setting up a few chairs...

- and this too shall pass, and the natural rhythm of things will bring me back to braxton's music again. lo, and -

well, we are still not quite there yet. but yesterday, finding myself alone-and-in-the-mood, i switched at long last from punk rock to jazz, and beyond; and this doesn't always work, if i's forced, but on this occasion it wasn't, and lots of good stuff just came flooding on back.

i played:

1. miles davis (quintet), in person friday night at the blackhawk (disc one, of four) - w/ mobley, wynton kelly, chambers and cobb: cooking!

2. evan parker, 50th birthday concert - but plunged right in at the deep end now: played 24 minutes of schlippenbach trio (parker, lovens) and twenty of parker/guy/lytton, my head and ears now well and truly opened up..!

3. henry threadgill's zooid, up popped the two lips in its entirety - incredible stuff; it is an absolute dead cert that the more one knows about (different attitudes and approaches to) music, the more experienced one's ears are... the better this stuff'll sound, guaranteed...

4. greg osby, banned in new york, tracks one and two... the girls were home by this point. i was quite impressed that not only did my (six-going-on-seven(teen)) daughter not demand to turn it off, she came in and showed me her she can do the "uptown funk" dance, all the way through - following the tune in her head, while standing right in front of the free-ish jazz which was permeating the room and operating at a very different rhythmic wavelength altogether - ! i'm not at all sure the six-year-old me coulda done that, or anything like it ;-)  as for the music, i am just gonna say this: jason moran... 'nuff said! just starting out he was, but he was on it -  oh and the leader was no slouch, neither...  (*)

- see, i would say that's a pretty fair warm-up for some braxton... stay tuned - !

c x

* these were all from my cd collection, not from rips or cd-rs or whatever... not sure why that's significant, but... anyway, that limits me mostly to music which i purchased in the years 2001-2005 and which survived the culls which accompanied imminent parenthood, then moving house... just the jazz (...) stuff (and not including any braxton whatsoever), that makes around 300 cds to choose from, all of it good... but it's a very scattershot selection in many respects and has barely been added to over the last few years, not much really. (how many braxton albums do i have? who cares?! lots! but even i do not need an answer to that question...) i just have this random greg osby album and none of his other stuff, but i do also have the osby-lovano team-up date friendly fire (featuring moran again, and lovano's bassist and drummer at the time, cameron brown and idris muhammad) - which i have not listened to in donkey's, but as it happens i can hear lovano in my head anytime i choose, and listening to osby yesterday, i could totally see how these two found each other: their sounds have several different overlapping qualities such as (seeming) dryness, intelligence, deceptive warmth and wit, etc ... i remember the album comes out with the usual blather about how the two leaders requested each other, but in this case, one can well believe it...