Friday, April 18th, 2008 ... 3:00 p.m. - 5:50 p.m. ... KZSU, 90.1 FM

(Return to playlists.)

Evelyn Glennie and Fred Frith are coming to town Wednesday, playing a duo show at Stanford. Given infinite time, I would have contacted Glennie's people about doing an interview, and also contacted Frith (who's local and presumably easier to reach) likewise, and put together a pre-recorded special, but ... oh well. I settled for watching the very interesting documentary, Touch the Sky, which follows Glennie into a number of musical settings, including an improv session with Frith in an abandoned sugar factory.

There's more here (that's the same link as used in the Sugar Factory listings below).

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)
Horizontal lines denote microphone breaks.

Fred Frith -- "Backroom II" -- Eye To Ear (Tzadik, 1997)

Blurry aggressive noise! A fitting transition out of the noisy David Leikam track (with the trio "z_bug") that David Bug used to close the previous show.

* Peter Paulsen Sextet -- "Triple Pairs" -- Change of Scenery (Wahbo, 2007)

Fairly mainstream, modern stuff, with lots of twists and an open approach to solos. This one's a 7/4 track that also features 2-against-3 polyrhythms, nicely tricky stuff.

Previously noted here.

? Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie -- "Scuttlebutt" -- The Sugar Factory (Tzadik, 2007)

Previously noted here.

Classic stuff from the early days of free jazz. The sound fidelity isn't crystal, and the sound's brightness overall can be hard to take, but what do you want? It's 1966! Kudos to ESP-Disk for all their work keeping some of these recordings alive.

The band here: Gato Barbieri, Karl Berger, Aldo Romano, Bo Stief, and of course Don Cherry on trumpet.

* Kali Z. Fasteau, Kidd Jordan, Newton T. Baker -- "Sound Science" -- Live at Kerava (Flying Note, 2008)

Live set with Baker on drums, Jordan on sax, and Fasteau playing her usual multi-assortment: sax, percussion, flute, cello, piano. The results are nice free-jazz passages with the energy derived from having an audience (this was at the Kerava Jazz Festival in Finland). "Sound Science" contrasts a reedy soprano sax with Jordan's hefty tenor sax sound. "Received Wisdom" brings in the cello for some crazed, high-pitched skronking alongside the sax. Piano on "Trancendance" helps build a bold and heavy jam. And the double drum kit attack on "Exponential Time" delivers some loud, fast fun.

Previously noted here.

? Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie -- "A Rag of Colts" -- The Sugar Factory (Tzadik, 2007)

Previously noted here.

? Evelyn Glennie -- "Manhattan Rave" [Dave Heath, composer] -- African Sunrise/Manhattan Rave (Black Box, 2000)

This CD consists of pieces Heath wrote with Glennie in mind. Heath is a modern composer with a youthful aggression to his work, and his goal here was to have Glennie bang the heck out of things while grand orchestral parts swirl around here. A couple of the pieces were written for drum kit, but "Manhattan Rave" switches her to trash percussion (sheet metal, pots/pans, old springs, whatever) and lets her go nuts. The percussion part is completely improvised, including a nice cadenza space (unaccompanied solo). The orchestra gets augmented by a drum kit, not played by Glennie, to lay down a light rock beat.

Elsewhere, on pieces like "African Sunrise," Glennie gets to bang the heck out of the drum kit herself. And you've got some quiet marimba pieces too, of course. I think the Black Box label is defunct, but they put up some terrific modern music during their run. The catalog is available in hi-definition audio formats at HDtracks.

More Glennie improv, kind of the hit single from this album (although it's not the one they made a CD single of; see below). A small bit more info here.

Fred Frith -- "Carnival on Wall Street" -- Speechless (Ralph, 1981)

The idea here was to alternate sets of Glennie and Frith. While Frith's recent work has dealt more in abstract improvisation, I wanted to kick off his first set with some of the more danceable art-rock he did in the '80s, when he was still composing pop-like tunes and experimenting with drum machines. Plus, this is the only vinyl we've got of Frith's solo works, so I wanted to give it a spin.

Ralph is the label that put out The Residents' early albums, and there's a Residents kind of weirdness to this tune, an evil circus instrumental with lots of synths, some drum machine, tense yet cartoony dramatic tones.

Previously noted here. Frith spins some dark, avant-garde guitar during this concerto, while Toychestra adds the obvious absurdity of toy instruments. Their parts include some serious yet simple riffs, though, as on the "3 Elephants" movement, and "Rewind," the concluding movement, adds haunting vocals from the five-woman band.

Bjork, w/Evelyn Glennie playing exhaust pipes -- "My Spine" -- Telegram (Elektra, 1996)

Duet of Bjork singing with Evelyn Glennie on exhaust pipes. The pipes are tuned, so there's a pretty melody to the music, and of course Bjork's lyrics run roughshod with the rhythm. It's spare but fast-paced, a nifty little 2:30 track with Glennie sharing a writing credit.

Telegram itself, if you don't already know, consists of remixes from Bjork's first solo albums. A lot of it is electronica- or triphop-influenced, but there's also this track (an original, non-remixed) and an appearance by the Brodsky Quartet.

After playing track after track of Glennie bashing things, I wanted to insert something calmer and delicate. This is a solo marimba piece she wrote, a tender evening kind of melody. There's lots of similarity to "A Little Prayer," the reverent song Glennie inserts into one of the improvisations with Frith in the film Touch the Sound. "Prayer" is included on the Sugar Factory CD in the piece "Walls Are Loosening."

From there, we went straight back into bashing stuff. This is a CD "single" of remixes of "Battle Cry," taken from the Iron Sun CD mentioned above. This one loops part of Glennie's performance, using it as the percussion backdrop to a swirl of a dance instrumental with some piano notes, guitar specks, and wordless vocals.

Henry Cow -- "Bittern Storm over Ulm" -- Unrest (East Side Digital, 1991; orig. released 1974)

Had to toss this one in. It's a short Frith composition from the days when he was loosely associated with the prog rock thing. You know, I'd always read how groups like Genesis and Yes "combined" classical and rock music, but they really didn't. They don't even have as much classical influence as the books claim (or, more proprely, the classical influence gets boiled out and becomes a rock reduction). Groups like Henry Cow or Univers Zero put forth a more authentic classical/rock hybrid, and they throw in things like bassoons, to boot.

Small set of crunchy sounds from a prepared guitar, the kind of thing Frith is best known for, I think.

A pretty, slow, delicate song, with accompaniment that includes Wu Fei on the guzheng (zither/koto-like stringed instrument). Fei takes the foreground, eventually getting into some slashing sounds but still keeping to a light-blown, drifting feel, while Frith plays long, high tones that feed the music's Asian atmosphere.

Frith would return the favor by contributing some work to Wu Fei's own album, A Distant Youth, noted here.

? Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie -- "In the World to Change the World" -- The Sugar Factory (Tzadik, 2007)

Previously noted here.

Previously noted here.

* Roy Campbell Ensemble -- "Pharaoh's Revenge, Part 1" -- Akhenaten Suite (AUM Fidelity, 2008)

A full-on suite that has an Egyptian theme in the titles but possibly not in the music itself. Very nice stuff, a rich jazz vein. I'll write more after giving it a better listen.

Sun Ra in standards mode, in small-group combos, playing mostly straightahead stuff with loving care. Aside from the crazy track 4 and some nuttiness spliced into the start of track 1, you'll find little Arkestra madness here -- although the players are in the house, especially John Gilmore and Marshall Allen on saxes. They add some very nice creative touches in a standards vein (see #3 and end of #2).

This is a rerelease of a 1978 album from the Saturn label, plus two takes on "I'll Get By," recorded by Sun Ra on organ with different small combos from the Arkestra, in 1973.

The combination of Vernon Reid (guitar), Jamaaledeen Tacuma (electric bass), and G. Calvin Weston (drums), proving that it's possible to add funk drive to avant-garde jazz. Haven't heard the whole CD yet, but I'm loving it at first glance. Tacuma defines much of the sound; it's got some similarity to Mirakle, the CD he did with Derek Bailey and Calvin Weston, noted here.

* = 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.