Climate change-related improvs but no Weather Report!

[Serial_Apologist]

Sat 3 Dec
5pm - J to Z
With Julian Joseph, today featuring highlights from the finals of the 2022 BBC Young Jazz Musician competition, recorded on 19 November at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Featured artists include pianists Luke Bacchus and Nick Manz, double bassist Ewan Hastie, guitarist Ralph Porrett and saxophonist Emma Rawicz-Szczerbo. And German pianist Julia Hülsmann shares her influences.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fnvl

12midnight - Freeness
In a programme first broadcast in May, Corey Mwamba presents music by improvisers exploring their environments and the climate crisis. Featuring instrumentalist, violinist and sound artist Ruby Colley and Glass Canyon Ensemble. Plus a 1994 recording from the Glasgow-based Scatter Archive record lable feauring saxophonists Lol Coxhill (1932-2012) and Mark Browne in a village hall in Wiltshire.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00175sv

Sun 4 Dec
4.30pm - Jazz Record Requests

http://www.alynshipton.co.uk/blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fn3g

Fri 9 Dec - Radio 4
11am - The Truth about Jazz (new series)
1/4 - The Roots of Jazz

Revised repeat, first broadcast on BBC World Service.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct43qn

[Alyn_Shipton]

Don't know why you've shaved 30 minutes off JRR today. It starts at 4....
Interesting title for the Radio 4 series. Does anyone know the truth about jazz?

[Jazzrook]

Don't know why you've shaved 30 minutes off JRR today. It starts at 4....
Interesting title for the Radio 4 series. Does anyone know the truth about jazz?

Any chance of a JRR playlist before 4, Alyn?

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Any chance of a JRR playlist before 4, Alyn?

JR

A Lorra Lorrra sax? As Cilla would bellow... Lester, Chris Potter, Mr Webster, Gene Ammons and Cannonball?

Actually without a listing, a kind of blindfold test, I thought that ain't Oscar P on the opening track...and lo, it was Teddy Wilson.

[Jazzrook]

A Lorra Lorrra sax? As Cilla would bellow... Lester, Chris Potter, Mr Webster, Gene Ammons and Cannonball?

Actually without a listing, a kind of blindfold test, I thought that ain't Oscar P on the opening track...and lo, it was Teddy Wilson.

Thanks, BN.
Dexter Gordon now playing.
I hate going into JRR blindfold(which rarely happens). Need to know what to record!

JR

[Alyn_Shipton]

Playlist there now - website glitch earlier!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Forgot the Dexter, which I thougt might be the majestic Copenhagen B&S, with Kenny Drew on Black Lion ( and I guess Steeplechase).

That Round Midnight version was better than I remember. (There's a story of Dexter on the stand with Ben Webster, and for calling Body and Soul, "with Coltrane changes". Webster infuriated)

[Jazzrook]

Playlist there now - website glitch earlier!

Many thanks, Alyn!

JR

[Serial_Apologist]

Don't know why you've shaved 30 minutes off JRR today. It starts at 4....
Interesting title for the Radio 4 series. Does anyone know the truth about jazz?

I know Radio Times sometimes gets things wrong; this miss billed starting time however has to be a first: as a consequence I've just missed half an hour of JRR, and will have to catch up later.

[Ian Thumwood]

"The truth about jazz" seems to be more concerned with jazz history as opposed to the music being about the truth. I would be interested to hear what Clive Myrie has to say about the music.

I find the notion that something subjective can ultimately been defined as representing any kind of "truth" to be a bit suspicious as tend to associate the idea with music which either has some kind of spiritual context like Coltrane or ruminative like Keith Jarrett to be something of a distraction to what I am hearing. It is wierd how this notion seems to have affected music , as if there is some kind of inner quality that can be mysteriously summoned up to capture the essence of the music. I cannot remember who said it but I recall jazz being described as an "imperfect" air form as the improvisatory nature means there is no finite performance. It is not something I would subscribe too and I would tend to think that if there is any "truth" within music, it is more likely to be captured in performances of a shorter nature than anything that is protracted. I suppose that obvious examples would be things like Louis' solos on the HOt 5 and 7 record, the clarinet solos with the Kansas City Six by Lester Young and, my candidate for the most perfectly contrived solo , "For Roy E" , a blues by Paul Bley which captures the sound of the trumpeter in under three minutes. (From the album "Tears.") However, if the idea of capturing an honest representation is broadened beyonf jazz, maybe you would have to include Chopin's Preludes which capture the essence of his nusic in miniature.

The one aspect of "truth" in a musical category which fascinates me is with Blues. This is probably unique insofar as capturing musical honesty but I would also say that there is probably no other style of music which comes with such cultural baggage. I don't think the standard rules apply for blues where a "Perfect" performance may be imperfect in more traditional asepcts such as time -keeping or where something too polished could be treated with suspicion. The rule about listening to a piece of music without being familiar as to who it is by probably cannot be subverted as much as in Blues where so many extra-musical factors contribute to making it "authentic." (i.e. It is not truthful is the artist has not lived the life he is singing about, etc, etc.) For me, the romanticism surrounding many blues artists , whether true or not, all serves to define whether the artist is being "true."

Picking up from this and Jazzrook's enthusiasm for the early Dave Holland's album" Conference of the birds" I have started reading Attar's book of the same name which, incredibaly, had no influence on the bassist when he named the album. The opening preface is full of contradictions along the notion of Islam which was very much the vogue within sufism in 12th century Persia. I have not got in to the main body of the work yet which is supposedly like an avian version of the Canterbury Tales but perhaps much more spiritual. Difficult to resist a book where the lead character is a Hoopoe.

[RichardB]

Regarding the "imperfection" of improvisatory musics, these words of the philosopher Alain Badiou might have some relevance:

Official art describes the glory of what exists. It's an art of victory. I think that is the most important point. An official art with an ideological determination is an art not of weakness but of strength. A militant art is the subjective expression, not of what exists, but of what becomes. It's an art of the choice and not an art of victory. An official art is an art of affirmative certainty. A militant art is an art of contradiction, an art of the contradiction between the affirmative nature of principles and the dubious result of struggles. […] In official art we have always the affirmative glorification of the result, but in a militant art we have something which is much closer to the process, closer to something that does not exist, near something that is a real witness and so something uncertain. And so, that sort of hesitation, which is inside the process, is also a formal necessity. This is why in militant art we cannot have the glorification of the form. We must have the form itself. It is a translation of the uncertainty of the process.

[RichardB]

Hmm, I thought that might have the effect of shutting down the conversation. The point is that it's the incompleteness or imperfection of improvisatory musics, including but not limited to jazz, that gives them their radical quality and their importance.

As for Conference of the Birds, I don't think it would be too much of a spoiler to say that what it's really about is that the spiritual truth that the thirty birds undergo so much hardship in search of is eventually revealed as having been within themselves the whole time. I don't know who it was that "supposed" it to be related to the Canterbury Tales but that comparison is extremely wide of the mark!

[Joseph K]

The point is that it's the incompleteness or imperfection of improvisatory musics, including but not limited to jazz, that gives them their radical quality and their importance.

I'd go along with that.

And also add that - as I've said before in trying to think and explain why my most listened-to albums are jazz ones - improvisational music has a kind of authenticity as a performance art that primarily notated music doesn't have (at least for me) in that a performance is a thing unto itself and not referable back to a score, or at least certainly not in the way notated music is, and that this indeed embraces things like imperfection and a sort of fluidity of change from each moment and performance. And, again as I've said before, these forgoing reasons make electronic music especially applicable to improvisation (the nonexistent score) and I'd also add that, despite embracing that fluidity of change there is paradoxically a sense in which a performance of improvisational music is 'fixed'.

I wonder, Richard, is Badiou actually talking about improvisational music in that quote or is it something you decided is applicable thereto?

[RichardB]

I wonder, Richard, is Badiou actually talking about improvisational music in that quote or is it something you decided is applicable thereto?

He's talking about art in general. He doesn't have much to say specifically about music, still less about improvisatory musics, but the idea that a "militant art" is one that refuses celebration and closure is something that comes up in his writings now and then (the few that I know anyway). Someone ought to (if they haven't already) compare Badiou's idea with Adorno's "informal" art.

[Joseph K]

He's talking about art in general. He doesn't have much to say specifically about music, still less about improvisatory musics, but the idea that a "militant art" is one that refuses celebration and closure is something that comes up in his writings now and then (the few that I know anyway). Someone ought to (if they haven't already) compare Badiou's idea with Adorno's "informal" art.

Sorry, I don't know why I asked whether he was talking about improvisation, given he's clearly talking about art in general!