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Berliner Festspiele | Jazzfest Berlin 2018 WDR Big Band feat. Jazzmeia Horn / Jason Moran – The Harlem Hellfighters | 3. November 2018 Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Große Bühne

Yesterday, I had the great honor of seeing Jason Moran’s Harlem Hellfighters project at the Berklee Theater in Boston. This is a project dedicated to the music and memory of James Reese Europe, the early jazz composer and conductor who, in directing an all-Black band of soldiers in World War I, did more than anyone to introduce the concept of jazz to Europe. Moran is deeply invested in jazz history and you can hear it in the music he plays and the projects he takes on. This was great stuff. The material, just played straight through with only one song break over an hour, ranges from arrangements clearly set in the early 20th century world of Reese to some pretty intense free jazz explorations for short periods of time. And it covers just about everything in between as well. The performance is combined with a video presentation that includes a little bit of footage of Reese, some World War I photos of Black soldiers, some modern stuff representing Reese and the places in his life, and whatever else the cinematographer wanted to do.

This was the second time I’ve seen Moran. The first was him leading a trio with Mary Halvorson on guitar and Ron Miles (RIP) on trumpet. Somehow, this was even better than that.

The band starts with Moran and his two most usual collaborators–Tarus Mateen on electric bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. OK, we need to talk about Waits. That guy is a fucking animal on the drums. I mean, absolutely one of the best drummers I’ve ever seen. I already knew this about him from reputation, but I had not seen him live before. It was astounding to watch him work. Also, Moran plays the piano facing the band, which means you can’t see his face, but you can see his hands work. I think it’s better that way, plus it puts him in more of a constant conversation with his band.

The rest of the band is a seven-man horn section. That includes Immanuel Wilkins on alto sax, Jose Davila on tuba, Darryl Harper on flute and clarinet, David Adewumi on trumpet, Brian Settles on tenor sax, Reginald Cyntje on trombone, and Chris Bates on trombone. This replicates the horn based work of early jazz in the big band era. So the horns dominate many of arrangements. The sound is beautiful and it is also LOUD. Which I like of course.

I also thought I would share Moran’s artist statement in the program for the evening. It’s better than me explaining it.

In other news:

With the release of the new Yo La Tengo album (reviewed below), Ira Kaplan picks his five favorite YLT songs. Might not have been my choices, but it’s his band!

Always always always have to respect those who start record labels dedicated to releasing great music that is forgotten about or just never got popular in the first place.

Presumably, the loud volume of my music when driving affects me in a positive way, making me a more awesome driver, and I refuse to read any evidence otherwise.

Like hip hop, zydeco is a music of poverty that takes on those issues. Not sure how much else there is in common between hip hop and zydeco.

Anyone in the neighborhood of Athens, Texas obviously needs to attend the Bob Wills Birthday Ball. Aaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaa.

Playing opera to discourage homeless people from sleeping at your gas station while also annoying everyone else around you is one way to get people to hate opera I guess.

I assume everyone is down for a Mastodon rock opera.

Good discussion of Wilko Johnson. Dr. Feelgood is not a favorite band of mine, but is obviously a historically important band.

I assume most of the things Frank Ocean has done in the seven years since the release of Blonde is smoke weed, but evidently he’s done some other things too.

This week’s playlist, a short one due to a lot of shuffle on ye olde itunes:

  1. Flaco Jimenez, self-titled
  2. Cat Power, You Are Free
  3. Matthew Shipp, Equilibrium
  4. Reggie Workman, Cerebral Caverns
  5. Alejandro Escovedo, A Man Under the Influence
  6. Waxahatchee, Saint Cloud
  7. Margo Price, All American Made
  8. Old & In the Way, self-titled
  9. Bomba Estéreo, Elegancia Tropical
  10. Ray Price, Night Life
  11. Townes Van Zandt, Our Mother the Mountain
  12. Rihanna, Talk This Talk
  13. Willie Nelson, Teatro
  14. The Tallest Man on Earth, The Wild Hunt
  15. Jason Isbell, Sirens of the Ditch
  16. William Parker, I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield
  17. Wussy, Funeral Dress II
  18. Morgan Wade, Reckless
  19. Arthur Russell, Love is Overtaking Me
  20. Marissa Nadler, For My Crimes
  21. Mitski, Laurel Hell
  22. Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy
  23. The Coathangers, Parasite
  24. Tropical Fuck Storm, A Laughing Death in Meat Space
  25. Buddy Miller, Universal United House of Prayer
  26. Wussy, What Heaven is Like
  27. Loretta Lynn, The Definitive Collection

Album Reviews:

Ben Monder/Tony Malaby/Tom Rainey, Live at 55 Bar

Three masters of modern jazz got together just days before Covid shut everything down, played a couple of days of awesome music, and then went home to put it together as a recording. In fact, 55 Bar never really recovered from the pandemic and is now permanently closed, much to my chagrin. Monder and Malaby have played together forever now and understand each other in the perfect way that makes modern improvisation work so well.

Plus, this has loud guitar. And this leads to a different point–how Sonny Sharrock saved my musical taste. When I was early in my college days, I was not really part of any kind of music scene. Most of my friends were listening to just your standard music of the day and I was already kind of branching out. Initially, that went into prog rock. Some of it was OK, but once I heard shit like Emerson Lake & Palmer or Yes, I backed way the hell off. But still, I was interested in complicated music and didn’t really know where to hear that. I started listening to Miles and Coltrane about that time too and that helped.

Then I heard Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages. I still think this is the best jazz album of all time. But the reason I bring it up here is that as someone who grew up on rock and roll, hearing the guitar used that way totally changed my life. It sent me down completely different paths–to Bill Frisell, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, and then so many other people. And so even today, when I hear the guitar used in this way like in this album, I am instantly hooked. In short, this is jazz for people who like rock and roll.

A-

Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World

There are two different Yo La Tengos. They are both very good Yo La Tengos. One, and the one we see most often these days, is the quiet contemplative YLT. Most of their last albums have worked this vein. But then there’s also the noisy, guitar riffing YLT. And that’s what this brand new album is. It’s so wonderful to hear again. I don’t think this is exactly a great album. It’s not I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One or I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Kick Your Ass. The guitar on those epic albums go on forever, plus you have the great songwriting and the outstanding covers that the band does so well. But this is just a tick under those albums, with more legible vocals and just more fun than we’ve heard from the band recently. Some of these songs are going to rule live.

A-

Death Cab for Cutie, Thank You For Today

Oh, this is OK. It’s dad rock and not a very exciting version of that either. It’s not bad. If you have been listening to Death Cab for twenty years, I bet you liked this album fairly well. If you’ve been listening to new trends in music since then, this probably comes off as kinda boring. Interesting to wonder this was really dad rock when they were popular in 2005. Maybe it was.

B-

Tune-Yards, Sketchy

Like most Tune-Yards albums, pretty funky, a little silly, kind of annoying at times (a one minute silent track in the middle of album automatically deducts 1/3 a grade). Always thought this would be fun live, but the albums seem really insubstantial. Can’t say it’s too different here. It’s not uninteresting. It’s just that I can’t get myself to care all that much about anything going on here. Again, I think it would be a lot of fun live. But to really get into the albums requires getting this band in a way that I never will.

B

The Weeknd, Dawn FM

One of last year’s major pop releases and one can hear why. This is first rate pop music, plus a pretty powerful confessional by Quincy Jones about losing his mother, having a terrible stepmother, and how this affected his relationships with women for a very long time. Death is the theme and while you can write bad songs about death if you get too literal about it, here it is more the existential crisis of death that is supreme and that’s is filled with possibility. Yeah, some of the songs are more standard pop about sex and breakups and those work find too. Great cameos from Tyler, the Creator and Lil’ Wayne. Could probably do without the Jim Carrey voice overs on the death radio station. But whatever. Evidently they are actually neighbors, which says a lot about the class of people The Weeknd now runs in. But this is contemplative pop music and how often do we really get that?

A-

Latin Playboys, Dose

Deep archival album this week, the second album from the Los Lobos side project of David Hildalgo, Latin Playboys, from 1999. The first album, from 94, I knew reasonably well back in the day, though I remember basically wondering how this was different than a Los Lobos album except for no Cesar Rojas. So I figured, let’s check this out a mere quarter-century after its release. Maybe I’m remembering that release incorrectly though because this is such a clearly left field album compared to your average Los Lobos album–less rootsy, a little more experimental, a little less obviously accessible. I’m not sure that this is any great album–the songs don’t really rise above the sound, which is to me the problem with most Los Lobos albums after about 1995. I love the Mexican folk music sounding violin sawing away with the odd drums on “Mustard,” for example, but the song itself is eminently forgettable. In the end though, I love the sound experiments more than I am indifferent about the lyrics, so yeah, this is cool.

A-

Whitehorse, I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying

An alright and reasonably pleasant but also rather toothless new album from this venerable Canadian folk-country outfit made up of a married couple. Some of the songs are pretty strong, though others tend to fall toward cliche or kind of lame arrangements. In the end, you can find better country out there, even if this couple does sing nicely together. Kind of remind me actually of Robin and Linda Williams, a nice couple who created a real solid career doing country-folk music together but never to me left an album I thought was exciting enough to listen to twice.

B-

Jockstrap, I Love You Jennifer B

I hate the name of this band and I am a fan of Drive By Truckers and Wussy, so bad band names are not something that drives me away. But this band isn’t going to change my mind about their band name. This is indie-electronic that often doesn’t go anywhere. Sometimes the songs grab your attention, usually they do not. She can sing, no doubt, but I wish she sang with a purpose more often.

B-

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.

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