THIS IS OUR MUSIC.

Swan Song

2011-04-20T06:18:00.003-05:00

TIME TO MOVE ON: For over four years I've made this my soapbox for musical matters, and you've graciously let me prattle on. It started as a place to post lists, but it became something more. At its best, it facilitated conversation; at its worst, it became a chore. But it was mine, and you shared it with me, and I've enjoyed that. I hope you have, too.

But it has begun to feel a bit shabby, a tad cramped, and like it just doesn't quite suit anymore. So after a bit of searching, a lot of consideration, and some negotiation, I've found a new place, and I hope you'll join me there.

The new address is THISISOURMUSIC.CA . Come on over, the party is already well underway.

#s 5-1 (at long last)

2011-01-12T22:02:00.003-05:00

How has a simple 30-point list become a grueling month-long odyssey? That's what happens when you're motivated by warring impulses, namely "Give the people what they want!" and "Always leave them wanting more!" It's complicated.

But it all comes to a head today, crowned by what my wife considers a very specious choice (did i just undersell the whole thing?). But if she has problems with it, she's welcome to start her own music blog, as are you all.

Ta-da!

5. Spoon, Transference

A grower. No secret that Spoon are one of the most dependable bands around. They got relatively accessible on Gimme Fiction, then got a bit more spiky on Ga Ga Ga Ga. Now they're riding a groove. This album is very good on listens one through five, fantastic on listens six through ten, and thereafter it becomes one of the best things the band have ever done. Time-released greatness.

4. Warpaint, The Fool

Art-rock that tastes like a careful blend of Jefferson Airplane and moodier Sonic Youth circa Experimental Jet Set Trash & No Star. No? Grab your "Bull in the Heather" cassingle and throw it into a bruised and damaged tape deck, then see if it doesn't sound a bit like the first side of this album. I speak in terms of "sides" because the scuttlebutt on this long player is that it drops in quality on the second half. So say the blogs, anyway. But I'm not really feeling that. I think side one sets a tone and side two rides it.

The women of Warpaint have locked onto a sound -- Mazzy Star with the training wheels removed -- that works to their strengths. The space between the spongey bass and the workaday drums forms an echo chamber into which they may drop their ethereal vocals (not like Enya ethereal, but ethereal nonetheless). Elsewhere the guitar skitters around, looking for a wormhole to wriggle through. All in all, a lovely set of warm, trippy dirges, lysergics not included.

3. Walkmen, Lisbon

I'm buying whatever these guys are selling at this point, frankly. I know there's nothing more sad than when a guy claims to understand a band, or that they're speaking directly to him, or soundtracking his life, or whatever, so I'll spare you all that, and in so doing avoid comparison to, say, that woman who comes into my store every so often wearing a black fedora and one white sequined glove, asking if MJ's estate has issued anything new. Sad, right?

But you get to a point where you think you've found life's sweet spot, the meaty middle where the things that interest you would've bored the younger you to death. Where things are painful and complicated, but all so very real that you're never once tempted to turn your head and look away. The point when your days seem like service to some debt you can't quite quantify, and yet there's a vague sense of satisfaction in all of it, like you're at work on a very complex project, the fruit of which you can't yet envision but which nonetheless tantalizes.

And the Walkmen? They seem to get that. All that. Every bit of frustration and each small payoff. It's all there in Hamilton Leithauser's voice, in the organ and the guitar and the bass, in the lyrical drums, and it runs through the lyrics, too. The small hits of bouyant joy ("Juveniles") are counterpoint to pretty much all of 2008's You + Me, and they feel like those oasis-like moments in the middle of your day when you forget everything else to focus on a shaft of sunlight.

Lisbon is another entry into a beautiful and ragged catalog that I'll probably be thumbing for years to come (you've been forewarned). It, like everything this band has done thus far, came along at the right time in my life, and thank God for it.

2. Dave Douglas, Spark of Being: Expand

Might be that Dave Douglas and Joe Pernice are fighting it out for the title of most TiOM list appearances (might be -- I'm too lazy to actually tally the figures). The man's a perennial lock, it seems, because he keeps churning out more and more legacy-securing discs like this one. They always sound like "What Miles and his band would've sounded like if..." but that tag is getting worn, so I won't apply it. This time around Douglas leads his Keystone band into experiments based on music they'd earlier produced that served as soundtrack to a film called Spark of Being, which in turn drew its themes from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. You with me? What results is much the same as what Keystone has produced in the past, namely warm, hard-chugging and perfectly airtight neo-fusion. What's remarkable this time is the lyricism that pours from Douglas' trumpet; he sounds more delicate and pretty than he has since his Tiny Bell Trio and Charms of the Night Sky days. The animating theme here is the connection between science and humanity, and the conclusion seems to be the inescapable nature of our vulnerability; we are fragile packages, redeemed by beauty, humanity, delicacy. That sentiment seeps from every note of this wondrous recording.

1. Superchunk, Majesty Shredding

Superchunk were already mid-career when, on Halloween, 1999, my wife (then girlfriend) and I traveled to Montreal to see them play at a venue I can't now recall. How long ago was that? Well, they were costumed, and drummer Jon Wurster was done up like Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit infamy (backwards red Yankees cap, a t-shirt that read FUKIN GONUTS and a red puffy jacket), and it counted as a current reference. Do you remember a time when anyone cared who Fred Durst was?

Anyway, Superchunk were touring in support of Come Pick Me Up, a mid-career record if ever there was one. In fact, it sounded almost late-career back then, the band having already secured elder-statesman status in the indie rock world. It was a record characterized by more intricate production, hushed vocals and varied instrumentation -- all pretty heady stuff for a band that made their name shouting "Slack Motherfucker!" into the faces of Chapel Hill punks. It was a good album, but a bit of me worried, on the drive from Ottawa to Montreal, how it would play live. They opened with "Hello Hawk" off that record, and my doubts were laid to rest. Where the album version was a bit restrained, live it was a squawky shout-along. There was a kid in the front row wearing a stuffed hawk on his head, and he was pumped, man.

The show was amazing (even though the girl at the merch table thought I said EXTRA large, so the t-shirt I went home with ended up being my GF's nightshirt), and the sounds and images of that night were what I called upon to make sense of 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, which continued down the path started by '97's Indoor Living and the aforementioned Come Pick Me Up. They'd get ultra-bored, I reasoned, making the same old records, even if the same old shows are just as cathartic and exciting as ever. Then they went on hiatus. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance were busy running their label, Merge, supplying the world with the millions upon millions of Arcade Fire CDs we all needed to make sense of our post-9/11 lives. Drummer Wurster filled time making comedy records, and bassist Jim Wilbur, who is the quintessential rock bassist in that he looks like a math teacher, did I don't know what.

But now here is Majesty Shredding, nine years after the last full length, and about a half a world away. This is a band in late career sounding like a version of themselves from twenty years ago. Not sounding like they're trying to sound like their younger selves, mind you. Note the distinction. This is a convincing evocation of those early records, a return to early-mid-'90s form. The vocals are shouted, the two guitars snake about one another, the drums are bashed, and the hooks are catchy. These songs would, for the most part, fit right in on vintage Superchunk albums No Pocky for Kitty or On the Mouth.

So why bother? Well, good question, but probably a moot one. Music like this exists solely for its own sake; nobody's trying to force it down your throat, or onto playlists, into heavy rotation, or turn it in to ringtones. You like it or you don't. The obvious selling point is that the band themselves are clearly enjoying the act of making it, to a ridiculously infectious degree, but they're not trying to change the world with these songs.

Nope, fact is the world doesn't really need more plain old indie rock like the kind Superchunk once made and are making again. But I sure as hell do.

#s 10-6

2011-01-03T22:56:00.002-05:00

Top ten! Truthfully, I long ago dismissed as fantasy any notion of having this all done by January 1st. It just wasn't going to happen. Having embraced this realpolitik, I found I actually slept more soundly, enjoyed food more, and treasured human connections to an even greater degree. It was liberating. That said, maybe we can wrap this up by week's end? No promises, of course. Onward...

10. Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks

The endless cavalcade of priceless Scottish pop continues unabated. The title alone makes this one worthy of mention. The band have tightened up their sound since their last (TiOM-listed) effort, which has them sounding like... what? I'm looking for one of those handy comparisons I'm so fond of employing. How about: Aztec Camera by way of Orange Juice?

9. Vampire Weekend, Contra

Remember when the debut dropped, and these popped-collar prep boys seemed bent on proving themselves the coolest of all the '80s-quoting hipsters? Ha, turns out we had them wrong! Instead of wanting to be the coolest, they were actually pretty serious about being the best. There was a mini-boom in world music-aping indie pop a few years back, but realistically VW are the only band we'll remember from that micro-movement. Justifiably so. The vocal refrain on "White Sky" is a trick that Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo would have killed to have dreamt up first. World/indie/whatever -- this is pop, and it is good.

8. Exploding Star Orchestra, Stars Have Shapes

Sun Ra is dead. Long live Rob Mazurek! Without him we might no longer have avant-big band music with a disdain for boundaries and an equal love for both melody and squall. This continues the streak of records that makes me think that Mazurek will one day be the subject of one doozie of a Mosaic box set.

7. Bruce Springsteen, The Promise

Because this is my list, and because I make the rules, newly-released troves of decades-old material count. Read about Bruuuce's triumph right here.

6. The National, High Violet

During lost weekends and holiday family barbeques I can often be heard to remark, loud, proud and sloppy, that the National employ a secret weapon which contributes to their awesomery. "Matt Berninger's voice" some yob invariably calls. "Nah," I belch, "it's the drums, man. The drums!" By that I mean Bryan Devendorf's shifting-sand percussion work, which can make a double-time high hat sound like the softest brush, and vice versa. The man is a machine. Of course, without all the rest of it -- that voice, the lyrics, the knotty guitar, the feeling that you're listening to rock music that doesn't take you for an idiot and your wife/girlfriend/sister for a faceless pair of breasts -- it wouldn't much matter. But put it all together, and High Violet bellies up to the bar alongside both Boxer and Alligator as essential slices of post-millennial life.

#s 15-11

2010-12-31T22:30:00.003-05:00

While you're all donning the proverbial lampshade headgear in anticipation of the ball dropping at midnight, I'm hard at work bringing y'all the next five entries. Devotion! Save a glass and a kiss for me, won't you?

15. Chicago Underground Duo, Boca Negro

Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek -- both busy guys, the latter hard at work with a group to appear further on up this list -- regroup as one iteration of the Chicago Underground improvising collective (they've been a trio, quartet, quintet and orchestra, too) to record ten complex, delicate and intriguing tracks. Traditional instruments (cornet, drums, vibes, mbira) are washed over and beneath by electronics, treated and tweaked, modulated and augmented, but the humanity underlying it all is never once compromised. Beautiful, strange, natural and touching.

14. David S. Ware, Onecept

Ware's sound is scraped down to the bone, extraneous layers sloughed off, sinew and bone exposed. He has been to hell and back, and he squeezes all of that through the mouthpiece of his horn. This is completely improvised. Tape rolls, ideas flow. That deviates from Ware's usual work pattern, and the results are harrowing. Warren Smith (d) and William Parker (b) are along for the ride. No slouches, either of them, but this is Ware's statement. Music as both test and testimony.

13. Tu Fawning, Hearts on Hold

Tu Fawning's not-so-secret weapon is Corrina Repp, who possesses a voice as big as Florence's, but a much smaller profile, at least so far. Quite a year for Flo and her Machine; might 2011 see Repp and her bandmates soundtracking a million mocha latte afternoons, too? The differences are more numerous than the similarities, but the voices beg comparison. I owe PF a case of thanks for introducing me to this band's debut EP; it had me fairly giddy for the full length. I take it the band went from duo to quartet in that time, and the sound also got bigger. Dramatic, grand and brash, but nuanced, subtle and delicate, too. Hearts on Hold is one of those records that's as much about feel as it is sound. Records like that are the ones you remember.

12. Surfer Blood, Astro Coast

Something in the water has surf/surfer/surfing featuring prominently in the cultural conversation circa now, more as notion than activity: surf music, "Angela Surf City," "Learned to Surf," and this band from Florida, where such a thing is at least plausible. What gives? Who's to say. Or care. Probably just a coincidence, but worth mentioning, anyway. Maybe. Astro Coast is a heavily reverbed storm front of pop-punk harmony meeting a low pressure zone of shoegazey noise. The breakers are huge! Wax down and paddle out, and catch a wave, or whatever!

11. The Black Keys, Brothers

Dan Auerbach's voice is a mournful instrument, a bluesy wail, a creaky gearbox, a sonic seducer; it is a thing kicked loose from time to wander the ether and the spiritual midspace between Memphis, Muscle Shoals and, er, Akron. The Black Keys' bluesrock is a delicate balance -- when you choose such as your arena, you risk falling into parody or slavish retread. But these two keep on the right side of that hashed line; they're neither too Zeppelin nor too... what? Raging Slab? Save your White Stripes comparisons as they're baseless and ill-informed. Might as well lump the Porsche and the Grand Caravan together (four wheels and an internal combustion? Check!). Brothers finds a helluva band in full stride, their footing sure, their direction unquestioned. And that voice!

Happy New Year!

#s 20-16

2010-12-22T22:38:00.004-05:00

Still with me? Another nibble now from the big list before we break for the holidays. More to follow in the week in between...

20. Aram Shelton Quartet, These Times

I detailed my Shelton fixation back in August. Let me only add that, after spending the last few weeks mildly obsessed with Lee Konitz At Storyville -- featuring another altoist captured at a fairly early point in his career, and with a new-ish band -- how wonderful it has been, over the last several years, to have a prejudice of mine dismantled brick by brick. For years I couldn't hear an alto playing modern jazz without comparing it to Parker's -- and judging it lacking. Same sort of thing occured with Coltrane, of course, before I fought my way out of that. But Shelton's playing has been refreshing for me in this way -- it sounds not like a pale imitation of anything, but like a single sincere, probing voice. Konitz, of course, is/was a different voice, too, and while listening the other night it occured to me that I was finally hearing these guys as players first, altos only secondarily. Might not sound like much, but it feels like a big deal to me.

19. Male Bonding, Nothing Hurts

An album that probably won't stand the test of time, quite honestly, but damn fun just the same, with crunch and harmonies sufficient to remind one of an old warhorse that will appear way, way up this list, just you wait.

18. Wolf Parade, Expo 86

Maybe the indie band of these times -- remember when we thought that'd be Modest Mouse? -- has a third album worth considering in terms of its place in the discography. When I guess at what bands I'll still be listening to in 10 years I feel pretty certain these guys will be one of the few. What the mid-40s me will hear when he listens back will be a dialing back of the prog tendencies that surfaced on At Mount Zoomer, and a move to a more free range rock. Bigger drums, keys more in service of the tunes than vice versa, and something I can't quite place that has me feeling more Bowie than Springsteen (the latter having felt like a major touchstone for the first record). This is a damn good record, even if there won't be as many songs plucked to populate mixes (or playlists?) in the years that follow its release.

17. Tomas Fujiwara and the Hook Up, Actionspeak

Inside-out postbop from drummer Fujiwara and his band, with much of the out provided by guitarist Mary Halvorson, who's no stranger to this blog (her quartet's Saturn Sings was in fact a near-miss for this year's list). I'm a sucker for stuff that sounds like mid-'60s Blue Note avant-bop (think along the Bobby Hutcherson - Andrew Hill - Jackie McLean axis). This approaches that, but for Halvorson's appealingly unique lines, which veer toward off-kilter, but never topple into the realm of queer-for-queer's sake. Bracing, engaging stuff.

16. Pernice Brothers, Goodbye, Killer

"Ah, there he is," the reader is saying, "Pernice had to show up sometime." Because yes, okay, if Joe Pernice slaps his name on just about anything in a calendar year, he can be certain of at least one thing: it will show up on TiOM's list at year's end. I'm reliable like that. But so is Pernice reliable: you can count on his records featuring sharp songwriting, beautiful pop arrangements, and that gorgeous voice. On Goodbye, Killer, the arrangements are a smidge less baroque, a bit more pared back, a bit more... rock than on some of his more recent outings. But in the end, there he is, good old Pernice. Come to think of it, in his steadiness and reliability he is very much like that other hero of mine.

Holiday Interlude

2010-12-20T11:28:00.002-05:00

#s 25-21

2010-12-18T07:50:00.007-05:00

25. Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

Michael Gira dusts off Swans to remind the Mile End anarchists who did what first. This actually sent me on a listening expedition the other night, into the remote wilds of '90s "post-rock," instrumental scores to the films in doom-minded musicians' heads, soundtracks to movies never made, funeral dirges for the still dying. Think Godspeed, Rachel's, the Boxhead Ensemble. What amazed me was how much it all sounded like outtakes from Nick Cave's and Warren Ellis's score for The Road. The second surprise was how much more affecting I found it, how difficult were the images of "mothers clutching babies, pick[ing] through the rubble and pull[ing] out their hair" -- it hurts more when you have more to lose, I suppose.

But Gira, and by extension Swans, have more bile than that other gang, more bite, as well as more room for redemption, it would seem. That last bit wouldn't have been true in the past, but perhaps the man has mellowed in his own peculiar way. His own young daughter duets with Devendra Banhart on "You Fucking People Make Me Sick." Classic!

That he cuts songs with vocals is something of a red herring; the assortment of noises and pummelling crescendos that dot his songs mark Gira as the first post-rocker, or perhaps more accurately the first post-apocalypse-rocker, since this (like every Swans record) sounds like the noise that greets the first day after the end of the world.

24. Gaslight Anthem, American Slang

I don't know about these guys. They've turned Boss-aping pop-punk into a cottage industry, earned Bruuuuce's approval, and spread their sound over three full-lengths, all with a bit of a tenuous grasp on the real nature of Springsteenian songcraft. They repeat the tropes, but lack the depth. And yet they do it all with such gusto, and make it catchy enough that you're moved to overlook their shortcomings, pogo along, and hope they'll one day turn out that breakneck cover of "Spirit in the Night" they seem destined to make.

23. Marc Ribot, Silent Movies

The swoon and clang of Marc Ribot's guitar is a sound both velvety and metallic. His solo guitar work, now documented on several albums (2001's Saints being an earlier highlight), is always engaging. Silent Movies consists of 13 pieces that serve as accompaniment to silent films both real and imagined, fragmentary explorations of image and mood that have the ability to lull, please and intrigue. Ribot is one of my longtime favourite musicians (and he's appeared on lists past), a key piece of a number of seminal recordings (Tom Waits' Rain Dogs, the Lounge Lizards' Voice of Chunk, to name two), but the material he's turned out for the Pi label since 2005 might be his most important work yet.

22. Best Coast, Crazy for You

Hands down the micro-trend of 2010: lo-fi girl group pop with a side of surf rock. Seriously. The best of the bunch is Best Coast's debut, a hazy, reverb-laden ode to weed, laziness and young love.

21. Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

Okay, alright, yes, it is good. Despite my misgivings over Win Butler's single-source theory of modern anomie, the fact that Arcade Fire (the U2 of the '10s) have birthed their most accessible record to date musn't be overlooked. A few lyrical duds ("Business men drink my blood / like the kids in high school said they would") are forgiven in light of the music that backs them. Overall AF have matured, and in doing so they've cemented their place in the vanguard of contemporary avant pop, and confirmed that they'll be with us for a long while yet.

This Is Our Music: 2010 (#s 30-26)

2010-12-14T10:21:00.005-05:00

Mid-December and things are gettin' kind of hectic, but The List is always front-of-mind, so while the upper echelons are still being shuffled and tweaked I wanted to start things off before somebody posted this shit on WikiLeaks.

This year's list carries the subheading "Stop Me if You Think That You've Heard This One Before" because, g-darnit, I'm in my mid-30s and the road behind me is long, and discovering new artists? That takes time, son, a product I find hard to source. So guess what? A ton of the acts on TiOM: 2010 have appeared on past lists. The more repeats that appear, the deeper I sink into the morass of my own hermetically-sealed world. Symtom or cause -- that's a tough one to sort, but regardless, I'm approaching full-on stasis mode, like when your dad picked up an Abba record at Sam's and knew he never again had to worry about finding new music, because for this moment he was hip, and he would remember this feeling for the rest of his days, and that was going to have to be enough.

Yes, there are new names, enough to prevent the amber from solidifying over these bones, if only temporarily. There are still discoveries to be made.

Had enough? Here we go:

30. Budos Band, Budos Band III
29. Josh Ritter, So Runs the World Away
28. Fond of Tigers, Continent and Western
27. Gil Scott-Heron, I'm New Here
26. Aeroplane Trio, Naranja Ha

Sober girls around me they be ackin like they druuuunk

2010-12-10T00:17:00.003-05:00

Making my list, checking it twice. All is flux at the moment. The only certainty? There will be no Far East Movement on This is Our Music's best of 2010 list. Or Ke$ha.

Keystone

2010-11-27T22:54:00.005-05:00

Dave Douglas

Photo by Bruno Bollaert/davedouglas.com

Darkness and Promise

2010-11-22T09:17:00.002-05:00

THE REASON I, and no doubt legions of other no-longer-boys staring down hairloss and paunchiness, am so excited about this ridiculous new Springsteen box thing is that it chronicles the Turning Point in the man's classic oeuvre.

Simply: there is a transition in every man's life from Born to Run to Darkness on the Edge of Town, a time when, suddenly, the rah-rah defiance of Born gives way to the crushing weight of Real Life. “No Surrender” and “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” still mean something, they still rouse the spirit every time they're played, but it becomes a matter of nostalgia, whereas Darkness etches a place that has become much more familiar to him, a compromised existence -- “trouble in the heartland” -- that wasn't exactly what he had in mind when he was still young and girlcrazy and half certain he ejaculated rocket fuel. But there he is.

Make no mistake, he's still aflame with a desire to go out at night and find out what he's got, maybe more than ever before, but he's a little worried about what he might find. The confidence and certainty are gone. All he knows for sure are the love and faith that make getting up in the morning possible.

SONY IS PROBABLY the best of the majors when it comes to putting together these sorts of massive packages – maybe from all their experience cashing in on Miles' legacy – so I have no doubt that the box is worth delving into. But what seems more intriguing to me (and less likely to result in darkness in the middle of my wallet) is The Promise, the stand-alone double-album worth of material that didn't make the cut for inclusion on Darkness way back in 1978. This is the stuff, universally lauded as album-worthy, that Springsteen trimmed away to reveal the darkness of Darkness. This is the stuff deemed extraneous. You get the sense that there's plenty to be gleaned from these tailings, a sort of shadow version of the man's/America's mentality circa '77-'78.

SPRINGSTEEN IS A tough sell among a certain demo, mostly because the boomers think they own him. That makes it hard for some to think of him as possessing currency. But the fact is they own him like I own him, which is to say not at all. But it can be tempting, can't it, to look at the details of what an artist has produced, to feel a kinship, a recognition, and to declare yours the only generation who'll truly get it. “You had to be there.” Bullshit. Show me a time, a place, populated by people who didn't, at one time or another, seeth with the urge “to spit in the face of these badlands.”

But at work there's a crappy version of “Merry Christmas, Baby” in rotation, calling to my coworkers' minds the vision of a hunch-shouldered and pandering Bruce, grinning and beaming, dancing with Courtney Cox, hamming it up with Clarence. So when I express admiration in the face of such evidence of lameness, eyes roll. That's fine. I start up conversations with the older guys coming in to lay down their $100 for the thing, they smile and shake their heads and then they take it home and watch the DVDs alone, listen to the CDs alone, wives elsewhere, uninterested, kids scoffing. If I had the spare money, I'd do the same.

PICK A CLICHE and it fits me like a pair of size 11 Blundstones. The “writer” working retail. The father of three rushing headlong toward a midlife something. The jazz fan who thinks “if people would only give it a chance...” The white guy in plaid shirts who thinks Bruuuuce! a kind of demigod. But all I know is this: there are works of art, cultural artifacts, that seem to warp the very air around them, that hum and glow, overshadowing lesser works, speaking to something vital or unassailable. These things make so many of your other things seem worthless, trivial, unworthy of the space they occupy. Springsteen is, it seems to me, the author of several such works, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, and I welcome the chance to spy on the process of creating such a work that these two (undeniably cash-grabby) releases offer me. Call me curious. Call me a sucker. Call me old. I don't mind a bit.

The Antidote

2010-11-15T07:17:00.003-05:00

BECAUSE YOU FIND yourself singing along to Rihanna and Taio Cruz while at work, just because they're on, sweet heaven they are always on, you find yourself during your home hours reaching for an antidote of sorts to make sure you're not still singing Want you to make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world as you drift off toward a fitful and brief sleep. The antidote takes many shapes, but of late it has looked and tasted like:

Exploding Star Orchestra, Stars Have Shapes

Aeroplane Trio, Naranja Ha

Warpaint, The Fool

...and the 900 or so songs on the ipod that you've rated at 5 stars, in a seemingly never-ending shuffle, like hit radio as programmed by you, which has put you at one side of a kind of soft war with your wife, who skips a song or changes the program every time you leave the room. Too much Neutral Milk Hotel? Probably. But you can never OD on RFTC or The Clash, is how you see it.

Among the Ruins

2010-10-24T21:28:00.005-05:00

Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
(operated 1829-1971)
Photo by AGF

I'VE BEEN sussing the connections between urban exploration and unitary urbanism, my efforts set to the squeal and clank of the Nation of Ulysses' brilliant neo-Situationist missive Plays Pretty for Baby. In some imaginary, pre-responsibility* youth, I see myself scaling rusted ladders in enormous subterranean tunnels to the ear-gutting cacophony of “The Kingdom of Heaven Must Be Taken by Storm” as played on cheap speakers duct-taped to my belt.

AFTER ALL, what is UE if not an attempt to reclaim that which most of us never consented to relinquish? An assault on the notion of perpetual ownership? A mobilized form of squatting? A waking dream aimed at re-imagining, redrawing, redressing the levels and vistas available to us as (ex-/sub-) urban dwellers?

OLD IDEAS become compost in the new city. Christopher Payne's book (and Oliver Sachs' introduction of same) forced me to reconsider the idea of asylum – less Arkham, more sanctuary, safe bosom, respite – the idea nevertheless lost, or mistranslated across scant few generations, as the human cost vs. hard currency pendulum swung wide in the other direction, lopping off heads as it traversed its course. Now all we have are hulls, husks, mute ghosts, and beautiful photographs.

Once social institutions crumble, we simply leave the buildings that housed them to do the same. We just walk away. Or how about this: we institutionalize civic compassion only when a certain set of economic conditions are present, and when these conditions cease to be, we can no longer afford said values. So, is civic compassion a luxury? Which is to say: once the Baby Boomers are through ravaging health care and pensions, will we have to forsake those values? And will the buildings that now house these apparatuses then fall into ruin?

THE UPSIDE: burgeoning armies of young rats abandoning Krylon for Cannon, Olympus or Nikon. Their directive is shifting from redecorating to preserving, cataloguing, archiving. The thrill must be similar. There are still dark passages, security guards, and razor wire to shimmy beneath, around and over. In Japan they call it haikyo. Why do the Japanese always have terms for these things before we do?

In Peterborough the methadone clinic is in a building erected in 1848, the last all-stone edifice put up here. There's a pizza joint next door. Just down the street, in another aged building, an old-school hardware store, the kind with uneven floors and cramped aisles. I love these buildings. I'd rather see them used than explored, they're better standing than razed to make room for whatever. That's part of this town's appeal: most of it is still standing, including the alluringly fenced-off GE campus, with some buildings dating back 100 years, to when the damn thing was opened by Edison himself! Electric City, indeed! Imagine the shit that lies rusting, bricked off, forgotten, piled-upon in there. It sits there like a giant black box, a question mark. From the road, through the fence, you only get glimpses. There are railroad tracks that disappear into the solid sides of buildings.

GE's still a going concern, miraculously, that campus still active, but virtually everywhere you look there exists abandonment, past endeavour sliding to ruin. What's alluring about these places, forgotten by most, might be the inherent metaphor of imminent collapse. That's the sound of the Nation of Ulysses' music, too; what structure is present threatens to come crashing down at any moment. This is no twee screed, but a battle cry consisting of skronk, thrash, Stooge-like noise, and arty aural pastiche. There is pressure from within and without. In time, we know, there will be only strata of linoleum, paint, wallboard and rot in the case of the soon-to-fall buildings – or scattered cultural-archeological findings to be re-purposed as an aesthetic, in NOU's case: suits, hair, sound, dogma. Dig it up, pry back the plywood, dust it off and remember what others have forgotten.

(For the time being, let's refrain from considering the seismic shift, Bush to Bush, that has meant that a gaggle of poseur agitators who were, in their time, inspirational but to be consumed with a knowing wink, would now, thanks to their penchant for titles like 13 Point Plan to Destroy America, be added to watch lists, or some other such shit. Let's just hold off thinking about how unbelievably stupid that is, alright, and about what it says about how shitty our lives have become, and about all that we have lost, in many cases willingly so, and what we are leaving to our kids. Okay?)

This is all front-of-mind for me these days, I think, because of where I have returned to work, i.e. the cruel and ever-shrivelling teat of music/video retail. When in the mall I am struck by the duelling desires to revel in so much commercial excess (dance to the end of the world!) and to see it all collapse tidily into its own footprint. I want to know what the place will look like once barren and empty. What will we leave behind? What ravages will nature visit upon the place? Maple trees in the food court?

OR, FORGET the Nation of Ulysses, put them out of mind, flourish and exeunt, fire them from their post as the house band at the post-historic dinner club. You know that exercise where they play stock footage of a bear, or a lion, or some other such menacing beast, and the soundtrack is ominous, dreadful, plodding, but then they play the same clip set to, I don't know, Henry Mancini or something, and you go, “Oh man, my filmic impressions are almost completely driven by the score! I'm such a pawn!” Well, reconsider... maybe in place of the Nation of Ulysses, we play something by Jason Adasiewicz, and what we see are dust motes merrily dancing through a lovely shaft of light. Adasiewicz' vibraphone is crystalline, pure – the mood is jaunty, offhandedly fun. We are cheered by the notion that dogged beauty exists in the places where our ruin is most glaringly obvious.

* The responsibility of parenthood is no construct, of course, no arbitrary enslavement in the unfeeling gears of the capitalist, imperialist mindfuck, but rather a very real, human impulse – a need – and one which no amount of debasement, humiliation, drudgery nor wage imprisonment can nullify. Feed them! Care for them! March off toward the front in the vain hope that they will not one day have to do the same for their children. Report back to me at a later date: is there anything so fulfilling?

Sweet Earth Flying

2010-10-21T06:17:00.004-05:00

Marion Brown, 1931-2010

Read about Brown's life, in his own words, at AllAboutJazz.

Photo via rootstrata.com

1989

2010-10-19T21:28:00.004-05:00

In 1989 I was 13 years old and just becoming politicized. I wasn't a militant young black man, but what I gleaned from PE was that there were things worth changing, and the possibility existed that we just might change them. We were going to create racial equality, harmony, understanding, tolerance. We were going to cure AIDS, eliminate hunger, colonize space, save the damn planet. The fuck happened?

Musically, holy shit -- pick a style, let me point to a seminal (or at least important, or at the very least "pretty damn good") album released that year. How about Full Moon Fever, 3 Feet High and Rising, Doolittle, Raw Like Sushi, The Stone Roses, Bleach, The Real Thing, Margin Walker and Paul's Boutique?

I don't want to fawn over what then held cache and now looks hopelessly kitschy ("the hair was funny! the pants were big!"), but try to remember what it felt like to be alive then (if applicable). It was naive and fresh and fun. We were smack in the middle of the Golden Age of Rap. Nobody had died since John Lennon. Am I remembering this right? The goddamned Berlin Wall fell! Communism was totally on its last legs. And even if the notion that The People made it happen turned out to be a romantic exaggeration (cf: Bulgarian blue jeans, heavy debt loads, inept leadership, wasteful and redundant systems... any of this sound startlingly familiar?), it sure felt like the future was a ripe oyster eager to split itself open and reveal to us, the youth, its slick and shiny treasure.

Ha ha!

In Rotation: The Cole Porter Song Book

2010-10-07T07:02:00.004-05:00

Calm the kids. Separate them if necessary. Serve drinks to the adults. Out the window see the late afternoon dark, the gusty wind, the leaves swirling as if in a snowglobe. Get dinner on the stove. As the kitchen heats up, take off your sweater. Boil, beat, chop, stir, fold, mix, repeat. Serve more drinks. Top up your own. Feed the babies. Wonder what you'll serve for dessert. Root around in the freezer for something, then remember the butter tarts your guests brought from the farmers' market. Breathe a sigh of relief. Be thankful for the small things. Quell another children's uprising. Top up the drinks. Call everyone to dinner. Put on Ella singing Cole Porter. Think longingly of a time before your own. Relax.

Seasons Change

2010-09-29T05:54:00.005-05:00

Suddenly gone are days at the beach and driving open-windowed, even the days of backyard apple harvesting have passed me by, and what remains is the inevitability of frost. The leaves here are kaleidoscopic and the air's got that tangy bite most days. All of this signals a change in music, of course. It's not as cut-and-dried as digging a box of sweaters and woolens out of the crawlspace, but somehow, what feels right just changes.

Just in time comes a new Walkmen album, Lisbon. Nice; almost like they planned it that way. You and Me is still necessary listening anytime I'm driving around town alone on a cool night. My hand gravitates toward it every time, without fail. There's just the right ratio of bluster to stillness on that record, and every bit of me wanted the new record to retain that feel. It does, mostly. There's a tad bit less introspection, a bit more, well, joy, but this being the Walkmen, it's tinted at the edges, the incoming rot, the sense of temporariness in the happiness that, if I'm being honest, I'd have to say feels true to how I experience happiness. It always feels conditional. I have a black, black heart.

What else? Destination: Out! posted some seriously crazy Masabumi Kikuchi shit that made my wife physically uncomfortable last night while we both shuffled around the kitchen. A bit like the polar opposite to the Walkmen, but worth mentioning, perhaps. It felt autumnal because it wasn't sunny West Coast comfyjazz.

Sooner or later I'll probably dig out the Philip Glass, too. Because I'm deep, deep into my rut now. Before long my kids will lament my reliability. "Shit, it's fall. Dad's gonna drag out that Dracula music."

The Black Saint, the Clown

2010-08-25T05:58:00.004-05:00

Charlie Mingus

Fast Citizen

2010-08-11T07:29:00.004-05:00

While the rest of us waste our lives watching CSI reruns on Spike, Aram Shelton is producing music with the crazed urgency of condemned man. He is an incredibly busy musician, sloughing off albums like skin cells. In that sense he's pedestrian as far as go musicians related to the Chicago scene. I hesitate to use the word scene because it reads poorly, but you know wherefrom I come. Shelton's based in Oakland now, but his associations with Chicago's well-populated improvised music scene are strong, just as Rob Mazurek's move to Brazil only made him busier in Illinois. I profiled Shelton a few years back on the now-defunct Now's the Time radio program, inspired by the debut of the trio dubbed Dragons 1976 (On Cortez, Locust Music, 2003). That was a fantastic record – it still sounds great to me – and once I started digging into the saxophonist's body of work I found a wealth of strong releases. I suppose that in the interim – the long, fallow years that followed – I've let lapse my claim to knowledge of Shelton's doings. Then Delmark sent me the second Fast Citizens record, and my interest was re-sparked.

So I'm glued to three Shelton-scented releases these days, though two of them are old news. That's the problem with this music: you can't ever catch up. There aren't enough hours and/or dollars. But you pick your spots, and the three I've chosen of late are these:

Dragons 1976, Winter Break (Singlespeed, 2006)
The trio is Shelton, Jason Ajemian on bass and Tim Daisy on drums, and the air, the expansiveness that marked On Cortez makes this record highly listenable as well. There's a feel to this unit – maybe it's timelessness, or a timeliness from another time – that suggests uncountable hours of study at the feet of dead men with long-silent horns. In and amongst all that air, that space, there's also a bite to Shelton's saxophone. Cool requires that even the smoothest quip contains a barb; sophistication is measured by the ability to disguise the point.

Fast Citizens, Two Cities (Delmark, 2009)
A sextet with a rotating leader's chair, the Fast Citizens have released only two albums but logged countless stage hours, if their playing is any indication. The cities alluded to are Chicago and Oakland, Shelton's base, since it was his turn to hold the speaking stick. You get the sense, though, that any one of these players could lead the ensemble to the Canaan of improvisational perfection. This band is tight. The compositions are good, and the improvising even better. Even if the chair only makes one full rotation, that leaves four more releases; at their established rate of an album every four years I'll be enjoying this band until my youngest graduates high school.

Aram Shelton Quartet, These Times (Singlespeed, 2010)
In which he adds clarinet to his repertoire. The quartet is like a juicy, marbled slab carved from the ham of the Fast Citizens. In musical terms, it kind of lands equidistant from Dragons and the Citizens, containing the fire and the space of both. The form and the formlessness. The great thing about this music is its ability to address needs: sometimes I want mathematical precision, other days I want something that swings. This group's got me covered.

Photo via aramshelton.com

Answers to Unaswerable Questions

2010-07-17T07:37:00.003-05:00

Waaaay back on March 5, Patrick, Friend of This is Our Music, dropped the following question in the comment box:

some of this stuff has been on my mind recently due to my friend jay asking for our favourite song of the 1950's. yes, one fave song from the 50's. i had to do a top 20 - 5 of those tunes were jazz numbers. what would be on your list?

Impossible!, I replied. So of course, I had to try my hand. The results:

Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker, “Bernie's Tune” (1952)
Hank Williams, “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (1952)
Horace Silver, “Room 608” (1953)
George Jones, “Why Baby Why?” (1955)
Johnny Cash, “I Walk the Line” (1956)
Sam Cooke, “Touch the Hem of His Garment” (1956)
Bo Diddley, “Who Do You Love?” (1956)
Charlie Feathers, “Can't Hardly Stand It” (1956)
Ella Fitzgerald, “Too Darn Hot” (1956)
Sonny Rollins, “You Don't Know What Love Is” (1956)
Carl Perkins, “Put Your Cat Clothes On” (1957)
Art Blakey, “Moanin'” (1958)
Eddie Cochran, “Summertime Blues” (1958)
Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train” (1958)
Dave Brubeck, “Take Five” (1959)
Ornette Coleman, “Lonely Woman” (1959)
John Coltrane, “Giant Steps” (1959)
Miles Davis, “So What” (1959)
Charles Mingus, “Better Git It In Your Soul” (1959)
Marty Robbins, “El Paso” (1959)

This list is attended by a truckload of caveats, of course, most glaringly the lack of women (lonely, Ella?) If it were a list of 25, there'd have been room for Patsy Cline and Wanda Jackson, but what can you do? The parameters were handed to me and I operated within them. Also, one of my favourite records of all time, Kenny Burrell's At the Five Spot (1959), is woefully absent, but sacrifices had to be made in the interest of a full representation of the decade in question. And god, '56 and '59: hell of a couple of years, huh?

Next, I understand, we're to move to 1960-64. Problematic: the 15 or so requisite Coltrane recordings won't leave much room for all that other stuff.

Son of Sisyphus

2010-07-13T13:35:00.004-05:00

Bill Dixon, 1925-2010

Being With

2010-07-06T22:27:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, you're in the right place at the right time. After the IMC's series on the brilliant Montreal saxophonist Francois Carrier aired on The Mighty 93.1 last year, Carrier contacted me to ask if I'd be interested in penning the liner notes to his next project. I answered in the affirmative, obviously. The album, entitled Being With, is an improvised duet recording with vocalist Veronique Dubois, and the results are intriguing. Released earlier this year on UK-based Leo Records ("Music for the inquiring mind and the passionate heart"), the music is available in both physical and an electronic formats.

Reprinted below are my notes from the CD package:

This seems to me to be an aptly titled collection of music, for if being is the most basic state of existence, then surely being with is one of the highest. It connotes partnership, cooperation, commonality, harmony; a connection across that which divides us.

To listen to the music contained herein is to witness moments when the two sounds – Francois Carrier’s horn and Veronique Dubois’ voice – are indistinguishable from one another. That sort of negation of the self is the essence of being with. When me becomes we. When the aims of the individual melt away, and the success of the pairing becomes of primary concern. Such moments are rare enough in human relations; musically they are a precious commodity indeed.

Whether they are whispering to one another, racing each other to the end of a line, or trading baboon calls, these two musicians are always in conversation, always connecting. Veronique Dubois performs the sorts of vocal gymnastics you might expect from Diamanda Galas or Yamatsuka Eye. She keens, soars, dips, her voice sometimes strangled or guttural, at other times crystalline-pure. In other words her vocalizations have much in common with Francois Carrier’s playing. This is what makes them so well suited for collaboration, for being with one another in such a setting.

Francois Carrier continually amazes me with his willingness to meet his collaborators in the fertile middle ground where individual performances are perhaps less technically impressive but where the key to successful improvisation lies (which isn’t to say that Carrier does not possess dazzling technique – he does, of course, but he is judicious in its display). This is true whether the collaborator is his frequent foil Michel Lambert, or a “guest” musician, such as Jean-Jacques Avenel on the brilliant Within. It speaks well of both artists’ sensibilities when such a sympathetic bond is forged, but I have yet to encounter a piece of music featuring this wonderful saxophonist in which he has failed to connect with another musician, and I doubt I ever will.

As states of existence go, perhaps this musical sense of being with is higher still, a plane most of us will never inhabit. In instances when this deeper being with is achieved the result is a wondrous musical communion. Sometimes, as is the case here, the meeting has been captured for posterity, and though the musicians involved are certainly lucky, we listeners are the truly fortunate ones.

Many thanks to Francois Carrier for allowing me the opportunity to contribute in some small way to this project, and, of course, for the wonderful music.

Not Dead Yet

2010-07-04T06:36:00.007-05:00

Cue the standard refrain: Sorry for the absence, but I've been busy, and so forth, etc. (But I think newborn twins counts as a legitimate excuse for not posting to a music blog read by no one). But as much to appease my own conscience as to convince you(?), I have to prove that I do indeed still have a pulse and that my good vs. crap music meter is still operational, so here's a brief rundown of what's been heard in my (suddenly crowded) house of late, in no particular order, because that's how my mind works:

Josh Berman, Old Idea
Wardell Gray, Live at the Haig, 1952
Pernice Brothers, Goodbye Killer (naturally)
Male Bonding, Nothing Hurts
George Lewis, Homage to Charles Parker
Phosphorescent, Here's to Taking It Easy
Josh Ritter, So Runs the World Away

I'm still alive! Back with more new content in the days ahead.

The Departed

2010-03-09T22:20:00.002-05:00

Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse

Very strange and sad to hear of Linkous' suicide on the weekend. I was assembling an iPod playlist for my wife's birthday celebrations on Saturday, and I stumbled across Good Morning, Spider. I threw "Sick of Goodbyes" on the list. What the hell, I thought.

The Jazz Loft Project

2010-01-11T21:04:00.007-05:00

The Jazz Loft Project

The ever-vigilant PF (manning the ramparts of culture, his eyes scan the horizon!) tipped me to this, and I’m grateful. It hits squarely at the intersection of several interests/passions/concerns of mine. First, there’s the jazz. Secondly, you got your photography. Thirdly, it's history. And lastly, there’s the undeniable appeal of a Collyer Brothers-like mentality – a hoarding packrat who can’t throw anything out, and feels a compulsion to (literally) record everything.

I’ll spare the details and simply urge you to click through. Scan through the photos, listen to the recordings, and make time for the 10-episode radio series. Fascinating stuff. (And if you're flush, why not buy the book and then lend it to me?)

Thing is, it’s easy to see how someone could become W. Eugene Smith.

And as a side note, is that not a supremely beautiful website? It’s only fitting, given the subject, but design like that ruins me for lazily slapped together pages.

Miles Gawks, Howard McGhee Blows

2010-01-09T21:21:00.002-05:00

From beyond the grave, McGhee shouts to a deaf world, It could have been me!

This is Our Music: 2009 (Pt. 2)

2009-12-30T20:57:00.010-05:00

10) Charles Rumback, Two Kinds of Art Thieves
Rumback is a tremendously giving, supportive drummer, the kind that fades into the wallpaper if you're not listening closely. But pay attention and you'll be rewarded by the way he buttresses the horns (Joshua Sclar on tenor and Greg Ward on alto) and bass (Jason Ajemian). Rumback debuts as a leader here, but he's far from green, and it comes across. The result is warm, open, loose. And yet again, Clean Feed is the platform for a winning record; the label that can't lose.

9) David S. Ware, Shakti
I retain no residual doubt that Ware is one of the most important musicians of his era, and Shakti confirms it anew. That the saxophonist felt the draft from Death's scythe earlier this year is perhaps more reason to appreciate this disk, and the others that preceded it in Ware's discography. That he is intact, new kidney apparently operating smoothly, lends promise to the hope that we'll have more of his music to treasure in the years ahead.

8) The Raveonettes, In and Out of Control
If all pop music were like this I would listen to commercial radio with a fervent mania bordering on religiosity, the way I imagine people once did on balmy summer nights in topdown cars while cicadas hummed and the sweet pinegum air was thick and warm. We would all know consensus on our favourite songs, and our futures would look as bright as all our yesterdays.

7) Vandermark 5, Annular Gift
Vandermark the yeoman. Vandermark the workhorse. Vandermark the champion. Vandermark the blue-collar intellectual. The band (Dave Rempis (alto and tenor sax); Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello, electronics); Kent Kessler (bass); Tim Daisy (drums)) hums along like a well-oiled, many-headed automaton, and a staggering run continues.

6) Sonic Youth, The Eternal
Nearly thirty years, 15 albums, endless experimentation, a devotion to stylistic restlessness, scores of followers who don't deserve the comparison, and you have to say this much for Sonic Youth: their Sonic Youth impression is bang-on.

5) Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Slick and smooth, poppy and damn-near perfect. This is the music I want to hear in car commercials, and in the iPod era, I can (God bless the invisible hand of the marketplace). I heard this while strolling the aisles of IKEA the other day, and it sounded right. I bought three Billy bookcases.

4) The XX, XX
Sexy, detached, effortless, cool. Can I dance to this? Is that cool? Or will that trip up my brooding? Because really, I could go either way.

3) Rob Mazurek, Sound Is
An abundance of space and atmosphere. A very interesting musician gets even more interesting.

2) Phosphorescent, To Willie
Matthew Houck unearths the essence of the Red Headed Stranger. If there's blood in your veins, chances are decent it'll be thinner before this record's over. Substances and self-loathing; outlaw country by way of Williamsburg. This initiates the countrified left hook-right jab combo at the top of this list, and they're close, man, close. But they serve different purposes: this one's for drinking and feeling low. Oh, and singing along with my three year-old daughter, who took a shining to "that "Reasons to Quit" song" as soon as she heard it. I chalk it up to the harmonies, not the lyrical content. Right?

1) Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
If Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (the better album, but probably only because "Star Witness" is a perfect song) was a revelation, Middle Cyclone is a confirmation. There is more blood, heart, fear and desire in Case's music than you can bear. Take heart, son; crying's the only natural response. The country-to-pop ratio's about the same as on a Taylor Swift album, but the country's a bit realer, and the pop is a thousand times smarter. Does God have taste? If so, he'll see to it that Neko's name is still spoken in a hundred years.

This is Our Music: 2009 (Pt. 1)

2009-12-20T22:39:00.006-05:00

25) Tony Wilson Sextet, The People Look Like Flowers At Last
24) St. Vincent, Actor
23) Japandroids, Post-Nothing
22) The Big Pink, A Brief History of Love
21) Young Galaxy, Invisible Republic
20) Deer Tick, Born on Flag Day
19) The Twilight Sad, Forget the Night Ahead
18) Obits, I Blame You
17) The Wooden Sky, If I Don't Come Home You'll Know I'm Gone
16) Great Lake Swimmers, Lost Channels
15) Francois Carrier and Michel Lambert, Nada
14) Joe Pernice, It Feels So Good When I Stop
13) White Rabbits, It's Frightening
12) Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilssen-Love, Chicago Volume
11) Grizzly Bear, Vicketimest

Allow me to re-introduce myself...

2009-12-07T22:19:00.003-05:00

THE DEADBEAT, never-present stiff who only occasionally checks in with a token gesture: that’s been me of late. I could plead busy! or distracted! and those things would be fully true, but only half the story. Disinterested! might be more accurate.

For a while there it seemed to me the most exciting thing I’d heard for a while was recorded in either 1982 or 1986 (take a bow, Mark E. Smith). That didn’t do much to stoke the fire that usually burns in me this time of year: the annual display of wankery that is the Year! End! List! I was, in a way that I’ve rarely been before, down on music. There were only a few stock pieces in the collection that I fell back on, mood pieces mostly, music for sleeping. Nothing new grabbed me.

Ah, but then Ron stepped in. I saw him on a recent trip to Ottawa, and he gave me a box of CDs (how many friends would do that?), the still-thriving fruit of our dormant enterprise. The contents of The Box, while not uniform in quality, were all new to me, and so they performed the neat trick of rousing me from my stupor.

THEN, STRANGE RUMBLINGS from Glenn Branca, of all people, opining that we’ve reached the End of Music; there’s nothing left to create! Maybe Branca’s out of ideas. Roses from dung: the piece served to awaken an anger in me (and others – check the comments) that someone would have the shortsighted nerve to declare such a thing. And it put my doldrums in perspective. It, along with the box of music Ron gifted, put me back on my course.

THE BOX was largely divided between three labels: Toronto’s Barnyard Records, Vancouver’s Drip Audio, and Chicago’s venerable Delmark (with a pinch of Long Song and a smattering of Altrisuoni). Of the first I was almost wholly ignorant; with the second I had only a passing acquaintance; with Delmark I was rather chummy. There were records by artists I’d lost track of, a few I’d been looking forward to hearing, and a bunch I’d never heard of. It was a good mix.

BUT THE POINT, really, is not that I was exposed to specific recordings, or discovered this artist or that label. The point is that, for the first time in a while, I was excited about music. And that brings us to now – December -- and to this blog’s reason for being. Heading into November of 2009, I wasn’t really looking forward to the annual exercise, something I’ve never felt before. Enter Ron, and The Box, and a revival of my enthusiasm.

Of the 20 or so CDs in that carton, only a couple will make it onto the list, but the wider point is that the gift, all that music, woke me up. So a debt is owed, Ron. Thank you.

SO, being as it is a bit late in the game, and that I find myself knee-deep in sawdust, paint, and IKEA kitchen components, this year’s exposition will be slightly truncated. Expect a lower word count, but all of the love. I’m thinking that the first, oh, ten or fifteen entries on the List will be devoid of explanation. I’ll save my verbiage for only the very top.

And to those of you who usually receive a CD: maybe January?

I Am Going to Make It Through This Year If It Kills Me

2009-10-26T20:47:00.003-05:00

John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats)

The Eternal

2009-10-09T06:57:00.002-05:00

Sonic Youth

The Iconoclast

2009-09-24T05:50:00.004-05:00

Rodrigo Amado

Tomorrow Came Today

2009-09-08T21:18:00.008-05:00

Paal Nilssen-Love

Now's the Time: The Finale

2009-08-26T21:34:00.006-05:00

So, this is it. I hope you'll join us tomorrow night (Thursday, August 27, 2009) for the very last episode of Now's the Time. Tune in at 93.1 FM in Ottawa and environs, and at CKCUFM.com everywhere else. It's a supersized dose of NTT; Mark Kiel, our good friend and host of Infinite Ceiling, has donated his time, literally, so that we can all sit around for an extra hour and get maudlin and self-aggrandizing about how great a show we of the Improvised Music Collective thought NTT was. It should all prove nearly unlistenable, but I'm looking forward to it.

So, for the regular time slot, that is 8:30-10:00 PM EST, I'll present the fifth (and final, obvs.) installment of our Francois Carrier series. And then, from about 10:00 (or whenever Ron, Mark, Aidian and Jim decide to show up) until 11:00, some or all of us will play tracks, tell stories, and get a bit weepy, one suspects.

Tune in. This is your last chance.

--> UPDATE: Here it is. Well, most of it. We never got around to pressing the REC button on the boombox for that last hour. But the first bit, the part where I go on about me and my fondness for Francois Carrier, that bit's recorded, and you can hear it here:

Now's the Time, the LAST EVER SHOW: Francois Carrier, Pt. 5 - Listening

You can also read about more about it here.

Used to Like That Song

2009-08-19T19:38:00.003-05:00

Joe Pernice rocks Stars Hollow, CT.

Hear This

2009-08-12T13:36:00.002-05:00

My good friend Ron over at Sound and Fury has been posting great stuff recently (well, he's been posting great stuff since day 1, but he really seems to be on a roll of late). He crowns it all with audio from Coltrane's last appearance at Newport. Essential downloading.

And speaking of Ron, and my other fellow IMC members, it is with both regret and happiness that I report that our little show, Now's the Time, will soon reach its conclusion. Several of the guys expressed a desire to devote their time and energies to other pursuits, and so we've given the bigwigs at CKCU 93.1 FM our notice. Our last show is slated for August 27th, and it promises to be a doozy; Mark of Infinite Ceiling, the fearless prog-oriented program which normally follows ours, has offered us his slot, meaning we'll be delivering a massive shot of NTT before we lower the curtain. That'll be 8:30 - 11:00 PM EST. The first part of the program will be my scheduled conclusion to our Francois Carrier series, and the last hour-ish will be a grand send-off -- think The Last Waltz, only grander in scope -- featuring the full complement of dues-paying IMC members.

And as one door closes... there may be changes afoot here at TiOM related to the demise and death of NTT (Long live NTT!), and I'll post news here if/as it develops.

With (Exit)

2009-07-28T19:37:00.004-05:00

Cecil Taylor

"Something greater than everything." (Updated)

2009-07-22T19:26:00.007-05:00

Blow the bad stuff out: Gideon et al. (not pictured: Francois Carrier)

I am hooked on the music of Montreal-based saxophonist, composer and improviser Francois Carrier; so much so that my IMC brother Ron and I have devoted 5 episodes of Now's the Time to Carrier's work. Thursday sees me take a bow for part 3, "Something Greater that Everything," an examination of Carrier's music in a spiritual context.

Curious about how Carrier links to Gideon and his 300 trumpet-wielding men? Of course you are. Tune in and find out:

NTT airs Thursday night, 8:30-10:00 EST on CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa, and at ckcufm.com everywhere else.

The episode will also be available for DL after it airs (I'll post info here). So, no excuses.

UPDATE: And here it is:

Now's the Time, July 23: "Something Greater Than Everything" - Spirituality in the Music of Francois Carrier

Touch the Hem of His Garment

2009-07-17T05:43:00.004-05:00

Sam Cooke

Crazy On You

2009-07-10T05:50:00.005-05:00

Nancy Wilson and Roger Fisher

Don't Give Up On Us

2009-07-07T11:00:00.009-05:00

I REMEMBER having a conversation with a friend one night in a noisy, crowded club, the sort of place I can’t imagine stomaching now, though back then it was something akin to a natural habitat. I knew this friend and I shared musical tastes – in fact it was a time in my life where that was pretty much a prerequisite to friendship. Now it seems to have been replaced by a need to find people with young children, like my wife and I do. That’s the fucked up way that your life determines your relationships. Anyway, this friend and I somehow started talking about the Replacements, I think because I’d been telling him about a course on the history of popular music I was taking at university, an elective outside my regular course of study in history (though for me the two were, and remain, very much connected of course, popular music sitting squarely in the pocket of my personal theory of cultural history, which I’d be happy to elaborate upon over a beer, if you’re interested). I had a paper to write, and I think I was telling him that I was thinking about make the ‘Mats the focus of that paper. I can’t fully replicate the conversation – some of it is lost to memory, other parts of it I never heard in the first place, buried as they were beneath rivers of bass and wailing treble (remember the setting) – but I do know with absolute certainty that we discovered a deep common love of Westerberg and Co., and I know that my friend said this: “The Replacements helped me survive high school.”

I GUESS I EXPECTED, if indeed I ever really thought about it, that songs like “I’m in Trouble” and “Bastards of Young” and “Here Comes a Regular” and “Can’t Hardly Wait” and would mean less to me by the time I hit my early-mid-thirties. I anticipated outgrowing the mix of crushing doubt, intense desire and unsubtle antipathy which supply the lifeblood of the Replacements’ music by the time I was married, had a child and a mortgage in a place geographically (if not spiritually) removed from the sodium-lit streets of my upbringing. So why do I need those songs now more than ever? Is it a simple, and paralyzingly depressing case of an early-midlife crisis?

Look, I’m ripe for depression these days. There’s no sense denying that. We moved to a new town last year and the truth is I haven’t taken to it so well just yet. It was a big change, and we were primed for it, sincerely hopeful. I also kind of felt like I had pretty well scotched things in Ottawa, why not try someplace new? And Peterborough is a good place, a nice town. But I haven’t really settled in yet, haven’t met anybody, haven’t joined anything. I stay at home with our daughter, take her to the library, the YMCA, talk to other parents, almost exclusively mothers. We live in an enlightened age, I know, and Peterborough’s a thoroughly liberal town, but a stay-at-home father’s still an anomaly. There are emotional barriers to forging friendships with those mothers. To boot, the move has exposed to great relief those guarded aspects of my personality; I don’t make friends easily (it doesn’t help that I never know what to say). So here I am, spending most of my days speaking only to my wife and our toddler. Night falls and I consider heading downstairs to my basement office to do some writing, but damn it, I’m tired, so a beer and a ballgame on TV is just about my speed. Then wham, it’s 11:00, I’m braindead exhausted, and I hate myself for wasting another evening.

Those are my days.

I’m isolated, treading water. And yeah, that’s got me down. So anything with the rosy tinge of the past, the faint whiff of a time when I felt more hope, is bound to appeal to me right now, and I get that. But with the Replacements, it feels like it’s more than that. It has something to do with the feeling that you’re running out of time.

MY WIFE is good to me. She basically understands what I’m feeling these days. She knows that while she’s landed in a new job and worked her way into a social circle, for me there isn’t the same joy concerning our new situation as there is for her. So when I say, “I need to head out to a movie tonight,” she’s fine with that. And when I said, “I think I need to get away for a weekend, by myself,” she was fine with that, too. She didn’t have to say, “Watch your budget,” because I understood that. It wasn’t as though I thought it would be prudent to fly to New York City for the weekend. But a short, economical road trip around Lake Ontario? Yeah, she was alright with that.

So Google Maps and I devised an itinerary: I would hit Buffalo, rattle around, have a bite and then take in a ballgame on Friday, all before the big prize, Rochester.

When I was a kid all our American network TV came from Rochester. I was raised on Rochester TV, so it’s maintained an undeserved air of nostalgia and mystery. I knew neighbourhoods, street names, business and personalities. I had this sense that, even without ever having gone there, I could find my way around the city; might actually feel a little bit at home there. Drive the streets, see the sights, go to a ballgame, and then cap it all with a visit to the great House of Guitars.

If you’re not lucky enough to have been in broadcast range of a station showing commercials for the HOG, then I pity you. They were fantastic. The proprietors, brothers Armand and Bruce Schaubroeck (who opened the store in ’64), and one or two employees (I guess) would clown it up in front of a camera, repeat the motto “The Store that Ate My Brain,” and hock instruments, records and tapes. Sometimes one of them wore a costume. In one version, somebody in a bunny costume spent the whole commercial saying “Hop, hop. Hop, hop.” It doesn’t sound like much, maybe, but they made an enormous impression on me as a kid, and they made the House of Guitars seem as though it must be pretty much the coolest place on the planet. If you absolutely need to see them I assume they’re on Youtube; otherwise it’s enough to take my word for it.

So I loaded up a box full of CDs, packed some clothes and left on a Friday morning. A beautiful day, the music loud. Had a good time in Buffalo, then drove to Rochester Saturday morning, visited the photography museum, then drove north through town to Irondequoit where the House of Guitars, in an old house-cum-storefront, like somebody’s basement shrine to rock ‘n roll, sat among the dry cleaners and butcher shops and tailors and video rental places.

I TOOK that picture, the one people put on Facebook, of themselves with the co-subject, in this case the store, visible over their shoulder. I held the camera at arm’s length, peered at the bulbous lens and fired. Then I did it again, to be sure.

Up the steps and into the store, greeted by walls of guitars and amps. I don’t know why I expected anything different. Glass cases with guitars leaning upright like statuary. I don’t know what music was playing. There were people everywhere trying guitars, talking guitars, looking at guitars. A sign must have caught my eye, because I began walking with purpose toward the back of the room, past the wall of amps, and then down a little stairway. RECORD STORE DOWNSTAIRS. A-ha.

First you come to a wall of framed photos, members of KISS and autographs from blues legends, stuff like that. A mugshot of David Bowie from when he and Iggy Pop were caught with weed in a Rochester hotel room. Then you come around the corner and there are the rows, the unruly rows, CDs stacked everywhere. Above you, on the high peaked ceiling, more posters, flags. Every inch of wall space bears more memorabilia, most of it autographed. Everywhere piles of stuff that make no sense, bear no order. Just chaos.

That’s when I did that thing, the thing which annoyed me perhaps most of all when I was a record store employee and customers would do it to me: I completely blanked. I had no idea what I was looking for. I had come here with the vague notion of picking up something new to listen to on the ride home, just to get something because I was here, but that constant running list of CDs that I want, that list which never actually gets written down, it completely disappeared on me. And so I wandered around like some music buying novice, feeling stupid and overwhelmed. Suddenly the camera around my neck felt very conspicuous, too.

First thing I pulled out of my head was the Replacements, for those reasons I alluded to above. I was hoping to find some of those shiny reissues. But the shelf was empty, or rather, the general alphabetical area where the Replacements should be, while incredibly crowded, CDs in their longboxes (I know!) jammed into too tight a space, was bereft of anything by the band in question. I wander over to the jazz section, and there I discover that it is perhaps best to stick to rock when shopping at the great HOG, for their jazz section is, well, a token jazz section. Back to the rock section.

Did I mention that this whole time, the store’s stereo is blasting Sabbath? Did I say that?

Hey, I know, how about some Zombies? Yes, the latest Odyssey and Oracle remaster/repackage/reissue. I’ll take that. Then I see the New Release section, or rather, the cardboard boxes sitting atop other stock, dates Sharpied onto their sides, filled with releases from last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before that, etc. At the HOG, this is as organized as it gets. But there was nothing in there I cared to drop $15 on, so I decided to scuttle this visit. I took the Zombies disc up to the cash.

I was pulling my wallet out and trying to downplay the presence of the Olympus E-410 hanging around my neck when the woman at the cash – short, 40s, dressed in black, with black hair, looked like she’d worked in the store since graduating high school 25 years ago – asked in that practiced, offhand way, “Were you looking for anything else?”

“No chance you have any Replacements in stock?” I said. “There wasn’t anything on the shelf. That I could find.”

“Oh man,” she said, “they’re like my favourite band.” That was a good sign. “I think we got those reissues in. They can’t be sold out.” And with that she raced out from behind the counter and led me toward the section. Here she came up empty, too.

“They might be in the back,” she said, and we charged off to a pair of storerooms (closets, really) tucked in the corner. In typical HOG fashion she had to go back and forth from one to the other a few times, because nothing was where it was supposed to be. She asked me which one I was looking for. I said might as well start with Sorry Ma… Forgot to Take Out the Trash. Finally she hit paydirt. She was smiling as she handed me the disc. “Oh man, thanks,’ I said. On the way back to the cash I put the Zombies album back on the shelf (budget, remember).

As she was getting ready to ring up Sorry Ma… she said, “God, I love these guys.” Then: “Wait, you gotta see this,” and again she raced around from behind the counter. In a second she was standing in front of one of the building’s columns, moving a very dusty pile of vinyl. She moved pieces of the stack until she found what she was looking for: a pair of framed shots of the Replacements, one Warner press shot and one snapshot of the band signing autographs in the HOG, probably around 1985 or ’86. Both photos were autographed. I said to her, “Mind if I get a shot of these?” I turned my camera on and fired away.

Back at the counter I paid for the disc, refused the plastic bag, and was on my way when she jerked a thumb over her shoulder and said, “That’s them too.”

And there, chicken-scratched on the wall in black marker, among the band's signatures:

DON’T GIVE UP ON US – Replacements

My head rang. There it was, the meat of those records, and their continuing – rising – appeal to me. Distilled to their essence. Because that’s it: that’s the pulsing, bloody, ragged heart of these songs, and of their effect on me: Don’t give up on us. Meaning: take our stance of disinterest with a grain of salt, but see beneath it; see that what we need is to hope for something bigger. We encrust it all in these layers of bullshit losers’ sloganeering in case, as we half suspect, there’s no point in hoping for something to deliver us. We’re steeling ourselves for the fall we’re almost certain awaits us if we strive. But without the slim hope, the minute sliver of a chance that somebody else is also holding out hope that we might be worth something – anything – we might as well be fucking dead. If you give up on me, I give up on me, and it’s over; I can just sit and wait to die.

I had come all the way to Rochester, to goddamned Irondequoit, to see this, to receive this bit of hope, like a grain of rice. I put it in my pocket and I headed home, back to my wife, my daughter, to my 30s.

I PLACE too much stock in music, depend too much on epiphanies gleaned from Westerberg and Coltrane and Joe Pernice and David S. Ware. I know that. If we’re all running around in 2009 creating self-contained worlds for ourselves and inventing the religious systems therein, then I’m taking musical performances as my scriptures. It might not be healthy, I suppose, but I’ve come too far, done it for too long to stop now. Something about the act of listening (the art of listening?) opens me up and renders me fertile for the seed of goodness. This sounds trite, but it’s true. It’s true that there are times when I simply don’t feel pure enough, good enough, in some way worthy enough to listen to John Coltrane. In those times I have to redeem myself with mind-blanking hard work, or a sincere act, before I feel right enough to listen to “Spiritual” or “Afro Blue” or, most religiously of all, A Love Supreme. There are also three or four pieces of music which have the power to centre and calm me, physically and mentally. Those are the things I plug into as I lay in bed at night, and the things I hum to myself when I feel anxious. With the Replacements, I knew they were right for my mindset, but before I saw that graffiti on the wall of the House of Guitars, I don’t think I could sum up just why, or what it was they said to me. Now I know: Don’t give up on us.

There is music for every emotion, for every longing and for every need, from ecstasy to lust to blackest depression to bemused indifference, etc. At different times I have need for all of it. The music of the Replacements is dear to me, is something I need more often than many others, because it says something I so badly need to hear, because it takes me someplace I desperately need to go: a place of hope amid the bullshit. For a couple of years now I have placed all my hope in my daughter – that’s what parents do, what they should do – but lately I have realized that I must reserve a small bit for myself, too. And that’s what the Replacements have helped me rediscover: the hope that we might be measured not as the people we are, but as the people we want to be.

Lady Gaga and Me: My short, thankless career as a wedding DJ

2009-06-30T08:54:00.007-05:00

When one of your dearest, closest friends asks a favour, you agree. When he is getting married and asks you to serve as one of his groomsmen, you accept. When he says that the groom's party will be wearing off-white suits, you dutifully run to your nearest chain menswear outlet and rent an ivory tuxedo with champagne accents. And when he asks if you and your other old, dear friend, Miss Imperial, will handle the music for the ceremony and reception, you fire up your PC and scour the hard drive for appropriate songs.

In the final weeks before the big day I prodded the bride-and-groom-to-be for direction. “What kind of music do you want?” I asked. The answers indicated to me that what they were looking for was music to shake their rumps.

But the first challenge was the first dance. “No Celine” was all the input I got for that one. No problem; after a few days of indecision I came up with “I Love You Because” by Elvis Presley, and they loved it.

But what to play after that?

Miss Imperial and I put our heads together and came up with a vague direction, and I went to work putting together a four-hour set that we figured would appeal to folks of our age and mindset. It ranged from old favourites to hip hop to reggae to the Clash to modern dancefloor rockers (Justice, LCD Soundsystem), with a lot of funky detours along the way. It was a good set. We would load the MP3s into Miss I's laptop, create an iTunes playlist, add a few songs from her library, then press PLAY and walk away to join the party.

Everything started well. We had tested the PA system and it worked fine. The ceremony music – JS Bach's Orchestral Suite in D Major, Air for the processional, and the Beatles' “Here Comes the Sun” for the joyous recessional – had gone beautifully. The outdoor ceremony, beneath shading trees and just feet from the banks of the Mississippi River in Carleton Place, Ontario, was airy, sun-dappled, fragrant and just about perfect. Then all retired to the Canoe Club, in the hall on the second floor with the balcony overlooking the river, for dinner, cake, and then dancing.

Fed, watered and increasingly relaxed, we began. I looked around during the first dance: smiles. Then a second slow song, “Loveable” by Sam Cooke, in case anyone else wanted to be rocked gently. Then we gradually increased the tempo. “To Love Somebody” by Nina Simone got my three-year-old daughter to the floor (during the ceremony she had been the escort of the flower girl, a chihuahua in a wedding dress), and she was joined by a few others during the Stones' “Get Off My Cloud.” All seemed to be going well. An upward trajectory in the dancing population was a good indicator, Miss I and I felt.

But then it plateaued, and soon it began to fall. Before long the dancefloor was a sparsely populated region. We started to panic. Maybe the Pixies, scheduled next, wouldn't get quite the reaction we had anticipated. We axed that. “American Girl” by Tom Petty was only mildly successful. Everywhere you looked: unimpressed faces. This was bad.

Then teenaged Cousin Jeffrey pranced up to the table. He handed us a CD. No case, no liners. “Lady Gaga,” he said. “Play track four.” We did so. It was “Pokerface.” Family members, young and old, flooded the dancefloor, danced exuberantly, climbed up onto the stage. Cousin Jeffrey knew every word. There were high fives, smiles, laughing, shouting. Oh heavens.

This, Miss Imperial and I knew, meant trouble. It was an extremely humbling moment.

Maybe, if you're of a certain age, you know the precise moment you first realized that you were completely irrelevant, but probably you don't. For me, that moment occurred at a friend's wedding, on Saturday, June 27, 2009, at the Carleton Place Canoe Club. It was early evening, warm and close, the sun dazzling as it set over the river. I was surrounded by good friends, my wife and daughter, even my parents. I was thirty-two years old, and in the realm of youth, relevance, with-it-ness, I no longer mattered.

We scrambled. Luckily, Miss Imperial has a deep iTunes library. We scored with the Peas' “Boom Boom Pow” and Beyonce's “Crazy in Love” (a classic, apparently). But our choices grew slim. “How long can we keep this up?” I asked her. She looked worried. Improbably, Justin Timberlake cleared the floor. But as the evening wore, older disco stuff kept the people moving. Cousin Jeffrey was judgemental, folding his arms and scowling when something wasn't right, laughing and clapping like a circus seal when we got it right. Over the course of night we would play Lady Gaga's “Just Dance” and two or three more from The Fame that I can't now name. Every damn time they filled the floor. My faith in humanity was rocked, and I was reminded of the Sean Paul Rule, which was taught to me several years ago when I became a product buyer for an HMV store in Ottawa. Soon after landing the job I happened to run into an old friend who was doing the same job in Toronto, and I asked him if there was anything I should know. “Just don't run out of Sean Paul,” he said, “and you'll be fine.” And he was right. (Cousin Jeffrey also requested Sean Paul, coincidentally, and it too was a hit.) Likewise, as a wedding DJ in 2009, just don't run out of Lady Gaga, it seems.

I need to step back here and thank Miss Imperial profusely, if she reads this. It was her, six-months-pregnant belly and all, who took over the laptop and saved the evening, remaining chained to the table and constantly fretting over where to go next. She eased us into the disco (Cousin Jeffrey seemed particularly taken with Diana Ross' “I'm Coming Out”) and from there, into the '80s stuff, where were in something of a comfort zone, and from there we were able, finally, to steer ourselves into material we felt closer to, the night having fallen and many of the guests having taken their leave.

When the night was darkest, we knew that anyone left on the dancefloor was probably loaded or old like us, so we had some more freedom, though I never did get my Horace Andy-Toots and the Maytals- Skatalites-Clash-MIA set in. Finally we were able to hand off responsibility to the groom's brother, plugging his laptop into the PA and letting him take things in a Diplo-and-hip-hop direction while we packed up and joined all our friends (minus the bride and groom) in heading back to the motel for the after-party.

There things were nice and comfy, all thirty-somethings who were fairly appreciative of all the stuff we had chosen. We put the playlist on random and sipped bourbon and coolers (though not the pregnant lady, of course), ate salty things and chatted into the small hours. By my fourth bourbon, after several gin & tonics back at the Canoe Club, I had more or less forgotten the trauma of coming face to face with my own old-and-lame nature. But there was a residual sting, and it lingers still.

In retrospect it's hard to imagine what I had been thinking in assembling that playlist. What fantasy gathering would I be attending where the guests would enthusiastically greet music by Steinski and the American Princes? Who exactly was going to shout “Oh snap!” when I dropped that Editors remix right after the Chemical Brothers and Justice? What the hell was I thinking? It would have been the wedding reception that I longed to attend, wearing through the soles of my replacement shoes (no way I could dance in those rented plastic things) as we all pogo'd, skanked, vogued and bopped the night away, but it bore no resemblance to reality.

So here I am, days later, gradually coming to accept my folly and the commentary it provides about me and my life. I don't mind being old. My friends are old, and for the most part we're happy. But I worry for a future populated by people who could find something appealing in the music of Lady frigging Gaga.

PS (July 1) - I've just spent a few minutes ruminating on the rich tragedy that is the fact that I didn't even get a chance to play "Losing My Edge," when in fact, that's exactly what was going on. Losing my edge. Huh.

Dedicated to You: Kodachrome

2009-06-23T20:59:00.001-05:00

Mama, they're taking my Kodachrome away.

And the beat goes on.

The Father and the Son (Updated)

2009-06-16T06:24:00.004-05:00

* * *

UPDATE: For more info on the show as it aired, read the Official IMC Myspace Blog. To download the episode, load it onto your iPod, drive out to your childhood home, knock on the door, hug your dad and tell him that you love him, plug said iPod into his stereo, and spend 90 blissful father-son moments on Sunday, go here:

Now's the Time, June 18, 2009: Fathers and Sons

* * *
Father's Day next Sunday; bought that tie yet? (Do fathers still wear ties?) In honour of that, Now's the Time (Thursday night, 8:30-10:00 pm EST on CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa, ckcufm.com for the rest of you) will be devoted to father-son teams in jazz. My co-host, co-programmer and partner in crime this time around is my own dad. It's all recorded, cut and uploaded, so there remains nothing but the airing. Once that's done with I'll post download information here.

You might guess at the selections: Marsalises a-plenty, the Freemans, Monk and his boy, Coltranes named John and Ravi. Lots of good music.

Happy Father's Day.

The 21st Century never done me no favours.

2009-06-01T22:04:00.006-05:00

Over the weekend my wife and I were doing some housepainting, and in the course of choosing some music to soundtrack the chore she said to me, "Let's relive 1995," and proceeded to throw some Verve, Cardigans, Massive Attack and Superchunk into the deck (yeah, we were those people). It was an enjoyable excercise, but yet another in a string of moments that make you think, Will I ever be relevant again? Which is to say, have I discovered all the music I'll ever love?

Fast forward to today, a rainy Monday, and my daughter and I were futzing around the house, making guacamole, hacking up a watermelon. These activities required musical backing, so I fired up a bunch of MP3s. None of which were from the current century, as it happened. None.

The culprits: Fela Kuti (pictured), Charlie Parker, Woody Shaw, Tlahoun Gessesse, Otis Redding, Mongo Santamaria, Toots and the Maytals, the Lovejoys, Eric Dolphy and Tony Allen.

Maybe the 20th Century didn't make any sense, but the '00s make even less. I miss "sir" and "ma'am." Rotary dial. Looking it up in a book. Formalities.

And right now I'm watching a ball game, Diamondbacks-Dodgers, and digging it because Vin Scully is doing the play-by-play, and I love Vin Scully. Why do I love Vin Scully? Because he works alone, and because he sounds like 1950.

All of which begs the question: Am I a man out of time?

Never Let You Go

2009-05-29T15:03:00.002-05:00

Ain't there one damn song...?

2009-05-01T05:27:00.007-05:00

Ain't there one song that'll block out all others for an afternoon, a day, a week? One song that I'll sing over the music on the radio, the TV? The song I'll hum while making coffee, and belt out while driving? One damn song that my daughter will sing with me? Ain't there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?

Announcing

2009-04-20T21:34:00.006-05:00

Got plans May 22nd?

Avant-Garde Bar, Ottawa

Chris Cawthray

Glen Hall

Improvised Music Collective

The (Downloadable) Braxton Problem

2009-04-14T21:12:00.004-05:00

Over at IMC World HQ (aka Myspace) you'll find the details and the download coordinates of last Thursday night's first part of a two installment profile of Anthony Braxton (assembled and hosted by yours truly). The show and accompanying blog post have already generated some discussion (but no kudos -- what gives?), so be sure to weigh in on the controversy that Mr. Braxton seems to inspire everywhere he's known.

If you're lazy and looking for gratification with fewer clicks, here's the link to the fully downloadable episode:

Now's the Time - April 9, 2009: Anthony Braxton, Part 1

Braxtonian Musings

2009-04-08T06:09:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow night's installment of Now's the Time (8:30PM EDT - CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa, ckcufm.com elsewhere) is the first of two shows dedicated to the music and career of Anthony Braxton. I'm going to try something new, in that instead of blathering on like I usually do I'll keep my on-air commentary to a minimum, squeeze in as much music as I can, and then use the forum provided by the blog on our myspace page to impart my thoughts on the riddle that is Braxton and his music.

Part two will air May 14. The music for both programs is to be taken from Braxton's 2007 release 9 Compositions (Iridium). Heady stuff.

Chris Cawthray Trio Recap

2009-03-31T19:28:00.005-05:00

Chris Cawthray (l) and Glen Hall

A lucky few patrons of The Spill had a unique opportunity to witness the improvisational prowess of a hell of a good band on Saturday afternoon. Peterborough isn't yet a jazz town, but if more people knew what they missed over the weekend, it just might turn out to be. (Did that make sense?). Over the course of about an hour, Chris Cawthray (d), Glen Hall (sax) and Simeon Abbott (keys) ran through a set that encompassed a Cawthray original, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Sonny Rollins, Beck, Rob Price and Wilco (I think Abbott's warm keys and Hall's inside --> out solo made their version of "Jesus, Etc." even more enjoyable than the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot original).

Full set list:

Hope Song (Chris Cawthray)
Mouse Game (Rob Price)
Showbiz Kids (Becker/Fagen)
Blessing in Disguise (Sonny Rollins)
Ballad of Hollis Brown (Dylan)
Paper Tiger (Beck)
Jesus, etc. (Wilco)
Untitled improvisation (Chris Cawthray Trio)

We at the IMC aren't licked yet, so pay close attention for news on upcoming shows in both Ottawa and Peterborough. (It is possible that that was our last matinee, though.)

Your Final Reminder

2009-03-27T17:08:00.003-05:00

Should be a good time tomorrow afternoon in Peterborough, with music supplied by Chris Cawthray, Simeon Abbott and Glen Hall. I'm also told, though I can't yet personally verify, that the evening act, a group known as Carpe Noctem, are worth your time as well. So consider clearing your schedule and joining us for a jazz day-night doubleheader.

In Rotation: To Willie

2009-03-16T06:07:00.002-05:00

What? To Willie by Phosphorescent, Matthew Houck's reverent ode to Willie Nelson, and therefore to plain old regret, doubt, the pain-muting qualities of various substances, and the fresh regret engendered thereby.

Why this? Why today? I can't fully explain it, but something about spring run-off invariably sends me scurrying for the comforts of country music and its off-shoots. Recent days have seen me cozying up to Neko Case and Merle Haggard, but this is the one that sticks, the CD that gets carried from the car to the house and back again. It stirs memories of pre-adolescence, when my dad would mumble along to Willie's albums (cassettes) and I'd try to figure out just what there was to be so damn sad about. Now I'm older, and I understand. So does Matthew Houck.

This was a test, in a way, this season. I mean, if in fact this is spring, because who the hell knows around here, but the sun's out, the snow's all but gone, and we're up to our armpits in mud. If we don't have a snowstorm in the next few weeks, we might even start to see shoots. But this is the first urban spring I've experienced in eight or nine years, and I wasn't sure it'd be the same. No flooded fields, no overflowing ditches, no gravel road turned into a mudpit. I wasn't sure I'd have the same musical impulses. Would I open the windows and bleat along with Gram Parsons the same as I used to? Happily, yes.

What's strange is the degree to which my two year-old daughter has taken to the record. Thing is her favourite song is "Reasons to Quit" (sample lyric: "...the coke and booze don't do me like before...") and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Marked Urgent

2009-03-05T19:58:00.002-05:00

Boogie on over to CKCU post haste to catch my ninety-minute take on the history of Black Saint and Soul Note. It's impossible to fit it all into an hour and a half, of course, and unfair to even try, but I'm funny like that. If you can't make it there tonight (8:30-10:00 pm EST) I'll put up download information here once it's available. But with music by Billy Harper (that right up there is the very first release on Black Saint, from '75), the original Air, the World Saxophone Quartet, Jemeel Moondoc, the String Trio of New York and Mal Waldron -- among others! -- there's no reason to spend your Thursday night doing anything else. Am I right?

Cawthray & Abbott

2009-02-27T21:50:00.003-05:00

Simeon Abbot (keys) and Chris Cawthray (drums), two-thirds of the band appearing March 28 in Peterborough.

Know Thy Demographic

2009-02-17T19:51:00.003-05:00

There's no sense denying who you are is the way I see it, and who I am is a guy who's a sucker for a particular brand of indie-approved classicist rock. And they know that -- they frigging know that. Need proof? Here's something that is so squarely in my increasingly worn pocket, my tiny-getting-tinier corner of the musical universe, that it might as well be personally addressed to me. Me and a hundred thousand other aging white whatevers. Ready? Alright:

The Hold Steady covering Springsteen's "Atlantic City."

Holy shit, right?

But not covering it in the way that any ponytailed coffeehouse hack would, which is to say faithful to the original as it was released, i.e. strummy acoustic and solo voice. No, the full band gets into this, and it works. Oh god does it work. Witness:

A large bouquet for Miss Imperial for the tip, by way of Stereogum. And yes, I intend to track down that War Child compilation.

Housekeeping

2009-01-30T22:08:00.004-05:00

No idea who or what that picture shows, but do a Google image search on "now's the time" and it's among the top returns. Sometimes context is overrated.

ITEM: Last night's edition of Now's the Time (the radio program) was supposed to be a whirlwind tour through whatever part of my brain stores memories related to the music I've been listening to recently, but technical difficulties overruled that. The program should air on February 19th. Check local listings.

ITEM: The Steinski career retrospective What Does it All Mean? is great headphone fodder while washing dishes, and paints a superior alternate universe where Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers never happened, but where that Steinski shit blew up large. History's full of what ifs.

ITEM: Good review of Mary Halvorson's Dragon's Head over at Bagatellen.

January Miscellany

2009-01-22T21:17:00.008-05:00

Always playing catch-up, I'll sandwich together my last several ideas for posts that never came to fruition. Let's go!

Freddie Hubbard
I'm overdue in mentioning this, but the great Freddie Hubbard (pictured) passed away on December 29. Hubbard's is an incredible body of work. The chances are, if you have anything resembling a jazz collection, you've got some Freddie in there even if you don't know it. Check the sleeves -- he was all over Blue Note in the '60s. There's nothing I could say here that my friend Mark-O isn't already saying better -- like right now, on Now's the Time on CKCU 93.1 FM.

Putting 2008 to Bed
In the interest of not dragging things out too long (too late?), and maybe beginning to concentrate on 2009, here's the last bit of '08-related chatter you'll hear from me. My favourite reissues (interpret that however you will) of the year that was were:

The Black Saint and Soul Note catalogs, which landed with a tympanic crash onto eMusic a few months back
Anthony Braxton, The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton (Mosaic) - Everything seems to be coming up Braxton in my world these days (I'll be doing a pair of shows on another recent Braxton set as winter shifts to spring) and this represents a motherlode of Braxtonia rescued from obscurity by the intrepid folks at Mosaic
VA, Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Nigerian Blues, 1970-76 - For my money (er, monthly download allowance?), the best of the several compilations of Nigerian music to surface recently

The Big Lie (a.k.a. Fuck Wynton)
The guys over at the always excellent Destination: Out have been doing their level best recently to shed light on the oft-misunderstood 1980s in a series of posts, but the most provocative note struck concerns the work and legacy of Wynton Marsalis (who must be mentioned if you hope to come to grips with that decade). The deeply, deeply conservative trumpeter is an incredible talent, no question, but there's little sense in denying that he's used his prominence to advance some ugly non-truths about The Music. We've debated this on Now's the Time before, and as I recall we had trouble reaching a true balance in our presentation of the argument, which boils down to Inclusiveness and Innovation (aka The Facts) vs. Wynton's Hagiography (oops, there I go again). Not one of the five of us could get behind his selective blindness. Anyway, head to D:O to read more.

Ginger Baker: All Kinds of Crazy
The prospect of crossing the Sahara to sit in on a few percussion-heavy jam sessions in Nigeria is crazy enough, but to do so in a pair of leather platform boots is plain batshit nutty. Then to seemingly get as baked as humanly possible before recording the echo pedal-aided voice-over for the documentary film which chronicles the journey is way, way beyond what most any of us mere mortals would ever in our lives consider doing. Ever. Still: entertaining.

Lastly
I'll be repping the IMC and hosting Now's the Time next Thursday, bringing a grab bag of things I've been listening to of late. Download info to follow.

The IMC Presents the Chris Cawthray Trio

2009-01-22T21:07:00.004-05:00

Our initial foray into "show facilitation" in Peterborough finds drummer Chris Cawthray and his trio appearing at The Spill on March 28th (note that it's an afternoon show). More info as available, but please, if you're within earshot (or walking/bussing/driving/training distance) come on by. No tickets, but we'll pass the hat until it's full, dump it out, and pass it again.

Who's Responsible?

The Spill

Chris Cawthray

The Improvised Music Collective / CKCU FM (Ottawa)

Best of 2008: Songs (Part 2)

2009-01-12T21:51:00.003-05:00

Portishead, “Plastic” (from Third)
One of the strengths of Third is that it doesn’t ride from obvious single to obvious single; it’s an album, in the most cohesive sense of that word. Extracting any one song from the front-to-back flow of the thing robs both of some of their power and grace. That said, several songs do stand up on their own, and “Plastic” is one of them. In its prematurely-truncated drum sample rests the crux of Portishead’s continuing power: the interplay of the authentic masquerading as the artificial and the artificial muddying the waters of authenticity.

The Raveonettes, “Hallucinations” (from Lust, Lust, Lust)
“Downstairs on the sidewalk I kissed Stella some more – those cliffhanger kisses, you know, when you feel as if you’ll drop to your doom if your tongues untwine – before she sank into the seat of her car and disappeared. Then I stood there for a long while, my heart a sparkler spraying light across the sidewalk.” – Johnny Miles, Dear American Airlines

The Walkmen, “On the Water” (from You and Me)
Song of the year. No point in repeating myself. Read all about my gushy love here.

Sun Kil Moon, “Tonight the Sky” (from April)
Sometimes it just takes a song ten minutes to properly unfold. Don’t rush a guy.

The Funkees, “Akula Owu Onyeara” (from Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Nigerian Blues, 1970-76)
A token inclusion from one of my favourite reissues of ought-eight (more on reissues in another post). Seems that compilations of Nigerian music are a dime a dozen these days, but this one shook my ass on several occasions. Also, I just watched Ginger Baker in Africa (more on that in another post) and I feel the need to include this. I know nothing about The Funkees, but this shit is crazy.

Dave Douglas and Keystone, “Kitten” (from Moonshine)
Awesome how Adam Benjamin makes his keyboard sound like a fuzzed-out guitar, no? That’s right: no guitar.

The Vandermark 5, “Speedplay (For Max Roach)” (from Beat Reader)
The world in seven minutes. Long live Vandermark.

The Peggy Lee Band, “Scribble Town” (from New Code)
Scribbly.

DJ/rupture and Andy Moor, “One Hundred Month Bloom” (from Patches)
Notable for the sample/interpolation of “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins. Also notable for incredibleness.

Bill Dixon and the Exploding Star Orchestra, “Constellations for Innerlight Projections (For Bill Dixon)” (from s/t)
I defy you to make sense of the spoken word bit. The song’s strength is as a showcase for this amazing ensemble, at once expansive and agile. They turn on a dime, rise to deafening heights, turn inward, crash upon themselves as though they were a single player.

Mary Halvorson Trio, “Momentary Lapse (No. 1)” (from Dragon’s Head)
Looking forward to her next release.

Matana Roberts, “Nomra” (from The Chicago Project)
Wonderful player, wonderful band.

Francois Carrier, “Experience” (from Within)
Not as monolithically impressive, perhaps, as “Core,” the (aptly-named) forty-minute centerpiece of Within, but a beautiful piece of group improvisation nonetheless.

Angles, “Every Woman is a Tree” (from Every Woman is a Tree)
Stylistic similarities to On Cortez by Dragons 1976 – a group of contemporary players mining the fertile nexus of hard bop and free music as you might’ve found on mid-‘60s Blue Note (think bands featuring Jackie McLean and Bobby Hutcherson), while still finding new directions to push the sound. I can’t recommend this album enough.

The Bitter Funeral Beer Band, “Chetu” (from Live in Frankfurt ’82)
“A bit drum circle-y,” said Mark-O. Maybe so. But I keep getting drawn further and further into this space where world and free music meet.

Best of 2008: Jazz/Improvised

2009-01-08T09:02:00.004-05:00

Tonight I convene (telephonically) with my IMC peers as we run down our picks for the best improvised recordings of 2008 on Now's the Time. It's on CKCU at 8:30 pm EST, or head to our myspace page after the fact for a recap. We'll record it, too, so watch this space for DL information.

My picks, of course, were laced in among the rock and pop stuff throughout December's 25 posts, but I'll try to elaborate on air, and probably play a couple of tracks from my top 2 or 3 choices.

Best of 2008: Songs (Part 1)

2009-01-06T07:35:00.005-05:00

Those of you already in possession of the much-coveted TiOM year-in-review CD will have anticipated this post, and it will prove as anticlimactic as snow in winter. But we soldier on.

Every one of the previously-posted album picks is represented by a song here, as are a few strong-but-not-top-25-strong albums. When it comes to the improvised stuff, the songs chosen, while all very good examples of the artists’ work, are often concessions to the length of a CD-R rather than the track I enjoyed most.

In order of appearance on the CD (that is, the order dictated by flow, and not a hierarchical ranking):

Love is All, “New Beginnings” (from A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night)

I’m a sucker for anything this spastic and unhinged. The addition of saxophone seals it. Big inning, indeed.

Vampire Weekend, “Oxford Comma” (from Vampire Weekend)

The Oxford Comma, also known as the Serial Comma, provides the basis for one of the catchier songs on VW’s debut.

Ra Ra Riot, “Ghost Under Rocks” (from The Rhumb Line)

If I’d put together a top 26, Ra Ra Riot’s The Rhumb Line would’ve squeaked onto the list. A buoyant and catchy collection by a band prominently featuring cello and violin, Rhumb has worked its way into increased rotation at TiOM HQ in recent weeks after laying neglected for a couple of months. Danceable and only slightly twee, RRR crib from the right set of notes, namely New Order, Kate Bush and the Flying Nun roster.

The Whigs, “Hot Bed” (from Mission Control)

Was the Whigs’ Mission Control as front-to-back strong as the rest of the albums on my list? No, no it was not. Do I love “Hot Bed” because it shows the band at their Replacements-aping best? Yes, yes I do.

The Night Marchers, “Closed for Inventory” (from See You in Magic)

Keep doing how you do, John Reis.

The Hold Steady, “Constructive Summer” (from Stay Positive)

God bless Craig Finn for his ability to toss off a line like, “Me and my friends are like double whiskey-coke, no ice.” When Stay Positive began this strong, it was clear Boys and Girls in America was no fluke.

Titus Andronicus, “No Future, Part II – The Days After No Future” (from The Airing of Grievances)

Absolutely perfect for late night air drumming while sitting before your PC and assembling a list of your favourite songs of the past year.

The Dodos, “Red and Purple” (from Visiter)

Visiter [sic] in a nutshell: clangy, tuneful, good.

Plants and Animals, “Bye, Bye, Bye” (from Parc Avenue)

By roughly the three-quarter point of Parc Avenue, I found myself overcome by the scent of patchouli, but “Bye, Bye, Bye” is grandiose and bombastic enough to disarm my defenses.

The Gaslight Anthem, “Miles Davis and the Cool” (from The ’59 Sound)

Mid-tempo longing and regret from Jersey Boss-worshippers.

The Baseball Project, “Past Time” (from Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails)

“Past Time” contains all of the Baseball Project’s DNA, acting as something of a sampler plate of the tracks that will follow. Half the fun of the album, and this song in particular, is sussing out how many of the names and stories you’re familiar with already, and how many you’ll have to look up at baseball-reference.com.

Bon Iver, “Skinny Love” (from For Emma, Forever Ago)

Hands down the best use of a warbly, multi-tracked falsetto in 2008.

Frightened Rabbit, The Twist (from The Midnight Organ Fight)

Perfectly evokes to the sense of unease and tension in the moment described, until it builds toward something approaching confidence and the narrator declares, damn it, I want you to want me.

The Constantines, “Million Star Hotel” (from Kensington Heights)

One of the highlights of Kensington Heights, about equal with “Trans Canada,” I’d say, but the space and tension of “MSH” was better suited to my purposes.

Wolf Parade, California Dreamer (from At Mount Zoomer)

I think we can all agree that indie and prog now share a bed, and sometimes it’s an uncomfortable arrangement, but often, as when Wolf Parade drop in that bubbly electric piano, it delivers pure pleasure.

#1

2008-12-25T17:53:00.002-05:00

Portishead, Third (Mercury/Island)

There was no reason to expect that Portishead would ever be relevant again. They'd had their heyday, inspired a decade or more of electro-acoustic mood music perfect for shopping or sipping caramel macchiatos (that music's blandness is not Portishead's fault), and promptly faded away. Fait accompli, right? And even if Adrian Utley, Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow were to reunite, they'd only be banking on past glory (box), right? Well, not so fast, it seems. A decade removed from their last perfomances together, the trio decided they still had something vital to offer, and lo, they were right.

Third is distinct from both of their previous studio albums, as well as their 1998 live release. They have sloughed off all signs of trendiness: gone are the scratches, the spy soundtrack samples, the vague '90s-ness of it all. What remains is the remarkable density of their sound, a deceptively smooth-seeming yet incredibly complex construction of live instrumentation and electronic augmentation. And still present is Beth Gibbons' voice, at once so strong and yet so vulnerable, the wounded ingenue, a singing style seemingly torn from a time now decades past (when I first head Dummy, almost FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, I was convinced the vocals had been ripped from a dusty 78 the producers had found at a rummage sale somewhere). But otherwise, so many references to who Portishead once were have been scrubbed away that Third represents an incredible act of reinvention.

In the past Portishead had, despite its air of longing and desperation, the ability to lull listeners. For all its inventiveness, this was ultimately the calling card of trip hop, the genre Portishead were said to have helped found: the easy tempi were for sipping beverages, for kicking back; for chilling. But Third is less Blue Room in a London club than it is Berlin warehouse-cum-sound-studio. It bristles, crackles, bucks and pushes. It unsettles. First single “Machine Gun,” with its rapidfire drum machine beat, is unapologetic krautrock. “Magic Doors” is backed by a wash of psychedelic tape-splice sound.

Third is so breathtakingly strong, so intricate and dark that it demands a rethink of Portishead's relationship to their earlier work. They were, I think, further ahead than we realized, more innovative and less interested in creating “a sound” than they were in exploring the possibilities of Sound. Dummy and Portishead suggested it, and Third has at last confirmed it: a familiarity with Portishead is essential to understanding the state of the art of music in the first decades of the twenty-first century. For most of us that century began about 7 or 8 years ago (probably it began on September 11, 2001, just as the twentieth century effectively began on June 28, 1914), but for Barrow, Gibbons and Utley, it started nearly a decade earlier, when they began their work together. The question is whether or not they can remain ahead of the curve, and what sort of art will result from their prescience. For the time being, we have Third, and we are fortunate, because Portishead could have easily called it a career ten years ago, when it seemed as though they had nothing left to prove.

#2

2008-12-24T16:04:00.003-05:00

The Walkmen, You and Me (Gigantic)

The buzz of a guitar's reverb in the skin of a drum, the rattle of a kick pedal as secondary percussion, the cracking of Hamilton Leithauser's voice at just the right moments, the rich hum of the organ... these are the subtle aural pleasures of You and Me. The intellectual pleasures are perhaps more acute; like a persistent stitch in your side, the Walkmen are here to remind you that aging isn't easy, and sure as hell isn't pretty, but it's unfailingly poignant, and real to boot. Y+M is an album-length rumination on that abrupt transition when you realize that you don't care if you look your age, because a) you can't be bothered anymore, and b) maybe there's an iota of dignity in not being 26 (or 29) anymore. The Walkmen sound tired, properly tired, and that results in a dropping of affectations. It sounds right, because damn it, who among us isn't weary? One foot in front of the other, we'll get by. They've been listening to Leonoard Cohen – we've got the proof right here – and they sound like it, courting melancholy and mule-headed hopefulness (the impossibly pretty “Canadian Girl”) in equal measure. When an album keeps its hat on for so much of its running length, the outbursts are all the more startling and meaningful. You and Me is a magnificent, well-tailored coat with fraying cuffs. It is elegant and desperate.

And then there's “On the Water,” which is about as perfect a song as I've ever heard. Its muted shuffle-step opening perfectly evokes, as Leithauser sings, “walking down this dirt road, watching at the sky, 'cause it's all I can do.” And when, at about the 2:13 mark, the song erupts like a shower of sparks, your heart does likewise, because you feel in an instant that you have permission to shout, ragged-voiced and pop-veined, every last damn thing that you've held back since things started to appear in your mind's rearview mirror. It is the wedding speech you've always wanted to give, the eulogy you hope to one day deliver, your tie askew, to a room full of gape-faced people. “On the Water” knows that you could have been somebody, and You and Me says you might be yet, but either way you'll have these songs; songs like heirlooms, songs like friends.

#3

2008-12-23T23:22:00.002-05:00

Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)

Every great album needs an equally great creation story, the myth of its genesis, the raw material of its run at immortality. For Emma, Forever Ago passes that test. Specifically, it is the end result of a broken relationship, a disbanded indie-folk outfit, and a period of intense isolation in the snow-driven Wisconsin woods. Justin Vernon, who adopted the Bon Iver moniker as a manglicized version of the French for good winter, endured a run of bad breaks, like many of us do, and reacted in a way that more of us should: he turned it into something of lasting value. Alone in that cabin, he might have made the worst sort of moping bedroom folk, but instead was able to hew something from the ice and wood and solitude that can only be called backwoods soul. His multitracked falsetto shimmers like windowpane frost, etched delicately atop solid rhythms punched out of an acoustic guitar, and spiced with a few horns, some spare drums and the odd electric guitar twang. There are the inevitable Iron & Wine comparisons, and they're valid, but only if you mean the mature Iron & Wine, as on The Shepherd's Dog, where the hushed folk plucking is seasoned with a broader musical palette. For Emma... is a lush, beautiful listen, the sort of album that worms its way into your life so that you find yourself conforming to its rhythms; background listening becomes focused listening. The strength of this record is in its ability to hold your attention, and I think it does that because of its unique genesis. It seems obvious to me that Vernon was writing and recording these songs for himself first and foremost, and that makes us spies on a series of very private moments. When an artist is this naked, the product can't help but prove compelling.

#4

2008-12-22T22:13:00.003-05:00

Angles, Every Woman is a Tree (Clean Feed)

For a nation of nine million souls, Sweden has placed a proportionally high number of albums on this list – Love is All, Bengt Berger, and the Raveonettes have already achieved the great distinction of being named TiOM top 25ers. Add alto saxophonist Martin Kuchen and his latest project, Angles, to that number. Every Woman is a Tree is a stark and dark, Matthias Stahl's vibraphones darkening the corners of this roiling live collective improvisation. This is free music as Freedom Music; protest and dissent circa now. Thou ancient, thou free rouses Sweden's national anthem; this sextet certainly bears that second part to heart. The performances are tense and tight, the tunes aren't frothy but have enough head to satisfy. All of it adds up to my favourite free/improv/jazz recording of 2008 (that it came from an artist and group I'd never before heard of makes it all the more pleasing). ((And once again, Clean Feed proves itself one of the most interesting labels out there.))

#5

2008-12-21T23:36:00.002-05:00

Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer (Sub Pop)

Not to repeat myself, but I was prepared to be disappointed by the follow up to the immensely satisfying Apologies to the Queen Mary. Well, I needn’t. At Mount Zoomer is almost completely devoid of a single, lacks the “naive, anthemic bluster” of its predecessor, rocks just a little bit less than …Queen Mary, and comes packaged in one of those shitty paperboard sleeves that’s impossible not to damage the first time you open it. Which is all to say that it’s just as good as Wolf Parade’s debut. I’d stop short of calling it better, because as debuts go, theirs was stupefyingly good. Zoomer is more of an album, though, in that it hangs together all of a piece, and several songs feel as though their primary purpose is to set a tone for the big set pieces (California Dreamer, Kissing the Beehive). All in all, it’s compelling, the rare album demanding a front-to-back listen in a way that’s commendable – weren’t we supposed to have witnessed the death of the album several times over by now? Wolf Parade didn’t make a second installment of their debut, though that would have been an achievement in itself. What they did instead was to grow up a bit and produce an incredible record shorn of the urgency of its antecedent, but one which is nevertheless deeper, more nuanced, and more patient. In short, they followed up one triumph with another, completely different one. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

#6

2008-12-20T22:35:00.002-05:00

The Raveonettes, Lust Lust Lust (Vice)

I hereby nominate the Raveonettes to score every future David Lynch project, and while they’re at it, why not go back and provide new music for everything he’s already done? Those would be DVDs worth shelling out for. On Lust…, the ‘nettes seem to have clarified their purpose, shedding much of the bloat that troubled their last long player, and rededicating themselves to their role as recombinant masters of American Kitsch (as is so often the case, it takes outsiders to perfect this shit); promoters of trash as high art. With songs that flare up like magnesium, mechano-drums, robo-Swede vocals and fuzzy, tinny guitar, Lust… is perfect homage to the art of rock & roll self-invention. Harmonized vocals lie like bedrock beneath spiky guitars, and Buddy Holly smiles from the great beyond. So might Luxe Interior, if he were dead. Like Mulholland Drive, there’s a chance I’m not understanding everything that’s happening here, but I’m sure as hell enjoying it. Now, how about it: The Raveonettes do Blue Velvet?

#7

2008-12-19T23:24:00.000-05:00

Frightened Rabbit, The Midnight Organ Fight (Fat Cat)

Nervy, rollicking, convulsive alt-folk-indie-rock. The best thing going in Scottish guitar pop. Equal parts hope and despair. Lush, tic-driven, and catchy. Hum it when you’re up, bellow it when you’re down. [Aw, jeezus, does anybody actually read this stuff?]

#8

2008-12-18T20:12:00.003-05:00

The Vandermark 5, Beat Reader (Atavistic)

Ken Vandermark’s mugshot ought to accompany the definition of “restless” in your Colliers or your OED. In jazz terms, he’s as promiscuous as they come, leaping from project to project, starting new bands, resurrecting old ones. – one-offs, touring ensembles, tributes, film music, intriguing collaborations… If it’s adventurous, he’s game. Once the tally is complete, I expect he’ll have released hundreds of recordings. But for better than a decade, he’s always returned to the Vandermark 5. That any working jazz unit has endured today’s climate for eleven years is truly remarkable; that it has managed to hold Vandermark’s interest is miraculous. There have been lineup changes, of course, but the core dictum of pushing free music in all directions has remained undisturbed. The V5, as it currently stands, is the exciting Dave Rempis on alto and tenor saxophone, Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello and electronics, Kent Kessler on bass, Tim Daisy on drums, and Vandermark, who here sticks to the low end of the register, playing baritone sax and clarinet. It’s a good choice, because he spends much of Beat Reader’s 69 minutes exploiting the guttural qualities of the baritone to an effect similar to his work on Bridge 61’s (excellent) 2006 release Journal, which is to say that a lot of the time the thing flat-out rocks. Vandermark’s gift is his combinatory approach; simply, his palette is larger that most. Punk, rock and funk are as ripe for pillaging as are blues, jazz, classical, what have you. This inclusiveness is what has always marked the great Vandermark 5 releases (Single Piece Flow, Target or Flag, A Discontinuous Line), and here it means that the quintet veer from spastic energy to containment and austerity in the blink of an eye. They are simultaneously controlled and unhinged; propulsive and passive, as appropriate. Lonberg-Holm’s cello is capable of centering the proceedings in a way that Jeb Bishop’s guitar could not. Similarly, Rempis’ tenor pushes things further into the funk realm. All in all, it is what we have come to expect from the V5: more of everything, the world in an hour. I wouldn’t dare slight Ken Vandermark for his restlessness and his creative hyperactivity. It simply results in too much incredible music. But I do hope he always calls the Vandermark 5 home.

#9

2008-12-17T21:33:00.002-05:00

Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend (XL)

So much advance hype preceded the release of Vampire Weekend that anything less than Album of the Year plaudits might be seen as a letdown. Well, whatever, they made a very good album, a wry, confident, highly listenable pop record replete with those much-discussed African pop influences. It’s like extras from a Bret Easton Ellis book put out a record, and though you long to hate them for their pedigree and their unearned trust fund security, you can’t deny the songs. Vampire Weekend pull off the neat trick of harkening back to a simultaneously ironic and carefree time that likely didn’t actually exist, and making you feel nostalgic for it just the same. Dance, deny, repeat. We knew "Mansard Roof" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" were good; turns out they weren't complete flukes. "Campus," "Oxford Comma" and "A-Punk" are just as solid. Dance, dance, dance.

#10

2008-12-17T21:18:00.005-05:00

Dave Douglas & Keystone, Moonshine (Greenleaf)

No surprise here, really, as Douglas seems to show up annually on my list, he just continues to evolve and to impress. Keystone is the band which originally came together around the 2005 album of that name, a project inspired by the silent films of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, he of the infamous Hollywood scandal, but this music is genuinely affectionate toward Arbuckle’s work. The 2005 disc even included a DVD containing an Arbuckle short film. In 2008 the band remains the same save for the keyboard chair, where Adam Benjamin replaces Jamie Saft. DJ Olive is present again, and he’s given more room to provide atmospherics and quasi-instrumental interjections than he was on the first album. John Kelman of AllAboutJazz.com sums it all up nicely:

What makes Moonshine ultimately such a success [...] is Douglas’ ability to cloak avant-garde concerns in accessible surroundings. As deep and challenging as anything he’s ever recorded, Moonshine remains an album that’s as much food for the heart and soul as it is for the mind, and continues Douglas’ remarkably unbroken string of superb and uncompromising releases.

#11

2008-12-15T21:35:00.002-05:00

Francois Carrier, Within (Leo)

Within is the sound of a trio of musicians (Carrier on alto and soprano saxophones, Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass and thumb piano, and Michel Lambert on drums, recorded live in Calgary) exhibiting group awareness and musical intuition so strong that it verges on telepathy. “The Moment” and “Experience” bookend the 40-minute “Core,” a staggering piece of creation-in-motion, an improvised statement of impressive depth and such obvious elation for the players that one is tempted to invoke some pretty heavy names as comparison points. But let’s resist that temptation and call it simply “singular,” perhaps even rapturous, and absolutely compelling.

#12

2008-12-14T22:17:00.004-05:00

Love is All, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night (What’s Your Rupture)

Just like their debut Nine Times That Same Song, this year’s A Hundred Things… plays out like a breathless run-on sentence, a harried and frenzied burst of energy, my two-year old daughter’s sugar rush babblings set to chugga-chugga post-punk guitars, the skronking saxophone, nervous tic drums, bubbly keyboards and Josephine Olausson's amateurish (in a good way) English-as-a-second-language vocals all competing to see who can get to the end of the song first, and even when they do slow it down, like on "When Giants Fall" or “Last Choice,” they make it so damn poppy-sweet, but not too TOO sugary, that you probably dance just as hard as you do to the fast stuff, so the cumulative effect is one of, yes, YES I like this, and after the second or third listen you’re bleating right along with Jansson, doing the freak-spank, playing rhythm guitar on a wooden spoon (or broom or hairbrush), and when, after a scant 32 minutes, the whole thing is over, you think to yourself, well THAT was fun.

#13

2008-12-13T22:37:00.001-05:00

Matana Roberts, The Chicago Project (Central Control)

Chicago-born saxophonist Matana Roberts came to notice playing with the trio Sticks and Stones (with Chad Taylor and Josh Abrams) whose 2004 album Shed Grace was one of that year’s best. In 2008 she fronts an impressive quartet comprised of Jeff Parker on guitar, Abrams on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. The group’s first release is The Chicago Project, a record notable for the quality of its quartet pieces as well as the three sax duets which place Roberts alongside the legendary Fred Anderson.

#14

2008-12-13T22:34:00.002-05:00

The Hold Steady, Stay Positive (Vagrant)

We’re still swooning over Boys and Girls in America, to be honest. That record’s bless-the-losers vibe, its rousing acceptance of advancing age and casual transgression, its ruddy heart, and its songs, were so on, so right, that it’s one of the rare records I’m listening to two years later. So expectations for Stay Positive were high, and for the most part, Craig Finn and co. deliver again. Opener “Constructive Summer” hits like a hot mid-afternoon beer buzz, and scores bonus points for referring to Joe Strummer as a saint. Then you find yourself in the midst of “Sequestered in Memphis,” which should already be playing on classic rock stations across the land on the strength of its piano-organ-guitar front line and its sing-along chorus. We’ll call “One for the Cutters” a brave misfire, because this band’s done enough to earn some of our patience, but yeah, the harpsichord (!) is a mistake. Things chug along like that, though, with pinches and dashes of a lot of the songs you’ve loved since you could turn on a radio yourself. It doesn’t all really gel again until track 8, “Stay Positive,” where the bile-and-nostalgia lyrics and the guitars mesh with the shouted “whoa-oh-ho-ho” chorus, and you begin to wonder if you haven’t shouted along with that chorus sometime in the hazy past, somewhere you can’t name. The Hold Steady frequently arouse such false memories; they’re sometimes called classicists, and sometimes labeled nothing more than a bar band, but as long as we have need for bars, we’ll have need for bar bands, especially ones as good as this. At their core such groups are made up of people who’ve obviously spent their lives listening to Big Albums, and hoping they’d make one themselves someday. These guys did – it was called Boys and Girls in America – and now they’ve followed it up with a Damn Good Album. It could never be as invigorating as hearing Boys and Girls… for the first time, but Stay Positive is the record that confirms that this band is one to grow older alongside. I said it in ’06, and I think it holds true: The Hold Steady’s failures seem terribly real, and their victories kind of feel like your own.

#15

2008-12-11T10:02:00.003-05:00

The Night Marchers, See You in Magic (Swami/Vagrant)

John Reis seems to know only one thing, and that’s how to play the world’s best grimy rock & roll. The man also known as Speedo has been the drive behind Drive Like Jehu, the mighty Rocket From the Crypt, the Sultans, the Hot Snakes, and now, having closed the lid on all those bands, he’s formed the Night Marchers. See You in Magic is the band’s debut, another winner in the Reis catalog, 13 more songs to add to the canon. The guitars on Reis-related records always sound the way angry guitars should sound: raw, loud, taut. The drums are big, the vocals are Reis’ trademark growl and yelp, and the songs are tuneful and tight. The loss of RFTC was lamentable for fans of no-bullshit garage rock. Similarly, both the Sultans and the Hot Snakes seemed incapable of wrong moves. They’re all gone now, but See You in Magic points toward a future where Reis continues to provide just what’s needed. Here’s hoping the run continues, though it shows no signs of doing otherwise.

#16

2008-12-10T21:08:00.002-05:00

Bill Dixon with the Exploding Star Orchestra, Bill Dixon with the Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey)

Head Exploding Star Rob Mazurek continues to enjoy an exciting career, neatly treading the line between Chicago’s fertile post-rock scene and all-out free jazz. Indeed, he provides a handy figurehead for that nexus, in that the point he occupies is now so thoroughly associated with both of those musical movements that they have probably now, or will soon merge altogether. For the second ESO release, Mazurek was lucky enough to attract the attention of Bill Dixon, who not only agreed to play on the set, but composed the two-part suite (“Entrances”) which opens and closes the album. Sandwiched between them is Mazurek’s “Constellations for Innerlight Projections (For Bill Dixon)”, so all in all it made sense to credit the project to Bill Dixon with… As with last year’s amazing We Are All From Somewhere Else, the Orchestra, made up of 13 Chicago improvising music scenesters, employ everything under the sun, from free blowing to melodic noodling to good old-fashioned space-age big band swinging, and once again flutist Nicole Mitchell is on hand to nearly steal the show. But Bill Dixon holds his own, too, and the end result is a thrilling recording which rewards repeat listens. Given the ever-present need for new and unpredictable sounds, it is perhaps no surprise that free jazz is alive and well; the big surprise is that its health is due in some measure to the mathrockers. With each daring and fresh release, they threaten their own oblivion, bound to become instead simply the next generation of improvisers. This record feels like a tacit acknowledgment of that very fact, a nod of appreciation from an elder to his natural descendents.

#17

2008-12-09T21:33:00.004-05:00

Sun Kil Moon, April (Caldo Verde)

Mark Kozelek’s tuneful drone of a voice and solid guitar chops, when wrapped about the melodies he snatches from thin air with alarming regularity, are always cause for celebration – or more accurately, for wistful longing and/or deep brooding. On April he conjures another set of stunners, an album which begins with the daunting “Lost Verses,” a song which, at nearly ten minutes long, provides something of a Sun Kil Moon primer. The next several tracks strum and wail and lull and thrash in a pleasing blur until the album crescendos on the ten-plus minute “Tonight the Sky,” an unruly guitar exercise which nevertheless retains its pretty core, lacing a tender vocal refrain amid the squall. If the final three tracks feel like a coda after that, it should be said that they form a damn fine one, and the four alternate performances on the second disc are similarly pleasing. On the last album of original Sun Kil Moon material, 2003’s Ghosts of the Great Highway, Kozelek provided two interpretations of his own song; the first, “Salvador Sanchez,” was a ragged take, built around a big electric guitar riff, while the second, called “Pancho Villa,” was the same song performed with a strummed acoustic guitar and a subtle backing arrangement. Both worked. And the beauty of April, as with so much of Kozelek’s work, is that you have the sense that he could pull the same trick with any of these songs, and the results would be equally impressive.

#18

2008-12-08T21:58:00.003-05:00

Bitter Funeral Beer Band, Live in Frankfurt ’82 (w/ Don Cherry & K. Sridhar) / Live in Nurnberg ‘84 (Country & Eastern)

In 1981 Swedish percussionist Bengt Berger, having studied West African music in Ghana, distilled his experience, convened a band, recorded and released Bitter Funeral Beer on the storied ECM label. He then put together a motley touring version of the band, a sprawling, boisterous ensemble, and toured Europe. The band never cut another studio album, but thanks to German state radio we have two extant live recordings, recently released on Berger’s own Country & Eastern label. The earlier set features the horn and personality of Don Cherry, who recognized in the project and in the person of Berger a kindred spirit to his own efforts to fuse world music and the jazz tradition (see: Cherry’s Mu suite), as well as sarod player K. Sridhar. It shines with a sense of inclusiveness and joyous abandon. The Nurnberg date feels more ragged, but no less exuberant, a rollicking percussion party so celebratory that it’s hard to decide who was having more fun, the audience or the band. Both albums are warm, well-recorded, and engaging, a pair of worthy additions to the global-minded improvised canon.

#19

2008-12-07T20:49:00.003-05:00

The Dodos, Visiter (Frenchkiss)

The Dodos make a joyful racket, a clangy thumping folky noise that some might say is freak-folk, but since I hate that genre and I like this, it can’t be so, right? Logan Kroeber’s percussion makes this tick, but without songs, man, it wouldn’t hold together. Alright, sometimes Meric Long’s singing is a bit strained, a bird in search of a wire too high, but the inherent sincerity puts you in a forgiving mood. Visiter [sic] fits in ’08 because you can hear the WOMAD influence, like if When Your Heartstrings Break was less brass band, more African percussion. And like Beulah, you get a frenetic mind-rush without ever feeling rushed or frenetic, just like you’re being kind of pleasantly zipped along on a pop-rock bumper car. Junkyard pop? World indie? Seussian rock? Pick a tag, then enjoy.

#20

2008-12-06T17:45:00.004-05:00

The Baseball Project, Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails (Yep Roc)

Aw, c’mon, was there more of a sure thing for my list in 2008? A jangly power-pop record made by Scott McCaughey and Peter Buck (as well as Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon) and devoted to baseball? Not fair. There are no more sure ways to bypass my critical sensibilities. What’s fantastic about this collection of diamond-themed songs is that they aren’t mere wistful odes to a bullshit bucolic pipedream of innocence and father-son catch sessions. No, they’re genuine nods of appreciation to the real people who’ve played the game. In that sense, Frozen Ropes… is less Field of Dreams, more Bull Durham, and that’s alright by me. Characters are what make these songs fly, lyrically – be it Curt Flood, Satchel Paige, Fernando Valenzuela, Harvey Haddix, Black Jack McDowell, or “Ted Fucking Williams.” Musically, the record rides the strengths of the amassed musicians, each of whom possess a heady power-pop CV. The titles suggests a second volume is forthcoming; if so, sign me up now.

Hey, how about that? I got through that whole blurb without resorting to the use of a baseball pun. Homerun!

#21

2008-12-05T23:31:00.001-05:00

DJ /rupture and Andy Moor, Patches (Unsuitable)

With apologies to the much-lauded Uproot, Patches is the best thing that Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ/rupture released in 2008, an inspired duet with guitarist Andy Moor, best known as a cog in the great and terrible machine that is the Ex. Patches is a collision of abrasion and disruption, a series of sonicscapes fusing Clayton’s aural ephemera with Moor’s improvised guitar imaginings. The result is like playing cut-and-splice with your dream-reels as soundtracked by Fred Frith’s negative-image doppelganger. A serious headplay.

#22

2008-12-05T23:26:00.002-05:00

Titus Andronicus, The Airing of Grievances (Troubleman Unlimited)

First impressions: Conor Oberst fronting a ragged punk band. But the more I listened, the more I began to appreciate Titus Andronicus’ blend of desperation and nihilism. The Airing of Grievances is a harrowing trip through the psyche of the thinking punk.

#23

2008-12-03T07:08:00.003-05:00

23. Peggy Lee Band, New Code (Drip Audio)

Vancouver cellist Lee (not to be confused with the original Peggy Lee) expands her group from a sextet to an octet with the addition of a tenor saxophone (Jon Bentley) and a second guitarist (Ron Samworth joins Tony Wilson). The result is New Code, a record of performances which strike the right balance between composed and improvised. Lee began her career as a classical musician before shifting into the new music and improvised world; classical music’s loss is the improvisors' gain (and ours too).

#24

2008-12-02T21:56:00.005-05:00

The Constantines, Kensington Heights (Arts & Crafts)

I was primed to push Kensington Heights right into the top ten before I’d even heard it. Something about this band hits me squarely in the chest, makes me want to champion them, spread their gospel. But the record unfortunately fails to deliver on the trajectory promised by their three album run (The Constantines -> Shine a Light -> Tournament of Hearts), instead surrounding a handful of strong songs with less impressive material. I’m choking on that last sentence, though, because sub-par material for the Constantines is still damn good stuff. It’s never less than honest, nothing but heartfelt, and obviously crafted with yeoman-like dedication. It’s all listenable, enjoyable and well made, but only on a couple of occasions – “Million Dollar Hotel,” “Trans Canada” and “Credit River” stand out – do they rise to the sorts of heights that you’ve come to expect of a Cons album. Call it a place-saver in the canon, something to tide us over until the next jaw-dropper.

#25

2008-12-01T22:46:00.005-05:00

The Gaslight Anthem, The ’59 Sound (Side One Dummy)

“I hate myself for loving you,” sang Joan Jett, and the words apply here, because New Jersey’s Gaslight Anthem recycle so many worn clichés that I wince when I think about the lyrics. But damn it if I don’t find myself singing along. They aim for a Springsteenian resonance; they come off as more of a Social Distortion retread (not that I don't love Social Distortion, but...). But there’s honesty in the effort. It’s true that singer Brian Fallon sounds a hell of a lot like the Bruce of “Johnny 99”, and there’s that shared Jersey heritage, so that’s fair; I expect there are worse things a kid from New Brunswick (New Jersey) can get caught up in than Springsteen worship. The whole thing reads like the natural outcome of a kid who’s spent his life relating to his hero’s lyrics and the characters brought to life therein. Musically there’s nothing groundbreaking here, but I’d be quick to say that though the Gaslight Anthem get lumped in with the Warped Tour mallpunk thing, they’re really just a rock & roll band with an ear for sing-along melodies. So, yeah, you take the good and you take the not-so-good. Over-obvious lyrics that borrow too many tropes about a halcyon past where guys wooed dolls by wearing their hearts on their rolled-up sleeves (sample song titles: “Miles Davis and the Cool,” “Here’s Looking at You, Kid”) and which actually quote Springsteen on more than one occasion? Check. Songs that you find yourself singing days later? Double check.

You Know What Time It Is

2008-12-01T18:10:00.006-05:00

The holiest time of the year: list season! In deference to my multitudinous musical personalities, I made like it was 2007 all over again and produced an holistic list – no segregation, no sellout – of my favourite sounds, be they rock/pop, jazzy jass jazz, or otherwise. What follows this post will be expositions both witty and urbane on the best twenty-five slices of musical Valhalla that found disc space on the TiOM Sansa in 2008.

The plan is to reveal one a day for twenty-five days, right up to Christmas Day, so add TiOM to your feeds so as not to miss a second of the thrilling action, or whatnot.Thereafter, tune in for posts about my favourite songs, albums that count as also-rans, and maybe, I don’t know, an incredibly well-presented essay on the role of improvisation in establishing new markets for musicians in the age of the download. (That last one’s a big maybe, though.)

So settle in and prepare to waste the month of December with me. It's not like you had anything else planned, right?

Coming Soon...

2008-11-26T06:29:00.002-05:00

Tears in My Eyes

2008-11-24T09:51:00.004-05:00

There were tears in my eyes -- quite literally, and I don't mean literally like I'm literally gonna kill you or, you know, when people say Literally...! and they mean the opposite -- when I read the news.

Unneccesary backstory: I used to work in a record store. A couple, in fact. Maybe you know that. And they thing about that is, you get used to being up to your armpits in CDs, just music everywhere. Reach out and there's a new musical direction to explore, somebody you work with turning you onto something you've never heard. And then there's the cost, of course: cheap. So, you're a young man and you have few responsibilities and you sink a lot of cash into the creation of a collection. It is a good time to be you. Alright, that's nice. Can't last forever, someday you move on. I moved on. But the jonesing for new music, that never leaves you. You can take the addict out of the record store, but you can't make him drink, or something. I'm always scotching those.

And not only do you not work in the record stores anymore, but you have responsibilities. The whole nine: mortgage, child, cars, dog and cat. So you can't funnel the money into the music anymore. But you find ways to cope. My way? eMusic, which is adding tons of new stuff daily. I don't do iTunes because ain't nobody gonna tell me how to use my files, plus it's a bit pricey, and I don't steal a lot of music because I still have this thing about maybe somebody ought to get paid. Karma, right, because maybe one day I'll be an artist, and it'd be nice if you'd lay out a bit of cheddar for my hard work (not musical, but art and work just the same).

I like eMusic. It gets me by. I pay my monthly and I get my alotment of downloads, and I'm through them in a day or two. Appetite sated, somewhat. You get your Love is All and your Gaslight Anthem and your Blue Giant and, yes, some John Prine too, and you feel contentment like a warm blanket over your heart. And the improvised music selection is good, like real good. I mean, lots of new, small labels (Clean Feed, holla atchya!) and some old stuff, like Fantasy Records. So no complaints.

But this? This is something other.

Ever heard of Black Saint and/or Soul Note Records? Well, god bless the Italians, because these sisterly labels contain an embarrassment of riches in their collective catalog. And that catalog? Now on eMusic. Which is insane. Which caused the teary eyes I mentioned a few 'graphs ago.

Already I have burned through some Jemeel Moondoc, some Dave Douglas, some String Trio of New York, some Geri Allen with Haden and Motian, and, of course, some David Murray. I'm debating whether or not to supplement my Old and New Dreams vinyl by obtaining the digital version. And on and on. There are like five hundred records in the stable now, and the only tough part will be prioritizing.

This right here is very, very huge. Thank you, Giacomo Pelliciotti! Thank you, whoever runs eMusic!

Music for Rain-Delayed World Series Games

2008-10-29T20:36:00.007-05:00

Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails

(Thanks again, N+P)

Currently Rocking (aka If You Were Me This Is What You'd Be Listening To Right Now)

2008-10-28T21:48:00.003-05:00

1. Woody Shaw, Blackstone Legacy (Contemporary, 1970)
2. Sun Ra, Outer Spaceways Incorporated (Black Lion, 1968)
3. DJ /rupture, Uproot (The Agriculture, 2008)
4. The Gun Club, Fire of Love (Slash/Rhino, 1981)
5. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Live in Paris (Actuel/Charly, 1969)

C/P/Z Postmortem

2008-10-19T20:18:00.003-05:00

(L-R) Ed Zankowski, Rob Price (holding guitar), Chris Cawthray at Avant-Garde Bar, Ottawa, October 18

A huge thanks to Chris Cawthray, Rob Price and Ed Zankowski for a wonderful performance at Ottawa's Avant-Garde Bar on Saturday night. An appreciative crowd was treated to two wide-ranging sets, as the trio showed the impressive breadth and depth of their improvisational abilities.

From a logistical perspective, the first IMC-promoted show was hitch-free. Huge props to IMC'er Jim, who really carried the load on this one. We're all hoping to profit from his newfound experience as we look to the future and the possibility of putting on more shows (watch this space for info, of course, as well as the Official IMC Myspace Page), including a return engagement for C/P/Z. We're also weighing the possibility of expanding our burgeoning empire west down Highway 7 to Peterborough.

The future is ours.

Knocks Me Off My Feet

2008-10-15T22:05:00.004-05:00

In the middle of the afternoon, I thought I might float away.

I'm in a new town now, and I'm still getting used to having a decent library nearby. I've been sampling liberally from the a/v collection, and the latest find is Stevie Wonder's meandering 1976 opus Songs in the Key of Life. It was always one of those albums I meant to pick up, when I thought about it, if ever the time was right, if I had the money in my pocket, if I found it on sale...

So this afternoon, washing some dishes, the sky low and heavy and the leaves, past their prime, coming down fast, I had Stevie on in the next room. Somewhere near the middle of disc 1, without warning, the voices suddenly became louder and more real than the music. It was as though a strange parade was making its way down my street and all my windows were open wide. Maybe there was a calliope on the back of a truck. Were there a dozen people, or a hundred? I put the dish towel down and stood, dumb.

It was a very strange and very exhilarating moment.

C/P/Z on NTT

2008-10-09T19:59:00.003-05:00

There's the fantastic poster for the IMC's inaugural foray into concert promotion, the show I've already hyped here (and I'll keep doing it until I'm sure you'll show up) featuring the fantastic trio of Cawthray/Price/Zankowski. If you're not sure what you might hear at the Avant-Garde Bar on October the 18th, tune in RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE to CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa, or listen live at ckcufm.com. Of course, the show will be available for download in the very near future. When it's available, I'll provide the details.

You might also consult chriscawthray.com for the drummer's perspective.

Palpable Liberation

2008-09-28T19:36:00.002-05:00

That phrase in the title comes from critic Byron Coley in reference to saxophonist Noah Howard, an artist whose career began in the midst of fire music's heyday and continues right up 'til the present. Howard's a bit of a riddle: sometimes Earth-shattering in his brilliance, throwing colour through the air in new and unexpected combinations, conjuring church and brothel and NYC loft in the span of a few notes, while at other times he has seemed little more than a borrower, a gifted anthologist of techniques and tones originating with some of his better-known New Thing contemporaries (Ayler, Coleman, Marion Brown, etc.). But when he's good, he's very good. And as luck would have it, he was the subject of the latest episode of Now's the Time. I spun some of his best, including At Judson Hall, where the sound of his alto paired with Briton Ric Colbeck's trumpet is, at times, purely narcotic. Add Catherine Norris' cello, and you have something truly unique in the annals of free jazz. Worth hunting down. We also sampled liberally from Black Ark, where Howard's foil is a young and fiery Arthur Doyle.

Anyway, I'd like to think it all made for a pretty entertaining 90 minutes of radio. Judge for yourself:

Now's the Time - September 25, 2008: Noah Howard

I'm currently at a loss for a topic for my next show. Suggestions?

"Entitlement," Priorities and Lies

2008-09-25T20:10:00.002-05:00

[Forgive me while I get political, but damn it, music is art, and I'm firmly of the belief that art and culture positively and concretely benefit society, and when my society is being led by by a man whose relationship with the arts is best described as "openly hostile," I get upset. Harper is in a position to benefit from the cache of Canadian culture abroad, a status earned by artists, musicians, writers and thinkers who have themselves been helped along by Federal funding, and when those artists are denied that help, and such cultural products begin to dry up, both Canadian standing in the world, and Canadians' sense of themselves are bound to suffer. I'll be back later with non-political words dedicated to my profile of Noah Howard airing tonight on CKCU.]

Much bluster today after PM Harper's denigration of the arts (sorry, the Arts), claiming that ordinary folks don't give a fig about spoiled artists, who are themselves too busy attending galas and, presumably, shining their diamonds to actually listen to what real, honest-to-God, salt-of-the-Earth, everyday Canadians really want to see/hear/think about.

It's a shrewd political move, of course, as the number of citizens working in the arts and likely to vote Conservative anyway would probably fit in my living room, but at its heart it is a divisive and damaging position to take, an alignment with the American notion of culture warfare and anti-elitism. An avalanche of pro-art, anti-Harper articles have appeared today (did you read the Globe?), and it's hard for me to find fault with any of them. But almost to a one, they all emphasize The Power of Art, to borrow from Simon Schama, and that is well and good. But it's also a case of preaching to the choir; an op-ed piece by Margaret Atwood isn't likely to suddenly convince anyone heretofore suspicious of arts funding that their lives have been enriched by Canadian artists. But a blog post by MK Piatkowski, artistic director of the One Big Umbrella theatre company, does just what's required: turns the economic argument back on the Conservatives and those aligned against arts funding. Piatkowski invites readers to use her argument wholesale, cut'n paste style, and I'll do just that. Read it, absorb it, and please, keep it in mind when you vote:

The problem is that the government has obscured what the eliminated programs actually did. The cuts were to eliminate programs that provided industry support - training programs for cultural workers, research and development programs, seed money and venture capital programs. All supports to promote work internationally have been eliminated.

Most artists are small businesses. Small business don't have the resources to leverage expansion on their own when they're first expanding their markets. That's why there are government assistance programs. Bank loans are impossible to come by because banks won't fund artistic ventures because the way it is sold doesn't fit into their cost/benefit analysis. There are no venture capital funds for arts, unless you're writing a Broadway music or making a Disney film. So we look to the government to provide assistance, as do other industries.

Again, it's the specific programs that were eliminated that were the problem. We understand it's a tight economy, but we also understand that right now is a growth period for our industry internationally as there is a much higher demand for entertainment product. These cuts will stop the forward growth we've been experiencing. Remember, Canada is a small market. To develop alternative funding sources, we need to expand. And there was no discussion with the industry about how we were going to move forward before the programs were canceled.

But instead of actually talking about what these programs did, the government chose a few grants to people they didn't like and used it to paint the programs as wasteful and unnecessary and to rile up their base of supporters against supposed "elitist art". And now Mr. Harper drops a comment that implies that artists are rich off government funding, completely ignoring the convenient fact that the majority of artists live at or below the poverty line and the successful ones live a middle-class lifestyle, with only the rare, odd exception.

There's also a misconception out there that the government funds the projects 100% and that it's easy money. No proposal to any government program that looks for more than 40% funding gets accepted. And there's a whole competitive process to go through with no guarantee of seeing money at the end. I've blogged about the process if you're curious.

And btw, the C-10 fallout has made it much more difficult for films to find investors because there is no trust that the government will honour their commitment. You see, the dirty secret of arts funding is that private investors will not commit until they see the government has. This is how they secure their investment.

The point is, artists are average Canadians too. We work hard to create something of value for society. We're just asking for our industry to be treated like the important economic engine it is.

Less-Than-Great Expectations, Immensely Pleasing Results

2008-09-24T09:22:00.003-05:00

I had put off getting Wolf Parade's At Mount Zoomer, but I've now rectified the situation, and I'm glad I did. I loved both their debut EP and Apologies to the Queen Mary with an intensity reminiscent of the sort of devotion I lavished on bands like Superchunk in high school. It was innocent and riveting and it produced an almost physical swelling in my abdomen. Springsteenian songcraft, ELO chorusing and naive, anthemic bluster. This band, I thought, will soundtrack my early 30s. They produced something as torn between jubilant uplift and crushing sorrow as the Arcade Fire, but with a sound that appealed to my ears just a little bit more (which is not to denigrate the AF and their brilliant Talking Heads-meets-U2-and-Springsteen-on-the-Plateau-for-some-50s-and-some-deep-conversation sound). But their sophomore album came out, and for some reason, I sort of avoided it. In retrospect, I recognize that I was dreading a letdown of the sort common when you give your heart to a debut record. Let's don't spoil what we have, I felt. And I closed myself off to what Wolf Parade might offer me a second time around. It was shortsighted and wrong, but my instinct for self-preservation extends to golden memories, it seems. It didn't help that I wasn't particularly in love with Sunset Rubdown.

To make a long story only slightly less long, I finally bought At Mount Zoomer, and I'm both annoyed with myself for not getting it sooner, and pleased that it seems primed to provide the churning, soaring, diving, burbling and whooping soundtrack to my autumn (alongside the mellower charms of You + Me). It's proggy in ways that I not only forgive, but love. It's a bit more grown up, a bit less spastic than Apologies..., but then, I guess I am too.

Here's to Wolf Parade for confounding my expectations.

If These Walls Could Talk

2008-09-17T21:14:00.008-05:00

While in New York last weekend to see the stadia (Shea and Yankee) before they meet the wrecking ball (or the memorabilia-seekers), my father and I put in at the legendary Village Vanguard to see the trio of Paul Motian, Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell. Needless to say, a fantastic set, with Lovano taking the helm on most pieces, and Frisell getting frisky with his gadgets and toys, but never overdoing it, and with Motian pushing things along without getting in the way. But as much as the band, we were there to see the venue, the venerable Vanguard. Consider the list of names who've played there (for reference, go to All Music, do an album search on "Village Vanguard" and see what comes up; then figure how many have taken the stage without the tapes rolling). It was quite a night. And yes, Lorraine Gordon still takes drink orders.

So, because lists are the new analysis, here are my three favourite Vanguard-born recordings of all-time:

3. Sonny Rollins, A Night at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note)

Sonny and his piano-free trio (Donald Bailey and Wilbur Ware on bass, Pete LaRoca and Elvin Jones on drums) took to the Vanguard stage in November of 1957 and cut enough material to fill two CDs (now available as The Complete..., whereas it used to be spliced into two volumes). The music is Rollins at his absolute best: agile, powerful, but with enough panache and humour that you might let your guard down and almost fail to recognize just how incredibly good, how dexterous a horn player he is. Few technicians sound this fun.

Also fun is running through these CDs a few times and then throwing Amon Tobin's brilliant Bricolage from 1997 into the CD player and spotting the samples culled from the former and sprinkled throughout the latter.

2. Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby (Riverside/Original Jazz Classics)

In June of '61, lyrical piano genius Bill Evans led a new trio down the tight stairway and into the club on 7th Avenue. The aforementioned Paul Motian occupied the drummer's stool (possibly the first time he'd been at the club, but not the last), and the bassist was the innovative Scott LaFaro. The rolling tapes captured enough music for two LPs that night, and they're both undisputed classics. Not bad for a day's work. Something about the sound of both Sunday... and Waltz for Debby is undeniably wonderful -- they sound like live jazz recordings should sound. I mean that both technically (the sound is clear, warm, perfect) and artistically. The interplay between these three men is astounding.

Listen to the title cut from "Waltz for Debby." Listen to Evans' sweet playfulness. Listen to LaFaro's ability to find the middle ground between Evans and Motian, and fill every nook therein. This record set a new standard for the piano trio. That's not hyperbole. This is not a piano backed by a rhythm section; it's three frontline instruments perfectly in tune with one another.

Now listen to "My Man's Gone Now" from Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Listen to the elegaic tone and try not to be affected by the knowledge that LaFaro would be gone ten days later, a victim of a car accident, not quite 26 years old.

1. John Coltrane, The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse)

If this comes as a surprise, you haven't been paying attention.

This is the point where John Coltrane jumped off into the abyss of complete artistic freedom. This is where he began exploring Eastern motifs and themes. This is where Eric Dolphy's sometimes-membership in the band bore it's greatest fruit. Coltrane used these handful of dates in November of 1961 to throw all his ideas into the hopper and see what emerged. He experimented with the makeup of his band, with new compositions, and with new techniques. He did all this with the critics and the curious fans in attendance. What he learned from these experiments set the trajectory for his art until his death.

This is essential listening. The thought that I was sitting in the same room that had borne witness to the creation of this music was as humbling an experience as I've ever known. If Coltrane is a religion, this is the first book of his New Testament.

Long Distance Dedication

2008-09-04T19:05:00.000-05:00

For Peter in Ottawa. C'mere. Go away.