Entries associated with the tag "European jazz":

Last night I dropped the new reissue of Machine Gun by the Peter Brötzmann Octet into my CD player. It had been a few years since I listened to the 1968 album, an indisputable milestone in the history of both free jazz and European jazz, but it still hit me with the same abrasive, ear-cleaning force as the first time I heard it. The German label FMP released the album with some alternate takes on CD back in the early 90s, but it failed to distinguish which were the masters and which weren’t. The new edition, dubbed The Complete Machine Gun Sessions and released on John Corbett’s Unheard Music Series label, not only makes that distinction clear, but ups the ante by adding a live version of the title track recorded two months earlier at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival, with additional saxophonist Gerd Dudek. (This performance was previously issued on the UMS release by Brötzmann called Fuck De Boere). The packaging also includes some great photos taken during the time and new essays by Corbett and Brötzmann.

The personnel alone would guarantee this album’s importance—Brötzmann was joined by fellow reedists Evan Parker and Willem Breuker, drummers Han Bennink and Sven-Ake Johansson, bassists Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall, and pianist Fred Van Hove, some of the most towering figures in European jazz captured early in their careers. But the music itself is downright titanic, one of the most ferocious and simultaneously joyful examples of spontaneous expression ever recorded, pushing the screaming saxophone style of Albert Ayler well past the brink of volatility. Although “Machine Gun” was the nickname Don Cherry gave to Brötzmann, it also describes the staccato sax outburst that opens the piece, giving way to a scalding chaos, one brilliantly undercut by some post-R & B sax riffing here and there that was inspired by Lionel Hampton’s classic “Flying Home.” The other two pieces are just as relentless, channeling the same primal energy while mixing in discrete bits like the almost kwela-like section that intercedes Van Hove’s “Responsibility/For Jan Van De Ven.”

There have been loads of manic free jazz records made over the last four decades, but nothing has yet topped Machine Gun. Tomorrow is the reissue's official release date.    

One more thing: I apologize for being AWOL last week—a burst hot water heater is my main excuse—but I’m back in full effect.

Today’s playlist:

Louie Ramirez, Ali Baba (Fania)
Hobart Smith, Blue Ridge Legacy (Rounder)
X Plastaz, Maasai Hip Hop (Out Here)
Johnny Griffin, Blues for Harvey (Steeplechase)
Junio Barreto, s/t (Tratore)

An essay by British critic Stuart Nicholson caught my eye as I was leafing through the March 2007 issue of the British jazz magazine Jazzwise. It suggests that the days of American jazz musicians riding Europe’s gravy train may be coming to an end. Many American jazz musicians rely on the European circuit to make a living, but with the growing popularity of the European scene, which has forged its own take on jazz over the last couple of decades, Americans are finding fewer gigs, and promoters are beginning to balk at the fees demanded by their booking agents (to cover travel expenses and so forth).

Nicholson is the guy who ruffled a lot of feathers (and prompted a withering comeback by Kevin Whitehead in this paper) back in 2001 with a New York Times article (registration required)—which he also spun into a his contribution to the book The Future of Jazz—that essentially declared that American jazz was dead and that the future belonged to Europeans mixing electronica and jazz. So I paid my ten bucks and picked up the mag to read the new piece . . . which goes on to rehash his claim that virtually all American jazz is a nostalgic retread of hard bop. That irked me enough that I finally read his 2005 book, the ludicrously titled Is Jazz Dead (or Has it Moved to a New Address)?

The two of them together make me surer than ever that Nicholson—a veteran writer with nearly ten books to his credit—is a clueless hack. He’s been regurgitating this Europe vs. America spew for at least seven years now--just about every quote in the Jazzwise piece was from the book. The frequency of egregious factual errors in the book would be enough to discredit him: he says the great German bassist Peter Kowald was Dutch, he identifies French musique concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer as Paul Schaeffer, and he claims Chicagoan Ken Vandermark won a “Guggenheim Genius award” (meaning his MacArthur grant), among others.

Nicholson has created this trans-Atlantic battle using selective evidence, and his certainty that Europe is winning is bolstered by his deep ignorance of what’s really going on in the US. He prattles on about the negative consequences of Wynton Marsalis’s doctrinaire take on jazz and the homogenizing effects of American jazz education—both fair, if tired points—but he presents nothing else to support the idea that we're in a tailspin over here, and citing groups like the where-are-they-now jazz-house group St. Germain and the vacuous Swedish trio E.S.T. doesn’t exactly help his case that Europe is on fire. His conclusion is that American jazz is doomed unless the government starts subsidizing it, stat!  Since we know that ain’t gonna happen, we’ll just have to cross our fingers. America has managed to support a creative musical engine for a century without subsidies, and though I'd love to see piles of money given over to the arts, I think we’ll continue to manage OK without it.