Friday, July 21st, 2006 ... 3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. ... KZSU, 90.1 FM

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)

* Pink Mountain -- "Mastiff Mix" -- Pink Mountain (Frenetic, 2006)

Previously noted here. I've been remiss, not playing this as much as it deserves (and I'm even the one who packed it into rotation on short notice, to help promote the band's CD release show!) I've got a few more weeks to correct that, luckily.

A two-CD set of improvisations from five different small groups, each featuring Leandre on bass. Great showcase for one of the premier improvisers of our time.

This particular track includes Maggie Nichols on wailing wordless vocals and Irene Schweitzer on piano, a really nice set (I played a fraction of the 25-minute piece). Other folks showing up include William Parker, India Cooke (really cool local violinist), and Carlos Zingaro.

A gospel-piano feel, with highly charged emotional sax from David S. Ware. Made for a nice mood-carrier from the Coltrane track, even though I stuck a mic break between them.

Previously mentioned here.

Trio album previously mentioned here. This is one of the longer tracks, about 5 minutes, with some of the happy turn-of-the-century clarinet sound that permeates the album, but also a briefly crazy free-jazz moment.

Valentino is a guitarist, but it's hard to think of this as a "guitar" album. The horns take front stage, and the tuba -- used in place of bass, a node to the old New Orleans sound -- colors the sound considerably. This track starts with some unaccompanied guitar and has a complex, progressive sound, so it stands out.

* Liberty Ellman -- "You Have Ears" -- Ophiuchus Butterfly (Pi Recordings, 2006)

Completing the three-song all-guitar set. More on this CD here.

Led by bass clarinetist Aaron Novik, Gubbish is an eciting project mixing Ornette-style jazz composing with hints of Klezmer scales. Good, creative stuff in a similar vein to Patrick Cress' Telepathy (a band that includes Novik; we had their latest CD in rotation recently.

One of the difficulties we face is the cataloguing of improv. Most of it gets filed as "jazz," given that it's saxophone-based, uses a jazz-combo kind of lineup (drums, acoustic bass, etc.), and has tenuous ties to the free jazz of the '60s. (Technically that's wrong; my understanding is that the improv pioneers in Europe were avoiding any connections with jazz -- and the music seems to have more in common with modern classical anyway.)

Lately, I've made the decision based on how close the sound gets to jazz, and that's eliminated a lot of CDs that one could consider fringe/modern jazz but aren't as "musical" -- electronics experiments, for instance. We don't toss them out; they just get added to the library as General instead of Jazz.

So, this CD. Most of the Emanem output gets put into jazz, but Hallett's use of unusual percussion (bicycle wheel, mainly) to produce squeaky, shimmery noises... and the overall percussion-heavy sound, and its sparseness... and the bowed saw Hallett uses, and the way Bell sounds on shakuhachi and other exotic instruments ... it just feels like an instrumental stew that would be too confining to call "jazz." So, I didn't; we classified this as General.

It's quite nice, by the way. Just one of those disks that makes me question the utility of even having library divisions. My take: We should throw everything into one big Library. Maybe use colored stickers to denote Jazz or Blues or Country (as we already do) but why keep the shelving separate between genres? I should add that the idea has almost no support, so maybe I'm just being an anti-genre snob.

They play violin/viola, guitars/electronics, drums/perc, and piano, respectively. A quartet from Oregon, doing improv with a studied, chamber-music air to it. That creates a nice sense of structure, but it's free enough to not be so pretentious (while still being good serious stuff).

Malphas, as mentioned before, is a chamber-music interpretation of some of Zorn's Masada songbook. Dynamic and frequently jazzy stuff.

As for the monks... I've been using our database search engine to look up the tracks on Malphas, hoping to find one that was released on the original 10 Masada albums. It would be cool to play the original and the Feldman/Courvoisier versions back-to-back, I thought. No luck so far, but a search for "Boel" turned up the composer named "Boellmann," whose work is represented on a track of this CD.

It made a good fit with the classical/chamber sounds of Malphas, so I went with it. But I used a 1-minute track instead of the 4-minute Bohllmann ... hey, sometimes even avant-garde DJs worry about listeners getting too bored.

Previously mentioned here. The vocal nature of this one (buoyant doo-wop styles) came to mind after the monks, and the spare, bluesy intro to the song made for a good transition.

Previously mentioned here.

* Lucien Dubuis with Marc Ribot -- "Insomnie" -- Willisau Jazz Festival (self-released, 2006)

Ah-HAHAHAHA! Yes! Saxophonist Dubuis' most recent CD just went through rotation; this is a live-CD follow-up that Dubuis' manager sent us. It's got Marc Ribot as a guest star, alongside Dubuis' own guitarist, and on this track they really crank it out. Big, loud, aggressive, fast, obnoxious -- woo hoo!

Speaking of big, loud, etc. ... previously mentioned here.

* Bennie Maupin Ensemble -- "Tapping Things" -- Penumbra (Cryptogramophone, 2006)

Previously noted here.

* Phillip Greenlief -- "Frogs" -- Seared Circuit Incident (Evander, 2006)

Jake Smolowe -- "Level with Me" -- Level with Me (self-released, 2004)

Wardell Gray -- "Scrapple from the Apple" -- Central Avenue (Prestige, 1976; recorded 1950)

* Fred Anderson -- "Timeless" -- Timeless (Delmark, 2006)

* = Item in KZSU rotation
! = Pop anomaly
? = Item not in KZSU library

-- Go back to Memory Select playlists.
-- Bay Area free/improv music calendar: http://www.bayimproviser.com.