WNUR Jazz Report, 10/27/96

GENERAL COMMENTS

• Tune in to WNUR on Friday, November 1st at noon for a feature on the Asian American Jazz Festival, Nov. 1-3 at the Bop Shop (there is also a free concert at the Chicago Cultural Center Oct. 31; see http://members.aol.com/aajaz/index.htm for full details on the schedule). The broadcast will include interviews and live performances by Francis Wong, Glenn Horiuchi, Miya Masaoka, Mark Izu, Anthony Brown, and Tatsu Aoki.
• Also this weekend, the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Marshall Allen, is in town for four nights of concerts: 11/1 Unity Temple (Oak Park), 11/2 International House (University of Chicago), 11/3 Unity Temple again, 11/4 Lounge Ax. E-mail Len Bukowski at bsidechi@aol.com for details. On his show on WNUR Wednesday 10/30 from 5am to 7am, Len will be playing two hours of selections from his archive of unreleased Sun Ra concert tapes. Most other jazz shows this week can be expected to feature a even heavier than usual concentration of the Arkestra, especially the new singles compilation from Evidence.
• Mozambiquean tenor saxophonist Orlando da Conceicao recently concluded an extended visit to Chicago; while he was here, he played a series of concerts with Ernest Dawkins at the Velvet Lounge and other venues. Conceicao and Dawkins also laid down some tracks in our recording studio that we hope to broadcast once they have been mixed; watch future reports for details.

NEW MUSIC COMMENTS

• Myra Melford's debut for Gramavision includes Dave Douglas, Chris Speed, Erik Friedlander, and Michael Sarin. Hopefully rumors that this group will perform in Chicago soon are true.
• The Matthew Shipp Trio is with William Parker and Whit Dickey and is the first jazz release on the Brinkman label.
• CIMPosium is a sampler containing one track each from the first 15 releases on Cadence's new imprint Creative Improvised Music Projects, including tracks by Joe McPhee, Frank Lowe, Evan Parker, Paul Lytton, Gregg Bendian, Ivo Perelman, and others.
• The ICP Orchestra is led by Misha Mengelberg and features top Dutch talent like Hans Bennink, Ab Baars, and Wolter Wierbos; Up There Trio (featuring vocalist Greetje Bitma) and Willem Breuker Kollektief are also Dutch. The Breuker disc is a sampler disc of cuts from previous albums. The October Meeting 1987 disc was recorded at the BIMhuis in Amsterdam and includes Dutch musicians as well as others like John Zorn and Christian Marclay. A CD of selections from the 1991 October Meeting has just been released and hopefully we'll have a copy soon; it includes tracks by an Anthony Braxton group (with Mengelberg, Bennink, and Mark Dresser) that was the germ for Braxton's subsequent Charlie Parker Project and a truly mad 17-minute track with Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, Arjen Gorter, and Bennink in which Parker as well as quoting "Bye Bye Blackbird" on his tenor saxophone tells a story about teddy bears, bestiality, and class warfare.
• Don Byron's new CD contains compositions by John Kirby, Raymond Scott, and Duke Ellington, played by a very tight and swinging large ensemble. Fun.
• The Tony Oxley Celebration Orchestra CD features guest trumpeter Bill Dixon as well as an assortment of cellists, vocalists, and electronics manipulators. Wild.
• The Charlie Parker disc is a (mostly) previously unreleased concert at Rockland Palace from 1952.
• The new Tristano/Marsh reissue contains two albums' worth of material, half from 1949, half from 1956; the 1949 sessions include "Intuition" and "Digression", which are arguably the first ever recorded examples of free jazz.
• The AMM reissue is of a 1984 Chicago concert and contains a previously unreleased track from the same concert of AMM (trio edition) performing the late Cornelius Cardew's graphic score "Treatise".
• Finally, the Polly Bradfield LP is one of the truly great unknown solo free improv records (and also incidentally set something of a high water mark for the most silence on an album of improvised music). Bradfield was active on the circa-1980 New York free improv scene that included Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, etc. but hasn't been heard from since an appearance on Zorn's The Big Gundown. Someone please reissue her solo album! The American free improv scene from this period as represented by labels like Parachute and Metalanguage is due for a major rediscovery.

ADDS THIS WEEK

<New releases>

• Frank Carlberg: The Crazy Woman (Accurate)
• various: October Meeting 1987 (BIMhuis)
• John Lindberg: Resurrection of a Dormant Soul (Black Saint)
• Matthew Shipp Trio: Prism (Brinkman)
• Up There Trio: Push It (BVHaast)
• various: CIMPosium (CIMP)
• Chet Baker: In Bologna (Dreyfus)
• Stan Getz: Live in Paris (Dreyfus)
• Joe Zawinul: My People (Escapade)
• Myra Melford: The Same River, Twice (Gramavision)
• ICP Orchestra@: Bospaadje Konijnehol II (ICP)
• Eric Reed: Musicale (Impulse!)
• Charlie Parker: Legendary Rockland Palace Concert 1952 (Jazz Classics)
• Chris Dahlgren: Slow Commotion (Koch)
• Gustafsson/Jormin/Jormin: Opus Apus (LJ)
• B Sharp Jazz Quartet: Searching For the One (Mama)
• Don Byron: Bug Music (Nonesuch)
• Jorgen Pettersson: Saxophone Con Forza (Phono Suecia)
• Terry Callier: TC in DC (Premonition)
• Al Grey: Me 'N Jack (Pullen)
• Chris Cutler & Zeena Parkins: Shark! (ReR)
• Bob Moses: Devotion (Soul Note)
• Manusardi/Santoro/Bergonzi/Lewis: Within (Soul Note)
• Tony Oxley Celebration Orchestra: The Enchanted Messenger (Soul Note)
• King Fleming: The King Fleming Songbook (Southport)
• April Aloisio: Footprints (Southport)
• Paquito D'Rivera: Cuba Jazz (TropiJazz)
• Christoph Baumann: Mentalities (Unit)
• McPhee/Parker/Lazro: (untitled) (Vandoeuvre)
• Betty Carter: I'm Yours, You're Mine (Verve)
• Jimmy Smith: Angel Eyes (Verve)
• Joe Henderson: Big Band (Verve)

<New reissues>

• Willem Breuker Kollektief: The Parrot (BVHaast)
• Billy Strayhorn: The Peaceful Side (Capitol)
• Lennie Tristano & Warne Marsh: Intuition (Capitol)
• Count Basie: Count Basie & the Kansas City 7 (Impulse!)
• AMM@: Combine + Laminates (Matchless)

<Not new, but new to WNUR>

• Max Nagl: Wumm! Zack! Vol. 1 (Extraplatte)
• Joelle Leandre & Rudiger Carl: Blue Goo Park (FMP)
• Tippett/Nicols/Tippett: Mr. Invisible & the Drunken Sheilas LP (FMP/SAJ)
• Hidden Voices: Live at Zatec LP (Leo)
• Parker/Guy/Rowe/Prevost: Supersession (Matchless)
• Polly Bradfield: Solo Violin Improvisations LP (Parachute)
• Elliott Sharp: Ism LP (Zoar)

JAZZ SHOW TOP 25

* denotes reissue, @ denotes not real new.

1. Sun Ra*: The Singles (2 CD's) (Evidence)
2. Jon Jang Sextet: Two Flowers on a Stem (Soul Note)
3. Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers: Lausanne 1960, 2nd Set (TCB)
4. Bobby Previte: Too Close to the Pole (Enja)
5. Marty Ehrlich: New York Child (Enja)
6. Gustafsson/Guy/Lovens: Mouth Eating Trees and Related Activities (OkkaDisk)
7. Cinghiale: Hoofbeats of the Snorting Swine (Eighth Day)
8. Alice Coltrane*: Ptah the El Daoud (Impulse!)
9. Available Jelly: Monuments (Ramboy)
10. Matthew Shipp Duo: With Roscoe Mitchell (2.13.61)
11. Gerry Gibbs Sextet: The Thrasher (Qwest)
12. Jimmy Giuffre*: Free Fall (Columbia (France))
13. Chet Baker: In Tokyo (2 CD's) (Evidence)
14. Derek Bailey@: Drop Me Off at 96th (Scatter)
15. Anthony Wonsey Trio: Anthonyology (Evidence)
16. Secret Passion Orchestra: Wait Until Dark (Unit)
17. Benny Carter & Phil Woods: Another Time, Another Place (2 CD's) (Evening Star)
18. Mark Helias@: Loopin' the Cool (Enja)
19. Coleman Hawkins Quartet*: Today and Now (Impulse!)
20. Lee Konitz: Rhapsody II (Evidence)
21. Oscar Peterson: Meets Roy Hargrove and Ralph Moore (Telarc)
22. Philip Johnson's Big Trouble: Flood at the Ant Farm (Black Saint)
23. Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre*: Forces and Feelings (Delmark)
24. Roscoe Mitchell*: Sound (Delmark)
25. Bob Stewart: Then & Now (Postcards)

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