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Zorn List Digest       Friday, December 7 2001       Volume 03 : Number 636



In this issue:
-
       Ian O'Brien
       Re: Boulez the terrorist
       Zorn with WDR orchestra - Dec 14-15
       Re: Zorn with WDR orchestra - Dec 14-15
       Re: Boulez the terrorist
       Re: Zorn with WDR orchestra - Dec 14-15
       Re: Boulez the terrorist
       Air
       Re: FREE FREEJAZZ SHOW
       Lou Reed's "POEtry"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2001 18:50:03 +0000
From: Philip Clarkson <[e-mail]>
Subject: Ian O'Brien

> Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 20:12:54 +0000
> From: "thomas chatterton" <[e-mail]>
> There's a new CD out by Ian O'Brien called 'History Of Things To Come'
> that's being similiarly described, as an electronica Mwandishi (Herbie
> Hancock) jazz flavoured workout, drum machines with lots of e-piano; anyone
> heard this yet?

Yes - I've got it. Certainly Herbie's Mwandishi period is a huge influence
on it, and when I tell you there are rather wonderful covers of Pat
Metheny's "A Midwestern Night's Dream" & Weather Report's "Teen Town" you
should get an idea of some of the other influences. I was surprised by how
gentle & pastoral the album is - his earlier releases, "Desert Scores"
(Ferox) & "Gigantic Days" (Peacefrog) are a lot more techno /
dance-influenced, but with the emphasis on interlocking morphing time
signatures. I think he's a really interesting artist - he's been working
recently with a few of the UK / European "broken beat" scene artists, who
you may also like, if you like this sound. In particular, there have been
strong releases by Domu ("Up & Down" on Archive, Kirk Degiorgio's As One
("21st Century Soul" on Ubiquity) & Afronuaght ("Shaping Fluid" on R&S) -
you can't go wrong with any of these, and much as I love Herbie's
"Future2Future", these releases are probably a bit more cutting-edge.

Phil Clarkson


- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2001 21:11:05 +0000
From: "Bill Ashline" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Boulez the terrorist

>From: "Remco Takken" <[e-mail]>
>Subject: Re: Boulez the terrorist

>Closest I can find, is
>'I once said that the most elegant solution of the problem of the opera was
>to blow up the opera houses, and I still think this is true. Opera is the
>area before all others in which things have stood still.' (Pierre Boulez,
>Orientations, p. 485)


This is a very smart statement by Boulez, but I suspect that few are capable
of "hearing" what he is saying, in the same way that people couldn't "hear"
what Stockhausen was saying when he made his comment, albeit in the context
of loving the concept of art, about the World Trade Center attack and
collapse.  The point, in the former case, is about a stultifying enactment
of the performative.  And in the latter case, it's about the performative in
its most virulent concrete affect.  And all the people could "hear" was the
destruction of an opera house and someone loving the attack on the WTC.
It's a reduction of metaphor to a banal statement, and this is what some
consider to be thinking.  The triumph of Bushism spreads to Europe.  If only
McCarthy could have had it so good.

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp


- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2001 14:06:53 -0500
From: Alan Lankin <[e-mail]>
Subject: Zorn with WDR orchestra - Dec 14-15

14.+15.12.2001      WDR Symphonie Orcheste, K÷ln, Philharmonie
                     John Zorn: Konzert (2001) fⁿr zwei Klaviere und
Orchester (UA) Kompositionsauftrag des WDR



Alan Lankin
[e-mail]
http://jazzmatazz.home.att.net





- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 16:04:20 -0800 (PST)
From: [e-mail] (m. rizzi)
Subject: Re: Zorn with WDR orchestra - Dec 14-15

    Weird, Zorn appears to be scheduled to play
    at Tonic in NYC on Dec. 15th according to
    their website tonic107.com

>14.+15.12.2001      WDR Symphonie Orcheste, K=F6ln, Philharmonie
>                     John Zorn: Konzert (2001) f=FCr zwei Klaviere und
>Orchester (UA) Kompositionsauftrag des WDR


- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 18:30:45 -0600
From: Joseph Zitt <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Boulez the terrorist

On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 09:11:05PM +0000, Bill Ashline wrote:

> collapse.  The point, in the former case, is about a stultifying enactment
> of the performative.  And in the latter case, it's about the performative in
> its most virulent concrete affect.  And all the people could "hear" was the
> destruction of an opera house and someone loving the attack on the WTC.

I suspect that for people to "hear" it, they might first have to know
what "performative" means and what "affect" means when used properly as
a noun :-)

- --
|> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <|
| [e-mail]           http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt |
| Latest CDs: Collaborations/ All Souls  http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt |
| Comma: Voices of New Music    Silence: the John Cage Discussion List |


- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2001 19:27:25 -0500
From: [e-mail] (Benjamin Pequet)
Subject: Re: Zorn with WDR orchestra - Dec 14-15

We are not at the end of our surprises! The man can play and have one of
his pieces performed at the same time! Otherwise indeed he'd have to be
flying a superjet.


At 16:04 6/12/01 -0800, m. rizzi wrote:

>         Weird, Zorn appears to be scheduled to play
>         at Tonic in NYC on Dec. 15th according to
>         their website tonic107.com


- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2001 16:50:02 -0800
From: "Revue des Fossiles" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Boulez the terrorist

Trying to find some more information regarding this incident I entered
"Boulez+Terrorist" into a Google search engine and this popped up at the
following URL -

http://www.classicalstuff.com/headlines.html

"Boulez Student Cleared of Responsibility in Cult Deaths
A French court has cleared Franco-Swiss conductor Michel Tabachnik of
responsibility for the deaths of 74 members of the Solar Temple doomsday
cult. The 58-year-old Tabachnik, a former student of Pierre Boulez, had been
charged with "membership in a criminal group," and prosecutors said he had
been a leading member of the cult, encouraging followers to go to their
deaths in a series of ritual killings and suicides in France, Canada, and
Switzerland between 1994 and 1997."

Does anyone know if the above incidents landed Boulez on some kind of
"watchdog" list?

Any information and clarificaton would be greatly appreciated.

Bill Ashline, your commentary re: "Stockhausen, Boulez, and Bushism" was
eloquently stated and right on target.

- - RdF.








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- -

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2001 11:56:59 +0100
From: "Andreas Dietz" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Air

jazzmatazz lists this upcoming release:

Air - All Along Air (Knitting Factory) Jan 22

can someone give some insights? is it an old live performance of
Threadgill┤s trio?

Andreas

_________________________________________________________________
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- -

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 07:34:05 -0800 (PST)
From: Andy Diaz <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: FREE FREEJAZZ SHOW

Dear Zorn Listers and Joseph,
My apologies.
Join VALVEJOB at:
> > SIBERIA IN EXILE
> > 356 W. 40th St, just east of 9th Ave
> > FRIDAY DECEMBER 7th 9:30 PM
That is in New York City.

Andy Diaz

- --- Joseph Zitt <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Remember that in posts that go to international
> lists, at least, it
> helps to mention in which
> city/province/country/continent a show will
> happen.
>
> On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 07:21:06AM -0800, Andy Diaz
> wrote:
>
> > Join VALVEJOB at:
> > SIBERIA IN EXILE
> > 356 W. 40th St, just east of 9th Ave
> > FRIDAY DECEMBER 7th 9:30 PM
>
> --
> |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~
> --- Marcel Duchamp <|
> | [e-mail]
> http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt |
> | Latest CDs: Collaborations/ All Souls
> http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt |
> | Comma: Voices of New Music    Silence: the John
> Cage Discussion List |
>


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send your FREE holiday greetings online!
http://greetings.yahoo.com

- -

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 09:09:44 EST
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Lou Reed's "POEtry"

Nice to see that Lou's working with Ornette Coleman...

November 25, 2001


Lou Reed, the Tell-Tale Rocker

By JON PARELES

IN 1845, four years before his death, Edgar Allan Poe first published "The
Imp of the Perverse," a short story about a murder. It identified a human
compulsion toward transgression and self-destruction. "The assurance of the
wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which
impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution," Poe wrote. "Nor will this
overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or
resolution into ulterior elements. It is radical, a primitive impulse —
elementary."

Some 124 years later, Lou Reed offered a more monosyallabic version of the
same idea. In the Velvet Underground's "Some Kinda Love," he sang, "Let us do
what you fear most/ That from which you recoil/ But which still makes your
eyes moist." It was not the first, and hardly the last, song in which Mr.
Reed would contemplate, as a matter-of-fact observer or playing a highly
volatile character, what goes on in the minds of people committing acts of
desperation, mania and depravity. Where Poe delivered his narratives in
elaborately sonorous prose, Mr. Reed has used a different vehicle: the rhythm
and clangor of rock.

Yet perhaps it was destined that as the 20th century ended, Mr. Reed would
find himself delving into and overhauling the works of Poe for "POEtry," a
music-theater collaboration with the director and designer Robert Wilson that
will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Tuesday to Dec. 8.

"I just love Poe's language," Mr. Reed, 59, said earlier this month. "To me,
it would slip right into my idea of what rock could be: the fun of the rhythm
of rock and the sex of rock and the physical push of it, with the real power
of the language."

From the beginning of his career, Mr. Reed has straddled the intellectual
precincts of literature and art and the down-and-dirty intensity of rock 'n'
roll. He wasn't trying to legitimize rock or to spoon-feed fancy notions to
teenagers. He was simply refusing to separate the things he loved. "I don't
see any reason why you can't like rock and be smart," he said. "We can engage
our minds within the song. There is a theory that if you engage the mind, the
crotch won't have any fun. But that's such a narrow-minded view of our
possibilities."

Mr. Reed had to invent his own path toward intelligent rock. He studied
poetry with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University, then became a contract
songwriter for Pickwick Records in the early 1960's, where he met other
musicians harboring greater ambitions. They coalesced in 1965 as the Velvet
Underground, the band that came to define New York rock. In his songs for the
Velvets, Mr. Reed defined a new street-level realism in rock, singing about
addicts, hustlers, sadomasochists and killers along with troubled lovers.

Unlike some of his latter-day admirers, Mr. Reed wasn't trafficking simply in
shock value, he insists. "There are great old blues songs that cover so much
of it; there are novels that have been covering it forever," he said. "I come
with a university background in English, so naturally it's not shocking to
me. It was only the format I presented it in. If it was a novel, you wouldn't
have spun around twice to think it was shocking. It would be, to any literate
person, a non-event. Drugs? Sex? Murder? Hello? Let's go back to Greek
tragedy. Or look at the end of `Hamlet.' But this is a very puritan country
at war with itself, and that's always been part of the problem."

The Velvets also opened up rock's sonic vocabulary to embrace not only
folk-rock and blues vamps, but minimalist drones and all-out noise. While
they maintained rigorously simple harmonies and rhythms, the Velvets tore
apart pre-existing notions of what a rock band should do with time and
texture. And while Mr. Reed's unsentimental lyrics have kept the songs from
growing dated, the music's combination of simplicity and pandemonium also
made the Velvets the ancestors of punk rock and of a school of New York music
that extends through Television and Patti Smith to the recent debut album by
the Strokes.

The Velvets forged their art connection when Andy Warhol became their
sponsor, making them the band for his touring Pop Art multimedia happening,
the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol also pushed the Velvets to keep
their harshest language and most abrasive sounds. As early as "The Gift,"
from the Velvets' 1968 album "White Light/White Heat," Mr. Reed combined a
macabrely amusing short story with roiling, inexorable music, as he has done
again in "POEtry."

Music from Mr. Reed's past has just resurfaced in the form of the Velvet
Underground's "Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes." Its three CD's were
originally recorded on cassettes at 1969 Velvets concerts in San Francisco
and St. Louis by Robert Quine, who went on to play lead guitar in Mr. Reed's
band from 1981 to 1985. (Mr. Reed, who said he had not spoken with Mr. Quine
in 15 years, had forgotten the tapes existed.) The low-fi recordings document
the Velvets' excursions from calm to chaos and back, particularly in the
three extended versions of "Sister Ray." Since then, Mr. Reed said, his
equipment has changed more than his aesthetics.

"I don't listen to anything I've ever done," he said. "Why would you? It's
unimaginable. I was there, I know what was going on. It's a version of what
I'm doing now, and it was there from the get-go, as they say. `The Quine
Tapes' have the power of youth and not worrying at that point about your ears
being hurt, not knowing enough. But that particular sound, that idea, that
approach, runs through everything I do. I've just tried, as I've gotten
older, to refine it.

"It's a sound I've always loved, from the very first day I was playing
through a broken speaker and said, `Oh ho!' All the way up to now, to a Line
6 box sitting on the floor with 100 versions of distortion, and always
thinking, `That sounds like a saxophone section,' or `You could do orchestral
things with this sound.' It's a basic idea. And if I could refine the
harmonics to just the ones I really like, and have the atonal ones when I
want them but not when I don't, that would be something. And I've spent the
better part of my life, the way a great saxophonist will try to find the
perfect reed or a violinist will look for the perfect violin, I've worked on
the best tube, the best speaker, the cone, the wood, the string, the pickup,
on and on and on."

On his solo albums since 1970, Mr. Reed's music has perambulated on a long
tether, trying horns or strings or backup singers or jazz soloists, but
regularly returning to his fundamental lineup of two guitars, bass and drums.
Meanwhile, Mr. Reed has riffled through personas sincere and ironic: a gossip
(with lyrics about Warhol's coterie in his biggest hit, "Walk on the Wild
Side"), a ranter, an adoring husband, a thoughtful mourner and a gun-toting
sociopath. He has gone through crests and troughs, but for every workmanlike
song in his repertory there is a gem or two. On his 2000 album "Ecstasy," his
character is still struggling with the imp of the perverse, as jealousy and
restlessness tear apart the romance he cherishes.

His real life is less turbulent: he and another downtown New York icon,
Laurie Anderson, are a couple. Asked about her effect on his work, he said,
"Everything's better when you're in love."

Though Mr. Reed has occasionally played the boorish rocker, he has never
disavowed literary intentions. Last year, Hyperion published "Pass Thru Fire:
The Collected Lyrics," endorsing Mr. Reed's significance as a poet. By then,
Mr. Wilson, who had gotten Mr. Reed to write songs for "Time Rocker" in 1996,
had already come up with the idea of a Poe adaptation. "Bob thought this is
something that could occur easily, without any weird rubbings going on," Mr.
Reed said.

"I saw it as a can't-win situation," Mr. Reed added with a smile. "I knew
people would say, `How dare he rewrite Poe?' But I thought, here's the
opportunity of a lifetime for real fun: to combine the kind of lyricism that
he has into a flexible rock format. I really like my version of it. It's
accessible, among other things. And I felt I was in league with the master.
In that kind of psychology, that interest in the drives and the meaning of
obsession and compulsion — in that realm Poe reigns supreme.
Particularly now, with the anxiety and everything else that's permeating our
lives right now."

Mr. Reed has just completed an audio version of "POEtry" to be released next
year. He sings most of the songs himself, backed by his own band and guest
musicians including Ornette Coleman and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. The
album also features the speaking voices of a cast that includes Elizabeth
Ashley, David Bowie, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Amanda Plummer and Fisher
Stevens.

The music in "POEtry" reaches back through Mr. Reed's entire career. With two
guitars, as usual, at its core, there's bluesy, broad-shouldered rock,
borderline funk and a mock-vaudeville interlude. The chamber- music cello of
"Street Hassle" returns; so does the austerity and almost unbearable tension
of "Berlin." As actors narrate the stories, Mr. Reed also unveils some purely
electronic music, updating both "The Gift" and the enveloping textures of
"Metal Machine Music," the feedback-and-overdubs 1975 instrumental album that
was rereleased last year and hailed as a precursor of industrial rock and
electronica.

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, "POEtry" is to be performed by the Thalia
Theater, which also presented "Time Rocker" and Mr. Wilson's collaboration
with Tom Waits, "The Black Rider." It is a troupe from Hamburg that speaks
mostly in German but sings in English. (The B.A.M. production will have
supertitles.) For "POEtry," unlike "Time Rocker," Mr. Reed has written not
only songs but dialogue, adapted from or inspired by Poe. "The intention was
to free Poe up a bit," Mr. Reed said. "To just loosen it a bit and get it out
of the book and take advantage of that amazing language going on, not to
mention that imagination. I read some of it with my jaw agape."

Mr. Reed identified not only with Poe's gallery of guilt-stricken madmen, but
with the sardonic humor and the sense of loss that also permeate Poe's
writings. "POEtry" reworks "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of
Usher," "Hop-Frog," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and
other Poe stories and poems. "These are the stories of Edgar Allan Poe," one
song announces with Reed's own bluntness. "Not exactly the boy next door." It
also includes a rewrite of "The Raven," using the original meter, in which
the narrator mentions not only his quaint and curious volumes of forgotten
lore, but also his cigarettes and Scotch.

"Within any given short story, there will be things pulled from other
sources," Mr. Reed said. "Poe keeps circling back a lot. The interests in the
stories are so much the same, and the female characters, and what happens to
them, and what they do to him, over and over and over.

"He's so contemporary," Mr. Reed added. "It would sad be if he's consigned to
some cartoon level, like the Roger Corman movies. And the language is so
beautiful. I spent so many hours with the dictionary, because some of these
words were already arcane when he used them. He was a show- off in that way.
My God, what a vocabulary. So I spent time finding out what these things
meant, and then making it a litte bit, not necessarily contemporary, but what
it actually meant. But the word he picked always had a beautiful sound."

There is a separation between Poe's grandiloquent diction and Mr. Reed's
usual pithiness, a division "POEtry" mines for laughs and epiphanies. But in
the end, it's also a collusion between two New Yorkers: two hard-boiled,
death-haunted, quietly sardonic writers who won't avert their gaze from the
worst they can see or imagine. "Obsession and guilt are reasons people write
in the first place," Mr. Reed said. "They are big continents to explore. For
Poe, and for me too."


______________________________________________________________________
Phil Spector: "I've been listening to a lot of Andrew Lloyd Webber lately,
and enjoying it. Someday I hope to set his stuff to music."





- -

------------------------------

End of Zorn List Digest V3 #636
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