3 Great New Live Albums
For those who can't or won't go to shows...
Montana update: I am gradually adjusting to the rhythms of life here. I don’t mean transitioning from Eastern Time to Mountain Time, though that was definitely a thing the first couple of weeks. I’m talking about the fact that there are several really good cafés near me that are only open from about 7 AM to 2 or 3 PM — they serve breakfast and lunch, and that’s it. And forget about Sunday. The only businesses open on Sundays in Bigfork (other than the churches, obviously, and there are several of those) are the hardware store and the grocery store. So I’m learning to how to not be on, not be prepared to do something, all the time. And it’s a pretty nice feeling.
Also, my streak of every single person I talk to being friendly and helpful continues. I haven’t met my next-door neighbors yet, but everyone I’ve done business with or spoken to — at the aforementioned grocery and hardware stores, at multiple local restaurants, at bookstores, at the post office, at the corner gas station/convenience store, at Walgreen’s — has been nice, in a genuine and human way. Nobody seems pissed off about being at their job; everyone has time to answer my dumb questions or help me find what I’m looking for. And yeah, you may think it’s that I’m a white guy, talking mostly to other white people, but my wife, who is not white, has pointed out that not once has she been asked where she’s from, or what her background is. No one has attempted to speak to her in Spanish, or deployed any of the other racial/ethnic microaggressions she got from people on a daily basis back in New Jersey. It’s nice here. People are chill. (Except on the roads, where they really do like to push those speed limits and will high-beam you or tailgate you or pass you if you’re not absolutely blasting along. Which is unnerving, and something I’m a little worried about, since I’m going to be getting a driver’s license sometime this spring, and I haven’t had one in almost 30 years.)
Not much else to report, except that on April 1, the government officially began plowing the roads through Glacier National Park, which they traditionally leave unplowed all winter so the animals (bears, bison, moose, etc., etc.) can do their thing in relative peace for several months. I look forward to exploring Glacier one of these days, once the weather warms up. (It’s still right around 30 degrees in the mornings here.)
Such Music: As I mentioned last week, Burning Ambulance has partnered up with Latvian music presenter Rihards Endriksons and his monthly Resonance FM show Such Music. The April installment is out now, and you can listen to it here. It’s devoted to the music of saxophonist André Vida, who may be the only person on Earth to have worked with both Anthony Braxton and Elton John. The show includes an interview, and a whole bunch of exclusive music, so check it out!
Live albums: I see a lot of people talking about seeing live music lately. Excited posts about festival lineups (Big Ears, which was this past weekend, has been the big one, but there are others, too), bitter discussions of ticket prices for huge stars that contrast the Cure’s approach versus that of Bruce Springsteen, and more.
Live music is kinda out of the question for me, for a couple of reasons: First, I’m in Montana. I don’t know of any jazz clubs near me, and artists I might potentially want to see aren’t likely to be playing in Kalispell anytime soon. Second, I am still skittish about being in crowded indoor spaces with other humans. Since moving here, I have eaten several meals in restaurants and bars, with nobody around me wearing masks, but my fellow patrons were far enough away that I didn’t feel especially imperiled. But standing shoulder to shoulder with shouting, sweating strangers in a dimly lit room? Even though I’m vaccinated, that’s just not gonna happen.
If you feel the way I do about this, trust that I see you. And you’re not wrong to want to stay safe. But if you also do miss the viscerality of live music, I get that too. So this week’s email is all about live albums. Not the same thing, but maybe close enough to ease the ache a bit.
Ecstatic Vision are a bunch of dirtbags from Philadelphia who play heavy psychedelic rock with the key bonus ingredient too many of their peers overlook: wailin’ sax. Like the Stooges on Fun House, like Hawkwind, like Mythic Sunship, they recognize that being able to go all the way over the top requires lung power. I included them in this Tidal roundup of sax-driven psych acts (loosely defined, I admit) back in 2019, and they’ve only gotten hotter since. Live at Dunajam was recorded in June 2022 and it’s a goddamn monster. Four of its six tracks are in the seven- to seven-and-a-half-minute range, and they feature Hawkwind-esque dragstrip-to-the-stars guitar with Lemmy-style lead bass, and the sax solos are rooted in circa-1969 free jazz squall with a heavy dose of George Thorogood-ish pedal-to-the-metal boogie. The lyrics are nonsense, but delivered in a convincing bellow. There’s even a version of “T.V. Eye” which is better than Naked City’s, if not quite as good as Radio Birdman’s jackhammer punk-rock take.
The Italian doom/occult rock outfit Messa has always been adventurous. Their 2016 debut, Belfry, included rumbling drone tracks, Danzig-meets-Heart anthems, and pieces that included eerie, warped clarinet and saxophone solos. The jazz element of their sound was even more prominent on 2018’s Feast For Water and 2022’s Close. Their new album Live At Roadburn was recorded a month after Close was released, and the core quartet is joined by three additional musicians playing acoustic guitar, synth, mandolin, oud, duduk, and saxophone in order to properly replicate the new songs. They play four tracks from Close — “Suspended,” “Orphalese,” “0=2,” and “Pilgrim,” sticking pretty close to the album versions throughout, except for “Pilgrim,” which expands from a little over nine minutes to nearly twelve. Still, the performances have an incantatory power. Vocalist Sara Bianchin is a true powerhouse, and her bandmates (and the guests) have put together some really beautiful arrangements that rise from almost folky gentleness to massive metal crunch without any part of the whole feeling false or grafted-on. Messa, like Spain’s Orthodox and very few other bands, understand how to expand doom and create a truly personal sound. I doubt they’ll ever have the money to tour outside Europe, so this live album is crucial for fans elsewhere.
Finally, trombonist Steve Swell is releasing For Jemeel — Fire From The Road this week, a triple(!) live CD featuring his band Fire Into Music, which consisted of alto saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, bassist William Parker, and drummer Hamid Drake. Moondoc (whom I interviewed in 2014; he died in 2021) and Swell made several albums together, and were clearly kindred creative spirits. This set includes two performances from Texas in October 2004, and a third from the Guelph Jazz Festival in Canada from September 2005. The first disc consists of a single 55-minute piece; the other two have three tracks each, which range in length from 12 to 32 minutes, so this is music for diehards, or folks who are willing to plant themselves in a comfortable chair and let the music wash over them for a while.
All of these guys have a long collective history. Moondoc and Parker played together in the saxophonist’s band Muntu during the loft jazz era in New York, and many years later made the brilliant duo album New World Pygmies; a second NWP volume added Drake to the mix. Parker and Drake, of course, also drive the bassist’s quartet, and were the rhythm section for Fred Anderson, Peter Brötzmann (in Die Like A Dog and on the trio double-disc Never Too Late But Always Too Early), Frode Gjerstad, Roy Campbell, and probably some others I can’t think of right now. Their ease with each other, their ability to be perfectly supportive while also bending and shaping the music to their own creative ends, is just breathtaking. When they’re at their best, as they are here — and look, I’ve never heard them play anything I didn’t like; they’re one of the most incredible teams in the history of music — time ceases to exist. You’re just floating in an endless blissful moment. Meanwhile, Moondoc and Swell are absolutely going for it, throwing out one spontaneously generated riff after another, exploring them in a lyrical and at times even beboppish fashion. (There are compositions performed: Moondoc’s “Junka Nu” shows up twice, and two Swell pieces, “Space Cowboys” and “Box Set,” are also performed; finally, there’s a collective work, “Swimming in a Galaxy of Goodwill and Sorrow,” which they recorded for a 2006 studio album of the same name that RogueArt hasn’t put up on their Bandcamp page yet.)
This collection reminds me of going to the Vision Festival and Tonic and the Cooler in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when free jazz was having a comeback moment. (It never went away, and it still hasn’t, but people were paying a surprising amount of attention for a little while. Then they stopped, and recently they’ve started again, thanks to a whole new generation of high-flying musical thrill seekers.) The performances I saw in those years — the David S. Ware Quartet, Fred Anderson/Kidd Jordan/William Parker/Hamid Drake, Die Like A Dog, Charles Gayle, Other Dimensions in Music, Test and many, many others — had a wild and convulsive energy, but more than that, they had a joy and vitality that you could feel in your long bones. This music has that same joy. It’s not trying to blast you through the wall or overwhelm you with raw sound; it swings much harder and more often than you might expect, and the love pouring off the stage is impossible to miss. There may be better starting points, but even if you’re new to these guys’ work, this collection will make your head bob, your knee bounce, and it will put a smile on your face.
One last thing: I am back to reviewing albums for Shfl, and last week I wrote about albums by Rare Earth, Roky Erickson, Bad Company, Pentangle, and Lana Del Rey. Read those, if you like.
That’s it for now. See you next week!
Tell us more about the book stores. Not that I plan on moving but it is always a good gauge for quality of life.