News of News of News of News

Some recent writing:

--On Krzysztof Penderecki for Bachtrack.

--On Don Cherry and Peter Brötzmann's work with children for the Don Cherry special in The Wire's September issue. (The issue also has reviews of a live performance by Edith Steyer's John Carter project, of the latest instalment in Wild Up's Julius Eastman project, and of Angel Bat Dawid's Requiem for Jazz and the latest in the Red Hot series, themed around Sun Ra's 'Nuclear War'; more reviews, of the A L'Arme Festival and of Klangraum Dusseldorf, in the October issue).

--Liner notes for The Art of Noticing, one of the CD releases recorded at Eddie Prevost's Bright Nowhere concerts last year.

--The Calvin Hernton Selected Poems is now in the world from Wesleyan UP, with the first review in from Publishers Weekly here.

Details of in-person and on-line launches to follow...

--Finally, I've updated my Soundcloud page for the first time in around a decade with some recordings from the past few years: https://soundcloud.com/david-grundy

John Coltrane: Selflessness / Live in Seattle

Coltrane in 1965 is what I keep coming back to. Now that all this stuff is on the you tube (see above), I've been listening to it again, taking advantage of the potential to skip back and forward in a track, to listen and re-listen to particular second-long clips without having to juggle the fast-forward function on cassette or cd player – just with mouse clicks, to listen to a ten-minute or a ten-second section three times in a row...and all that jazz. McCoy Tyner's playing was so *thick* at this time, his chordal voicings approaching clusters in their density, and his rhythmic monotony a crucial part of the dialectic between stasis and continuance/momentum that gives his playing its peculiar quality. (This is similar, I suppose, to the trance states induced by particular kinds of tribal drumming, but you're not going to go into a trance here: the rhythm is too insistent and also too broken-up (thanks to elvin jones, “gretsch freak”) – it doesn't have that swirling endlessness that makes alice coltrane's playing on, say, ‘live in japan’, ultimately boring (much as I love her harp-like-swirl and the use of the entire range of the keyboard, from lowest thud to highest tinkle - and tho' of course the boring and monotony as such are in some sense a crucial part of both pianist’s playing styles, in a way i'm not sure i've yet quite grasped or come to terms with. (Tho’ this might provide a clue:

The venerable Curt Sachs may have put his finger on what is at issue here in Rhythm and Tempo (1953), when he discovered that "rhythm" itself, to misquote Freud, is a primeval word with antithetical senses. On the one hand, rhuthmos (Greek) denoted river or flow. On the other rhythmus (Latin) denoted blockage or dam. Sachs's point is not that Greeks and Romans had different cultural coordinates (to a large extent they did) but that coiled within rhythm itself was a certain undecidability - perhaps the very same undecidability that Derrida traced in the connotative oscillations of "tympan."

John Mowitt, 'Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking' (Duke University Press, 2002), p.24))))

So there's this thing called 'selflessness' that coltrane recorded in ’65 - it's from those studio sessions that were included on 'the major works of john coltrane', a 2cd box set impulse released in the 90s sometime, and which i remember listening to after borrowing it from my local library (who for some reason owned this (now probably out-of-print) thing alongside art blakey and stan getz and MJQ and courtney pine (they subsequently sold off all this stuff, no idea where it went: perhaps some old-people's home now possesses 'ascension', 'om', 'selflessness' and 'kulu se mama' on two shining discs and plays it as dinner music)). that was the first time i heard 'ascension', and 'selflessness' is a side-note compared to that…but ‘side-note’ is the wrong turn of phrase entirely, this is *vital* shit. i hate it when, say, allmusicguide does one of their fucking capsule reviews where they go, 'o, this is fine, but not the best place to start if this is your first time with player x', relegating most everything to some deferred future where you're an ‘expert’ and can therefore ‘take it.’ to that I’d say, *launch yourself in*, yeah? - of course you won't fucking understand it, I still don't, coltrane himself didn't, this is at the limits, it's hard to understand when you're up in that air... - but, ok, I heard 'expression' and 'ascension' early on, and i loved the passionate melodics of the opening heads (‘ogunde’ is based on a folk song, after all), and i didn't really *understand* pharoah sanders at all, and in fact i actively disliked him, but these things take time, go on with it, get on.

('selflessness' and 'live in seattle', which are the things i'm going to write about here, both feature donald rafael garrett on bass and clarinet, which is ostensibly the reason i'm considering them both together. garrett's not someone who was much heard from, or about, but val wilmer's 'as serious as your life' posits him as one of those crucial mentor figures during the mid-60s (giuseppi logan as another), whose contributions to the music and to the scene were certainly not proportional to their scant and inadequate documentation on record. (http://www.bardoworks.it/rafael.html has some further info.)


Donald Rafael Garrett in concert in Pisa, San Zeno abbey, 1983

// now let's get on, 'selflessness' opening with one of those melodies coltrane was writing around this time, ostensibly as serene or joyous up-cry, but which turn into a kind of desperate keening -as if one wished *too much* for that transcendent, solving/dissolving joy, for that synthesis, for the one final note that would provide the answer to the thousand fractured, cycling notes played through before: coltrane himself blowing the melody strong, sanders dipping and diving around him, with some wonderful watery, rattley flutter-tonguing.

& rafael garrett's arco bass insists on being taken as a third lead melody voice, blending with the horns, rather than partaking in the strummed and thrummed deep-end accompaniment that jimmy garrison, the coltrane quartet regular, would have provided. – to illustrate this, let’s take the first ten minutes or so of 'evolution', from the 'live in seattle' recording, where Coltrane, Sanders, and Garrett (this time on bass clarinet) soar in imitative, roaring and meshing blasts and honks, while Garrison provides a solid rhythmic underpinning which seems to be going on its own separate box or booth, tethering down the 'out of this world' massed vocalised ecstasies of breath and air and metal, and essentially playing the flamenco-inflected bass solo which he then proceeds to deliver once the horns have stopped playing (this solo being a regular occurrence on Coltrane's live recordings). the absence of a drummer highlights just how 'free' the horns were capable of be(com)ing, of moving outside established licks in a flowing and melting and melding way: formally, one could describe this as ‘rhapsodic’ (in the sense that the term 'rhapsody’ comes from the Greek 'rhapsōidos', which itself comes from the combination of 'rhaptein', to sew, stitch together, and 'aidein,' to sing). & jazz itself is, perhaps, ultimately a rhapsodic form, based on fragments, breaks, discontinuities, allusions and quotations – at the same time that, as in hip-hop, *‘flow’* is central: propulsion, momentum, ‘looking ahead’. nonetheless, garrison’s desire to provide an established 'jazz' element does contrast with what the horns are doing (tho' to start off with his picked harmonics sound suitably 'exotic'); their flow reaches an extent to which it becomes *overwhelming*, dispensing with clock-checking time, with finishing a tune in ten minutes so that people can go and buy drinks, so that time itself becomes a felt, controllable thing, slowed down and speeded up at the musicians’ will – for the ultimate example of that, you’d have to look at those mammoth extended pieces by the Cecil Taylor Unit, where time itself stretches so much it almost seems to break, to fracture, to become meaningless.

well, now we’re here, hell, let’s just *listen* to the *whole* of 'evolution' – garrett's thin-reed wail on clarinet, notes bent, metallic melted to malleable shape-shift, transitioning into sanders' shronking and then that unbearably beautiful way he ends his solos with a kind of desperate lyricism, keening up-slide to notes. again, that *thin-ness,* not the full-bodied-ness we think of when we think of free jazz – say, Brotzmann or Coltrane himself – not that *filling out* of the sound-space: yeah, Sanders can do that, does do that, but what I'm talking about here is his use of *fragility*, a sense of self un-stable and breaking under the pressure and force of riots and revolutions and that late 60s belief in cosmic transformation; yeah, fucking *eschatology*, if you like, material transformation – sound is material, isn't it, it could speak another reality into being and not simply be contained within the glass-cash-register chinking register of the night-club / the record-label / the hit-parade / the culture industry. Uh, yeah, if Sanders' multiphonic explosions of simultaneous multiple notes, overtones, difference tones intend to vibrate the space into the fullest potential possible, the most filled wholeness - "every kinda chord you can hear under the fucking sun” - his solos at this time end with, say, two successive notes, the stalled beginnings of a melody, as his saxophone moves into being a voice, trying to sing a song to itself but now having to flutter-tongue burble and cry in woundedness – and it's the *transition* here that gets me, in this say, thirty seconds of music which expands out beyond itself as a non-melodic ear-worm which encapsulates for me what Coltrane could have and was constantly trying and failing to do - that failure as *built into the condition of the music*, the condition of music itself, the condition of the world itself that would not change as was wished – a desire that cannot express itself in logic, barely even in illogic, gesturing towards the "possible world," yeah, a "community of risk," someone in some other context said that.

that transition i mean is when sanders' solo is ending and suddenly, without warning on the audio version at least, coltrane, i think it is, comes out to the microphone and starts shouting, comes in roaring, 'OOOMMM' 'OORRRRHM' / 'OOOOOM' – 'OM', the primal word, the primal vocalised sound that sets the universe into being ("and god *said*, let there be light" - light and sound as one simultaneous flash, an explosion into being as the origin of the universe, some collective pre-evolutionary memory of the big bang) (see simon weil's fine article 'circling om') - that roaring is *almost* a parody of some horror-movie ‘black-magic’ voodoo roar, but it transcends that, it's not transcendent, it's a bellow of roaring animal pain outside language, outside the formal language of music, outside song - is not speech, is not song – is both – those moments when coltrane would take the horn out of his mouth; as miles davis had advised, but not to stop playing, instead to give vent to that roar of exhilaration mixed anguish…

more transitions (‘transition’ the title of a record from this year, coltrane’s music itself in transition, in creative mentor-exchange with the new thing saxophonists – sanders, shepp, carlos ward, ayler, john Gilmore – for whom he was a talismanic figure, the leader and legitimiser of the movement – tho’ he was equally influenced by their own side-slant attack; the ‘classic quartet’ splintering apart, that tension, between tyner’s static rhythmix and the way his playing cannot *help* but ratchet up in intensity and depth and drive when placed in the same physical space as coltrane’s boiling over; jones perhaps the prime force driving coltrane out into polyrhythmic ambiguity (that means, simultaneity), (*energy music*), himself frustrated (exhilarated?) by the wall of sound above and beyond him (reportedly throwing his drum-sticks at the wall at the end of ‘ascension’); garrison the one hold-over, once the transition to that final quintet was accomplished – and yet, it’s precisely that tension, that push-pull, that gives this music its power, and its *objective social content* – this the year of the watts riots – rip it up, split it up, all felt as personal upheaval, split and shatter into collectivity, that transition into new forms is *of course* painful, as any transition is, who knows where and what horror or beauty it could turn into, treading on thin ice, on air, tight rope tightened or loosening.)
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so, transition, when coltrane stops shouting and the horns go triple over garrison's jazz moves, when they're wailing da-naaaaaaahhhhh-nuh, da-naaaaaaaaaaah-nuh (I can't fucking 'transcribe this', as onomatopoeia or notation or whatever - it is un-fixable in that sense, less we develop the technology to contain it - and if we did that, then we'd be in some society where our understanding of what went beyond our current grain made life liveable, where wounded cry was not just some impoliteness to be ignored, ill-advised feeling-show)); when Tyner comes in under and it's like some floor locks into place beneath the horns, and then he solos, the relief of that, there's only so much reality or surreality or irreality you can endure... 7:08 into Tyner's solo, Garrison pluck-repeating single note, the music freezing into repeated locked-record-groove stasis, like stammer-stuckness, like Coltrane repeating the head to 'confirmation' twenty times in a row, seeing it from its different angles, its different permutations, trying to reach every possible harmonic implication, to see the whole thing from all fucking angles - but different to that, I suppose, in that repetition is used in Tyner as a particular dramatic effect, whether gravity pillar-thick chord or as harp-like arpeggiated swirl with thick deep-end muscle - a space he moved into at this time, 1965, which never before or since was quite the same, had a lightness to it that this gravity-insistence - well, it's that, but at the same time it suggests that moment when everything's gonna split open - it never quite does - well, the horns come back in and thick cluster bash, is pentecost tongues to "set fire and death on whitey's ass" (if you believe amiri baraka...ok, this is not hate music – or maybe it *is* - “what we need is hatred. from it our ideas are born” (genet) – maybe it is, and maybe the critics were right (the london evening standard’s jack massarik, & his infamous off-mic “torrents of hate” jibe when some coltrane was played on one of bbc radio 3’s afternoon jazz snoozefests) – but if they were right, they were right in a strictly narrow sense that made them see that hatred as mere perversity, misanthropy, nihilism;

any hatred that there is in the music would have to be inextricably linked to love, love and hate mingled, hate motivated by love - by which i mean that there has to be a sense of what *has to be done* (perhaps *hateful* things) if change is going to be more than just a willed-for moment of religious transcendence, reliant on the intervention of an on-high god we ceaselessly invoke with or without the hope that he will finally choose *now* to intervene - it is still an in invocation then, but an invocation to action, however direct or indirect, to change systems of oppression and exploitation, bigotry and misery. of course, coltrane has an odd relation to direct action, we see this in that awkward interview where frank kofsky tries desperately to make him into a post-malcolm marxist but only succeeds in getting him to talk about the need for universal peace...archie shepp, the disciple, no doubt encouraged him to raise the political ante, there were young black men in the clubs at which he played shouting 'black power! black power!', and maybe coltrane would have become more politicised if he'd lived until the 60s - but this is the same as the 'what would malcolm have done if he'd lived' argument that those on the left still engage in from time to time. (counter-facts, counter-histories are all very well, but they never happened, did they?)

oh, ok, back to 'selflessness' again, and finally: things move on out. i'm so used to thinking of sanders' playing as undergoing a trajectory, from wild yawping, coruscating, disturbing beauties with coltrane (and those couple of blue note dates, ‘symphony for improvisers’ and ‘where is brooklyn’ w/don cherry), and then, once coltrane dies and he becomes a leader in his own right, a more controlled use of the free playing as occasional effect, climax, or 'interlude', between burbling, mellow, melodic rambles over ethnicky grooves and repeating chords...but here sanders' playing is not just the squall or blast of sound i'd remembered it as; rather, he develops rather jauntily carnivalesque rhythms (in a very distant pre-echo of Sonny Rollins, circa 'Don't Stop the Carnival'), tho' this is done, it shd be noted, thru unusual and forceful tonguings or fingerings (or however it is he gets those effects).

dig too, on these recordings (on this and 'live in seattle'), how the two main horns, sanders and coltrane, sometimes seem to swap over, coltrane adopting sanders-esque howls, sanders sliding his own melodicisms alongside coltrane's prophet-like, authoritative pronouncements. i'm not using 'prophet' here as some un-thought-through metaphor: prophets (i'm thinking in the biblical sense here) use poeticised, metaphorical, fanciful language (i mean, 'revelations' is sci-fi before the category of sci-fi, right?) to call down the abuses and corruptions and degradations of current society; to predict the calamities that will befall the society if it does not change it ways (or have those ways *changed for it*); and to posit an alternative future in which that society is healed and mended and transformed. is coltrane not doing all three of those here, as far as the limits of his instrument and his epoch and his imagination will let him?

of this kind of *total engagement* there is still need.

Billy Bang is Dead / Memorial Playlist

Billy Bang & Shoji Hano at Inage Candy, Chiba, Japan, 11th Oct 2008 (MP3 version included in the playlist link at the bottom of the post)

"I lived many deaths, being a soldier in Vietnam fighting. I learned to get past death in Vietnam as a soldier. I was afraid of death, and that's the truth – no one wants to die – but I could not be afraid of death to do my job. I pulled point, I was the first cat out, I did ambushes, I was in the actual war fighting, so I could not be afraid of death, because I might have to give my life up for my next compadre right next to me, so death had no significance for me – the job of survival did, the job of getting the job done did. So I was not afraid of death, and…nobody wants to die, but I was not afraid of it. And I'm still not, especially not now, because I think I left the world with enough documentation and testimony that if I leave tomorrow – not tomorrow, but I'm sure I will leave – then I feel good about leaving the planet earth with what I left behind me, and with me, so I have no problem with that. And then, I don't know what the next story is about, where I go, so I'm not worried about that. People who are preoccupied with that do not live, and the best thing is to live every day, each and every day until that time come. And let death take care of itself."

Violinist Billy Bang died of lung cancer on Monday, April 11th 2011, at the age of 63. Probably best known these days for two fairly recent albums reflecting on his experience as a solider in Vietnam, he’d established himself on the New York loft jazz scene back in the 70s, becoming a key figure, along with the likes of frequent collaborator William Parker, in the second-(third-? fourth-?)generation free jazz movement. His playing combined abrasive grit, rough-edged folksiness, surprisingly straightforward melodicism, and a certain swinging jazz touch (the latter was to become particularly prominent later on in his career, though that’s not to suggest he morphed into Didier Lockwood…).

The violin/drums format witnessed in the at the top of this post brings to mind, of course, the legendary collaboration between Leroy Jenkins and Rashied Ali, 'Swift are the Winds of Life'. Bang's folkish touch and Shoji Hano's ebullient rhythms ensure, however, that this duet has a very different feel, somewhere between a hoe-down, a call to the spirits, and a straightforward rock-out. Listen four minutes in as the violinist locks into repeated figures, playing them over and over with minimal variation – incantation, invocation, whatever you choose to call it, it has undeniable power.

Bang’s playing suggested any number of folk traditions - elegant plucked pentatonic figures reminiscent of Oriental music, big sawing motions and slides from American country and appalaichan traditions, percussive col legno from the avant-garde, and of course the free-jazz tinged post-bop language which he made his own. As he said in an interview, his aim was to get between the virtuoso technique of Leroy Jenkins (with whom he studied) and the much-maligned, but more intuitive approach of Ornette Coleman. It's that combination of melodic simplicity with a certain 'off' roughness around the edges (rather than the heightened sweetness we're accustomed to from Hollywood movies and the classical violin repertoire) that makes Bang really stand out. His compositions, which tended to be riff and groove based, demonstrated that same simplicity, but he was by no means a 'simplistic' musician, as should be obvious from just glancing at the number of different projects and musicians he worked with, often changing from record to record. (And as was made even more abundantly clear when listening to excerpts from WKCR’s 24-hour Bang memorial broadcast.)

Bang’s musical story proper begins upon his return from military service in Vietnam; finding the South Bronx its own kind of war zone, he half-wondered if going to fight had saved him from the equal trauma of drug addiction – nonetheless, he continued to suffer nightmares from his own experience throughout the following decades. Having studied law, his first case proved to be fixed; disgusted at how easy it was to manipulate the justice system, he ended up falling in with a group of Black-Panther-inspired would-be-revolutionaries; due to his weapons-handling experience from Vietnam, he ended up being tasked to buy the group guns. On one such trip (the weapons were to be purchased for the purpose of a bank robbery), he chanced across a violin in a pawn-shop, and, on a whim, used the money intended for the guns to purchase a violin, the instrument he had originally studied whilst at school. His comrades, convinced that Vietnam had finally driven him mad, abandoned him and carried out the robbery on their own; several of their number were killed. You could say that music literally saved Billy Bang’s life.

“The reason why I become an artist was because I was really trying to evade society’s infrastructure. When I came home from Vietnam, I didn’t want to kill anymore, I didn’t want to be part of the conglomeration of sending people out to die for non reason. So, the only thing I could find the truth in was the music. I knew I wouldn’t make a dollar, but I didn’t care about the money. I said, as long as I believe in the truth, I can live with myself. I can get up, when I go shave, I can look in the mirror and be a happy soul.”

Though his playing was rusty at first, he had apparently convinced himself that music was what he wanted to do; and not just any music, but the esoteric and most definitely non-lucrative free forms of New York’s downtown jazz players. He moved downtown, just to be closer to them, and ended up studying privately with Leroy Jenkins. Technique now matching concept, he was ready to make his mark, and began forming his own ensembles: the String Trio of New York, with John Lindberg and James Emery, The Music Ensemble and The Survival Ensemble. The significance of this latter name is twofold: firstly, even if you’re never going to make enough money to become rich or famous, you have to make enough to survive, to feed yourself and house yourself and your family; secondly, this music is actually necessary ‘in order to survive’ in a society plagued by racism and poverty and inequality and the sacrifice of artistic endeavour on the altar of money and superficiality. Over the years, it was the former that would prove the hardest to accomplish: combine continuing psychological troubles from Vietnam with a hostile or indifferent climate for adventurous jazz-derived music (particularly if it was played by African-Americans), and there were times when Bang nearly went broke. Indeed, his eventual musical confrontation with the Vietnam experience, on those early 2000s records, only came about because of his plea to Justin Time label head Jean-Pierre Leduc for a recording project: Leduc suggested tackling Vietnam, and Bang, after much thought, agreed.

“Sugar, the sweetest thing out there – we put it in our teas, our coffee, our hot chocolate – is initially, originally brown – it’s brown, it looks like my colour. But they don’t want that, so they bleach it, they make it different and they make it white, because it represents their…thing – white people, Europeans, so they make sugar white. They don’t want nothing brown to be sweet. It’s a conscious thing, it’s not an accident – it’s not like, ‘wow, let’s just drop this colour in’ – there’s a purpose to that. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – I watched this as a kid – the cowboys that show up, the good cowboys, always dress in white. The bad cowboys, the evil guys, always dress in black. So black always means bad and negative and ugly. So I grew up with this – well, I’m saying, shit, I’m not bad and ugly and negative. The truth is, I had to fight through all this to become me, to become myself, to get beyond all this, to get stronger than anything out there, and that’s who I am to today. I learned to trust my own self and I applied that to my music. I learned that the universe is one place – the earth as we know it is only one home. I started thinking that I was a man of the planet earth, and that allowed me not to think in terms of borders and conscriptions and I was free – I was very free.”

Despite the difficulties that were to come, and those that had already been, the '70s were an exciting time for the likes of Bang: there was an abundance of music being played, recorded and released, and loft spaces finally allowed for an arena in which musicians could perform what they wanted, how they wanted, at whatever length, rather than having to kow-tow to the wishes and financial desires of nightclub owners perplexed by lengthy pieces that demanded prolonged and focussed concentration, rather than slotting into easy, manageable chunks, as the background to clinking glasses and cash registers. One gets the sense of a real community just by looking at the personnel lists on the back of the record sleeves – so-and-so appears as a sideman on this record by this other musician, who appears as a sideman on his sideman’s record…etc. Furthermore, the presence of figures about whom very little is known, such as saxophonist Bilal Abdur Rahman, who composed half the material on Bang’s own debut as a leader, ‘New York Collage’, suggests that the scene was made up of far more than just a handful of initiates and masters – especially given the fact that the ‘masters’ weren’t exactly well-known in their own right. As Valerie Wilmer puts it in her liner notes for the 1983 record 'Intensive Care' by The Jazz Doctors (Bang, Frank Lowe, Rafael Garrett, and Denis Charles): "To have reached [this] point in music history, thousands of men and women have gone unsung and unrecorded. Only a handful of individuals are allowed to enter the history books despite the clearly collective nature of music practice."

And Bang himself makes the same point, in a more generalised way:

“You can be yourself to some degree, you have to be strong within oneself, but if you just think the world revolves around you as a person, being yourself, you cannot co-exist – and co-existence makes peace, it makes love, it makes harmony. This is my belief.”

Bang’s first recording came in 1974, though it was not released until the end of the decade, as part of a compilation of music recorded at various dates over a period of several years: William Parker’s ‘Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace’. In fact, Bang appears on two cuts from the final album – the 1974 date, which finds him somewhat submerged into a medium-sized instrumental ensemble (‘Rattles and Bells and the Light of the Sun’), and a 1976 piece forming part of the music for the ballet ‘Dawn Voice,’ in which he joins fellow violinist Ramsey Ameen (later of the Cecil Taylor Unit) to accompany Parker’s poetry recitation.

William Parker - Face Still Hands Folded
Billy Bang, Ramsey Ameen (violin) William Parker (recitation)
Recorded October 1976
from 'Through Acceptance of the Mystery Peace' (1981)

This Parker album also featured a couple of other ‘Downtown’ violinists besides Ameen and Bang: Jason Kao Hwang and Polly Bradfield, the latter of whom would appear alongside our man on Frank Lowe’s 1977 ‘Lowe and Behold’. Whereas Bradfield (a musician virtually unknown today, except to the extreme cognoscenti) has an at times shockingly abrasive approach, Bang can be heard as a contrasting lyrical (if somewhat off-kilter) voice (the track opens with his short duet with John Zorn, who was here making his recorded debut proper).

The Frank Lowe Orchestra - Heavy Drama
Frank Lowe (tenor sax, arr), Joseph Bowie (trombone), Butch Morris (cornet), Arthur Williams (trumpet), John Zorn (alto sax) Peter Kuhn (clarinet) Polly Bradfield, Billy Bang (violin) Eugene Chadbourne (guitar) John Lindberg (bass) Phillip Wilson (drums)
from 'Lowe and Behold' (1977)

The following year, Bang released the already-mentioned ‘New York Collage’: an opportunity to demonstrate his compositions, it also featured his own poetry recitation on the second side. The record opens with a tribute to John Coltrane, as was fairly standard for free jazz dates (Frank Wright’s ‘One For John’, for instance), but from the start it clearly has its own aesthetic: a brief violin solo gives way to a jaunty unison theme, soon moving into an accelerating repeated figure which provides a transition between tight written material and more ‘out’ ensemble playing, everyone soloing at once with enthusiastic abandon. Though there are plenty of fire-breathing moments here, Bang’s violin tones and compositions give a more studied, thoughtful, pre-structured feel to things than, say, is the case with the Arthur Doyle school (indeed, as Hank Shteamer suggests in a recent post on ‘Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches’, even the album that is supposedly the definition of ‘out-there’ free jazz, Peter Brötzmann’s ‘Machine Gun’, is, in fact, a suite alternating composed elements in a variety of genres, moods, and tempi.) Still out-of-print, half the album can be heard in a vinyl rip provided by Destination…out.

Billy Bang - Nobody Hear The Music The Same Way (Dedicated to John Coltrane)
Billy Bang (violin, bells, shaker, percussion), Bilal Abdur Rahman (tenor sax, soprano sax, bull horn, percussion), Henry Warner (alto sax, bells, shaker, percussion), William Parker (bass), Khuwana Fuller (conga), Rashid Bakr (drums)
from 'New York Collage' (1978)

Bang was certainly not hanging around: in the next year he released his first solo recording (from which we hear a track built around urgent, swirling repetitions and bright, hard-edged clarion calls), and his first recording with the String Trio of New York, a group he had co-founded with bassist John Lindberg and guitarist James Emery in 1977. (The Trio has continued until the present day, though Bang left in 1986, his placed since filled by a rotating cast of violinists, including Charles Burnham and Regina Carter). Though the line-up suggests a somewhat neo-classical, or perhaps third-stream side, the music contains plenty of propulsion and gut. Characteristic of the group's releases was a sharing of compositional duties between each trio member; Bang's contribution to their debut is the intriguingly-titled 'Subway Ride with Giuseppi Logan', who at the time had vanished from the scene, having been an important mentor for and collaborator with New York's 'New Thing' musicians during the mid-60s. Dancing, winding, interlocking improvisatory lines over dot-dash bass rhythms suggest the high-flung conversation between Bang and Logan, the two free jazz travellers - mystical, intellectual gravitas within the alien technological rush of the modern city. (Perhaps they didn't even speak; musicians yes, but in this case choosing to communicate through their silence, to communicate through simple presence - songs of the unspoken, songs of the unsung.) No matter the evocative nature of such contextual musings, it's an exhilirating track, tricsky yet flowing, tripping and dancing and flying through air.

Billy Bang - Part of Distinction Without a Difference
Billy Bang (violin)
from 'Distinction Without a Difference' (1979)

String Trio of New York - Subway Ride with Giuseppi Logan
Billy Bang (violin) James Emery (guitar) John Lindberg (bass)
from 'First String' (1979)

As is obvious from the larger ensemble recordings, such as the Lowe, or the varied instrumental line-ups on the Parker, Bang’s group-playing interests were moving far beyond the trumpet/ saxophone/ piano/ bass/ drums format inherited from be-bop. One might immediately think of his incorporation of traditional Vietnamese instruments on the later Vietnam projects, a timbral quality foreshadowed on the final piece from a 1980 trio session called ‘Changing Seasons’. For me, this closing track is one of the most texturally interesting of all Bang’s recordings, the combination of Toshi Tsuchitori’s autoharp and the plucked strings of Bang and William Parker giving the music an insectoid yet somehow stately quality, moving with abstract dancing flickers and flecks and sometimes even near-grooves (Parker’s grounding bass). Much of the piece’s feel – of a music on its toes, dancing quickly and skitterishly but with a certain amount of energising nervousness and trepidation – is surely due to the way Tsuchitori plays the autoharp (I suspect with some sort of drumstick). Bang, meanwhile, nicely mixes up simpatico staccato with squelches and scrapes – towards the end, contributing and developing one particular upwards-rising bowed figure (with added squeaky-door frequencies) that introduces a palpable and building sense of tension, of being inexorably drawn/ driven to some climax – compelled to go there, whatever the risks. And then the introduction of flutes right at the end, and the dissolve into the sound of crickets which opened the record as a whole. Really, I think, one of the highlights of the Bang discography. (And it’s not in print, of course.) Tsuchitori, incidentally, plays mostly drums on the record – since then, he’s moved from free jazz percussion towards investigating ancient instruments and Asian / African music and dance, recording alongside some prehistoric paintings in a French cave along the way), as well as collaborating with theatre director Peter Brook.

Billy Bang - Winter Rains
Toshi Tsuchitori (autoharp) Billy Bang (violin) William Parker (bass, flute)
from 'Changing Seasons' (1981)

We hear a different side of Bang on a perhaps dated, but nonetheless still exhilarating jazz-rock number from Bill Laswell’s ‘Material’. His violin adds bite and textural variety to the tricksy ensemble passages, and another, wilder dimension in during a solo towards the end of the track. This was recorded around the same time he made his sole appearance as a member of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s similarly funky electric band The Decoding Society (alongside Byard Lancaster, Vernon Reid and Charles Brackeen on their debut album, 'Eye on You'). On the selected track, 'Shaman', Bang gets to play the shaman in his trance, whirligging furiously in between a Shannon Jackson drum solo and the weirded-out guitar and quizzical, almost mocking melody line that dominate the tune. Also in this 'punk jazz' vein are a later appearance with British avant-rock band Sonicphonics and a guest spot with Last Exit and Diamanda Galas at the 1986 Moers Jazz Festival (available as a bootleg recording).

Material - Upriver
Olu Dara (cornet) Billy Bang (violin) Sonny Sharrock (guitar) Bill Laswell (bass) Michael Beinhorn (synthesizers, tapes, radio, guitar, drums) Fred Maher (guitar, drums, percussion)
from 'Memory Serves' (1981)

Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society - Shaman
Billy Bang (violin) Byard Lancaster (alto sax) Charles Brackeen (tenor sax) Vernon Reid, Bern Nix (guitar) Melvin Gibbs (bass) Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) Erasto Vasconcelos (percussion)
from 'Eye on You' (1980)

Last Exit with Billy Bang/Diamanda Galas - Enemy Within
Peter Brötzmann (tenor sax) Sonny Sharrock (guitar) Bill Laswell (bass) Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) + Billy Bang (violin) Diamanda Galas (voice)
Recorded live at the Moers Jazz Festival, 1986

Enjoyable as they were, Bang's electric adventures in general remained something of a sideline: the real meat of his playing came during acoustic collaborations. And it was during one of these collaborations that he was pushed to perhaps his furthest extent, in a spark-generating quartet led by pianist Marilyn Crispell. At this stage, one hears her fascinatingly weaving her own sound out of (broadly speaking) Cecil Taylorian territory: the music is loud, passionate, heavy, the heavy piano chords and echoing lines really spurring Bang on to whooping, wailing flights. Bang's violin sometimes gets rather lost in the mono radio mix (there's an official recording, doubtless with better sound, called 'Live in Berlin', which I haven't, thus far, been able to get on my hands on); however, the audio is generally adequate, and this track has the added bonus of a superb Peter Kowald solo, ringing tones from his rasping, growling bass as though determinedly wringing the last drop of water from a wet sponge. Comparing all this to Crispell's rather placid recent albums on ECM makes one wish she’d continued developing what she’d started here. I'd include the whole recording in this playlist, if it weren't 38 minutes long: it can be downloaded, however, from Folly For To See For What.

Marilyn Crispell Quartet - Chant
Billy Bang (violin) Marilyn Crispell (piano)Peter Kowald (bass) John Betsch (drums)
Recorded live at Donaueschinger Musiktage, 1982 (SWF2 radio broadcast)

Rather 'lighter' in tone, but no less 'worthy', is a 1984 live date with Don Cherry, who once again proves himself as a player uniquely capable of fitting into any given context without modifying his essential style (check his collaborations with Peter Brotzmann, Rip Rig and Panic). Like Cherry, Bange was as capable of playing with an infectiously 'happy', joyous tone as he was of delving deep and stretching out. That same joy comes through in one of his catchiest tunes, 'Rainbow Gladiator', also taped in a live setting; and in a tribute to Stuff Smith recorded with, all of people, Sun Ra (who had actually played with Smith back in '50s Chicago). It's a mark of the respect with which Bang was heard that Ra took one of his very few sideman jobs in a group led by the violinist; and the date itself is a wonderful example of ostensibly 'free' players digging deep into the tradition without the slightest hint of neo-conservatism. After all, as Bang points out in the liner notes, "[Stuff Smith] was avant garde too, in his own way... By the nature of his instrument, basically. People still don't understand the notes of Smith or can catch him. He was so far-fetched, so far away from jazz. Not for the main people, not for the people that are inside, but even for people that are in my neighbourhood [The Bronx]. I had never heard of Stuff Smith. It too me a long time. You would hear Papa John Creach before you'd hear Stuff Smith. You would actually hear Ray Nance before you'd hear of Stuff Smith. So he was outside of that medium, somehow." Steve Holtje, in this same liner notes, succintly captures how the Bang-Ra group find their own way into Smith's legacy; Ra, "finding complexity in simplicity", playing a solo on this track that "almost any pianist could play - but only Ra would think of it. And while comping under Bang, Ra turns the music inside out with his off-kilter rhythms and harmonies. Bang is hardly overshadowed, spinning out inventive yet swinging, structurally sound lines. With Ore's fat bass sound and Cyrille's pointillistic drumming providing a rock-solid but supremely flexible rhythm section, the liberties Ra likes to take are perfectly supported." (Incidentally, Bang revisited this tune on his most recent recording, 2010's 'Prayer for Peace'.)

Billy Bang & Don Cherry - Unknown Title
Don Cherry (pocket trumpet) Billy Bang (violin) Wilber Morris (bass) Denis Charles (drums)
Recorded live at Tramps, NYC, 1984

Billy Bang Sextet - Rainbow Gladiator
Billy Bang (violin) Roy Campbell (trumpet) Oscar Sanders (guitar) Thurman Barker (marimba, percussion) William Parker (bass) Zen Matsuura (drums) Eddie Conde (conga)
from 'Live at Carlos 1' (1986)

Billy Bang/ Sun Ra - Only Time Will Tell
Billy Bang (violin) Sun Ra (piano) John Ore (bass) Andrew Cyrille (drums)
from 'A Tribute to Stuff Smith' (1992)

In some ways, Bang's whole life was shadowed by his experiences in Vietnam, but it wasn't until his last 10 years that he directly approached the subject in music, recruiting a band of other ex-Vietnam vets, including Ted Daniel and Butch Morris, and releasing two of his best received albums, 'Vietnam: The Aftermath' and 'Vietnam: Reflections'. Having made his peace with Vietnam, tragically, it was still Vietnam that had the last word; the cancer that caused his death was apparently a result of Agent Orange.

It was that first Vietnam album that brough him some added notice in the jazz press: people seemed surprised at its easy, swinging nature (as if Bang hadn't shown them how capable he was of playing in that style already), respectful of its historical resonance. As Jim Santella wrote in a review for All About Jazz: "The music moves evenly with a peaceful country air. Dirges, dances, ceremonial rites, a little dramatic counterpoint, and swinging anthems take on surreal qualities through Billy Bang's compositions.[...]Bang and five other members of the ensemble are veterans. They've turned these memories into a positive affair. Culture, society, and a deeper meaning color the session thoroughly, but they're couched in lively, straight-ahead jazz terms."

Billy Bang - Tunnel Rat (Flashlight & a '45)
Billy Bang (violin) Ted Daniel (trumpet) John Hicks (piano) Curtis Lundy (bass) Michael Carvin (drums)
from 'Vietnam: The Aftermath' (2001)

One of Bang's finest recent recordings came in a quintet with Frank Lowe; this was also one of the saxophonist's final performances before he too, succumbed to cancer, and, indeed, he played this concert with only one lung, becoming so out of breath at the end of proceedings that the promoter wanted to call an ambulance. Bang and Lowe’s musical relationship had lasted for more than twenty-five years, and by this stage, both had, perhaps, ‘mellowed out’ a little: Lowe’s solos, while retaining atonal interjections, are less burry and ferocious than they had been in the ’70s, instead taking on a pithy and even pretty edge, while Bang swoops between grandstanding, super-fast runs, staccato rhythmics, and smoothly expansive melodies. The track I've chosen, 'Nothing But Love', gives Lowe and Bang the least solo space of any of the tunes on the record, but their unison statements of the righteously hopefuly melody attain an added poignancy with both mens' passing. Another side of the band is shown in the video embedded below; recorded five years earlier, it finds Lowe in fine fire-breathing mode, yet manages to slot deliciously into a fairly straight (yet not cliche-laden) jazz & blues-based approach.)



Billy Bang / Frank Lowe Quintet - Nothing But Love
Frank Lowe (tenor sax) Billy Bang (violin) Andrew Bemkey (piano) Todd Nicholson (bass) Tatsuya Nakatani (drums)
from 'Above and Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids' (2005)

The technological boom of the past decade has meant 'obscure' musicians such as Bang can, theoretically, be seen and heard by tens of thousands of people all round the world - something undreamed of in earlier days of day-to-day struggle. And if that might be a rather utopian way of looking at things - it still is a struggle for those playing this music, and the internet isn't going to change all that - it's nonetheless true that there's more than enough good-quality video evidence of Bang's playing during the 2000s to allow even the laziest music fan to investigate his work. I've chosen to embed a few examples below (they won't be featured in the playlist, obviously). To begin with, Bang guesting with the band Trouble) contrasts Harvey Cowan’s freescrape violin solo with Bang’s own melodic, building approach. Cowan (who is apparently also an architect) sounds a bit like Bang used to – not that either approach is less relevant or valid, just that Bang plays differently now (though he can of course whip out the dissonances and rough finishes - they are what gives his playing its spice). Following that, two trios with Hamiet Bluiett, the first also featuring Jin Hi Kim on komungo (a Korean zither dating back to the 7th century), the second with percussionist Kahil El'Zhabar; another trio with Kim and William Parker; and a very fine duo with Parker (all recorded live). Roulette TV, meanwhile, has a full-length solo violin performance from 2010, opening with an introspective piece self-descriptively entitled ‘Daydream’, proceeding through a poem dedicated to Denis Charles and ending with a trademark super-fast cadenza. It's both a fine example of Bang’s solo technique and of the relation between his compositional and improvisational methods (as explained in the interview which appears towards the end of the video). Interesting also to compare it to the solo violin piece from 30 years earlier which I posted nearer the top of the playlist.

Roulette TV: BILLY BANG from Roulette Intermedium on Vimeo.

Bang appeared, if anything, to be growing stronger, rather than withering with age: albums like the Sirone-Bang Ensemble's 'Configuration' and the William Parker Violin Trio's 'Scrapbook' have some of his finest playing on record, and ‘Prayer for Peace’ had been among the best-received jazz albums of 2010 - so the news of his death came as quite a shock to quite a few people. Perhaps, those closest to Bang knew; and at last year’s Vision Festival, he’d announced his battle with cancer. But he was determined to keep on playing through it, and there were planned appearances, for example, at this year’s Vision (where he was going to pay tribute to the recently-deceased Marion Brown), and a number of other dates. The video below, from Feburary 2011, is perhaps his last documented performance: a quintet featuring Dick Griffin on trombone, Andrew Bemkey (who we heard with the Lowe/Bang Quintet) on piano, Hilliard Greene on bass, and Newman Taylor-Baker on drums. As a shaven-headed Bang leads with the solemn, hymn-like melody of 'Prayer for Peace' over churchy piano chords, trombone and bass drones, and rumbling drums, one reflects that the title of the piece he dedicated to John Coltrane could just as well apply to the man himself: "Nobody Hear the Music the Same Way."

Billy Bang Quintet - Prayer for Peace
Billy Bang (violin) Dick Griffin (trombone) Andrew Bemkey (piano) Hilliard Greene (bass) Newman Taylor Baker (drums)
Recorded live at the Savoy Theatre, 4th Feb 2011

Download the Full Playlist Here
(THIS contains some tracks from bootleg recordings and MP3 versions of videos: sound quality on these will not be up to the standard of the official album tracks.)

The quotations interspersed throughout the post above are transcriptions from a video interview given by Bang in 2007, and available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsXJ2uzM9Vo. George Scala's Billy Bang discography can be found at http://www.mindspring.com/~scala/bang.htm, while John Lindberg's reminiscence of his time with Bang in the String Trio of New York is at New Music Box.