Monday, August 13, 2007

recovering from keithy-poo jarrett

Apologies: this is a scatterbrained post that I managed to fit in my break from the paperwork.

Hopefully the above youtubified clip will help all of us (perhaps including DJA who feels he “inadvertently opened a can of worms”) relax after The Keith Jarrett Incident. (…But, no, I don’t know why Williams’ hands are never shown.)
Talking about pianists, thanks to the ‘HurdAudio Rotations’, I got introduced to the music of Paul Plimley who has a track entitled ‘We Got Noh Rhythm’.
This reminded me of when I was a (young and stupid college student) Composer (capital ‘C’), and I had this silly idea that, if I could fuse the ventilated rhythms of Feldman with the dramatic tone-deafness (and I mean that in the nicest way) of Xenakis, I’d have found my niche. ’Course I failed (anyone who’s ever tried even a cursory analysis of the above score-makers’ works will know why). I did eventually manage something a little like this, but in improvisation, not in composition. The sound world I arrived at was on parallel docks with Noh (what Zappa called Science Fiction Music)….

Apropos of nothing, Jeff Albert offers some fine audio recordings for download.
(Incidentally, in light of Paul Rutherford’s passing, a question: what is it about trombonists improvisers? why do they seem (grossly generalizing for a moment) more extravagant and extrovert? and why are half my—a guitar player’s—favorite improvisers trombonists?)
Finally, Andrew Durkin (under the perhaps unfair label ‘navel-gazing’) has a personal/political/idiosyncratic take on bodies and music (something that interests me also, but under a much more straightforward label—‘body’).

That’s my break from my administrative duties over: back to work….

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, extravagant and extrovert come out of a trombone much more naturally than subtle and introspective. That's does however open the issue of do we chose it because we are the way we are, or does it makes us the way we are...