Liberation Music Orchestra

This Is Not America, from the late (2014) Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, sounds as relevant now as ever.  Carla Bley (far right, above) provided piano, arranged and conducted, and will be a featured artist in next year's Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Fidel Castro's recent death also reminds me of the Liberation Music Orchestra's 1970 effort, an ode to revolution from a line-up of jazz superstars (Gato Barbieri, Dewey Redman, Don Cherry, Michael Mantler, Roswell Rudd, Howard Johnson, Paul Motian, and Andrew Cyrille, among others), with Bley (far left, below) once again on piano, arranging, and composing many of the pieces, including the wittily titled The Ending To The First Side and Side Two's Drinking Song.

A luta continua . . . .

You Had Us At DakhaBrahka

Road trip.  Looks like we're going to Knoxville.

The lineup for the 2017 Big Ears Festival was announced today, and OMG - Wilco!  Tortoise!  Shara Worden!  Gavin Byers!  The Magnetic Fields!  

But this isn't an indie rock festival, although there are some fine indie rock performers in the lineup. This is a New Music festival and includes the avant garde, jazz, and modern composers as well.  

We were big fans of avant jazz composer Carla Bley as early as the mid-1970s, and still fondly remember a free outdoor show she did in Boston's Copley Plaza.

Similarly, living treasure Meredith Monk has alternately inspired us, spooked us, and baffled us for decades now, and it's hard to believe we still haven't actually seen her perform yet.

All of which is not to ignore Deerhoof, Blonde Redhead, Laetitia Sadier, Colin Stetson, Xiu Xiu, Richard Teitelbaum, Henry Threadgill, Henry Grimes, Six Organs of Admittance, and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who we saw open earlier this year for Animal Collective.  

There's also a lot of names I don't recognize, but judging by the company they're keeping, I look forward to discovering them.

But if for no other reason, it looks like we're going to Knoxville for The Ukraine's DakhaBrahka, the stars of the last and best Bumbershoot Festival we attended in Seattle (2014).     

We've cleared our schedule for March 23 to 26, and look forward to this major musical event.

Carla Bley

I never got to see the late Paul Bley perform, but several times in the late 70s, I did get to see his by-then ex-wife, Carla Bley, who had previously composed Bley's signature Ida Lupino.

With their narrative and almost cinematic compositions, Carla Bley's records still sound more like rock records to me than jazz.  An album like 1979's Musique Mechanique was not a big leap for fans of prog-rock bands like early Genesis and Yes, or for those accustomed to the big-band arrangements of Frank Zappa. Her compositions from this period were fairly simple rhythmically, often based on 4/4 marches - no complicated jazz drumming to confound the audience - and her soloists may not have conjured the nuanced emotions of the finest jazz, but the solos were loud and brash and suitably epic.  In other words, just the thing that rock audiences ate up.    

When Carla Bley and Her Very Large Band played Boston's Paradise Theater, a rock club, the audience treated them like rock stars, enthusiastically calling out the names of soloists ("Windo!") and dancing in their seats (this was when rock clubs still followed the cabaret model of seating the audience at tables with a two-drink minimum).

Bley's most famous composition is probably the more adventurous and avant-garde Escalator Over The Hill, an operatic magnum opus that sprawls over three bizarre discs that she composed with the Canadian drummer Paul Haines.  Another rock connection:  Paul Haines' daughter, Emily, would later go on and become the songwriter and lead singer for the Toronto band Metric.