Ascension,Improv,Cybernetic Jazz....

Listening to Jazz on 3 last night and caught the last part of an interview with Oscar Brown jnr. Found out that he wrote the lyrics to Mongo Santamaria's Afro-Blue, a tune that Coltrane played regularly. Speaking of which, the next item featured Evan Parker interviewing John Tchicai, who played on the Ascension sessions. Parker said that he was revered for having only seen Coltrane played live, whereas Tchicai was held in even higher esteem for having played with Coltrane. Presenter Jez Nelson revealed that there were scuffles outside his first live performance at the Red Rose, in North London, where Spring Heel Jack's John Coxon and Ashley Wales put on an Improv night. You can listen to the show for a week. If you all you can manage is a 5-minute listen, fast forwad right to the end of the 60-min show to hear Tchicai read a poem accompanied by Spring Heel Jack. Blew me away, anyway...

A great interview with Spring Heel Jack can be found here, from around the time just after the release of the Amasses album, talking about their juxtaposition of Amercan and European Improv giants with their own blend of electronics and also touching on Bach, dub, William Faulkner, Korosawa and Luciano Berio. Related to the above paragraph, they discuss Ascension and the physicality of the playing of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Mark Sanders. DJ Spooky also gets a mention:

The reason the records we have made work well and are interesting to listen to,
is that we haven't set ourselves up as propagandists for the electronic idea.
Like DJ Spooky's idea of “21st Century Jazz”. It is propaganda and is
irrelevant. Twenty-first centuries jazz exists without him or with him. It
doesn't make any difference. Evan Parker will be blowing saxophone, and that is
21st century jazz. And if he lived to the 22nd century, it would be 22nd century
jazz. Propagandising something smacks of record companies trying to sell
records, and that is what I hate about it. The notion of new electronic jazz has
got to be resisted. The truth has got to be told. It has got to be said that it
is not something new.

Been reading more of DJ Spooky at his website. I've read his Rhythm Science, a beautifully designed book and accompanying cd, which discusses his thoughts on micro-culture and musical hybrids. He invents his own terms to depict the changes going on in culture. There is a lot to gain from reading the book yet he strays into nonsense territory in some chapters, where his creative use of hybrid words becomes incomprehensible, to me, at least ('cybernetic jazz', for instance, or 'illbient'). The interview with Matthew Shipp is a good read though, Spooky going off on tangents, topics including Xennakis, Rimbaud, Charlie Patton and Duke Ellington.

Thanks to the Yorkshireman for pointing me in the direction of Salon.com which has a great selection of free mp3s from Dylan to the Animal Collective, from Richard Thompson to Four Tet, from Sun Ra to Teenage Fanclub, and from Albert Ayler to Teenage Fanclub.

Simon Reynolds' blog can be found here. Worth a read despite the following drivel which is a perfect example of what I was going on about here.

...made me think of Sontag’s angle on literary modernism and pornography. The
extreme focus (sensory, psychological, cinematic) entailed in the erotic
transactions here depicted lends itself to a certain avant-garde
intensification, most apparent in the stereo-placement and ultra-vivid
chromaticism of the vocals, which tripped me out on the first few listens.

Music critic (for The New Yorker) Alex Ross' blog can be found here. He draws attention to a lovely little piece On Messiaen's Quartet Pour La Fin Du Temps.

jazz,john coltrane,blogs,Improv,spring heel jack