hier passiert ja nicht mehr viel und katharsis hat ja auch schon sein ok gegeben, deshalb werde ich mal nach und nach auflösen.
#1
CHICAGO UNDERGROUND TRIO: PROTEST
aus SLON, thrill jockey 2004
rob mazurek (co, computer), noel kupersmith (b, computer), chad taylor (dm).
rec. 27.-30.4.2004, keyclubrecording chicago
war ja erraten, von den meisten auch wertgeschätzt und ich habe eigentlich schon alles dazu gesagt. kern der „underground“-bands sind mazurek und taylor, beide heißen „chicago underground duo“, das wird aufgefüllt bis zum „orchestra“. seit einiger zeit gibt es aber auch „sao paulo underground“, das der kurzem in brasilien lebende mazurek mit anderen musikern macht (bisher 2 alben, beide ganz großartig). ich mag seinen ton ja sehr gerne, aber eigentlich ist seine spielweise eher traditionell. die meisten seiner projekte funktionieren aber ganz großartig in der verbindung von jazz, postrock und elektronik, was ja wirklich eine leistung ist. auch live geht das sehr gut.
#2
BOBO STENSON TRIO: UNDERWEAR
aus UNDERWEAR, ECM 1971
bobo stenson (p), arild andersen (b), jon christensen (dm)
rec 18. & 19.5. 1971, bendiksen studio, oslo
ich bin und bleibe fan von bobo stenson, auch von seinen aktuellen trio-alben. ich finde ihn einfach hochmusikalisch, auch wenn er keinen total individuellen stil hat. das hier war das album mit der laufenden nummer 12 der ECM-produktion, wo es wirklich noch heiß & free zur sache ging. eine meiner ersten jazzplatten überhaupt (also anfang der 90er gekauft). das war ich mir schuldig.
#3
MOACIR SANTOS: COISA No. 6
aus COISAS, forma 1965
moacir santos (p, bs), julio barbosa, joao geronimo menezes (tp), ducilando pereira, jorge ferreira da silva (as), luiz bezerra (ts), geraldo medeiros (bs), edmundo maciel (tb), armando pallas (b-tb), nicolino cópia (fl), chaim lewak (p), claudio das neves (vib), geraldo vespar (g), gabriel bezerra (b), wilson das neves (dm), elias ferreira (per).
rec. 1965 in brasilien
auf die großartigen bigband-sounds von moacir santos bin ich tatsächlich in brasilien gestoßen, wo seine sachen auf diversen samplern drauf sind. ben ratcliff hat ein bisschen recherchiert:
Cults of rediscovered artists grow quickly and sometimes without much warning; in the 1990s, they have sprouted so rapidly that among the reissues there has hardly been room to appreciate a new young player with something to say. (Who needs Luciana Souza, whose context and range of interests are perhaps not worn on her sleeve, when you’ve got Phil Ranelin, frozen in time, a perfect snapshot of 1970s black consciousness? Or something like that.)
So I am surprised that there isn’t much of a cult around the Brazilian jazz composer and arranger Moacir Santos. Born poor in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, Santos became an itinerant musician, playing around other states in the north, Bahia and Ceará. Toward the end of the 1940s, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, to work in the studios of Rádio Nacional, where staff arrangers were needed. But he saw that popular music was art and vice versa, and he studied the big-band composers as well as took lessons with Joachim Koelreutter, the Austrian composer who was lured to Brazil in the 1950s during the age of modernism and taught a whole generation of Brazilian music makers.
I’ve found little information about what Santos was listening to around the time he made “Coisas”, which was the period right before he moved to Los Angeles (where he still lives) to teach and work on film sound tracks. But it sounds like it was a mixture of two influences: the brass-conscious arrangers who were confortable with West Coast jazz as well as samba – say, Bob Brookmeyer or Gary McFarland – and the new, small-group arrangements heard on so many Blue Note albums of the time, the spacious, intriguing-instrumentation sound of Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch”, say. (If you administered a blindfold test, you’d have people guessing that the vibraphonist on “Coisa No. 2,” Claudio das Neves, was Bobby Hutcherson – it’s the way the dry, clanky chords are deployed in the arrangement.) He was attuned to American currents; he also sensed what was in the air.
The tracks are simply called “Coisas” (“Things”) and numbered one through ten; for some reason, they’re presented out of order. On each track, it’s the structure and timbre that first seizes you: it doesn’t sound based in a genre. The melody of “Coisa No. 1” is carried by baritone saxophone, with sparse counterpoint from muted trumpet and trombone; the rhythm section is a samba setup, with big and small animal-skin drums and an acoustic guitar. The bass lines are minimal, mostly there to help accent the bass drum.
Then it’s the melodies, which are concise, bold things, moving through very nonobvious chord choices. “Coisa No. 5” shows that his gift for concision and piquancy was not unlike Wayne Shorter’s. How the music unfolds! At first it comes on strong, with tuba accenting a military-sounding waltz; then, after the introduction, the song changes to a more flowing six-eight, with trombone taking the melody, tuba and guitar giving counterpoint. In the second chorus, after the trombone, a flute improvisation takes over until the bridge (juxtaposition was Santos’s stock-in-trade), and then Luiz Bezerra’s Getz-like tenor saxophone takes over.
The next song, hinging on a two-chord figure and recorded simply with piano and hand drums, at first sounds like one of Ellington’s stripped-down miniatures from his 1953 “Piano Reflections”. The fuller band does eventually slide in, with vibraphone and a brass section, again with those spare Afro-Brazilian drums. (That there are very few cymbals on this album is a constant source of wonder for American ears attuned to jazz drumming.) The weight and density of the music changes from track to track; there’s an organ (uncredited, and probably played by Santos) on numbers six and ten; there’s a small string section on number eight. Different soloists come to light; you don’t hear all soloists play what they know on each track.
“Coisa No. 5”, otherwise known as “Nanã”, was picked up by the circle of jazz and MPB (Música Popular Brasileira, or Brazilian pop) composers in Santos’s orbit and turned into a hit; more than one hundred versions have been recorded, most of them using lyrics written by Mario Telles. Even before “Coisas” was released in 1965, “Nanã” was recorded by the important Brazilian jazz and pop bands of the day: Os Cobras, Edison Machado’s ensemble, and Mario Castro-Neves’s, too.
Santos did, in fact, record in the States; he made three albums for Blue Note in the 1970s. But they are long deleted, and even in Japan, the land where jazz reissues are plentiful, there’s little interest in rereleasing them.
So there you have it: a foreign jazz arranger with an exploratory and musically sound mid-sixties bent; associations with the loungey Bossa Nova figures (Castro-Neves, Carlos Lyra, Roberto Menescal, Baden Powell); black-genius stature; obscurity. Why is this man not famous? And why is this CD still unavailable?
#4
SUN RA AND HIS SOLAR ARKESTRA: PLEASURE
aus OTHER PLANES OF THERE, evidence 1964
sun ra (p), pat patrick (bs), ronnie boykins (b), roger blank und/oder lex humphries (dm).
rec. at the choreographer’s workshop, NYC, 1964
das wurde ja auch identifiziert und ich habe auch schon geschrieben, warum ich das stück ausgewählt hatte. ich dachte eigentlich, dass ra’s piano leichter zu identifizieren sei, aber verstimmte klaviere in irgendwelchen proberäumen können ja von wem auch immer gespielt werden. richtig durch bin ich bei ra’s diskographie noch nicht, das geht wahrscheinlich auch kaum – aber ich finde es großartig, immer wieder um sie zu kreisen und hin und wieder tolle entdeckungen zu machen – wie eben dieses stück hier.
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