DIATOMACEOUS EARTH
Muistardeaux Collective embarks on a new recording, video, painting, and poetry project called Deeper into Jazz. Here we will chronicle the various ways we approach the cool together and apart. more soon. who has time to blog. non
We want to play instruments for expression.
Much can be said about sides of the brain and various forms of communication and thought. We are two who talk to one another often about an inexpressible “thing” or “essence”. This is why we turn to music. Here, we express things to one another with the freedom of subjective interpretation where one player can glean the essence of the anothers input even, and especially, if the result is something completely unexpected by the participants. Here is where we can create something new and larger than our logical minds can comprehend. By turning presenting it to an audience, the process can potentially begin anew. This is the function of art, for it requires a viewer, listener, and feeler. . Muistardeaux Collective was initially attracted to jazz for its complete freedom, a freedom we have since realized is steeped in tradition, skill, and countless hours of practice. At first, we were able to insert a jazz noise here and there and pleasured in slipping the surly bounds of craft. We learned that this is not what makes music great, no matter how experimental or post post post post post experimental we think it may be. Music has logic. Music is inherently logical. What excites us is the developing of skill to produce a logical sound under the auspices of making new music in the moment.
The predicament of the contemporary musician is the same as it always has been-create the future by using the tools of the past and present. With the proliferation of the internet and by creating squarely in the information age, the artist today is responsible for everything that is occurring world wide.
we are musicians. it would be wonderful if an audience digs what we do. We do not try to create music that is unlistenable. We are not an 80′s cover band seeking to entertain an audience for pay.
Our music is real time synthesis of our experience of living. In it, we are able to bring experience into the musical parameter that we are creating.
in 2012, human beings are compromised at best, and incapable at worst of pure creation. Thinkers are far too inundated with “knowledge” and, thereby beholden to reference,to achieve an honest creative gesture except by unconscious, subconscious, or semi conscious means. For this reason, We continue to investigate the the potential of improvisation, chance, and mystery. Information is in rapid flux…
We want to communicate with honesty.
We are a band working together 600 miles apart. That’s not easy, but it can be if with the proper frame of mind. Ideas are important and the expansion of them through the process of creation and destruction with trust is revelatory. The name of our band is Diatomaceous Earth.
Things get messier when we try to play with words. They also get less messy, see what I mean? Sometimes while you’re looking for the best way to say something, your daughter walks right out the front door with no shirt on.
Muistardeaux played jazz the other night. These guys have been playing together for a while – Barry Hutcherson is on drums (Bobby Hutcherson’s son), John Engle on bass and a guy named Chris on guitar. They get together in John’s garage studio most Thursdays from around 630-830p, which is a great time frame. Another group of guys that I have jammed with – they are more of a partying and jamming group of guys – also play on Thursdays in a pretty killer studio shack but they start at 10pm, which is too late for me these days. Barry, John and Chris don’t party, they just get together and play and talk some and play some more. They have been wanting to add a horn or keyboard or preferably someone who could play both. I don’t play keyboards at all I assured them. On tenor sax I was also probably going to be in a little over my head but thought I’d be able to keep up and occasionally give them something interesting. The basic score of the night is that I was in over my head and didn’t give them much interestingness. Or maybe I did, but I had the acute feeling of using up all my riffs and atonal stuff – something Anthony Torres called mixolydian or Middle Eastern or something like that but it’s not mixolydian at all – about halfway through the first tune. After that I was holding on and playing softer than a horn player really should. I was also sweating and my head got tired. There’s a distinct Muistardeauxism that I think characterizes the way that we make art and play music. It’s an intuitive freedom, a loose but informed expression. When it’s flowing it flows big and colorfully. But with jazz we can’t really even put that into play until there’s a certain baseline capacity that’s already been met. Maybe that’s not true but it feels right now like it is so it must be right now. So we’re practicing our scales and arpeggios every day. And we have tried to play along to Jaco Pastorius and Bob Mintzer on YouTube. I chugged an organic Root Beer at John’s after we finished playing and I don’t drink soda.
It is perhaps presumptuous to claim absolutes when it comes to the human condition and our raison d’etre here on Earth. But it is hard to identify anything more important than communication, with other people, with ourselves and with the Earth itself. It is what creates and resolves conflict, it forges connections, and it brings joy and anguish and ultimately peace. With that peace comes the potential for an elemental love. This is where we as artists have come to music, and specifically jazz, as the primal and timeless vehicle of communication. Jazz allows the simultaneous “now” of both personal and collaborative expression. It challenges us to follow one another while stepping out into our own new territories in the moment every moment. Music in general makes this possible, but there are things inherent in jazz that blow the “now” up to giant step proportions. David Bowie once said that he hated touring because he just couldn’t get around the fact that he was playing the same songs every night. With jazz, every time you play the music is potentially being reinvented. Every time you play your own boundaries are potentially being demolished and redrawn with glory, as are the connections between you and your fellow players. You are speaking a never before language on the spot and using it immediately to communicate with each other. In the finest of moments, you are understanding everything about each other. And even in the hardest of moments, you are always a half-step away from the potential for grand resolution and love.
John Coltrane would often take 45 minute solos just to find the “it” that the moment was presenting, but the “it” is happening at all times. We can play the same song night after night and that it will be different every time. It’s not something ordained by the composer or the soloist or the rhythm section, it’s something created alchemically by all of these elements and the air and the fire and water and the rotation of the Earth and the planets and the universe and whatever contains the universe and beyond. This is why we play jazz and why Diotomaceous Earth tunes to 432hz. We’re also working on a new vocal song right now.
The challenges of being a student of the arts differ little from those of a student of mathematics or science. Despite the latter having more empirical backing, all students must forge ahead with the capacity to challenge any previously accepted notion of the “truth” when it appears insufficient or failing. That knowledge is vast and tangled is an accepted fact and to date, irrefutable. Upon engaging the tangle of any knowledge system, the student must indeed proceed not only with humility but a healthy doss of skepticism as well. Its all hypothesis yall. We met KD Lang yesterday. She is a nice person and an artist we respect.
We are reading Patti Smith’s book “Just Kids”. It’s a soulful story of her complicated but unmitigated relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe – more than anything, it’s a loving elegy to him and his impact on her life. But throughout the book we are reminded of how inbred and silly much of the art world is from bottom to top. People helping, screwing, seeking, fucking, eating, crapping, gazing, loving, hating, shooting, celebrating, creating and destroying each other inside an incestuous insider’s world. With minimal contact with the world at large, the inbreeding creates a vicious cycle of DNA aberration that ultimately swallows and consumes. It’s little wonder many artists are in such a painful state of neurosis and intense pressure. Who is the audience?
Excerpts from Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodic Manifesto: “Communism, socialism, capitalism, and monarchy in the world (have) and are changing for a truer relationship of the democracy of the individual. Every person who has had a democratic experience by birth or by passport knows there are no hatred or enemies in democracy, because everyone is an individual. Learning, doing, being, are the conversationship for perfecting, protecting, and caring of the belief in existence as an individual in relationship to everyone, physically, mentally, spiritually — the concept of self. —I play pure emotion —In music, the only thaing that matters is whether you feel it or not —Chords are just the name for sounds, which really need no names at all, as names are sometimes confusing —People don’t realize it, but there is a real folklore music in jazz. It’s neither black nor white. it’s the mixture of the races, and folklore has come from it. —Blow what you feel – anything. Play the thought, the idea in yoru mind – Break away from the convention and stagnation – escape! —People have forgotten how beautiful it is to be natural. Even in love.”
Listening to Sun Ra’s “Jazz in Silhouette” and thinking nature and the world and God and the spirits and jazz and cool cats and loving this. Love and a lot of other things
We cant tell if Stanley Crouch is a genius or a conservative Marsalis Matinee. Here is a excerpt from his 1986 essay “On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis” The contemporary Miles Davis, when one hears his music or watches him perform, deserves the description that Nietzsche gave of Wagner, “the greatest example of self-violation in the history of art”. Davis made much fine music for the first half of his professional life, and represented for many the uncompromising Afro-American artist contemptuous of Uncle Tom, but he has fallen from grace-and been celebrated for it. As usual, the fall from grace has been a form of success. Desperate to maintain his position at the forefront of modern music, to sustain his financial position, and to be admired for the hipness of his purported innovations, Davis turned butt to the beautiful in order to genuflect before the commercial. Genuflect:
I dunno, I really like On the Corner, Bitches Brew, and Aura. More than Birth of the Cool. So What???
Muistardeaux Collective is ranchsitting on the Northern California coast and thinking about the relationship connection between nature and human and jazz. There is an understanding of responsibility, care and exchange. There is a fluidity of movement that goes with the unexpected and moves. Man is nature and the nature is the music.
Fanfare for the Warriors, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago -this has been a pretty tough record for us. We have put it on several times, skipped around a bit, but never got all the way through it. We shall try again because there are some really amazing passages in this record. The thing that throws us is the very thing that captivates us in other recordings. In A Love Supreme, John Coltrane’s masterpiece, the human voice is mesmerizing and borderline psychedelic. Here, with AEC, we find the voice to be disruptive. From what we know of AEC, they are way into bringing this shit to and from Afrika, and in doing so have to use the voice. ok. If we were writing this for the Village Voice, our editor would have a cow because we aren’t saying much and we haven’t listened extensively, but alas this is just a hack jazz blog read by us and a guy that used to play in my band. and you! Decent! Hopefully, a good few listens will produce a worthwhile review of Fanfare. We feel there is alot in there for us. Now back to the easy listening jazz of Stanley Crouch. We love you Stanley-we put the us in trust baby.
Eating crow. We knew this album was going to be good because it has been giving us so much trouble. We bought it on an educated whim having always like the use of the word Art in the name of the group. We knew too that these were some crazy avant garde free jazz dudes that specialized in cacophony; and, we have always held a lazy interest in Afrikan mythology because we suspect that is where real Soul ultimately comes from. Understanding this style of music has admittedly been a challenge for us. So, we tried again-and this time with much success. Fanfare for the Warriors was recorded in Chicago in September 1973. It consists of seven songs that we will discuss briefly now. The first sound on the record is the human voice saying the title of the lead track “Illistrum”. The Ensemble then immediately lunches into a free form of bells, whistles, comic horns beeping and honking, sometimes whining for almost two minutes until a beat slowly emerges providing a vehicle for saxophonist Joseph Jarman’s recitation of the myth poem that shares a name with the song. Very quickly: this song features a bass saxophone! “Barnyard Scuffle Shuffle” holds off on its powerful swing for a melancholy piano introduction that moves proudly through its sadness. The melody is beautiful and pure until it is utterly assaulted by a hard thirty seconds of jazz noise until it all drops at once and the band is swinging its way through a lively blues shuffle. We suspect this is a Chicago Shuffle, dont know the difference yet. The bass figure sounds like a tuba and sits high in the mix until the horn section cooks the swing until its done. Great song. After such a nicely resolved tune the band blasts out a staccato horn and drum section echoing the fastest “call and response” you ever heard in”Nonaah”. The piano then shelters us from the firestorm with an introspective yet manic interlude. There are some very beautiful notes in here played by guest pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. The piano here is the only rhythmic anchor as the drums roll this way and that. We found the title track to be the most challenging. It features overblown, almost tortured horns, and the feel is quite chaotic-the horns screaming at and indicting the listener. This song is indeed a battle cry of the righteous oppressed, but lets not talk about politics here k? The tunes makes us dizzy and finalizes our psychology with a very large and very low chord from the piano. This one chord informs the almost eight minutes of music that preceded it. After all of the screaming, the Art Ensemble gingerly poses the question “What’s to Say”, easily the most happy sounding tune on the record. The song opens with piccolo, flute, and percussion that collectively usher in change. This song sounds like spring-full of hope and renewal. The bowed bass and low notes from the piano rumble along as the song comes to a close. War is over if you want it. “Tnoona” is the stand out track for us. This strikingly original number features a sax part that is entirely the sound of the players breath moving in and out, inhale and exhale, of the instrument. The effect is that of traveling the vastness of space-stars and other celestial debris whirring around us on all sides. The other horn parts (including several saxophones) do sound notes but they are heavily breathed through as well. Stark beauty this, the piano tinkles and twinkles away amidst a bass line that rumbles, machine-like and urban from station to station and on into the dark night. We love this tune and feel that its the highest point in the record. But dont skip to this track, its majesty and intrigue is dependent on what happens before… Surprisingly, Fanfare for the Warriors ends with a typical straight ahead jazz form that incorporates a Latin bridge section and some New Orleans piano work. We like the song and the arrangement is sophisticated but we were curious about why it was included here. Until the vocals come in. The entire group sings in unison but with different timbres and vocal abilities. What a save! We can hear here that this song may have influenced the vocal styling of Andre 3000 form the contemporary hip hop group Outkast. Go on and marinate on that for a while. This is a great and challenging achievement. Our persistence paid off with one of our most enriching listening experiences in a good while. This recording was made possible by a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts.
What is nature and what is it doing? Chaos and harmony and everything else are bringing life to bear. There is no confusion, only everything all at once sharing and taking. It poses so many questions that where do you begin is just that, where do you begin. It also says just begin and don’t fart around with it, or yes fart around with it. We wonder why jazz has typically been most virile in the cities rather than in rural areas. Bucolics rather than alcoholics. Nature in the raw is what its getting into, isn’t it? We think there is simply something more exposing in the city man and more exposed. But we also wonder if that’s kind of a stupid thing to say. We are man and therefore we should have something to say. Shoulds coulds mean nothing. Hey holler and shout and scream and coo and oooh and do it all with balls of blue on the Champs Elysee. Fire and water too, swinging. Sloppy yes but tight as shit. Get loosey goosey power. YES!!!!!!
Man we havent even gotten through ten percent of the stuff we aim to, yet this question is bugging us: What to do with fusion? Stanley Crouch says to toss it out with the bath water. And, listening to the Weather Report on the radio this morning made us want to agree with him (Jaco Pastorious is this weeks Artist in the Spotlight on Portlands Listener Supported Jazz radio station KMHD). This Weather Report song, Birdland, was their big hit and man it sucked, like television music or something. So we guess we will look into it a bit, but where to start? Return to Forever? Maybe we will ask Jeff Lorber the next time we see him.
First up, the Chicago Shuffle. The Texas Shuffle differs from the Chicago Shuffle only by one note in the Snare drum pattern. With the Swing shuffle, the right hand plays a Jazz Ride Pattern and keeps the same Snare drum figure as the Texas shuffle. Now the Half Time Shuffle is probably the one mostly used in modern music. And last but not least, the Steve Gadd Shuffle with two bass drum variations. The right hand plays quarter notes on the Ride or Hi-hat and the left foot always plays the third triplet. And also last but not least, the classic Bernard Purdie half-time shuffle groove appears on the Steely Dan tune, Home At Last, from their 1977 album release, Aja (MCA Records).
“Learn the principle, abide by the principle, and dissolve the principle.” – Bruce Lee
We are tired and feeling out of shape. We finally go ride our 10-speed into the wind and when we see a girl riding her bike ahead of us on the road we push harder and blow by her and then keep pushing harder. There is no substitute for work. If we work, we will produce something. If we work harder then we will produce something else. And if we push ourselves past the usual and into another part of us that is somewhere closer to our limits, then we will start to produce things that are ours and only ours. Bruce Nauman once said that he wanted to make art that got straight to it like a punch in the face. Really? Then quit bouncing around on your tiptoes in your studio and playing with face paints. Smart and original for the time, yes. Punch in the face? Maybe if you punch like Judy Chicago.
Most art is referential, meaning it approximates something else, sometimes in a very abstract way and sometimes in a more literal way. Schoppenhauer famously wrote that music was the only art that was wholly non-referential. In one way, he is correct. Music itself is simply music and not referring to anything else worldly. However, so much of music is referential to other music. Where is folk without Woody Guthrie? Where is classical music as we know it without Mozart or Haydn? Rock & roll without Rush? And yet music, like all art, bellows the gospel of absolute freedom and expression. Absolute freedom comes with mastery. Learn the principle, abide by the principle, dissolve the principe. Create your own language and sing it.
We’ve been exploring free jazz with the expectation that this is where we are going as we delve deeper into jazz. We know there are plenty of excellent bebop and post-bebop jazz players out there and we know that we are probably not going to be two of them. Free jazz promises just that – freedom! But even free jazz has its tropes – honking horns explosive and spasmodic, disregard for formal chord progressions or even chords at all, tempos gone wild, an Afromythology here, an Astralpsychodelia there. A potential cliche born every moment.
This brings us, or not, to Cecil Taylor. We’ve been aware of him for a while but haven’t ever delved into his music at all. Now we have and we need a much bigger shovel than we ever imagined before. To call Cecil Taylor a master feels insufficient and genius is a word overused. The quick and easy is Taylor is a monster of vision, narrative, technique, passion, philosophy and expression. He absolutely pounds the ivories. After listening to his music we suspect we are in over our head trying to learn from him at this point in our development but now that we have opened the CT box we can’t put him back in. It’s down the hole and up into an expanded world of thinking about jazz. He has said in interviews that he doesn’t even think the word means anything. Which is almost the same, but not, as saying it means everything.
Where to begin with CT? We listened to a handful of his better known albums – Cecil Taylor Unit, Unit Structures, Nefertiti, Silent Tongues – and got a mouthful every time we hit play. There’s a lot of stuff going on, all at once, from every range and angle. His ensemble compositions are very dense and overwhelming, with every instrument going very hard. His solo work is also dense, complicated and overwhelming, but here we felt that we could at least have direct unfettered access to what Taylor and his music are doing. We chose to review “Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)”, a solo album recorded live in 1973 in Austria. The performance included all of his “Silent Tongues” composition (his first monumental live recording) and what is listed as two encores but actually sounds like one epilogue movement. We selected “Air” over “Silent” because a) it was recorded in an Austrian castle; and b) we’re really into nature jazz right now so we liked the title better.
PART ONE The first few minutes are somewhat pensive in fits and bursts establishing some themes in the lower keys. There are barely audible moans from the pianist humming along with the melodies. He’s playing some pretty, sometimes even quirky lines, but with a consistent bass line that offsets any clear happy chords – majors? – with darker tones. Then after five minutes he takes off. His point counterpoint comes from multiple directions, we as listeners are kept off balance continuously. Right when you think you are able to lock into a line or theme it jumps off the ledge into a cascade. There are lots of cascades.
At 8:30 Taylor launches into what we were about to call “a new key introducing a new theme” but we have no idea if he has been in a specific key and we are quickly losing track of themes. We are unhinged and settling in to simply listen. The music is becoming visual ups and downs and stairsteps and round arcs and chutes and ladders. There are moments of frenetic up and down energy and then sometimes just a flash of tender beauty before frenzy again. But this is no random frenzy. We have no idea what he is playing but it is very deliberate and precise.
At 16:00 there is a new theme in the middle register that is cinematic, with continuous accents from the very lower and very upper ranges of the keyboards. Taylor sets off some runs by leaving them naked with no left hand bass bed. This causes an abrupt change in musical personality that makes us feel that we are in the middle of a passionate discussion slipping from exhaltation to argument to proclamation. There is no waver in anything being said, even when the tension and dynamics are more relaxed and those moments are few and far between. Every time we are tempted to use the word “atonal” or “dissonance” we suspect these words mean nothing here. Somewhere around 28:00 the music gets even more muscular and flashes beefy visuals before our eyes. This is cinematic stuff with a wildly passionate narrative that weak-kneed critics might call oversaturated. Anthony Lane would love this movie.
At 32:30 Taylor comes as close as he has yet to playing a riff that we recognize as “jazzy” and he tosses it back and forth for a few minutes between left and right hand chromatic cascades that escalate into a veritable cavalcade. Then they abruptly resolve on a recognizable chord of all things before running up the walls and through the roof. Taylor is breathing hard and singing with his alter-egos that are both battling and making love to each other. Listening to this is to bear witness to a very deep and entirely exposed exploration of something we suspect is very profound. It’s undecipherable and we don’t care; understanding this language is unnecessary. 39:45 things change direction and we are briefly in a quiet dark alleyway in between our last canyon and the next volcano. Just before 43:00 the left and right hands are playing with and off each other rhythmically and tonally in a totally new way and this lasts just enough for us to consider before the right hand takes off and challenges the left to respond. At 44:10 there is applause.
PART TWO Again we start in the lower register, in some fits and bursts, but a primary theme is recognizable. The cinematic personality is even more pronounced in this part, like the score to Halloween if Halloween were a silent film drunk with adrenaline. By the time we finish writing that sentence the music scolds us for our simplicity, but the theme remains. And then it is joined by a recurrent left hand theme that hammers and keeps the question marks flying. Left hand and right hand are now in constant conversation with loud yelling at some points and confident statements – less loud but never below a mezzo forte at their calmest. There is lots of ffortissimo here and pounding the keys never sounded so at home. At 12:00 Taylor hands are at the very extremes of the keyboard but they somehow find the time and space to jump into the middle and provide the moderates’ input. The continuous point-counterpoint sounds like words and sentences at times and at others like purely visceral messages unfettered by the conventions of language. He said she said we all said everything is said – this is exquisite storytelling!
A flashing riff tantalizes at 15:47 and we can almost picture Taylor shimmy in his seat. Then at 17:25 the left hand lays down a bed of tumbling stones and the right hand sings his heart out and for a moment we relax into a what feels like love and laughter or at least a great second date and laughter. The right hand almost returns the favor a few minutes later but the bed never really is a bed and the left never gets to wax. Taylor isn’t much for soliloquies. Just when we feel like we are getting tired of the relentless conversation, beautiful chords in mezzo piano lure us back in. They don’t get the stage themselves, the left and right hands still have lots to say, but we appear to be approaching a later stage of concession and acceptance. The chords at 27:00 are beautiful and in another world that might be surprising but it is not here. By now we know that Taylor is capable of anything and we have no expectations. This final four minutes is simply a pleasure.
“Air Above Mountains” was a holistic revelation for us. This is astonishing music unlike what we have heard before and how it made us feel and react was entirely new. The music is in constant flux, constant movement, a vital river filled with riffles and rapids and swirling eddies. More on what all this means later because we aren’t quite sure yet.
“I know how to practice.” – Cecil Taylor
what is swing?
What the fuck did tighe o'shannon do for me? He was nice to me sometimes and told me that we are true brothers, always complemented me on elizbeth and went on about what a beauty she is and a nice girl. and tom on his sax. he and tom got along great. i felt annoyed with him after the first year. Tom sees the charm still. i don't maybe I'm closed minded or a nazi homophobe. strange but none of it felt too genuine ah that s not true. I went to the truck almost every time i was in SF. he's one of those friends that a good in small doses. cant take him in. not what jesus would have done, but jesus doesn't owe child support. i hate that i have to go through such an intense moral dilemma scenario often with Tighe. Is this because he is my moral compass? To my knowledge Tighe has never lied to me, and I don't think that he is a liar. Does he make me so crazy because I am a liar? or at least because I have stood in a church or a heart shape and promised to someone that I would love them forever. I wasn't making an informed decision.
So why then is Tighe a lightning rod for my sins. OMFG! is he Jesus? my lord and saviour??? Some where in my psyche and for what ever reason, I must hold him in such a place. I don't understand this. Everyone says he means no harm, but my feelings sure did get hurt a lot, so much so that i shut er down, and resigned myself to my boring house wife life, and the league, and these chairs that I will cover until company comes. Don't even get me started about Atsu.
Bottom line, and Tighe is a bottom line kinda a guy. Bottom line: He is a good person and a friend of mine, I am lucky to have known this true original that did exactly what he felt. I respect that and need more of it in my life. Money got me scared and a lot of loud sounds happened that made me jump.
Oh god i am a capitalist. i heard myself saying that i am enjoying this meal because i worked hard all day at my job to get it, because i am a responsible member of society. The problem with Tighe is that he is smart and strong and on the level. he could have had this dinner.
|
|
|
|
|
|