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From: owner-zorn-list-digest@lists.xmission.com (Zorn List Digest) To: zorn-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Subject: Zorn List Digest V2 #915 Reply-To: zorn-list Sender: owner-zorn-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Errors-To: owner-zorn-list-digest@lists.xmission.com Precedence: bulk Zorn List Digest Thursday, April 27 2000 Volume 02 : Number 915 In this issue: - Evan Parker at the Knit RE: AST info Re: Evan Parker at the Knit RE: Re: AST info RE: reyseger/purves golden quartet opinion on Roy Nathanson's FIRE AT KEATON'S BAR & GRILL? re: books for sale bobby previte question Attn. Sonic Youth and Jim O'Rourke Fans ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 15:07:24 -0400 From: Jeremy Isaac Mc Cormick <jm010f@mail.rochester.edu> Subject: Evan Parker at the Knit Hey, Zornites, this is only my second post to the group, but I feel like I know what is and isn't topical from all your posts. There hasn't been to much about Zorn lately, but that's fine because we're a group of people with diverse interests united by a love of strange, beautiful, underground, and experimental music of which Zorn is just one protagonist. I must say that the Evan Parker show was perhaps some of the best free improvising I have ever seen. I was at the second set Friday night, and he played with Gerry Hemingway and Mark Dresier. They played one long improvisation and added a bass clarinetist for a second, short one. I'll just talk about the first piece, because it was incredibly memorable. Parker dominated the first half or so, spinning out long, complicated lines, using tonguing, dynamics, and circular breathing to come up with inventive, long phrases. His sound had more Coltrane in it than I expected, and he avoided the cliched blasting which saxophonists sometimes fall into in these types of musical situations. Strangely enough, he reminded me of Charlie Parker with his brilliant use of ghosted and fluffed notes. I mean, he played so beautifully, like a combo of Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and maybe a less histrionic Peter Brotzmann (am I being farfetched, here, someone tell me!), plus some Steve Lacy with the long lines. I thought, "If I still played the saxophone, I'd wanna play like that." And the rhythm section was so tight. Their particular style reminded me of electronic music I've heard, such as Reo Nodo (spelling?), in which there are phrases and beats which repeat for a few bars or three and a half bars or some other odd amount and then blend seemlessly into some other phrase or a section with no pulse (or at least one that isn't discernible to me!). These guys played off each other like I have never heard before. Mark Dresier sounded so filthy, yet somehow insanely brilliant and virtuosic. He gave the whole group a coherent, huge sound like a pile of undulating dirt. Gerry Hemingway teased with a beat that lasted maybe 10 seconds, and then he'd launch into a crazed, lopsided polka. Another similarity to experimental electronic music was their incredible inventiveness with the sounds of their instruments. Gerry Hemingway put all kinds of weird stuff on, in, and around his high-hat to get strange quiet, shimmering effects. He also got 3 or 4 distinct tones out of his bass drum, and I have no clue how he managed it. And their thoughts must have coincided with mine. I'd think, "It's getting a little bombastic and unmusical," and they'd break into a soft part right then. Or I'd think, "This is great. Play like this for the next 5 minutes," and they would! Great show. If you ever have a chance to see him live, especially with those two guys, don't pass it up. It renewed my faith in the potential for absolute musicality and inventiveness in a free-jazz type setting. I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts, especially reports on the Sunday extravaganza, the use of live electronics, and the playing he did with Berne (I forget which night). Jeremy M. - - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 14:21:50 -0500 From: "John Thomas" <jgthomas@nortelnetworks.com> Subject: RE: AST info This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. - ------_=_NextPart_001_01BFAEEB.9FE30F4E Content-Type: text/plain Jeroen: >>Yesterday afternoon I was fortunate enough to attend a concert of the >>Amsterdam String Trio (Ernst Reijseger, Maurice Horsthuis & Ernst >>Glerum) in a little church just outside Groningen. The new repertoire >>isn't as harsh and hardcore-improv is it used to be, but still as >>adventurous as their earlier material. All the pieces were >>written by Horsthuis, so that could account for the "classical" >>nature of them. Glerum mentioned a new album is upcoming on Winter & >>Winter, so that's something to look out for. Hey, that's great news! I am a definite fan of their other record _Wild West_ on Nimbus. I tried finding other records with Horsthuis mentioned in Kevin Whitehead's excellent _New Dutch Swing_ (like Amsterdam Drama) but came up empty. I am not that familiar with their total repertoire but I wound't consider _Wild West_ either harsh or hardcore-improv but it definitely has enough improv in it to satisfy me. :) Speaking of hard-to-find Dutch jazz/improv-related records, has anyone ever found a copy of Available Jelly's record _Al(l)ways_ on NOM? Cheers John - ------_=_NextPart_001_01BFAEEB.9FE30F4E Content-Type: text/html Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV=3D"Content-Type" CONTENT=3D"text/html; = charset=3Dus-ascii"> <META NAME=3D"Generator" CONTENT=3D"MS Exchange Server version = 5.5.2651.65"> <TITLE>RE: AST info</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> Jeroen: >>Yesterday = afternoon I was fortunate enough to attend a concert of the >>Amsterdam = String Trio (Ernst Reijseger, Maurice Horsthuis & Ernst >>Glerum) in = a little church just outside Groningen. The new repertoire >>isn't as = harsh and hardcore-improv is it used to be, but still as >>adventurous = as their earlier material. All the pieces were >>written by = Horsthuis, so that could account for the "classical" >>nature of = them. Glerum mentioned a new album is upcoming on Winter & >>Winter, so = that's something to look out for. Hey, that's great = news! I am a definite fan of their other record _Wild West_ on Nimbus. I tried = finding other records with Horsthuis mentioned in Kevin Whitehead's = excellent _New Dutch Swing_ (like Amsterdam Drama) but came up empty. I am not that = familiar with their total repertoire but I wound't consider _Wild West_ either = harsh or hardcore-improv but it definitely has enough improv in it to = satisfy me. :) Speaking of = hard-to-find Dutch jazz/improv-related records, has anyone ever found a copy = of Available Jelly's record _Al(l)ways_ on NOM? Cheers John </BODY> </HTML> - ------_=_NextPart_001_01BFAEEB.9FE30F4E-- - - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 16:26:16 EDT From: JonAbbey2@aol.com Subject: Re: Evan Parker at the Knit In a message dated 4/25/00 3:07:57 PM, jm010f@mail.rochester.edu writes: << I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts, especially reports on the Sunday extravaganza, the use of live electronics, and the playing he did with Berne (I forget which night). >> there's a superb review of Thursday's sets in today's NY Times: - ---------------------------------- MUSIC REVIEW Evan Parker: Trills and Rolls in a Mysterious World of His Own By BEN RATLIFF In describing Evan Parker's music, sooner or later you're going to use a circle metaphor -- a wheel, a mandala, a spiral. For 35 years he's been rigorously attached to a particular kind of soprano saxophone language, one more or less of his own devising. In it the normal jazz-improviser's code of conversational broken phrases is discarded in favor of long, continuous statements; Mr. Parker uses the technique of circular breathing, and can blow without pausing for 20 minutes or more. But rather than droning, he gives you bunches of notes that come stippled with ornament, making low tones and high overtones collide, trilling them and rolling them together so closely into line that he sounds as if he's playing two instruments at once. He lights upon distinct patterns, generates a fairly small range of harmony and uses a handful of favorite polyrhythms that he taps out on the keys. It's a system and it's instantly easy to follow, but it's mysterious, too. His performances are such a complex barrage on the ears, such an original use of wind and stamina, that they seem polymorphous: they start as coldly as math and then turn into sex. But Mr. Parker is also a generous player who listens to his collaborators. Beginning a four-night stand at the Knitting Factory on Thursday night, he played two duet sets that proceeded differently by virtue of his partners. The first was with Ned Rothenberg, and it came close to an ideal partnership. Mr. Rothenberg spent much of the set as accompanist, interjecting notes and chords on the bass clarinet that guided the listener harmonically through the gnarled rush of Mr. Parker's playing. You could see the melody and the logic in it, and it was an illumination, like reading Joyce with clear explanatory footnotes. But then he came out of his secondary role and took the spotlight himself for a short while; instead of Mr. Parker's leonine serenity, he played with a thicker, more athletic sound. Mr. Rothenberg's rhythms were different, too, shorter and more aggressive, and when he used overtones he made little tunes out of them. Richard Teitelbaum played live electronics against Mr. Parker in the second set, and it was a more speculative venture. Mr. Parker is working a lot with electronics these days, but it's mostly of a sort in which his own saxophone sounds are digitally processed and fed back to him in scrambled form, which initiates (naturally) a circular process. Mr. Teitelbaum operated differently, using his own samples and sounds, many of them referring to real things in the physical world: monkey cries, violins, drums, saxophone choirs, African singing. There was a philosophical disjunction going on here, since Mr. Parker's work is completely unmoored from references to the world outside his own playing; also, Mr. Teitelbaum's sounds were funny, whereas Mr. Parker's were anything but. Finally, Mr. Teitelbaum gave a performance that was more or less complete in itself rather than looking for the gaps to be filled; it forced Mr. Parker into a secondary role for most of the set, playing broken phrases and long tones. (He further acquiesced by playing the tenor saxophone, which makes him sound mellow and phlegmatic.) But the set ended with a territorial gesture: changing back to soprano, Mr. Parker ripped off a powerful 10-minute solo -- reasserting that his was a music of almost religious conviction, not tinkering humor. - ------------------------------------------------------- Jon www.erstwhilerecords.com - - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 16:07:57 +0200 From: "dekater" <dekater@worldonline.nl> Subject: RE: Re: AST info This is a multi-part message in MIME format. - ------=_NextPart_000_0013_01BFAF99.964C40A0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I've got a copy of Available Jelly's "Al(l)ways". It's great. Maybe = BVHaast can help you out: wbk@xs4all.nl Jan Luyben. - ------=_NextPart_000_0013_01BFAF99.964C40A0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META content=3Dtext/html;charset=3Diso-8859-1 = http-equiv=3DContent-Type> <META content=3D'"MSHTML 4.72.3612.1706"' name=3DGENERATOR> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=3D#b8b8b8> <DIV>I've got a copy of Available Jelly's = "Al(l)ways". It's great. Maybe BVHaast can help you out: <A=20 href=3D"mailto:wbk@xs4all.nl">wbk@xs4all.nl</A></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Jan = Luyben.</DIV></BODY></HTML> - ------=_NextPart_000_0013_01BFAF99.964C40A0-- - - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 16:12:22 +0200 From: "dekater" <dekater@worldonline.nl> Subject: RE: reyseger/purves This is a multi-part message in MIME format. - ------=_NextPart_000_0022_01BFAF9A.342927C0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I think you can purchase almost any Reyseger-Purves thing in the blind.=20 They're both fine players. From what I heard the duo is performing = again. Jan Luyben - ------=_NextPart_000_0022_01BFAF9A.342927C0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META content=3Dtext/html;charset=3Diso-8859-1 = http-equiv=3DContent-Type> <META content=3D'"MSHTML 4.72.3612.1706"' name=3DGENERATOR> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=3D#b8b8b8> <DIV>I think you can purchase almost any=20 Reyseger-Purves thing in the blind. </DIV> <DIV>They're both fine players. From what = I heard the=20 duo is performing again.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Jan = Luyben</DIV></BODY></HTML> - ------=_NextPart_000_0022_01BFAF9A.342927C0-- - - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 14:08:54 -0400 From: Jason Tors <jtors@organic.com> Subject: golden quartet I saw Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet [tzadik] featuring Wadada Leo Smith Anthony Davis Malachi Favors Magoustous Jack DeJohnette piqued my interest I was wondering if anyone has listened to it and can give a review. forgive me if there has already been postings on this album . - - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:38:20 -0700 From: "Patrice L. Roussel" <proussel@ichips.intel.com> Subject: opinion on Roy Nathanson's FIRE AT KEATON'S BAR & GRILL? Any opinion on the following record? - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ *** - FIRE AT KEATON'S BAR & GRILL: Roy Nathanson Roy Nathanson; Elvis Costello; Deborah Harris; etc. 2000 - Six Degrees Records (USA), 657036 1024-2 (CD) - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Also, besides Roy and the stars, who else plays on it? Thanks, Patrice. - - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 18:07:21 -0400 From: Jeremy Isaac Mc Cormick <jm010f@mail.rochester.edu> Subject: re: books for sale Hey guys, sorry to get your chops wet with offering those books, but a nice guy from zorn-list offered to buy all of them. If that doesn't happen, I will still offer them to the first people who contacted me. Later. jah jeremy - - ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 15:27:18 +1000 From: "Julian" <jcurwin@hartingdale.com.au> Subject: bobby previte question Are there any updates on whether Bobby Previte is releasing his older material, or on his recording of "The Horse"? Patrice's discography says the latter was planned for halfway through last year... - - ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 20:17:32 -0400 From: Steve Smith <ssmith36@sprynet.com> Subject: Attn. Sonic Youth and Jim O'Rourke Fans Found this on the Billboard website on Tuesday and just now got around to forwarding... hope the formatting isn't too mangled. Steve Smith ssmith36@sprynet.com NP - King Crimson, "ProzaKc Blues," 'The ConstruKction of Light' (Virgin, advance CD) ================================================ Sonic Youth Ventures Through 'NYC Ghosts & Flowers' By Chris Morris LOS ANGELES -- Sonic Youth's new DGC album, "NYC Ghosts & Flowers," due May 16, finds the veteran modern rock band at its most adventurous. "We didn't intentionally try to make a record that was completely outside," says guitarist Thurston Moore. "I just think it's weirder. It's not a noisy record. I think when people think something is kind of out, they think it's noise and skronk going on." While the 44-minute album is far less sprawling than Sonic Youth's last album, the 72-minute "A Thousand Leaves" (1998), "NYC Ghosts & Flowers" generally eschews neat song structures in favor of a more abstract approach. The set's eight tracks often veer into the evanescent terrain explored by the band in the four all-instrumental sets on its indie label SYR -- especially the most recent volume, last year's "Goodbye 20th Century," a collection of neo-classical modern works by such composers as John Cage, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros. Moore says, "In a way, our involvement with that music was really early on, in the '70s, when [guitarist] Lee [Ranaldo] and I were doing stuff with [composer Glenn] Branca, etc. That whole school was potent at the time for us, but at the same time we were very young, and we didn't lend it too much credence. It was sort of something there, informing us. It was something that made an impression on us and [that] we always somewhat employed through the years, although we were much more interested in being an all-out rock band. "I think it's not until now that we got involved with working with these musicians, with their music, and dealing with it historically and having sort of a newfound appreciation for it -- maybe just because of our own development, our age, being able to look at it as 40-year-olds," continues Moore. "That, in a way, did something. We felt we could make that music part of our world more than ever before, without losing the idea of being a four-piece rock band." Moore also attributes the texture of the album to the theft of the group's instruments. Sonic Youth's collection of modified and unusually tuned guitars, stolen from a van in L.A. last summer, has never been recovered. "That was at once completely debilitating, but on another level it was completely liberating," Moore says. "It was insane coming home and knowing that in a couple of months we had to really start working and writing and recording. This record is basically us going into the studio with nothing except scraps and picking up those scraps and jamming things in them and pretty much being a new band -- or at least having new instruments and enjoying it, because it was radicalizing us further, in a way." Additionally, the album's lyrical content -- especially on "Small Flowers Crack Concrete," a recitation with musical accompaniment reflects the impact of the Beat writers and poets and particularly the Cleveland school that included D.R. Wagner and the late d.a. levy. "I really wanted to draw more attention to the literature underground, it being really hand in hand with the music underground," Moore says. "It always has been, and I've always felt that to be a really important thing, through Dylan, through Patti Smith, and then through things... like Iggy [Pop], the way he was writing. Even those lyrics like the Ramones were writing." "NYC Ghosts & Flowers" was co-produced by Sonic Youth's longtime collaborator Wharton Tiers and Jim O'Rourke, former member of the Chicago band Gastr Del Sol and one of the Windy City's most prominent young producer/musicians. Moore says, "Jim is representative of this generation that is younger than us who we were really sort of attracted to -- as somebody who is so attuned and informed by academic musical ideas, like modern composition and avant-garde musics but at the same time is completely in love with the great work of Van Dyke Parks or Sparks." With bassist Kim Gordon, Moore's wife, now serving as a third guitarist, O'Rourke contributed some basswork to the new album and will also appear with the group on tour. "He's going to be our Eno," Moore says with a laugh. "He's going to play bass; he's going to play some guitar; he's going to play synthesizer. He's going to stand right up there in the front right next to Kim, with a Steinbrenner bass, and just bum everybody out in the front row." Moore expects Sonic Youth to begin touring at the beginning of June. He says, "We're going to run around the U.S. a little bit, a lot of Midwest kind of stuff, then go to Euro, do some stuff, and come back and do all of August with Pearl Jam. They've asked us before, and we've always [said] no, but I think we want to do it this time." - - ------------------------------ End of Zorn List Digest V2 #915 ******************************* To unsubscribe from zorn-list-digest, send an email to "majordomo@lists.xmission.com" with "unsubscribe zorn-list-digest" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message. A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "zorn-list-digest" in the commands above with "zorn-list". Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from ftp.xmission.com, in pub/lists/zorn-list/archive. These are organized by date. Problems? Email the list owner at zorn-list-owner@lists.xmission.com