Rather than write about my recent sextet tour myself, I leave that in the very creative hands of blogger-with-attitude, guitarist extraordinaire, and papa-to-be, my man Evan O’Reilly over at In This Game A Minute. He tends to have much more interesting times on the road than I do anyway; I stay in the hotel room and practice, he hangs out with snakes at Finnish disco clubs.
I was asked for a list of my five favorite big band recordings, for a downbeat feature Frank Hadley is writing. Even though I know there was a bit of blog-world discussion about this a few months ago (as usual Darcy James Argue was on the case with the roundup), it still ended up being a tough assignment; it’s so hard to nail down just five favorites, there’s so much spectacular stuff out there. (It hurts to have Basie, Gil Evans, Brotherhood of Breath, and however many others left out!) But in the end I went the sentimental route, and chose five recordings I love that have particular meaning for me personally.
Duke Ellington - Great Paris Concert (1963)
It would be easy to have just a list of Ellington records. I probably have close to a hundred Duke records, and honestly, just about all of them are pretty great. But as much as I love the early stuff (especially the Bubber Miley and Rex Stewart eras), and some of the later classics like Far East Suite or …And His Mother Called Him Bill, The Great Paris Concert would have to be my pick. It was one of the first Ellington recordings I ever bought (recommended to me by James Jabbo Ware, see below, when I took a workshop with him when I was a teenager), and it remains one of my favorites. The ensemble playing on this recording is unbelievable, totally loose and relaxed and totally together at the same time; listen to the “Rockin’ in Rhythm” that kicks things off, that’s the best band in the world. Johnny Hodges is in particularly masterful form, that alone is reason for joy. And for about a year when I was in my twenties, I would listen to this version of “Concierto for Cootie” before every gig, I’m still trying to get that sound.
Anthony Braxton - Creative Orchestra (Koln) 1978
Playing Braxton’s large ensemble music has been an inspirational and transformative experience for me for over fifteen years. To use Anthony’s own terminology, it is restructuralist music; it acknowledges, even celebrates, existing musical traditions while reinventing and reimagining those principles in extraordinarily creative ways. The Creative Orchestra Music 1976 album (that was just reissued on the Mosaic box set) is justly recognized as a masterpiece, but I actually like this 1978 Koln concert more; this is a touring band that has truly lived in the music, there’s both a comfort with the material and a sense of exploration that couldn’t happen with a studio record. It’s an incredible bunch of musicians, including an all-star brass section with Leo Smith, Kenny Wheeler, George Lewis, and Ray Anderson. It was also one of the first recordings/tours for folks like Marty Ehrlich, Ned Rothenberg, Vinnie Golia, and Marilyn Crispell, launching them all to pretty wonderful careers; clearly, I’m not the only person whose musical outlook was changed by playing Braxton’s music.
Sun Ra - Purple Night (1989)
Picking just one Sun Ra recording is like trying to pick just one Ellington, there’s so much wonderful music, and such a diversity of styles and eras. I love the subtly tweaked swing of his late 50s-early 60s recordings (Fate in a Pleasant Mood is a particular favorite) as much as the explosive energy of his 70s work (Concert for the Comet Kohoutek). But I’m going with one of his last albums, Purple Night. While this might not be Ra’s most mind-blowing album, it was my first, and it was a beautiful introduction to his sound world. Weird and funny (”Stars Fell on Alabama”!?!) and intimate, one of the best recordings of Sun Ra’s piano playing I know of, a totally grooving army of percussionists, great solos by John Gilmore and Marshall Allen and Michael Ray and all the Arkestra regulars, and the huge bonus of a fantastic Don Cherry guest appearance.
Fred Ho and the Monkey Orchestra - Monkey Part One (1996)
For me, Fred demonstrated the direct inspiration of Ellington, Mingus, etc did not have to be restricted to traditional instrumentation or jazz forms. (It was also nice to find another Chinese-American creative musician named Ho!) Here he combines a full saxophone section (plus trombone, bass and drums), with Chinese traditional instruments and vocals to tell the story of the Monkey King, one of my favorite mythological trickster figures. True to the Monkey spirit, the music is thrilling and fun, evocative and unique. This is no world music fusion buffet; the blend of styles and rhythms is totally organic and all the instruments are fully intergrated into a rich ensemble sound and a great composer’s vision. Yeah, it’s not your usual big band, but the writing clearly deals with that tradition. And every big band should have an erhu anyway.
James Jabbo Ware & the Me We & Them Orchestra - Heritage Is (1995)
I was lucky to have bass trombonist Bill Lowe as an early mentor (and then lifelong friend). Bill is a charter member of James Jabbo Ware’s Me We and Them Orchestra, one of the great underground New York big bands, still going strong after more than three decades, and Bill brought them up to Boston for a performance while I was still in high school. This was the first real big band I ever heard live, not some school or repertory band, but a working composer-led ensemble with its own sound, and I was immediately hooked. Jabbo comes out of the Ellington tradition, crafting tunes to feature specific individuals and musical personalities, fully utilizing the harmonic and timbral potential of a jazz orchestra, harnessing the improvisational energy of post-Coltrane jazz into extended forms and structures. This album captures much of the excitement I felt that first night, with great solos by Lowe, JD Parran, Cecil Bridgewater, John Stubblefield, and Donald Smith among many others, and master percussionist Warren Smith anchoring the rhythm section.
New Haven is an interesting town…you can go from gritty urban areas to Yale’s ivy-covered buildings to suburban strip malls to rural farmland in about a five mile radius. A little schizophrenic, but certainly provides a lot of variety for a small city.
My favorite thing has been the proximity of some real outdoors; within ten minutes from my home I can be hiking up a mountain, or sitting by a lake. With my first spring outside of New York City in half a decade, I have been making the most of it. Which is a long way of saying I’ve been neglecting my computer in favor of trees. Which is clearly a healthy thing, so no apologies.
But nonetheless, an announcement and a video. My sextet is heading out on tour this week, so to all my dedicated readers in Switzerland, Finland, and Germany, do come out. Here are the details:
Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet
THB - cornet, compositions; Matt Bauder - tenor sax, clarinet; Mary Halvorson & Evan O’Reilly - guitars; Nate McBride - acoustic & electric bass; Tomas Fujiwara - drums
June 5, 9:30pm, Taktlos Festival, Zurich, Switzerland
June 6, 8pm, Kerava Festival, Finland
June 8, 8:30pm, Stadtgarten, Cologne, Germany
And from me and Tomas’ Chicago residency in April, a little live clip of the sextet we co-led; Tomas and Nate in the rhythm section, with Jeb Bishop on trombone, Nicole Mitchell on flute, and Jeff Parker on guitar.
What is a Positive Catastrophe?
A) A drastic economic crisis that forces a once-wealthy nation to acknowledge its wasteful and consumerist ways and chart a new course towards a sustainable, ecological, and socially-just future.
B) A global invasion of giant, outerspace insects, forcing the inhabitants of Earth to abandon their age-old divisions of nationality, race, and religion and unite in their common humanity to repel the alien hordes.
C) A trans-idiomatic ten-piece little big band that will be celebrating the release of a new recording with two nights of music at one of NYC’s finest venues.
D) All of the above.
Positive Catastrophe
Friday May 8 - Saturday May 9, sets at 9pm and 10:30pm
at the Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson St, NYC
CD release event for Garabatos Volume One on Cuneiform Records.
Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet, co-leader), Abraham Gomez-Delgado (percussion, voice, co-leader), Jen Shyu (voice, erhu), Mark Taylor (french horn), Reut Regev (trombone), Jim Hobbs (alto sax), Michael Attias (baritone sax), Pete Fitzpatrick (guitar), Alvaro Benavides (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums).
So I’ve only been on the road with the Convergence Quartet (w/Alex Hawkins on piano, Dom Lash on bass, and Harris Eisenstadt on drums) for a couple of days, and we’ve already snuck into youtubeland, playing a tune by Alex. Five more gigs to come, come on out if you’re in Merrie Olde. And if you’re more a radio person than video, a performance at the Cheltenham Festival will be broadcast on BBC’s Jazz on 3 next Monday, May 4, 11.15pm (Greenwich mean time represent) and streaming the week to follow. Cheers!
I had a really great time in the Midwest a week ago, getting to play with a plethora of fantastic musicians. Much of it was recorded, so hopefully I can use that as an excuse to update my site with some new live MP3s. In the meantime, here’s a video clip of the big band in Chicago absolutely nailing Anthony Braxton’s Composition 58 (dedicated to John Philip Sousa, if you didn’t guess that…). The band includes Josh Berman and Jaimie Branch (cornet/trumpet), Jeb Bishop and Nick Broste (trombones), Nicole Mitchell (flute), Caroline Davis, Keefe Jackson and Dave Rempis (saxes), Jason Adasiewicz (vibes), Jeff Parker (guitar), Nate McBride (bass), and Tim Daisy and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), with Jeff, Jeb, Jason, and Nicole taking the solo honors, and filmed by Braxton uber-archivist Jason Guthartz of Restructures fame. Hope you enjoy!
It is somewhat surprising, though deeply gratifying, to be getting some love from the mainstream media these days, even from the most unlikely sources. Maybe they thought a story about a scrappy little musician’s collective would be a nice antidote to the stories of bank collapses and bailouts. (Maybe next, we can get some bailouts for scrappy musician collectives…)
Nate Chinen wrote really nice article about the Firehouse 12 experience in the Times today, check it out. And it even includes a sidebar, and many audio samples! There was also a thoughful review of The Thirteenth Assembly a few weeks ago. I must compliment Mr. Chinen, beyond being positive, which is always lovely, both articles get to the real point of two fairly unusual endeavors, rather than imposing preconceived notions upon them.
Last weekend, Tomas Fujiwara and I went into the WFMU studios for a Sunday morning recording they broadcast later in the week. WFMU is a great place, old school free-form radio, so many thanks to Scott McDowell for hooking it up. You can check out the music here.
If those sounds make you happy, and you live in the Midwest, you’re in luck. I’ll be spending the first couple weeks of April playing with a bevy of lovely people in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Detroit. Check my calendar for info, and hope to see you out there.
Finally, some more duo joy I’ve been meaning to mention for ages…the last time I was in Vienna, I had the chance to record a few improvisations with the fantastic Austrian trumpet player Lorenz Raab. It’s now available online only from crackshop.at, hope you enjoy.
I’m very happy to announce that (un)sentimental, the debut CD of The Thirteenth Assembly, is now available from Important Records. The group is a collective quartet featuring Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar, Jessica Pavone on viola, and myself playing cornet, with everyone contributing compositions. Each musician brings a strikingly different personal aesthetic, but we’ve spent many hours in many groups hashing it all out together, and it manages to come together in a pretty unique group sound. According to The New York Times, the album “irons a noisy new wrinkle in the upstart avant-garde”; I’m not totally sure what that means, but I’ll take it as a good thing.
So 8pm this Wednesday, March 11, we’ll be celebrating with a CD release concert at Barbes, 376 9th St, corner of 6th Ave in Park Slope. Come on out and make it a party! There will be prizes: the first person to figure out where we got the band name wins a free CD. You can sneak a listen to some of the songs at the band’s myspace page, so you can hum along with the songs. And we might even have DVDs from a live performance in Troy available for sale, product product product!
And that’s not all the musical collective fun in store this month:
Monday, March 16 - The Throes (the band formerly known as the Nate Wooley/Taylor Ho Bynum Quartet) will be playing in the newly relocated RUCMA series, at The Local 269, 269 Houston at Suffolk. Nate on trumpet, me on cornet, Ken Filiano on bass, and Tomas Fujiwara on drums, compositions from all four of us. Some youtube-y action of the group below. Responding to the rapid growth in the music industry, this group also has a new CD coming out on CIMP Records, which should see the light of day sometime this year. We’re on at 9pm, but show up at 7:30 for a set by the Flow Trio, with my man Joe Morris on bass, Louie Belogenis on saxophone, and Charles Downs on drums. (And if I may say so myself, Joe’s recent bass quartet CD, High Definition on hatOLOGY, is killer, check it out.)
Coming up later in the month, on Saturday March 28 at the Douglas Street Music Collective (295 Douglas St, Brooklyn) I’ll be playing in a trio with the wonderful musicians Carl Maguire on piano and Loren Kiyoshi Dempster on cello. (For what it’s worth, Carl’s the only person I can think of to figure out the Thirteenth Assembly name.) Then for most of April, I’m going to be either in the Midwest or the UK, so if you have friends in Chicago or London send them my way, details at my gig calendar.
And to plug a gig not of mine, but the one I love: my wife, the choreographer and dancer Rachel Bernsen, will be presenting a really exceptional new piece in Danspace Project’s Draftworks Series at St. Mark’s Church (131 E. 10th St), Saturday, March 7 at 3pm, on a double bill with Milka Djordjevich and Chris Peck. It features musical collaborators Carl Testa and Anne Rhodes and dancer Lindsey Bauer, and it’s something very special, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett
“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.” - Herman Melville