entirely meat with no maggots
to nurture. Perhaps our own
tragedies are so intense that we
missed the edifice collapsing
around us. Bassist/composer
Williams Parker's new disc is
based around the singing of
Leena Conquest, and I have to
wonder if the need to put things
into words has a similar thrust
as the need to eulogize a world
that is as increasingly unrecognizable to this Parker as it was
to Charlie Parker. Both will be
increasingly lionized, of course:
the better to make us forget the
long-gone conditions that created them. 'Land Song' has Conquest singing 'Who owns the
land/Mr. Johnson owns the
land' and it is a bitter irony that
equal-lack-of-opportunity has
allowed slavery to expand its
base of exploitation. And its
quarterly earnings.
The waning of improvisational
music and avant-jazz in NYC
may be a metaphorical extension of what will be the solidification of the new city grid once
development begins to wane,
as well as the lack of possibility
allowed under late capitalism.
Or it could just be that everyone
is really, really into Daft Punk. It
is true that most of the perennials from a decade ago, musicians who risked
over-exposure, appear to have
fallen off the map - William Parker would be a notable exception. Power drummer William
Hooker used to play with anyone and everyone, and poorly
recorded documents of his collaborations used to clog the
indie record stores, usually for
the better. Now it seems as if
Hooker hasn't done a show in
years: Where would he play?
But the records keep leaking
out, and this 2001 document of
consecutive nights in Seattle one with the guitarist Horist, the
other with violinist King - features the sort of overdriven but
textured interplay that shows
how Hooker elided genre into
pure improvisation. Which,
these days, I guess he'll have to
do in his basement.
Former drummer for William
Parker and David Ware, Ibarra
later shifted over to John Zorn's
tent, Zorn being a man of certain
proclivities. But this does not
take anything away from Ibarra,
who was the strongest young
drummer of the 1990s. She
does seem to have drifted away
from the scene, and this recording of her 2007 solo concert at
the Brecht Forum suggests that
she's possibly found a way to
mix all her subcultural leanings
into a package in which she can
financially sustain herself without
an audience. This is, after all,
what all jazz performers of an
experimental nature must do:
The descendents of
Albert Ayler need their own
Richard Mellon Scaife. Ibarra is
subtle as usual - she's a virtuoso
with a bird-like touch that didn't
always suit the Ware Quartet though she atypically cranks it
up a bit on a few tracks. But
what moved me most was the
way crowd noise would fade in
and out like a low rumble, a
rhythmic loop in itself, implying
the fading of history and allowing Ibarra to become a document of our shared, mislaid past.
There is still an improv underground, but it leans away from
jazz toward an Ivy League mixture of Harry Smith and Morton
Subotnik, favoring elitist freaks
as opposed to Salt Of The
Earth types. Perhaps it was
always thus. Fred Katz was a
cellist with the highly underrated drummer Chico Hamilton
during the 1950s, pioneering
cool jazz and Third Stream music in a band that included a
young Eric Dolphy. He eventually became a professor of Anthropology - not to say that this
reissue of a 1958 record of folk
song adaptations is in any way
authentic. In fact, it is its evocation of elite obsession with
working class authenticity that
gives it a lounge-y, inauthentic
buzz. That might sound like a
putdown, but not from this
critic. In a Wal-Mart world,
evidence of the past's attempts
at taking measure of itself is
rare enough: It's been a long
time since someone ripped
down an ugly building to put up
a beautiful one. And Katz's album, featuring a gigantic
rhythm section which includes
Marlon Brando's bongo
teacher, can now be allowed
artifact status itself.
Alto saxophonist Coleman is
known as a technocrat, with his
impossible to understand MBASE system filled with rhythmic pirouettes, Shorter-esque
off-harmonies and electronic
keyboard blasts. He's also a
fervent Brooklyn acolyte, and his
desire to go no-frills solo implies
that he, too, understands the
destruction that the present-day
mindset has wrought on his
HOMEBASE. His album title
and liner notes stress a symbolist
approach to autobiography, with
the music inspired by specific
thought and event, like those
Godard films that seemed to
shoot hoops with whatever was
on his mind at the time of filming:
diary transformed into filigree,
which the passing of time would
then set as relic. The music itself,
though, is exceptionally tuneful,
not dogmatic or programmatic,
evoking jazz history without aping it. It may not be Coleman's
typical approach, but I can't think
of anything he's done which better represents a sense of inner
life. And, for the jazz musician,
the city dweller, the prideful outsider: Inner life is just about all
we have left. At least we can
remember and, perhaps, be inspired by memory. And then
have those inspirations ignored.