Leap In The Dark

Jazz and improvisation have gone together like bread and butter since the first player stepped out to blow a lead. There is something about the music that just lends itself to allowing musicians the freedom to explore all a piece of music has to offer. However, it's jazz's free form nature which seems to have worked against its integration with orchestral works. Although modern composers have drawn upon many other elements of contemporary music and technologies, orchestral and jazz haven't seemed to be able to find the comfort zone where they can blend easily.

At least that's how Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris saw it, and what prompted him to develop his system of "playing" an ensemble called conduction. Conduction is a serious of gestures, including facial expression, that allow a conductor to generate notation for his performers on the fly based on factors like what the audience is feeling, who is playing in the band that night, the backgrounds of the musicians involved, (musically and otherwise), and of course whatever is needed to fulfill the emotional requirements of the music. There are hand gestures to change the rhythm, have sections repeated, have an instrument play in a higher or lower register, to silence, and to control volume. Needless to say that in order for a band to successfully carry off this type of performance, in which there are no written scores or arrangements, everybody involved has to be completely familiar with the vocabulary of gestures and be skilled enough a player to keep up with what are rapid fire changes.

One such collective of musicians who are emulating Butch Morris are Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, who are set to release Making Love To The Dark Ages, on the Live Wired Music, March 17th/09, a disc comprised of pieces produced using conduction. Handling the conduction duties for Burnt Sugar is Greg Tate, and because this is a studio performance his job is also expanded to included those post production duties of a producer as well. However, he does more than just add a little reverb here, or clean up the pitch there, he takes full advantage of the broad spectrum of electronic music, sampling, and other "non-played" instruments that are now available to bands and musicians to round out the sound.

This all sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster; a mishmash of sounds that end up being discordant at best and absolute hell at its worst. Yet when you listen to pieces like "Chains And Water, A, B, and C", they sound like they have been as carefully orchestrated as any piece of music with full notation and separate arrangements for each instrument. Each part, from the vocals to the electronic effects, sound and feel as if they were carefully rehearsed for days in advance. In fact before I read any of the accompanying press package that came with the disc, I wouldn't have been able to tell from listening the extent to which improvisation was involved in the creation of any of the pieces.

Now part of that comes from the players all buying into the system and learning the vocabulary of gestures that Tate uses. However it also necessitates having musicians of some skill, ones who are able to do things like change direction on a dime without missing a beat or inverting the rhythmic pattern of a song without it turning chaotic and confusing. For those who are able to rise to this challenge, they are awarded with the gift of freedom like they've probably not experienced before in a large group format. For instead of simply playing their part in the charts, they are able to explore their instrument's potential within the parameters allowed by which ever gesture has been employed by Tate at the time. Since those are everything from repeat that phrase again, to repeat that phrase but this time do it with a Latin beat, it's not what you could call limiting.

Now lest you think this is just unorganized chaos with everybody simply playing what they want, the music is developed along themes. So each track on Making Love To The Dark Ages builds from a consistent motif established prior to it being played. Therefore, the song always starts the same, where it ends up travelling to, on the other hand, is another story. What makes this music so intoxicating to listen to is the surprises that await the listener while accompanying the musicians on their journey.

The title track, "Making Love To Dark The Ages", is Tate's response to eight years of a Bush administration that in his mind created a world in which selfishness, inequity, and cruelty were commonplace. While at times the song descends into a wild cacophony that reflects the turmoil and ugliness of those behaviours, it also carries within it the sound of resilience, the belief that the world can and will recover from those years. There were two instruments, or sounds, that stood out in particular for me in this piece because of their contrasting influences on the overall tone; an improvised scat vocal line that insisted on being heard in spite of everything else going on around it and the metallic sounds of electronic music which verged on being annoying because of its constant demands to be heard.

On the one hand there was the most human of all musical sounds, the human voice, and on the other, there was its antithesis, the sound of a machine, the voice of all that couldn't care less who was washed away or swept under in the course of events. Between these two polar opposites swirled the confusing sounds of other instruments that began to feel like the state of chaos formed by the pull both forces could exert on people. During the past eight years it has sometimes felt like we were being forced to choose between the inexorable pull of technology and compassion and caring, instead of finding a way for them to work in harmony, and this song managed to bring those feelings to life.

Perhaps this is what's truly most amazing about Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber's CD Making Love To The Dark Ages, the fact they are able to convey complex ideas and emotions through music in such a way the listener is able to relate to it on their own terms. You don't need to understand how they are making their to music to know it is powerful and amazing. However, it does make it all the more amazing when you do. Improvisation in music has come a long way from a horn player standing up an riffing a few bars around the theme of a song, and Burnt Sugar Arkestra Chamber are one of the most accomplished ensembles working in that field today.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:47 PM | Permalink

Anybody familiar with even the most basic history of jazz and blues knows how they both have their origins in African tribal music that came to North America with slaves. When the slaves were Christianized by their masters those sounds formed the basis for the music of their churches, which in turn provided the inspiration for its secular cousins jazz and blues. Of course African American traditional, or folk music, isn't the only one to have inspired other genres. In Louisiana's Cajun music one can hear the sounds of Normandy that were brought south by the deported former settlers of New France, the Acadians, while traditional Hungarian, Romanian, and Roma (gypsy) music inspired the orchestral compositions of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok.

So it's only natural for a jazz musician whose origins are in South East Asia to want and go back to the traditional music of where he was born and use it as inspiration for a new series of compositions. Which is exactly what Fareed Haque has done with his latest group, Fareed Haque & The Flat Earth Ensemble, on the soon to be released CD, Flat Planet, on the Owl Studios label. Drawing specifically upon the folk music of Pakistan and North Western India (which is also the basis for today's Bollywood music as well) Haque's intent was to emulate fellow jazz musicians of African American descent embracing of, what he calls, "the groove of gospel music", by doing the same with "the groove of my own heritage". Punjabi folk music, he claims, is to India what gospel is to America - funky, fun, danceable and spiritual.

In order to achieve his goal Haque has augmented Flat Earth Ensemble's regular line up with some special guests. The band is already a mix of traditions featuring as it does players on the instruments we normally associate with jazz; guitars, saxophone, drums, keyboards, and bass as well as those playing tabla, dhol, and other South East Asian percussion instruments. However the addition of sitar and Hindustani violin allows them to expand their sound even more and explore melody as well as rhythm.

Anyone familiar with Bollywood musicals, especially modern ones, and movies like Bend It Like Beckham that have brought Indian music to Western audiences, will know that Haque isn't exaggerating with his description of the music as funky and fun. However if you come to this disc expecting to hear something along the lines of what you'd hear in one of those movies you'll be disappointed. Remember he's not trying to recreate either Bollywood, traditional folk, or even the dance hall music that has sprung up out of the fusion of Bhangra (the name given a specific type of folk and dance music from the Punjabi region of India) with hip-hop, reggae, and house music. What he's doing is creating music that draws upon those influences like jazz draws upon gospel.

While some of the tracks have beats and sounds that make them immediately identifiable as South East Asian, much like you can hear identifiable elements of funk in some jazz fusion projects, there are quite a few more where he's taken a couple of quantum leaps away from his source material to create something new. However, in order to ensure that listeners are able to appreciate, as much as possible, what he has created, Haque builds up to those pieces by beginning the disc with songs containing elements of either rhythm or melody that we can identify with. It's like he's showing us the various stages he went through in working with the music in order to develop his final sound.

Whether it's the track that leads off the disc, "Big Bhangra", with its insistent, tabla and kanjira driven beat that evokes the pulsating rhythm that propels dancers across the screen of a Bollywood musical, or "The Chant", incorporating sitar and violin to flavour the melody, the tracks at the beginning of the disc introduce the listener to the various elements that are used in the traditional music. However, even with these tunes he and the band are starting to expand and develop those aspects and give you an indication of the direction he will taking the music in.

Somehow or other, even at this stage, the music doesn't seem like a fusion of sounds, where one has been welded onto the other. Instead it feels like Haque and his band are taking individual elements - as described above - and seeing how they interact with the band's regular sound in order to develop something new. It's like they are asking themselves what does a sitar do to the melody line of a song and how can we create that feel without actually using its sound? Of course, as these songs are in of themselves great pieces of music, the music is nowhere near as clinical as that sort of description makes it sound. However, as we progress further into the recording and the band is pared back to only its original membership, we begin to feel the Punjabi influence more than actually hear Punjabi sounds in the music.

So by the time we reach the conclusion of the disc, three movements from "The Four Corners Suite"; tracks nine ("North"), ten ("South"), and eleven ("West"), Haque and the rest of The Flat Earth Ensemble have created a sound in which you can hear the debt owed to the folk music without actually hearing any of its distinctive elements. It's like you would never think to hear it that John Coletrane's music is related to African American gospel, as it has evolved so far from that sound.

Flat Planet by Fareed Haque & The Flat Earth Ensemble is a great disc that's not only filled with interesting and fun music, but gives you an insight into how a musician will develop a new sound. Derived from the traditional music of the Punjabi region of India and the surrounding environs, the sound he ultimately creates is not only appreciative of Haque's cultural background, but beautiful in its own right.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:07 PM | Permalink

Have you ever considered what makes a story that is told different from a story that is written down? The most obvious one is your relationship to the person who is recounting the tale. In the case of a story that's been put down on paper there is a sense of distance between the author and what they are recounting, while the story teller is more directly involved with his narration. Whether or not what they are telling you actually happened is irrelevant, their physical presence and the sound of their voice connects them to their story in a way that creates an intimacy that is hard to recreate with the written word.

It's been my experience that when a story that was originally told is converted into a written work it loses that sense of intimacy. However, that was before I read A Life Full Of Holes, published by Harper Collins Canada, a story told by Moroccan author Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (the pen name of Larbi Layachi) that was recorded and translated by the great American writer Paul Bowles. Somehow or other, even though you are reading this story, it manages to capture the experience of having it told to you.

According to the introduction this story was told to Bowles by Charhadi over the course of a couple of months. Charhadi would simply plunk himself down in front of the tape recorder and tell a section of the story without stopping or even pausing to think about what he was going to say next. Instead of adapting the story into something polished, Bowles elected to simply translate it from Charhadi's dialect as literally as possible without any editing.

A Life Full Of Holes is the of the story of Ahmed ben Said Haddari in Morocco. Told in the first person, the story follows him from early childhood through adolescence until adulthood. The picture that is painted is one of abject poverty and misery as he tells us of the various ways in which he tries to make a living, and the misadventures that befall him. From his step-father who refuses to feed him unless he goes to work when he's a child, the beatings he experiences at the hands of bullies, the racism he faces from the Europeans (referred to as Nazarenes in reference to the fact that their prophet Jesus was originally from Nazareth) who occupy and rule Morocco, to the times he spends in jail, his life is one long struggle to survive. Every time it looks like he might finally be getting his head above water something happens to pull him back under again.

What makes this story so powerful is the straight forward manner that Ahmed reports on what happens to him. Whether it's the prison guards stealing the food and cigarettes his mother has brought him in jail or him being arrested for being in possession of kif and his sentence being decided by a representative of the tobacco industry (they want people to smoke tobacco instead of kif and pressure judges into passing stiff sentences against kif users in order to discourage its use and force people to switch to their product), his various misfortunes are presented in a matter of fact manner that makes them seem like everyday occurrences that could and do befall everybody.

There is something about reading about injustices presented without emotion that makes them even more disturbing. It makes them seem like just another part of life that people have to deal with, and that nothing anybody does is going to make it any better. It doesn't seem to matter whether it's the Europeans or fellow Arabs in charge, as anybody whom Ahmed comes across who has some sort of power is corrupt in one way or another.

There is a pervasive element of fatalism that flows throughout A Life Full Of Holes that is personified by the way Ahmed and other characters accept their lot in life. "Allah wills it" - God wills it - eventually becomes his one solace against misfortune as it allows him to take whatever comes his way with a certain level of equanimity. There's no point in getting upset about being sentenced to jail for three years for something you didn't do, because there's nothing you can do about it anyway. If its God's will that you're going to spend that time in jail, you might as well just try to make the best of a bad situation instead of giving yourself aggravation by fighting the inevitable.

What really gives this book its power though is the fact that in spite of it being written out, you still have the sense that the story is being told to you. While Charhadi electing to tell it from the point of view of his lead character in the first person helps create that impression, the fact that it is told completely in the present tense gives it an immediacy that's normally lacking in a written narrative. Each stage of Ahmed's life is recounted while he is living it, so we are experiencing it at the same time he does with none of the usual division between characters and readers.

A Life Full Of Holes is not only a powerful and slightly horrifying portrayal of life for the poorest of the poor in colonial Morocco in the 1960's, it's also a brilliant example of how it's possible to recreate the magic and immediacy of oral story-telling in writing. Most times when people write out a story that's been told to them they tend to adapt it to meet the needs of the novel form. That's not been the case here, and the result is something truly unique and special.

A Life Full Of Holes can be purchased either directly from Harper Collins Canada or through an on line retailer like Amazon.ca

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:54 PM | Permalink

My first introduction to the band Yes came via my older brother's record collection back in the early 1970's when I found his copy of the triple album set Yes Songs. The first thing that grabbed my attention about the collection was, like I'm sure so many other people, Roger Dean's art work. The futuristic, and fantastic, landscapes that decorated both the outer and inner sleeves of the album were sufficiently bizarre (even today his work from that time makes me think of giant toadstools) that it made me want to hear the music that inspired it.

In those days swirling synthesizers, twenty minute songs, and the use of orchestral instruments in pop music was still a novelty and so the music lived up to the expectations that the artwork created that this was going to be something different. However once the novelty wore off I quickly tired of their music. For while there was no question that they expanded the horizons of pop music's potential with their approach to composition and their incorporation of electronics, their material all began to sound the same very quickly. Instead of continuing to push the envelope of discovery that they had begun by continuing to experiment, they seemed to have settled on a formula and stuck with it.

That's not to say that I've ignored the band, or the solo careers of various individuals after they left Yes, in the years since then. Periodically I've checked out what they've been doing in the hopes that they've managed to recapture that spark of invention that inspired their first albums and that maybe one of them will have come up with something a little different or new. It was for this reason that I decided to check out the DVD, Tour Of The Universe, distributed by MVD Video, that was created out of a live concert that Jon Anderson, one time, and still occasional, lead singer of Yes, gave at the XM Satellite Radio station in Washington DC in 2004. While some of the concert was going to be comprised of older material from Yes and Anderson's solo career, it was the promise of new material that really interested me.

Anyone even slightly familiar with the music of Yes will remember Jon Anderson's very distinctive soprano voice. It was the perfect match for the keyboards and the ethereal sound that the band was after. While the voice hasn't changed at all, what has changed is Anderson's approach to the music. While the music was as lush and textured as one would expect from a former member of Yes, the focus was primarily on Anderson's voice and whatever instrument he was playing live. (As this was a real solo gig, all accompaniment was pre-recorded or pre-programmed)

The combination of Anderson's voice and one of either the semi-acoustic guitar, classical guitar, harp, or simple electric piano that he chose to play resulted in a sound that had more in common with traditional folk music of the British Isles than anything that Yes had ever produced. There had always been that underlying element to a lot of Yes' and Anderson's music in the past, but here he brought it into the foreground. Instead of electronic music that had a suggestion of folk undertones, the traditional music was brought front and centre and the electronics were used to generate an ethereal atmosphere evocative of the bygone era where the music originated.

Contributing to this atmosphere were the elaborate post production visual effects that had been added to the music. Although the concert was recorded live, almost every song has been turned into a video presentation that accents its theme. While some of these were slightly cliched, the video for "White Buffalo" was almost embarrassing in the way it presented Native Americans, others were beautiful in the way they were able capture the feelings generated by the music and bring them to life. It was those times, where the music and the visuals synchronized, that the connection to the older time that the music was striving to recreate was the strongest, and they were also some of the most powerful moments on the DVD.

Unfortunately, instead of letting us draw our own conclusions from the music and visuals that he has created for us on Tour Of The Universe Anderson is proselytizing a "philosophy". It appears that he has become fascinated with the concept of the "Golden Mean" and sees it as having some sort of bearing on the answer to the secrets of the universe. The Golden Mean, as far as I could understand from the special features included with the DVD, is a geometric formula that was first developed by Euclid in Classical Greek times that expresses the relationship of two parts of a whole with each other and with the whole. So, unfortunately, we are forced to endure quite a bit of what amounts to no more than what I would refer to as New Age nonsense being foisted on us while listening to the music.

If that isn't bad enough, even more annoying are the constant interruptions by somebody from XM Satellite Radio spouting metaphysical garbage about the power of satellite radio and how it will change the world. In fact we are subject to quite a number of commercials for the station throughout the course of the DVD, so whatever flow or sense of continuity that Anderson might have been trying to create with his music is disrupted. It's all very well and good that the concert was filmed in their studios, but they simply make themselves look silly and unprofessional by their constant interruptions.

The sound and visual quality of this disc are uniformly excellent as you have the option of 5.1 DTS Surround, 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround, or plain Dolby Digital Stereo and NTSC 16:9 wide screen display. As I mentioned before the special features focus on the wonders of the Golden Mean, and unless you've an interest in that subject they can easily be ignored.

In the end, in spite of the distractions, Tour Of The Universe will be a treat for people who are fans of Jon Anderson. The twenty plus songs in the concert include re-workings of vintage numbers from his days in Yes and new material being played for the first time. Even those who may not have been fans of the band, or who tired of the excesses of progressive rock, can't help but appreciate the sincerity and elegance of his performance.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:58 PM | Permalink

Iggy Pop is one of those names that seems to have been around for ever. I can't remember when I first heard of him, but I do remember knowing who he was in 1977 when people were excited by the fact that David Bowie was playing keyboards in the band that he was currently touring with. Part of his renown came from the infamy associated with the rumours of his cutting himself on stage with glass or that he vomited on stage, but the other part was that he had been performing punk rock before punk rock even existed. However for all that, I actually knew very little about the man or his history.

The documentary film Iggy Pop: Lust For Life was shot in 1986 when Iggy showed up on the charts again with a song of the same name. It features interviews with both Iggy and the Stooges' lead guitar player, the late Ron Asheton, concert footage from 1986, and archival footage of the Stooges dating back to their early days in Ann Arbor Michigan playing on campus at the University of Michigan. Released by MVD Entertainment Group on DVD for what might be the first time, the forty-five minute film gives those who don't much about the man and the band aside from the name and the reputation not only a substantial amount of information about them, but also a sampling of their musical career to that point.

The first surprise is finding out that Iggy and the Stooges formed in 1969 and were playing the two to three chord punk sound that became the hallmark of bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Interestingly enough, Iggy sites in an interview one of his earliest influences being the electric blues of Chicago. He talks of a trip he made to that city in the mid 1960's and how the music blew him away with its honesty and rawness. In the same interview he said that as a little white guy he couldn't very well do what they were doing, but it did inspire him to try and find his own way of being that honest in his expression.

One of the funniest pieces of archival footage that makes up part of the film is an out take from an interview Iggy did on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) back in 1977 with a very uncomfortable looking Peter Gzowski on one of Canada's earliest late night talk show, 90 Minutes Live. At one point Gzowski asked about punk rock and Iggy responded by saying that only dilettantes referred to it as punk rock because punk was a derogatory term. When Gzowski pressed him about the rumours of his having vomited during a show he calmly replied that it only happened once when he wasn't feeling well. As he knew he was going to be sick, he said, he decided to try and make it as artistic as possible - and proceeded to jump and demonstrate how you can be physically sick artistically. (minus the puke)

Watching him during that interview it was hard not to believe that he had a serious drug habit. There was just something about the way he handled himself and his speech patterns that led one to believe he had to be using something. In the interviews with Ron Asheton, who sadly died on January 09th/09 after the Stooges had only recently reunited, he not only talks about the early days of playing together, but the fact that it was heroin use that caused the band to break up for the first time back in the 1970's. He doesn't mention anybody's name specifically, but it was pretty obvious he was talking about Iggy.

These interviews were shot in 1986 when Iggy was having some commercial success with his release Blah Blah Blah and the song "Real Wild Child", but he wasn't playing with Ron or any of the other original members of the Stooges. While the interview with Iggy takes place on a rooftop in New York City, and has the feel of a "rock star" interview, the one with Ron takes place back in Ann Arbor, and has him leading the crew around to visit all the old sites where the band used to rehearse, gig, and sell drugs. He doesn't look very much like a rock star anymore as he stands in the basement of his parent's home where he and the guys used to rehearse back in the late 1960's, and where he came up with the guitar sound that was their distinguishing signature.

While the interviews with both Iggy and Ron are informative and fun as Iggy is a fascinating man, and Ron has no compunctions about being completely honest about how he feels when it comes to the band's demise and his current (1986) relationship with Iggy, other parts of the movie are a little bit disconcerting. For while all the interviews are conducted in English, the voice over narration is in German and there are no sub-titles provided to tell you what's being said. While some of it is fairly easy to guess at - introductions to songs aren't that much different whether they're done in English or German - there's other times when it would be nice to know what the heck the narrator is talking about.

I also understand that while it makes sense to talk about which groups and musicians influenced the Stooges, and who they in turn influenced, it seemed sort of silly to play a full song, "Anarchy". by the Sex Pistols, and a fair bit of music by Jimi Hendrix (according to Ron one of the band's biggest early influences) instead of filling that space with music by the Stooges. As for the concert footage of Iggy and The Stooges, the pieces taken from Iggy's 1986 tour were of reasonable quality, but most of the other clips, including the previously mentioned interview with Peter Gzowski, are not that good. Either the sound is full of static or the picture is poor. While it's sort of neat to see grainy black and white footage of the Stooges playing an early concert in Ann Arbor, the quality is so poor that you can't even make out what songs the band are playing.

Iggy Pop is one of the seminal figures in American popular music as his music laid the groundwork for many of the punk and garage rock bands that became prominent in the 1970's and 1980's. While Iggy Pop: Lust For Life does a good job of providing us with a portrait of the man and the early history of the band, there really isn't quite enough examples of their music to back up the facts. There are no special features to augment the movie, and even though the sound is Dolby digital, it doesn't do much for clips where the music can't be discerned in the first place. The movie is a good introduction to the man and his band, but leaves you wanting more, for at forty-five minutes it can only scratch the surface of what has to be a far more involved history than the one depicted here.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:39 AM | Permalink