This was actually released a week ago, but I'm just learning about it now.
Chris Forsyth's BASIC, a trio including Douglas McCombs (bass) and Mikel Patrick Avery (percussion and electronics), play guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll with an improvisational, experimental edge. They performed at last March's Big Ears festival and although they made my short list of acts to see, I didn't get the chance (I was at a "secret show" duet of jazz guitarists Julian Lage and Nils Cline at the time of their set).
I don't really have any words here to add to the music. You either get it and dig it or you don't. I do, and am glad that this music exists in my world.
The revered South African jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim, born as Dollar Brand, died last weekend. Impermanence is swift.
Ibrahim wasn't as well known or famous as, say, the recently departed Sonny Rollins, but the outpouring of sympathy and tributes I've seen on line is a testament to his humanity, to the way his music touched so many listeners. It seems like everyone who ever heard him has some personal experience of the way his music touched them that they want to express, and the outpouring of respect for a relatively obscure jazz musician is impressive.
The hypnotic rhythm of his Ishmael was a personal favorite of mine. I first heard it on late-night radio (WBUR) in Boston back in the 70s and I remember the feeling of elation I felt every time I heard the opening bass lines (Cecil McBee) and the wash of cymbals (Roy Brooks) on air, knowing the voyage it was about to take me on. I had a copy of his 1976 LP, Banyana – Children of Africa, on which the track appears. I still return to the album often and consider it nothing short of a masterpiece.
I never saw him perform live. But I do have a bootleg recording of a performance (March 7, 1976) from the period of Ishmael and Banyana that a friend had taped at Boston's Emmanuel Church and sent to me literally decades later.
Speaking of digital files, fun fact: Ibrahim's Calypso Minor, from his soundtrack to the 1990 Claire Denis film, No Fear, No Die, was the very first track I ever owned on MP3. Back in the mid '90s, I had read something in the old print-media newspaper about some new digital-music format, and an online search (keyword: MP3) led me to a file for the track on an AOL bulletin board, which I immediately downloaded. Every other digital-music file I've ever downloaded or somehow came to own in my life was subsequent to Calypso Minor.
Yesterday's New Music Friday included the release of the new album, Demand to Be Taken Alive!, by the Baltimore band, Horse Lords. If their music sounds somehow "different" to you, congratulations, you've got a good musical ear. They employ the just intonation tuning system championed by La Monte Young and Harry Partch, among others.
I'm not a musician and have only the weakest of grasps of music theory so I'll probably get this wrong, but as I understand it, just intonation is a tuning system that allows chords and intervals to ring perfectly clear and doesn't produce "beating," those faint, restless "waves" heard during sustained notes. Thus, the tuning has a characteristically lush and resonant sound.
The "just" in "just intonation" doesn't mean "only" or "merely," but instead means conforming to a standard of correctness, as in "just behavior" or "just reward." Notes in just intonation are tuned using whole-number frequency ratios that align with the natural overtone series. However, the downside is that an instrument tuned to a certain key in just intonation will sound beautiful in that key, but will sound out of tune in a different key unless the instrument is re-tuned specific to that other key.
Nearly all Western music uses equal temperament to avoid this limitation. Equal temperament divides the octave into 12 equal semitones. Because of mathematical compromises, nearly every interval is slightly "out of tune" by a tiny fraction and chords can sound slightly less pure and can produce the "beats" that just intonation lacks. However, it allows instruments with fixed pitches (like pianos and guitars) to play in all 12 musical keys with equal ease. You can say that every guitar and every piano is ever so slightly out of tune, but nearly all Western Music uses equal temperament, in part because that's how western instruments are designed and built.
Horse Lords gets around this problem by using hand-modified guitars with repositioned frets, re-tuned and customized by the band's guitarist, Owen Gardner. The other band members are Andrew Bernstein (saxophone), Max Eilbacher (bass), and Sam Haberman (drums). Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! also features vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, the first Horse Lords album to include vocalists (but no lyrics); toward the end of the track, note the use of the hocketing technique employed in the Ramayana Monkey Chant and elsewhere. The album also features bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone and trombonist Weston Olencki.
Demand to Be Taken Alive! is streaming everywhere and can by purchased on Bandcamp. The band will perform at Atlanta's Drunken Unicorn on October 13.
