Things Have Got to Change

Apparently, back in 1971, someone at Impulse! Records fucked up on the job. They posthumously issued John Coltrane's previously unreleased Sun Ship album, but managed to run at least one pressing of the album with Side Two of Archie Shepp's Things Have Got to Change as Side Two of the Coltrane album. 

To some ears, free jazz is free jazz and it all sounds alike, but there's really a huge, oceanic difference between what the John Coltrane Quartet was playing in 1965 (when Sun Ship was recorded) and what Shepp was doing in 1971. But anyway, there are still copies of Sun Ship out there with Things Have Got to Change as Side Two.

In 1975, one of my housemates. Bruce, owned a Chevy Vega with an eight-track player. As a side note, it was Bruce who first introduced me to the music of Terry Riley and Harry Partch, and hence minimalism and 20th Century composers, and was also instrumental in my awareness of avant-garde jazz and other "out there" forms of music. In any event, that misprinted version of Sun Ship managed to make it to the eight-track format - someone apparently used a mispressed vinyl of the album as the master for both the eight-track and cassette versions - and Bruce had unknowingly bought a "wrong" copy of the album for his Vega's eight-track player.

The first time I heard Sun Ship was riding around Long Island with Bruce in his Vega. Yes, we were the kind of guys that rode around in a 1975 Chevy Vega blaring John Coltrane in suburban  New York. But we had no idea about the pressing error and innocently assumed that Shepp's Change was something by Trane. The label incorrectly said Side Two contained the tracks Attaining and Ascent, and although I couldn't hear a break anywhere in Change indicating the start of a new track, that wasn't all that unusual for late-period Coltrane, when one song in a suite might flow seamlessly into the next. 

But what was unusual was the looseness of the music, all that percussion, the choruses of voices chanting "gotta change" and "goddammit," and even the subtle washes of electronic sounds. Coltrane had gotten that funky?, I wondered. That angry? Bruce and I concluded that's probably why the material never got released until after Trane's passing. 

So all my life, at least since 1975, I had always assumed that late in his life, John Coltrane had embraced a streetwise, anarchic style of revolutionary free jazz, a style that could only be heard on Side Two of Sun Ship. The trouble was, I could never find a copy of Sun Ship with that radical Side Two. By the time of the CD era, all versions of Sun Ship only contained the quartet tracks - no choruses, no electronics, no small army of percussionists. The MP3 era didn't have the mystery track either, and even all the voluminous box sets didn't provide an answer, nor did the streaming era.

Any time I asked Google about a 1960s or '70s free-jazz track with voices chanting a chorus of "goddammit," it would always tell me I was thinking of Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn, a great song to be sure but a completely different animal, not to mention no chanting.    

I was starting to question either my memory or my sanity. Was I just plain wrong, and while Bruce had a copy of Sun Ship, could the track I remembered be one of his other tapes? Could he have been playing a trick all along, switching the tapes when I wasn't looking? Or were we just so high (hey, it was the '70s, man) that we were "hearing" all those voices and electronic effects, but it wasn't on the tape? Okay, that might happen once, but every time? And just on Side Two? Not likely (but we were serious stoners back then). 

Last weekend, 50 years after the fact, I finally posed the question on Reddit as to what that mystery track was, and within an hour, someone posted a reply about the mispressing. I tracked down Shepp's Things Have Got to Change on Spotify and almost instantly recognized it as that long-lost "Coltrane" track. Oddly, while I'm familiar with much of Shepp's discography, I've somehow always managed to skip past the Change album. 

But mystery solved, sanity confirmed, and crisis averted. Someone at Impulse! had fucked up.

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet

Orcutt Shelly Miller

I could start a whole series on "Bands I Wanted to See at Big Ears but Missed" or just leave it at this one post as a late "New Music Friday" entry, but here's the latest from Orcutt Shelly Miller, covering Captain Beefheart's Hot Head with David Yow (The Jesus Lizard) on guest vocals.     

Unpacking Big Ears: The Rest of the Sets

 

This post should get us the rest of the way through the 2026 Big Ears sets that we saw this year. Most years, I don't finish a full recap of the festival, getting either bored or distracted about halfway through, so either I'm getting more disciplined or there's less going on in my life (or both!).

Also, I want to point out that these sets aren't the "also-rans," the mediocre to poor seeds and stems that I'm including just for the sake of completeness. Some of them, like Jeff Parker's Expansion Trio and the Patricia Brennan Septet, were among the best of the weekend, but just didn't fit in with the broad categories of the previous posts.

I might could have put Parker in with the SML post from two weeks ago, as Jeremiah Chiu, the synth player in SML, was a member of the trio, which also included drummer Ben Lumsdaine. I (sadly) missed Parker's ETA IVtet last year, and his spacey, grooved-out set this year by his Expansion Trio was as good a salve as any to make up for my loss.  

The music of Parker is also as good an example as any of the continuing evolution of so-called jazz music. Jazz history has been marked by rebels and innovators, from Charlie Parker upending the swing era with bebop to Miles introducing cool jazz and modal forms to Coltrane opening things up to free jazz and the avan-garde to Miles revolutionizing the form again with electric instruments and jazz fusion. But jazz purists would want to freeze the history sometime in the 1970s and not want to recognize any innovations since then. 

But look at other forms of music, from rock to hip-hop, that have continued to evolve and evolve significantly since then. No one expects hip hop to still be all "hip, hop, don't stop the rockin' to the bang-bang boogie." No one expects rock music to still sound like Billy Joel. Both forms have evolved in so many ways, but why not jazz? Why must it still sound like Duke Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, like Charles Mingus or Sonny Rollins?

To be sure, that's not what Jeff Parker's about, but his music, while still undeniably "jazz," is moving in directions no one could have anticipated in 1975. The music is rhythmic and beat driven, melodic but not tied to song structure, free but not chaotic. It's centered around the electric guitar, not horns, but doesn't sound anything like Wes or Les. It's 2026 music, lovingly crafted and tastefully presented.           

I also got to see another iconoclastic guitarist who defies any classification or genre - the legendary Fred Frith. There is no telling what to expect from Frith, and I for one didn't expect the notorious improviser to be playing primarily bass, accompanied by accordion, sax, and drums on carefully crafted compositions. I saw Frith a year or two ago at Big Ears improving with a table guitar along with Ikue Mori, and the galactic distance between that set and this is but a hint of the breadth of Frith's universe.

Speaking of guitars, I also caught a set of six guitars but not one single live musician, except for a technician keeping the set going. Lou Reed Drones was a longform, six-hour drone performance curated by Laurie Anderson of guitars from Reed’s collection arranged against a group of amplifiers so that their tuned feedback created a drone of ever-changing harmonics. The sound was deafeningly loud, far louder than this video sample suggests. 

Although set in the same former Greyhound station as the SML performances, it was less than visually compelling - after you took in the arrangement, there wasn't much to see, but I hung around for some 15 minutes before wandering off to find something to eat. I'm still glad I stopped by, though.  

Speaking of drone, the legendary Charlemagne Palestine gave a rare performance at Big Ears this year. I missed his organ recital, but caught his piano piece, where he performed an extended drone of repeated notes with changing overtones and harmonics. His piano and stage were covered by silk fabrics and stuffed animals in front of projections of his own abstract water-color artwork. The piece developed a hypnotic quality and the audience was as rapt and attentive as any I've been a part of.  

One of my most anticipated sets was possibly Patricia Brennan's Septet. The vibraphonist, who I first encountered in Mary Halvorson's Amaryllis band, was joined by trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonists Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon (who I also saw with Brain Marsella's Imaginarium), along with a bass, a drummer, and a percussionist to give it all an Afro-Cuban flavor. My anticipation was high, and Brennan's high-energy and exciting performance more than met my expectations. This  band swings and swings hard (even though it also sound nothing like what anyone might have imagined in 1975).

Finally, speaking of 1975, the festival concluded (for me at least) with a performance of something called the Miles Electric Band: Celebrating Miles Davis at 100. It was a large, at least ten-person, ensemble and reasonably recreated some of Miles' late 60's and early 70's compositions, although perhaps a tad too faithfully and without much apparent enthusiasm or passion. And why did they include an extended acoustic piano solo in a set of "Electric Miles?" This would have been an exciting discovery had I stumbled across them unexpectedly at some club, but as the final headlining act of Big Ears 2026, well, the festival had delivered far better all weekend.   

Not to say I don't love the music of that period in Miles career. I do. And not to say the musicians weren't talented. They were. But it was a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts, or possibly that after four days of outstanding musicality, I had become jaded.    

And that was it! Four day, and my seventh year at the Festival. Looking forward to 2027!

Unpacking Big Ears: The John Zorn Sets

"No photography," the signs said, and to make sure no one missed it, the ushers walked up and down the aisles of the Bijou holding up the signs. Now, I'm not a big fan of following the rules just because the rules exist, and while it would have been very easy to sneak a few quick shots of the John Zorn performances from the seats, I uncharacteristically complied. Others didn't, apparently, so all the pics here of Zorn and company are from social media sources (the signs didn't say "no reposting pics that others might have taken").

For the third time in five years (by my count), the 2026 Big Ears festival included a Zorn residency, basically handing over The Bijou Theater to him for two days (Friday  and Saturday). As far as I'm concerned, they can give him a residency every year - let him have the full run of the Bijou all four days to do whatever the hell he wants. His music is that diverse, his roster of associated artists that large, and his universe that expansive and fascinating that it wouldn't get old. Alternatively, if there were a multi-day Zorn festival every year (most likely in New York), I'd go.

This year's residency included a duet set with Laurie Anderson, his vocal arrangements for soprano Barbara Hannigan, Love Songs featuring Petra Haden, piano compositions for the Brian Marsella Trio,  Incerto, featuring Marsella and Julian Lage, chamber music with the Junction Trio, and a live soundtrack for experimental cinema with Ikue Mori. No disrecpect, but I didn't see any of those sets mostly due to schedule conflicts with other must-see Big Ears shows. 

Probably the most anticipated Zorn set was the reunion of his original Masada quartet, featuring Zorn, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen, and drummer Joey Baron. The original OG Masada, who haven't performed together since 2001, as far as I know. The four of them together on stage, performing the music from the sadly now-out-of-print CDs on the Japanese DIW label, was a truly historic event, the kind of thing Ken Burns should do a documentary about if only he could break free of Wynton Marsallis' influence and learn to connect the dots between post-bop jazz and Zorn's klezmer-influenced, post-Ornette music.  

The demand for the show was such that they played twice, once on Friday morning (well, starting 12 noon) and again on Saturday night. I caught the Friday show and intended to go on Saturday, too, but got caught up in the aforementioned schedule conflicts. 

The set was fantastic. The band swung hard, the solos were outstanding, and the rhythm section of Cohen and Burns was tight. I'm hoping, praying, that the set was recorded, as I would love to be able to relive the experience again. If you're not familiar what with what the hybrid of Zorn's downtown avant-garde, Ornette's harmolodics, and traditional klezmer might sound like, here's the quartet in 1999 (back in Zorn's long-hair period): 

On Sunday night, I also got to see Masada trumpeter Dave Douglas and his own quartet, which included the iconoclastic saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, cellist Tomeka Reid, and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang of the band Son Lux.

 

After starting the day with Masada, I ended that Friday with Zorn's closing set, Awakening Ground, a trio improvisation of Zorn, keyboardist John Medeski, and drummer Dave Lombardo (of Slayer fame).  

The set was energetic and amazing, but one thing that really stood out to me was how limited rock-music drumming is compared to jazz. This isn't a knock on Lombardo - he's a great drummer, albeit a great rock drummer. But after a day of listening to Joey Baron, Ben Lumsdaine (with Jeff Parker's trio), Ben Perowsky (of Steven Bernstein's band), and Jordan Glenn (Fred Frith), rock drumming sounded lead-footed and clumsy. 

One big difference is the use of cymbals. While jazz drummers are playing several different rhythms simultaneously and keeping the cymbals in constant use in support of one rhythm or another, Lombardo tends to use them only at the end of a run across his toms and snare, as a sort of exclamations point ("boom-boom-ba-doom-splash!"). After listening to all those cymbals all day, it almost felt like I was listening to recorded music with one track missing - where's the rest of the drum set?

Not to say Lombardo wasn't heavy and powerful - he was. But as another example of the difference between rock and jazz drumming, at one point during Awakening Ground, Lombardo lost his drum stick in the middle of his big showcase solo. Not dissing Dave - everyone loses drumsticks (it happens). I clearly saw the stick go flying up in the air after a particularly powerful strike. But the lost stick seemed to throw Lombardo off, and he had to temporarily stop his solo, grab another stick and start again from where he had left off. All this was probably took no more than a second or two and many people might not have even noticed, but Zorn walked over to Dave's drum set after the song ended to console him for his faux pas.                

By contrast, on Saturday night, part of the reason I didn't see the second Masada set was because I was at The Blackbox (formerly the Old City Performing Arts Center) watching the Darius Jones Trio with veteran jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver.

Like Lombardo, Cleaver (unfortunately, not in the picture above) also lost a drumstick during his performance (like I said, it happens). But Cleaver literally didn't miss a beat - his other hand busily tapping out a polyrhythm (on the cymbals) and his feet working the bass drums, he calmly pulled another stick out of his kit and kept on going, and if you didn't see the stick fly off, you'd never have known it happened by listening.

Anyway, I'm not shitting on Lombardo, and my observation (not even a criticism) is the well-known difference between rock and jazz drumming. But as long as I mentioned Darius Jones, although he's not a Zorn associate (i.e., in the Zorniverse), I'll mention here that his set was magnificent, the sort of mysterious, almost mystical, late-night free jazz one might of heard in a downtown loft in the 1970s.

Back to Zorn. I started Saturday off with a performance of his game-piece, Cobra, performed by a large, all-star ensemble including Lombardo, Ches Smith, Brian Marsella, John Medeski, Jorge Roeder, Simon Hanes, Ikue Mori, Sae Hashimoto, Wendy Eisenberg, William Winant, Kenny Wollesen, and many more.

It's difficult to describe a performance of Cobra. It's basically a group improvisation set to some arcane set of rules, conducted by Zorn and based on suggestions by the performers. Hands are raised, signs are flashed, headbands are worn at various performers at various times, and it's all chaotic and bizarre and wonderful and strangely humorous, and no two performances are ever anything like each other.

Which brings me around to two other sets by two other large ensembles. While not officially part of the Zorn residency, both were led by members of his core group of performers and featured participants in his Cobra set.

First, Sunday started with a set by Brian Marsella's Imaginarium. 

The large ensemble included three horns, a drummer, two percussionists (including Sae Hashimoto), a violinist, a guitarist, and a bassist, and credit should also go to the projectionist, who showed a continuous series of dazzling lights, trippy films, and other visual effects that changed with every song. This short video was screened during the first full piece of the set after Marsella's sung/spoken introduction:

"Imaginarium" is a fitting name for the ensemble, as their performance was all over the musical universe, never lingering in one spot for long. Violinist Meg Okura and guitarist John Lee had particular standout moments, but everyone contributed, and contributed mightily, to the effort. If you like Burnt Weenie Sandwich/Waka-jawaka-era Frank Zappa, this was the set for you. If you like having your mind blown by sheer creativity, this was the set for you. If you just like good music, daringly composed and flawlessly performed, this was the set for you. Along with Masada, it was one of the standout sets of the whole festival for me. 

Finally, later on that same Sunday, I caught Simon Hanes' Gargantua, a fitting name for his 18-person ensemble. Three was the operational number for this band, as it had three vocalists, three French horns, three trombones, three electric guitars, three bassists, and three drummers, all conducted, frantically, by Hanes.

Hanes is best known to Zorn fans for his punk-rock outfit Trigger and their CD of Zorn's Bagatelle compositions. He's also part of the Italian soundtrack-pop band Tredici Bacci and has collaborated with pianist Anthony Coleman. But Gargantua was something else entirely. What it was, I'm still not sure, as it turned on a dime, sometimes mid-song, from chamber ensemble to noise to almost ambient vocal harmony to punk to funk and every other possible genre Hanes could imagine. At one point, just to give you an idea of the variability, the score called for the three singers to yell and swear at Hanes ("fuck you, Simon!") as they balled up the sheet music and threw it at him. Two minutes later, they were singing beautiful polytonal harmonies. There were triple trombone solos reminiscent of Centipede's Septober Energy. There were shrieking guitar solos. It was fun, if exhausting in the sheer exuberance of its creativity.

I was at the front row, right behind Simon's conducting, and it was hard to capture the full ensemble or anything other than Hanes' butt. Here's a pic I found of the set on social media, with your humble narrator visible on the rail wearing my trademark brown cap.   

And that's it, although that a lot - three "official" Zorn residency sets, a set by his Masada bandmate Dave Douglas, two large ensemble sets led by two of his frequent collaborators, and Darius Jones thrown in for good measure.

Like I said, Big Ears could hold a Zorn residency every year, just give him the keys to the Bijou for the weekend, and I'd he happy.

Easter

Unpacking Big Ears: The Nels Cline Sets

 

I'll say this about Big Ears 2026 - lots of guitarists. They say guitar music is dead, and that may be true for pop music, but the guitar is alive and well in the worlds of jazz and the avant-garde. Not only was I able to catch three very different sets by the wonderful Mary Halvorson, I also caught three by the versatile Nels Cline. 

Cline was my "winner" of Big Ears 2025 with five appearances (that I know of), although I was only able to catch three. I saw him three times this year, too, tied with Halvorson, but I still gave the "winner" crown to the band SML for their three-night residency of two sets per night and the way they used that residency to be the talk of the town this year. But enough about them, it's Nels time.

Thursday night, the opening day, ended with a late-night (11:30-1:00) set by Medeski, Martin, Metzger and Cline, lined up below as Medeski, Cline, Metzger, and Martin, at the Mill & Mine.         

Like Ches Smith's Clone Row earlier that evening, MMM&C were a two-guitar combo, with Medeski's organ pedals providing the bass lines. Here they are free improvising at a Phish after-party at Le Poisson Rouge in New York last December:  

Overall, their sound at Big Ears was more rambunctious and noisy than the relatively polite show above, and Cline seemed to drown Metzger out much of the time and gave him less space to lead. But after seeing Clone Row and two sets by SML, it was a great way to end the first night.

On Friday, even before I saw the "secret set" by Halvorson and Marc Ribot, I saw another "secret set" by Cline and Julian Lage.

The improvisational set was sublime and one of the highlights of the weekend. They played lovely, intricate music and seemed to wrap their melodies around and between each other's lines. I know it's a cliche, but the rapport and communication between the two guitarists seemed almost telepathic at times. Two old friends, they've been playing together for years, and it showed in their performance. Here that are up in Seattle in 2015, although their partnership goes back even further than that:

Here's Lage reacting after Cline apparently just told him the world's dirtiest joke:

Later that same day, I unexpectedly caught Cline a third time, when he made an unannounced and surprise appearance during the finale of Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra playing the music of Sly Stone.   

This set was fun. It's not a widely shared opinion, but I believe Sly & the Family Stone are among the very greatest of the popular 1960s rock acts, and their music has aged better and sounds more relevant today than some 90% or more of the other 60's bands from back then. Listen to Sly's If You Want Me to Stay followed by, say, any track by your favorite Haight-Ashbury acid-rock outfit, and you'll see what I mean. 

Trumpeter and bandleader Bernstein, the chief instigator behind the band Sexmob, brought a punk-jazz energy to the music, radically rearranging the songs so that they didn't sound like a jukebox playing the hits or a Family Stone "tribute" band. The ten-piece ensemble included organist John Medeski (who I saw the night before) as well as two singers, Sandra St. Victor and Joan Wasser, who performs as Joan As Police Woman. 

This isn't a new outfit by any means. Here they are in 2011 playing Stone's Stand along with Medeski and St. Victor.  

Like I said, this was a fun and joyous set, more a celebration of Sly's music than a reverential recreation of his songs. Everyone in the audience was jumping and bobbing along to the music, and the only reason there wasn't dancing was because the tiny Jackson Terminal was packed too tight for a dance floor. The set ran a little long, and I was close enough to the stage to see a venue manager trying to signal to Bernstein from offstage that it was time to wrap up, but he ignored her as the band built up to the planned climax of the show. And then, just as things were reaching their frenzied conclusion, Nels walked on stage for an unannounced cameo and ripped an absolute barn-burner of a solo that tore the roof off the tiny terminal and left the mind-blown audience in absolute ecstasy.     

Nels' showcase performance of the festival was his Lovers set on Sunday with the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra. I didn't go. I love Nels and his playing, but I don't share his fondness for Henry Mancini and the other sources of the Lovers suite. It all sounds schmaltzy and overly sentimental to me. And when you have Tom Skinner, Shane Parrish, and Matt Mitchell all performing at the same time (the eternal Big Ears dilemma)  and the Lovers set sandwiched between Simon Hayes' Gargantua and the Dave Douglas Quintet, why subject yourself to something you won't appreciate?