Blue Bone Express - The Early Years: 2004-2007

I got this CD in the mail about a month ago and there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t listened to it all the way through at least once. I love this recording.

Blue Bone Express is a band made up of youngish players from the San Francisco area who play an amalgamation of Traditional Jazz and Brass Band music. They sound like no other band mining this territory. First of all, they actually sound like a band. There’s a gamboling cohesiveness to their sound that you almost never hear on Traditional Jazz recordings (at least not on most revival sides). It’s a loud and loose sound entirely lacking in the sense of stagnation that comes wafting from most Trad Jazz releases. There’s genuine excitement here. Especially when Kevin Brunetti is leading on sax. At times he has an unhinged quality to his playing that goes so well with this kind of music. He reminds me of both Fred Anderson and Pee Wee Russell. Brunetti sounds like neither of them (well, maybe a little bit like Anderson), but he has that same willingness to take the music absolutely anywhere.

However, this isn’t the kind of record your going to listen to for inspired solo playing. This isn’t that kind of band. They don’t make that kind of music. These guys can definitely play their instruments, but if your idea of small-band jazz is a collection of virtuosos taking solo turns, go somewhere else. This is jazz of a more elemental nature. It’s music to move to. It’s body music. I like that. I’m so sick of the quasi-intellectual trappings of jazz. What a dull burden. This band blows that tired pretense out of the water and makes you want to move.

The more I’ve been listening to this disc the more I’m tending to hear this band as a world unto themselves. They just don’t fit with anything that’s out there. I can’t imagine them being embraced by the Trad jazz festival scene (where the last thing anybody seems to want is the unexpected). And they definitely don’t have the corny slickness that appears to be a prerequisite for making it with the Lindy hoppers. These guys are like the Captain Beefheart of Trad Jazz.

There’s just one aspect of this record I can’t totally get with. It’s the trotting out of warhorses like That’s A Plenty and Just a Closer Walk With Thee. There isn’t too much of that shtick on this disc, but when you hear those songs along side the bands originals (all by piano and trumpet player Jara Queeto) you can’t help but notice how much more fresh Queeto’s tunes sound. Those old songs probably come across well in their live set, but I don’t see any need for them on this disc. I would have been happy to see a full set of the bands own music. However, I have to say their version of Midnight in Moscow is the best I’ve ever heard.

This isn’t Be-bop or Swing or the New Thing. This is the Real Thing. This is living, breathing, spitting Jazz music. It’s not revival music. It’s not museum music. It’s music inspired by a tradition and informed by it’s own time. It’s rough and inviting and convivial. It’s the best new jazz record I’ve heard in a long time.

Check out Blue Bone Express HERE and HERE.

The Three Sounds

I’ve been in an ultra-modern mood lately and listening to music that’s just 50 years old as opposed to the 80-year-old noise that’s usually ringing in my ears. Today I’ve been playing The Three Sounds, a piano trio that recorded a pack of albums for Blue Note in the late 50s and early 60s. I like this shit. These guys play with a solid, swinging, blues feeling. There’s nothing here to punish your ears. The music comes across easy and genial. It makes you want to move. That’s not to say that this is light music. You pay some attention to this stuff and it’ll return all kinds of good things.

Apparently The Three Sounds were none too popular with the critics of their day. That’s not too surprising. The Downbeat crowd at that time was too busy polishing the knobs of introverted, “serious” players like Bill Evans and John Coltrane to be bothered getting with anything so carefree as this music. Gene Harris, the piano slice of The Three Sounds pie, went on to get a better critical reception as a solo act in the 80s and 90s. But by that point, the only folks paying any real notice to Jazz were the aficionados, who had sub divided into camps where they no longer had to be bothered with any kind of music that wasn’t in line with their expectations. That meant the only people bothering to evaluate his music were, more or less, predisposed to liking him.

Is that a bad thing? I’m not sure. On the one hand why should anyone be expected go on subjecting themselves to Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and their ilk if they prefer the sort of music Lester Young or Louis Armstrong made? On the other hand, this narrowing of the palate is a great inducement to stagnation - both for players and listeners.

What’s probably been most detrimental to Jazz, though, is that since the demise of swing the dominant chord in Jazz has moved further and further away from having anything to do with dance. It stopped being a participatory music. Fuck the audience. Let them sit there and watch as their tortured demi-gods spew inscrutable brilliance. How boring.

Seen from that vantage point you can understand why The Three Sounds were dismissed as lightweights in their day. If you approach the music from an overtly intellectual perspective, music as accessible and fluid as the stuff they made in 1959 is easy to write off as mere fluff. It lacks the requisite anguish and obscurity that is too often mistaken for depth. Anybody having this much fun can’t possibly be making art. What a rancid idea. Spend any time with the work of people like Groucho Marx or Bill Hicks or John Kennedy Toole and you’ll quickly realize how stinking that kind of thinking is.

Unfortunately this sort of approach to Jazz has largely won out. And that might explain a lot as to why Jazz is considered unapproachable and dull by most of the people I know. I wonder how different things might be if the prominent Jazz critics of the post-war period had been more in tune with Philip Larkin than Leonard Feather.

Of course, this is all wool gathering. You play the music and this kind of churning quickly evaporates. It can’t stand up to anything so alive as music such as this.

Jazz Modernism by Alfred Appel, JR.

I wanted to like this book.

When this thing came out (about 6 years ago) I was dying to read it. But the cover price of $35 was a bit steep for me. So I put it on my want list figuring I’d come across it somewhere, sometime at a price more favorable to my circumstances. A couple weeks ago I did. I found a beat up copy at a library purge for $2. I scooped that bitch up with something like glee in my heart.

Yeah, well, the glee is gone. This book is a dud.

Appel’s mission here is to establish a bunch of Jazzbos in the “great modernist tradition of the arts.” OK, so I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. That sounds right up my alley. I like the idea of looking at some of the musicians I love (Armstrong, Ellington, Waller, Holiday, Teagarden) within the broader context of modernism. The only problem is, it just doesn’t work. In fact, I think Appel winds up doing them a disservice. These people made popular (you could even say vernacular) music based in a tradition they willingly worked within and extended. Lumping them into an esoteric, avant garde movement that was hell bent on subverting any tradition they could get their hands on seems a fundamental mistake.

To be blunt, this fucking book bugs me. After about 150 pages of random associations and cross-references I got damn tired of Appel’s “reading” of the music. Unlike the artists he uses for comparison (Picasso, Alexander Calder, James Joyce…), the musicians he’s talking about don’t require the services of an academic. Their form of communication is more direct than that. All you need to do is listen.

The 9th Best Radio Station in the Country

The 9th best radio station in the country - that's how KBRD (680 AM) describes itself, but don't believe it. If there are 8 radio stations in this country better than KBRD, I'll eat an antennae. There's just no way there are 8 better than this massively awesome sound spewer from Olympia, Washington.

They say they're "playing music of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s (and a couple years on either side)" and that don't tell you shit. You have to hear this. There's something so incredibly fine about their mash-up of washed-up music that it sounds damn near subversive. This isn't just another nostalgia station. This is far, far weirder than that. Sure they play all those crooners and sweet bands that haunt the "music of your life" pits, but they also throw in large doses of people like Bob Wills, Billie Holiday, Wingy Malone, Art Hodes, Vince Giordano, Lester Young, Willie ''The Lion'' Smith, Leon Redbone, Washboard Sam and about every other jazzer and blueser you can name. And none of it is ghettoized into little compartments or specialty shows. No, they play it all as if this music is something to use and enjoy instead of something precious that needs to be preserved, explained and made dull. Damn, this is just how it ought to be. As far as I'm concerned, this is certainly the best radio station in the country.

To listen online to KBRD (680 AM) go HERE.

Yehoodi & The Bennett Archive

This is a deadly time of year here in the rust belt. We're locked in a deep freeze. The earth has died. It's buried under mounds of soot covered snow. The sun rarely appears. Birds freeze in mid-flight and drop from the sky like cannon balls.

But I'm kind of liking it.

For the past couple days I've been hunkered down in my hovel brewing strong beer and filling the air with the aroma of malt and hops and the loud sounds of démodé music.

Most of what I've been blasting is coming over the internet from a couple different sources.

First, there's all this great shit at The Bennett Archive. It's just a bunch of old radio shows hosted by some guy named Gordon Bennett. I know nothing of him, but he was (yes, he's dead) certainly great on the radio. He was given to broadcasting the kind of brutally intransigent jazz that drives sophisticates mad. This is Trad Jazz at it's most unapologetic. Stomping, careening and non too subtle. He spins all the usual suspects playing all the usual shit and it sounds great.

Gordon Bennett sounds great, too. He introduces the music with a slushy delivery that makes him sounds about one half in the bag and one half off his rocker. He was obviously an obsessive and I love him for it. It's like sitting around listening to your crazy uncle play his records for you. Sometimes they skip and sometimes they crack so much you can tell they've been played half to death. But that just adds to the charm. If anybody is aware of anything else out there even remotley like this, please let me know. I live for this kind of crap.

When I need a break from Bennett I switch over to Yehoodi.com - a nice site that's all about Swing. Gordon Bennett would have made the folks at Yehoodi puke. At Yehoodi everybody sounds fresh, sober and smart and the music swings like crazy. These people definitely know what they're doing and they have such a clear love and appreciation for the music that you'd have to be sour at heart not to get caught up in their enthusiasm.

On Thursday, they played an absolutely stunning four hour set of music by the Chicago DJ James Pustejovsky that was loaded with great Swing and Trad. He mixes in a lot of newer music with the older stuff and makes it all sound seamless. Don't miss this!! It'll be on the air throughout January. Also at Yehoodi you can grab the excellent "Hey Mr. Jesse" podcast. I've been digging through the archives of that show for the past few days and finding one great show after another. Really, it's a fucking treasure trove.

One of the things I love about the whole Yehoodi thing is that they come at the music from the perspective of dancers. That visceral approach is so refreshing. Man, if there's one thing sorely missing from the jazz scene it's feet that move and asses that shake.

OK, I've got to get back to my beer. I'm brewing an Imperial Bock and getting shit-faced from the steam rolling off the brew pot. Good night, nurse!

Harry Blons' Dixieland Band

I was trolling around the local antique pit the other day when I came across this jewel from 1952 on Audiophile Records (AP-6) out of Saukville, WI. There was no way I could pass this up. After all, I grew up not far from Saukville, WI. When I was a kid, I used to go there to get drunk and beaten up. I've been all over that town. Still, I had no idea that anything resembling Jass ever emanated from there. Imagine my shock when I saw this thing. I quickly coughed up the cash and raced home only to find that my habitually unreliable Crosley turntable has decided it's tired of spinning at 78 rpm. Shit.

So here I am with what looks to be some genuinely prime Dixieland stomp and no way to get it into my ears. I just sit here staring at the thing. It's not bad looking, either. Virgin Red Vinyl! And judging from the warhorses these guys are trotting out ("Panama", "Clarinet Marmalade", "Just a Closer Walk With Thee") you know it's got to be loaded with lo-brow goodness. One day I'll get to here this baby roar. Until then, I pine.

As for Harry Blons, it appears he was a fairly well known clarinet player who made his name playing a lot of Dixieland around the Minneapolis area in the 40s and 50s. He recorded a fair bit (often with Doc Evans). I'll need to dig up some more of his music soon. Here's a nice bio of Blons by the magnificent Eugene Chadbourne.

By the way, the original Audiophile Records label started as the hobby of an eccentric wizard named Ewing Nunn. Here & Here are a couple good sites that tell his story. Nunn eventually sold his label to Jim Cullum Sr. and a number of the original Audiophile discs have since been reissued by George Buck's Jazzology family of labels.

King Oliver & The Blues

This afternoon I was at a liquor store trying to buy a six-pack of something to enhance the day and wound up waiting around while a clerk and customer assured one another that this is certainly the most depressing time of year. It was a glum, little exchange about the post-holiday blues and the long, dark winter that looms ahead.
"Let's not forget the economy," I wanted to say.
But I didn't.
I'm tired of getting dirty looks all the time.
After I got my beer and got out it dawned on me that what I should have done was suggest they listen to some King Oliver. Of course, that probably would have been no help to them at all. Most likely, they would have considered my suggestion pure gibberish. Well, fuck them.
Anyway, I've been listening to a lot of King Oliver lately and I'm telling you that powerful horn of his is full of good news. Mostly what I've been playing is a Collection I stumbled upon at Big Road Blues. This is an excellent set assembled around King Oliver's backing of blues singers in the late 1920s.
I can't think of a better way to get to know his sound. Most of these sides are small band pieces where Oliver's horn comes through beautifully. All the selections are choice, but I have to admit to being partial to "Mean Tight Mama" by Sara Martin. Surely, this has to be one of the greatest song about being ugly ever recorded.
And while you're over there, don't miss the accompanying notes by Jeff Harris. He's written an excellent introduction to the music.