21 April 2007

the Vandermark 5-live in london 2002

boromir said' I've upped the Vandermark 5 concert:- http://rapidshare.com/files/26284734/VDMLive.rar.html From a BBC Radio 3 broadcast in 2002 (London I think). 70 mins split into 7 tracksRipped at 192 Kbps.
A bit of radio crackle here and there otherwise good sound quality.


Personnel:Ken Vandermark: reedsDave Rempis: reedsJeb Bishop: tromboneTim Mulvenna: drumsKent Kessler: bass Really punchy stuff. Kind of hard bop, with tunes you can hum.



a lot of free, jazz fans dont appear to like vandermark very much,theres a tendency to see him as a populist, or is it the old canard that white boys simply dont swing.
something layed down as law by some of the hardliners in the second wave of sixties freejazzers and ascociated poets and critics.
archie shepp and if my memory serves me well even the great marion brown, were known to deplore the incursions of whitey on their turf.
sun ra never (with the sole ecseption of alan silva)used white folk in his bands ,not to mention some of the,( these days )unspeakable things he said about them.

all of this at the time reflected the fact no doubt that stan getz , gerry mulligan ,chet baker and bill evans ,as talented as they were ,were still getting most of the accolades and making most of the money.
they were posterboys,and from the mid fifties to the mid sixties probably the faces most associated with jazz in the majority white conciousness.

retrospectively we can see that in the avant guard on the fringes there had been great white mavericks,and eccentrics that also deserve to be celebrated ,contemporary jazz and improvised music would be very different had the likes of
mel powell, gil melle, george russell, jimmy guiffre(what a giant)steve lacy, carla bley, paul bley, roswell rudd, paul motian etc etc...,never appeared.

vandermarks a bit of a maverick and individualist as much as one can be in this era, but none of my jazz loving friends admire him or respect his work much, or even that of say mats gustafsson
whom he often plays with.

anyone whos a free jazz purist may disdain the vandermark 5, but heres no gainsaying vandermark's integrity or or the authority of his own dialect and idiom.
he even plays free jazz in its classic form ,really well when he feels like it.
CHECK OUT HIS RECORDS LIVE AT THE GLENN MILLER CAFE, AND THE ONE BY THE SAME GROUP(HIS TRIO+GUSTAFSSON) ON WOBBLY RAIL FOR EXAMPLE.
i personaly like a lot of his various projects
and yep im not kidding that attitude does still exist at least in my part of the world.

this will be my last post for a long while(at least of stuff ive got) my disc drive and also programs like audacity are out of action due to a fuck up by microsoft microshits' software department, any one having a windows xp operating system will know what im talking about.
i accidently turned on windows security updates and it screwed me, for what could be a long time .

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

you sir
are not only ignorant ,but somewhat malicious at that,perhaps the vandermark of the blogger world
light, inane and dare i say it, just a racist fool.
you can bet your life ken vandermark commands greater fees t jazz festivals than say the likes of an original like charles gayle.
please in future refrain from priggishness and opinionated bigotry, its clear to me by your understatement of certain matters that you know nothing of jazz history.
church #9 or orgy in rythm ,are a much more accurate representtive source of the living facts.
vlad

Anonymous said...

yeah more grandiose authoritarian pronouncements from you you pigsuckin' piece 'o shit an methinks i'll puke
rawwwk
flashgordonsape

Anonymous said...

Gentlemen: Please. Let's abandon the invective, and enjoy the music. This Vandermark post is excellent, and I thank Boromir and Dipmong.

"Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe" - Albert Ayler.

Anonymous said...

hey, this is an old and totally futile debate. it raises its ugly head every once in a while in many forums, so it's no surprise we see it here... i always thought that point of this very honest music that we all like so much was precisely to step away from these issues and to realize that they have absolutely no merit. the source from which albert and brotzman draw their power makes no distinction between them. my best advice would be: forget about it and go put on spiritual unity, follow it up with die like a dog "fragments". that will straighten things out.

Anonymous said...

vlad, as the genial host of church 9 said, chill, man

we're all on the same side

and I won't even dignify with response, moronic pronouncements from our favorite toddler with a typewriter

sorry to hear 'bout the computer agro, dipmong. take a well-earned rest!

and thanks for the tunes, chaps

centrifuge said...

is your pc healed?

even shepp had ros rudd in his band (though he liked to make it clear who was the master - check out the pic inside four for trane: shepp and trane seated on chairs, rudd squatting down beside shepp to tell him something while shepp turns his head with a look of "yes, my minion, what can i do for you?")... the point is that even the militant guys in the 60s weren't prejudiced against hard-working guys like rudd or lacy (et al). they weren't the enemy.

basically when someone is perceived to get too much attention too quickly, whether in the form of critical plaudits or commercial success, many jazz listeners distrust that player - regardless of race, these days, i think. i reckon vandermark is just too trendy and puts himself about a bit too much for people's liking - but i've heard far worse things said (by the same people) about the marsalis brothers.

for my part i was very interested in vandermark when i first got into this stuff - but found that his recorded material always left me a bit flat. i only have one of his actual albums and it's never really inspired me much, same goes for many other tracks i've heard here and there; that said i still think he's potentially interesting and i wouldn't give up on him the way some obviously have!

this concert sounds good to me, with some of the excitement (that his stuff maybe can't quite generate in the studio) restored... did anyone hear that 12-cd box set, live in krakow?