Mars Williams

Proudly, I can say that I didn’t know it was Mars Williams up on stage, and he did indeed blow me away. To me, the Psychedelic Furs were the band my younger sister liked for their dreamy, glossy songs. I went in with modest expectations and walked away thinking, wow, those guys rock more than I expected, and whoever plays sax for them is a monster.

That was a couple of years ago. A friend had an extra ticket to the Cruel World festival in Los Angeles — a day full of ’80s nostalgia acts and some related modern-day artists like Blaqk Audio. Not a jazz scene, obviously. The main attraction for me was Devo. (I will forever savor and envy The New York Times’ October 2023 headline: Devo’s Future Came True.) The surprise highlight, and the thing that still sticks in my mind most strongly, was Mars.

Mars died of cancer earlier in November, as I learned through Peter Margasak’s Nowhere Street newsletter. On Mars’ GoFundMe page, Mars’ family notes that when treatments proved ineffective, he opted to “spend six weeks of the time he had left living as he had since he was a teenager — out on the road performing night after night.” Good for you, Mars.

I knew Mars’ name and work — but apparently not his face — from the Chicago avant-garde scene, the same vector that brought me to Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, Nicole Mitchell, Dave Rempis, and so many others. It’s tragic that he won’t be here for one last round of the Ayler Xmas shows.

Elsewhere: Martin Schray provided thoughtful words for the Free Jazz Collective, including a blitz of Mars Williams recommendations. Hannah Butler wrote a touching obituary for the Chicago Tribune.

Craig Taborn would like 60 seconds of your time, 60 times

60 x Sixty arrived in September with minimal explanation. The main thing to know is that it’s Craig Taborn’s experiment, an online set of sixty 60-second pieces played in random order. It exists at https://60xsixty.com.

I think of 60 x Sixty as a museum installation built to be experienced from afar. In addition to the varying moods and textures of the music, each track is illustrated by one color, possibly selected at random, filling the browser window. You’re suffused in color, which can make the musical journey feel more like participating in an immersive film (albeit one where nothing physically happens). The color does not necessarily complement the sounds — and yet, you can’t help but try to marry the two.

The music is mostly electronic (solo piano makes several appearances), sometimes busy, sometimes sparse, but always conveying that placid “museum installation” feeling, even when an individual piece presents jarring rhythms or tumbling layers of motion. The tone of each musical doodle stays level — no sudden shifts within any given 60 seconds.

The pieces never feel long, for obvious reasons, but some pieces do seem to linger and develop, while others feel like they make a quick statement and then bow out. I think this was mostly a function of whether my attention was diverted — but then again, some of the “shortest” songs were the ones closest to a conventional melody and rhythm. Maybe those pieces simply offered less to explore.

It’s tempting here to draw comparisons to The Residents’ Commercial Album, which likewise consisted of 60-second tracks. Some of Taborn’s pure synth creations even feel like they could fit on that album. The Residents, though, were coming from a prankster’s POV, the conceit being that they were reducing pop songs to the essentials, stripping away repeated verses and choruses. 60 x Sixty is a more serious exploration of time and attention.

I don’t think my notes from my first listen are all that instructive, but here’s a sample:

2. Greenish brown. A stagger of drums and a distorted horn. 27. Powder blue. Very slow piano notes over a distant motor rumbling. 31. A darker pink. The white noise of ocean waves. 33. Light purple. 5/4 keyboard riff against a springy EDM beat. 38. Pale green. Jagged and corrupt. 44. Mustard. A fading chime and the rumble of an eternal subway train, almost musique concrète. 45. Pale blue. Piano with a touch of free-jazz energy (other solo piano pieces have been more ambient). 53. Forest green. Cinematic strings but also crunching, latching sounds; very Halloweeny. 54. Pale green again. Ambient piano with a Harold Budd-esque central chord. 56. Olive green. Piano in a chaotic vein, classical off the leash. 60. Royal blue. Glass insects skittering on a table of water.

Minus Zero

Bandcamp Friday is coming up, the first-Friday-of-the-month sale where the website becomes a nonprofit for a day, donating its cut of all music sales to the artists. It’s a nice gesture on their part, and a great way to support musicians. (Much better than Spotify. I do use Spotify, but independent musicians and creative-music artists lack the “scale of catalog” to earn even couch-cushion change from the platform.)

Bandcamp Friday is fun to support, and it takes on a different, equally glowing feeling when it comes to a nonprofit label that’s giving away its own proceeds already.

Minus Zero, founded in 2017, is an online label that donates its revenues to Planned Parenthood. “Label” might be the wrong word. Minus Zero is more like a community collective, a never-ending bake sale where artists (a combination of Bay Area folks and New Yorkers) can convert some of their work into money to a good cause. 

The catalog is a trove of current and archival recordings, including some live work: 

• ROVA Saxophone Quartet has contributed an album of graphic scores, and you can also buy the scores themselves.
• Vinny Golia contributed his manic Music for Woodwinds, Strings, Piano, and Percussion, originally released on the pfMentum label and reviewed here.
• The terrific improvised-jazz trio of Ben Goldberg, Vijay Anderson, and Sheldon Brown (clarinet/drums/sax) released a group of studio recordings combining full-length tracks and some miniatures
• As noted previously, improv-metal trio Trigger teamed up with vocalist/violinist Dina Maccabee to create a nice noisy album.

A lot of Minus Zero’s output takes advantage of the lack of a physical format — no LP sides or CDs to fill:

• Live at Temescal Arts, by Josh Marshall and Daniel Pearce, is a 22-minute sax/drums improvisation, energetic and thoughtful.
• Small Cities, by Vinnie Sperrazza and Noa Fort, is an 8-minute handful of percussion miniatures.
• Drummer Jordan Glenn’s group BEAK put forth a clutch of live tracks.

And there’s plenty more to explore from the likes of Beth Custer, Lisa Mezzacappa, Ava Mendoza, Marco Eneidi (!), John Tchicai, and Robert Dick. The label’s newest releases include For Diane, a multi-artist album of piano solos in tribute to the late Diane Moser. Plenty to explore, and this Friday marks a particularly nice moment to lay down a few dollars in support.

Separately, Minus Zero has forwarded around this group of links pertaining to the political assault on healthcare and women’s reproductive rights. If this isn’t the right time for you to support the cause with your wallet, you can support it in spirit by staying educated:

NPR 
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/02/1022860226/long-drives-costly-flights-and-wearying-waits-what-abortion-requires-in-the-sout

Texas Tribune 
www.texastribune.org/2021/05/18/texas-heartbeat-bill-abortions-law/
www.texastribune.org/2021/07/13/texas-heartbeat-bill-lawsuit/

Democracy Now 
www.democracynow.org/2021/7/13/reproductive_rights_roe_v_wade_scotus

AP (Montana) 
apnews.com/article/health-abortion-laws-montana-planned-parenthood-92274e5af2f373b9a1fae952e2c4367c

Guttmacher Institute 
www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-policy-absence-roe#

Raven Chacon’s Radio Coyote: Through June 30

From “A Very Long Line” by Postcommodity, an art collective that includes Raven Chacon.

As a DJ, I reveled in playing obscure, forgotten tracks from the KZSU library: records from the vinyl collection, or CDs that had gone unplayed for 10 years. I’m sure listeners didn’t notice the difference, but I enjoyed the thrill of discovery, and when I gave air time to those discs, it felt like I was adding good to the world.

Cut to Albuquerque, current home of Raven Chacon, who for 20 years has been releasing limited-edition recordings on his SickSickSick Distro label. We’re talking 50 or 100 copies, and they do sell out, vanishing into the ether.

Now they’re getting air time. The 73-album catalogue is part of the menu for Radio Coyote, a sort of art project produced by the California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute. It’s a literal radio broadcast — 88.1FM in San Francisco — and webstream, 24 hours a day from April 1 to June 30.

Sfsound.org has been doing its online radio feed for years now, so it’s not as if Coyote Radio is your only chance to hear experimental noise and the like. But I enjoy the fact that the SickSickSick catalogue is part of what’s on offer — another chance at life for those out-of-print recordings. A “temporary archive,” as Chacon explained to I Care If You Listen, like a aural museum exhibit that rolls past while you sit still. Also on the bill are guests — podcasters and other musicians from the Southwest or the Bay Area — and stretches of free-form programming.

I found out about this early in May and finally gave it a go on May 13. As it happens, SickSickSick specializes in experimental sounds but also brutally loud metal (one blurb boasts that the vinyl record is pressed so loudly, your needle will skip), which isn’t really my thing. But I first caught Radio Coyote during a span of noise and sound collages — pleasant strolls through alternative mindspaces.

Lobsterbreath (SickSickSick #34) flipped styles from one track to the next — old Italian pop, low-key noise, a string section for the track called “Credits.” I wonder if it was all found-sound. The Late Severa Wires (SickSickSick #39, recorded live on KFJC!) was more conventionally noise-based, with sounds generated from guitars and drums, possibly a laptop in there too.

Black Drink (SickSickSick #40), created by the trio of Barbara and Tom Hohmann and Chacon himself, combined acoustic and electric sounds (including a guitar and possibly homemade drums) with samples and found recordings.

Radio Coyote is not a full 24/7 broadcast; a few hours’ worth of programming gets repeated throughout the day, interspersed by those free form segments (which might be repeated as well, come to think of it). It was a good couple of hours of listening for me, though, and I’ll be back. I love that this is happening and that these sounds are existing out on the physical airwaves. But after that session, I did flip over to sfsound.org radio and its fully 24/7 stream.

Radio Coyote broadcasts through June 30: https://www.radiocoyote.org/ or 88.1FM in San Francisco.

Sonny Simmons, 1933-2021

I was slow to pick up on the passing of Sonny Simmons, and like so many others, I’m sad but still grateful. Grateful that we have his music, but also that this once-forgotten ’60s free-jazz pioneer got a second act. As has been well documented, Simmons was homeless in San Francisco for a long spell, eventually getting back into the recording studio in the ’90s and migrating to Paris sometime around 1995. The 21st century saw him release a flurry of work, including some ambitious albums like Nomadic with Moksha Sannyasan and Beyond the Planets with Delphine Latil and Thomas Bellier and a whole series of albums with The Cosmosamatics, the band he fronted with fellow saxophonist Marcus Miller.

My first exposure to Simmons was in text form. The liner notes of Bruce Ackley’s trio album, The Hearing (Avant, 1998), mention that the track “Juggernaut” was written for Simmons:

For many years I had the fortune to hear Sonny play on the streets of San Francisco. One evening, while I was at an opening for a friend’s painting exhibit in a downtown gallery, I heard the sound of his alto out the window as he played in the nearly deserted streets four stories below. I knew it had to be Sonny because I could hear the sound of the Dolphy school being driven up into the air. I immediately left the gallery and stood in the street listening for several minutes to his enormous tone and cascading ideas.

Back then, I didn’t fully grasp the Eric Dolphy reference, but I got Ackely’s meaning.

As happens with any scrap of useful information, I started noticing Simmons’ name more often — in print, in conversation — the small, passing references among those in the know. Soon enough, Arhoolie Records in El Cerrito, California, rereleased Simmons’ 1969 album Manhattan Egos and sent a copy to us at KZSU. I got to experience Sonny full blast, including the four beautifully raw live tracks appended to the album. Eventually I would dig up more of Simmons’ output, mostly through used record bins.

I even got to write about Simmons. During my brief stint with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Mission District restaurant Bruno’s took a chance on booking a long series of free-jazz gigs. Simmons played either the premiere show or one shortly after, which I covered in brief for the Guardian. Good times.

There are two documentaries about Simmons, documenting his musical ambitions and his struggles living in the Bay Area. The one cited in Simmons’ recent obituaries is In Modern Time by Robert Brewster; it flips between Simmons’ current-day (2003) work in San Francisco and a trip back to Louisiana, where white vigilantes literally forced his family off of their farm when Sonny was 6.

The second, available through Edgetone Records, is The Multiple Rated X Truth by Brandon Evans, a saxophonist who released collaborations with Simmons on his Parallactic record label. Here’s a preview.

Near as I can tell, Simmons’ passing didn’t rate an obituary in The New York Times, in contrast to many other pivotal jazz figures. He hadn’t played much in the city since the 1960s, as this brief review from 1995 explains. As frustrated as Simmons was with the Bay Area, the music community here did appreciate him. He would eventually find greener pastures in Paris, of course, and I can only hope that after decades of struggle, he found some modicum of peace.

RIP, Dr. Tim Smith

I was saddened last month to hear that Tim Smith, the brain and heart of the band Cardiacs, had died.

Rhodri Marsden wrote a touching and succinct tribute for The Guardian. Cardiacs’ stage persona was built around a tyrannical Tim who himself was a slave of the shadowy Alphabet Business Concern, but as Marsden writes:

His bandmates speak of a generous hippy, a man who made everyone feel good about themselves. He was no extrovert, but was certainly a magnet. He ran an open house, welcomed you in, and offered limitless reserves of enthusiasm and support. He always said that his favourite music was his friends’ music. He’d go to your gigs, and he’d stand at the front.

I owe local musicians Amy X. Neuburg and Polly Moller for introducing me to Cardiacs, on separate occasions. I believe they also indoctrinated Moe Staiano, and his social media posts helped get me hooked, too.

I could link to any number of Cardiacs songs (R.E.S., Tarred and Feathered, Come Back Clammy Lammy, Flap Off You Beak, Is This the Life) or recount the cover band called ReCardiacs Fly.

But here’s something I didn’t know, and perhaps you didn’t either: Tim Smith received an honorary doctorate from The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in late 2018. He was honored in person, in Scotland, at a ceremony that included speeches and lots of music — and they captured it on film, thankfully:

Tim went through an inconceivable ordeal with dystonia — a condition involving, among other things, continual involuntary muscle contractions — for something like 12 years following a stroke. His mind was still sharp, by all accounts, leaving him a prisoner in his body that entire time. In a 2017 interview, he described it as: “Imagine if you were wearing a skintight bodysuit made of fishnet all around you, with electrical pulses going all the time.”

He could only communicate by pointing to letters on a board, and yet he was still thinking in sentences like that. Imagine.

In contrast to his stage persona, Tim was apparently a kindly soul, making it all the more sad that so many people outright loathed the band. Their catalog has been available online for some time, and it’s now on Bandcamp as well. It’s not too late to drop them a little love.

Eddie Gale Memorial Livestream: Saturday, August 8

I think I saw Eddie Gale perform only once or twice, which is sad. I did get to interview him on the radio, however, and while I don’t remember the details, the impression in my head is that he was engaging and entertaining, and that we ran long.

It’s always been a point of pride for me that Eddie was from the South Bay, and that he carried the title of San Jose’s Official Ambassador of Jazz, bestowed for real by then-mayor Norm Mineta. Eddie Gale passed away on July 10, and as you can see from the tributes posted to forevermissed.com, he was generous with his time and energy and was a mentor to many a Bay Area musician. (WARNING: That link might launch with audio playing.)

Do yourself a favor and check out his albums. He might be best known for having appeared on Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, but Eddie also blazed his own path as a leader. His albums Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening take free jazz in a spiritual direction heavy in civil rights activism, with lots of revolutionary choral vocals. Around the turn of the century, he frequently played with the funky jam band Mushroom. His recurring band in modern years was called the Inner Peace Jazz Orchestra, a reflection of the kind of world Eddie was striving for.

There will be a memorial livestream for Eddie on Saturday, August 8, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Pacific time. The forevermissed link above will have the link.

Help the Starry Plough

Having written about Barbès last week, it occurred to me that there are venues here at home that could use help too…

It’s not as though I’ve built a thorough list, but the Starry Plough in Berkeley came to mind quickly. Over the years, they opened their doors to creative music, willing to occasionally put experimental jazz or rock acts in front their usual roots-music and pub-music audiences. (A few examples: Toychestra, Amy X. Neuburg, Surplus 1980, Jack o’ the Clock.) Economic reality being what it is, those shows became more infrequent over the past decade, but I still remember the Plough fondly and still checked their listings once in a while, just in case.

They serve food but have no outdoor seating, so they’ll have to subsist on take-out for a long while. Small bars and clubs will be among the last businesses to reopen, and the Plough has set its GoFundMe rather high in realization of this.

There are so many other venues in a similar plight, and even if you have the resources, it’s difficult to support all of them. I’m just mentioning this one for the same reason Brooklynites are banding together for Barbès: The Starry Plough is a source of community, and I’ve had some really good times there. Maybe there’s a similar venue in your life. Understandably, not everyone has the means, but if you do, at least consider dropping them the price of the beer and burger you would have gotten.

Photo via thestarryplough.com.

Songs for Barbès

Here’s something fun: New York City venue Barbès posted a month’s worth of video performances from musicians, little love notes to celebrate the bar’s 18th birthday (on May 1, 2020) and maybe draw a little attention to the Barbès fundraiser.

A jewel of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, Barbès hosts a lot of music that would land in the “world” category. Eastern European or Latin American or African, traditional or modern, folky or jazzy or even classical — every permutation seems to come up. They also host frequent shows out of New York’s avant-jazz scene, which is how I got introduced. The bar is a tight squeeze on a crowded Saturday night, but it’s a cozy, welcoming spot, and for my friends who lived in that neighborhood for a few years, it was an anchor.

The homemade videos are all sheltered-in-place and often charming, sometimes including spoken well-wishes to Barbès. Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey (who I believe are married) stitched together two improvisations for their four-minute tribute.

Jenny Scheinman, who was part of the early-’00s Bay Area scene, plays a friendly “Little Calypso” on violin. It still amazes me how much sound a violin can produce with so little actual motion.

The New Mellow Edwards, a quartet led by trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, recorded separately to produce their piece. Watch bassist Trevor Dunn — the look he gives to camera at the end is perfect.

Ben Monder contributes “Never Let Me Go.” The first comment on the YouTube page refers to Monder’s “impossible” playing, which to me is the perfect word. I’m impressed with the harmonic vocabulary of jazz guitarists in particular, but Monder is other-dimension-ly — I’m thinking especially of the gorgeous, baffling, dense chording on parts of his 1998 trio album Flux (with Drew Gress on bass on Jim Black on drums).

Finally, the ensemble called Anbessa Orchestra made a slickly edited video of their song “Lions.”

And so on. There are a few dozen videos stacked up on Barbès’ YouTube site, and they went along with a GoFundMe campaign that was successful but could still use a little more love.

A Cavalcade of Solos

While music sales can’t make up for the loss of gigs, recordings are the main product musicians can offer right now. Assuming social distancing stays in place for months to come — which it should — what happens when the backlog of ensemble/band album releases dries up?

A pop band can record an album piecemeal in home studios. But jazz and improv, even chamber music, rely more on the artistry and strength of real-time interaction. Track-by-track recording doesn’t seem ideal. It’s certainly possible, as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra shows with “Quarantine Blues.” Likewise, group performances (and therefore group recordings) over the internet are certainly possible. Mark Dresser has been researching that angle for more than a decade with his Telematics project, and technology has largely caught up to the ideas he was first envisioning.

But the more likely route for most improv-heavy, free-form experimental music, especially given the budgets involved, is a burst of solo recordings.

It’s already started. Saxophonist Steve Lehman fired an early salvo with Xenakis and the Valedictorian, recorded literally in his car. (His wife, filmmaker Olivia Newman, caught some of the magic on video.) As Nate Chinen explains on his WBGO blog, Lehman’s EP one of several solo/duo projects that Pi Recordings plans to issue in the coming weeks, with all proceeds going directly to the artists.

On the local front, clarinetist Ben Goldberg is recording an ongoing Plague Diary, measuring 56 tracks and counting. Kyle Bruckmann likewise recorded a quarantine sketchbook called Draußen ist Feindlich. Both are available on Bandcamp.

 

Tim Berne even recorded his first-ever solo album, Sacred Vowels.

Of course, solo performance is an established genre of its own. Just about every free-improv performer puts out at least one solo record, it seems. And computers and looping can turn live solo performance into a multi-layered experience; Goldberg started doing that with even the earliest Plague Diary tracks.

Stray thought: On the rock/pop end of the spectrum, music is recorded piecemeal in the first place, so it’s easy to envision a band recording all their parts at home and engineering them into a normal-sounding album. What if you tried the same thing with free improvisation — passing a recording from one musician to the next, layering something together “exquisite corpse” style? There must be a recorded example of this out there somewhere, but whether there is or not, it would be fun to see someone try.

Photo: kylejglenn on Unsplash.