Old Folks At Home

The title might lead you to think this is about the Stephen Foster standard also known as (Way Down Upon the) Swanee River. If you're disappointed that it's not, you can read all about it at Wikipedia, here.

Last night, the community jazz band with which I play performed its obligatory annual concert at a local assisted living facility. We played in the dining room to a crowd of about 25 seniors, with a few visiting family members mixed in. We were prepared to play a couple sets but was told on arrival that only 45 minutes of music would be required. After that, many of the attendees would simply wander off, presumably from boredom or drowsiness. I thought it was ironic that one of the musicians warned the folks that they might want to move to the back of the room because we can get quite loud; the irony being that most of them probably lost their hearing long ago. Then the director instructed us to keep the volume down. The drummer was playing so softly that we almost couldn't hear him and, as a consequence, the tempo became a little vague at times; the trombones dragged and the saxes rushed and a few bars would go by before the mess was straightened out. But I'm sure our audience never knew the difference.

Trash Talk

Last night I burned a CD with three versions of Freedom Jazz Dance and some other selected sax features for a colleage. The three versions of Freedom Jazz Dance are:

1. Eddie Harris on " Eddie Harris: The Last Concert" with the WDR Big Band
2. James Carter on "Live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge"
3. "Jazz Times Superband" with Bob Berg, Joey DeFrancesco, et. al. (for some reason, I thought Michael Brecker played on this album but it's his brother, Randy, who appears)

As I was listening to the CD this morning, I was reminded again of the pure cacophony that James Carter is capable of producing. After an unaccompanied intro and one sloppy chorus of the head, James launches into his "solo" material with a completely atonal (nearly nontonal) multiphonic belched at full volume. He persists through endless ear-splitting choruses with various squeaks and squawks disguised as altissimo performance as well as chaotic sequences of seemingly random notes played too fast to be distinguised as anything but white noise. The overall effect is not unlike the static, sweeping chirps, and random bursts of noise heard while trying to dial in a faint signal on an old radio. Defenders of Carter's raucous style might call this "free improvisation", a style suggested by the tune's title. A better, and musical(!), example of free impovisation is demonstrated in the Jazz Times Superband performance. Bob Berg also employs multiphonics, ventures into the saxophone's altissimo range, and executes rapid improvisational passages but sparingly and tastefully.