Her "Year of magical thinking" is a tale of mourning and a tribute and I concede mine may not be a tale of mourning. A tribute though - THAT, yes. It is a tribute to music, to what it has done to me, to what it has been for me, in the past twelve months. Formative, informative, cut deep and healed (not too) fast - and the scars I have will last me a lifetime.
Do i regret any of them? No.
Do I blame her? No. I could never blame her for all the things in C she brought me: C-chord suites and solos, cyanide breakups, courtship, care, cunning chivalry, curioisity cum cat. A conundrum. A C-section: and here I am born. Not better. New.
Check it out.
So, music. Jazz, hip-hop, funk, classical, opera. My favourite things for 2005? I leave it to those who compile "best of" lists and delude they will last more than the time to refresh the page. But I WILL throw a few bones to my ... dawgs. Not necessarily made in 2005. But relevant - for me at least - in the year that is almost to RIP.
Christian McBride's Live at Tonic, due March - what I've heard of it, over a dinner with McBride himself and no side dish of sleazy comons (amen and hallelujah), is worthy. No doubt.
Ethiopiques (Either/Orchestra), Live in Addis -- with the partecipation of Mulatu Astatke; his soundtrack for Jarmusch's Broken Flowers is a delicacy. Jarmusch told me Archie Shepp used to live in his loft in the Sixties. Schepp, invention and cirumvention of musical canons, one of the most elegant cats ever. I see a line from Shepp to Astatke, elegance, exotic elegance, the fun of deconsruction.
Gold sounds, Ali Jackson, Cyrus Chestnut, Reginald Veal, James Carter - because it was about time someone made the Pavement a jazz suit. Not a suit, a t-shirt more like. And yes because Ali and Reginald hold a special place in my heart. And yes I was wrong on James Carter.
Jeremy Pelt, Identity: because his is one experiment in jazzatronica we don't want to kill ourselves for. For once. Listen to Scorpio (naturally it would be better if you had access to Mr. Pelt's own live recordings of the 12' composition: he would play them for you and illustrate how the piece progressed as the quartet developed an ... Identity. Precisely. Then he would do something like asking for some fresh Electronic music to check out and you would say ... Telefon Tel Aviv. And he would go on iTunes and buy it and promise a sure quick death if he doesn't dig it. Well, I'm still alive)
Telefon Tel Aviv. Anything. Really. I'll drink it and pour it all over my body.
RJD2 (Deadringer), Caribou (The milk of human kindness), Prefuse 73 (One word extinguisher, Extinguished), The GZA (Word from the Genius), Dangerdoom (The mouse and the mask), Gostface killah (Supreme clientele). El-P/Cage.
4 hero.
The Roots.
Bill Frisell (East West). Metheny/Coleman (Song X reissue). The staged discoveries: Town Hall (Diz and Bird), Carnegie (Monk and Trane), One down one up (Trane)
Chemical brothers' Push the button (BELIEVE, perfect sountrack for the perfect public restroom fuck *pubic testdoom fuck*, SURFACE TO AIR, perfect sountrack for when you feel you don't have it in your lungs to breathe, for whatever the reason, cigarettes, inedia, pain)
Fiona Apple - she and Michael Chabon should put a new spin on Mensa and inaugurate a buen retiro for geniuses who happen to be unfairly, supernaturally gorgeous looking too.
Wynton Marsalis, Live at the House of tribes. For reasons I don't need to explain.
Carla Bley/Charlie Haden, Not in our name. Hasta siempre la LMO, Liberation music orchestra. Not in our name, and little does it matter that it once was Cambodia and now it's ... you pick: New Orleans? Iraq? Bolivia?
Bley/Haden, same flavor, same fervor, same fever as in 1969.
Bley on the critics who found the new album "weak", compared to the 1969 debut: "So it's not as fiery? Maybe we should take machine guns and shoot everyone in the audience. That would make it more of a frisky record. Maybe we could get some guns and go after some of those reviewers. Then we'd be true revolutionaries".
Bley on music: "it's a calling. We do music like breathing. We have to. That's how we wonder what life's about"
At the NYC School of rock (the inspiration for the movie with Joe Black, and no they weren't credited for that, and yes there were roumors of a lawsuit there, for like... 3secs), speaking with Gracie, 5 years old. FIVE. She looks like Dakota Fanning, she's as sassy and witty (and has as raucous a voice) as Frances McDormand. She already knows she wants to be a drummer. And her favourites bands, for 2005 and ever are, and I quote:
"Ramones, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin".
5 years old ladies and gentlemen. And to know what she wants. And for that to be music.
In the words of jazz "Blessed is the child"
*Of course it helps that we live in a country where unlike, say, Iran, a large body of music hasn't just been banned (did you read the news? Nothing like that had happened since the Seventies). Then again we do have the case for Intelligent design. So maybe we'll get there. To the musical Torquemada (remember the Spanish Inquisition?)
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