(Photo by Frank Schindelbeck borrowed from here.)
---
Next Tuesday and Wednesday, Buffalo Collision will be playing at the Dakota in downtown Minneapolis. This edition of BC will feature Tim Berne, Ethan Iverson, Dave King, and one of the great improvising cellists, Hank Roberts.
Dave and Ethan both grew up listening to Hank, especially on Tim Berne's own album Fractured Fairy Tales, in the co-op Miniature with Berne and Joey Baron, and as a member of the seminal Bill Frisell quartet.
We are thrilled to be playing with Hank for the first time next week.
---
There are many interesting blog posts from August for us to belatedly link to:
Hanging out at Postclassic is important for those with an interest in minimalism. A feisty debate was started by this post. The final humorous wrap-up is here. It seems that there just aren't enough names for styles these days (a topic, by the way, which was a major point of the Stanley Crouch interview). How irritating that Bernard Holland selected a Count Basie recording as a recommended document of minimalist music: that is a real insult to those composers who have devoted their lives to squeezing the juice out of just a little rather than a lot. (Holland is better off sticking to the center, like in today's superb Pavarotti obit.)
Since then, Kyle Gann has moved on to a conference on minimalism in Wales, from where he writes:
Jonathan Bernard (U. of Washington) stepped in to play pop music indistinguishable from minimalism (Orbital, Eno, King Crimson, Sigur Ros, Villalobos, Plastikman, and others), and to warn us that someday soon minimalism may seem like merely a classical tributary into a much larger worldwide movement.
This is absolutely true. (Consider how smoothly Philip Glass could remix a David Bowie album, which is a disc Dave really digs.)
---
In a related essay, DJA has excellent comments on classical players and the beat.
---
What's not to like about Steve Smith's answer to number five?
---
Terry Teachout's Louis Armstrong bio is progressing nicely.
---
In the middle of some deep analysis, Jeremy Denk notes:
...Beauty subverts functioning.
(This last sentence has been proven in my life 3,793,421 times; the last time was just yesterday, when Cory called me at 3 in the morning to explain that he was following two beautiful 18 year old girls, and had found himself inexplicably in their company at a McDonalds — McDonalds! I did not answer the phone but woke up nonetheless and then found myself stumbling over to my phone which was charging against the wall and listening to his voicemail and then sleeping very intermittently until 7 when I decided to get up once and for all, super grumpy. Cory, meanwhile had 7 hours of rehearsal and a 3 hour drive the next day, and when contacted by phone seemed a bit turgid or sluggish in temperament; I, too, found myself often staring at a sock on my floor, simultaneously langorous and bitter, and incapable of will. Thus, the beauty of the two girls— which I did not even witness! —passed, like a virus, through Cory to me and impeded both of our functionings. Astounding.)
---
Non-blog:
Jason Moran has a new Mp3 collection of great pianists on his website. The clips of Oscar Dennard are quite amazing. Who's Oscar Dennard? Google doesn't know much, but there is a nice photo from a Zurich club (the other musicians are Idrees Sulieman and Jamil Nasser):
All of the Mp3's on Jason's site are recommended, including those of Moran himself. Don't miss the duo performance of "A Foggy Day" with Lee Konitz.
---
Jason plays with Ethan's former teacher, Fred Hersch, tomorrow night. Nate Chinen's review of the Iverson/Hersch gig on Tuesday is in The New York Times.
