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Separating Out the Wheat
(Madison, WI, 1994)
by Arthur Durkee
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Not all the best improvised music (jazz) falls into the mainstream. A lot of it does. And a lot of really amazing things fall through the categorical cracks, unclassifiable and unruly. That’s hardly a revelation, except if you disagree. I know a lot of jazz players, jazz listeners, and jazz fans of many stripes who listen mostly to a few things, a few select artists and/or jazz periods/styles. Their knowledge is often encyclopedic within the context of the jazz they usually listen to. Outside of their familiar realms, however, they are lost in terra incognita. (Nor do some of them particularly care what else is out there.) And all too often, it’s like getting a root canal done to get these friends to listen to anything new and/or different.
Is music like furniture, some comfortable familiar armchair we like to curl up in? Should our musical tastes be uniform—or something we wear like a uniform, like a familiar suit-and-tie we always wear to the office? Why do we so often take what we listen to for granted? Why do we so often judge our artistic and/or musical choices and selections by the criteria, I don’t always know what I like, but I know what I don’t like?
I don’t get it.
To my taste (probably different from many of yours, based on the letters I’ve received in the past year or so on this topic), I find a lot of inspiration for my improvised music (jazz) playing from things I hear outside the jazz mainstream—sometimes pretty close in, sometimes very far out. The point is, if you only listen to one thing, if you only appreciate or listen to only one or two or even three kinds of music, how can you stay inspired? All I know is that I cannot (several of my regular musical collaborators echo this sentiment). Like many, I happen to like a lot of mainstream, “inside” jazz. I also happen to like a lot of things my more neo-conservative friends shudder at, “weird” stuff like like oldtime country music, ambient dub, punk rock, odd bluegrass (especially psychobilly, punkabilly and satire-grass), “progressive” rock (you know, that nameless descendant of *shudder* fusion from the late 70s), good modern folk, good modern folk/rock, world music (I’ve played Javanese gamelan longer than I’ve played jazz), certain very talented singer/songwriters (yes, most of them play guitar), and so on, and so on.
Even less understandable, to me, is that some of these friends have less of a problem about what music I listen to, then that I listen to so many kinds of things! Well, I’ve simply stuck to the basic listening philosophy I decided on when I was still a teenager: I’ll listen to anything, twice, before I decide if I like it or not. It’s pretty basic; simply reserve judgment for awhile. What’s so strange about that?
The other things that stir me musically can be found in good books (especially good poetry), good food, travel, conversation (I recently had another late night talk about jazz with a musical friend: we stayed up way too late, and never regretted it), driving in my car (I commute 20 miles to work), and so on, and so on.
In short: Everything. All of it. Life.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t separate it out. Everything runs together, everything feeds off everything else. All the creative arts blur together in my head, and I’ve stopped trying to make distinctions between them.
So, as the long Wisconsin winter settles in (and lots of us start to think about fireplaces, wool socks, hot cocoa, and snuggling indoors), I tend to want to curl up in front of a warm stereo and listen to good stuff. (Actually, I’m almost always listening to new CDs; it’s sort of an addiction.) And I also tend to want to sit in the sunlight by the picture window in my front room for an hour or two before driving in to work, reading and writing. (I write about as much poetry as I write music, sometimes more: I’ve never been able to distinguish between the two, creatively.)
So, what follows is some of what I’ve been listening to lately, and things I’ve found inspiring to read in the last year; sort of a Best Of 1994, if you wish. It’s what inspires me as a jazz player. As a musician.
How about you? What have you been listening to for inspiration, or reading?
Tell you what: Make all our lives more interesting: Send us a list of Your Favorite Albums, including but not limited to jazz, and we’ll run it, along with any comments you care to include. If you like, send us a list of your Top Ten Desert Island Albums—the ones you’d want to be shipwrecked with, because you can’t live without them! Maybe we can all still listen to each other, and learn from each other.
Anyway, here’s my own list, to start the ball rolling. There’s no particular order, nor any particular reason why I’ve annotated some entries but not others, either: basically, if it’s included here, it’s cool.
MUSIC:
Laurie Anderson: Bright Red (Warner Bros.).
Bad Livers: Horses in the Mines (1/4Stick). Downhome-in-the-woodshed punk-billy music, weird and oldtimey.
Ginger Baker Trio: Going Back Home (Atlantic). Ginger Baker, drums; Bill Frisell, guitar; Charlie Haden, bass. This album contains my current favorite recorded performance of Monk’s Straight, No Chaser. A perfect trio album by 3 really amazing players.
Glenn Branca: Symphony Nos. 8 & 10 (Blast First/Atavistic).
Jeff Buckley: Grace (Columbia).
Bruce Cockburn: Dart to the Heart (Columbia).
Diamanda Galas w/ John Paul Jones: The Sporting Life (Mute).
Jan Garbarek Group: Twelve Moons (ECM). Norwegian saxophonist Garbarek continues his ongoing exploration of Scandinavian folk music, successfully blended with improvised music.
Trey Gunn: One Thousand Years (Discipline Records). Gunn plays Stick (my own instrument), and is a member of the newly-reformed King Crimson—so maybe I’m biased, but I think this is what progressive rock is all about!
Killbilly: Foggy Mountain Anarchy (Crystal Clear Sound). Thrash-grass from Texas, funny and loud.
Killdozer: Uncompromising War On Art Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Touch & Go). Madison’s own political punk trio, humorous, twisted, and intelligent.
Bill Laswell/Pete Namlook: Psychonavigation (Subharmonic). One of several Laswell ambient dub projects this year: utterly spare, utterly compelling.
Material: Hallucination Engine (Axiom). Bill Laswell’s supergroup project features a heavy contribution from saxman Wayne Shorter this time out; Material’s smoothest and deepest CD so far.
October Project: October Project (Epic). Beautiful poetry sung to some of the most theoretically-advanced chord changes ever written in pop music. Lush and profound—something to dive into and swim around in.
Robby Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble: Music for The Native Americans (Capitol).
Louis Sclavis/Dominique Pifarely: Acoustic Quartet (ECM). Improvised music from France, featuring the astounding Marc Ducret on guitar; this music falls somewhere between Bird and Boulez, Monk and Berio. Terrific!
Sky Cries Mary: This Timeless Turning (World Domination).
Steve Tibbetts: The Fall of Us All (ECM).
Eberhard Weber: Pendulum (ECM). Bassist Weber produces a multi-track solo album that is lyrical and probing, romantic and avant-garde. Very impressive.
Lena Willemark/Ale Möller: Nordan (ECM).
Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart: Take Me to God (Island).
Those Darn Accordions: Squeeze This! (Flying Fish).
Yothu Yindi: Freedom (Hollywood Records).
WORDS:
Christina Baldwin: Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest. Bantam/New Age. (Working through this book, along with Julia Cameron’s book listed below, is a terrific way to get unstuck creatively, and get down to work.)
Hakim Bey: T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia. (Possibly the most subversive book I’ve ever read, except maybe Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.)
Julia Cameron: The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Jeremy Tarcher.
Francis Davis: In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s. Oxford University Press. This essay collection contains a nifty 1983 interview with local hero Roscoe Mitchell.
Reshad Feild: The Last Barrier: A Sufi Journey. Element.
John Giorno: You Got to Burn to Shine: New & Selected Writings. High Risk Books. Poetry, performance pieces, and memoirs by the founder of The Dial-A-Poem Poets.
Robert Hass, ed. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa. Excellent translations and biographies of the great historical masters of haiku.
Sherryl Jordan: The Juniper Game. Scholastic. A terrific, visionary “young adult” novel.
W.P. Kinsella: Shoeless Joe. Ballantine Books. The novel that was the basis of the movie Field of Dreams: a lyrical, moving book.
Marsha Sinetar: Ordinary People As Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Self-discovery. Paulist Press.
Hayden Carruth: Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics. Iowa University Press. A gifted poet and essayist looks at jazz’s influence on writing and culture in this country.
Jim Stephens, ed. Bright Moments: A Collection of Jazz Poetry. Abraxas Press. Stephens is a Madisonian, and used to do a late-night jazz show on WORT-FM in Madison.
Jean Valentine: The River at Wolf. Alice James Books. A new collection by a favorite poet.
William Butler Yeats: The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy & Folklore. Prism Press. The classic collection of tales retold by the great Irish poet.
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