YEAH, WELL, YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT I THINK?

I contributed to The Wire's year-end roundup, sending them my top 10 albums, my top 10 reissues, and some short thoughts on 2015 as refracted through the prism of culture. Those thoughts are reproduced below, but you should really buy the issue; there's a ton of great stuff in it, including my reviews of the new albums by Apparatus and Nate Wooley, both of which are very good. I recommend getting a digital subscription, which allows you full access to the Wire archives going all the way back to their first issue, plus subscriber-only music downloads and other cool stuff. Anyway, year-end thoughts:

The jazz story of the year was the arrival and rapid ascent of Kamasi Washington. His presence on the most overrated hip-hop album of 2015, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, helped his PR team create significant anticipation for his debut The Epic. Rapturously received, even by critics who couldn't spell jazz if you spotted them the j and one of the zs, it became the music's biggest crossover success story since the 1970s. It was also a really good record, and Washington is one of the most compelling live performers around. I was privileged to review his New York debut for this magazine, and it was the best show I saw all year.

I attended more jazz performances in 2015 than any other type, and that seems likely to continue. Jazz feels like it's revitalizing itself from within, in exciting, unpredictable ways. On the other hand, my other great musical love, metal, seems to be imploding. Formerly extreme styles have become cliches and crutches; bands can either sell records or get positive reviews, but not both, and the state of the US market dictates that tour packages must include a minimum of four bands, which is two too many for an old man to put up with on a weeknight.

No year is complete without a death list, and 2015's included some musicians whose work - even if only a single towering album - permanently altered my personal soundworld: Ornette Coleman, Tangerine Dream's Edgar Froese, the Stooges' saxophonist Steve Mackay and Yes bassist Chris Squire all departed this year. Nothing here now but the recordings, in William Burroughs's phrase.

10 THINGS I HAVE DONE...

...that you probably have not. (Inspired by this list.)

1) Eaten chocolate cake with Ornette Coleman in his apartment.
2) Interviewed Lemmy in front of a live audience. (Video.)
3) Had my picture taken with Ozzy Osbourne backstage at Madison Square Garden.
4) Been a guest on live radio with Rob Halford of Judas Priest, and host Jim Breuer.
5) Received a phone call at home from Tony Iommi.
6) Nearly been thrown out of a Manhattan deli with Abel Ferrara.
7) Lived with a weird eco-militant/hippie cult.
8) Written liner notes for two CDs (one of which hasn't been released as of this writing).
9) Been flown to Stockholm to hear the last Opeth studio album and interview the band.
10) Self-published a book, and (as of this writing) three issues of a magazine.

PULLED FROM THE FLAMES

I posted a bunch of stuff on Burning Ambulance this week. Here's the rundown:

Monday: review of Joe Morris's Camera
Tuesday: review of William Parker's Uncle Joe's Spirit House
Wednesday: interview with drummer Barry Altschul, by Hank Shteamer
Thursday: review of Many Arms' Missing Time
Friday: review of the Ornette Coleman Quartet's Reunion 1990

I hope you enjoy all this stuff, and I hope it'll convince you to buy issues of Burning Ambulance, the third of which will be coming out very soon.

AND HOW WAS YOUR FRIDAY NIGHT?

So the Sonny Rollins 80th birthday show at the Beacon Theatre in NYC last night? Pretty fucking amazing. His regular band (guitarist Russell Malone, bassist Bob Cranshaw, drummer Kobie Watkins and percussionist Sammy Figueroa) was strong enough, but they only played two numbers ("Patan Jali," "Global Warming") before the guests started showing up. First was trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who did "I Can't Get Started" on flugelhorn and a really hard-swinging "Rain Check" (including a long passage of trading fours with Rollins, while Watkins set off one bomb after another) on trumpet. Then came Jim Hall, who looked about a thousand and five and was dressed like he'd come straight from the early bird special at Denny's, but who kicked a shocking amount of ass on "In A Sentimental Mood" and "If Ever I Would Leave You." Then the original band was replaced by a rhythm section of Christian McBride and (an unannounced) Roy Haynes. They played "In My Solitude," and Haynes took a solo that was like controlled demolition. Then they launched into a hard-swinging version of "Sonnymoon For Two," at which point Rollins announced one more guest was backstage. They vamped for a minute or two, building suspense, and then out walked...

Ornette Coleman.

The crowd went apeshit, and these two octogenarians, who'd never shared a stage before, absolutely tore it up, Rollins going further out than he has since Our Man In Jazz and Ornette squealing and bending the blues any way he felt like. It was awesome.

That was the end of the main set; the whole band (minus Ornette) came back for a closing version of "St. Thomas," but post-OC, it was a slight step downhill. Still, this was a once-in-a-lifetime show, and I'm kind of amazed I was there.

GENERATION F? F YOU.

Marc Myers, with whom I was totally unfamiliar until just now, posted the following on his JazzWax blog over the weekend:

Can jazz survive Generation F? The "F" here stands for "flighty," and anyone who has watched people in their 20s listen to music today knows what I'm talking about. Songs in iTunes libraries and on iPods serve mostly as white noise for this demographic group. Music is what you put on while working, organizing photos on your computer, i-Chatting or texting...

But the way music is consumed today among young people doesn't bode well for jazz. In addition to treating music as sound rather than art, Generation F rarely listens to an entire track, let alone an entire album. The record industry has been grappling with this album problem since the arrival of the digital download. Buyers cherry pick what they want for 99 cents rather than purchase entire albums. Which means most personal iTunes libraries are vessels for thousands of individual songs. Melody fatigue sets in fast and fingers commonly click for the next song before a track is through...

Jazz is listening music. You need to pay attention and become absorbed by what the musicians are doing, how they're communicating and why what they're doing is special. Jazz has never been mass market music—it's not ideal for dancing, its melodies are complicated to listen to, and its history is too deep for a casual relationship. Now add a generation that hasn't been trained to concentrate on what they're listening to and it's hard to see how jazz will be perceived as meaningful going forward by a large percentage of this group.

First of all, people have been listening to individual songs for a lot longer than they've been listening to albums. The 78 rpm record had one song per side. So did the 45. Only with the advent of the 33 1/3 rpm LP in the mid-1950s did listening to an entire album become a common practice—because albums were specifically sold to consumers for that purpose. And throughout the early history of the LP, and all the way into the '80s, people still bought a whole fuckin' lot of singles. It's also worth noting that the formula for albums, until the mid '60s, was "hits and filler"—labels would put the band's big hit singles as the first track on each side, then fill up the rest with whatever other material was available.

Now let's walk through that third paragraph, which is what's really pissing me off at the moment.

• "Jazz is listening music." As opposed to music you taste, or smell.
• "You need to pay attention and become absorbed by what the musicians are doing, how they're communicating and why what they're doing is special." No, you "need" to respond any way the music induces you to respond. If the music makes you want to sit quietly in a chair, pipe to lips, and contemplate the specialness of the musicians' communication, super. If it makes you want to dance (the way Ornette Coleman or Thelonious Monk make me want to dance), that's fine, too. It's up to you how you respond. Which brings me to...
• "Jazz has never been mass market music..." Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and pretty much the whole swing era pantheon, and all those who came before them, would beg to differ.
• "it's not ideal for dancing..." See above.
• "its melodies are complicated to listen to..." Sometimes, but there are fistfuls of counterexamples, from Art Blakey's thick, bluesy grooves to Albert Ayler's melodies, which were practically nursery-rhyme simple. Hell, how about "A Love Supreme"? Can't get much more simple than four notes.
• "...and its history is too deep for a casual relationship." I could say the same about heavy metal. But I wouldn't, because I'm not a snobbish idiot. Music is music. Each work should be taken or left on its own merits. This is the single thing I hate most about jazz people—their fixation on the idea that jazz is a course of study, not a world of music there to be enjoyed. Not studied, though you can do that if you want to. Enjoyed. Jazz musicians, like all musicians, make music in the hope that it will give people pleasure, not in the hope that it will give people subjects for monographs and symposia decades later. This is why I say that if you want to convert a non-jazz listener into a jazz listener, don't say "You should listen to jazz." Instead, figure out what they already like, and say, "You should listen to [specific jazz album]."

It's a good thing Myers' complaining is mostly directed at people his own age or older. If people in their twenties read his whiny bullshit and reductive generalizations of their generation, they might wind up turned off to jazz, rather than mostly unaware of it, as they are now. (Here's a hint, Marc: most Americans, regardless of age, are pretty much unaware of jazz. Try making a positive contribution to the discussion next time, rather than griping pointlessly about "these kids today.")

MUSIC BOXES

Last week, Amazon offered a pretty damn good deal on the Led Zeppelin 10CD Complete Studio Recordings box from 1993. Ordinarily it's $115, but they were selling it for $70, so I decided to grab it, since I've only ever owned Physical Graffiti on CD. Also, I wanted to get this version, rather than the 2009 Definitive Collection, because, frankly, the newer remasters were likely to be compressed and limited all to hell. (I visited a couple of audio-nerd burrows to figure out whether this is in fact the case; opinions varied.) Also, the fetishistic quality of that set actually turned me off - the idea of miniature reproductions of all six In Through the Out Door sleeves and a version of the Led Zeppelin III sleeve with a working pinwheel just felt obsessive and pathetic. Music is sound. I care about sound quality, not playing with (or just sitting and reverently staring at) packaging.

I think I made the right choice. The discs sound fantastic. (Assuming you like Led Zeppelin, of course.)

I have this weird ambivalence about packaging. On the one hand, as a reader and writer, I love a really well-written essay, and some boxes/deluxe reissues have terrific liner notes. The Robert Palmer essay in the Ornette Coleman box Beauty is a Rare Thing is a good example of this, and I'm sure I could dig through my collection and come up with a bunch of others, but you get my point. The trouble is, boxes are also frequently (especially now when they emerge as labors of love from indie labels desperate to dissuade folks from just downloading the audio content) loaded down with extraneous crap. The Albert Ayler box Holy Ghost had a pressed flower, postcards, reproductions of zines, and on and on, when all I wanted was the music and the book. And the new 3CD/1DVD/7"/book/photos edition of Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power just seems absurd to me. (The essays and "testimonials" are pretty much guaranteed to be a total waste of everyone's time, and I like Henry Rollins.)

So I like that the 1993 Led Zeppelin box pairs up the discs into little books, in the process juggling them out of release order so Physical Graffiti can get its own book. I like it because the perversity, the non-deluxeness of it, is so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of Led Zeppelin, as I understand it: "Here's the album. No, there's no single. No, we don't have a publicist. See you on the road."

I also like it because it's that much easier to reconcile spending $70 on CDs that I'll immediately import into my MacBook and thence to my iPod. Maura Johnston, a writer who's too smart to waste her time talking about American Idol as much as she does, had a pretty good essay about ridding oneself of physical music and going digital-only on pastemagazine.com the other day. She's still got a romantic attachment to the idea of physical music-objects qua objects; "There was value in music having a physical presence—even those records that you’d only pull out for very specific reasons reminded you of their existence during a routine house-cleaning," she writes. "As music becomes less physical, its whole essence becomes more disposable."

I like having some stuff around in physical form, for the simple reason that my iPod and headphones are a unit, in my head. I have a cable that allows me to plug my iPod into my stereo, but I never do it. So there are certain CDs I keep around just because when I want to listen to them, I want to use speakers to do so. These range from Miles Davis's Agharta, which takes over my living room like a rabid animal when I let it loose in the apartment, to Ryoji Ikeda's Matrix, which uses ultra-high frequencies and panning to create effects that headphones simply can't duplicate - it's as much about audiology as aesthetics. And I have the feeling that although these Led Zeppelin albums are, indeed, gonna be permanent fixtures in my iPod, there are going to be plenty of times when I'm gonna want to hear "No Quarter" or "Achilles Last Stand" through speakers, at room-filling volume.