FIRST AMG UPDATE OF 2010

Can't believe I've gone almost a whole month without posting links to AMG reviews. Well, here are a bunch of 'em.

Arcana Coelestia, Le Mirage de l'Ideal
Arsis, Starve for the Devil
Circle of Contempt, Artifacts in Motion
Robin Crutchfield, The Hidden Folk
Dismember, Like an Ever Flowing Stream
Enfold Darkness, Our Cursed Rapture
Geist, Galeere
Ihsahn, After
Mutiny Within, Mutiny Within
N.A.M.B., Bman
Martin Rev, Stigmata
Matthew Shipp, Nu Bop Live
Sarke, Vorunah
Strong Arm Steady, In Search of Stoney Jackson
The Third Eye, Awakening....
The Third Eye, Searching
The Third Eye, Brother
Urna, Iter ad Lucem
Various Artists, The Psychedelic Salvage Company, Vol. 1 & 2
Worm Ouroboros, Worm Ouroboros

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.”

Buy the issue.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON JAZZ TALK

A summary of a conversation I had on Twitter today:

@pdfreeman Jazz proselytizers need to stop saying “you need to listen to jazz” and start saying “you need to listen to [specific album].” Rock fans can say “I like Elvis” or “I like Metallica.” Jazzheads shouldn’t feel pressured to rep the whole genre. I love many different kinds of jazz but wouldn’t listen to most jazz vocal albums, or a Miles Davis/Bill Evans disc, on a dare. Albert Ayler for noise kidz. Ella Fitzgerald for folks who like VH1 girl-with-piano stuff. Mahavishnu Orchestra for metalheads.

@garrettshelton i'd add the first album suggested shouldn't be Kind of Blue. It has ZERO to do what's going on today

@pdfreeman Neither do the Beatles, but they still sell.

@garrettshelton not about sales but about the relationship. i hear more influence on rock over the last decade by the beatles, than KoB in jazz.

@epicharmus For some new listeners, though, there's more appeal in saying "I'm listening to jazz" than "I'm listening to [specific album]." Another way of putting it: some newbies come to jazz because of its "cool" rather than a visceral response the music qua music gives. Liking music for its "coolness" may seem stupid (tho I'm not totally down on cool), but it can be a gateway to appreciating other qualities.

@garrettshelton rock fans can say they like modern groups, without referencing legacy acts or dead artists - and not be looked down upon too

@pdfreeman At some point historical ignorance will earn ridicule, but yeah, w/rock you can come in just about anywhere. Folks can, and do, come to jazz cold - I sure did; started w/"KoB" but heard "On the Corner" weeks later & liked it better.

@pdfreeman How much do jazz artists hurt themselves by explicitly referencing history - releasing "[New Guy] Plays [Dead Guy]" CDs all the damn time? No rock artist could expect to be taken seriously releasing a covers album as their debut. "Standards" = Sha Na Na.

@Cave17Matt Never hurt anyone's sales! Most people are scared of "jazz," need a familiar entry point. Like the oldies. Come on - Sha Na Na wasn't trying to put their own spin on anything.

@epicharmus I'm not sure most jazz newcomers know the originals well enough to be tempted!

@Cave17Matt New jazz artists have no percentage in selling to jazz newcomers though. Sadly their audience is well-educated middleagers.

@pdfreeman Young jazz players should hit the road, open for indie-rock bands or play the jam band circuit. Leave jazz clubs to geezers. Jazz festivals give all the big money to veteran headliners anyway - new players'd better off aggressively chasing new fans. Biggest obstacle: jazz-player mindset/temperament - upscale, educated & probably resistant to punk-rock squalor in service of art. "I didn't go to Juilliard so I could sleep in a beer-puddle on the floor of some basement!"

POLE POSITION

Behemoth aren't just your everyday, run-of-the-mill death-metal band
[From the Cleveland Scene]

A lot of death metal is interchangeable — and that's coming from a fan of the genre. But there's no mistaking Behemoth. The Polish trio spent the last dozen years, roughly since 1999's Satanica and 2000's Thelema.6, trying to engulf the world in the sonic equivalent of a firestorm. Drummer Zbigniew Robert Prominski, a.k.a. "Inferno," plays some of the most powerful blast beats in death metal, hammering at the snare like he's firing a chain gun, as the double kick drums knock holes into your skull. Meanwhile, singer-guitarist Adam "Nergal" Darski fires off ferocious guitar riffs that trade the typical death-metal rhythmic grinding for a more anthemic, relentlessly destructive sound — he's going for overwhelming power from first note to last, and often comes closer to Psalm 69-era Ministry than, say, Cannibal Corpse.

But Darksi's vocals really get your attention. He avoids the typical extreme-metal guttural croak/bark, instead ranting and roaring like a blast furnace. It's such a distinctive, almost inhuman sound that the obvious question is what kind of effects pedal does he use to achieve it?

"What you can hear is pretty much my voice," he says. "Sometimes I just double it or triple it. That's how you get the impression that there's a few people screaming."

Darski believes there are a lot of misconceptions about Behemoth. One of the major ones is that the group made a major stylistic shift in 2000, abandoning the black metal of its first three albums in favor of a more death-metal sound. "Our style has been evolving throughout the years; every record is different," he asserts with some accuracy. "I wouldn't really say that after Thelema.6 we changed. If you listen to each one of our nine albums, each one is different. It's constant evolution."

This constant evolution is particularly surprising given that the current lineup — with Inferno on drums and Tomasz "Orion" Wróblewski on bass — has been together since 2003 (Inferno's actually been drumming for Behemoth since 1997).

"Because we've written so much music, it's more and more difficult to come up with something that's gonna be Behemoth style at the same time that it's fresh and challenging," says Darski. "We can't just get in a rehearsal room and throw ideas at each other and the song comes out. It's a much longer and more painful process."

For this reason, he has decided it's important to make each Behemoth album a statement. This means abandoning a longstanding practice of releasing EPs of B-sides, live tracks and cover songs between albums. One of these five- or six-track releases has followed every Behemoth disc since Thelema.6, and the range of covers Behemoth has essayed over the years is surprising, to say the least. They've offered their own roaring take on other extreme metal bands' work (Morbid Angel's "Day of Suffering," Mayhem's "Carnage," Venom's "Welcome to Hell"), but they've also released versions of David Bowie's "Hello Spaceboy," Nine Inch Nails' "Wish" and the Ramones' "I'm Not Jesus." But no more.

"There's gonna be no more small releases; it just makes no sense," says Darksi. "I want people to wait for another album. I want them to anticipate — to be really, really hungry for the next Behemoth opus. I don't want to distract their hunger with a small release. We will release a DVD, but that's a different story. There will be no musical release from Behemoth this year or in 2011."

Two years should be just about long enough to absorb the band's most recent album. Evangelion came out in August and topped many metal critics' year-end lists. It's not as florid or ambitious as 2004's Demigod, which featured synths simulating an orchestra and a male choir, but it contains some of the most powerful songs the band has ever written. "Alas, the Lord Is Upon Me" finds Darski combining the black-metal spirit of the band's early days with the ultra-aggressive blasting of their more recent work, while the doom-haunted "Ov Fire and the Void" is possibly the slowest song in their discography. Meanwhile, the album's epic closing track, "Lucifer," uses a poem by Polish poet Tadeusz Miciski as its lyrics.

That's a surprising gesture on Darski's part. He's tended to ignore his homeland's culture, preferring to write songs employing imagery from various ancient lands, including Babylon (Nergal, his stage name, was a Babylonian deity) and other Middle Eastern countries. But as he makes very clear, it's always metaphorical.

"We're not Nile, we're not Absu, we're not Melechesh," he says, citing other extreme metal bands who make the ancient desert tribes their primary subject matter. "We write about our lives, our perspectives, our point of view. We just wrap it up in this Biblical ancient stuff."

Part of that desire to look outside may be rooted in Behemoth's relative obscurity in Poland — which is ironic since Darski is engaged to Dorota "Doda" Rabczewska, one of Poland's biggest female pop stars.

"She's big, she's a star," he says. "We're just an extreme-metal band who happen to be recognized by a larger audience. But our music is anti-mainstream, basically. You can sell a certain amount of records, and this is it. We've sold 15,000 records in Poland, and I don't really think it's going to be easy to surpass those numbers. We can't do much better than that. But we'll see — maybe I'm wrong."

PAZZ Y JOP, OTRA VEZ

Well, the 2009 Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll results are out, and they're pretty depressing if you don't like whiteboy indie rock. Good thing I decided to stop giving a fuck.

But just for the record, here's where the ten albums I voted for wound up:

Bebe, Y. - #1384
Graciela Beltran, Reina de la Banda - #1207
Bomba Estereo, Blow Up - #501 (two votes)
Don Omar, iDon - #1387
Girl in a Coma, Trio B.C. - #645 (two votes)
Natalia Lafourcade, Hu Hu Hu - #180 (FOUR votes!)
Paulina Rubio, Gran City Pop - #1093
V/A - Si, Para Usted: The Funky Beats Of Revolutionary Cuba Vol. 2 - #654 (two votes)
Los Tigres del Norte, La Granja - #599 (two votes)
Wisin y Yandel, La Revolución - #616 (two votes)