The New Year Brings New Ears: Our Earth / Our World, A Musical Review by Kirpal Gordon

Peter Kuhn: alto & tenor sax, Bb clarinet

Dave Sewelson: baritone & sopranino sax

Larry Roland: bass

Gerald Cleaver: drums

purchase at www.pfmentum.com

Our Earth 25:22

Our World 12:36

It Matters 11:07

Our Earth / Our World is a quartet performance of three sound cycles “recorded on a brisk evening at the 2015 Arts for Art Festival,” according to Robert Bush’s excellent liner notes. Spring and all her glories and Stravinsky-esque rites---fertility, rain, eruption, migration, birth, joy, expansion, fruition, flow, resurrection, sacrifice, cleansing, emergence, explosion, manifestation, ascension---are certainly in the house on the opening number, “Our Earth.” Although reedmen Sewelson and Kuhn display agile improvisational duets “thriving on a riff” whose repetitions and variations turn into prismatic elegance against the steady heart pulse and groundswell of Roland and Cleaver, the saxophonists’ greater gifts are reserved for the less traditional sounds they play. Sewelson’s range on the baritone and sopranino sax evokes so many sounds of nature: of flight and fight, of waves and wind, of leaves blowing in tress and brooks overflowing their banks while Kuhn’s Bb clarinet runs and tenor sax work are wails to the Unknown expressing the inexpressible as Exodus, spider weave, “space for the Silence.” Indeed, these two downtown free-jazz masters, relieved of the 32 bar song structure, reveal structure in everything they undertake. 

This sensation of structure within structure only deepens when the horns lay out and Roland and Cleaver duet, delivering a bare-bone but kalediscopic pulse before Kuhn returns on tenor sax and Sewelson joins him on sopranino sax. I have the distinct experience that these four musicians are collectively celebrating our Earth as the source of our real nature and using their instruments, a product of civilization, to transport us to a pre- or post-civilized condition within ourselves.  The blended horn ending hit like waking up in the garden of Eden.

“Our World” opens with Cleaver rolling that multi-rhythmic voodoo on the drum kit. He’s simultaneously subtle and relentless---truly a force of nature.  By the time clarinet and sopranino arrive to spin call and answer refrains to Cleaver while Roland holds it down, the band has truly transported this listener to a new appreciation of our world.

“It Matters” features Roland out front with an extraordinary bass solo with some beautiful bowing that, like his peers on reeds, finds sounds, rhythms and harmonies that return the listener to the world of nature: whales, tides, swells, whirpools. Cleaver’s skills with cymbals add gravitas to the mix while Kuhn flies the skies on clarinet and Sewelson bends time with his bare hands and long tones. Yes, this is a return to our original nature. It is not music pointing at a portal; its music IS the portal. As bassist extraordinaire & AG scene mahker William Parker writes, “Veterans are in the house bringing in some of that old time religion. No time to experiment they know exactly where they are going into the unknown where pure creativity lives.”

Howard Mandel's Miles Ornette Cecil---Jazz Beyond Jazz: A Review by Kirpal Gordon

 



Miles Ornette Cecil---Jazz Beyond Jazz celebrates a brilliant marriage of form (you-are-there journalism) & content (free jazz). Reading Howard Mandel’s Faulkneresque sentences---& laughing aloud cheering scoffing making connections re-membering)---is so much like listening to the music he’s writing about. One feels one’s own initiation into a new way of listening as if one’s mind-skin could stretch to absorb every nuance. Like his three subjects, Mandel knows how to improvise & stand under the understanding at the gates of Eden.

 

As a young turk he honed his writing chops working the graveyard shift at Chicago’s Daily News, a gig that helped him develop his sinewy sentence style.  Like a horn player ‘shedding on long tones, this extra lung strengthened his many tiered thoughts on the New Thing & beyond. Even more so: by aligning his vision/mission as a critic/advocate with theirs as composers, he has created an open form with which to respond to an open form. By contrast, those of the more button-down rhetorical persuasion venture into the realm of free jazz with their just-the-facts-ma’am journalism & it’s all outside the event looking in. After all, what happens in a “composition” of Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor or even the later Miles Davis is up for grabs. They don’t “do it on the paper.” At times there may be a lead sheet, but the music is truly being composed as it is being played & it is being played by everyone all at once. This, of course, requires extreme confidence & a sense of presence in the performers; it’s high risk. To deliver it to readers, therefore, requires a reviewer willing to risk his own ego in the service of the music.

 

Whether he’s being charmed or chumped out of his own biases, Mandel brings to his thirty-plus-year relationship with the Big Three a beginner’s mind & a zesty participation mystique in the event. The autobiographical element is disarming, funny, reader-friendly & context-evoking. The result: a level of personal engagement with a trio of unique talents often misunderstood & certainly enigmatic but not inscrutable. Mandel reveals them to us as hard-core urban black tribal lore, the survival code of rule breakers who confront a “rule beyond rule,” & to reveal their “jazz beyond jazz” he delivers a “crit beyond crit,” fully qualified for the task. Mandel is the awe-struck kid with a backstage pass.  As Nat Hentoff wrote, “It's really reporting, as well as listening. This is jazz from the inside---an essential book, not only for new listeners but for historians of jazz now, & in the future. We hear the musicians speak, informing the author---& us---thereby adding to how much more of the music we come to hear.”

 

Like the living jazz tradition (not the dead packaged product long time passing), Mandel sits inside the music “with no direction home.” Rather than a definitive account encrypted on the head of a pin, he takes us down the rabbit hole in a realm of intuition & spirit talk, underground, down here where we belong.  Mandel brings to the tea party a wide range of cultural interests & the changes of mind he has made along the way. George Kanzler noted in JazzTimes that “Mandel assumes many roles here---elucidating critic & devoted fan, knowledgeable listener & Boswellian acolyte, evangelist & champion of the avant garde---all taken on with infectious enthusiasm.”

 

This sense of infection is the final reason to shout about this publication. Deeply versed in the American grain, Mandel summons an encyclopedic knowledge of show biz, vaudeville, pop, classical, funk, soul, rock, hip hop, world beat, blues urban & country as he weaves together assorted streams on the art of critique, race relations, American history & the political & spiritual overtones of the music of Davis, Coleman & Taylor. For those who know little of free jazz, these pages serve as an excellent primer. For those who wonder why Miles, a commercial superstar, gets included as a major influence & for those who never grokked Ornette’s harmolodics or the wild madcap genius of Cecil, Mandel is a trustworthy guide. 

 

One may find oneself re-reading it cover-to-cover & playing the music mentioned over-&-over & hearing it finally as if for the first time. This book delivered that gift for this reviewer. Mandel’s love of our music shines through the turning pages, an invitation to join the ongoing event, thereby becoming part of the community he makes. Because Mandel can handle “the cloud of unknowing” without sweating how far-out or in-close his take, willing to be what he is, a fool for free jazz, he’s restorative for us all, even the feinschmeckers who think they know better. 

 

Referencing H. L. Menken’s “Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism” in the front matter---“he makes the work of art live for the spectator”---Mandel gives us new ears to cohere the beyond that Miles, Ornette & Cecil continue to establish. Now that his blog is up & running we won’t have to wait for his next book; we can surf along as he continues to do what not enough music critics do these days: hit the clubs, halls & street corners to go ride the music & come back & tell us what happened. 

 

Miles Ornette Cecil---Jazz Beyond Jazz is available on Amazon. Follow Howard Mandel’s posts at www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/. An earlier version of this review appeared in Big Bridge.