The Art Group Behind Last Night’s OWS Light Projection | In the Air: Art+Auction's Gossip Column | ARTINFO.com

The Art Group Behind Last Night’s OWS Light Projection | In the Air: Art+Auction's Gossip Column | ARTINFO.com

Top Ten, 2011

1. Joe McPhee and Michael Zerang, Creole Gardens: A New Orleans Suite, NoBusiness;
2. Matthew Shipp and Matthew Shipp Trio, Art of the Improviser, Thirsty Ear;
3. Wadada Leo Smith's Organic, Heart's Reflections, Cuneiform;
4. William Parker, Crumbling In The Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake, Centering;
5. Daniel Levin Quartet, Organic Modernism, Clean Feed;
6. Mary Halvorsen and Jessica Pavone, Departure of Reason, Thirsty Ear;
7. Darius Jones Trio, Big Gurl, AUM Fidelity;
8.The Rempis Percussion Quartet, Montreal Parade, 482 Music;
9.Spanish Donkey, XYX, Northern Spy;
10.Klang, Other Doors, Allos Documents.

All Time Entries from Jazzreview.com, JazzTimes.com and AllAboutJazz.com

http://jazzreview.com/component/k2/itemlist/user/72-lynhorton.html

http://jazztimes.com/contributors/17952-lyn-horton

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/contrib.php?id=2825



All the articles I have written are listed at these links. For the third, searching my name will give more.

Thanks to all.

A Way Out: No, I'm Already In

In some ways, I am just so stuck. Stuck inside my box, which is a fairly large box, if one considers its contents: both metaphorically and ideologically.

Those who discuss the distinction between "inside" and "outside" the box are attempting to convey the difference between status quo and revolutionary, or between mediocrity, conformism, largely acceptable and edgy, non-conformist, individualistic, and rarely understood without explanation. Ambition is not primarily a factor in either although it somehow subliminally drives the activity of both.

But the association of ambition with the latter out-on-a-limb-ness (yet another metaphor for the innovative) deprives it of its honesty and beauty. Rather motivation and incentive and necessity trigger the formation of that which is next but never realized until it presents itself through the creative process.

The creative process is an overused phrase. What it means. What it means is an undefinable, ineluctable, formless span of time. I certainly cannot understand it on the level of brain science. But I know when it is happening. It takes me over and simply lets me go where I want to go. My emotions are relegated to a back seat. Thinking in the language I am working with flows. I intend less to make a statement. But, then, the process winds down and I become conscious and, only then, can I begin to mold what I am doing and truly make a statement.

The vocabulary of the creative process changes from one language to the next. Take your pick: music, visual art, writing, performance, film, photography, acting. I do not want to open the door to any argument of what is and what does not take claim of the creative process. We pursue it all the time whether we like it or not. It is the means to move from one task to the next. Some of us are more organized about it than others. It is a product of the heart and mind. And I am not the first person to say that. Nor am I the first person to write on the gist of these words.

Another element that propels the creative process is desire. The desire to latch onto the transmitting of a congealing of chemistry in the universe. I have to believe that everything impales on everything else as influence. No escape is possible, because we are living. At least I am now. And whatever has been left by the living, now departed, can be deep within us. It is more the 'however' we need to heed. How we harness  the energy that penetrates us with past discovery and the reign of the spirit over a slice of humanity.

Successful (in terms of fulfillment) artists never really know what they are doing. And if they start to analyze what they are doing, they catch themselves, and stop. Analysis of what artists do is for the observers, the listeners. Analysis means examining whys and researching the past as opposed to describing how and inherent impact on the future. Analysis has nothing to do with investigating feelings, only picking out the mechanics. The capacity for awareness stemming from both within and without is far different from the capacity to analyze and impose views down from some morass of supposed knowledge.

Someone once told me that if I feel pain, it means something is happening. That same person told me that he sheds tears when he reaches enlightenment. There is no logic to the juxtaposition of the quick stories of that insight and instance. But I can say that spinning wildly away from them is meaning, endless meaning that has no verbal approximation. Does the sun shine? Does the human being live or move from day to day senselessly?

Because I am an artist, my sources for how I work and what the result becomes arise from assimilation of living. Growth in the art depends on the deepening of experience and filling the cracks as the art is expressed. The culminations of every stage of experiencing life within the art infuse the imagination with fireworks, opening doors, exuberance, deeper feeling, deeper self-understanding in relation to everything. Not only to the art making tools, or the musical instruments or typewriter, but how the hell to use them in the appropriate configurations.

And when I am at that stage, my elation scatters wide over the terrain of possibility. I have the terrain to stand on. That is where I begin. Its constituents are language, love, confidence and having the right-sized shoes.

Photo:
Before The Storm, August 27, 2011
copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Broken Partials, Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris, Not Two Records, 2011

In the beginning was an African ritual in which the ring shout and the innate rhythm elicited by the stomping of feet represented a cue for a communal gathering of spirits. Throughout history, the purity of the ring shout has changed to evoke and provoke more than was ever intended. A music evolved most often associated with the blues. The blues became “jazz” and “jazz” has so many offshoots that they sometimes have no name except “sound.”  

Broken Partials is a duet between longtime collaborators, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Joe Morris.  The recording’s salient focus is how the sound develops from “Broken Partials, One” to “Broken Partials, Eight.” The redundancy of the title describes both the improvised steps that constitute the whole and the infinitely brief hiatuses between and within those steps.

Concision of motion on their instruments clarifies the process that the musicians go through to tell their story, the outcome of which is unknown until the resilient pizzicato on the bass simply ends the recording. The subject of the story that they are both telling is how they play their instruments. Chords counteract sensible sequences of notes that transform from one to another through tremolos, runs, walking lines, arpeggios, ostinatos; snapped, pounded and repeated single notes; and the rare indications of melody.

The tempos may be laid back occasionally but the tempos only become important if it cannot be understood that they are part and parcel of the reason that the music falls into shapes that intersect, run parallel, blend, or split. Tempos and pitch, chord, key, phrase, interaction, separation and understated, underlying rhythm indivisibly define the improvisation. No matter how abstractly the music is explained verbally, words can never equal the abstract beauty of the music as it lends itself to the passing of time.  

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Awakening, Nicole Mitchell, Delmark, 2011

Touted as the country’s best ‘jazz’ flutist, Nicole Mitchell has really got it going on. In Awakening, she collaborates with her group to give a sprightly, endlessly energetic and sensitive take on her own compositions. She works with Chicago musicians: guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Harrison Bankhead and drummer Avreeayl Ra.

Mitchell believes in melody, harking back to traditional forms, but she also wants improvisation to infuse her music with freshness. That fact reveals her playfulness and interest in molding mood.

Her fellow players hook right up to her lines. Parker not only strums, but also launches himself into solos that are not foreign appendages to the whole unit’s exploration. He never explodes on his electric guitar; he moves around mellifluously between pizzicatos and chords, a soft, thorough and utter complement to Mitchell’s metallic struts, leaps, flutters, and voice-like 'brrrrrrs' and sirenic 'oooohs.'

Bankhead is a model bassist, holding onto and maximizing harmony with Mitchell's strikingly melodic sequences of high-pitched tones. In fact, the harmonic spaces between the flute, guitar and bass are perfectly poised. After a non-scattered intro, “Journey on a Thread” seems to exemplify the most exploratory of the tracks, highlighted with Bankhead’s popping the strings on his bass in a lengthy well-grounded solo.

“More Than I Can Say” features Parker playing a carefully plotted pizzicato that sets the tide for this slow tempo Latin-inspired piece. Mitchell spins the sound of the flute in the background and Ra interjects rolls on the toms with a persistent cymbal sibilance. Mitchell eventually takes the tune, laden with romanticism, supported in part by the way in which Ra teases the way for Parker’s re-emergence.  Once Parker resumes his fingered line, one can imagine Mitchell listening, off to the side clutching her flute in her arms like a baby until she and Parker come together at the end for the close.

Photo by Lauren Deutsch

Nicole Mitchell married Calvin Gannt in July of 2011. She left Chicago for Long Beach, California. On her September 1, 2011, Facebook page, she wrote this note:

Dear Chicago,

You will always be my home! You've been so generous, so loving, and even kicked my butt when I needed it! I've been squeezed by the heat, the passion and the storms into who I am. You'll always be at my core. I loved being invisible, swallowed up by the crowds full of dreams like myself, and I loved submerging into the sounds of hope and determination that makes Chicago cutting edge. The Iron and concrete, the spirit lake of serenity and aqua blue meditations. The parks and most of all the beautiful people. I've been called away to California. I'm looking forward to more growth and more challenges with my new life. But I hope to always be present and rooted in some way to you, Chi.

Love Nicole

In the title cut of her album, "Awakening," which also concludes the disc, it seems that she projects a feeling through her playing that she is eventually going to broadcast that she will leave her hometown; for at the end of a soft, moderately paced, sometimes melancholy flute song, the flute's sound simply drifts away in a descending slur.

                         

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton


Track listing: Curly Top; Journey on a Thread; Center of the Earth; Snowflakes; Momentum; More Than I Can Say; There; F.O.C.; Awakening.

Out of This World's Distortions, AUM Fidelity, 2011

Farmers By Nature bandleader and drummer Gerald Cleaver wrote the brief liner notes to his group’s record, Out of This World’s Distortions. They begin with this sentence: “Craig, William and I are trying to get to the root of things (no pun intended).”

 

Yet, upon taking another look, one discovers on the album cover itself a photograph of trees and on the inside, underneath the liner notes,  a shadow of the head on a marble statue perhaps of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the wilderness, and, underneath the disc, a panoramic view of tree tops obviously photographed  from the ground.  Roots are implied in these images.  Roots of trees…roots of nature...roots of improvised music…the very origins of growth and development which portend a certain solemn beauty of sound.

The trio of Craig Taborn on piano, William Parker on bass and Cleaver on drums presents a unique statement. The piano gives lightness to the heaviness of Parker and Cleaver’s combined tone that pulls it out of the ground. A strong basis for the music is repetition, no arpeggios and little tendency towards decoration. In other words, this is serious work, as in tilling-the-soil work. 

Delicacy does not escape the stream as is demonstrated in Cleaver’s touch with the mallets to the toms or sticks to the cymbals, and Taborn’s tickling of the treble notes and sturdy phrasing on the piano, or even in Parker’s sure-fingered pizzicato and bowing that draws out a sinewy resilience from the bass strings. The delicacy is not without intention and matches the directness of the rest of the music.

Communicated throughout Out of This World’s Distortions is a sense of onward-ness. There is no stopping the transmission of the straightforward musical message heard in every solo and every thoroughly integrated collaboration among the threesome. The message begins with a quiet celebration of Chicago sax player Fred Anderson, who passed away the day before this album was recorded, and ends with a wave of a march that gradually fades away into the distance in the actual playing, not by means of mastering in the studio.

copyright 2011 Lyn Horton

Track listing: For Fred Anderson; Tait's Traced Traits; Out Of This World's Distortions Grow Aspens And Other Beautiful Things; Sir Snacktray Speaks; Cutting's Gait; Mud, Mapped.