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 . . . .

Brown Rice

One of my favorite albums from the '70s, if not of all time, diminished somewhat from the vinyl version by the audio compression in this format, but still an effective recording.  This is what was playing in my head during my university years - and what my college roommates kept telling me to turn down late at night.  However, this music holds up much better now, some 40 years later, than the laid-back, radio-format soft rock to which they were listening.

In those heady university years, between listening to Don Cherry, Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Jon Hassel, and schlepping LP copies of No Pussyfooting, Another Green World, In C, Music for 18 Musicians, and Mu, Part I from apartment to apartment, I felt like I had tapped into the music of the future, and it kind of turns out that I was right, at least with regard to my future. 

Wadada

You may not have heard of him, but Wadada Leo Smith is probably the greatest living jazz musician today.  His interpretations of electric, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis (1926-1991) were impeccable, and now he's taking on another hero of mine, Don Cherry (1936-1995).

I don't blog about jazz much, mostly because so much of the genre has become so moribund, and also because the few remaining innovators tend not to tour much. But this track, Don Cherry's Electric Sonic Garden, is freaking awesome.