Ben Bierman's Some Takes on the Blues

Most jazz lovers understand how this genre intersects with the blues, and how the two mesh perfectly together. Trumpeter Ben Bierman "takes" this a step further by playing on the very idea that jazz can expand the repertoire by playing on the typical 12-bar constructs. On Some Takes on the Blues, Bierman has a consider amount of fun inserting blues into a wide variety of musical genres--Latin jazz, ragtime, country and, of course, rock and roll. The trumpeter also plays with the traditional 12-bar structures by expanding into 32-bar blues ("Pretty Blues") and even 48-bar blues ("Let's Chill One"), but accomplishes all this in such an easy, laid back way, opting for simplicity whenever he can.

Bierman's a bit of an academic--he's an Associate Professor at the City University of New York, and he has written several essays and articles. He's even published a book called Listening to Jazz. That informs his approach to this music to a certain extent--Some Takes on the Blues is calm, controlled and thoughtful. But Bierman also balances that out with a fierce enthusiasm that only a true jazz musician can lay out, something that probably resulted from sharing the stage with everyone from Johnny Copeland to B. B. King to Stevie Ray Vaughn to Archie Shepp.

Let's take this meticulous structure on step further--Bierman is also a multi-instrumentalist. In addition to his remarkably clear trumpeting, he also plays guitar, piano and bass. While he has help from guitarist Andy Reiss and drummers Willie Martinez and Emanuel Bierman, you're hearing a lot of Bierman in this songs. When you hear him grab his old acoustic guitar and play his heart out on "Leo's Rag," or when he delivers a smooth solo piano performance on "Blues for WC," you can almost imagine him in his classroom, jumping from instrument to instrument, showing his students how it's done.

"The blues has been the one constant in my musical life--in many ways everything I have to say filters through it," Bierman explains on the liner notes. While music is often performed by those who "play how they feel," to paraphrase Donald Fagen, a cerebral approach to jazz is often equally rewarding, such as when performers such as Miles Davis experimented with modal jazz in the late "50s. Thoughtfulness and rigor can earth many new discoveries, and Ben Bierman seems like the kind of musician who will pursue this approach for the rest of his life.

Crashdown Butterfly's Near Life Experience

At one of my first magazine gigs, we had a running gag about my music reviews--especially since I was the only one who would regularly tackle hard rock and even metal. This was a gag I'd place at the end of the review, and sometimes it made it in and sometimes it didn't: "Well, they're not Tool...but no one is." A dozen years later I find myself surprised that I'm liking metal more and more, as long as it tries to stretch beyond the usual croaking and thunder-drumming. You know, like Tool does. With this Crashdown Butterfly EP, Near Life Experience, I'm tempted to say, "They're not Tool, but they're trying." That's not meant to be a diss, but here's a simple truth about this Seattle-based quartet. They like Tool, and it shows.

As I said before, singer-guitarist Ira Merrill doesn't croak like a frog, not even once. Like my dear buddy Maynard, Merrill can scream but he's not a screamer. He understands the importance of adding that honey to his delivery, as well as a subdued earnestness that brings just a little more intelligence to the pounding, forceful rhythms. Drummer Steve Gale isn't trying to be Danny Carey, long-limbed and almost deviant with time signatures, but he plays tight and fast and uses his big kit to be more expressive and to echo Merrill's commitment to music rather than seismic activity. Bassist Bob Lyman and second singer-guitarist David Miller round out the quartet into a nice tight machine, but this is where a second influence comes in hot.

When Merrill and Miller share the mic, you can hear it, spooky and sad at once--Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell. Man, these two come up with harmonies that have that same sense of despair, coupled with enough swagger to show the world that not all hard rock bands are created equally. Alice in Chains is a band I started to appreciate late in life, and that had something to do with the poignancy behind the band's history, that rock-bottom view where secrets are kept. I don't know if Merrill and Miller have seen the world through the same deeply smudged sunglasses, but they know what that pain sounds like, and they know that rock and roll isn't always a party.

Another easy comparison, considering the geography, is Soundgarden. In fact, Crashdown Butterfly dedicated a recent video to the memory of Chris Cornell, and that's when you start thinking about grunge and how all the singers have gone away and how some of us secretly wish for a reset so we can enjoy that time all over again. It was liberating, the meshing of two different spheres of rock, and perhaps that's why Crashdown Butterfly sounds so good and so tight. I've always had the feeling that the heyday of grunge was too brief, too fleeting, and while it changed the way we listen to both traditional forms of rock and metal it feels troubling that it all happened twenty years ago. Near Life Experience suggests a world where everyone held on and kept playing. I'll look forward to whatever follows this EP.

Skylark Quartet's Live in Tokyo

I have to tell you a story about the first time I listened to this CD. Just after it arrived in the mail, I stuck it in the CD player and pressed play and then walked into the next room so I could give it a cursory listen while I worked. Minutes before, I had started the dishwasher in the kitchen on the other side of the house. Suddenly I heard a huge crashing sound, like glass, and I thought maybe the dishwasher was busy destroying our drinking glasses. I stopped the dishwasher, opened the door and looked around and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then it occurred to me--was that crashing sound on the CD? I went back to the beginning and listened and there it was, a sudden crash, followed by a series of low mechanical sounds. Skylark Quartet? Live in Tokyo? Did someone stick the wrong CD in its case back at the publicist's office?

Suffice it to say that you haven't heard music like this before, much less jazz. I have to go back to the fact that this came from the Marginal Frequency record label. My first taste of Marginal Frequency was Alloys from Lori Goldston and Judith Hamann, which I reviewed just about a month ago. I called that recording "a full dissection of the cello and how it interacts with its human counterparts." Shortly after I received that release in the mail, I nearly deleted an email from recording engineer Al Jones simply because I wasn't sure if he was talking about music or not. Marginal Frequency takes such a novel, off-road approach to experimental music that I thought I was being offered a course in some long-forgotten science. Marginal Frequency is so intriguing and strange that I've talked to Al about writing an article for the summer issue of The Occasional. (Yes, we're still trying to get the Spring issue out as I write this.)

The Skylark Quartet consists of Orlando Lewis on clarinet, Franz-Ludwig Austenmeister on keyboards, Hayden Pennyfeather on bass and Roland Spindler, but you wouldn't know that from merely listening to these eleven tracks, all titled "Skylark," which of course is the classic song written by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. You won't know that by listening, either. These tracks, recorded live but without audience response, are deconstructions in the most dramatic sense, a supreme reduction in the sounds of each instrument until they resemble a series of random noises recorded in a haunted, vandalized factory. The clarinet is defined mostly by the sound of air passing through the reed, the keyboards sound like random beeps and blips from a computer and the bass is so austere that you'll forget it's there until you hear a single plucked note. The drums, of course, are equally spare, a minimal amount of percussion and no beat, other than the occasional smashing of more glass on that factory floor.

Does this sound too weird for you? It doesn't for me. I can dive into my LP and CD collection and pull out all sorts of weird recordings, ones I heard once and swore never to hear again, ones I put on when I want the party to break up and ones I actually truly love because they touch something rusty and dark in the corners of my soul. Live In Tokyo is fascinating, however, for a couple of reasons. First, the music slowly appears and evolves as you progress through the tracks, and you start to recognize the strains of "Skylark." Secondly, it's "permanently archived here, and available for a time in a limited pressing of 150 CDs from glass master," according to the Marginal Frequency website, which adds to the mystery. "Documentation of this rare performance is limited to the recorded audio, and what could be gleaned from observers Kanji Nakao, Sam Sfirri, Taku Unami, and Reiji Hattori."

In other words, I don't possess all of the puzzle pieces yet, but as I chat with Al Jones and prepare for an article about Marginal Frequency, I hope to solve that mystery.

Charming Disaster's Spells + Rituals

[As an aside, I'm looking at yet another giant pile of music to review--always a good thing--but if I publish one review in Part-Time Audiophile per day, I'll never catch up. So I'm going to put some reviews back up on the blog until I catch up!]

So, what does it take to make it in the music industry these days? What does it take to become a big pop/rock star? That's kind of a boring subject in 2019, I know, since the stuff that makes the Top 40 these days is mostly crap. I hate saying that, because every other old guy out there is saying the same thing, but I listen to albums like Charming Disaster's Spells + Rituals and I think, "If this had been released when I was young, back in the '70s and '80s, they'd be a big thing. They'd be noticed. They'd get plenty of airplay."

Charming Disaster is fronted by Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris, a duo who sing well, write great songs and imbue every track with imagination and skill. We used to call that talent. Between the two of them, they also play ukeleles, guitars, pianos, music boxes, ratchet sets, glass jars, canned air and plenty of percussion. The band also includes Don Godwin, who plays bass, drums, horns, backing vocals and more percussion, with Heather Cole playing violin, Jessie Kilguss playing harmonium and Patricia Santos playing the cello. That's the kind of line-up that can play almost anything you want--and they do, in a way. Charming Disaster balances smart pop songs against a confident stage presence, sort of a swagger, that suggest the two people out front are destined for great things.

Let me amend that--in a perfect world, everyone would be talking about that cool new group Charming Disaster. Do you know them? They're great!

I know, I'm waxing nostalgic here, lamenting the passing of the days where most of us kids were listening to 40 or 50 groups and singers at most. Pop music has exploded exponentially over the last thirty years, and there will never be another Beatles. I'm blathering on and on because I know there are people out there who also miss a music scene where talent, intelligence and originality rise to the top. These people will hear Charming Disaster's mixture of bluesy pop, a little ironic country, an encyclopedic knowledge of the rock and roll canon, and a couple of great voices that harmonize perfectly. In a way, Charming Disaster resembles Queen--is anyone else getting tired of that band's second wind?--and how these people are overflowing with musical ideas that simply defy categorization.

In a way, Spells + Rituals makes me just a little sad--mostly because it is so good and so unique and maybe they'll get noticed and maybe they won't. I think of every great indie band that seemed poised to be a huge thing due to an excellent album, and how they faded into obscurity and even I don't remember them anymore. So maybe this is a challenge to all of you who are reading this. Listen to this album, this band, and let me know if you think they're as good as I do. Maybe I've lost touch with popular music, but I don't care because I still feel like I know what's good and what isn't. This is good, and Charming Disaster should be a big thing...in a perfect world that may not exist anymore.

2L Recordings' Lux

My latest review for Part-Time Audiophile is this masterful recording from Norway's 2L Recordings, Lux, is in many ways one of the finest releases I've heard from this amazing record label. You can read it here.

Brian Jabas Smith's Tucson Salvage

My first book review ever--I think--is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. This is Brian Jabas Smith's collection of his Tucson Salvage column for Tucson Weekly, and it's stunningly poignant and extremely well-written. You can read about it here.

Ruth Palmer's Johann Sebastian Bach on Berliner Meisterschallplatten Direct-to-Disc LP

My latest review, on the exquisite Berliner Meisterschallplatten direct-to-disc LP of violinist Ruth Palmer playing Bach is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.