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an Internet jazz samplerAbout The MusicI remember how strange it seemed, years ago, when Prestige put out an LP by Benny Golson entitled Stockholm Sojourn. Golson and a large local orchestra recorded some music in the Swedish capital, and some months later American soloists added their statements in New York and four Swedish jazz stars dubbed theirs in Stockholm. Such collaborations, later to become the rule in popular music, have always seemed unnatural in jazz, and most similar attempts have been failures. Jazz thrives on interaction among musicians as well as among aficionados and fanatics who are brought together by their love of the form. The new electronic communication possibilities opened up by the Internet have created a new community of musicians and music lovers who have come to know each other through daily interaction on the net, who argue, provide each other with information, and even mourn together. Rarely do we meet face to face. What a pleasure it was, a year or so ago, to visit Toronto and at intermission to walk up to Mark Eisenman, a wonderful young Canadian pianist I had met on rmb, and to put face and voice to a name. Many of us have had similar experiences. The present CD provides still another form of communication between scattered tribes of jazz lovers. While we have never met, we have encountered some of these musicians on the net. Sam Hokin has been maintaining a site with original jazz charts by himself, his wife Carla Shedivy and others. They, as well as three other performers from this album - Jonathan Cohen, Marc Sabatella, and Mark Sullivan - have made their music available to other players in this manner. Even if you cannot read music, you can access more information on these artists by tuning in Hokins jazz charts page; if you can read, you can follow the lead sheets to the Cohen, Sullivan, and Hokin/Shedivy cuts presented here, which are stored at the site. It is fascinating to finally hear the music of Marc Sabatella whose pioneering electronic jazz primer, available to everyone without charge on the Internet, is a model of educational generosity. The primer is not only free, it provides one of the best introductions to improvisation that I have ever encountered. Reading it you could never guess what kind of music Sabatella really plays. One of the joys of listening to the music on this CD was to hear his strong, original free piano playing in a free jazz context. You know that this man has studied all of the tradition and has chosen to play this way! The random nature of the compilation might tell us something about what is happening out there beyond the scope of the larger labels. It is therefore interesting to observe that there is hardly a trace here of the currently fashionable hard-bop revival, and that the only well-known ringers - Steve Coleman and Hugh Ragin - are original stylists who have carved out careers far from the fashionable world of the young lions. Since no one was turned down, and the selections presented here were chosen by the musicians themselves, one cannot blame any outside influence for what is found here. The selections range from a soft bossa nova, sung quietly by Connie McElrone, accompanied only by guitar and minimal percussion (Blue Morning), to Mark Sullivan's rock-influenced electric guitar excursion on Skronk or Glenn Horiuchi's post-Taylor solo piano on Background Noise. Sullivan's guitar has rock roots, but the piece swings hard, and one hesitates to label it as fusion as the sources of his inspiration are more complex than the current usage of the word implies. Indeed, tired fusion seems to be absent here, as is any influence from those muzak arch-villains of rmb, who shall remain nameless here. The prevailing mood appears to be quite different. The one truly slow ballad of the set, a tenor outing by Swedish saxophonist Hans-Olov Oberg (Eva Selina) is atmospheric without any saccharine, while the other truly slow piece, Brackets, is an Aylerish dirge, which cleverly exploits the contrasting sounds of regular and bass trumpets of Jeff Beer and Ryan Shultz. All the pieces are originals; the one standard, Billy Strayhorns Lush Life, is played at an unusually fast tempo by Gordon Brisker's quartet. Brisker, probably the veteran here, has five albums to his name, but he will probably be best known to many as the author of Jazz Improvisation and the Inner Person. Now you can check out if he means what he writes. Oberg and Brisker work here with traditional sax and rhythm section groups, and pianist Terry Bowness provides us with a piano, bass, and drums trio on Her Raven Hair. Only one piece has the traditional tenor sax and trumpet front line quintet, Jonathan Cohen's Persian Cat. The format may be traditional but the head is a complex original with a difficult chord progression. The Boston-area sextet What's New provides a rich texture on Shimon Benschitrit's Seagull, featuring an electric bass solo by the composer. From the other coast comes another sextet, Triceratops, a Bay area group named after a three-horned dinosaur. The front line of two reeds and a trombone provides a rich texture of a different kind. The aleatoric nature of this anthology is part of its strength. The differences in styles, in experience, and instrumental control contribute to a picture of a spread-out jazz community that includes people from all over this country and even from Sweden, a land that has been home to many jazz expatriots. None of the cuts has any commercial overtones. We all know how difficult it is for musicians to survive in a world dominated by an omnivorous entertainment industry, but we also know tenacious local artists who persist in working against the grain. The new possibilities opened up by the ever increasing number of independent small labels and by the facilities of the Internet makes one optimistic that there is still room for innovation and nonconformity in an age of cultural homogeneity. Piotr Michalowski |
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