The event is free and open to the public (21+ as Tubby’s is a bar). I’ll be spinning relevant recordings before and after on the turntables as well. We hope to see you there!

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Creative musician birthdays, March 23:

Johnny Guarnieri, pianist, 1917–1985

Varty Haroutunian, tenor saxophonist, 1922–2007

Al Aarons, trumpeter, 1932–2015

Dave Frishberg, pianist, 1933–2021

Dave Pike, vibraphonist, 1938–2015

Masahiro Kikuchi, organist/pianist, 1940–2008

John McNeil, trumpeter, 1948–2024

Gerry Hemingway, percussionist, b. 1955

Stefon Harris, vibraphonist, b. 1973

I wanted to take a moment to update you on the Keefe Jackson “Trio” concert taking place next Sunday, March 1, at Tubby’s Kingston, as you may have seen the flyers around town or online. We billed it as a trio because the fourth member of the group had to first be able to get into the country unscathed. Now that he’s here, we can officially let you know that this will be a rare US concert of These Things Happen, which joins Keefe, Luke Stewart, and Mikel Patrick Avery with Dutch pianist Oscar Jan Hoogland (he’ll be playing an electric keyboard for this appearance). I was very impressed upon hearing their Astral Spirits debut a few years ago; they are touring in support of their latest, A Gentle Reminder, forthcoming on Chicago imprint Corbett vs. Dempsey.

A pretty extraordinary video of the group in concert at Amsterdam’s BIMHuis is viewable here (with Joshua Abrams on bass):

Keefe has this to say: “The music of These Things Happen lives in the spaces between Chicago and Amsterdam, composition and improvisation, sobriety and wild abandon, playfulness and innocence. Starting with classic pieces and originals from the Dutch and American jazz traditions, the group will digress, covering new ground: discover and ignore, grab and release, create and let go. While the Chicago musician comes to jazz naturally, the Dutch approach to this music has often been that of respectful game and play. With These Things Happen this contrast is one of sincere joy. The compositions of Misha Mengelberg stand next to those of Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols and originals.”

As before, doors are at 7 and the show starts at 8, $20 either at the door or in advance. I’ll play records before and after as well.

If you know someone who might want to attend, please feel free to forward this Substack. The more the merrier! And if you are unable to join us, please listen to and buy the musicians’ work either via Bandcamp/online marketplaces or your local brick-and-mortar record store.

See you out there!

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Creative musician birthdays, Feb. 22:

James Reese Europe, composer and organizer, 1880–1919

Bob Ysaguirre, tubaist and bassist, 1897–1982

Joe Tarto, tubaist and bassist, 1902–1986

Rex Stewart, cornetist, 1907–1967

Claude “Fiddler” Williams, violinist and guitarist, 1908–2004

Buddy Tate, saxophonist and clarinetist, 1913–2001

Joe Wilder, trumpeter, 1922–2014

Dave Bailey, drummer, 1926–2023

Whitey Mitchell, bassist, 1932–2009

Roman Dylag, bassist, 1938–2023

George Haslam, saxophonist and record producer, b. 1939

Marc Charig, trumpeter and cornetist, b. 1944

Harvey Mason, drummer, b. 1947

Joe LaBarbera, drummer, b.1948

photo credit: Christi Joza Orisha

Sad news from the European creative music scene, as reedist Michel Portal died on February 12 at age 90. I had the great opportunity to see Portal play twice in 2004, once with bassist Anthony Cox and drummer Dave King, and the other with a larger ensemble around his Minneapolis We Insist! suite. Both concerts were part of the Minnesota Sur Seine festival, founded by Nato Records’ Jean Rochard and Sara Remke, then a café owner in St. Paul. I believe the festival ceased after 2008. Using the All About Jazz card, I was able to interview Portal (whose earlier work I’d been a huge fan of for some time); Portal did not speak much English, so his assistant translated in real time. I have the French on a minicassette, but the audio isn’t too clear at this point. At the time I was told his answers would have required a much more detailed translation because of his poetic, complex speaking style. I’m republishing the interview here as while it does exist buried in the archives of the “other site,” there’s no visibility. Maybe at some point I can get a proper translation done of the whole thing, if the audio can be restored.

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Born November 27, 1935 in Bayonne, France, reedman Michel Portal has the unique position of being one of the architects of modern European jazz and having a hand in some of the most significant shifts in modern classical music. Portal, along with pianist François Tusques, trumpeter Bernard Vitet, drummer Charles Saudrais and tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, embraced and expanded upon the innovations of Ornette, Cecil, Coltrane and Archie Shepp as part of the nascent French free jazz movement. In addition to leading and co-leading groups with Leon Francioli, Pierre Favre, Joachim Kühn and Barre Phillips throughout the ‘70s, Portal was a central figure in post-Cageian open-form classical music. With trombonist-composer Vinko Globokar, pianist-composer Carlos Roque Alsina and percussionist Jean-Pierre Drouet, Portal and New Phonic Art worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Maruicio Kagel and Luciano Berio among others, figuring importantly in Stockhausen’s From the Seven Days compositional cycle.

Since the 1980s, Portal has composed music for films in addition to working as one of France’s and Europe’s leading improvisers. In October 2004, while Portal was visiting Minneapolis as part of the inaugural Minnesota Sur Seine jazz festival, writer Clifford Allen had the rare opportunity to speak with the artist.

I wanted to start with how you got involved in music. You began on clarinet, right?

My family were musicians and they all tried to play something. My father played trumpet, my grandfather played bassoon and when I was very young I saw many instruments around me, and I picked up the trumpet, then the clarinet, then the horn and the violin, and I tried to make sounds. I wasn’t really looking for music; it was always there. I played flute at seven, then clarinet and my father wanted me to stop for a bit to concentrate on my studies. I was ten when I picked up the clarinet again.

What music first moved you when you were young?

I played the standard classical repertoire for clarinet; I think I was twelve when I played Bartók and Debussy - Mozart as well.

And you won some prizes for clarinet when you were studying it, right?

Yes. In the province of Bayonne, I entered a contest in Bordeaux to play the Bartók trio for clarinet, violin and piano, and my professor encouraged me to go to Paris. I was in high school and my father did not want me to do music as a vocation, though I could not see anything else to do. It wasn’t a violent conflict, though [laughs]... my father wanted me to support myself and this [for him] was a hobby.

How did you get interested in jazz and improvising?

When you see the repertoire for all of eternity of an instrument, you see the major pieces. Very young, I played Mozart, Brahms, one piece of the Rhapsodies of Debussy and, after a while of playing all these pieces, they became very uninteresting, blah, blah, up-and-down, up-and-down, and I thought “What can I do with a piece after this?” It was after the war, and we had American music on the transistor radio, and I heard these new, incredible sounds - the trumpeter, the saxophonist, it was incredible for me. What is this? This is jazz music? There was a beginning of the music in France, and we would make transcriptions from the radio, and every day we would tune in to hear Jimmy Lunceford and his orchestra, all the time.

At the same time, I remembered a chorus of Charlie Parker, and it was terrible because I didn’t have a record [to learn from] and practice, so I thought “oh my, this is too hard.” After school, with the ragtime orchestra, we were overjoyed because we could improvise like Jimmy Noone, and we’d imitate him and New Orleans jazz, King Oliver, and sometimes we’d play modern music like Duke Ellington. I was happy because, unlike in the orchestras, I had an opportunity to play as a soloist. When the musicians would hit those high notes, their way of playing the C major scale was unbelievable! During my childhood I was very influenced by the American musicians and I had an opportunity to play with the Chicago Orchestra, but I was so afraid of flying that I could not go and, not only that, it was such an incredible opportunity that I got scared off. I also did not know at that time (and I still do not) whether I wanted to be a classical musician or a jazz musician, so it was a very difficult position to be in. Of course, playing jazz in America was a big step because I would have to learn how to wash cars and drive a taxi during the day, and there were already so many great jazzmen in America that it would be harder for me to make it in the first place.

To do something in the United States was very exceptional at the time; besides Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, there were not so many big French names in jazz music that had reached the United States. I’d have had to change my name to Michael Kennedy or something! I was afraid of having to not only learn to play the music the American way, but to have to build for myself a mythology. I would rather just play. Jazz is a difficult music to make your way in; there are fewer big stars now than there were then, and I see the jazz musician as someone who one evening could have 200 people in a room and the next evening play in a hall for thousands.

Was there a feeling at that time that French jazz was picking up in the ‘50s and early ‘60s with people like [pianist-arranger] Jef Gilson and [saxophonist] Barney Wilen, and that it might have led you to stay, to perhaps try and build something?

Well, there was a growing political situation in France that led to that music and the American black musicians were also coming to France to live [especially in the late 60s]. I did not want to play dance music and it was also very difficult to play the clubs at that time because there were only a few people who got top billing - everybody else was on their own. It was a very violent time politically - anarchy and resistance - and there were also as many different ways of playing jazz as there were jazz musicians in France. So we became very restrained by the term “jazz” and we wanted to go beyond the standard tunes to find something that would fight for social values as well as musical ones. We were starting to write our own music and it was very different from the American styles; we gained confidence, and started to group together and form our own bands.

So along these lines, how did [free improvisation ensemble] New Phonic Art come together?

New Phonic Art was something else altogether; improvisation became a fashion and a formula, and it seemed like composers and musicians were afraid of losing control over what was played. So this was a test. Of course, there is the fact that we wanted to improvise, and improvisation has a quality of bringing together very good things and very bad things, but the will to improvisation is nevertheless very strong. For me, it was a conflict between the written tradition and what was “spoken,” if you will. New Phonic Art was a tool of two composers who were trying to go in this direction [Stockhausen and Kagel], and also of performance.

I have a funny story for you. I was in Portland with [group-mates Vinko] Globokar, [Carlos] Alsina and Jean-Pierre Drouet, and we went from there to Mexico. We had a huge variety of instruments from Afghanistan, Morocco and other places, and had to have them shipped. When we got to Mexico, we had to tell the customs officers who we were and what we were doing. So I was to tell them that we were the New Phonic Art Ensemble, and we play music - we had to fake the documents to make it easier. The officer asked us what kind of music we played and so I told him that we played classical music. And he said “You have a lot of instruments. What kind of music is it?” “Contemporary.” “What is the name of your group?” “New Phonic Art.” “Como?” “New Phonic Art.” “Hmm.” So then he said to his comrade, “No Fornicar [No fucking – Portal may have also said “New Fornicar” or “New Fucking”]. Open the cases!” [laughing] Nobody had a clue what was going to happen, and we had to open up all the cases and try to explain what was in them.

But eventually we had to stop the group, because we had reached the limits of what could happen with the personalities of the players and with the ensemble. As it was pure improvisation, one could tell what the others were going to do before they did it. One of the musicians was a sad guy, and he’d always start his improvisations with a lament: “oooh, oooh, mmm... and I always thought “I know who’s doing that!” No matter what he was doing or what anybody else did, that’s always how it went. So, it was done. Also, it had become common to incorporate freedom into some sort of written form, as a tool, and that made more sense to us.

In playing with New Phonic Art and with Mauricio Kagel (specifically, the piece “Exotica” ), you played a lot of non-Western instruments, many of which you had not played before. How did that scenario affect your approach to improvisation afterwards?

Well, there was a group of composers who were involved with musical theatre and they brought these instruments into their pieces as a sort of self-joke. Kagel was someone who liked to make fun of people and he had me act as an old blues player, as an old tired jazzman, and he would incorporate noise elements into this as well. He would direct me to say something odd while making some sounds - “no more water, no more water [Michel crinkles a bag]” - a lot of pandering. There was a lot of involvement with the Living Theatre, where we would go onstage just speaking nonsense [Michel provides an example]. We defied a lot of the rules, and even Xenakis told me just not to care and not to worry if what came of it was good or not. I’d be asked to play a phrase or make a noise and not to think about the context or what others were doing. The proposal was to free myself and the other musicians from questions of “why do you play that way” or “what are you doing?” Musicians like Eric Dolphy were attacked with those same questions, but there were those on the other side [especially in Europe] who said “just play that way, do what you want.” It helped us to learn that one just has to play what one wants, without concern for what’s going on outside of making the music.

Well, even in free jazz there is a tendency for people to be expected to play a certain way, but as I’ve noticed in your music, it seems like there isn’t that regard for expectation and that contexts appear to merge without concern for how it sounds - just to see what can be done. To me, this sounds very much in line with what you were learning in New Phonic Art and the Living Theatre.

Every musician that comes along has a certain way of playing in mind—Albert Ayler, Jimi Hendrix—and every musician has a clear reference in mind, a sort of “father.” At this time, everybody was trying to play together [perhaps across certain bounds], but we all had a spiritual leader. After the deaths of Ayler and Hendrix, and later of Miles Davis (who was a big reference for a lot of musicians), many people lost their way - they were totally destroyed. But at the same time, without a clear reference, many musicians have focused on their own identity and way of playing, being honest with themselves. If you were to ask each one of these musicians what style they play, they would say “the only one that exists.” Yet at some stage, the communication between musicians was lost, and things became very fuzzy and dried up. Without a reference point, the hinge on which communication exists becomes lost.

I don’t want to become part of any fashionable trends, an “example” of something; in France it is always a matter of fashion and each fashion is very, very short-lived. France is very intellectual, very avant-garde and people don’t like to hear what they think has already been done. It is very pretentious.

How did you come to play in Minneapolis?

I will be honest. I was at a stage where I did not know what I wanted and I did not know what I was doing with my music. At the time, I needed to record, but I was unconvinced that I could find a way to do it right. I’d met Jean Rochard [Nato/Universal] and at that time it was of interest to combine styles - say, free with funk or electronics. So we decided that I should come here to work with Michael Bland and see what would happen. People in France thought I wasn’t the right guy to play with these kind of musicians and I was not very popular at that time, but I’ve tried a lot of things in my life and now I have done that, so what’s next?

But I’ve done it, I’ve experienced Minneapolis and these players, and now I must find something new. I must figure it out - I want to do my own thing and I must flow like a river. It may come, and it may not - the Minneapolis project was my last and that was in 2000. I’m a bit worried because I don’t see anything on the horizon. Maybe I’ll leave the country!

Thanks to Michel, Jean Rochard of Nato Records, the staff of Minnesota Sur Seine and Eric Damien for interpreting.

Selected Discography

Sunny Murray, Sunny Murray (Shandar, 1968)
Michel Portal, Our Meanings and Our Feelings (Pathé, 1969)
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Aus Den Sieben Tagen (Deutsche Grammophone, 1969)
Michel Portal/John Surman/etc., Alors!!! (Futura, 1970)
Mauricio Kagel, Exotica (Deutsche Grammophone, 1971)
New Phonic Art/Iskra 1903/Wired, Free Improvisation (Deutsche Grammophone, 1971)
Michel Portal, No, No But it May Be... (Le Chant du Monde, 1971)
Michel Portal, Minneapolis We Insist! (Universal, 2000)

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Creative Musician Birthdays, Feb. 16:

Alec Wilder, composer, 1907–1980

Bill Doggett, organist/pianist, 1916–1996

Charlie Fowlkes, saxophonist, 1916–1980

Howard Riley, pianist, 1943–2025

Jeff Clayton, saxophonist, 1954–2020

It sometimes feels weird to promote art in conditions that are extra trying, but art contributes to community, solidarity & hopefully some form of peace. We hope that you can find those things wherever you are.

If you are in the Hudson Valley, I’d like to alert you to the 30th installment of “So, What Do You Think?” at Tubby’s in Kingston, New York on Sunday, March 1. This concert presents the music of Chicago-based saxophonist / clarinetist Keefe Jackson with bassist Luke Stewart (Irreversible Entanglements, SILT Trio, Blacks’ Myths) and percussionist Mikel Patrick Avery (Natural Information Society, BASIC). This will be a powerful evening of improvised music that is not to be missed.

Doors at 7pm, concert at 8pm

$20 in advance or at the door

flyer design after Arthur Jones’ Scorpio by d.norsen.

I might also play records before/after if there’s time!

Band bios attached for your perusal. We look forward to seeing you out there!

Take good care.

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Creative Musician Birthdays, January 30:

Roy Eldridge, trumpeter, 1911-1989

Bernie Leighton, pianist, 1921-1994

Ahmed Abdul-Malik, oud player and bassist, 1927-1993

Tubby Hayes, saxophonist, flutist, and vibraphonist, 1935-1973

Tony Levin, drummer, 1940-2011

Buddy Terry, saxophonist, 1941-2019

Ralph Lalama, saxophonist, b. 1951

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In any music, there is a certain sound that grabs you immediately. I remember my first hearings of Coltrane, Ayler, and Dolphy—those might be obvious, albeit varied saxophonists—and the arco bass glissandi of Alan Silva on Cecil Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note LP Unit Structures, a flywheel-like zip from middle to upper register, and a string sound I hadn’t experienced quite like that before. As the first direct statement on the title cut, it’s a brief but concentrated passage between the rustle of piano strings and Lyons’ alto pecks and the initial ensemble passages. The other bassist on the date, Henry Grimes, offers a more percussive thrum opposite ponticello action, but they’re both in a thicket of constant play, lines and splotches refereeing between piano, drums, woodwinds and trumpet. Silva’s bass playing (and his cello and violin work, the latter played between his knees) quickly became a key voice for me in the landscape of Black American improvised music heard on records by Taylor, Ayler, trumpeter Bill Dixon, saxophonists Frank Wright (with whom he’d co-found the Center of the World in 1972, a band and label collaboration with pianist Bobby Few and drummer Muhammad Ali) and Archie Shepp, pianists Dave Burrell and Sun Ra, drummer Sunny Murray, and his own orchestral music.

Silva’s work is dense but detailed; as a bassist, his pizzicato is pulsing and muscular, but bowed, it’s granted an explosive, gutsy and colorful abstraction. Born in Bermuda in January 1939 (the dates January 21, 22, and 29 have alternately been given), he moved with his family to Brooklyn at a young age. A painter (he’s used the term “action painter”), he also studied trumpet with Donald Byrd before picking up the bass in the late 1950s, realizing he would not be as technically proficient on the horn as his mentor. Silva soon linked up with fellow vanguard improvisers such as Dixon, pianist Burton Greene, and others in the burgeoning free music underground. With Greene and the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble he was a member of the short-lived but important Jazz Composers Guild, co-founded by Dixon and Taylor. With Dixon and choreographer Judith Dunn, Silva was a key participant in trans-media art practices of the mid-60s; the trumpeter and bassist would reconvene multiple times in the 1970s and 80s. Silva relocated to France in 1969 and has lived in Europe ever since, founding the Institute of Art, Culture and Perception (France’s first “Free Jazz School”) around 1976 as well as periodically convening the Celestrial [Celestial + Terrestrial] Communications Orchestra from 1969 forward.

I only saw Silva in concert twice, occasions encapsulated by the 2001 Vision Festival, which occupied the Knitting Factory’s second location in TriBeCa that year. The Festival celebrated saxophonist Frank Wright (1935-1990) by presenting a Center of the World-adjacent quartet featuring Silva (bass) and Few from that group alongside alto saxophonist Noah Howard, an early collaborator of Wright’s, and drummer Leroy Williams, on a perhaps more post-bebop runthrough of the CotW’s R&B-rooted and kaleidoscopic free canvases. The specifics of the set are a bit hard to conjure almost 25 years later, but I remember it being electrifying to see Howard, Few, and Silva sharing a stage for the first time in years. Silva also brought together a quartet with saxophonists Sabir Mateen and Abdelhaï Bennani and a drummer (maybe Jackson Krall, corrections welcome!), with the leader on piano and Kurzweil synthesizer. The interplay between Silva and Mateen was striking—Margaret Davis gave me a Sabir button afterwards, my slackjawed expression during the music proof that I’d been shaken by the sound of his tenor in this glorious unit.

This was the first Vision Festival I attended, and some of the cohort associated with the early 70s expatriate Parisian scene of which Silva was a part performed: Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Malachi Favors Maghostut from the Art Ensemble of Chicago/AACM, Leroy Jenkins (AACM), Jerome Cooper, Burrell, Few, Howard, Kali Fasteau, as well as loft-/post-loft-era regulars Frank Lowe, Billy Bang, Jemeel Moondoc, Ahmed Abdullah, Juini Booth, William Parker, David S. Ware, Joe Rigby, percussion architects Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, and Andrew Cyrille alongside numerous others. It was valuable to be exposed to Silva’s piano and synthesizer work live; the only place I’d previously heard that aspect of his palette was on A Hero’s Welcome, a duo with Parker recorded for Eremite in 1998, bought sound unheard. At the time I was not quite ready for electronic orchestration in an improvised context, but years later it began to click. The now-discontinued Kurzweil is (or was) a way for a single musician to mass and deploy sound or tonal color at great scale, given the polyphonic range (48 voices in the mid-90s) and expressiveness of the instrument.

Silva’s Kurzweil is all over three recent digital-only releases from the Eremite vaults spotlighting live recordings of the Celestrial Communication Ensemble at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, Massachusetts in 1999, 2000, and 2002, ranging from 50 to 90 minutes in length and joining him with drummers Laurence Cook and Jackson Krall, Mateen, Parker, and trumpeter Raphe Malik. Orchestra or Ensemble don’t really matter aesthetically as the logistics and great expense of convening a big band to improvise on dense charts isn’t realistic and even if the numeric size of sprawling prior discs isn’t at play here, the total commitment to arranging and bending massive blocks of sound (think Ives, Xenakis, Graettinger) and hurling planetary invocations at one another surely is, and one can feel orchestration without the presence of additional voices. But Silva’s music isn’t all crags, as the first movement of “Emancipation Suite for the 21st Century” (from the 2002 set) offers reedy carpets for Mateen’s clarinet and flute, punctuated with brilliant blurts and angular, arco bass-like units of motion before coagulating into a kinetic freight train of energy.

Though out of print physically, other Silva discs for Eremite are a powerful window into his work of the 1990s and early 2000s: H.Con.Res.57/Treasure Box, a 4-CD set housed in an LP-sized hand-painted case; a disc with the Vision Festival’s Sound Vision Orchestra from 1999; duos with reedist Oluyemi Thomas and Parker; and The All-Star Game, joining Silva and Parker with drummer Hamid Drake and saxophonists Marshall Allen and Kidd Jordan. He’s slowed down recently in terms of commercial recordings with his last CD appearance occurring on Celebration (nunc.), which documents an 80th birthday concert with trumpeter Itaru Oki (1941-2020), drummer Makoto Sato, and guitarist Richard Comte. FreeJazzArt: Sessions for Bill Dixon (RogueArt, 2014), saw Silva returning to the bass for a stirring and incisive program of duets with trumpeter Jacques Coursil (1938-2020), himself a significant figure on both the New York and Parisian free music scenes in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. At 87, Alan Silva is an international treasure no matter the instrument or ensemble, and we can be happy this visionary has shared so much of his art with us.

Further reading:

Panken, Ted. “For Bassist Alan Silva’s 85th Birthday, a WKCR Interview in January 1994,” in Today is the Question: Ted Panken on Music, Politics, and the Arts, https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/for-bassist-alan-silvas-85th-birthday-a-wkcr-interview-in-january-1994/

Nai, Larry. “Alan Silva Interview,” in Cadence Magazine, July 1999, 4-19, 135.

Monk, Vanita and Johanna. “Alan Silva Wants His MTV,” in Monastery, August 2001, https://www.monastery.nl/bulletin/silva/silva.html

Warburton, Dan. “Silva Interview,” in Paris Transatlantic Magazine, December 2002, https://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/silva.html

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Creative music birthdays on this day, January 22:

Juan Tizol, trombonist, 1900-1984

Teddy McRae, saxophonist, 1908-1999

JJ Johnson, trombonist, 1924-2001

Teddy Smith, bassist, 1932-1999

Jean-Louis Viale, drummer, 1933-1984

Alan Silva, multi-instrumentalist, b. 1939*

Eberhard Weber, bassist, b. 1940

Maarten Altena, bassist, b. 1943

Michał Urbaniak, violinist and saxophonist, 1943-2025

Milo Fine, multi-instrumentalist, b. 1952

*various dates given, Wikipedia has settled on Jan. 22.

From 2003 until 2005 I lived in Minneapolis off of Lyndale Avenue South, not far from the Wedge (co-op grocery), C.C. Club (bar), Treehouse Records (no longer extant), and similar businesses. It was a nice neighborhood, affordable and full of artists and weirdos. I’d moved there for a couple of reasons: I had family nearby and though I’d gone to school in Chicago I wasn’t particularly in love with that city either; like a lot of early-to-mid-twentysomethings, that age for me was a bit restless and I moved around a bit. Minneapolis has a strong contemporary art scene, great music and food, and interesting people. The winters were a lot to take but I met lifelong friends there whom I’ll call out: Clint Simonson (De Stijl Records), James Lindbloom (Roaratorio Records), Jon Skuldt (Coat-Tail Records; played in the bands White and Group Icky Rats), artist Sarah Petersen and her musician brother Jesse. It was pretty powerful to be in the area when the De Stijl/Freedom From festivals were ongoing, as well as the jazz festival Minnesota Sur Seine, where I interviewed both reedist Michel Portal and pianist François Tusques. I was also able to witness the music of reedist Douglas Ewart, guitarists Michael Yonkers and John Koerner, and bassist Anthony Cox; Leo Kottke was a regular customer at the used bookshop I worked at. Conspicuously absent from my sonic education then was the multi-instrumentalist and writer Milo Fine, though I’ve since become more keyed into his universe.

My parents recently moved to St. Paul from Texas, joining my sister; while it’s been some time since I was last in the region, it holds space in my life, even if for a long time my relationship with the area was sorta fraught. The last several years have put the Cities and their inhabitants through the ringer: George Floyd’s murder, the Hortman assassinations, the Annunciation shooting, and now the murder of Renée Good. Surely other traumas have been inflicted, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind. There is undoubtedly more to come for all of us from this administration and we’ve got to look out for one another and stay safe. On Freak Out!, The Mothers of Invention sardonically intoned “it can’t happen here” (amazingly enough, that album is almost 60 years old) with a nod to Sinclair Lewis, and of course the fact is that it always could, did, and does. Solidarity.

donate:

https://www.ilcm.org/

https://www.wfmn.org/funds/immigrant-rapid-response/

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Creative musician birthdays, January 17:

“Big” Sid Catlett, drummer, 1910–1951

George Handy, pianist and arranger/composer, 1920–1997

Cedar Walton, pianist, 1934–2013

Ted Dunbar, guitarist and educator, 1937–1998

Billy Harper, saxophonist, b. 1943

Cyrus Chestnut, pianist, b. 1963

It’s a different climate now for hunting down obscure LPs, given the internet and availability of all manner of arcana to anyone with a credit card. But the music and the printed page will hopefully outlast most of that extraneous crud. Three decades on, that Grand Royal article has, in part, morphed into a book titled Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960-1980 (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2025) with Moore, reedist Mats Gustafsson, and writer Byron Coley contributing short essays on over 100 avant-garde jazz records they’ve deemed crucial listening. The book terminates its survey in 1980 chiefly to avoid CDs and digital media, as well as ensuring “none of us were involved in any of the potential choices” [Coley]. There’s a preamble including pre-free but decidedly left-field recordings by pianists Mary Lou Williams, Lennie Tristano, Sun Ra, Nadi Qamar, a young Cecil Taylor (1956’s Jazz Advance, on Transition), and Bob Graettinger’s City of Glass (conducted by Stan Kenton), but things really kick off in 1960, the point by which Taylor and Ornette Coleman had both made their stand in New York. The records (and one cassette) discussed range from the canonized and relatively easily sourced to acetates and micro-pressings that, as first editions anyway, are basically impossible to find, let alone acquire.

Not Bengt “Frippe” Nordstrom’s Meaningless, but a more findable stand-in with identical sleeve (BN8A/8D).

Each entry is lavishly illustrated with photos of the album cover and labels, from what I can tell gathered by Gustafsson (including some from Harald Hult’s collection; Harald ran the great Stockholm record store Andra Jazz until his death in 2018). Now Jazz Now isn’t just about objects, though that’s obviously a huge part of its appeal—otherwise the authors wouldn’t rhapsodize about the smell of vintage cardboard. It also includes several period photos by Philippe Gras (1942-2007), and texts by vocalist Neneh Cherry and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee bookend the, erm, volume, contextualizing these records with something familial (in Cherry’s case) and alive. The albums are organized roughly chronologically by release date, rather than with some “best of” hierarchy or even alphabetically, and only one leader entry per artist is allowed (for example, drummer Sunny Murray might play on a few represented records but the only LP under his name featured is Sonny’s Time Now (Jihad Productions, 1965)). The texts are not grouped by writer and their voices are stylistically different enough that it feels like a jumpy but highly engaging conversation, their enthusiasm infectious. Personnel and discographical information are handily included, including some reissue data, although the rundown of pressings is not always consistent (this book is not meant to be Lord or Bruyninckx). One thing that the original “Top Ten” list did was point to a number of additional albums in its write-ups which is less prevalent in Now Jazz Now, though there are many more records discussed in the present text, perhaps rendering such breadcrumbs moot.

As someone with similar tastes to the compilers who’s familiar with almost all of the covered recordings, it’s difficult to find much fault with their 107 choices; certainly there are some things I might’ve included instead but they are of equal interest, on par with everything in here (it would be neat to see the spreadsheet the three worked from to whittle down decades of obsessive listening and collecting; who wouldn’t want to compare notes?). Lists are by nature a fickle thing and, as one of the authors observed, change almost daily. The only aspect that I quibble with is the inclusion of a few items that are pure collectors’ fancy insofar as they are limited to one, two, or fifteen known examples—such unobtainable pieces are arguably inessential to a collection in their first state, though those discs have been re/issued formally in recent years. There is, of course, another side to spotlighting such rarities that is hard to disagree with, as broader knowledge of certain artists’ work is in itself not a bad thing and may lead to greater availability. At least it is interesting to see what the Sonet mockup of Danish pianist Tom Prehn’s excellent Axiom LP (ed. of 2, reissued by Corbett vs. Dempsey and Rune Grammofon) actually looks like! Now Jazz Now isn’t really a coffee table book in the sense of some album cover compendia out there, rather a loose and eccentric but handsomely assembled guide to a bunch of very heavy jazz records. If that’s your thing, it’s well worth scooping and poring over.

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Creative musician (and related) birthdays, January 8:

Wendell Culley, trumpeter, 1906-1983

Bobby Tucker, pianist, 1923-2007

Georg Riedel, bassist, 1934-2024

Bill Goodwin, drummer, b. 1942

Thurman Barker, drummer and mallet percussionist, b. 1952

me, b. 1977

Dan Tepfer, pianist, b. 1982

Here and there, like a lot of my fellow music scribes, I’ve participated in year-end lists, usually the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll (now hosted by Tom Hull via Arts Fuse), as well as the Spanish site El Intruso. It was hard to keep tabs this year, and I kinda let things slide on that front, as well as being a bit confounded by top-100 or top-350 lists (I wish I had that kind of bandwidth!). At certain points it has felt necessary to contribute twenty or so recordings in such a roundup, though it’s always with the caveat that most records I truly fall in love with take more than a year to work their charms. Time has also folded in on itself a bit, insofar as it seems like more than several months have passed between now and when a certain gig or disc was released—it’s hard to fathom, for example, that the Tubby’s concert featuring William Hooker, Alan Braufman, and James Brandon Lewis was just six months ago (June 26, 2025) and not a year or more in the past. It was incredible, but a lot has happened since. Similarly, I had to do a bit of Discogs- and Bandcamp-grazing to see what new releases I’d picked up this year had actually come out this year—I don’t know what other people do as far as keeping a log, but that’s worked for me as a memory refresher.

As for things that recently landed on my desk, I’m still making my way enthusiastically through The Bottle Tapes 6 CD set on Corbett vs. Dempsey; its most recent cuts are 20 years old, but the music is incredibly fresh and powerful throughout. I lived in Chicago during 2001-2003 (graduate school) and attended quite a number of Empty Bottle Jazz and Improvised Music Series concerts, and as someone who has presented creative music in rock or related clubs, this set is an affirming example of what can be done with rather variable resources. The box is, I think, nearly sold out of its one-time print run, which says a lot about how much the series and its aftereffects have done for the music as a whole. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that it also underscores the fact that some musicians who loomed large within the context of Chicago free music and its larger web have departed: we’re hearing late saxophonists Von Freeman, Fred Anderson, Mars Williams, and Ron Dewar in their home city, as well as frequent visitor Peter Brötzmann in his prime. In fact, quite a few artists represented through these concerts have passed on, like Milford Graves, pianist and instrument-builder Cor Fuhler, and guitarist Davey Williams. My first personal exposure to a number of European free improvisers occurred in Chicago, and it always seemed to me that there was a more direct line to that circuit there than in New York, probably in large part due to the efforts of John Corbett, Ken Vandermark, and their network. Being able to see people like pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach or violinist Philipp Wachsmann live and up close in a relatively small venue instead of just listening to the records at home presented another story. The rapport was visible as well as being audible. If you are on the fence about it, I’d try and snag a copy of The Bottle Tapes before it is gone.

Keep on listening and reading, and thanks for continuing to support this small publication/newsletter/what have you in any way that you can. I’ll try to do my part on this end and keep writing, even if it’s merely a sketch of something. To a positive year ahead.

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Creative musician birthdays today, December 31:

John Kirby, bassist, 1908-1952

Jonah Jones, trumpeter, 1909-2000

Peter Herbolzheimer, trombonist, 1935-2010

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Any time I’ve had a site, performance series, or radio show, I’ve named it after a record. This Substack is, as I’ve mentioned before, named after bassist Barre Phillips’ 1971 JAPO LP For All It Is. The improvised music series I curate at Tubby’s takes its title from the 1971 Spontaneous Music Ensemble recording “So, What Do You Think?” (released on the ethnographically-focused Tangent imprint). The posters for the series are all riffs on obscure free jazz record covers, remixed by designer d.norsen (Numero, LITA). In Brooklyn when we were doing shows at Wonders of Nature and Footlight, the series was called The Way Ahead, which could refer to either the 1968 Archie Shepp Impulse! album with that title or the 1969 Jacques Coursil BYG-Actuel LP Way Ahead; both contain prescient music. When I was using Blogger, said blog was christened Ni Kantu, after the Esperanto sing-along and linguistic demonstration album Ni Kantu en Esperanto (Let’s Sing in Esperanto), the debut release on venerated avant-garde and countercultural label ESP-Disk’. In the 1990s, when I had a radio program on KJHK-FM in Lawrence, Kansas, I used the title Revolutionary Ensembles, named after the group and also in homage to their ESP album, which I later learned is called Vietnam 1 & 2 but for all intents and purposes appears as a self-titled disc: Revolutionary Ensemble (the show continued with that name after I graduated, presenting somewhat different music). I’ve never been that great at grabbing titles out of the air, Singularity Codex being a rare exception, and it always felt easier to borrow something from a preexisting object and usually one I’ve spent a lot of time with. It also has long felt important to acknowledge that for me, learning about the music has come not only from observing it in performance and speaking to the artists, but also a steady diet of records. The knowledge gleaned from what’s on the plastic page is a vital framework for understanding what goes (or went) on outside of the recording studio.

Getting interested in this music coincided with a growing vinyl obsession. I had a small but nice collection of punk and indie rock LPs and 45s at the outset of college . When the jazz bug bit a couple of years later I immediately began following whatever threads presented themselves (personnel, record labels, etc.) in a quest to hear as much as I could on a student (and later grad student) budget. This was long before the advent of YouTube and share blogs, so if I wanted to hear something I had to seek it out physically or at least find someone who had a copy. Eventually I’d live in cities with great record stores; visits to places like New York (where I’d eventually call home) were an occasional but worthwhile digging experience. Online record marketplaces were cropping up at the same time and I scoured them for LPs featuring obscure sidemen, completing the discography of a cultish musician or embarking on a path to discover someone new to me. 28 years later, I’m sitting on several thousand LPs and a few thousand CDs (the latter got culled in a move; I did this less heavily with vinyl but certainly have sold off chunks over the years), a respectable but not astronomical amount well crammed into two rooms of a small house.

no room for Hawes

I wouldn’t say that vinyl sounds better, looks better, or tastes better than another format, but it is strangely addictive. Part of that is visual: the healthy-sized square is appealing, there are often descriptive notes to get lost in, not to mention room for interesting cover art. A 12” record is the right shape to (carefully) handle, and the labels look cool; 7” singles were never my thing, really, but I’ve accumulated some as well. At one point it seemed that singles weren’t conducive to improvised music, given the short playing time per side, but they can lend themselves to concise, unique performances (the FMP singles and the Instant Composers’ Pool/Misha Mengelberg-Han Bennink flexi disc set are cases in point). 10”s are something I try to minimize because, in the words of Academy Records’ Mike Davis, they are “the devil’s format:” awkwardly too small to shelve with LPs and too big to stuff anywhere else. I’ve always been single-minded and compulsive when I get interested in something: music, cycling, writing projects, railroadiana, so it’s no surprise that records became an obsession and even though I am somewhat less driven now, the fruits of frenzied, fascinated acquisition surround me, walls and walls of uncommon and arcane recordings, most in fine condition. I’ve also found myself listening to more music digitally as, frankly, I don’t have the room or funds to own a file copy of everything I want to hear.

When I started reviewing albums in grad school I found it easy, given how much my ear was attuned to what I’d heard on the stereo and in person, to compare music on a new disc with what had come before—not always accurately, mind you, but it was a healthy place to start. Records lent themselves to constant reassessment, so in a sense I was already reviewing them before I started writing about them; with art-historical formal analysis as a model, giving a recording context and exploring what the music does and how it operates were codified early. What I would eventually learn is that while most musicians are tuned in to a wide range of sounds, far fewer are insatiable record collectors and something I notice in their playing could be a spurious correlation (for example, comparing saxophonist Michaël Attias to John Tchicaï is probably unfair to both, though there may be some parallel phrases that turn up). Writing about live events was always different, though I could call up the immediacy of a first-time listen and familiarity with the form to extrapolate into something more lasting. As an interviewer, knowing an artist’s discography has always been important, though their process has always interested me far more than recounting a laundry list of sessions (not to mention that in some cases, the sessions that didn’t get released can be more intriguing than those that did).

It’s hard to re-capture the excitement of early exposure to cornerstone records: the heaving drone of the title cut to trombonist Roswell Rudd’s Everywhere (that tune composed by Woody Herman/Stan Kenton-associated trombonist Bill Harris, reimagined as a free house of mirrors) or the shock of Albert Ayler’s Bells, which I was turned onto by a record store clerk in Lawrence, KS, and never looked back from. A few years later I remember blind-buying English guitarist Ray Russell’s June 11, 1971: Live at the ICA as a 2CD set and being so blown away by it I had to seek out the original vinyl. I’d listened to Derek Bailey and Sonny Sharrock but this was a very different thing; wiry and gleefully unhinged within an elegantly-arranged framework. The minimally abstract red and green cover design by RCA ad man Olav Wyper was a nice visual touch as well. I had the opportunity to interview Ray over email, a kind and interesting fellow whose music should be heard by more ears, still. Similarly, curiosity led me to Japanese drummer Masahiko Togashi’s 1969 LP We Now Create; and the floodgates eventually opened to a world of Japanese jazz and free improvisation. We Now Create is a beautiful statement of intent with early and formidable appearances by guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi (why reissues of his records don’t fly off the shelves I’ll never understand), bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa, and reedist Mototeru Takagi, its handsome jacket displaying a painting by Togashi himself. Having the experience of an artistic statement flooring you is too rare these days, especially as we are continually saturated by, well, everything.

Building up a stash/archive of albums and discs and the process of occasionally “trimming the garden” (as reedist Mats Gustafsson terms it), because most of us can’t keep it all, is a curious one. I was thinking about it this morning because at one point I decided that I did not have the need/room for the small clutch of LPs by pianist Hampton Hawes that I owned. A couple I enjoyed, a few others I did not connect with and had purchased mainly because they featured drummer Bruz Freeman, brother of Chicago saxophonist Von and guitarist George, and uncle to saxophonist Chico Freeman. Alvin Fielder pushed me to listen to more Bruz (based in Los Angeles, Freeman was in the crucial west coast avant-garde quartet of trumpeter Bobby Bradford and reedist John Carter). Hawes never really grabbed me (that’s a “me” thing and was never the musician’s problem!) so I purged the records but now, reading about how he influenced a number of Japanese jazz pianists including Yosuke Yamashita and Toshiko Akiyoshi, I feel like maybe I was too hasty. Of course, the H section is crammed pretty tightly so I may just have to revisit these sounds digitally. Maybe I’ll hear something I hadn’t heard before, which is the reason, luxury, and curse of having a large physical listening library—it’s all there for reevaluation as time and space allow. The immediate impact of a sound is one thing, but the gradualness of coming to appreciate a work is highly underrated.

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Creative Musician Birthdays, Dec. 22:

Ronnie Ball, pianist, 1927-1984

Masayuki Takayanagi, guitarist, 1932-1991

Joe Lee Wilson, vocalist, 1935-2011

Nick Ceroli, drummer, 1939-1985

Beb Guérin, bassist, 1941-1980

Warren Benbow, drummer, 1954-2024

John Patitucci, bassist, b. 1959

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In the summer of 2023, my first book was released via the publishing arm of French record label RogueArt. Titled Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt, it explores in depth the pianist’s 25 releases for the label as both leader and sideman, as well as the book Logos & Language, a collaborative volume of dialogues and poems from Shipp and Steve Dalachinsky. A lot went into this project and it was also a collaborative venture in a way, given how much back-and-forth discussion I had with Shipp throughout the process. In addition to formal analyses of recordings, it features a number of artist interviews (in full: William Parker, Rob Brown, Joe Morris, Whit Dickey, Yuko Otomo, label founder Michel Dorbon, recording engineer Jim Clouse) and studies of the circumstances that gave rise to much of the work of Shipp and his regular working partners—namely, the Lower East Side community that incubated the music associated with the Vision Festival and Arts for Art, and more specifically alto saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc’s group Muntu, which laid the aesthetic and philosophical groundwork for a number of figures and ensembles in the ensuing decades (for example, this was William Parker’s first regular unit as a participant).

Singularity Codex was generally well-received by the “jazz press,” and Matt and I did a few book talks over the year or so following its release. He and I still chat regularly and there’s surely more to write on his work and that of his playing partners because the music, while bedrock for me, is also contemporary enough to continue evolving both in terms of its content/form and my perception of it. So it is interesting that a year and a half after publication, a review appeared on the website Jazz Right Now (full disclosure: a website I have written for in the past) by Jim Feast, a poet and novelist who edited a number of Ralph Nader’s books and Barney Rosset’s autobiography. Feast is a Marxist and has been deeply ensconced in Lower East Side culture, art, and sociology for many years, so his piece takes the nurturing of music in this environment as a jumping-off point for further thought and experimentation.

There’s much weight to the thesis that the LES gave rise to a communist squat-ethos of improvised music and improvised spaces and this might be inherent and unique to the community, and Feast’s exploration is a fascinating place to start. I am glad that my book inspired him to write on this subject and calling it a “review” only scratches the surface of what he’s getting into here. And while I was somewhat aware that he was working on a piece about Singularity Codex, the scale of the result is fascinating and impressive. I still stand by the book as doing exactly what I intended it to do and structured it in a way I remain happy with—not bad for a debut. As for the work at large: we’ll keep going.

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Creative musician birthdays today, November 30:

Benny Moten, bassist, 1916-1977

Marco Rizo, pianist, 1920-1998

Jack Sheldon, trumpeter and vocalist, 1931-2019

Johnny Dyani, bassist and pianist, 1945-1986

Stan Sulzmann, saxophonist, b. 1948

We’d planned to have the series be quarterly but when something interesting falls into your lap, you might as well take the opportunity to present it, right? So we’ve added one extra show on December 2, featuring the Swedish-American collaborative trio FÖR (Isak Ingvarsson, woodwinds; Kweku Sumbry & Shakoor Hakeem, drums and hand percussion). Notably this concert is FREE and there is no admission charge. This is thanks to the Live Music Society’s Music in Action Grant, which has supported monthly free concerts at Tubby’s all year long. I’ll also be DJing records at the bar before and after the set, primarily drawing from the SWDYT? HQ Swedish and Scandinavian jazz collection.

So in short: doors 7, music 8, I’ll be spinning starting a bit before 7, and there is no cost to attend this event. Thanks as ever to Tubby’s, Rocket Number Nine Records, d.norsen for poster design/remix, and in this case, Music in Action. See you out there!

Clifford

About the Artists

Isak Ingvarsson – Saxophone, Clarinet, Flutes

A rising voice in the European jazz scene, Ingvarsson has performed with Per “Texas” Johansson, Kresten Osgood, Fredrik Ljungkvist, and many others. Currently pursuing a Master’s at City College of New York under the mentorship of Tim Berne, Ingvarsson blends avant-garde jazz, Scandinavian minimalism, and raw emotional depth.

Kweku Sumbry – Drums, Djembe, Percussion

A key member of the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet, Sumbry brings West African rhythmic traditions to a contemporary jazz setting. Widely acclaimed for his distinctive voice on both drum set and traditional percussion, he has performed with Ambrose Akinmusire, Shabaka Hutchings, Solange, and Reggie Workman.

Shakoor Hakeem – Percussion

A fearless, deeply expressive improviser rooted in Afro-diasporic mysticism and ritualistic tradition. Hakeem has worked with Graham Haynes, Maria Grand, Joel Ross, and Wallace Roney, among others, and is known for his powerful, focused presence on stage.

Shakoor Hakeem & Kweku Sumbru - Transcendence

Transcendence Live at Minaret Records, August 15 2025

Isak Ingvarsson - Live at Amager Records, Copenhagen

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Creative Musician Birthdays, November 23:

Tyree Glenn, trombonist and vibraphonist, 1912-1974

Johnny Mandel, composer, 1925-2020

Pat Patrick, saxophonist, 1929-1991

Victor Gaskin, bassist, 1934-2012

Alvin Fielder, drummer and historian, 1935-2019

Jiří Stivín, reedist, b. 1942

Ray Drummond, bassist, 1946-2025

Melton Mustafa, trumpeter and educator, 1947-2017

Also, a reminder for any upstate readers: November 11th at Tubby’s in Kingston, we’re presenting percussionist Ben Bennett and guitarist Kieran Daly in a duo as well as guitarist Matt Sargent and electronic musician Dani Dobkin. It promises to be a heck of a concert. Tickets here. Previous post announcing the show is here.

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Recently, a musician friend who I’ve written about a number of times—in reviews, interviews, and done liner notes for—mentioned a couple of new releases that he was hoping I could write about. Another musician who I interviewed at length (though not in over a decade) sent me a care package of recent work that I’m exploring with much curiosity. I actually haven’t reviewed records consistently for a very long time, but this got me thinking. I didn’t start this Substack with the intent of reviews making their way here, but I am not opposed to it either. The main reason such an endeavor is challenging is because once one puts oneself out there as a reviewer, the floodgates open (I still get emails, usually friendly, from labels assuming I am part of the general music journalist scene. They might do well to check the date of my last record review). It’s certainly worthwhile as a listener to keep one’s ear to the ground and explore new music with open ears and though it may take me a while to get to an enclosed Bandcamp or Soundcloud link, I do follow through, even if I don’t put the proverbial pen to paper as a result.

Another reason why I don’t do standard reviews is because as someone who books concerts, I’d feel a little weird writing about recordings that an artist might be touring and have the desire to play locally. It feels (or could feel) a bit like I’m unable to be objective, though the other side of that is that one can gain insight experiencing a book of music live. The community of rabid improvised music fans is fairly small, and invariably there will be crossover between presenters, reviewers, liner-note writers, label owners, and other people within this cottage industry. Finally, though burnout within the critical environment was real, my primary struggles were that a) it was both hard to be neutral about a recording insofar as my whims might give me a different listen on a different day and, related, b) what I’ve learned is that recordings hit differently years removed from when I first heard them, and this is true in both a positive and the negative sense.

For example, the other day I pulled out the Alvin Fielder CD A Measure of Vision, released 18 years ago on the Portuguese label Clean Feed. The album has Alvin in a trio with pianist Chris Parker and the late Dallas, TX trumpeter Dennis González (with whom he’d been working since the 1980s), along with Dennis’ children Aaron (bass) and Stefan (vibraphone) on a couple of tracks. Dennis, Aaron, and Stefan had a group called Yells At Eels, who were a very strong unit. Alvin and I were friends; he died in 2019 at age 83, and I had not only the great pleasure of interviewing him in 2006 but also continuing regular phone conversations for many years afterward. I remember at the time thinking the CD was excellent (and might’ve reviewed it to that effect) but while driving the 90 minutes to and from work it hit me that the disc is truly great, an album filled not only with familial rapport but also a level of intensity that goes beyond the personal connection that each player clearly had with one another. They were really pushing themselves and the music, and it shows. I spent much time talking about modern jazz drumming and its history with Alvin, and it was easy to pick up on passages that draw from Max, Elvin, Blackwell, and other drummers who’d entered into his lexicon, but this is a group recording and significant space is given to the band as a whole. It was a true joy to revisit this disc after a number of years.

Now, if I were to completely give in to the fact that ideas and opinions about music and art are utterly unfixed, I’d never put anything about it in the permanent record to begin with. Art is not static, so why should thinking and writing about it be? What has been interesting for me is, instead of a strict album review, interviewing artists about a specific recording or set of recordings and weaving that into something. That is how liner notes have generally worked for me (at least when writing notes for a release on which the artists are living), and I also utilized this approach throughout Singularity Codex, my book on Matthew Shipp and his RogueArt albums. Musicians talking about their own work isn’t necessarily objective but it is a window into their process and from that, going by their words and intent, one gets a very detailed framework that can be useful as a listening guide. Though it’s how I started writing about this music, critically examining records feels a bit reductive when done traditionally. But there are ways to get out of the box and perhaps try a different approach. Will the results make it onto this Substack? Stay tuned.

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Creative musicians born on this day, November 6:

Francy Boland, pianist and arranger/composer (1929-2005)

Paul Flaherty, saxophonist (b. 1948)

Arturo Sandoval, trumpeter and pianist (b. 1949)

solo bass birthday twins: Barre Phillips and Tetsu Saitoh (author’s copies)

Of course, being born on a certain day doesn’t dictate one’s life path—there are numerous other factors at play, most of them environmental (Alvin acknowledged this with statements like “there must be something in the water in Pittsburgh,” referencing Steel City drummers Joe Harris and J.C. Moses). But I’ve long found it interesting to think about artists who share a birthday and what commonalities and differences might be found. And it’s an easy excuse to think about the artists themselves on what might be an otherwise random day of the week; when I was on Instagram, periodically I’d do a birthday post with several records from different musicians who share an “Earth arrival day.” Looking at today, October 27, it’s an interesting coincidence that several important contrabassists share birthdays: Sonny Dallas (1931–2007), Barre Phillips (1934–2024), Arild Andersen (b. 1945), Nick Stephens (b. 1946), Ken Filiano (b. 1952), and Tetsu Saitoh (1955–2019). Dallas was more of an inventive traditionalist, heard to great advantage on alto saxophonist Lee Konitz’ Motion LP, a trio album with Elvin Jones on drums recorded for Verve in 1961. The others in this list are readily associated with the avant-garde, though of course their playing covers a wide range of instrumental possibilities. Barre Phillips’ 1971 double-bass quartet (and drums) LP For All It Is (released on Japo) is the namesake of this Substack, and well worth your time if you haven’t heard it.

In my post discussing Bill Dixon and Bob Wilson, whose birthdays are a day apart, you might have guessed I was thinking along these simplified astrological lines (of course, there’s much more than sun signs at play in any of this), given the important role both have played in my (Capricorn sun, Leo moon) life. It’s interesting to look at who else shares those birthdays, October 5 and 4th, respectively:

October 5:

Frank Guarente, trumpeter (1893–1942)

Fred Norman, trombonist (1910–1933)

Jimmy Blanton, bassist (1918–1942)

Bill Dixon, trumpeter, composer, visual artist, educator (1925–2010)

A.R. Penck, visual artist, drummer, pianist, bassist, record and concert producer (1939–2017)

Donald Ayler, trumpeter (1942–2007)

Clifton Anderson, trombonist (b. 1957)

Tord Gustavsen, pianist (b. 1970)

October 4:

Greely Walton, tenor saxophonist (1904–1993)

Noël Chibouste, trumpeter (1909–1994)

Marvin Ash, pianist (1914–1974)

Stan Hasselgård, clarinetist (1922–1948)

Walter Bishop, Jr., pianist (1927–1998)

Leon Thomas, vocalist (1937–1999)

Mark Levine, pianist and valve trombonist, author (1938–2022)

Steve Swallow, bassist (b. 1940)

Eddie Gomez, bassist (b. 1944)

Robert Hurst, bassist (b. 1954)

Mat Maneri, violinist and violist (b. 1969)

I can’t speak to the personalities of all of these people, but find it incredibly curious that, for example, Dixon and A.R. Penck, polymaths both, share October 5, and the 4th consists of four extraordinary string players in addition to theater director and visual artist Bob Wilson. As for myself, I don’t particularly get that excited about my own birthday, but I find celebrating others’, even by acknowledging their shared artistry and time on this planet, as something worth doing.

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Creative musicians born on Oct. 27:

Babs Gonzales, vocalist (1919–1980)

George Wallington, pianist (1924–1993)

Elmon Wright, saxophonist (1929–1984)

Sonny Dallas, bassist (1931–2007)

Barre Phillips, bassist (1934–2024)

Philip Catherine, guitarist (b. 1942)

Arild Andersen, bassist (b. 1945)

Nick Stephens, bassist (b. 1946)

Ken Filiano, bassist (b. 1942)

Tetsu Saitoh, bassist (1955–2019)

David Hazeltine, pianist (b. 1958)

Igor Butman, saxophonist (b. 1961)

Amanda Monaco, guitarist (b. 1973)

One of the things I figured that I would use this platform for is announcing concerts happening locally in Kingston that I’m involved with. Previously, Instagram served this purpose (as did my email list); now, Substack & email will do the trick (I hope). I’ve been curating shows at Tubby’s since the spring of 2022 and still continuing apace, so if you are in the area, please come through!

Our improvised music series “So, What Do You Think?” returns on November 11 for a night consisting of two formidable duos: Kieran Daly/Ben Bennett and Matt Sargent/Dani Dobkin. Kieran and Ben are traveling from Chicago and Philly, respectively, while Matt and Dani are New York-based (City/country). The show hits around 8 as usual, $15 in advance or at the door. Apologies to Fuzzhead for boosting their boosted cover art. Thanks to d.norsen for design alterations and Rocket Number Nine for their continued support.

Artist bios:

Ben Bennett and Kieran Daly: “iterative frictional and sliding timbres from idiophones and guitar”

Kieran Daly is an American composer with a concentration in experimental monophonic music. His work focuses on a primarily performance-based, first-principles approach using iterative processes, sliding timbres, and pulse salience as formal determinants. Some of his prolific output has been presented by Cafe OTO, CHIMEFest, Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theatre, Default Den Haag, Hibari Music, Infant Tree, Issue Project Room, Madacy Jazz, Museum of Modern Art, Poetry Project, Pilar Brussels, Pioneer Works, Pitchfork, Segue Foundation, Triple Canopy, and Wire Magazine. Since 2015, he has soundtracked several features and shorts by Canadian filmmaker Isiah Medina.

Ben Bennett is an improvising percussionist who makes timbrally and formally diverse music from simplified instruments in the membranophone and idiophone families. His latest work, Music for Idiophones, deals with dynamic stick-slip behavior of various basic materials. He has toured extensively throughout the Americas and Europe and performed in several international festivals as a soloist and in improvising ensembles. His recent collaborators include Pascal Battus, Axel Dörner, Bryan Eubanks, Sandy Ewen, Beat Keller, Greg Kelley, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Carina Khorkhordina, Alexander Markvart, Karen Ng, Chris Pitsiokos, Ernesto Rodrigues, Guillherme Rodrigues, Ute Wasserman, Jacob Wick, Nate Wooley, and Jack Wright.

Dani Dobkin (synthesizer) and Matt Sargent (guitar and electronics) are a musical duo from New York. Beginning with a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,“Act so that there is no use in a center,” the improvising duo delights in the exploration of their contrasting sensibilities. Since 2021, they have released two albums and completed two North American tours, during which they’ve continued a musical conversation across many shows in museums, cathedrals, universities, warehouses, and bars. Their music has been described as “a strangely emotional, gossamer-like tapestry of sounds, from barely audible phrases to saturating swells of noise. It all sounds almost like an American primitive guitar record retrieved from far in the future.” (Antonio Poscic, Future Music) Writing about their newest album, Old Dutch Church, Bill Meyer of the Chicago Reader states, “Dobkin’s electronics shimmer and writhe like something growing under the light of Sargent’s carefully spaced harmonics.” Dobkin received a BFA from Bard College, both an MFA in Sound Art and a DMA in Music Composition from Columbia University. They are currently serving as an early career fellow at Columbia University and teaching electronic music at Bard College. Matt is an assistant professor of music at Bard College.

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Creative musician birthdays, October 16:

Buck Washington, pianist and vocalist (1903-1955)

Ray Anderson, trombonist (b. 1952)

Tim Berne, alto and baritone saxophonist (b. 1954)

Roy Hargrove, trumpeter (1969-2018)

Lawrence Weiner, in an interview I conducted in 2020 for the Unseen Worlds reissues of Richard Landry’s 4 Cuts Placed In A First Quarter and Having Been Built On Sand With Another Base (Basis) In Fact, two collaborations with Weiner.

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Two auspicious birthdays happened last weekend: October 5 would have been Bill Dixon’s 100th birthday, and October 4 would have been Bob Wilson’s 84th. October 4 was also Bob’s memorial at BAM (he died July 31), and I was in attendance, meaning that though I’d hoped to pull this piece together sooner, traveling back and forth to Brooklyn precluded it. I was privileged to work for/with Bob over the course of a decade, and also lucky to know Bill Dixon late in his life, interviewing him first over the phone for The New York City Jazz Record in 2004 and again in 2008 over a week in Bennington, Vermont for a piece that eventually found a home at All About Jazz (Bill and I kept in regular touch over those years). In the latter setting, the interviews were supported by collaborators Stephen Haynes, Rob Mazurek, and Bill’s partner Sharon Vogel, all of whom filled out our dialogues with additional, real-time insight and occasional pushback. Bill and Bob are both beyond category although it’s absolutely fair to start with the trumpet and composition/improvisation when talking about Bill’s work, just as it’s reasonable to begin with the theatre for Bob’s art. In a way, it’s hard to imagine two more different individuals—a Black American trumpeter from New England steeped in the post-Armstrong traditions of the music who became a pillar of the avant-garde, and a white gay Texan whose architecture studies at Pratt led to surreal operas. But both of these individuals had exacting visions and an astute generosity of spirit that, despite the vastly alternate contexts in which they came up, resulted in some interesting parallels.

Bill Dixon serigraph EA, 1994, artist’s proof. Author’s framed copy (apologies for the glare)

Bill was born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts on October 5, 1925, raised in New York, and died in 2010 at age 84 in Vermont, where he’d lived full-time since 1973. He began teaching at Bennington College in the music department in 1968 in collaboration with choreographer Judith Dunn, with whom he collaborated extensively from 1966-73 (the Bill Dixon-Judith Dunn Company of Musicians and Dancers). Following a year as visiting faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971-72, Dixon founded the Black Music Division at Bennington, developing a situation at the college which interpolated students and teaching artists in a rigorous laboratory for the study and performance of Black Music (or “this music,” as Bill called it). Bill was also trained as a painter and he was an organizer, having co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild in New York (1964-65), a short-lived but crucial labor guild that brought together a number of underground musicians to advocate for improved working conditions both in concert and recording environments. In addition to Dixon, its members included Cecil Taylor1, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Paul and Carla Bley, Michael Mantler, Burton Greene, and the flutist Gary William Friedman; it’s difficult to imagine an AACM, BAG, or Instant Composers Pool without the Guild’s existence. The clubs or record labels don’t want this music? Fine, create your own environment for the work to get done. I don’t think I’ve encountered a more committed person; a couple of oft-repeated statements (and variations of such) support this and stand out: “there is always someone trying to keep you from doing the thing that you do” and “wherever you are, that is your Carnegie Hall.” It was clear that doing something meant doing it thoroughly, clearly, and openly, giving everything with whatever you’re capable of at that moment. It is no wonder that his watershed 1967 album for RCA-Victor is titled Intents & Purposes (RCA LSP-3844).

Read more

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One of the things that I found social media most useful for, and this is specific to Instagram, was documenting gigs. For a while I wrote concert reviews (in addition to record reviews and artist profiles/interviews) when I was at The New York City Jazz Record. I kept a black Moleskine that I scribbled in furiously and later attempted to decipher. Maybe at some point I’ll transcribe the entirety of those notebooks; there were certainly some inspired annotations, though of course on one level, to quote Eric Dolphy, “once you hear music it is gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.” It was a little easier to snap an iPhone photo and do a brief writeup on Instagram in a concert’s immediate post facto zone—the music still felt fresh, the energy high, and I had a set of images to choose from. Occasionally, I’d post a minute of video. It didn’t feel like journalism, but it was a way to mark something that had occurred which was incredibly special and specific to a place (yes, I still have the photos, but not the descriptions). In recent years, living in Kingston, New York, that usually meant Tubby’s, as well as the Lace Mill (where bassist Michael Bisio has convened world-class Sunday afternoon improvised music performances once a month), Handbell Studios (the Creative Music Orchestra, with roots in the Creative Music Studio of Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso, and Ornette Coleman), and the recently opened Unicorn Bar. There are others, too: saxophonist Peyton Pleninger, an invigorating and curious player who works regularly with drummer Tani Tabbal, is hosting sessions in nearby Stone Ridge at the Tavern, which I hope to attend soon. Apparently experimental music is happening on the former Mount Tremper Arts property, too, further up in the Catskills.

Tubby’s was the reason—or a reason, at least—for moving to Kingston originally. Situated on Broadway in the Midtown neighborhood and a ten minute walk from our house, knowledge that there was a bar presenting interesting music sealed the deal during the pandemic. Of course, the venue was closed from March 2020 until fall 2021, but incredibly they were able to hold on during that vicious year and are now in their seventh year of operation, hosting music of all stripes. When I met Cory Plump and Katy McElroy, two of the owners (Astral Spirits’ Nate Cross was the connection—Cory had worked for Monofonus Press in Austin), the idea for an improvised music series was collectively hatched, not something I’d planned to do again but given that the musicians keep the entirety of the door, it seemed like a no-brainer. “So, What Do You Think?” was inaugurated in 2022 with the James Brandon Lewis Trio and though it’s gone from monthly to quarterly (see above reference to burning candles), we’ve kept it active. November 11th will be the 28th installment, with the duos of percussionist Ben Bennett and guitarist Kieran Daly and guitarist Matt Sargent and electronic artist Dani Dobkin. More on that configuration very soon.

Though I have been going to fewer shows recently owing to job commitments and my rediscovered obsessive love for cycling (which precludes late weekend nights and requires some travel), I was glad to be in attendance for a couple of celebratory free shows during last week’s 7th Anniversary celebration (apologies to Mountain Movers, who I’d planned to see but was double-booked). Steve Gunn, the guitarist and singer-songwriter, stretched and tangled with feedback and arcs that veered toward the discursive for his solo set, in which he challenged himself to occupy the fringes of a song while keeping the (or a) center in sight. Garcia Peoples are a band I hadn’t seen in a few years but pre-pandemic was able to catch quite often, including a memorable WFMU on-air performance helmed by Jeff Conklin when he was at the station. Despite their name, the quintet (sometimes sextet) splits the difference between Blue Öyster Cult and Hawkwind more than conjuring the Dead; their Tuesday set built a full head of steam after a few songs of, perhaps, feeling out the room, and they were as captivating as they’ve ever been. Curiously, the band closed with an instrumental “jazz fusion” number (their term), which thankfully migrated away from ECM worship, remaining toothy and unafraid to elbow through the changes. I was especially struck by the drumming of Cesar Arakaki throughout, as he’s an incredibly clean and powerful player, pushing the ensemble with swells of deftly-applied sound.

Garcia Peoples, September 25. L-R: PG Six, Danny Arakaki, Cesar Arakaki, Andy Cush, Tom Malach. Photo by the author.

Tubby’s is small, with room for about 80 people, with a long bar/front area and music in the back, separated by a heavy curtain. In that space I’ve seen things (musically) that you would not believe. Being outside of the city, given room to breathe, a lot can go down. Most of the small venues in Kingston seem to offer a fair deal for musicians, with everything going to the artists, which is not easy to pull off. Things change and owning/operating a club is extremely difficult albeit in a different way than being an artist; perhaps it helps that some of these operations are led by artists in the first place. For example, Plump is a musician—he was in wiry post-punk groups Spray Paint and Rider/Horse, and currently plays bass in Winged Wheel—as well as being a venue owner. It’s an incredibly weird time to be a musician and/or presenting music given the slow implosion of the industry itself, but the presence of community is hugely important in terms of keeping afloat the things that matter. And if you are part of this community, broadly or narrowly, I hope to see you out there, in one way or another!

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Creative musician birthdays:

Rolf Kühn, clarinetist (1929-2022)

Melba Joyce, vocalist (b. 1939)

Malcolm Griffiths, trombonist (1941-2021)

Jean-Luc Ponty, violinist (b. 1942)

Steve Dalachinsky, poet (1946-2019)

Roy Campbell, Jr., trumpeter (1952-2014)

Dave Kikoski, pianist (b. 1961)

Alex Skolnick, guitarist (b. 1968)

Landry’s first recorded appearance, with swamp pop band The Swing Kings, c. 1968 (that’s him on flute). Author’s copy.

First, as always, a hearty thanks to those who read and subscribe, as that kind of engagement is seen and duly noted! I suppose one useful thing about this platform is that one doesn’t have to hew to a specific format and occasionally it can operate in lieu of a standard email list (though a lot of us probably still have those as well; I certainly do) and host “extended announcements.” So, without further ado, here is such an announcement and some riffage:

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BOMB Magazine has published an interview I did with the musician and artist Dickie Landry in their Fall issue. It’s available in both their print issue as well as online and the latter is linked here. Dickie and I had a great chat, as we always do, and it was both fun and necessary to catch up with him for more formal purposes. I first interviewed & got to know Dickie on a personal level in 2010, when Unseen Worlds founder Tom McCutchon and I visited him at his home in Lafayette, Louisiana, for the purposes of both an oral history and the reissue of his Fifteen Saxophones LP (Northern Lights/Wergo), which had been out of print for many years. The interview that fed into the liner notes for that reissue was published in full on the Paris Transatlantic Magazine website; there are a few typos, and we’ve since corrected the name of the violinist Dickie saw debuting Philip Glass’ Strung Out, but it stands as a very informative document. I’m glad that Paris Transatlantic remains accessible in 2025, even if it’s no longer published, as I was able to cut my teeth interviewing there – Landry, Dave Burrell, Kees Hazevoet, Graham Collier, Joe Giardullo – and all of the magazine’s interviews are extremely worth your while.

Dickie and I became friends pretty quickly; we ate, drank, and if memory serves me right, crashed a wedding during those few days of conversing and studying his archives (which are now in the process of being placed). On this trek I also met David Bradshaw, the artist and sharpshooter/Burroughs collaborator, while with Dickie at a “home distillery” and impromptu tasting – it was clear that Lafayette and nearby Cecilia were special places. In 2010 I knew Dickie’s records, photography, and time with Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, but not a lot about his painting career or how integral he’s been to so many recordings outside the avant-garde canon. Things got tied together even more fully when I went to work for Bob Wilson, with whom he collaborated extensively.

In subsequent years Unseen Worlds reissued the rest of his LP catalog, including Solos, 4 Cuts Placed In A First Quarter (both originally on Chatham Square), and Having Been Built On Sand With Another Base (Basis) In Fact (Rüdiger Schöttle), the latter two joining him with artist Lawrence Weiner. As part of that project, I wrote the liner notes for each, as well as interviewing not only Dickie multiple times but also Weiner (!), saxophonist Richard Peck, and artists/actors Elaine Grove, Mel Kendrick, and Bella Obermaier. Grove, Kendrick, and Obermaier were all in A First Quarter, along with artist Tina Girouard (1946-2020, Dickie’s former partner), and what transpired was basically an oral history of the film. I’d love to find a way, whether here or elsewhere, to publish those interviews as a standalone document. Weiner’s films aren’t easy to see but if you have the opportunity, this is definitely a crucial one and the soundtrack (or sonic intervention, hence the term “cut” – Landry actually had a tape player with the music running as they were filming) is incredibly moving.

There’s much more to the Landry story, and hopefully the bulk of it gets told!

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creative musician birthdays today, September 18:

John Thomas, trombone, 1902-1971

Frank Socolow, tenor saxophone and oboe, 1923-1981

Steve Marcus, saxophones, 1939-2005

Jovino Santos Neto, piano, b. 1954

John Fedchock, trombone, b. 1957

Emily Remler, guitar, 1957-1990

Nils Petter Molvaer, trumpet, b. 1960

Pete Zimmer, drums, b. 1977

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Not too long ago, a musician friend of mine sent a link to a YouTube video that had been uploaded a few years ago but which I had never seen, featuring drummer Art Taylor’s quintet (“Arthur Taylor’s Wailers”) at the hallowed Lower Manhattan club the Village Vanguard in 1992. Taylor’s working group at the time featured saxophonists Abraham Burton and Willie Williams, pianist Jacky Terrasson, and bassist Tyler Mitchell, and the two hour program (two sets) is a mixture of standards and more obscure tunes by the leader’s confreres. The first half of the video was shot honing in on Taylor’s hands as they dance across the drums, keeping contact with the floor tom, snare, rack, and ride cymbal; his face is usually obscured, and you can’t see much of the rest of the band (though you can hear them just fine). But that’s okay, as the videographer seemed intent on capturing the focused, warm intensity of Taylor from a small table at stage right, close enough for the video camera’s mic to be absolutely overloaded, usually from the kit but occasionally Burton’s alto edges into the red, tart as ever. The Vanguard is a place that I’ve been to quite a number of times, though sadly after Taylor himself passed. It still holds numerous aftereffects from decades of creative music. I haven’t seen a whole lot of live Taylor footage; there’s a bit more on YouTube and presumably a bunch exists in European television archives. This footage is pretty special.

Arthur “Art” Taylor (1929-1995) is a consistently fascinating figure in this music; he was born in New York and came up as a youth in the fertile Harlem bop scene with peers like alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and pianist Richie Powell (Bud’s younger brother). Apparently his biggest early influences were G.T. Hogan and Kenny Clarke; Hogan is obscure, but was formative in the landscapes of a number of early bebop drummers. As a side-note, the drummer and historian Alvin Fielder (1935-2019) was of the opinion that modern jazz drumming comes from four originators—Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes—and most drummers of that era are a combination of things they learned from those players. I hear the cleanness of Clarke, the flash of Roy, and the technical explosiveness of Max throughout Taylor’s playing on this 1992 live date, and probably a bit less of Blakey’s drum choir-bombast (though sometimes Taylor serves up thick rolls that acknowledge the Africanness of Blakey and the modern jazz drum tradition as a whole). Alvin generally thought drummers tended toward a combination of two of the four, with some seasoning from the others.

Getting back to some of what makes Taylor intriguing, though he was a sideman with just about every hard-bop musician you could name from the second half of the 1950s and served as a sort of house drummer for Prestige Records as well as regularly recording for Blue Note and Savoy, decamping to Paris at the start of the 1960s changed his landscape significantly. Being a Black American expatriate during the height of the Civil Rights movement, he was overseas during this tumultuous decade, among a coterie of musicians who had similarly chosen to “starve a little better” in Europe where, though the earnings were meager, social acceptance was greater (leaving out, for the time being, the complexities of Black American ‘otherness’ as a curiosity in a place like Paris—that subject spans books on its own). By the close of that decade, following the May 1968 uprisings, Taylor would find himself playing free music with saxophonists Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, and Noah Howard, luminaries of the avant-garde whose music was not accepted in America but who could find gigs and recording contracts (if not much money) in France and elsewhere in Europe.

Hearing him with Wright and Howard’s quartet on LP (one 1970 session spread across the albums Uhuru Na Umoja and most of Space Dimension), there’s a crisp, uncluttered, but loquacious sound that he adds to the proceedings, in conversation but never overpowering—it’s clear he was listening to and learning from his more “outside” comrades. Taylor’s performing and recording partners at this time also included saxophonists Nathan Davis and Hal “Cornbread” Singer and the Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece, who’d settled there via New York and London, where he was also part of both cities’ burgeoning modern jazz scenes. Reece’s stunning From In To Out LP, a live date released on the reliably eccentric Futura imprint, is propelled heavily by Taylor’s insistent, tough economy.

I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but at one point I was chatting with German reedist Peter Brötzmann about concerts he’d witnessed, and he told me that one of the heaviest nights of jazz he ever saw in person was at the American Center in Paris, probably at the turn of the 1970s, when Jackie McLean was there with a local rhythm section made up of pianist Siegfried Kessler, bassist Patrice Caratini, and Taylor. The pace McLean and Taylor set was relentless; Caratini was the first to drop out, then Kessler, leaving the saxophonist and drummer to go at it as a duo for the remainder of the concert. Brötzmann said that it was probably the “freest” thing he’d witnessed, both firmly within the jazz tradition but decidedly taking things as far as they could go—from in to out, indeed.

Several years later came the drummer’s massive contribution to jazz literature in the form of Notes and Tones (1977/1982 [manuscript/foreword], reissued and expanded in 1992), a collection of interviews he conducted with a number of his peers in which he asked them pointed questions about their experiences as Black individuals playing music, dealing with racism and the economics of living from one’s art, attitudes about jazz and free jazz in particular, music critics, revolutionary ideologies, pan-Africanism, as well as their daily lives and routines. This book, along with Valerie Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life, was a bible as I was beginning to study the music’s history in college. I wouldn’t say that as an interviewer I’m anywhere close to accomplishing what Taylor is able to do—after all, my experiences in life necessitate a different approach—but his realness and curiosity are something that I try to instill in any such conversation I have. The interviews themselves are colorful and rich, and give one just as much an idea of the interviewer as the interviewee. Taylor is patient, letting others speak, and lends a professional and open energy to the dialogue, much like his playing.

All this is to say that Art Taylor is emblematic of musicians whom we, as listeners, should be studying, and not necessarily limiting that study to, say, records or CDs cut decades prior. What Taylor dealt with in life goes into his sound, and while he’s someone I think of as a master musician, the whole thing around him is what fascinates—he was relentlessly curious about his fellow artists and the sociopolitical and economic situations they found themselves in, and was similarly intrigued by the directions in which the music was going, whether palatable to a broad audience or not. He was a sociologist, historian, community builder, and griot (listen to him at the end of the Vanguard video call out audience members Walter Bishop, Jr., the pianist, and visual artists Prophet Jennings and Caton Mitchell [the bassist’s father], imploring concertgoers to acknowledge the history and humanity that surrounded them). I’ve long felt that the context around an artist and how that feeds into their being is the real juice, and why it’s similarly difficult to succinctly describe a musician’s sound when that sound is everything they’ve lived. Every time I pick up an album with Taylor on it (and there are hundreds—he was incredibly prolific on disc, mostly under the direction of other players, but occasionally as a leader himself), it’s because that’s another window into the Taylor-ness of his universe. His loose, clean, chattery swing is just a bonus.

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creative musician birthdays today:

“Jazz” Gillum, harmonica and voice (1904-1966)

Bob Enevoldsen, valve trombone and tenor saxophone (1920-2005)

William “Smiley” Winters, drums (1924-1994)

Charles Moffett, drums and vibraphone (1929-1997)

“Baby Face” Willette, Hammond organ (1933-1971)

Oliver Jones, piano (b. 1934)

Hiram Bullock, guitar (1955-2008)

Dan Aran, drums and dumbek (b. 1977)

I wanted to begin with something that is slightly less tied to the music world, rather geared towards the other profession in which I’ve been involved for the better part of 25 years: art(s) archivist. As a lot of you probably saw via Instagram, for over a decade I worked as the archivist for theater director and visual artist Robert Wilson and the Watermill Center, the arts laboratory and residency program he founded in 1992 (and which opened publicly in 2006) in Water Mill, a hamlet near Southampton, New York. Bob (we never called him “Robert” or “Mr. Wilson”) died on July 31, 2025 at 83 after a months-long illness, and I was no longer with the organization, having parted ways last winter. What follows will be a bit loose as I stopped taking notes after a little while on the job and it’s difficult sometimes to detail each part of an experience when you’re in the middle of it. I’ll add here that this is not meant to be a primer on Bob and his work, though such resources do exist (Stefan Brecht’s heady The Theatre of Visions, Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s Absolute Wilson, and Hilton Als’ 2012 New Yorker profile “Slow Man” are great places to start).

I did not come to Bob from the theater world, rather from archival science, but with a deep background in modern and contemporary art and experimental music. In 2012 I relocated to New York from Texas and was on the job market. With a few false starts after some freelancing, I applied for and began working with Bob and the Center in September 2013. I knew a little of his work, mostly through the lens of Philip Glass and Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera on which they collaborated, but was largely unfamiliar with the scale of this scene. I think I applied for the position in the spring, and all told I went through around five interviews, including one or two phoners with Deb Verhoff, the librarian who was leading the search committee. It took quite a while to get face time with Bob because of the International Summer Program, a six-to-seven week intensive that brought over 100 artists from all over the world to Watermill in order to stage installations for the summer benefit and assist in workshopping several of his pieces each year. I would eventually learn what the ISP actually consisted of—a month and a half of controlled chaos—and it was both highly rewarding and utterly maddening.

In August Bob, Deb, theater producer Elisabetta di Mambro, and a couple of other collaborators (maybe co-director Nicola Panzer) interviewed me at the round table in his studio/office at Watermill. Bob was quiet, intense, and thoughtful, asking me first where I was from—it was always important for him to know the environment someone came up in—and his ears perked up when I mentioned I’d lived in Texas and had been working with the Judd Foundation in New York. Bob proceeded to show me the si-gale-gale funereal puppet near the table, a fragile figure in unpainted, shell-adorned wood, a stand-in for the slow, deliberate movements in much of Bob’s theater work. Later that day he would have me lie in one of the stargazer beds, which were cranked horizontally so one could look up at the night sky. Devilishly, Bob did this during the day so that I was looking up at the hot late summer sun while I was wearing an ill-fitting wool suit.

Thankfully after all of that I was hired and what began was an odyssey through this mad world of experimental theater and opera, archives, the summer program and benefit, and in the middle of it all was Bob. I’ve relayed elsewhere that he could be an incredibly generous person as well as being unbelievably difficult. He was dedicated to the work and whatever needed to happen to ensure it was realized, and this consisted of opening several (sometimes as many as a dozen) pieces in a given year. In addition to plays and operas there were installations of light and sound, exhibitions of objects and artworks from his vast collection (as well as his own pieces—video portraits, glass sculptures, and the ever-present chairs), one-night staged events, film and video works, at least one radio play, and probably other things that I am forgetting. Because of the pace at which theaters and theater makers operate, a lot of things were needed immediately that couldn’t always be done in a short amount of time and it was no wonder that a large portion of the archives were unprocessed when I began.

One of my early projects was to start cataloging Bob’s productions, which effectively began in 1963 with dance pieces created while he was studying architecture at Pratt University. At last count Bob realized over 400 works, theatrical and otherwise, with another couple hundred unrealized productions which, despite not existing in the traditional sense, included copious physical records including correspondence, sketches, notes, staging diagrams, and even rehearsal photographs or footage. Given the scale of each endeavor and the fact that projects in different media interpolated and influenced each other, I treated all of them as productions whether or not they were onstage. My task was to examine the documentation and figure out what these works entailed, design an alphanumeric code applying to each work, and create a backbone of material for each production so that one could trace its evolution from sketch to opening night. It was a great way to familiarize myself with his oeuvre and all the people and ideas that were involved, not to mention the records themselves (some of which were in offsite storage, which was unheated and where I spent at least one winter processing).

Bob and Jack Smith in The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, 1969. Photo by Martin Bough, courtesy RW Work, Ltd.

Bob had several archivists over the years before me, so my role was hardly new, though I did approach it differently. His first archivist was Robyn Brentano, who was an early member of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the performance troupe that he founded to realize his works from 1968 to 1975. She collected documentation of all the ensemble works from that period, which are difficult to conjure in a modern theatrical context. The Byrds, culled from people he met in his life and not necessarily “professional” actors, were then in residence at 147 Spring Street, the loft that Bob shared with choreographer Andy De Groat, his partner at the time, just a couple of blocks up from Donald Judd’s home and studio at 101 Spring Street and many other Soho artist lofts. Bob named the troupe after Bird Hoffman, a Waco artist whose movement therapy was helpful to him; as a young person, he had a language processing disorder, and her slowing down of his movements mitigated his stutter. A side note: the nonprofit arm of Bob’s work was the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, founded in 1969 as a 501(c)3 in the State of New York, which became the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation after the Watermill Center opened to the public in 2006.

The cataloging of works was tied to a re-processing effort for the entirety of the production records, which were previously split up and organized by type of document. Collating them seemed imperative on its own, but would also yield metadata that Deb and I could use for the digital archives and library project, titled the Library of Inspiration. Deb had been hired for this initiative a year or so earlier; Bob wanted to build an underground library and performance space at the Watermill Center, a desire that could be traced back at least as far as a scuttled Paul Thek underground exhibition space/chapel called 13 Stations (which itself borrows a name from the video works Stations and Video 13). Rightly, Deb saw no rational reason to build a subterranean library and archive in the swampy, sandy soil of Long Island—a conservation and construction nightmare—and reimagined the project as a digital interface that would, through like metadata, bring together siloed areas such as Bob’s art collection, archives, Watermill event documentation, and the 10,000 volume research library. This was eventually rolled out in 2017 and in 2024 a significant redesign was begun (mostly due to the sunsetting of our off-the-shelf digital asset management system). Much of my interaction with year-round artist residents was to connect them with this resource, and perfecting an artist-centered approach to information and library reference within the Watermill universe.

Involved in all of this (and as you can imagine it is the tip of the iceberg) is a hell of a lot of trust. Given the fact that Bob was constantly working on productions, many of which drew from elements in previous works, organization and clarity were incredibly important. Bob was a visual thinker and a lot of things that he recalled about certain productions were images or sequences of images from the stage. Depending on how well a work had been documented, these images may look quite different from what he had in his mind. The archives had to be the next best thing to Bob’s own brain as a repository for information, and responsiveness was key since the ability to have an answer at one’s fingertips in a staging situation was imperative. The role was sort of like a combination of a PR archivist and a scholarly, institutional archivist (which was and remains my bent), given that a vast historical imprint was at equal play with consistent, sharp visual documentation of current projects. Not only did one have to know Bob’s work but also a significant amount regarding his collaborators, a vast network of visual artists, dancers, actors, musicians, theater makers, writers, and even scientists instrumental in the making of Bob’s multivalent world.

What appealed to me very quickly was not only the fact that his network consisted of so many artists I was already interested in, but that Bob’s early pieces were so difficult to conceive of unless one was there. For example, the 168-hour continuous play KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia Terrace: a story about a family and some people changing, from 1972. This was a continuous performance that took place outside of Shiraz, Iran during the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Art and involved the Byrd Hoffman players as well as local Iranians. Part of the piece took place in old Persepolis—images of Andy De Groat spinning next to a reflective pool are etched in my mind—and another part unfolded on the steppes of Haft Tan Mountain (on which Bob hoped to mount a huge explosion, which thankfully never occurred). Parts of his 1971 silent opera Deafman Glance were woven in as well; Deafman had put Bob on the international theater map, and encouraged Louis Aragon to publish a letter to the deceased André Breton proclaiming Wilson as the heir apparent to midcentury French surrealists.

Coming from free movement sessions and practices in the Spring Street loft, Bob and the Byrds developed a suite of silent operas that unfolded starting in 1968 with the King of Spain (which opened at the Anderson Theater in New York), followed by The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Deafman, KA MOUNTAIN and the condensed 24 hour Overture, and finally 1973’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. Each of these pieces was unique but they shared scenes, sections and images, like recurring moments and characters in a continuous but variable dreamland. Though I could only experience these works through archival documentation and arrangement, I was utterly fascinated by them. Who is this Black woman sitting immobile onstage with a stuffed raven on her arm? Why is this man constantly running back and forth? Who are these silver people holding giant panes of glass? Is that a card game unfolding amidst these strange actions? These works weren’t exactly Happenings but they opened up another related field of time-based and semi-dedifferentiated activity. You get the idea.

Bob always had a knack for gathering people around him to generate works that were beyond comprehension. Even though with Einstein on the Beach he began using “professional actors” on some level, that wasn’t a hard and fast rule and as I witnessed, if you were trustworthy, creative, and could commit to the work, it was entirely feasible that you could be part of the “thing.” But the Byrds were a special micro-community of artists and free thinkers and I was able to meet a number of them over the years, as well as witness their activities through an archival lens. Like those who passed through the summer residency, many of the Byrds stayed in touch and worked together long after the collective ceased its formal existence. In addition to the aforementioned Brentano and De Groat, the Byrds included people like dancer-actor Sheryl Sutton, poet and visual artist Christopher Knowles, musician-composers Michael Galasso and Alan Lloyd, playwright Jim Neu and his wife, actor Carol Mullins, poet Stefan Brecht, visual artists Paul Thek, Ann Wilson (no relation to Bob), and Gordon Matta-Clark, performance artists Richie Gallo and Cindy Lubar Bishop, filmmaker Jack Smith, choreographer Kenneth King, and costume designer John D’Arcangelo. Of course, this list just scratches the surface of all who were involved and their contributions went beyond any specific artistic medium.

Christopher Knowles lego installation at the Watermill Center, 2022, photo by the author.

Getting to be in the same space as someone like Christopher Knowles was an incredibly deep experience; he’d started working with Bob in 1973, when The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Bob had been given a tape of the teenage Chris reading one of his poems, a systemic audiopoem and sound work called “Emily Likes the TV,” and was interested in meeting him. Chris’s mother brought him to the opening night of Stalin where, after some deliberation about how to include him, Bob began the play by reciting a line from “Emily Likes the TV” onstage. Chris and Bob unfolded the poem’s patterns and this became a part of the work. Soon after, Chris was brought into the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds and was probably Bob’s most consistent creative partner for over fifty years. I would drive Chris to and from Watermill in the summers, packing a rented SUV full of his legos, Simon Says electronic games, alarm clocks, paints, markers, and canvases, as he was a de facto resident of the ISP. Chris is deeply into music and a record collector; classic rock radio and talking about the hits was a staple of the drives to and from Long Island. Once we arrived, I’d watch as Chris installed his objects, paintings, and sculptures in the Center. Part of his practice as an emerging artist in the 1970s was the creation of list poems—top 100 song lists, or mapping Manhattan vertically street by street, even diagramming people he knew in terms of couples and breakups. These were typewritten and could emerge as extremely long scrolls, some of them in abstract patterns without obvious textual reference (some are collected in the 1979 publication Typings, released by poet and publisher Annabel Lee’s Vehicle Editions). Knowles’ texts served as part of the libretto for Einstein on the Beach and were incorporated into a number of Bob’s operas.

Though I was based out of New York and the office and archives were in the flower district, I would go out to Water Mill for stretches of the summer. The Center was where Bob and his collaborators lived, surrounded by selections from his 8,000-piece art collection in a building occupying the former site of a Western Union telecommunications facility, with forested grounds into which artists would insert themselves, creating sound, performance, and visual installations that made the summer benefit a dreamlike and dissonant experience. As you can imagine, with archival materials in the City while I occupied whatever real estate on the island I could, summer wasn’t easy. No matter, if I couldn’t bring materials out for Bob to examine, I was put to work landscaping, preparing communal meals, or running production errands. At the time I found it frustrating as it was outside of a defined “role,” but gradually I understood that this flexibility and variety was a significant part of the machine that fulfilled whatever the situation needed. The ISP wasn’t exactly like the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds though it wasn’t far off, either—there were return collaborators, frequent visitors, and staff involvement each summer, as we all added in where we could, ensuring this crazy thing got off the ground. Yes, it raised money for the Center’s yearly operating budget but it also fed into Bob’s art, which he workshopped during the last few weeks of the summer, ironing out components of future works with summer participants and collaborators.

Over the years Bob and curator Noah Khoshbin showed appreciation for my dedication to experimental and improvised music. For the Center’s open house in August, Discover Watermill Day, I was invited to present saxophonist Michael Foster and percussionist Ben Bennett in 2018 and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and bassist Luke Stewart in 2019, both duos occupying forested space on the west side of the grounds. I recall Bob asking me to ensure that pine needles were clearly placed in a white wooden triangle on the forest floor, in which Foster and Bennett played. At the time, clearing leaf litter didn’t feel particularly necessary, but it made the space “pop” and the musicians, in white lab coats, looked well staged as they belted out and explored sonic possibilities en plein air. In 2020, days before the COVID-19 lockdown, Foster and Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking) performed a set of electroacoustic improvisation in Bob’s Chelsea studio, followed by a live interview which I conducted. The audience was a healthy mix of Bob followers (less keyed into noise) and noise fans who didn’t really know Bob. The studio, which also housed a small study library, is filled with art from Oceania, Latin America, long tables and chairs from dynastic China, Inuit sculptures, Shaker furniture, and works by Paul Thek and John Cage as well as Bob himself.

In 2022, for the summer benefit, STAND, I brought pianist Matthew Shipp, guitarist Ava Mendoza, and violist Joanna Mattrey to the Center and on the grounds, interspersed with visual and time-based art and the Center’s landscape, each performed solo. Shipp was on a raised platform on the west lot, and his performance crescendoed as participants lifted Tsubasa Kato’s wooden boat-like sculpture skyward—a one-time interaction between the pianist and a work of visual art made kinetic through crowd collectivity. Mendoza and Mattrey were staged among ceremonial stones in the forest, shredding as attendees milled through the woods. Bob isn’t generally associated with free music but he knew and worked with multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry and saxophonist Dickie Landry. Cherry was a regular at the Byrd loft, playing flute amidst movement workshops, and was part of the ensemble for the 1988 work Cosmopolitan Greetings. I remember Bob being quite shocked when he learned I was a huge fan of Don and his music. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy’s Futurities, the opera he composed (with set designs by painter Kenneth Noland) was among many works proposed to Bob by various experimental musicians, and they stayed in touch. Another interesting connection: though logistical challenges precluded Ornette Coleman contributing new music to 1433: The Grand Voyage, Coleman’s friendship with Dickie Landry resulted in an excerpt of “Theme from a Symphony” being used in the opera—spry exuberance that curiously fits within the context of a 15th century epic.

Shipp at Watermill in 2022, photo by the author.

It might be worthwhile to ask why I’m no longer with the Foundation and why I stopped working for Bob. Obviously as complex and sometimes fraught as the relationship was, I loved Bob and his work dearly and accomplished a ton over the years I was at Byrd Hoffman. As a result of the pandemic, the New York offices closed and the archives were moved into the Center. With a new residency building constructed next door, modeled after a Shaker barn, the former artist dorms were converted into a study center, which fit a large portion of the physical records in one location. By the beginning of 2021 I had moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley, meaning that commuting from my home to a site about 4 hours away was unfeasible and though some of my job could be done remotely, not enough of it to make telecommuting a solution—plus, as an archivist, one wants to physically engage with the materials and their tangible context, even if one works “digitally.” My job was passed on, in part, to another individual and now I have a related position with an arts institution upstate. I last spoke with Bob around the winter of 2024-2025 and had no idea that he’d be gone half a year later.

It’s not always possible to say goodbye and to honor someone for what they’ve done for your life, but knowing of the lasting influence they’ve had, as well as putting the work in on behalf of their legacy does count for something. It’s hard to quantify Bob’s impact on my approach though a deeper awareness of theater and Downtown performance felt like the missing piece in my understanding of postwar art and music. I don’t make art, I’m not a lighting designer, actor, dancer, or costume designer and don’t move particularly slowly; these are areas one could see an obvious visual connection. But one thing Bob often imparted that stuck with me was the dictum that “the purpose of art is to ask questions—to ask ‘what is it?’” Visually and otherwise, what moves me is that which feels undefinable rather than what operates within certain abstract but specific parameters. If it takes work to make sense of what something is, that can be a profound experience and doesn’t necessarily mean that its immediate impact is mitigated—Bob’s vision has a gestalt but is open to a myriad of interpretations. Thank you, Bob, for changing my life.

What you’ll find on this particular Substack will be observations about creative work, music and otherwise, that I enjoy and think more people should know about as well as occasional concert listings for the “So, What Do You Think?” series I’ve been running since 2022 at Tubby’s in Kingston, New York. So far in 2025 we’ve had Joe McPhee and Mike Faloon read and do a talkback from the McPhee memoir Straight Up Without Wings; Bark Culture with Blue Lake and Ezra Feinberg; and the trio of William Hooker, Alan Braufman, and James Brandon Lewis celebrating the release of A Time/Within, archival recordings of Hooker, Braufman, and David S. Ware from 1977. The next concert is on November 11 and details will be here (and elsewhere).

I still have a website that is probably overdue for a redesign. On that website you will find a list of some of the publications I’ve written for, projects I’ve been involved with (including my 2023 book Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt), and a number of interviews with musicians.

As far as paid (cheap!) subscriber content I am planning to roll that out shortly and will keep folks apprised of what that entails – probably longer form pieces or interviews that don’t quite fit anywhere else, as well as the usual Substack perks of commentary and archival access. Watch this space.

More soon,

Clifford

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Creative musicians born on this day, August 20:

Jack Teagarden (1905-1964), trombone

Frank Rosolino (1926-1978), trombone

Jimmy Raney (1927-1995), guitar

Enrico Rava (b. 1939), trumpet and flugelhorn

Milford Graves (1941-2021), drums

Michael Sell (b. 1942), trumpet

Jiggs Whigham (b. 1943), trombone

Terry Clarke (b. 1943), drums

Kenneth Terroade (b. 1944), tenor saxophone and flute

John Clayton (b. 1952), contrabass

Reto Weber (b. 1953), percussion