ugEXPLODE Live #1: Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group 11.23.11

Here are some excerpts from the Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group gig at the Stone in NYC on 11.23.11. In addition to the core trio of Marc, myself and Marcus Cummins on soprano saxophone, we had special guests Sabir Mateen (tenor saxophone) and Roy Campbell Jr. (trumpet, flugelhorn). Watch this and get your face ripped off.

ugEXPLODE Artists #1: Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group

The Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group formed in early 2007 and has executed 18 actions of molten aural eruption since. In 2006, Marc Edwards somehow found my Myspace page and wrote me a note saying he liked what he heard. I was familiar with Marc's music - particularly the torrid 1976 Cecil Taylor album "Dark To Themselves" - as well as his reputation as a steadfastly incendiary torchbearer of high-energy free music. I told him I was coming to New York to play and asked him if he would want to make a group. He said, "Most drummers are scared to play with me! Okay, great!" I saw this as an opportunity. If Marc kicked my ass all over the stage, well, it would have been an ass-whipping by one of the best.  I stood to learn something, no matter what.

I have constantly looked to great musicians from past generations for inspiration and comradery.  The originators of form tend to possess valuable information most new generation players have no clue about. The new musicians tend to draw their inspiration from fully codified and formalized sources, whereas the creators of the actual source material had to invent their language from nebulous origins, outside of accepted categories. There is a certain quality of experience in older improvisers which I'm not hearing in most younger players. Since many of the elder players came to free music from other forms - whether it was straight-ahead jazz, classical, etc. - they have a broader foundation on which to build upon, whereas new improvisers tend to be primarily influenced by . . . improvised music. There's often a lack of guts in contemporary improvisation. I don't hear much struggle. I don't hear much pain. I don't hear the desperation of someone who needs to speak as if their life depended on it. That's what I want to hear from music. Marc Edwards plays the drums like his life depends on it. 

Our first meeting took place at the defunct New York City club, Tonic, on February 12, 2007.  The personnel consisted of myself and Marc on drums, Damon Smith and Lisle Ellis on basses, Marco Eneidi on alto saxophone and Elliott Levin on tenor saxophone and flute. Essentially we shook hands and played. Extracts of the concert appear on the 2007 ugEXPLODE release "Firestorm".  The music was extremely dense, well-articulated and completely full-on for the entire duration. There's a certain sort of mass that Marc and I achieve when we play together: Marc is coming from a more rudiment-oriented marching band style of playing, whereas I tend to deal in a lot of fast single strokes as an extension of blast-beat and punk drumming. We are both concerned with clear execution at extremely fast tempos, so I believe there's remains a transparent quality to our cumulative efforts, despite the fact that together we tend to be louder than a nuclear bomb. Luckily we had an extremely strong group of players to kick off the proceedings.


The two following performances took place in New York at Lit Lounge on May 5, 2008 and The Delancey on September 22, 2008. I was still living in Oakland, California, but had begun travelling more frequently to the East Coast in search of new playing situations. Excerpts from both shows appeared on our out-of-print 2009 CD-R release "Mysteries Beneath The Planet".  The Lit Lounge show was originally conceived to be a combo with three drummers and three saxophonists. Unfortunately Charles Gayle couldn't make the gig, so the line-up consisted of myself, Marc and Andrew Barker on drums and Ras Moshe and Mario Rechtern on reeds. We maintained a flesh-melting intensity for the duration of the set.  The Delancey show featured another all-new lineup with myself and Marc on drums, Peter Evans on trumpet, Paul Flaherty on tenor saxophone, Darius Jones on alto saxophone and Tom Blancarte on bass.  The music took on a more orchestral form at this performance with a lot of timbral variation, while still maintaining the volcanic energy we always aim to conjure.


We did another gig at Otto's Shrunken Head in New York on April 28, 2009 with Elliott Levin, Darius Jones, bassist Adam Lane and trumpeter Forbes Graham. Something really seemed to stick with this particular formation, so we recorded this sextet in the studio on November 14, 2009, resulting in the 2010 ugEXPLODE Release "Blood of the Earth".  The CD consists of two half-hour tracks which rage with fury and eloquence, thanks to the great soloists. I tried to keep this line-up together, but it was proving to be very tough, considering the lack of gigs and money as well as the fact that Elliott and Forbes were travelling from out of town to do the shows. After I moved to New York in December 2009, we tried to reconvene the group but couldn't nail down consistent personnel. The January 31, 2010 gig at Knitting Factory featured Adam Lane, Elliott Levin and Forbes Graham, but substituted Aaron Burnett on tenor saxophone for Darius Jones. The February 25, 2010 Paris London West Nile performance had Levin, Burnett and Tom Blancarte on bass.


It was beginning to seem like a logistical and financial nightmare to do the larger, twin-drum groups and I was looking to develop a group language with a consistent group of musicians, so Marc and I decided to scale back the unit for the time being. Most New York venues cannot handle the extreme energy and volume of the big group, so Marc remained on drums, while I switched to bass (my first instrument). We re-emerged on June 18, 2010 at the Bowery Electric as a trio with soprano saxophonist Marcus Cummins. This has remained the core group since. Marcus is a very linear, logical player and he is talented at unravelling endless, winding streams of melody which I tend to complement with shifting, broad harmonic pedal tones. A lot of the time, I am rapidly tremolo-picking to maintain the group momentum, as well as to create a constant tonal density for Marcus to work with. We have never really discussed any specific approach towards the actual music, preferring to let it manifest itself spontaneously without critique or analysis. Since then we have made nine performances with this formation (one gig substituted Matt Nelson on tenor saxophone for Marcus, and another added Mario Rechtern to the group for a quartet).

I have been searching for another permanent lead voice for the band for a while and we may have found it in tenor saxophonist Jeremy Viner.  I saw Jeremy performing with drummer Danny Sher a few months ago and was impressed by his phrasing and technique. The first time Jeremy performed with us was last night, November 13, 2011, at Freddy's Bar in Brooklyn. I think he worked really well with the group as I think the recording below will prove.


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Weasel: What are you trying to do with this music?

Marc: That's a good question. I was heavily influenced by the sci fi thriller, "Forbidden Planet". I believe playing this music will help raise consciousness on this planet, gradually, as mankind evolves to higher states.

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This is what the Marc Edwards/Weasel Walter Group does: create massive fields of intensity in the hope of jarring listeners into action and feeling. This is the sound of revolt.

-Weasel Walter, 11.14.11

Milford Graves Quartet - Belgium 1973 Video

Milford Graves' recorded output is downright scarce in relation to the imposing reputation his drumming holds amongst adherents of free music. In particular, his work during the 1970s rages with a distinctive fury matched by few before or since. The album "Babi", released in 1977 on Graves own imprint IPS, is the best authorized representation of this innovator operating at peak intensity. It features wild, superhuman saxophone playing by longtime cohorts Arthur Doyle (still in the scene, but now operating from his homebase in Alabama) and Hugh Glover. Recorded live for WBAI-FM on March 20, 1976, this unique, rough-hewn recording brims with excitement. Often, the horn players are very far off microphone, wailing away like hellishly agitated spectres in the background while Graves' drums remain front and center, heavily focused on the ancient traditions of deeply resonant one-headed toms and eschewing the traditional rattle of the modern snare drum completely. Graves' signature vocal punctuations help underline the ritualistic aura of his group's frenzied rites. The opening cut from "Babi" can be heard below . . .

A sort of alternate version of "Babi" also floats around in trading circles. Recorded live at Columbia University on June 12, 1976 with the same line-up, the 55-minute tape doesn't have the same focused audio fidelity of the proper album, but it does feature more sustained explorations of complete density,  a natural balance of instruments as well as some bass clarinet playing presumably by Doyle. The conclusion to this burning set engages the audience directly. There's a lot of clapping and screaming as the band gradually fades in volume, marching around the room while still blowing and pounding their guts out. This is clearly inclusive music and the large audience responds with great enthusiasm. I think audiences in general might have had a little more blood running through their veins back then? The definitely had stronger ears compared to the average wimpola so-called "music lover" these days.

A duo recording featuring Graves and Glover was issued on a Folkways Records anthology called "New American Music, Volume 1" in 1975. The piece, titled "Transmutations", begins with tinkling small percussion and vocal interplay from both musicians before quieting into a moody, low tom groove with piquant rhythmic jabs, whistle blasts and more vocalizations from Graves. At 3:38, Glover enters on tenor saxophone in a typically high-energy, animalistic solo focused on cries and harsh split tones at the highest register of the instrument. The duo grind to a halt after a minute, only to launch back into more of same seconds later.  At 6:50 another churning groove appears momentarily before Glover switches to what sounds like throaty clarinet playing. This music is not polished in a traditional Western sense. It is loose and focused on spontaneous communication. Glover is certainly more interested in expressing himself than he is at playing into the microphone! Around the nine minute mark, Glover re-enters on tenor saxophone and Graves goads him to further excesses with his endlessly roiling drums, shouts and whistles. There's an out-of-control feel to "Transmutations". It is not a "perfect" piece of music by any means, but it succeeds at being completely free and in the moment, a snapshot of what they happened to play on that particular occasion.

My personal favorite Milford Graves recording is a 47-minute long bootleg of his quartet appearing at the Jazz Middelheimin Festival in Antwerp, Belgium on August 15, 1973. I don't believe I am at liberty to spread this audio recording, but the video embedded below contains excerpts from this very show and will impart at least a vague idea of what I am talking about. It is does not successfully convey the entire arc of the complete set, but I am still grateful that this footage exists and can be seen freely. The schtick in the middle of the video might seem a little heavy-handed divorced from the context of the entire performance, but Graves gets to serious percussive business by 13:30. When the horns re-enter around 17:30, critical mass is finally achieved in an orgiastic display of intensity. Please make it through the whole video to see the last four minutes. The audio I have sounds like it springs from a somewhat different source than the soundtrack for the video. It is also runs at a much faster speed and is higher pitched.

 

Weasel Walter and Joe Rigby, 2007. photo by Marc Edwards

This particular incarnation of Mr. Graves' band featured a trio of particularly interesting, lesser-known players of great individuality. Glover is primarily known for his work with Graves and, to my knowledge, does not appear on any other officially released recordings available in the marketplace. Arthur Williams was, according to my source, a self-taught trumpeter. His lack of traditional technique is more than compensated by his energy and imaginative phrasing. My source believes that Mr. Williams is deceased. He appears on several other recordings lead by William Parker and Jemeel Moondoc, as well as the fine 1979 Peter Kuhn LP "Livin' Right" (Big City Records, out of print) also featuring Parker on bass, Dennis Charles on drums and Toshinori Kondo on dueling trumpet.  Joe Rigby is still somewhat active in the music scene. The small but hardcore UK label Homeboy Records has issued two hard-to-find cd-rs of solo and quartet music by Rigby, albeit in a more traditional vein. I met him when my band (documented on the sextet tracks on "Firestorm") shared a double bill with William Hooker's band at the defunct, lamented Manhattan venue Tonic in 2007. I told him I loved his playing on that Antwerp bootleg. He really didn't have much to say and didn't seem impressed with my flattery! You can't win 'em all. Ha ha ha. Rigby has probably been heard by the most listeners on the well-received Steve Reid reissue "Nova" (Mustevic, 1976, reissued by Universal Sound in 2000).

Milford Graves appears on less than a dozen releases since the release of his iconoclastic "Babi" LP in 1977.  Since the '80s he has created two somewhat painterly one-man CDs; sparred mightily with John Zorn, David Murray and German saxophone titan Peter Brötzmann; participated in reunions with the legendary New York Art Quartet (co-led by John Tchicai and Roswell Rudd) and laid down a mercurial trio session featuring Anthony Braxton and William Parker. Overall, he seems to have actively resisted involvement in the professional music business - perhaps in protest to the terrible, undignified treatment many creative musicians are perpetually treated to - and I shudder to think what amazing master tapes lie dormant in his own archives. I hope one day we will find out. I have a feeling his absolute best, most mind-bending work has not yet been heard.

- Weasel Walter

Time To Suck #1 + Music I Played on the Radio Earlier Tonight

Tonight I hosted the WKCR Musicians Show from 6-9 PM. I got there early so I could take in a little bit of the staggering archives at the station. Just browsing the spines of the tape reels made my brain hurt. It was utterly insane what they had on file there. Extremely rare recordings from the classic Free Jazz eras, with insane, once-in-a-lifetime line-ups. It was a bit overwhelming. I honestly couldn't concentrate hard enough to take very much of it in. Ultimately, I wound up playing some old favorites, some upcoming new releases involving myself, some unreleased live stuff I play on and a few solid chunks from three archival reels. Here's how it went down:

Albert Ayler "Holy Ghost" from "The New Wave In Jazz" (Impulse, 1965)

Joseph Jarman "Little Fox Run" from "Song For" (Delmark, 1967)

Marshall Allen/Weasel Walter - untitled, live performance (unreleased, 2008)

James Blood Ulmer "Revealing" from "Tales of Captain Black" (Artists House, 1979)

Eric Zinman/Mario Rechtern/Weasel Walter - untitled studio track (unreleased, 2010)

Ric Colbeck Group "Highlands"/"Lowlands" from unreleased Pixie Records session (1966) w/ Benny Maupin, Byard Lancaster, Sunny Murray, Joel Freedman, Sirone, Sunny Murray

Keshavan Maslak Trio "Buddha's Hand" from "Buddha's Hand" (Circle, 1978)

QUOK (Ava Mendoza/Tim Dahl/Weasel Walter) "The George Russell Lydia Lunch Mode" from unreleased studio album (ugEXPLODE, 2012)

Jimmy Lyons Ensemble - untitled studio session (1975) w/ Andrew Cyrille, Karen Borca, Raphe Malik, Hayes Burnett

Forbes/Young/Walter - untitled piece from unreleased studio album (ugEXPLODE, 2012)

Sam Rivers "Tranquility" from "Crystals" (Impulse, 1974)

Marion Brown "QBIC" from "Porto Novo" (Freedom, 1967)

Ted Daniel's Energy "Giblet" from unreleased live recording (1975) w/ Oliver Lake, Daniel Carter, a.o.

Evan Parker/Peter Evans/John Edwards/Weasel Walter - untitled piece from unreleased live performance (2009)

Arthur Doyle Group "November 8th or 9th - I Can't Remember When" from "Alabama Feelings" (AK-BA, 1978)

Cecil Taylor Unit - side 2 of "The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor" (Prestige, rec. 1969)

So, as you can see, I played tons of HARDCORE free jazz. At a certain point, I gently provoked the listeners and the phones rang off the hook with positive comments. There are still people out there who want to listen to this stuff. I'm glad I had a chance to play it all.

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And for something completely different, here is a feature I like to refer to as "TIME TO SUCK":

Time To Suck, Volume One:
The songs I love to hear, at your expense.
Grow A big mustache, quit Spirit, then go to Japan and play "Thunder Island".

ugEX Blast From The Past #2: Masayuki Takayanagi

 The following article first appeared in the SF Bay Guardian in Fall 2006:

"For more than three decades Masayuki Takayanagi (1932-1991) has served as a cult figure to a small but rabid coterie of listeners searching for the roots of extremity in improvised music and free jazz. The Japanese guitarist has received kudos from renowned experimentalists like John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Jim O'Rourke, and Otomo Yoshihide, yet has remained obscure because his recorded output has been generally unavailable, particularly in the United States. During the last decade a slew of his reissued recordings have been available only as hard-to-find, pricey imports, while the original vinyl pressings have clandestinely changed hands for ridiculous amounts of money.

So what's the big deal? Beginning in the late '60s, Takayanagi blazed kamikaze musical assaults of a previously unheard violence and abstraction in the jazz idiom. Long before the pure Japanoise of artists like Merzbow, Masayuki Takayanagi threw down a gauntlet. "I always feel that beauty of form and tone are lies. Playing music that's muddy and violently splattered is an essential way of getting at the truth," he once wrote. This warlike, bloody-minded approach manifested itself in a concept he called "mass projection" - a gushing, sweaty arc of maximum density and energy that was savagely defiant of melody, interplay, and structure. The recently reissued 1973 two-CD live concert anthology "Inspiration and Power 14 Free Jazz Festival 1" (Art Union, Japan) consists of a 10-minute-long excerpt of a blinding, static force field of sound performed on drums, electric guitar, and cello. The remainder of the disc includes the cream of the crop of Japanese jazz modernists from the era: of particular note, an incredible piano-sax-drums endurance display by the Yosuke Yamashita trio that might even make an energy music legend like Cecil Taylor beg for mercy. But the Takayanagi group's insane display of bombast steals the show, hands down.

Unfortunately, a good portion of Takayanagi's early free-music output is marred by lousy audience recording quality: a gaggle of early '70s performances on the DIW and PSF labels suffice as archival documents but barely hint at the true strength and articulation of the music hidden beneath the low fidelity. The newly issued CD versions of the mythically scarce 1975 diptych "Axis: Another Revolvable Thing Parts 1 and 2" (Doubt Music, Japan) should rectify this situation, showcasing almost 100 sharply focused minutes of Takayanagi and his classic New Directions Unit in full fury.

Recorded live in Tokyo on Sept. 5, 1975, the quartet revealed their manifesto in six movements, roughly building from agitated, spacious quietude to climactic, sustained catharsis. Although the volumes mix up the sequence, the release's freshly translated liner notes suggest that the music can also be pondered in the order it was actually executed. The first part - a display of Takayanagi's more minimal "gradual projection" style - evokes the low volume scuttling of English guitar pioneer Derek Bailey's early Company groups. Spotlighting acoustic guitar, flute, slide whistle, rubbery acoustic bass, and skittering percussion, the music is pervaded with a deceptively delicate sense of barely maintained restraint. A second gradual projection concerns isolated, dynamic sounds that burst through silence in their own mysterious tempos. After a few minutes, Kenji Mori's lumpy bass clarinet croaks while Takayanagi surprisingly sneaks in a few brief melodic shards that allude to his straight-ahead roots. Part three - a dull, superfluous drum solo - seems to fill space before the final half of the concert: three mass projections. The first builds very slowly with sustained cymbal wash and sinister tremolo bass bowing before revealing the initial, perverted grunts from Takayanagi's now-electrified strings. The second pushes the intensity up but still feels like a tease, threatening to explode before receding into sustained tones penetrated by pricking soprano saxophone curlicues and tumbling percussion.

In the final segment, the floodgates open, and we are assaulted by a lengthy tirade that appears to start at maximum intensity but manages to blow straight through the roof, ascending further into unknown levels of forceful cruelty. Hiroshi Yamazaki's superhumanly dense drum attack violently propels the onslaught. Bassist Nobuyoshi Ino ditches his main ax, creating an acidic wall of fierce noise on cello, while Takayanagi goads his guitar into shrieks of feedback and crusty slabs of distorted density, bashing it with a metal slide. Intermittently cutting through the din on his alto saxophone, the unflappable Mori is eerily eloquent, carefully transforming his phrases amid the chaos of the others. Throughout this hypnotic overload of information, one might concentrate on the detail of individual parts, the texture of the whole, or on nothing at all. After 16 minutes, the fever pitch goes unfathomably higher as the saxophone finally lapses into outright screaming. Takayanagi's guitar coasts arrogantly over the damage in thick sheets of atonality before finally ascending into dog-whistle range, calling an end to a harrowing 22 minutes of sustained devastation. If only the first and last sequences of this concert were paired alone on one release, Axis might have been Takayanagi's single finest recording. With this reissue, at least, the secret is out, and the tortured innovations of an obscure musical pioneer are finally revealed to a wider audience seeking buckets of blood in their music."

- Weasel Walter

ugEX Blast From The Past #1