Sun Ra – Piano Recital: Teatro La Fenice, Venezia

Piano Recital: Teatro La Fenice, Venezia

Sun RaPiano Recital: Teatro La Fenice, Venezia Golden Years of New Jazz GY 21 (2003)


In all of the many, many recordings Sun Ra made over the course of about five decades of activity only a few were for solo piano.  Some listeners malign the solo stuff as weaker than the more widely known group recordings.  Personal opinions aside, solo piano albums like Monorails and Satellites and St. Louis Blues (and for the most part Solo Piano, Vol. 1 too) featured songs that Sun Ra’s larger bands didn’t play.  Ra’s solo material was simply different.  But the posthumously released Piano Recital dips into the Arkestra’s songbook for some favorites like “Love in Outer Space,” “Outer Spaceways Inc.,” and “Friendly Galaxy/ Spontaneous Simplicity.”  There also are some standards, like Fats Waller‘s “Honeysuckle Rose,” Billy Strayhorn‘s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and a Cecil Taylor-esque read of Val Burton & Will Jason‘s “Penthouse Serenade” (popularized by Nat “King” Cole).  Sun Ra’s playing is a lot more assured than on Monorails and Satellites from a dozen years before.  Perhaps it was the live audience that made the difference.  In any event, he sounds relaxed and comfortable, and doesn’t strain to do anything out of character.  This album might be the best of the solo recordings.  It certainly is the only one that provides a crisp distillation of the familiar group material.  While still not an essential item, this should satisfy any looking for something in line with the solo piano concept.

Sun Ra – Monorails and Satellites

Monorails and Satelites

Sun RaMonorails and Satellites El Saturn SR 509 (1968)


Sun Ra has been criticized by some as not being a great pianist.  His first album of solo piano recordings, Monorails and Satellites, probably won’t change any minds on that score.  The material here covers a broad spectrum, from dissonant avant-garde to melodic balladry.  The songs are different from what Sun Ra’s larger band was recording around the same time, so rather than being a new take on familiar forms these solo records represent an expansion of his palette.  Unfortunately, the performances are mediocre at best.  The most difficult material, like “Space Towers” and “Cogitation,” sounds like inferior renditions of compositions by Arnold Schönberg with added syncopation.  The ballads are a bit better, but often seem like the work of a merely adequate performer being self-consciously difficult to try to project himself beyond his means.  The most effective passages are where Sun Ra shows his versatility by playing stride piano and the like.  Monorails and Satellites probably won’t win any new fans.  Even longtime fans might find this difficult to enjoy.

Ornette Coleman – The Best of Ornette Coleman: The Blue Note Years

The Best of Ornette Coleman: The Blue Note Years

Ornette ColemanThe Best of Ornette Coleman: The Blue Note Years Blue Note 7243 8 23372 2 5 (1997)


This could have been more aptly titled “The Best of the Worst.”  Ornette’s time with a recording contract for Blue Note came both when he was experimenting with new configurations of his music, and when Blue Note was just starting to drift into irrelevance.  Collected here are tracks from, in order of appearance, New York Is Now!, At The “Golden Circle” Stockholm, Volume One, The Empty Foxhole, and Jackie McLean‘s New and Old Gospel.  Recording as a leader, only the live Golden Circle album is really successful from this period, and it found Ornette re-stating and summarizing his past in a lighter trio setting.  Of the other tracks, “Broad Way Blues” is quite nice, even if it is a rather stiff performance of more transitional material that he bettered later on.  “Old Gospel” is from a rare album on which Ornette plays for another leader but doesn’t completely dominate the leader McLean.  All said, this collection is completely unnecessary, though perhaps it sheds some light on a much-maligned period of Ornette’s illustrious career.  Listeners should be warned that this is by no means representative of the man’s entire career.

Ornette Coleman – Friends and Neighbors

Friends and Neighbors: Ornette Live at Prince Street

Ornette ColemanFriends and Neighbors: Ornette Live at Prince Street Flying Dutchman (1970)


Ornette Coleman has had a strange and wonderful career.  From the beginning, he was an iconoclast who sparked intensely divisive reactions. And yet, eventually, he was accepted as one of the most significant jazz musicians to date.  But his legacy is a bizarre thing.  He has recorded for a variety of record labels.  He jumped around far more than most: they call Impulse! “the house that Trane built” and Miles Davis started on Prestige but stayed on Columbia for decades.  Whatever the reasons for Ornette to jump around so much (I’m actually not familiar enough with the circumstances to comment), the result was a patchwork of recordings on different labels, many of which seem to have never been reissued, as of this writing, or have seen only fleeting reissues that soon went out of print.  What this means is that listeners born long after Ornette’s career began often have no access at all to huge swaths of his recordings.  In fact, even among Ornette fans, there are plenty who base their admiration entirely on his output for Atlantic records, which spanned a period of only about five years!

Ornette signed a one record deal with Bob Thiele‘s Flying Dutchman label, and released Friends and Neighbors, a live recording made sometime in 1970 at Ornette’s own New York City loft at 131 Prince Street on the Lower East Side.  It was, at that time, still a seedy area abandoned by industrial concerns.  But it had been in fits and starts a haven for jazz musicians, and would increasingly become a kind of magnet for jazz musicians in the 1970s.  The Wildflowers series of albums from the later 70s documented the scene in all its glory.  It was an independent-minded scene, with musicians doing everything themselves, from finding venues, promotion, to performance.  This was partly out of necessity, as venues and record labels closed or were simply unwilling to support this kind of music.  It was still a successful endeavor, for a time, and many musicians could support themselves this way while making the music they wanted.

This band is interesting.  It has Ed Blackwell (d), Charlie Haden (b) and Dewey Redman (ts), but also, literally, friends and neighbors on vocals — the audience of people who came to the show get to participate.  Redman’s time with Ornette is a strange one.  Many recordings by the two have lacked reissues, and those they recorded for Blue Note were are notoriously off.  But Redman added a unique contrast to Ornette’s sour alto (and his squealing trumpet and violin!), with a hefty tone that conveyed a sense of definite, conscious purpose.  Ornette’s son Denardo had started playing drums in his father’s bands, but longtime collaborator Ed Blackwell is back behind the drum kit this time.  Blackwell was a perfect match for Ornette’s style of music, and that is evident here.  He brings in traces of bop styling while also having a light rolling lilt (a style he expanded through work with longtime Ornette collaborator Don Cherry).  Charlie Haden is a rock.  He’s fantastic here as always, with a warm inviting character that adds down-home grooves and cheerful optimism to the mix.  It is Haden’s contributions, more than anything else, that make the music catchy and welcoming.

Some of the best material here is when Ornette is playing violin or trumpet (both versions of “Friends and Neighbors” and “Let’s Play”).  Other musicians like Miles Davis (as mentioned in his autobiography) despised Ornette for playing instruments for which he was supposedly not qualified.  This is one of the most fundamental differences between Ornette and everyone else though.  He was an autodidact.  And he was an anarchist.  Teaching himself to play an instrument was the natural thing to do, from those perspectives.  And he was bound by no one’s external ideas about who gets to decide what is the right or wrong way to play any instrument.  So his self-taught techniques on violin and trumpet lacked the path-dependencies of people trained by others to follow certain performance institutions, meaning, especially, a respect for traditional hierarchies of teachers and students passed down from (only) respected elders to (only) younger players who respect and value the status of the teachers and reproduce the hierarchy.  In a really classic anarchistic and autodidactic fashion, Ornette abruptly severs those institutional pathways and just plays however he wants.  This almost always draws the ire of people (“conservatives” is the formal name) who demand adherence to social hierarchies that they have climbed, are climbing, or wish to climb.  Some hate him for eschewing these hierarchies they are invested in, but that is precisely what other people love about Ornette!  This is the most elemental reason for the polarizing reactions to the man’s music.

For a CD reissue of Friends and Neighbors, Dean Rudland provides excellent liner notes.  He makes the pointed observation that Ornette’s music was “non-harmonic”.  This might seem like a confusing statement about a musician who has dubbed his approach to artistic endeavor “Harmolodics”.  But what it means is that Ornette generally does not dictate harmonic relationships in his compositions, at all.  He establishes melodic progressions, but harmonic relationships arise only through the collective actions of all the performers during the act of improvising the songs.  This is one of Ornette’s most radical concepts.  He steadfastly refuses to establish relationships between performers.  Everyone gets to play (transpose – the term Ornette tends to use) at his discretion, and the resultant harmonies become whatever they become.  The performers don’t have complete discretion (this is not like some incoherent anarcho-punk morass).  There is a structure offered, which is kind of an agreed direction (Ornette tends to call this playing in “unison”), but the implementation is equally open to the discretion of all the performers.

The man’s music was evolving through this period, and the use of trumpet and violin were the most telling signals that it would boldly go where no one chose to take it before.  It is on the trumpet and violin songs that it is most clear that each performer is allowed to do anything and contribute equally.  Ornette has no privileged position in the band.  These things are contrasted by “Long Time No See” and the first part of “Forgotten Songs”, which kind of look back to what Ornette was doing back in the early 60s with the Don Cherry quartet or with the Izenzon/Moffett trio in the mid-60s.

While Friends and Neighbors might not be the most significant of Ornette’s recordings, it is still a really, really good one, very near the top of the stack.  It shows him continuing to develop and refine the concepts that would culminate in Science Fiction (1972).

Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night

The Heart of Saturday Night

Tom WaitsThe Heart of Saturday Night 7E-1015 (1974)


The Heart of Saturday Night sits — sometimes uncomfortably — between the California soft rock of Tom Waits’ debut and the beatnik barfly music of his later 1970s work.  His avant hobo persona was still a long ways off.  Waits is ambling in the right direction, but compared to later efforts the performances come across as too uncertain and the songwriting too muddled.  In a perplexing way, the worn out and boozy ambiance of Small Change and the theatrical and maudlin touches of Blue Valentine ending up providing the missing ingredients.  So while there is hardly anything in particular wrong with this album, Waits has done better.

Tom Waits – Small Change

Small Change

Tom WaitsSmall Change Asylum 7E-1078 (1976)


Fans of Tom Waits’ later work aren’t always on board for his earlier stuff, and vice-versa.  Aside from briefly dabbling in soft rock, his early period was primarily marked by boozy bar songs, piano ballads, a sprinkling of orchestrated numbers, and a gentle subversion of traditional pop with an eye toward the seedier side of life.  Well, for his early period, Small Change might be the best.  It opens with the lush, maudlin “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).”  The next song “Step Right Up” showcases the off-kilter songwriting talents on which Waits would increasingly rely.  The rest of the album focuses more on piano bar jazz and blues, with borderline incoherent vocals and a fascination with the dark corners of down-and-out society.  It all works though, somehow.  This is right on the pulse of late-night drunken melancholy.  If you played this at an AA meeting you’d probably make some people cry.

David Ruffin – David Ruffin

David Ruffin

David RuffinDavid Ruffin Motown M762L (1973)


This self-titled album was my first exposure to David Ruffin’s solo material, back in the late 1990s.  I knew him as the lead singer of The Temptations, and hey, those glasses were back in style!  Definitely not his best.  Yet stuff like “I Miss You, Part 1” is still decent.  The problem is that he’s not doing the sweet, sumptuous string backing thing but also hasn’t fully committed to the psychedelic soul sound that would work well on his next effort Me ‘n Rock ‘n Roll Are Here to Stay.  So he’s stuck in some kind of middle-ground limbo.  It’s that, plus the material is forgettable and his voice isn’t as effective as elsewhere.  He had that once-in-a-lifetime coarse soulfulness in those vocal chords.  Here he comes across as almost hoarse much of the time.  Adequate, but unessential.

Richard Davis – Epistrophy & Now’s the Time

Epistrophy & Now's the Time

Richard DavisEpistrophy & Now’s the Time: Recorded Live! at Jazz City Muse MR 5002 (1972)


A pretty great live date recorded 7 September 1972 in New York City.  The original LP had one extended song per side, but the 1992 CD reissue adds another superb cut.  The set opens with Monk‘s “Epistrophy”.  Davis on bass plays in a way similar to Miroslav Vitouš, seamlessly drifting between playing lead and comping — though more often he’s on lead here.  Cliff Jordan plays the melody on sax in one of the most awesomely sleazy interpretations I’ve yet heard,  It’s classic Jordan, totally ribald but with a token veneer of politeness.  The performance is strong, but the band is really just warming up.  Charlie Parker‘s “Now’s the Time” is where this set really takes off.  It opens with a wild drum solo from Freddie Waits, who really is on fire throughout this whole album.  Then Davis enters, and right away Clifford Jordan jumps in to state the melody of Parker’s song.  The rest of the group joins in to direct the sound to more of a bop setting.  But before long, the group is off in other directions.  At times, the performance sounds like acoustic fusion.  Later on, it strongly resembles Don Cherry‘s later 1960s world music jazz.  Then Joe Bonner turns everything around and plays something in the style of Cecil Taylor.  Bonner has somewhat of a lesser role through the set, but his contributions are superb, adding perfectly stated accompaniment and occasional flourishes of solo statements.  Davis is playing arco (with a bow) by the end, blending modern classical influences as he was known for, though if you didn’t know it you might think someone had entered on electric guitar.  Toward the end, the melody to Parker’s song is restated, to bring back the bop influences.  Finally, the bonus track “Highest Mountain” ratchets up the energy even more to close the set on a high note.

The sound on the recording is a bit mediocre, and definitely is a product of the 1970s.  The soft, slightly muted dynamics are reminiscent of Rahsaan Roland Kirk‘s Bright Moments from the same era.  But the musicians are really open stylistically and in top form as technicians.  Some of the “songs” they play are almost like afterthoughts.  It seems that these guys were out to play some music and they are really just offering extended quotes from jazz standards more so than truly covering the songs in a conventional fashion, as is especially the case on “Now’s the Time.”  That gives this album a relaxed, welcoming feel.  The spontaneous shifts between widely different styles is something that probably never would have happened in the studio.

Richard Davis’ discography as a leader is somewhat slim, and it includes quite a number of live recordings released on relatively obscure jazz labels.  Now’s the Time might be a standout among those.  I saw The Pyramid Trio (with Roy Campbell, Jr., William Parker and Hamid Drake) in early 2003, and what those guys were doing was pretty similar to what Richard’s band was doing live over 30 years earlier.  In fact, much of what The Pyramid Trio did was exactly the same as what Richard Davis’ group does on Now’s the Time.  Maybe that can be explained by the fact that William Parker studied with Davis at one point.  But it also shows how Davis’ style of performance hasn’t lost any relevance through the years.

Sun Ra – The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums

The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears

Sun RaThe Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears Evidence ECD 22217-2 (2000)

Rescued from the dustbin of history by Evidence, this pairing of albums originally intended for release by Impulse! in the early 1970s (a few tracks from Cymbals were released on Deep Purple) highlights Sun Ra in electric small combo settings.  Cymbals is very a much a continuation of efforts like “The Night of the Purple Moon”.  Yet where The Night of the Purple Moon had Sun Ra up front, Cymbals finds Ra taking a more secondary role while the reed players are at center stage.  Songs like the lengthy “Thoughts Under a Dark Blue Light” are based around extended sax workouts, and built out with plenty of welcoming grooves.  Crystal Spears goes in a different direction though.  The performances are more challenging.  Sun Ra takes on a more prominent role too, with John Gilmore getting a ton of space to himself on “Sunrise in the Western Sky”.  It’s the more intriguing and unique of the two discs, though it may leave a few listeners behind not in tune with the noisier aspects of Sun Ra’s music.

Sun Ra’s synth (mini-moog) blasting out raw sound on “Crystal Spears” is not unlike Miles Davis‘ keyboard in the mid-1970s.  Miles would lean his whole forearm on the keyboard to create massive blocks of sound, as on “Maiysha” from Get Up With It or much of Dark Magus (“Tatu” for example).  This took Davis away from any tonality of course, but it also broke the bonds between melody, harmony and rhythm by presenting sounds that were independent from much of what else went on with the music.  Davis got these ideas from German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (thanks to house guest Paul Buckmaster), whose compositions like Prozession pointed the way for electronic music organized in elemental terms based on moment-to-moment relationships rather than any kind of overarching guiding structure.  Most call it “noise”.  Noise?  “2 a : sound; especially: one that lacks agreeable musical quality or is noticeably unpleasant b : any sound that is undesired or interferes with one’s hearing of something.” “noise.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 20 October 2009. But the negative connotations that term carries are purely relative, because it’s only disagreeable or unwanted if you assume from the start that traditional rules about tonality and the implicit guidelines set by standard musical notation define the exclusive boundaries of “agreeable” music.  For the rest of us we can just enjoy the more wide-ranging possibilities that exist outside those assumptions.  That undoubtedly was how Sun Ra looked at it — he was a guy who wouldn’t hesitate to mention that he was from Saturn after all (though it is interesting to note that Stockhausen too believed himself to be of extraterrestrial origin, and also was greatly influenced by swing-era jazz).

In the final judgment, both discs here are highlights from a fertile period when Sun Ra and his faithful cohorts were finding new ways to make their music more accessible while still retaining the essence of the loose, free musics on which they had established their roles as interstellar musical travelers in the preceding decades.

Anthony Braxton – For Alto

For Alto

Anthony BraxtonFor Alto Delmark DS-420/421 (1971)


This one does not live up to its reputation.  For one thing, it’s poorly recorded.  But that aside, I think the biggest problem is that Braxton just isn’t able to pull off many of his ideas.  The big ideas are here, and they are big indeed.  But geez, this sounds like a Phish concert some of the time, with kind of wanky solos that trample the underlying concepts beyond the point of being interesting anymore.  Braxton’s angular style was never particularly tactful, but I think he quickly picked up enough tact to get to a higher plane following these recordings.  In other words, there is a self-indulgent quality to this that holds it back — always his Achilles heel.  Later Braxton recordings are better.  Though I suppose this does deserve credit for helping to create a space for recordings as uncompromising as this, with an entire album of abstract, screeching saxophone solos.