Abrams, Lewis, Mitchell: The Trio

The Trio at the Petrillo Bandshell, Grant Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
September 4, 2009

Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
George Lewis, trombone, laptop
Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and alto saxophones, flute


[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

It is unusual to hear musicians in their fifties and sixties and seventies introduced as “the cutting edge,” but the description is indeed accurate. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, of which Muhal Richard Abrams (b. 1930) is a co-founder and of which George Lewis (b. 1952) and Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) are distinguished members, represents still, at least to my ears, the last giant step (or two or three steps) forward in jazz composition and performance practice.

At a time when the word “jazz” is for many people synonymous with, say, Diana Krall or Wynton Marsalis, terms like “cutting edge” and “experimental” can serve to enforce artistic marginalization. I remember being told, only a few years ago, that Charles Olson was an inappropriate choice for a student of postwar American poetry: “He's not mainstream!” Well, that depends on where you’re standing. I doubt that the radio personality who introduced Messrs. Abrams, Lewis, and Mitchell as “cutting edge” last night has played their music on the air. But I’m happy that the Chicago Jazz Festival brought the trio to Grant Park and honored Abrams as the festival’s artist-in-residence this year.

The Trio played one nearly hour-long spontaneous improvisation last night. It might be more appropriate to think of these musicians as a quartet, with Lewis’s MacBook Pro as the fourth voice. The group’s performance was a matter of uncompromised concentration — no grooves, no riffs, no tunes, nothing to fall back upon beyond a resourceful attention to the moment, developed through years of practice. The performance began with a lacy piano figure. A duet for alto and piano followed, with foghorn-like accompaniment from Lewis’s Mac. A muted trombone statement followed, while Mitchell sustained notes via circular breathing. Then a open-faced trombone solo, with traffic-like sounds from the Mac. Sometime later, Mitchell repeated a single long tone on flute as Abrams and Lewis raced around him. An Abrams solo passage suggested an atonal, swirling version of boogie-woogie piano. Later still, an alto solo against jungle noises. Not long after that, a slightly raucous balladic interlude for alto, trombone, and piano. Near the end, a strange and wonderful moment in which it was impossible to tell whether faint engine and exhaust noises were the work of Lewis’s Mac or Chicago. The close was unexpectedly beautiful and apt, with the Mac producing a repeated percussion figure and what sounded like train engines, while the three musicians sat as an audience at their own performance. And then Abrams plucked a repeated high note on a piano string. The train had left the station.

A coda: on our way back to the underground municipal parking garage, we heard on Michigan Avenue the beginning of a performance by a chorus of young people representing Mennonite Innercity Evangelism. I wonder whether they too had come up to Chicago from downstate Illinois.











[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

Further reading

About Streaming, a 2006 Abrams-Lewis-Mitchell recording (Pi Recordings)

Interpreting Avant-Garde Music (Elaine’s thoughts on the interpreter for the deaf at the side of the stage)

Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell (Wikipedia articles)

George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) tells the story of the AACM.

Stolen Mongols

News from the Telegraph:

Cartrain, a 17-year-old graffiti artist embroiled in a feud with Damien Hirst, has been arrested after stealing pencils from the millionaire artist’s latest installation. . . .

Cartrain visited Hirst’s installation Pharmacy in July, which was being shown as part of Tate Britain’s Classified exhibition until it closed last month, and removed a few of the rare “Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series” pencils.

Cartrain then created a parody police poster.

According to the real police, the Metropolitan Police, the pencils, part of a £10 million installation, are worth £500,000. £500,000 for Mongols? It’s not as if they’re Blackwings.

A related post
Mongol No. 2 3/8

Outsourcing worry

Stanley Auster (b. 1928) is the grandson of Louis Auster, the man oral historian Jeff Kisseloff describes as “the patriarch of the Lower East Side’s first family of egg creams.” Stanley’s father Julius was also in the business:

He always smoked a lot of cigars. Typically, you would see him behind the counter with his foot up on a low shelf, puffing away, completely satisfied. He was always completely free of worry. Honestly, he never seemed to be preoccupied with anything. I was just the opposite. I was always worried about everything. One day when I was about ten, I asked him about it.

“Daddy, why don’t you ever worry?”

He thought for a moment, and then he said, “If I tell you, do you promise not to tell anybody?”

“Yeah.”

“I have someone who worries for me.”

“What do you mean?”

He had a friend, little Ike. They both loved cigars and they were inseparable. They didn’t talk much, but they liked being together. Ikey was out of work most of the time, but somehow he could afford those cigars.

My father explained it to me. “Little Ike and I have an understanding. Anytime something bothers me, I tell it to Little Ike, and he says he will worry about it. I tell him these things, and the moment I tell him, it’s over. I wipe it out of my mind, and Ike takes care of it.”

He was serious. He then suggested that when I get older I should find someone. “It’s worth it. I pay him for it.”

He actually paid Little Ike to worry for him, and that was how Ike could afford his cigars. It was what you call a symbiotic relationship.

Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 64–65.

Outsourcing worry! I wish I’d thought of it. But whom to hire? How much to pay? And how to be sure the job would get done?

[Note: A comment from Howard Henner on a 2008 New York Times egg-cream story states that Louis Auster’s original recipe for chocolate syrup is known now only to Henner and his cousin Stanley Auster. Stanley Auster, I take it, is still with us. I wish I knew where I learned about Jeff Kisseloff’s book, a few months ago.

Now I know: at Tom the Piper’s Son.]

“A song is an intimation of immortality”

Van Dyke Parks, in an interview with an Australian newspaper:

“A song is an intimation of immortality, sometimes approached with piety, sometimes approached with vanity but generally the latter. Always feel that there is a reason to be doing this that survives that judgment call: an alternative something.”

Parks is of course borrowing from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wordsworth is also a source for “Child Is Father of the Man,” from the Wilson–Parks collaboration SMiLE.

Van Dyke Parks is a speaker at the Big Sound 2009 music conference next week in Australia.

Read more:

Eternal life of the song (WA Today)

Dang

The word of the day and of the day before this one and of the day before that one and of the one before that is dang. Since Monday, Elaine and I have been saying dang. Just for fun. It is the week of the dang. (We make our own fun.)

I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, hoping for a history of the word rich and strange. But no. The verb steps on stage in the 1790s: “A euphemistic substitute for DAMN.” The noun follows in 1906: "A damn, cuss." A few sample sentences, and that’s it.

Dang.

Re: Schaefer

If anyone knows a good remedy to remove the Schaefer jingle from a human head, please advise.

A related post
SCHAEFER

SCHAEFER

The clue for 18 Across in today’s New York Times crossword — “‘The one beer to have when you’re having more than one’ sloganeer” — brings back the past. The answer (in crossword caps): SCHAEFER.

When the world was young, Schaefer Beer was everywhere. The Schaefer slogan, which formed the opening and closing lines of a compelling jingle, played a part even in my life as a third-grader. Our teacher, Roslyn Vistreich, Mrs. Vistreich, had assigned us the task of bringing in and telling a joke for the class. Mine:

Why did the doctor tell the expecting mother to drink Schaefer?

Because she was having more than one.

That’s funny — in at least a couple of ways. But Mrs. Vistreich was not amused. I was already on her bad side, being a clock-watcher, staircase talker, and whistler. The joke didn’t help. No joke.

Related reading
Schaefer Beer (Wikipedia)

Mr. White’s neighborhoods

E.B. White on New York City neighborhoods, each a few blocks long, each with its own drugstore, grocery store, liquor store, newsstand, shoe-repair place, and so on:

So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.

Shopkeepers are particularly conscious of neighborhood boundary lines. A woman friend of mine moved recently from one apartment to another, a distance of three blocks. When she turned up, the day after the move, at the same grocer’s that she had patronized for years, the proprietor was in ecstasy — almost in tears — at seeing her. “I was afraid,” he said, “now that you’ve moved away I wouldn’t be seeing you any more.” To him, away was three blocks, or about seven hundred and fifty feet.

From Here Is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 29–30.

This essay in book form would be a wonderful gift for anyone hailing from or headed to the city. Never mind that White was writing in 1948. As he says in a foreword, the New York that he has described had already become a matter of the past by the time his book was published. It’s the reader’s job, he says, “to bring New York down to date,” though in a final dark meditation on Manhattan’s vulnerability to attacking planes, White has done the job for us.

Here Is New York is available again in hardcover, from The Little Bookroom. It’s this book I had in mind when I wrote last month that I pass up books that I would’ve bought without hesitation in the past. Maybe I’ll still get a copy. (But for now: thanks, library.)

A tip to speed up Firefox

I thought that when I switched to a Mac, I was done with defragmenting. But not entirely: Firefox (on any platform) seems to show significant improvement in speed after one defragments the Places database, the home of Bookmarks and History, like so:

1. Click on Tools, then Error Console.

2. Type the following (without returns) into the Code box:

3. Click on Evaluate.

Or install the “experimental” extension Vacuum Places Improved, which does the work for you on a regular basis.

Further reading
Speed up Firefox with VACUUM (Oremj’s Blog)

Enric Jardí on type

With its right-side-up and upside-down dual front covers, Enric Jardí’s Twenty-Two Tips on Typography (That Some Designers Will Never Reveal) / Twenty-Two Things That You Should Never Do with Typefaces (That Some Designers Will Never Tell You) (Barcelona/New York: Actar, 2007) is a cleverly designed two-in-one presentation of common-sense do’s and don’t’s about document design. Alas, Jardí’s advice is often undercut by an awkward translation from the Spanish. For instance:

It is often useful that these kinds of formulas have a fixed scale of element sizes beforehand. . . . However, it does occur that sometimes it is hard to see things even if they are exactly the planned size and in the place marked by the guidelines.

Even worse is a level of carelessness that suggests the absence of editing and proofing — sentence fragments, missing punctuation, even this sentence:

Look for contrast: itit iss better to have two very different typefaces than typefaces that “match.”

It’s even better though to correct typos.

Jardí’s advice is worth reading, but this book in its present form isn’t worth $24.95. Better to borrow (as I did) from a library.