so there it was then. not one of the best years for a lot of reasons, but they're outside the scope of this essentially superficial and frothy blog, for which we should be thankful.
ahem.
so i'm sure you're dying to know - what were peter's most nicest records of 2010? unusually, i liked quite a few this year, though for most of the time i seem to be listening to stuff made before i was born or at least while i was in short trousers.
s. carey - all we grow
this is a ludicrously beautiful record. kind of like a less precious and clever sufjan stevens maybe. minimalist but lush and often really moving. at least i thought so. thanks to rory for pushing this one my way.
john zorn - the goddess
every now and again zorn comes up with a corker - the problem is finding them in his ludicrously huge release schedule. marc ribot is especially wondrous on this. some beautiful writing - reminds me a bit of something mike gibbs might have written in the late 60s - shades of carla bley and gary burton's 'a genuine tong funeral' too.
rumer - seasons of my soul
sadsack MOR devotee that i am, i found this largely irresistible. yeah, it sounds like a lot of other things but that's why i like it.
stian westerhus - pitch black star spangled
at the other end of the scale. this is dark as fuck, as my mother might have said (not really). somewhere between sonny sharrock and keith rowe but not like them or anything much else.
christopher willitts - tiger flower circle sun
this has rarely been off my personal stereo over the last couple of months. good music for winter walking though not quite as individual as his previous, surf boundaries. mr willitts himself is claearly an unreconstructed hippy judging from the way he writes and talks about his music, but i can ignore that.
frazey ford - obadiah
lucy got me in to the be good tanyas a few years back, for which i'm eternally grateful. i like the willie mitchell type production on this album - the band really get that tight but loose vibe down that you hear on those al green or ann peebles records. and trish klein is one of my favourite guitarists.
exploding star orchestra - stars have shapes
i liked this one a lot. kind of the AACM goes electronical. i can't help wondering how they get the money together to take a band this size out on the road.
captain's gone
don van vliet has died. we were obviously unlikely to see another album from him, but nevertheless, it's a sad time for devotees of the long lunar note. chris has written a rather lovely and thoughtful post on his blog, so there's no need for me to say much here, other than to post my favourite picture of a rock group ever.
city of lost angels
last week i had the pleasure of playing in petra jean phillipson's band for a short run of a performance of 'city of lost angels', a sort of gig/dance performance at notting hill's print room based around petra's rather wonderful album 'notes on death'. other members of the band were mr paul may on the drums, guitarist fred lyenn jacques and nell catchpole on viola. also featured were fontane liang (harp) and joanne leigh gibson, whose opening treated tuba improv was pretty transcendent.
the performance was not without challenges and was pretty far removed from the concept of a standard gig; it took place in the round with the band members on plinths in each corner of the space, and of course the arrangements had to be pretty tight in order not to screw up the choreography (four dancers made up the company and did an amazing job, particularly on the last night when the place was extremely crowded). but we managed to pull it off. the second night was my favourite - it seemed to crackle with energy. this FT review is from the first night.
the performance was not without challenges and was pretty far removed from the concept of a standard gig; it took place in the round with the band members on plinths in each corner of the space, and of course the arrangements had to be pretty tight in order not to screw up the choreography (four dancers made up the company and did an amazing job, particularly on the last night when the place was extremely crowded). but we managed to pull it off. the second night was my favourite - it seemed to crackle with energy. this FT review is from the first night.
in Dublin
i'm not long back from Dublin and the Forwind records night at the Severed Head Gallery. nice sets from everyone involved (including sonnamble - finally a gig that wasn't a horrifying disappointment either for us or the audience). despite nasty weather etc, a good turnout and a lovely night was had by all.
here's most of james o' sullivan's solo set. nice!
2 london jazz fest gigs - the first
unusually i saw two jazz festival gigs last week.
not herbie hancock, fortunately.
the first was the william parker/hamid drake trio with alto saxophonist zhenya strigalev at the baltic restaurant. a strange venue in some ways, and the audience was split between expensive looking people eating and scruffy jazzheads nursing bottles of polish lager. parker is a hero of mine and this was a nice opportunity to watch him at work. wearing a beaming smile much of the time, he grooved, swang and squealed away in rock solid fashion. the set seemed to be mostly improvised, with a few ornette-ish heads thrown in at times. things were mainly kept at a reasonable intensity, though a spidery ballad near the start of the set opened up some nice melodic interplay between parker and stigalev. strigalev is one of those players that i've heard a little of but whose immersion in such a wide variety of projects makes you wonder what he actually really wants to do. still, it's a way of getting more gigs i guess, so fair play to him. in this context he coped pretty well, i thought. there was a bit of ornette, maybe even rollins (in his freer moments) in some passages. hamid drake is a restless groove machine, constantly shifting the ground underneath parker, who nevertheless dug in at every rhythmic shift. there's a lot of mingus in parker i think - that same elemental, er thing. a solo where he played with pulling the g string off the neck so it buzzed (sounding a bit like a large fly hitting itself against repeatedly against a window) was very reminiscent of charles at his punkest.
some things didn't work too well and sometimes drake's rock/funk tendencies got a bit much, forcing the music into stasis, which isn't where it wants to be. an encore featuring drake on frame drum went nowhere much, but my feeling was that they'd have been happy to go on all night if they could, and that counts for a lot. a nice gig.
not herbie hancock, fortunately.
the first was the william parker/hamid drake trio with alto saxophonist zhenya strigalev at the baltic restaurant. a strange venue in some ways, and the audience was split between expensive looking people eating and scruffy jazzheads nursing bottles of polish lager. parker is a hero of mine and this was a nice opportunity to watch him at work. wearing a beaming smile much of the time, he grooved, swang and squealed away in rock solid fashion. the set seemed to be mostly improvised, with a few ornette-ish heads thrown in at times. things were mainly kept at a reasonable intensity, though a spidery ballad near the start of the set opened up some nice melodic interplay between parker and stigalev. strigalev is one of those players that i've heard a little of but whose immersion in such a wide variety of projects makes you wonder what he actually really wants to do. still, it's a way of getting more gigs i guess, so fair play to him. in this context he coped pretty well, i thought. there was a bit of ornette, maybe even rollins (in his freer moments) in some passages. hamid drake is a restless groove machine, constantly shifting the ground underneath parker, who nevertheless dug in at every rhythmic shift. there's a lot of mingus in parker i think - that same elemental, er thing. a solo where he played with pulling the g string off the neck so it buzzed (sounding a bit like a large fly hitting itself against repeatedly against a window) was very reminiscent of charles at his punkest.
some things didn't work too well and sometimes drake's rock/funk tendencies got a bit much, forcing the music into stasis, which isn't where it wants to be. an encore featuring drake on frame drum went nowhere much, but my feeling was that they'd have been happy to go on all night if they could, and that counts for a lot. a nice gig.
great album covers of our time - no 1
years ago i was given a whole lot of stockhausen on vinyl - hymnen, carre, telemusik, stimmung, mixtur - all the hits. in fact there was even a double album called stockhausen's greatest hits. really. but kurzwellen became one of my faves, much to my mum's annoyance.the instruments are (from the composer's notes) piano, electronium, large tam-tam with microphone, viola with contact microphone, 2 filters with 4 faders, 4 short-wave receivers. and it's a sort of directed improvisation. and it's strong stuff. as is the cover.
by most standards this probably wouldn't qualify as music. as you might expect, it's atonal, peppered with bangs, bleeps, squeals, static and scrapes. and it was a double album. certainly my mum found it utterly repellent and i think, genuinely upsetting that anyone would want to listen to it. i probably slightly enjoyed this reaction.
i remember showing her the cover, in the hope that the picture might convince her that these were serious musicians. they wore suits and looked as though they had washed recently. and they were on deutsche grammophon too. that was a label for proper music, wasn't it?. i think she was actually slightly horrified that karlheinz and chums looked like bank employees rather than the usual bearded, longhaired creepy types to be found lurking on the album covers that usually littered my room.
i loved that cover, because it represented some other world - where people wearing suits and who probably didn't take that many drugs made weird noises for a living. it exuded seriousness - i got the feeling that these guys had devoted their lives to making this alien, harsh, unforgiving music. their world was as foreign and exotic to me as the worlds of haight-ashbury in 1967 or new york in 1977 or chicago in the thirties. and it still is.
