Tagged: tomdjllsposts

Bristle : this quartet, started up by reedman Randy McKean, acts more like a co-operative, with composing duties shared by the founder with fellow reedist Cory Wright, violin/oboist Murray Campbell, and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa. The results are astonishing. Mood-swings cut as sharp and clear as a diamond’s facets. Hemphillian harmonies that taste like tangerine juice spiked with stinging nettle. No genre is safe from their predatory gene-splicing. On their first release bulletproof , ‘Notlob’ bounces along for awhile in jaunty fashion, but ends up somewhere south of Albert Ayler by the [...]

May you live in meme-ingful times. Gallery: "Casually Pepper-Spray Everything Cop" meme.  Endless pics. (Well, as of last count, 502.) This collection of images is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Let's get the obvious ones out of the way first — sort of clear the quad of the passive resisters, as it were: 1. Holy Hell! There must be a LOTTA people out of work, or slagging off while AT work! ( Duh .) 2. Humans are creative things, once given a fun theme to riff on. 3. [...]

There's been some coverage here on B of The B about the corporate takeover of station KUSF, in San Francisco. While that battle still rages , WFMU has come up with a brilliant, incredibly generous solution: hosting the "KUSF in Exile" stream. Your favorite KUSF deejays are still on the air, still putting out the freeform mixes you love out there on the West Coast. Tune in here.   Brick & mortar containers for out-music are doing just as poorly in the Bay Area. It's a story that cycles [...]

The following comes to us from our friend Bhob Rainey : As much as I enjoy records and even CDs, SACDs, and the like, I’m pretty damn happy that so much music can be streamed and downloaded in high- or very-close-to-high-quality digital formats. Sites like Bandcamp and SoundCloud have allowed a great deal of interesting music to live and propagate on the internet at no cost to artists of all stripes. And it bears mentioning that these sites and their embeddable players are far more pleasant to use and look at than some of their predecessors. [...]

Don van Vliet's passing on the 17th is an occasion still beyond my power to fathom, let alone "blog." Instead, I offer as a tribute the following quasi-academic exercise in lyrics analysis. It would be perhaps more fitting of the grief and loss many of us are feeling, if I chose   to delve into the unbearably mordant There Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evenin' Stage . (There was a Santa Claus on van Vliet's evenin' stage — his later-in-life career as an abstract painter.)  The man was deep . We shall not see [...]

  Braxton’s Composition 96 for Orchestra and Slide Projectors breaks up a large standard European orchestra into sections that move en masse. The lead sheets gave us copyists the top line of each section — say, woodwinds, in which case the highest-scored instrument was first flute — and all the other instruments in that family (including saxophones, double-reed instruments, clarinets) stack underneath the flute notes in a giant, 11-voice chord spaced in diatonic seconds and thirds. The melodic lines are typical asymmetrical, jumping Braxtonian gestures, so (if you haven’t heard the piece) imagine the sound a rainbow-colored [...]

p Dan Plonsey was part of the CMS student sax section that summer of ‘79 ( Mars Williams and Fred Hess were in there, too.). Plonsey recalls, “Braxton had us reading his graphic scores, the ones that are just a rising and falling line, like the stock market. He first had us use the graph to indicate pitch, then perhaps volume, and then he had us gradually turn from left to right, leaning forward and back, along with the graph. He was so pleased with this effect that he went running to get Roscoe [...]

p IN THE FLOW FESTIVAL MAY 15, BEATNIK STUDIOS, SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIAp Something like a live-blog (all times are given in Pacific Daylight Time) We interrupt my ongoing Braxton-fest series with a real series about real music happening in the moment... Polly Moller and I got here around noon just in time for the Nahum Zdybel trio, pleasant guitar-trio jazz covering a Satiep Gymnopedie , Nefertiti , [...]

pOn a summer day in 1979, Anthony Braxton walked into a banquet room in the Oehler Mountain Lodge, set up some hot lights and videotape cameras, and launched a big band of music students into motion. Literally. We were supposed to not just play the squiggles on the diagrams before us; we were to move them — to translate the lines into physical gestures. Ducking and weaving and writhing, the horn and string players traced arcs and wiggles in a spaghetti-bowl of musical stew. Drummers jumped and bull fiddlers twirled. While the cameras rolled, he shouted, [...]

 Anthony Braxton’s music has always shown an interest in transcendence, carried forward from the Coltrane/Ayler ecstatic jazz model, with bits of Sun Ra, Ives, Cage and Stockhausen as well. The Ghost Trance Music (GTM) is a result of trance or trance-like processes under which the music is composed, and which the scores and instructions seek to bring out in the players. Braxton has said he tries to write the GTM scores in a trance state, letting the dots flow freely from his pen, allowing his personal melodic language to emerge [...]