Matthew T Grant

First thing I noticed was that Chris Potter doesn’t have an iPhone. He took a call right before the set and it looked like he just had one of those free phones, or maybe a Blackberry. A Blackberry would make sense – as one of the leading tenors of the day, he’s got a business to run – but, somehow, an iPhone would have made more sense.

Chris Potter plays with the precision, force and lucidity that I associate with Stan Getz. His harmonic conception is palpably modern stemming as it does from Coltrane, of course, but even more obviously, at least to these ears, from Wayne Shorter. Last night he led the band through a set comprised primarily of new and, as Potter pointed out, untitled compositions, many reminiscent of the cyclical openness of Shorter’s mid-sixties work, though one at least, the last number, sounding fairly Zawinul-esque.

In other words, the evening provided a healthy dose of melodic and spacious dynamism that was simultaneously grounded, cerebral, and even atmospheric.

Last time I saw Potter he was accompanied by the guitarist Adam Rogers and I was struck then by Rogers’ mastery of myriad styles from bebop to fusion to funk-rock. Last night, I had a similar feeling about Potter’s talent; he has obviously subsumed the dominant tenor strains of the last fifty years and continues to deploy and forge them into a deliberate and individualized sound.

The main challenge for someone at Potter’s level of playing is not sounding too much like any of the guys he could sound like. Following in Shorter’s footsteps helps him do this since the latter’s career was literally born in Coltrane’s shadow (Trane had recommended him as a replacement for himself to Miles). Shorter of course, whose playing in the 60s bears some un-mistakable Trane-isms, went on to build a towering body of work characterized by a nuanced, engaging and distinctive vision. Potter’s oeuvre, for its part, remains a compellingly evolved work in progress.

Potter did sound sort of Trane-y at times, especially on one self-penned ballad. In fact, he even took the band on an extended, Eastern modal workout right out of Trane’s playbook. I was glad to see him take the head with his tenor but, inevitably, he reached for the soprano and I thought we were moving straight into imitative homage territory. I was pleasantly surprised, however. Potter’s soprano tone was more in the controlled, Jan Garbarek vein and, in fact, highlighted by contrast the helter-skelter, jittery and frantic nature of Trane’s.

Potter’s supporting cast featured Larry Grenadier on bass, Edward Simon on piano, and Marcus Gilmore on drums. Grenadier is a pro – thoughtful, lyrical, focused. Marcus Gilmore is full of energy and ideas and a deft juggler of simultaneously independent rhythmic flows and phrases. Simon produced endlessly beautiful and absorbing tableaux which, unfortunately, I was not always able to adequately descry, seated as I was some five feet behind the cauldron of Gilmore’s drum kit.

A young Berklee kid sat down next to me right before things jumped off. We were chatting and he asked me if “I played.” I’ve been playing guitar for over thirty years but I’m so self-conscious about my abilities that I responded, “Ah, I’m just a hacker. A journeyman.”

Later, as the band kicked in and I started to get a little lost in the music, I realized I should have told him the truth: I’m a latter-day beatnik jazz mystic type of guy. Ever since I heard Coltrane’s Ascension, I knew that jazz was a portal into the All, a complex and transient exploration of the infinite Now. When I hear jazz live, I’m looking for a hit of that.

And frankly, listening to Chris Potter’s angular, sinewy, but fleshed out and utterly human solos, and everything the band did around and through them, I got my fix.

Image source: Olivier Bruchez.

I went to see Rush at the Garden last night. It was good, but it wasn’t sublime.

Here’s the thing. I’ve liked Rush since I was a kid and in fact still listen to their music with an, for some, alarming frequency (my favorite album being Fly by Night). However, I never really explored their catalog, which I otherwise celebrate, beyond Moving Pictures, the mega-hit which sold over 4 million copies worldwide and put them on the classic rock map for good.

If I think of things from the standpoint of Geddy, Alex, and Neil, I realize that for them, Rush is everything they have done since they started playing together in something like 1968. In fact, early on in the show Geddy Lee joked that they had “400 songs” that they could play for us.

Unfortunately, for many of my generation—I recently turned 47—Rush actually boils down to the 4 or 5 songs (“Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” etc.) that we’ve heard a thousand times and, if you are a semi-fan like me, choice cuts from the preceding albums (“Xanadu” from A Farewell to Kings or “The Necromancer” from Caress of Steel). Aside from “Subdivisions” off Signals, I couldn’t really name a Rush song recorded after 1980.

It was for this reason, and a couple others, that the first lengthy set Rush played was a bit of the hard slog. Kicking things off with a very corny, though highly produced, film clip that set up the “time machine” theme of the evening, the band launched into one of their biggest hits, “Spirit of the Radio,” and it was exhilarating. When you hear a band play a song that has been kicking around your ears for thirty years it is undeniably powerful and I was, for about 4 minutes and 50 seconds, transported. Read the rest of this entry »

“Can’t you see that I’m the one who understands you?”

When my oldest son was 3 or maybe 4, he picked up a copy of Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, opened it and, looking intently at the pages (he could not read at the time), started shouting, “I knew it! I knew it!” This perfectly illustrates my own relationship to the work of this seductively abstruse thinker.

One thesis of the aforementioned well-worn paperback is that the gaze is an object of desire. We want to be seen. This yearning is rooted in us at an existential level and finds expression throughout our culture. Why else, I ask you, would  spiritual union, intimacy, and intense personal commitment be expressed simply as, “I see you,” in the film Avatar?

Of course, the idea that people seek out “the gaze of the other” doesn’t really sound that profound considering that everywhere we look advertisements abound promising methods to improve our appearance in order to make ourselves more attractive. For his part, Lacan makes his idea stranger than obvious by insisting that the gaze is an actual object (captured, for example, in Holbein’s anamorphotic skull), and not just the fact that someone casts a longing glance our way.

In her finely crafted hit, “You Belong With Me,” Taylor Swift emphasizes that the “gaze” as object of desire is actually a placeholder for something even more potent and abstract: knowledge. That is, rather than merely being seen, we want to be known. To put it another way, what we want the other to see in us is our understanding of them.

The protagonist of the song, well-aware of the visual allure of her high-heeled, short-skirted sexual rival, goes out of her way to convince the object of her desire (“you in your worn out jeans”) that what she has to offer is something to be more highly prized. Certainly, she says, the toned legs and prominent ass buttocks of a cheerleader are undeniably appealing, but what is more elusive and valuable, in fact, what you yourself lack, is the satisfaction that comes from clear-sighted self-knowledge, which I alone, as the one who gets your humor and knows your story, can provide.

The irony, and tragedy, I suppose, is that visual immediacy can so easily trump this intimate knowing, however desirable the latter may in the end be. I believe that this is amply illustrated by the video for “You Belong with Me.” The fact that Taylor Swift is herself physically attractive not only makes the narrative unbelievable, at least as told from her perspective, but also highlights the challenge of becoming an object of desire through primarily subjective (“I know you”) means.

At least that’s what I got out of it.

Caught Pat Martino’s first set at Scullers last night. He was playing with organist Tony Monaco and drummer Jason Brown and confirmed note-by-sinewy-note  his well-deserved status as a living master still very much in possession of his prodigious gifts.

Martino’s patented “horn-like” lines were in full display, as was his aptly groovy and well nigh gut-bucket comping, while his dynamic phrasing added a sublimely meta-rhythmic layer to all the serpentine spideriness of his “concept.”

One thing that separates Martino from the be-boppers and modernists who preceded him (the Jimmy Raneys and Jim Halls of the world) and the post-modern post-fusionists of today (from Scofield to Rosenwinkel) is that he’s got a healthy dose of the Sixties on him. This shines through in his come-by-it-honestly nativist approach to the funky organ trio setting as well as in his trance-inducing, raga-esque vorticism (which reminded me, at times, of my longtime idol, Gabor Szabo).

In other words, Martino was great.

Nevertheless, for me, the true star of the evening was Tony Monaco. A highly animated and expressive guy (his protean facial expressions were themselves worth the price of admission), he played astoundingly well, moving fluidly from vintage Jimmy Smithery to an ELP-like psychedelia. The neck-deep in the reverb, quasi-soap-opera tone he chose during “Alone Together,” which he rode deep into an obscure, supersonic well, was emblematic of his adventurous, effervescent, and endlessly captivating style. We haven’t heard the last from Mr. Monaco.

The evening’s one moment of strangeness was when Pat temporarily dismissed the band and invited his wife, Ayako, to play a couple numbers with him. I couldn’t get my head around that move until I thought, “This guy has basically been on the road for 45 years and, at this point, the stage is more or less his living room. Why shouldn’t he just sit down with his wife and play a couple tunes for friends?”

Except, of course, the stage is not a living room and we are not his friends, which made this portion of the show either eccentric, endearing, or irritating, depending on where you were at mentally.

Image Credit: tom.beetz

Listening to this Derek and the Dominoes boot is like eavesdropping on the dream of a drunkard.

I can imagine being at the show and perceiving it in the same befuddled way as it is presented in this recording: blurred, remote, and overwhelming. In other words, for all its distorted obscurity here we actually get the real thing itself, the event as it must have unfolded in the delirious ears of those present.

Akin to a lot of Dead audience tapes, the main thing you can hear is the guitar with everything else melting into a gray (or in the Dead’s case, “day-glo”) sludge. The lo-fidelity of the recording makes the performance densely abstract; you get the sense of the music’s general contours, its velocity, its trajectory, but your bewildered mind has to fill in the details.

Except, of course, for that guitar, the one identifiable, concrete element around which the otherwise chaotic noise organizes itself.

There are moments in Eric Clapton’s playing where I’ve said to myself, “That’s why people dig Clapton,” and some of those moments can be found in this ancient maelstrom’s aural whorl. These are the moments when the legend and hype of Clapton (his abstraction) take on solid form and exercise an uncanny, even mesmeric, force.

(Oddly enough, I don’t believe these are the same moments that Clapton appreciates in his own playing, but what of it? There’s no accounting for taste.)

I draw your attention to the following instances of Clapton’s concrete abstraction as worthy of further study: “Had to Cry Today” and “Sea of Joy” from Blind Faith; “Deserted Cities of the Heart” from Live Cream, Volume II;  “Roll It Over” and “Pearly Queen,” from Rainbow Concert; and, if you can find them, any Cream bootlegs from their 1967 tour (like this one from Detroit’s Grande Ballroom).

Clapton was hardly God, but at times He was close enough.

Image Courtesy of deadheaduk.

Looking for Slayer videos on YouTube I came across this: “Reek of Putrefaction,” by Carcass.

Apparently the video was shot on the “Grindcrusher” Tour in 1989. The tour got it’s name from an amazing compilation which I bought on cassette back in 1990 at a store that no longer exists.

In addition to the studied metal stylings of Carcass, said cassette introduced me to some of my favorite metal bands – Bolt Thrower, Morbid Angel, and Entombed.

The cassette also introduced me to Earache Records, the grey lady of grindcore labels. In fact, it was while rummaging through a bin of cheap Earache cassettes at the first big Metal/Hardcore festival in Worcester that I came across Sleep‘s enduring classic, Holy Mountain, originally issued on Earache.

I paid like $3 for that thing and then listened to it about a ten thousand times.

I once blew the mind of a friend when he asked if I could guess his favorite guitarist and I responded, correctly, “Manitas de Plata.” Of course, that was just a lucky shot in the dark, but Manitas de Plata was an incredible guitar player in the flamenco style. Apparently, Picasso was so taken with him that he drew on his guitar.

I found this video of the maestro playing for Brigitte Bardot in 1968. The lovely Ms. Bardot seems likewise taken with the French Romani’s fleet and silvery fingerings.

Very strange recordings of shortwave radio messages apparently used by intelligence agencies during the Cold War but introduced to a broader audience after becoming an object of obsessive interest for hipster dad-rockers like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Check it out:

Audio Courtesy of Irdial and Archive.org.

The fact that I was grooving on Andrew Hill, coupled with the fact that I decided to check out  his Andrew!!! (literally, I got the cd at the library) because I saw that John Gilmore, longtime collaborator of Sun Ra, played on it, makes me a “jazzhole.”

Likewise, the fact that I would say, “Everyone knows Point of Departure cuz Dolphy was on it, but I prefer the stuff Hill did with Sam Rivers,” makes me a “jazzhole.”

Nevertheless, if digging the esoteric masters of the art is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Image Courtesy of Max Sparber.

I just got back from the symphony whereat I heard Joshua Bell play Brahms’ Violin Concerto.

Though I’ve always been a rock guy (the first album I ever bought was KISS Destroyer, and, indeed as I write this, I’m listening to Jimmy Page live with the Yardbirds from 1968), I have been “into” classical music, which my mother referred to as “long hair” music, off and on since I was a kid and, as it turns out, actually listened to that concerto fairly frequently at one point.

Why was I listening to it then? Because I had become obsessed with a violinist, Henryk Szeryng,  and, having sought out his recordings, one day lit upon his interpretation of Brahms’ masterwork done for Mercury’s Living Presence imprint in 1962.

How had I become obsessed with Szeryng? I went up to Canada in December 1993 to attend the MLA Convention in Toronto and was staying near Georgetown, Ontario with the family of a Canadian acquaintance.  We were hanging out with his next door neighbor’s grandson, David, who played viola in the string quartet at Indiana University South Bend (I believe this is David today), and that guy put on Szeryng’s recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin.

I had never heard these compositions before nor had I heard a violinist like Szeryng, whose tone was exotically rough hewn and absolutely entrancing. I felt drawn into the sonatas, invited to inhabit them. When David mentioned that Szeryng had been a morphine addict, I was hooked.

I had never really thought of classical musicians as characters, let alone madmen and junkies. This was my mistake. Although others who knew him later confirmed to me that Szeryng could in fact play beautifully even when exquisitely wasted, I soon discovered that beyond that he had led an incredibly colorful life which included, among other things, emigrating to Mexico with a host of Poles fleeing the Nazis and eventually becoming a Mexican citizen out of gratitude to the nation which had so graciously welcomed him and his compatriots.

Long story short, I heard exceeding virtuosity in Joshua Bell’s performance – that young man sure can play the fiddle – but I did not hear anything ragged or wild in it. And I missed that.

Image Courtesy of mint imperial.