Obviously it's only been a few weeks since McC posted about the Jazz Cafe sets by the "Forces quartet" - and what great stuff that is! - but I came across several more minor curiosities (relatively speaking - all still of interest) while researching my own previous post and thought I'd better try and get them out of the way.
The first one - not quite sure why Youtube is only showing this to me now, when the video was posted well over four years ago, and previous searches were far closer to this thematically than the ones I used recently - is a version of Comp. 23b by Brian Krock's Liddle. I first came across one of Brian's videos a few years ago, an analysis of B's musical systems for which he'd perused the Tri-Axium Writings* - and I know he's a friend of (popular Youtuber/jazz-fusion bassist) Adam Neely's, although evidently he hasn't managed to attract the same sort of following. Anyway, I remember him singling out this number - we might think of it as one of B's "greatest hits" although we would well-advised to avoid the temptation - before, and I didn't realise there was a video of one of Brian's bands playing it. Despite always having been a popular number, it is not frequently covered, presumably because the head is so challenging to play at the correct tempo** - but of course it's a real statement when anyone can pull it off the way the quartet does here. The band includes an excellent guitarist, Olli Hirvonen, who was completely unknown to me. Krock's own alto solo seems to start out quite tentatively, with him apparently trying to resolve a melodic figure that doesn't ostensibly have a direct connection to the piece; he gradually opens up a bit as it progresses. Just to hammer home the all-round technical chops they possess, the band plays an extra-long version of the ending and, again, totally nails it.
Let's see... there's a live video purporting to feature a reunited Dave Holland Quartet - i.e. the Conference line-up - from the summer of 1974: that might sound rather unlikely (when I first saw the video's title, I thought a mistake had been made with the year) but it does come with full venue and date information and I'll take their word for it***. The video, posted by the same channel which gave us the Châteauvallon 1973 broadcast, comes from a French TV broadcast and is of very good quality (although the vision mixer seems to have got a bit carried away). The band is on excellent form as it tears into - well, I would not have known it was "Q&A" if the caption hadn't said so, but it's been rather a long time since I listened to that album - and it can safely be assumed that live performances would always see this band playing a lot more "out" than they could get away with for a studio date. Rivers sticks to flute throughout; B. rotates through several horns, including a generous helping of contrabass clarinet. Starting around 18.40 in the clip, we finally get some sketched references to the written theme. Definitely worth a watch.
Also from the historical archives: B's tearing his way through "Impressions" at the Woodstock Jazz Festival in 1981, an event famously released under the name Creative Music Studio on Douglas. Here proceedings are cut bizarrely short - the editor's curtain pulled slowly down during Chick Corea's solo - but we do get to the see the whole of B's own solo, which is typically superb and really burns white-hot in the end. Corea, Miroslav Vitous and Jack DeJohnette make up the rest of the band on this. The clip itself was posted way back in 2006, but I don't remember ever seeing it before. A curiosity, it appears to have been part of some longer broadcast presumably compiled for the Italian market (from the very brief bit of audience interaction with B. at the beginning) but it does offer a fairly rare opportunity to see B. in full flight at an event where he wasn't leading his own band.
The remaining three videos here are all from the same occasion, on 10th June 2018, and are posted by Kaufman Music Centre - although the first clip also exists online as filmed by an audience member, presumably the drummer's mother. This first clip features a group of very young music students tackling part of the score for Comp. 192, and came courtesy of a programme called Face the Music. The ensemble is conducted by Kyoko Kitamura, listed as one of three coaches for this event along with Carl Testa and Aakash Mittal - present for the performance, stage left on saxophone (Mittal's credentials for teaching this material are unclear); Testa himself is not there, or at least not in shot, but his wife is very much involved: singer Anne Rhodes, seated stage right and key to the performance#, though for some reason not credited in the video. It's pretty short, and the manifold implications for expanded improvisation inherent in a larger group playing a piece written as a duet go basically unexplored, but it's still extremely encouraging to see young musicians grappling with this material - although, with the exception of the percussionist, they don't actually appear to be enjoying themselves very much. (Maybe they were just concentrating very hard.)
Clip two from this event is also under the auspices of Face the Music, but features a completely different group of students conducted by Mittal in Comp. 69b (+108b). The band seem to have been working from a simplified score which highlights isolated elements of the written theme, but at 4.24 the performance suddenly catches fire## and all the players, who are older and presumably that much more experienced than those in the first clip, really get stuck in, especially the flautist, trombonist and vibraphonist. This is actually quite a delight to watch, although having got to the end I was left wondering exactly when the pulse track was supposedly played. In retrospect, I suppose that the section from around three minutes until the point of ignition - in which a couple of lines of the theme are repeated in slightly bewildering fashion - is probably when some elements from 108b are being played, though there is nothing recognisable here as a pulse track. This feels a bit like nitpicking with such a spirited performance, but is really a comment on whoever arranged the score - presumably Mittal since he conducted it - rather than on the joyous playing.
Clip three features a Tri-Centric Quartet - that is, the four aforementioned grownups - running through a medley of Comps. 175 & 225. Rhodes, Kitamura, Testa and Mittal give what does come across at times as a rather subdued performance, but then Comp. 175 was originally a Creative Orchestra piece, and choosing this primary material to showcase the two singers was always going to leave rather large holes in the soundscape. It's still quite fun to watch though and makes for an interesting counterpart to the two student videos.
That's that for now - I'm on a short family holiday at time of writing and have also been ill, so my intended posting schedule for the rest of the month has suffered a bit of a setback, but we'll get there...
* I myself never did get to grips properly with this work, which is very difficult to read. (The fault is still largely with me, since I did my degree in Philosophy and if I'd been a more diligent student, I might have been more used to tackling this sort of thing.) Of course, how much of it Mr Krock himself actually read in order to produce a 32-minute video is open to question...
** The Locals used to play this number, but they slowed it right down. (Their CD release will be written about sometime fairly soon...)
*** Oddly enough, my list of tapes doesn't include a single entry from 1974, and the only live recordings I was aware of by the band all date from 1972, i.e. the around same time as the Conference sessions. I don't remember ever previously being told about this band reuniting later. But the occasion was the Antibes Jazz Festival and I daresay it wouldn't be too difficult to check - I shall assume the stated details are correct.
# This piece, the first GTM to be written for a vocalist, was originally performed with Lauren Newton and has since become a bit of a staple for the Syntactical GTM book; a singer is absolutely crucial to it, and it makes sense that a professional would have been drafted in for the role, though this still doesn't explain why AR is not credited.
## 69b, a favourite of Marilyn Crispell's, typically goes volcanic when performed live; obviously we wouldn't expect a group of students to be able to reproduce previous versions, but they give it a pretty good go... and they do look as if they had fun with it. Most heartening :-D
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