Black and White?

I can’t believe they’re still arguing over the black/white thing in the US jazz blogosphere at the moment......... The trumpeter Randy Sandke wrote a book called Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz which apparently, (I haven’t read the book), claims that some white jazz musicians got/are getting a raw deal from left-leaning white critics over the years and, due to the political/PC bias of these critics, were never given the credit for their achievements. This has created a storm in a teacup effect with heavy hitters from the jazz blog world weighing in (mostly negatively towards Sandke’s thesis) and Sandke taking on all-comers with huge rebuttals of their arguments, (how much time does Sandke have!? If it was me it would be just too exhausting to go into the minutiae of everyone’s arguments for the sake of rebuttal).

To an outsider to American jazz politics like myself, the arguments about whether somebody dissed Michael Brecker in an article several years ago, or who did or did not claim Bix had a poor sense of rhythm just seems daft. Ethan Iverson has a gigantic piece on it which gets into the fine detail of who said what, when, and about whom. Apparently Sandke is about to give a rebuttal to this piece – which will join the rebuttals he’s already made in response to Howard Mandel and David Adler

From where I’m sitting it seems extraordinary to watch some very famous writers and musicians savaging each other over this subject. Surely this argument about who was most influential and why, or who got their due and who didn’t, is over? It seems especially bizarre to see suggestions being made that X didn’t get his due because he was white, and Y was over-praised because he was black. And vice versa. I really didn’t think so many serious writers and musicians could get so passionately involved in the arcana of these arguments. Surely there are more important things to discuss these days – such as the dwindling playing opportunities for ALL musicians, black OR white?



As to the argument that jazz history has been skewed by a political/racial agenda - without having read the book, but being an avid student of jazz history (via the music rather than the books on it), it seems glaringly obvious that though there have always been good and great white players, the vast bulk of what constitutes the influential history of the music (at least up to 1970), and the major developments in jazz, have emanated from the Afro-American community. There’s no getting away from it – no matter how many Bix’s, Artie Shaws, Benny Goodmans, Stan Getz’s, and Bill Evans’ (and many other great white players) you acknowledge, if you take Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Ornette and Coltrane (not to mention Monk and Mingus.....), out of the mix then it’s all over – there’s no real major body of work around which the other musicians – black and white – revolve.

You could make an analogy with classical music in this respect – yes there are lots of great non-German composers (especially post 20th century) but if you take Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler, and Schoenberg out of the picture then there probably is no picture left since the development of the music itself is so dependant on the work of these German composers.

Jazz history is completely dependant on the work of these aforementioned jazz greats and the music can’t be imagined without them. And they’re all Afro-Americans. It’s a music that sprung from the Afro-American community in the US and while there were great white players involved from even the earliest times, the major development of the music revolves around Afro-Americans.

At least up as far as 1970



After that the picture is far less clear – you have the rise of the fusion movement, most of which was dominated by white players, and the transformation and maturation of European jazz – undergoing an evolutionary process which saw it change from being an imitation (sometimes poor) of American jazz into something which had highly individual regional characteristics and many really great and original instrumentalists. In America over the past thirty years many influential instrumentalists – Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, Dave Holland, Brad Mehldau, Kurt Wosenwinkel, Joey Baron, Dave Douglas and many others – have been white. And of course there have been many influential black players as well – Jeff Watts, Terence Blanchard, Mark Turner, Kenny Kirkland, and many others including of course Wynton and Branford Marsalis. However the domination of the music by Afro-Americans has waned since 1970 and to me this is a subject far more worthy of discussion than the current furore over who dissed who, who was quoted out of context, and who said what and when.



It seems to me that Afro-American society at large has pretty much abandoned jazz as being something that has any relevance for them. Of course there are still players coming out of the Afro-American community, and people in the community for whom the whom the music has importance, but as a whole the music doesn’t seem to have much support from the people from whom it originally sprang. In my recent trip to New York I went to 11 gigs in 5 days and saw hardly any Afro-Americans in the audience.

And I think the current apathy and lack of interest in jazz displayed by the vast majority of Afro-Americans is a tragedy for the music and a tragedy for Afro-American culture. And I think it’s a far more interesting and important discussion than the current Stateside squabble that seems to be more about bruised egos and people scoring points off each other than any effort to bring clarity to their argument. And, sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic, the argument itself seems like such a waste of time to me. Surely we have more important fish to fry these days than whether somebody misquoted Gary Giddins!?

New York Jazz Holiday

To the Village Vanguard to see Kurt Rosenwinkel

Me: ‘Hi, I’ve bought three tickets online for tonight – here they are. Thank You’

Door Guy: ‘Certainly, let me see.......(consults list), yes, here we are and there you go – enjoy the show’

Now that’s what MIGHT have happened if it had been any other jazz club in any other city in the world, but this being the Vanguard, in New York City what actually happened was that I delivered my part of the script and the tickets, and was met with a blank stare and disinterested shuffling of the list by the troglodyte on the door, whose studied boredom and lack of any verbal response made be feel like giving him a richly-deserved clump across the side of his head for his rudeness and stupidity.

Of course there are rude people everywhere, and other places where rudeness is the norm (Hong Kong!), but only in New York do some people pride themselves on being jerks. They imagine it’s cool somehow, and wear it as a badge of honour, and of all the possible things one could be proud of, this has to be the stupidest – being a jerk is easy! Anyone can do it! Being polite takes a little (and only a little) more effort. The rudeness itself I don’t mind, (and after about 15 visits to NYC I expect it), but the pride that some New Yorker’s take in it I find really irritating, stupid and a bit pathetic actually. Rudeness as hipness? Ha!

Rant over.

I went to New York with my son Chris, who’s a guitarist, for a ‘jazz holiday’, packing in as much music as possible in 6 days, picking up my new bass, catching the Winterjazz Fest, and seeing as many friends as possible. There’s no better place to undertake a musical orgy of this nature – there is no question that New York IS the jazz capital of the world. There are more great (and some not so great) jazz musicians living there and more jazz activity going on there, than in any other one single place in the world. This has both advantages and disadvantages for the musicians who live there (more on that anon), but for the casual visitor such as myself, it’s nothing short of an embarrassment of riches and I try to get over there at fairly regular intervals to see friends, play sometimes, and see as much music as I can.

Back to the Vanguard and Kurt. He was playing with a quartet (Aaron Parks, Ben Street and Ted Poor), and I was kind of disappointed with it – I felt it was underpowered in terms of energy and commitment from the group and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was because the band didn’t feel like getting it going or whether they were just having an off night. It seemed a bit careless and casual at times, and really, considering its history, carelessness and casualness are not qualities you should be bringing to the Vanguard if you’re lucky enough to get a week there. Kurt really did get it going on a Byard blues in the second set and then you could see what all the fuss is about, but overall I felt a bit short-changed.

My son disagreed with me, he thought it was great – but then again, he’s a guitarist! The deification of Kurt by pretty much all guitarists under the age of thirty continues apace, and I can appreciate why – he really is unique and has his own thing. But he’s reaching that point where (like other icons before him) he’s in a winning situation with the audience as soon as he takes the guitar out of the case and so the motivation to grow and challenge himself has to come from him and him alone all the time. I’m not sure he really was up for that particular challenge on this particular evening.


(Dafnis Prieto)

Winter Jazzfest

The following night it was on to the Winter Jazzfest. I had deliberately made sure our visit coincided with the festival having read great reports of it the year before. And it was great – musically. But organisationally, to use a technical term, it sucks. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to listen to music under more uncomfortable conditions, where the audience is treated more shabbily and where the admission and ticketing procedures are more shambolic and audience-unfriendly. To buy a two-night ticket in advance and then to have to queue in the freezing cold two nights in a row to pick up tickets for the individual nights (why!?) and then not to be guaranteed entry to anything (more freezing queue-ing), and to have to endure hours of standing at the concerts themselves while not being able to actually see what you were hearing, is an indictment of the festival organisers.

Anecdotally too I’ve heard the musicians are paid very little if anything at all. If this is true then it’s a disgrace, since the much touted musical riches of which the festival boasts is based on these same musicians not getting paid. Which would be cool if nobody else got paid either. If ever I’m asked to play for nothing I always say that I’ll be happy to do it as long as the promoter, the bar staff, sound engineers, ticket sellers, doormen, and anyone else involved with the event (including the venues) are not getting any money either. But that’s never the case – it’s pretty much always the musicians who are the saps in these situations. It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth when everybody wins except the guys around whose work and dedication the whole event revolves.

But musically, and hardly surprisingly given where we were, there was some incredible music to be heard (if not seen). We attended some great performances by bands working in a wide variety of stylistic/musical approaches and the 40-minute set format of the festival really does aid multiple consumption of music, especially given the diversity of the acts. Not everything was great, but most was at least very good and often much more than very good.

I managed to catch Nguyen Le with Rudresh Mahanthappa (great!), Dafnis Prieto with Jason Lindner and Kokayi (very interesting and the improvised ‘auction’ was outstanding), Jamie Baum’s Octet (great writing), Dana Leong, (terrible, risible), Tineke Postma (very well played, but maybe a bit naively programmed considering the wham-bam-thank you ma’am nature of the festival set), Miles Okazaki with Guillaume Perret and Damion Reed (fantastic set, some very original music played by a real band), and Steve Coleman and Five Elements (a real return to form, killer set and the new band sounds great – the addition of piano and guitar really adds something).

Musically it was great for the most part and I know I inevitably missed a lot of great music too, you can’t be everywhere. But really the organisers need to get their act together – a festival boasting of its greatness while treating both audiences and musicians badly, and depending on their goodwill and willingness to put up with poor conditions is doing some pretty hollow boasting................

(with Lindsey Horner)
Socially the festival was very nice too of course and I ran into so many musician friends – Jim Black, Ben Perowsky, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Curtis Hasselbring, Nguyen Le and and many others just in the two nights we were there. And I hung out with several other musicians over the course of our visit – Arthur Kell (our very generous and gracious host while we were in NY), Jonathan Mele (whom I knew from his time in Dublin), David O Rourke (another Dublin connection – we knew each other when we were both jazz tyros, going to every gig we could in the late 70s), and especially Lindsey Horner the great bassist who is one of my oldest friends in music. Lindsey studied music in Dublin in the late 70s/eartly 80s and was on the scene, and we became good friends and have been ever since. In recession-ridden Ireland of the 80s (though we have now renewed our acquaintance with recession in recent times) about 30,000 people a year were leaving Ireland to work abroad – we used to say that Lindsey was the only person of that era to travel in the opposite direction.


(Manifestation of the iPhone Plague at Kenny's Castaways)

One thing I noticed at the gigs in NY, which is now pretty common everywhere, is the iPhone Plague....... At every gig, little beacons of light appear in all corners of the room as people obsessively check their messages, or send SMS messages. It’s impossible to look around the room and not see someone checking their phones. It’s become both a plague at gigs, and a worrying indicator that people find it more and more difficult just to concentrate on one thing at a time. Even something as great as live music can’t hold their attention anymore, everything takes second place to those damn phones. And these are adults who presumably have only had cell phones for about the past 10 years – what will it be like for kids who have been raised with them? Will they have any attention span at all or be capable of listening to music without doing something else at the same time? Brave New World..........


To the Jazz Standard on a Sunday morning to do a rhythmic clinic for young musicians. This was part of the programme they run there for talented kids called the Jazz Standard Discovery Programme, a terrific initiative directed by my old friend, guitarist arranger and composer David O Rourke, where the kids get a clinic or workshop or some kind of educational event first and then play – for real people, in a real jazz club! One of the biggest problems for young musicians (and many older ones too) these days is that it’s really hard just to be able to find places to play. For these kids the chance to play in the Jazz Standard on a Sunday morning to a full house in a jazz club atmosphere is invaluable and something that they’ll always remember.

And they were very talented kids too – very pleasant and engaged during my presentation and enthusiastic and disciplined in how they presented their music to the public. After all the ‘is jazz finished?’ talk that seems to excise the minds of everyone in the music these days it’s somehow very reassuring to see a bunch of 14-18 year olds who are interested enough in the music to take the time to learn something as challenging as ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum’

Terence Blanchard

In the evening we went to see Terence Blanchard’s quintet at the Jazz Standard – something I thoroughly enjoyed. With guys like Blanchard, who because of his gifted youth has been around for so long already, it’s easy to take them for granted. At this point he has such a huge body of work behind him and is recording and writing all the time, it’s easy to underestimate just how exceptional this guy is. This was brought home to me during a blistering set with his quintet in which Blanchard demonstrated what a true improvising virtuoso is, and in which his group, propelled along by Kendrick Scott, explored three pieces in a set that harked back to traditional jazz values. Having just come from the Winter Jazzfest where the eclecticism of contemporary jazz was patently evident and where all kinds of grooves were utilised and influences flaunted, Blanchard’s gig was a nice reminder of how good more traditional jazz can be in the right hands. His band demonstrated again that in the end it’s not really about the material (he finished the set with ‘Autumn Leaves, the hoariest of all hoary old chestnuts), but the imagination and creativity that you bring to it. As a bassist I must say I was really impressed by Joe Sanders, a guy I’d not heard before but who operated in the creative space between the drums and the soloists in a way reminiscent of the way Ron Carter bossed Miles’ quintet in the 60s, but without aping any of his mannerisms. Real creativity in accompaniment and cracking the whip in the rhythm section.

Brazil!


(Cidinho Teixeira, Fabiana, Itaguara Brandao - Zinc Bar)

Whenever I’m in New York on a Sunday, I always go to the Zinc Bar to hear Cindinho Teixeira’s group playing outstanding Brazilian jazz (it’s almost a religious observance for me......). The spirit that’s on display here – and the almost careless virtuosity – is always uplifting, and they play music in the way that I believe it should be played. They always give you the vibe that there is nothing better a person could be doing than playing music. And that’s how it should be – it IS a privilege for us to be playing music, and especially creative music, yet you’d often not know that from our onstage demeanour - shuffling on stage, almost never speaking to the audience, no tune announcements. No wonder ‘civilians’ often feel that attending a jazz gig is like being at a meeting of a secret society........ But not with the Brazilians – they display a wonderful combination of incredible musicianship with an esprit de corps that’s just a pleasure to witness. And of course the music is great too! They’ve been doing this gig on Sunday nights for 15 years, and it shows. Piano, bass, drums and voice with occasional sitters in. Unfortunately the second set was blighted by one of these – the saxophonist Alex Foster who sat in on difficult tunes he patently didn’t know, played overlong solos littered with blues scale clichés, with the microphone rammed into the bell of his horn and generally managed to suck all the life out of every piece he played on. It’s the kind of thing that gives saxophone players a bad name...........


(My new bass)

The New Baby

Apart from the music and the hang, the other major reason for me to go to NYC on this trip was to pick up my beautiful new bass. This was custom built for me by the great luthier Harvey Citron who lives and works in Woodstock. Lindsey was kind enough to drive us up, so we set off in a blizzard and made our way to Harvey’s place and picked up my new baby. It’s a very exciting thing to get a new instrument, especially one as good as this. Once again it’s an acoustic bass guitar, but with a narrower body than my old bass and with more electronic control.

I’ve been exclusively playing my other bass since 1993, so to get a new one at this stage is really something – terra incognita. I was wondering if it would be too different to the one I have and maybe I’d not enjoy playing it as much as I’d hoped. But one quick run up and down the neck of the bass scotched all those fears – it’s a wonderful instrument to play with a great sound, and fits my hand beautifully. What’s interesting to me is how different it is to my other one – because of the narrower body it doesn’t have as loud an acoustic sound as my old bass, and it has more of a feel of a bass guitar than the old one too. The old bass has a lot of upright qualities to it, due to its large body size and lack of any volume or tone buttons on the body – it’s just the sound of the instrument and trying to reproduce that as closely as possible on the amp. With the Citron there’s far more control (bass geek alert!), since it has 2 Piezos and a magnetic pickup so you can move between the acoustic sound to a completely electric sound. I can see myself using both instruments in different settings – the older one for more out-and-out ‘jazz’ settings, and the Citron for other situations.


(Lindsey and I collecting the bass in the middle of a blizzard....)

New York - Beauty and The Beast

So, a week in New York and a good battery charge as always. Looking back on it, the Winter Jazzfest pointed to both the strengths and weaknesses of the NY jazz scene. On the one hand there’s an extraordinary concentration of great musicians in a very small area, making for a hothouse creative atmosphere and an abundance of players on every instrument who play on a very high level. If you’ve got a creative project that you want to do, you will definitely find the right musicians for it in NY. I think that’s especially true of drummers – the amount of great drummers in New York is just scary, I really envy New York musicians the access they have to these drummers.

Being a jazz musician in New York also means being exposed to an endless stream of great gigs too and opportunities to hear some of the best players in the world playing in intimate settings. As a player you can measure yourself against some of the best and this can drive your development and technical abilities (sink or swim!). You can also get opportunities to play with great musicians in informal settings that don’t really exist outside the NY ‘session’ scene. These are all serious plusses for the way things are in New York.

On the minus side it has to be said there are just far too many musicians in New York for it to make any sense on an economic level. The money paid for playing clubs in NY is laughable – there is no way you could make a living by solely performing creative music in New York. The abundance and availability of musicians and the lack of places to play drives the price musicians can charge for NY gigs down to below subsistence levels. It’s a buyers market for the clubs and the musicians suffer. For all the advantages of being cheek by jowl with so many great musicians, there is the reality of the economics of it. A lot of the New York musicians I know work in (often menial) day jobs that have nothing to do with music, and the reality for them is that they’re not going to get out of that situation anytime soon. As they get older and take on responsibilities the typical situation of doing two rehearsals of original music for a gig that pays $30 is revealed for the economic luxury that it is. All that work, all that practice, all that study, all of that creative energy, and in the end you get less than if you’d done a four-hour shift at Dunkin’ Donuts......... The New York jazz scene depends on the willingness of a large percentage of its musicians to put musical value before economic reality. But with performance opportunities shrinking even further, and ever more musicians arriving in New York like gunslingers riding into town to prove themselves, can this model survive?


(Rudresh and I survey the scene....)

And one other aspect of this that I’ve not seen discussed too much is the distortion and depletion of the national jazz scene created by the never ending influx of musicians into New York. The US jazz scene, as a national scene, is almost non-existent. Apart from NY there are some scenes of reasonable size in a few places – Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and maybe a few others. But all of these pale into insignificance beside the bloated New York scene. And this just can’t be healthy for jazz in the US. What you have in the US is one huge scene with far too many musicians and no money, and a series of cities, often with over a million people in them, with virtually no scene at all. If you read any jazz history (and fairly recent history at that) you learn that there were scenes in many cities (Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles etc.) and that each scene had a particular flavour in the way the music was played. There were in fact regional dialects of jazz and there was a touring circuit. There may be still regional ways of playing the music these days (I’m not in a position to say, but outside the New Orleans scene, I suspect not), but the touring circuit is certainly gone. To get an idea of how difficult it is economically to tour in the US, have a look at this.

There is a constant refrain of ‘man, you gotta go to New York’ that’s sung to any player of any ability in the US - it’s held up as the Nirvana for jazz musicians, and that’s perfectly understandable. But the reality is that if a really good player from a regional city leaves that scene, it will be impoverished by his or her leaving. If every major city in the US had a relatively healthy scene, the audience for jazz would be bigger since regional cities would not just depend on the occasional visits by heavy hitters from NY in order to hear some good improvised music, and audiences would grow. Good local players would grow the scenes in these towns and in turn create a touring circuit for other musicians (and themselves).

A good example of this can be seen in Europe – not by any design, but simply by geography and culture. In Europe you have a variety of different and relatively healthy scenes based around different cities. Paris, Berlin, Koln, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo, London, Barcelona, Rome , Helsinki and Stockholm all have sizeable scenes – none on the scale of New York, but big enough to sustain local musicians and create a touring circuit both for them and for visiting Americans (Europe is still the financial El Dorado for a lot of NY musicians). If a city were to emerge in Europe in which all the activity of the European scene were focussed, in the way that exists in NY, the other city’s scenes would wither and die, just like the regional scenes in so many US cities have withered and died. And the regional dialects of French, Swedish, Italian and German jazz would probably die too along with it.

As a jazz scene New York reminds me of one of those huge edge of town malls that arrives in an area and sucks all the economic life out of the high streets of any town within 50 miles of it. Nearly the entire US scene is based there, and this ‘gotta go to New York’ mentality means that it’s almost impossible for a regional scene to hold on to its good players. They in turn all arrive in New York where they have to scuffle and jostle for financial crumbs.

Let’s imagine that say 30 players of every instrument were to leave NY tomorrow and go back to their home cities and expend their energy there and develop their own scenes there, how much healthier would both those regional scenes be and how much better economically would the New York scene be for giving the musicians there a little more economic room to breathe? I’m not suggesting forced repatriation of all bassists! Nor do I have any solution to the problem as I see it – it is what it is and it’s hard to see, for lots of reasons, how it will ever be any other way. I’m just making the point that the huge concentration of musicians in New York is definitely not an unreservedly healthy thing – yes it provides an incredible level of musicianship and creative music, but at what cost to the musicians and the national scene?

New York has always been great for jazz, and always will be. I just wonder how long more can the musicians pay the real-life price for that greatness?

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (and Happy New Year)

Another year, another blog. This is either the last one of 2010 or the first of 2011, depending on your point of view – or mine I suppose. It’s been an interesting year in terms of writing the blog – with the arrival of Google Stats I’ve been able to see which posts created the most interest and were the most read. And reading the stats taught me that I often completely misjudge which topics are of the most interest to readers. A quick look at the stats for the year give me the following top five:

1. The post about great jazz musicians playing on terrible ‘jazz’ recordings by classical musicians looking for a bit of street cred

2. A post about the possibility that Bill Evans influence has slid somewhat off the jazz radar of young musicians

3. Elvin Jones – the perfect drummer?

4. The recordings that Steve Coleman and Dave Holland made together

5. Child Prodigies in Jazz


The post about the jazz/classical thing was by far the most read post on the blog, which I guess makes sense since there is a whiff of a rant in it and it names names a bit – everyone loves controversy! The child prodigy post also provoked some interest. But the three of the top five most popular posts were about well known figures in the jazz world, which tells me that people still prefer to read about what, or whom, they know. For myself, although I’m interested in all my subjects, I often find the stuff about the actual music – structural, conceptual, philosophical, technical things – to be the most interesting things to discuss. But my readers seem to prefer to read about the musicians who play the music rather than read about the music itself.

One interesting aside came from someone commenting on the Bill Evans post, who said that it had come as a relief to him that this post was less ‘angry’ than my normal efforts. Angry!? Me!? Disputatious maybe, a malcontent quite possibly – but angry? Hmmmm....... interesting. I’m quite conscious of not trying to personalise things unless I feel I can’t make my point any other way, and though I do get angry about some aspects of the jazz world, I try and reign in my baser instincts and remain within the bounds of civilised discourse. The classical musician post was about as close as I get to a rant – I think! It’s definitely interesting to see yourself as others see you sometimes.

One thing I do recognise is my tendency to be a bit verbose sometimes – I fight against it but I tend not to be able to get out in under 5000 words. This will probably be the shortest post of 2011........... I’ve got an interview with Steve Coleman coming up that’s huge – but at least on this occasion the post is huge because Steve is being verbose rather than me.

Thanks as always to everyone who read the blog over the past year, and particularly to those who took the time to write and express their opinions – I really appreciate you taking the time and am flattered by your interest.

Next up for me – and no doubt some kind of report will feature on these pages – I’ll be heading off to New York for a week or so, to see some music, meet lots of friends and bring home my new custom-made bass – a pretty good way to start the year.

Happy 2011!

Chin15: Albert Glasser "Confessions of an Opium Eater"

A new projected series of releases on Chinstrap is music & sound-design of interest extracted from public-domain films. Not claiming to be the definitive packaging of the music and sound enclosed, we rather present the work for the possibility of further investigation into the composers and sound-designers featured.



Albert Zugsmith's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" is a strange, flawed, but ultimately fascinating film, a truly weird adventure story which sees Vincent Price attempting to free trafficked women in Chinatown, smoking a healthy dose of opium along the way. The score, by incredibly prolific B-movie composer Albert Glasser, combines classically-tinged orchestral music with elements of jazz & rock'n'roll, traditional chinese music, electronic polyrhythmic pulses, and theremins. We are also served up some delightfully strange monologues from the dulcet tones of Vincent Price, in the midst of a very, very bad opium trip. The sound design is equally peculiar and disorientating, awash with ear piercing screams of smuggled Chinese ladies, squawking parrots, a myriad crashes and bashes, running water, and creaking ships.

You can download Zugsmith's "Confessions of an Opium Eater", starring Vincent Price, as an AVI here.

Legal disclaimer: This release is made under the belief that this score and sound-design are in the public-domain, and is intended to disseminate and raise appreciation of this film music. The Albert Zugsmith film "Confessions of an Opium Eater" is, to the best of our awareness, in the public-domain, and we are proceeding on the presumption that the score is also. If you represent the interests of Albert Glasser and object to this release, we will willingly remove it.

Chinstrap is a not-for-profit music gallery.

Edited & Mastered by Ergo Phizmiz

Chin14: Vulnavia Vanity "Worse Things Happen at Sea"

Chinstrap are delighted to present the debut single from young philanderer, explorer and hedonist Vulnavia Vanity.



"Worse Things Happen At Sea" is one of the catchiest coming-out songs ever to pop out of the proverbial musical oceans. Complete with a very blue video by Martha Moopette, "Worse Things Happen At Sea" is the first will and testicle of a young wizard of songcraft, a magnetic performer and surely the sexiest unknown Pop Star to grace the obscurantist seas Chinstrap sails. *



This single is presented alongside remixes by Oblivian Substanshall, Ergo Phizmiz and The Superfools.

Written & Performed by Vulnavia Vanity. Video by Martha Moopette. Produced by Ergo Phizmiz.

* Here at Chinstrap we believe, wholeheartedly, that the greatest pop stars in the world are generally unknown and working under the pretence of being experimentalists. The culture spearheaded by Lord Simon of Cowell has destroyed the genuine pop star. A true, born pop star is, by nature, a maverick, a vagabond and an outsider, and wouldn't consider appearing on a talent show to be judged and put down by a bunch of idiots who can't hold a tune themselves. That's why all pop stars today appear to be pretending, because they are pretend. They want to be pop stars, rather than naturally just being pop stars. Vulnavia Vanity is a pop star. Simon Cowell's eyeballs and testicles would disintegrate if he sat and watched him for more than a minute.*

* How's that for a press release that uses the world "testicle" twice?

Under The Influence

I recently read a very interesting interview with Brad Mehldau, via Peter Hum, where Brad, in discussing his influences, makes the following very good point:

“In terms of influence, one discourse that's curiously non-existent over players of my generation is: how we are influenced by our musical peers -- the living breathing people we are actively playing with and listening to now, players of our own generation.”

This is absolutely true – the questions most often asked by jazz journalists and casual listeners, (probably because it’s a relatively easy question to ask and demands little research or proof to back-up), when discussing a young or young-ish, (anyone under 40 seems to be described as ‘young’ there days.......), musician is: ‘who does he/she sound like?’. And by extension who are they influenced by? What they (the journalist or listener) are listening for is some kind of surface idiomatic similarity between the person they’re discussing and the playing of some other musician whose playing they’re familiar with. ‘His playing bears the discernible influence of X’, or ‘she’s clearly been listening to Y’, or ‘the music sounds like the mid-period recordings of Z’. It’s an easy game to play and doesn’t require much effort on the part of the writer or listener – hear a phrase or two you’ve heard in the playing of somebody else and then make a blanket statement outlining the clear influence of same.

But the point Brad makes is an important one - you are not only influenced by the people you’ve listened to, you are also influenced by the people you play with. I would venture to suggest that the people you play with are far more influential on you than any player you’ve only heard on record or seen live but have never actually been with. Because being with other musicians goes beyond the actual playing time, it also includes the hours you spend with them not playing - the travelling, and hanging and the endless discussions about music and life that are an inseparable part of being a working jazz musician. All of these things can help to shape your outlook on music in a way that goes way beyond the mere playing of your instrument.

As a bassist, a saxophone player telling me what they listen for in bass playing, or suggesting something they think might work in the music we’re playing, might make a big difference to how I think about the piece and may have a big influence on how I play it. That can also be true for the music as a whole – sometimes somebody can say something to you, (not necessarily a player of the same instrument as you) which can change your entire approach to the kind of music under discussion, or even the totality of how you think about music. I’ve had several of those what I call ‘light bulb moments’, where another musician has said something to me – often casually – that has completely changed how I think about something. These are huge influences, and go way beyond which bassist I was listening to when I was younger.



And there can be other influences too. Seeing Woody Shaw at the Village Vanguard and Elvin Jones in Ronnie Scott’s, both when I was in my early 20s, had a profound influence on me. I can honestly say that my approach to music completely changed after seeing them play, and my playing changed, but not in any way that could be discerned by a casual listener. These were fundamental core influences for me that went beyond the playing of the bass and into the music I wanted to play and how I wanted to play it.

And then there’s the influence of playing. This is the point that Brad makes – how we’re influenced by the people we’re playing with. This is by far the most important influence you can have in my opinion. Your first-hand experiences on the bandstand are far more influential on your playing than any second-hand experience you can have by listening to a CD or going to a gig – no matter how great those may be. For myself, I learned different things from different people – and most of it from playing situations rather than being taught formally.

In fact my formal jazz education is limited to two 3-week stints at the Banff Centre in Canada in the mid-80s, where I met many of my peers with whom I stayed in touch and later played with (Simon Nabatov, Andy Laster, Owen Howard, Tanya Kalmanovitch among others), which of itself was very valuable to me. But another reason Banff was hugely influential on me was because it put me in personal contact with Dave Holland, Dave Liebman, Kenny Wheeler and Steve Coleman

The opportunity to study with Dave Holland was invaluable to me – he’d always been a favourite of mine and to spend six weeks in all in his company, listening to him play, teach, and talk about playing was really game changing as far as my playing was concerned.

With Steve I was introduced to a whole new world of music – everything was new with him – rhythm, harmony, melody – it was simply the opening of a new universe in terms of conception and had a profound impact on me. I spent a lot of time hanging with him and talking and we’ve stayed in touch ever since either by email or in person and he remains a huge influence on me. I never played in his band, but we’ve played in several informal sessions, (and I did a recording with him in NY that was never released) – and all of these playing experiences were important ones for me too.

NB I will be posting an interview with Steve on the subject of rhythm very soon.

The contact I made with Dave Liebman in Banff went on to become one of the most important influences in my musical life – more on this below, and more on Kenny Wheeler.

So those ‘formal’ education experiences were important to me, but really I’ve been mostly shaped by playing, both with older musicians and with my peers. I’ve been lucky enough to play with a lot of older, more experienced musicians - in a way I did a kind of apprenticeship that would be familiar to musicians of an earlier era. I was lucky enough to come in on the tail end of that system and it really formed the basis of my education in music – on the job training. And I can look back and pinpoint particular aspects of music that I was exposed to by specific musicians, and that influenced me hugely.

My first, and a huge playing influence, was with the Irish guitarist Louis Stewart. I began playing with him in 1979 and I freely admit I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing at that point! My theory and harmony knowledge was pretty much nil, (though I’d been raised listening to jazz and so was familiar with the music and innately through that, with song form), and then suddenly there I was playing with a master of voice leading, of bebop, of swing – someone who was at the height of his powers. Louis was the first Irish jazz musician to have an international reputation and career and to be exposed to that level of playing and experience at that point in my development was a huge thing for me. I was forced to improve and try and keep up – this was a real bebop environment – almost no originals, no Real Book, no charts, just tunes – which you were supposed to know. I scrambled to keep up but in the process learned lots of tunes, began to understand harmony and learned how to play off instinct when all else failed. Some videos from that time have surfaced on Youtube recently – and here’s one of a very gauche 21 year old me at the Cork Jazz Festival, hanging onto Louis’ coat tails as he tears through Morning of the Carnival.

At that time I was also involved with a trio with the drummer from that clip, the late great John Wadham, and another great Irish guitar player (with whom I still often play), Tommy Halferty. That was a very adventurous group for its time, and we played original compositions and also played free (heresy on the Irish scene at the time!) and it was my first exposure to a milieu where pretty much anything went. We also played some of the fastest tempos I have ever played and this was great for getting my chops in shape!

After that I played a lot on the Irish scene and in subsequent years began playing with international musicians and I learned something from all of those situations, but there were a few that influenced me hugely for various reasons:

From playing with Sonny Fortune I learned about stamina! Sonny is a product of the 1960s NY jazz scene and musically he came up just at the end of that decade and he saw Coltrane many times (I remember him telling me about a conversation he had with Trane), played with McCoy and Elvin, as well as with Miles, (‘Agharta"), and many others. And he was definitely an energy player who emerged in the era of the long solo. I played with him quite a lot at the end of the 1980s and playing with Sonny you had to learn how to both pace yourself AND play with high energy and intensity. When Sonny called ‘Invitation’ you knew you were in for the long haul – Sonny loved to stretch on that tune (in fact on most tunes.....) and as a rhythm section you’d better be giving him the energy he wants!

From the drummer Steve Argüelles I learned about spontaneity and really being in the moment with no predetermined strategies for any particular piece. I played in a trio with Steve and the English altoist Martin Speake for about two years and Steve really opened me up to a lot of stuff, especially the idea of not necessarily playing anything the same way twice. It was in this group too that I first got to play Ornette’s music and where a lot of the repertoire was comprised of open form pieces, and I had to learn how to deal with that in a convincing way. Coming from a more conventional background this wasn't easy for me at first, and Steve really opened me up to new ways of thinking about playing improvised music. I learned a lot about all sorts of things from playing over a 20 year period with Steve’s brother Julian too – a great musician and a good friend

Simon Nabatov really influenced me in terms of thinking about music in a conceptual way. Simon is very strong on structure and the importance of being aware of the philosophy underpinning what you do as an improvising musician. Many hours on the bandstand with Simon (who is also of course an incredible pianist), and even more hours talking and hanging had a profound influence on how I think about certain aspects of music.

Another very important person for me was the Indian percussionist Ramesh Shotham. At a time when I was really trying to develop my rhythmic vocabulary Ramesh explained the technicalities of South Indian classical rhythmic techniques to me. He hooked me up with many Indian musicians, and we played together with the Karnataka College of Percussion and Charlie Mariano and many others, both in Europe and in India. Without Ramesh’s influence my rhythmic knowledge wouldn’t be anything like what it is now.

Playing with Kenny Wheeler really taught me how to negotiate complex harmonies while being lyrical at the same time. Kenny’s tunes are of course some of the most exquisite pieces in contemporary jazz, but are also extremely challenging to play. I had to work really hard in the practice room to learn how to navigate through the changes of some of those pieces, and to play his music with him was an education in itself.

Where to start on the influence playing with Dave Liebman has had on me.........? I’ve learned so much from him that it’s hard to narrow it down, but some of the most important things I’ve learned from him would include DRAMA! I remember him saying to the band before one of first gigs we did with him, in that classic Lieb straight-to-the-point way - ‘When we play I want drama – I don’t want any of that boring, in-the-middle-shit!’. I learned about the importance of programming a set effectively – how to best do that. How to balance discipline with spontaneity – the importance of keeping everything fresh. And, like with Sonny Fortune (whose musical background is similar in some ways – Miles, Elvin etc.) to be able to play with real intensity ALL the time! The countless musical discussions I’ve had with Lieb over the years - on the road, in restaurants, bars, clubs, planes, hanging out – has really helped shape me in terms of how I think about music.

This clip is taken from a gig with Lieb in the 55 Bar in NY with myself and Jim Black – the picture quality is not good, but the music gives an example of the importance that Lieb places on drama, energy and spontaneity.



But although I’ve learned so much from playing with these great international musicians, there’s something about playing with your contemporaries that feels different to any other playing situation, and since you do that more often than you do playing with visiting musicians, or being on the road with occasional projects, it has a far bigger effect on you than pretty much anything else.



By far the longest playing association I’ve had was with the Guilfoyle/Nielsen trio – with Mike Nielsen on guitar, and my brother Conor on drums. Over a fifteen year period we played together on innumerable occasions, either as a trio or as a rhythm section. In one particularly intense five-year period we developed a very forward thinking approach to expanding our rhythmic language which culminated in me writing my Rhythm Book which is still in print, and us recording our (hardly surprisingly) unreleased ‘Fucked-Up Classics’ album in 1993, featuring a whole album of standards played in Odd Metres. I’ve written about the trio elsewhere and you can download the album Here. But really the time spent with Mike and Conor either working as a trio or as a rhythm section accompanying a myriad of great players (Lieb, Sonny Fortune, Kenny Wheeler, Kenny Werner, Joe Lovano, Larry Coryell, Pat LaBarbera, Conrad Herwig etc.) had by far a bigger influence on my development as a musician than any other single thing, and far exceeds any influence I may have gleaned from listening to records or seeing gigs. The years of talking and experimenting, of developing ideas together and working on them had an incalculable influence on how I play and how I think as a creative musician.

So, influence is not (or definitely shouldn’t be!) just about who you listen to on your own instrument and who you most admire – it’s about ideas and experience, concepts and compositions, mentors and role models, exemplars and experiences. We are not just products of narrow instrumental concerns - loose clones of who we listen to on recordings - but are guided by the totality of our experience in music. Influence is not a simple thing, it, like the music, is a complex mixture of things - at any moment our music reflects not only who we've listened to, but also where we've been, who we've been with and who we are.

On the Road - Hong Kong and Japan - Addendum

To give a little musical context to my recent travel blog, Pekka Pylkkanen, the leader of the band that I went to Hong Kong and Japan with recently, has posted a Video from the Hong Kong concert. I really had fun playing and travelling with these guys!

Pekka Pylkkanen - alto
George Contrafouris - piano
RG - bass
Carlos Ezequiel