THIS MONTH IN JAZZIZ

ENRICO RAVA
The Words And The Days
ECM
Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava's discography is both wide and deep, encompassing sessions as free as Manfred Schoof's 1969 classic of blare, European Echoes, and Cecil Taylor's Winged Serpent from 1984, as well as a long history with ECM, having first recorded for them 32 years ago on 1975's The Pilgrim And The Stars.
This disc, his eighth for the label and his second since re-signing in 2003, features a working band of younger Italian musicians, including trombonist Gianluca Petrella, pianist Andrea Pozza (replacing Stefano Bollani), bassist Rosario Bonaccorso, and drummer Roberto Gatto. Rava's tone is rich and full, and he's shadowed throughout by Petrella - one man in the left speaker, the other in the right to beguiling effect.
Petrella's growling, sputtering solo on the irresistibly grooving "Echoes Of Duke" is one of the highlights of the album. It's followed by stream after stream of rippling high notes from Rava, asserting, in case anyone forgot, just whose album this is. But every member of this band gets spotlight time, bassist Bonaccorso most notably of all: "Sogni Proibiti" ("Forbidden Song" for you non-Italian-speakers) is a two-minute bass solo, effectively leading into the lush ballad "Todamor," that's reminiscent, in its powerful strumming, of Jimmy Garrison's work with John Coltrane.
At 12 tracks in just over 72 minutes, it could be argued that The Words And The Days is a touch long. But trying to choose which of these beautiful performances to chop away would be close to impossible.


SATOKO FUJII FOUR
When We Were There
Polystar
Pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura (her husband and creative partner) are staggeringly productive, and their eclecticism is almost as determined as their profligacy. While her various orchestras (she operates four, one in New York and three in Japan) frequently traffic in long-form compositions or marathon improvisations, when the groups get smaller, so do the pieces.
When We Were There teams Fujii and Tamura with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black, both Americans, for an 11-track set of remarkable concision. only three tracks pass the five-minute mark, one being the 15-minute finale, "A Diversion." The whole album runs just under an hour. "Sandstorm," the 2:31 opener, comes in hard and whirls around the listener's head much like its namesake. The title track, by contrast, centers around a pulsing piano line and Latin rhythm.
Other tracks shift from slow, chamber-like interactions to ultra-abstract soundscapes - "A Path Through The Garden" includes passages where Dresser's bowed bass is a distant scrape, and Black's drums sound like they're being dusted rather than played. Track 10, "Inori," is a three-minute miniature that finds Tamura and Dresser playing near-unison phrases, and its delicate finality serves to separate everything that came before.
Fujii doesn't typically specialize in Cecil Taylor-esque tsunamis of notes. Most of When We Were There is more reminiscent of a disc like Matthew Shipp's New Orbit, her interaction with Tamura mirroring Shipp's precise figures, which landed like raindrops around Wadada Leo Smith's bleary trumpet lines. On "Runaway Radio," though, Fujii rumbles around the keyboard's low end to powerful effect, and "A Diversion" surges and recedes repeatedly during its allotted quarter hour. This disc combines its miniatures into a unified whole, then caps everything off with a truly grand finale. It's one of Fujii's most satisfying releases.

THIS MONTH IN METAL MANIACS

AZRAEL
Act III: Self/Act IV: Goat
Moribund Cult
The most fascinating aspect of black metal, at its best, is its seeming opposition to what prior generations grew up believing to bhe the core values of metal. Not the whole Satan thing. In that respect, the face-painted forest trolls are way at the back of a long, long line. But anybody who thinks of metal as being fundamentally about transcendence, catharsis, being larger than life - whether that's communicated through instrumental virtuosity, rafter-shaking vocal power or generally via bandmates' collective interaction - has to feel like black metal, so frequently created by bedroom loners these days, is a conscious rejection of all these values. Riffing is primitive, mixing is blurry, vocals are incomprehensible howls mutated by effects. Azrael is a duo, not a solo act, and vocalist/guitarist Lord Samaiza and bassist/drummer Algol are determined to outdo their contemporaries. These two discs are extremely well recorded by the standards of the genre. Algol's drumming, in particular, is crisp and powerful throughout. The cymbals are superbly recorded, never disintegrating into a messy, oversaturated hiss. Samaiza's not content to limit himself to the genre's usual fuzzed-out guitar tones, either, doubling his lines on acoustic just as Algol plays upright bass on a few songs. The vocals are incomprehensible croaks, and there are no lyrics in the booklet, but that only winds up making the music - progressive and often quite beautiful - easier to focus on. These guys are serious artists, operating on a level far beyond most of their contemporaries. They're too profligate for their own good, of course. Two 64-minute CDs is a lot to offer even to devoted BM listeners. But spend a week or two dipping into this overflowing offering and you're sure to come away satisfied.

A TALE OF TWO SABBATHS

Listening to the new Black Sabbath (Dio version) disc, Live At The Hammersmith Odeon, I came away with two or three dominant responses. Response #1: Wow, this kicks all kinds of ass. Response #1A: Wow, Vinny Appice is a fucking incredible hard rock/metal drummer. His machine-gun fills on "Neon Knights" alone are worth the price of this disc - maybe even the wildly inflated eBay price that's about to take hold, now that the initial 5000 copy print run has vanished. Response #2: Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio up front were/are a completely different band than Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne up front, and nowhere is that made clearer than when Dio tackles the Osbourne-era material on this disc.

See, the thing of it is, and this is in no way a slap at Dio, whose work in just about every context I tend to like (I'm not a big Elf fan, but hey, who is?)...but he sings nonsense. His lyrics are disjointed strings of often clumsy metaphor, all about questing, and heroism in the face of nothing specific, and the soul, and on and on. If you know Dio's music, you know the deal. For example, here are the lyrics to "Heaven And Hell":

Sing me a song, you're a singer
Do me a wrong, you're a bringer of evil
The Devil is never a maker
The less that you give, you're a taker
So it's on and on and on, it's Heaven and Hell, oh well
The lover of life's not a sinner
The ending is just a beginner
The closer you get to the meaning
The sooner you'll know that you're dreaming
So it's on and on and on, oh it's on and on and on
It goes on and on and on, Heaven and Hell
I can tell, fool, fool!
Well if it seems to be real, it's illusion
For every moment of truth, there's confusion in life
Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer
And it's on and on, on and on and on...
They say that life's a carousel
Spinning fast, you've got to ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
And they'll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It's Heaven and Hell, oh no!
Fool, fool!
You've got to bleed for the dancer!
Fool, fool!
Look for the answer!
Fool, fool, fool!

This song is meaningless. No single verse has anything to do with the one that precedes it, or the one that follows it; indeed, no idea is sustained for an entire verse. Note the deployment of the place-holder "Oh well" and the utterly clumsy phrasing ("The less that you give, you're a taker") undertaken just to fill out the rhyme scheme. It's a string of muddled concepts that don't stand up to even rudimentary analysis, but sound really fucking cool bellowed into a packed, screaming arena atop a wall of power chords and thunderous rhythm. And every one of Dio's lyrics with Black Sabbath are exactly the same kind of empty mumbo-jumbo. Even when he seems to be addressing something specific, such as the song "Country Girl," he blows it up into a big gaseous cloud about a girl who'll "snatch your soul" - but she doesn't even have a name, or any identifying characteristics. Dio doesn't sing about women; he sings about Woman. And this is why he falls so flat on some of the early Sabbath songs that make it into the set here, "War Pigs" and "Paranoid" in particular.

Those early songs, written primarily by Geezer Butler, had a psychic groundedness that turned them into messages aimed straight at the hearts and minds of stoned, depressed late-60s/early-70s youth across the globe, but particularly in the then-failing Western industrial nations like the UK and US. A lyric like

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight
They leave that all to the poor

with its raw class rage, is utterly beyond Dio's ken. Thus, he attempts to put his own stamp on the song, ad-libbing at the beginning "Oh, they take you away/Make you go/You die/But you try/Oh yeah" over the classic opening doom riff. It's almost embarrassing; it takes the song from the realm of political protest to the brink of Broadway schtick. The ad-libs continue throughout the song, so it's not like Dio's not trying to sell it, but he's doing it in the only way he knows how - through muddled conceptualism. Concrete ideas just aren't his thing. And so, while both the Dio-era Sabbath and the Ozzy-era Sabbath released great records, they were doing completely different things. Which is why the Heaven and Hell project, during which the band plays only Dio-era material, is such a good thing. It keeps Dio from screwing around with songs he doesn't understand.

(To be totally fair, there are Ozzy-era songs with lyrics that are unreal enough for Dio to tackle them in perfect psychic comfort. I'll bet he could sing the fucking hell out of "Supernaut," for example.)

METAL UPDATE

There hasn't been all that much metal content on this blog of late. So here's a brief change-up.

I got the Black Sabbath (Dio version) Live At The Hammersmith Odeon CD, out today on Rhino Handmade. I can now go on with my life, without spending every waking moment mentally kicking myself in the nuts for not getting into the Radio City show a month back. This thing is fucking awe-inspiring. Take your copy of Live Evil and break it into a million glimmering shards, because this is the stone cold shit. Limited edition, so get one today.

John Darnielle is a clear and perceptive thinker, a smart motherfucker generally speaking. But when it comes to metal, he and I don't always agree 100 percent. He likes Laethora a whole fuckin' lot. Based on his write-up, I dug through my towers of promos until I found this one (luckily, it was right near the top of the first tower I approached). And...well...it's okay. But it's not life-changing in any way, shape or form. I could listen to the Nox album another dozen times before feeling the need to go back to these Swedes, I think. (Minor heresy: I'm not a huge Swedish-death-metal fan, period. Grave? Love 'em. Entombed? Like Clandestine just fine, but can take or leave everything else. Arch Enemy? Fucking great, but they're more pan-Euro than Swedish, and Meshuggah aren't even from Earth.) Bloody Panda, who he big-ups a few times on lptj, are as good as he says, though. And I have the feeling that when the new Pig Destroyer lands, he and I will be totally in sync.

ANDREW HILL 1931-2007

The pianist Andrew Hill, who died of lung cancer on April 20, was born in 1931, not 1937, as was frequently reported, and in Chicago, not in Haiti, like he used to tell reporters and liner-note writers. Never as willfully enigmatic as Thelonious Monk or as alienating (to some ears) as Cecil Taylor, Hill was an integral member of Blue Note Records' mid-'60s class of "in 'n' out" players—musicians equally comfortable with freedom, complexity, and the deceptively simple joys of hard bop. His compositions were frequently tricky, almost to the point of dissonance, but "Pumpkin," "Refuge," "Black Fire," and many more have melodies and a swinging energy that's impossible to shake loose once you hear them. [Read the rest here.]

Tuesday morning 10:
"Flight 19" (Point Of Departure)
"Tired Trade" (Black Fire)
"Mother Mercy" (unreleased session, 6/1970)
"Subterfuge" (Black Fire)
"Soul Special" (Grass Roots)
"Wailing Wall" (Smoke Stack)
"Symmetry" (Andrew!!!)
"Mira" (Grass Roots)
"Yellow Violet" (Dance With Death)
"Verne" (Smoke Stack)