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.

A YEAR IN FIVE LISTS

I submitted year-end album lists to three places: The Wire, my day job, and the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. Each had different requirements and different emphases, so each list is slightly different, but they have titles in common. Here they are, with discussion to follow.

I sent The Wire a Top Ten albums list, and a Top Ten reissues list, as follows:

TOP 10 RECORDS OF THE YEAR
1. Miles Davis Quintet, Live in Europe 1967 (Sony, 3CD/1DVD)
2. Defeatist, Tyranny of Decay (Nerve Altar, LP)
3. JD Allen Trio, Victory! (Sunnyside, CD)
4. Amon Amarth, Surtur Rising (Metal Blade, CD)
5. Wormrot, Dirge (Earache, CD)
6. Stacy Dillard, Good and Bad Memories (Criss Cross, CD)
7. Corrupted, Garten der Unbewusstheit (Nostalgia Blackrain, CD)
8. Vader, Welcome to the Morbid Reich (Nuclear Blast, CD)
9. Krisiun, The Great Execution (Century Media, CD)
10. Orthodox, Ba’al (Alone, CD)

TOP 10 REISSUES OF THE YEAR
1. Bill Dixon, Intents & Purposes (International Phonograph, CD)
2. Julius Hemphill, Dogon A.D. (International Phonograph, CD)
3. Alice Coltrane, Universal Consciousness/Lord of Lords (Impulse!/Verve, CD)
4. David Murray Octets, The Complete Remastered Recordings On Black Saint & Soul Note (CAM London, 5CD Box)
5. Pink Floyd, Ummagumma, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals (Capitol, CD)
6. Stan Getz, Quintets: The Clef & Norgran Studio Albums (Verve, CD)
7. Wes Montgomery, Movin’: The Complete Verve Recordings (Hip-O Select, 5CD Box)
8. Sonora Ponceña, El Gigante Sureño (Fania, 2CD)
9. Howlin’ Wolf, The Howlin’ Wolf Album (Get On Down, CD)
10. Various Artists, Cartagena! Curro Fuentes & the Big Band Cumbia and Descarga Sound of Colombia 1962-72 (Soundway, CD)

Those lists were submitted in early November; if I had it to do over again, I'd dump the Sonora Ponceña compilation and replace it with an Ismael Rivera comp, Maelo, on the same label. But everything else would remain the same.

Here's the list I published on Roadrunner Records' roundup of lists from staff and artists:

1. JD Allen Trio, Victory! (Sunnyside)
2. Amon Amarth, Surtur Rising (Metal Blade)
3. 2NE1, 2nd Mini Album (YG Entertainment)
4. Defeatist, Tyranny of Decay (Nerve Altar)
5. Vader, Welcome to the Morbid Reich (Nuclear Blast)
6. Girl in a Coma, Exits & All the Rest (Blackheart)
7. capsule, World of Fantasy (Contempode/Yamaha)
8. Corrupted, Garten der Unbewusstheit (Nostalgia Blackrain)
9. Wormrot, Dirge (Earache)
10. Boris, Attention Please (Sargent House)

That one was published in early December. Lots of overlap, but acts I'd discovered in the interim - 2NE1 and capsule - were fit in, and I had to make room for San Antonio-based trio Girl in a Coma, who I didn't think Wire readers would care about, and Boris, who on Attention Please let their female guitarist, Wata, sing and went in a generally J-pop direction.

Finally, here are the top 10 albums and - for the first time ever - top 10 singles lists I submitted to the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll:

2011 ALBUMS
1. Amon Amarth, Surtur Rising (Metal Blade)
2. Motörhead, The Wörld is Yours (Motörhead Music)
3. Perfume, JPN (Tokuma Japan)
4. capsule, World of Fantasy (Contemode/Yamaha)
5. Emmure, Speaker of the Dead (Victory)
6. Mastodon, The Hunter (Reprise)
7. Girl in a Coma, Exits & All the Rest (Blackheart)
8. Wormrot, Dirge (Earache)
9. Vader, Welcome to the Morbid Reich (Nuclear Blast)
10. Morbid Angel, Illud Divinum Insanus (Season of Mist)

2011 SINGLES
1. 2NE1, “I Am the Best” (YG Entertainment)
2. Wonder Girls, “Be My Baby” (JYP Entertainment)
3. Brad Paisley, “A Man Don’t Have to Die” (Arista Nashville)
4. Ronnie Dunn, “Cost of Livin’” (Arista Nashville)
5. The Answer, “Rock ’n’ Roll Outlaw” (Albert)
6. Pitbull, “Bon, Bon” (Mr. 305 Inc./Sony Latino)
7. DJ Shadow feat. Afrikan Boy, “I'm Excited” (Verve)
8. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, “Livin’ in the Jungle” (Lost Highway)
9. Wisin & Yandel, “Zun Zun Rompiendo Caderas” (Machete Music/Universal)
10. Britney Spears, “Till the World Ends” (Jive)

A lot of recurring album titles there, again. If you add up all the albums on my three lists (not including reissues), there's 19 - had I chosen a twentieth, it would have been Trivium's In Waves, but obviously there's a conflict of interest there. For similar reasons, I omitted Machine Head's Unto the Locust and Opeth's Heritage, which otherwise would have gotten honorable-mention status somewhere along the line.

If any pick is gonna stick out from my three lists, it's almost certainly gonna be the Morbid Angel album. (Not enough of my peers even know of Emmure's existence to give me crap for listing their album - but trust me, it's based on pure, raw listener pleasure. Speaker of the Dead is a gloriously boneheaded exercise in knuckle-dragging, chest-thumping hawd-kowah. If you liked Judge's Bringin' It Down, well, this is the 21st Century version. And if you didn't like Bringin' It Down, I don't even know why we're friends.) Here's the thing: I've never been a big Morbid Angel fan. Their early albums don't appeal to me nearly as much as contemporaneous work by Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Napalm Death, etc., etc. But this new one...the death metal songs were pleasingly assaultive, and the industrial/gabber/Danny-Elfman songs were just weird and catchy enough to be fun. It's a fun album, and if you don't like it, that's probably because you weren't expecting to, and can't quite bring yourself to, crack a smile while listening to Morbid Angel.

That sort of attitude is a perfect encapsulation of my biggest problem with metal this year. Over and over, I found myself running up against a small crew of bloggers and (self-described, despite tons of evidence to the contrary) fans who I choose to call the Border Guards. Permanently two-faced from having to simultaneously keep potential fans outside and musicians inside the fences they built in their heads, when the Border Guards weren’t competing to see who could pile more opprobrium on the one guy who had a (slightly) new thought about uses to which black metal’s sonic tropes, long since hardened into laughable cliché, could be put, they were shrugging off the crimes of a racist murderer and the charges against an accused rapist, because then, it was the music and not the rhetoric around it (or the person making it) that mattered. Never willing to discuss a new album unless they were absolutely sure you hadn’t heard it, you fucking poser, the Border Guards did more this year to ensure metal’s continued irrelevance to the larger cultural discussion than anyone outside the genre ever could.

I like uncool metal—the kind you can headbang to, and sometimes even pump your fist and sing along to. I like guitar solos, and choruses. Arty, dissonant noise/sludge/funeral doom records in their black-on-black sleeves don't interest me. (Corrupted being the lone exception, because that record was just beautiful.) I want metal—hell, I want music, period—that's gonna make me say (even if it's just in my head), "Dude, that was awesome!" I want more awesomeness in 2012.

TEARS IN RAIN

Today, someone I follow on Twitter posted, "My music writing bibliography is over 12 pages long." I thought about whether I could even catalog my own writing about music, and soon realized it would be utterly impossible.

I started writing about music for money in 1996. I've written literally hundreds of album reviews, maybe (hell, almost certainly) thousands at this point, for dozens of outlets, both print and online. Several of the websites I've written for (music.com, paperthinwalls.com, metaledgemag.com) are gone now. The metal blog I ran for MSN in 2009 and 2010 (Adrien Begrand runs it now, and does a great job) switched hosts after its first eight or nine months of existence, and in the transition, a lot of posts were lost, permanently deleted. I had a blog before this one which is long gone.

Some of the magazines I've written for don't exist anymore, either. Does anybody remember Oneworld, Russell Simmons' attempt to create his own Vibe? How about the US version of Metal Hammer that only lasted six months? I wrote for both, as well as tiny zines - Carpe Noctem, Subliminal Tattoos - now long dead. And I've got tearsheets of some of that stuff, but not all of it. I don't have copies of anything I wrote for Magnet or Cowbell. And even in the cases of magazines that I currently write for - Alternative Press, The Wire, Jazziz - my archives are far from complete. Not only do I not have tearsheets or moldering stacks of back issues, I can't even access the original manuscripts, as a lot of them were written with WordPerfect and saved to floppy discs which I threw away years ago. Vast swaths of my output - years' worth of work, hundreds of thousands if not millions of words - are totally inaccessible to me.

And yet...I don't care, not really. I'm much more concerned with the next thing I'm going to write than whatever I've already turned in (and been paid for). Even if I could somehow access all the words I've ever typed, I wouldn't re-read them. Sometimes I'll get a press release that includes a quote from a review, un-bylined, and I'll think, "That sounds like something I wrote." But if I can't go back and check, does it even matter?

I put together a collection of longish profiles in 2009. I'm proud of all those pieces, and if you'd buy a copy of the book, I'd be happy. I was even giving some thought to gathering the profiles I've written since, but I don't have anywhere close to a book's worth yet, and I'm writing fewer of them now.

Eric Dolphy famously said, "When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again." That's how I feel about much of what I've written over the last 15 years. I wrote it, and now it's gone. Time to write some more.

INTERVIEW: CLARE AMORY (EXCEPTER)

Last year, I profiled New York-based experimental electronic sextet Excepter for The Wire. I interviewed three of their members—John Fell "Jeff" Ryan, Lala Ryan, and Jon Nicholson—in person, and sent questions to two other members, Clare Amory and Nathan Corbin, by email. Today it was announced that Amory has died of cancer at age 35. In a spirit of remembrance, here are her answers to my emailed questions, in full.

How long have you been in Excepter?
I even tried to google and figure out if my first show was at Tonic or Suoni Per Il Popolo festival in Montreal, and I just couldn't remember or figure it out. I had been to every show for so long before and felt part of it. It was 2006-7 I think. Before I had been in FEAST which played traditionally structured songs and practiced 2 hrs. at a time 3 times a week. I loved FEAST especially at the end when we were playing Stoner Sludge Metal and had finally figured out how to record. After that band ended I was playing with Nathan and friends at home and didn't want to do anything else. It took a while for my brain to want to play Excepter. Now it's good to be truly free and with the other weirds. You are an Excepter or you're not an Excepter whether you started playing yet or not and really we're all Excepters.

Were you and Nathan a couple when you joined?
Yes and we had already been playing together as LAKE for a while before, also as eyelasher. We can play loud at home whenever we want which is great.

How were you each recruited?
I think Jeff told me a bunch of times I could play when I wanted, then at some point I just did and now I always do.

The music is improvised, and then edited later by Jeff - are the rest of you consulted on edits, or do you hear the album when it's done?
It's true that Jeff has the final say. That makes everything so easy. I can vary my participation in different processes in the band as it suits me and nobody's ever given me grief. After being a dancer and in heavily rehearsed and composed projects for years, the space is IT brother. I don't care about winning I just want to be free. Sometimes we talk about the feeling of the record or specific parts of it, we get the cuts he's worked out in advance so we can talk about it if we want.

Has this process evolved over time, or was this the arrangement when you joined the group?
It evolves with changes in instrumentation; a new instrument can become the leader and tell the group what to do. The lasting effects of various tour vibes; usually great! We tour in high style with giant burgers and become a freedom force. There's nothing like it and it makes the music enormous. The number of shows in a time period effects how tight our web is woven.

Can you describe the negotiations (spoken and unspoken) that determine the course of a live set?
Sometimes Nathan and I listen to each other's beats at home before a show. We're also listening to the same records at home before we leave. Sometimes the band works out a technical component like Porkchop [Jon Nicholson] and Nathan synching for the night. Sometimes Lala says that she's worked out some special spell. Jeff often has excited and explosive arm gestures followed by shyness that communicate his vibe for the night. I am always happy when I get to the club and I can tell what everybody is like, then we play. We listen to each other, I feel like we get along. I wait for openings. I try not to play or do anything unneccesary.

What was the experience of playing the 17-hour set on Election Day 2008 like? How do you prepare for, and "come down" from, something like that?
To prepare I chose my instruments. I voted in Pennsylvania at 6 am and then drove 4 hours to the club so I was a little late. The drive was amazing, I have video somewhere. I always know it's going to be dreamlike, the longer I play like this the less the number of hours matter. We could play from now until we die I think, we would just sleep and eat right there while the others kept it going. When you pause to eat you get really good ideas.

THIEVES WHO PLAY BY THE RULES

I went into Takers with my brain clenched. I was expecting it to be terrible. I considered the casting of T.I., Chris Brown, Paul Walker and even Idris Elba to be warning signs. I've seen former castmembers of The Wire popping up in hip-hop videos lately, and Elba's done some other movies aimed at urban blacks—he co-starred with Beyoncé in 2009's Obsessed, remember, and he did a Tyler Perry movie, Daddy's Little Girls, too. So I was expecting it to be a 90-minute version of one of those hip-hop videos that finds the rappers and their friends and hangers-on reshooting one of their favorite gangster movies—an imitation of an imitation.

Well, Takers is much better than that. It's not original—it's a genre picture, a heist movie. Genre movies have rules, and Takers only breaks one, and when that surprise comes, it's a solid choice on the filmmakers' part.

There are two basic heist-movie stories, the "one last job" story and the "job too big to pass up" story. Takers is the latter, with some twists thrown in. Elba plays the leader of a five-man, high-end heist team; they pull off a Heat-style bank robbery as the movie begins, getting away by hijacking a news helicopter. Then they're contacted by T.I., the sixth member of the crew, who went to prison following a 2004 job. He comes out early, and returns offering an even bigger job than the one we just saw them complete, albeit on a rush schedule. It's an armored car robbery, not unlike the one in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, a fact that's explicitly acknowledged in dialogue. There's about 30 seconds of "it's too quick...can we trust him?" dialogue within the group, before they're all in. As you knew they would be, 'cause otherwise there's no movie.

Meanwhile, there's a parallel narrative about the obsessed detective, played by Matt Dillon, who's tracking whoever was behind the movie-opening bank job. That's all pretty much straight out of Heat, except Dillon doesn't shout as much as Al Pacino. (In fact, he delivers most of his dialogue in a sullen mutter.) And while that story's not as interesting as the criminals' preparations for their big job, it's handled better than many writers would have done. Dialogue between Dillon and his partner is expository but not clunky. There are some decent twists along the way, too.

What I like best about heist movies is the part where the team does the actual physical work of preparing—dressing up like city workers and crawling through the sewers to lay charges, jackhammering through the floor of the building next door to the one they're going to rob, tapping into the alarm system and stealing the passcodes, that stuff. Takers does that stuff well. Some of the things it doesn't do well, like showing us how all the members of the crew save one get away from the second-act climax, or doing more to establish the power of a love triangle (it doesn't help that two-thirds of the characters involved in said triangle are given almost no motivation...not just to be together, but to exist at all), are forgivable in my eyes because the important stuff is handled efficiently and without showiness. The filmmakers also keep the thing I was most worried about having to endure—music video-style passages where the thieves stand (or sit) around looking cool, drinking expensive liquor with anonymous and underdressed women draped over them—to a relative minimum. Oh, and in general the movie is very well shot and edited—it's digital, but since it takes place in 2010, that's not a mood-shattering distraction the way it was in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, set in the 1930s but seemingly filmed on a Flip video camera.

Ultimately, to me, the most interesting character in the entire movie is played by, of all people, Paul Walker. He's an underrated actor, because he doesn't ever seem to be working very hard, and he allows everyone else in a scene to out-shout him, when they're not physically throwing him around or otherwise making the viewer forget he's there at all. Put him next to a cartoon character like Vin Diesel in the first and fourth Fast & the Furious movies, and he comes off like a paperweight. Put him next to Jessica Alba and her absurdly undersized bikini, in Into the Blue, and his presence is once again an afterthought. Here, he plays Idris Elba's #2 man, and while T.I. and Chris Brown and Hayden Christensen (playing his latest in a long line of smirking d-bags, this time with the addition of a silly hat and paint-on tattoos) are making spectacles of themselves, he hangs in the background and is silently competent. To paraphrase Mark Wahlberg's character in The Departed, he's the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy. And sure enough, when the movie reaches its final confrontation, it's Walker who emerges unscathed and...well, I'll let you go see it for yourself.

Like I said, Takers is a heist movie. Heist movies, like all genre movies, have rules, and this one plays by them, until it doesn't. It also nods to its predecessors in various ways, big and small, obvious (and acknowledged) and not. If I had to compare it to anything, I'd compare it to Heat, but without the pretentiousness that makes stretches of that movie a slog. Heat wants to be grand opera; Takers wants to be exactly what it is—a good genre movie, worth your ticket and your time if you're a fan of the genre. Period.

THE SOLITARY AGONY OF THE LIT-FIC WRITER (OR, FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS, FICTION DIVISION)

This Slate.com essay is the latest variant of something I've read over and over the past few years—the "woe is me" cry of the literary fiction writer. This woman wrote a novel, Stiltsville, which will be published by Harper Collins on August 1. Here's the synopsis, from Amazon:

With its lush flora and constant sun, South Florida is the true star of Daniel's exquisite debut, which follows a marriage over the course of 30 years. In 1969, having traveled from Atlanta to Miami for a college friend's wedding, 26-year-old Frances Ellerby meets glamorous Miami native Marse Heiger, who introduces her to Dennis DuVals and his house on stilts in Biscayne Bay. Though Marse has set her cap for Dennis, he and Frances fall in love and marry within a year. "I had no idea then," Frances says, "what would happen to my love, what nourishment it would receive, how mighty it would grow." Dennis and Frances have a daughter, Margo, buy a house in Coral Gables, and their life together proceeds as a series of ups and downs, beautifully told from Frances's pensive, sharp perspective. As the years pass and Miami changes, so do Frances, Dennis, and Margo, and the nuances of their relationships shift and realign, drawing inexorably toward a moving resolution.

That sounds like a book I'd rather stab my eyes out than read. Hell, that sounds like a book that would make my 61-year-old mother laugh in my face, if I offered it to her. And yet, this woman spent ten years grinding away, compelled to tell the story of a woman and her goddamn stilt house in Florida.

I've read these piteous cries from writers of "quality" lit-fic for years, talking about how they've slaved over their postmodern tales of suburban marital dissolution, or young men coming to grips with the adult world outside the room where they keep all their comic books, or whatever the fuck it is...and then I look at authors I read, like Scott Sigler, or Harlan Coben, or Stephen King—dudes who crank out a book a year and never shed a single public tear in the process. And it makes me think that maybe the reason literary fiction takes so long, and takes so much out of its writers, is that it's every bit as boring to write as it is to read.

(As far as the whole non-productivity thing, I can't quite take the essayist/author's side on that one, either. I have ideas for novels that never get off the ground, but it's not because I'm blocked or agonizing over the creative process—it's because I'm too busy writing other stuff. I've probably written hundreds of thousands of words this year, but they're subdivided into 200-words-or-less increments for All Music Guide, Alternative Press, the Cleveland Scene, The Wire, etc., etc. When I write a thousand words or more at a shot, they tend to be for a magazine feature. I'd love to have enough hours in the day to sit down and crank out a novel, but I write about a half dozen record reviews a week, on average, and maintain two blogs—this one and this one. Hell, just writing this blog post is taking me away from a magazine profile of Joe Morris that I should be working on.)

BILL DIXON 1925-2010

I've known this was coming for a few days, but was sworn to secrecy. Here's the email I just received from Scott Menhinick at Improvised Communications:

I've just been asked by his estate to deliver the sad news that trumpeter/composer/educator Bill Dixon died last night in his sleep at his longtime home in North Bennington, Vermont after a two-year illness.

He was 84 years old.

Dixon is survived by his longtime partner Sharon Vogel and two children.

Information about a memorial service and where to send donations in his name is forthcoming.

An official obituary is in the works and will be available shortly.

Update: Here's a terrific video clip I'd never seen before today:



Dixon was one of the most interesting people I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing (for The Wire; the piece is also included in Sound Levels). I'm gonna be listening to his music for a long, long time to come, and I'm sure other people will be, too. (I hope this loss, massive as it is, will if nothing else help get Intents & Purposes back in print on CD.)

Dixon's discography is far from massive, so it's not outlandish to suggest that one listen to as much of it as possible rather than recommending an ideal starting point. But if I had to pick personal favorites, they'd be:

Thoughts (Soul Note, 1986, w/Marco Eneidi, alto sax; John Buckingham, tuba; Peter Kowald, William Parker and Mario Pavone, bass; Lawrence Cook, drums)
Vade Mecum I & II (Soul Note, 1994/96, w/Barry Guy and William Parker, bass; Tony Oxley, drums)
Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley, s/t (Victo, 2002)
Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009, w/Taylor Ho Bynum, Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes and Rob Mazurek, trumpet, cornet, flugenhorn, bass trumpet, piccolo cornet and electronics; Glynis Lomon, cello; Michel Côté, bass and contrabass clarinet; Ken Filiano, bass and electronics; Warren Smith, vibes, marimba, drums and percussion)

Tapestries is indispensable because of its inclusion of a DVD that documents the recording sessions as well as lectures from Dixon on improvisation and ensemble playing. Indeed, if there's more of that footage (and I'm sure there is), it should really be made available. Musicians and listeners a like have a lot to learn from this man's body of work, and any ideas he chose to express directly need to be filtered into the cultural bloodstream as much and as soon as possible.

THE MERCH TABLE

So maybe you've noticed I've been posting here more frequently. I've definitely noticed an increase in traffic, and more people commenting, both of which are awesome. I would like to thank everyone who stops by with any kind of regularity; I'm gonna try to keep this blog flowing at the same pace going forward, and I welcome your comments.

I'd also like to point out the links in the right-hand column.

I self-published a book this year—Sound Levels: Profiles in American Music, 2002-2009. It's a collection of pieces I wrote for The Wire, Metal Edge, and Global Rhythm, with additional information about each story (how it came about, whether I thought the interview and/or the final piece was totally successful or could have been better, etc.), and I think you'd really enjoy it. So if that seems interesting to you, click the button and buy one. It's $15 for a physical book, $5 for a digital download, and Lulu.com (the site I used to publish it) is offering free shipping all summer on orders over $19.95.

"What can I buy that'll put me over the top?" you ask. Why, you could purchase issue #1 of Burning Ambulance, the quarterly zine I edit. The second issue is coming very soon, but in the meantime, you could be reading epic-length profiles of Matthew Shipp, a trawl through the massive discography of Henry Threadgill, a session diary from Bill Dixon's most recent recording sessions by members of the band, an exploration of the work of mysterious Spanish metal-and-more band Orthodox, and the ever-popular "much more." That's only $10 for a physical copy and $5 for a download.

Of course, if you haven't got shelf space for even one more book or magazine, but you still want to give me your money, there's a Paypal donation button over there, too. Any books, CDs, or DVDs (or, you know, food) I purchase with your money will naturally become fodder for the blog—that seems fair, right?

WHY I LOVE WRITING FOR ALTERNATIVE PRESS

From the letters column in AP #264, which just arrived in my mailbox:

I literally screamed when I flipped to the From First To Last feature in AP 262. You guys never mention From First To Last, and they're one of if not the best "scene" bands of my generation. I've practically grown up on them. Although I don't agree with some of the opinions expressed in the article (i.e., that Throne To The Wolves is better than the rest of their albums), I'm so grateful that you guys finally printed something about them. They deserve as much or more press than most of the bands AP goes on about. So, mad props.
Essy Lynn Davis
Oak Grove, MO

When I went downstairs to eat my breakfast, I ran straight into my May issue of AP. So of course, I opened it up, looked at the first few ads, then opened to the features list in the table of contents to see the most glorious words ever: From First To Last. Naturally, I flipped to page 86 to see my magazine graced with the lovely talents that have been my life since the ripe age of 12 when I went to my first Warped Tour in 2005 and saw their beautiful faces up close and personal. I have every album, including Aesthetic, and have loved the lyrics and music that has changed my life. And although their self-titled album was a slight disappointment, it was really awesome to read why exactly they created it and why they did what they did with it. It opened my eyes to truly how rough a time they were going through. And it was the first I heard of them not having Travis Richter. So thank you, AP, for further informing me on my favorite band in the world.
Morgan Tangent
Ventura, CA

I can say with relative confidence that nothing I've written for The Wire, not even the piece on Wadada Leo Smith, has ever inspired literal screaming.

THIS MONTH IN THE WIRE

I wrote the cover story for the new issue of The Wire; it's about trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. I'm not gonna reproduce the whole thing here, because a) the editors would get mad at me, and b) I want you to go buy the issue. Trust me, it's worth it. I'm really happy with the story, and there's a bunch of other cool stuff in the issue - an Invisible Jukebox with synth/computer music pioneer Eliane Radigue, for example. But here's a teaser:

“You learn a lot about yourself when you play solo music,” says Wadada Leo Smith. “Because focusing on a solo requires the same kind of energy as focusing on an ensemble. It’s just that the ensemble gives you a multiplicity of things to look at, while a solo gives you this intense involvement that amounts to the same thing.”

A trumpeter and composer who started out on the drums, this friendly, soft-spoken professor with shoulder-length dreads and a grey beard has spent more than four decades exploring a unique and hypnotic soundworld that has involved jazz quartets, loud electric groups, string ensembles and groups of laptop improvisors, but some of his most affecting music has been performed alone in a room with an array of horns, percussion devices and other noise makers. And even when surrounded by other players, there’s a spacious quality to his composition and instrumental approach that creates a Zen-like calm in the listener.

Smith was one of the first post-Fire Music avant garde jazz players. Born Leo Smith in Mississippi in 1941, he converted to Rastafarianism in the mid-1980s, taking the name Wadada, which means 'love' in Amharic, the Semitic language of Ethiopia. In recent years, he has converted again, this time to Islam, and added the name Ishmael, but his voicemail message still announces, "This is Wadada." Along with Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins and other members of the Chicago based AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), he helped shift the locus of American free playing from the spiritually overpowering blare of Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, et al, towards something that focused on overtly intellectual explorations of music as language and system. Between 1967 and the early 1970s, he appeared on many crucial discs, including three of Braxton’s earliest albums (3 Compositions Of New Jazz, the self-titled BYG release and This Time), as well as Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre’s Humility In The Light Of The Creator and Marion Brown’s Geechee Recollections.

“I had been referred to [Braxton] by another fellow I met in the army - I guess when they were stationed in Korea or something,” Smith recalls. “I had a phone number, and when I got to Chicago I looked Braxton up and we started immediately making connections. It was a mutual situation, where I understood things he was looking for and he checked out some of the things I was looking for.”

Smith contributed one of his own pieces, “The Bell,” to Braxton’s debut album as a leader, 3 Compositions Of New Jazz. In its first half, the piece primarily features violinist Leroy Jenkins, with occasional piano from Muhal Richard Abrams behind him; at the composition’s midpoint, though, Smith and Braxton enter, turning it into a mixture of 20th century classical and raw sound. Braxton switches frantically between instruments (clarinet, flute, saxophone), seeming to offer no more than one blurt or squawk on each before dropping it. Smith, on the other hand, seems to be attempting to play the trumpet in such a way as to emphasize the silence more than the notes. This strategy would recur again and again in the decades to follow.

It was in the process of writing and recording this piece that Smith began to develop his compositional concept of “rhythm units,” later to be formalized as a graphic notation system known as Ankhrasmation (the word is a hybrid of the ancient Egyptian word for 'life force' (ankh), the Amharic word for 'head' or 'father' (ras), and the universal term for 'mother' (ma)). “I discovered that rhythm could be organized as proportional and not metrical,” he says. “And I found that if I could group a set of figures into an idea of long and short, and then I organized a relationship between each set, between a single set and between each part of a set, that I had stepped on something that would be profoundly useful. I didn’t know at the time they were rhythm units, or that it would have such an impact on my music, I simply knew that I was struggling hard to find a way to verbally contextualize what I was trying to do in these figures. And the rhythm units gave me that idea.

“When I came to Chicago I had already composed a pretty good body of work and already begun to understand music without metrical progression or modulation,” he continues. “And I was never, ever working in a harmonic sphere, where harmonic progression was important. And you look at Braxton, he was doing just the opposite, he was looking at how you make creative music with those connections. I was not so much interested in that part of it. I always looked at how you make music without all those things everybody has inherited.”

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