2008: Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band, Houston Person & Ron Carter, Pia Fraus, Deke Dickerson, Paavoharju, Lau Nau
Jazz, Estonian shoegaze, Finnish mystics and Oklahoma
Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band. Season of
Changes.
United States, May 6
Rich and original jazz led and largely composed by a drummer who has supported everyone from pop stars to the best jazz instrumentalists of his era to Bob Dylan and draws from every tradition in American song. It’s jazz, but it doesn’t sound quite like it’s sure that’s what it is.
Houston Person & Ron Carter. Just Between Friends.
United States, May 6
Part of what makes the collaboration between Houston Person and Ron Carter – now in its fourth decade – compelling is the imbalance of their stature in the history of jazz. Ron Carter, the most-recorded bassist ever to live, is one of the legends and masters of his instrument and has performed on some of the most significant jazz recordings of the past sixty years. Houston Person, for all his qualities, just isn’t one of the absolute legends and masters of his instrument, and just hasn’t performed on any of the most significant jazz recordings of the past sixty years. Had Carter made a duo album with Wayne Shorter, it would be a major event; had Person made one with Gene Harris, it wouldn’t have been. But that’s only part of what makes the collaboration interesting. The real interest lies in their not having made one such album but (so far) six. Theirs has got to be the lengthiest series of tenor sax and bass duo albums ever recorded. It’s in that context that these simple but richly played renditions of standards become hours in the kind of conversation that lives through a lifetime. Jim Jarmusch’s fascinating Coffee and Cigarettes would be even more fascinating had he brought the participants together every 8-10 years for four decades, I’m inclined to believe. Certainly Person and Carter seem to agree.
Pia Fraus. After Summer.
Estonia, May 13
There are shoegaze bands who build the brittle edges of desperation right into the center of their billowing blankets of fuzz. Pia Fraus are not one of those. They intend instead to hold on to the warmer corners of summer as far into Sunday morning, early October as they can. But the bummer is still there – when the ethereal Sarah Records-style harmonized vocals and those billowing blankets of fuzz drop out, their memory lingers like that day in June in the orchard in the park that you hadn’t thought was so sweet.
Deke Dickerson. King of the Whole Wide World.
United States, May 13
Somewhere in Texas there’s a perfect honky tonk. At the bar folks are dressed in gaudy vintage, jeans, and cowboy hats. A dozen people dance on the barroom floor to wheezy songs from the jukebox. There’s one man tending bar and he’s in no hurry. In the corner a band is setting up for the evening, getting tuned and testing microphones. This is the music they’re about to lay down.
Paavoharju. Laulu Laakson Kukista.
Finland, May 14
In a northern land where woods and meadows intertwine and separate endlessly, the dusk hour in summer feels like it is taking place just on the edge of a gauzy substance, a coming-and-going veil, that keeps the waking world apart from a world of voices, bells, and sighs. (In winter the same boundary grows harrowing and sinister.) Out for a stroll over the hills, you must take care not to listen too hard to what sounds like a voice holding a hint of melody just there: it might lift you away. Some fall in love with that land beyond the gauze. Some like to see that it’s there but never approach. This is the landscape of Goblin Market and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The only ones in danger are those who pretend it doesn’t exist and who, so pretending, when it rises up about them, have no recourse and are caught unawares.
Lau Nau. Nukkuu.
Finland, May 14
This is the angelic music heard by those who venture beyond the gauze, all the more fatal for how fragile, how gentle it sounds.