Data.Wave #15 - Interview with Bill Laswell

You can read a transcript of the interview here

Holger Czukay

Holger Czukay

RIP

24 March 1938  • 5 September 2017

 

IBAAKU : MIXTAPE N° 490

Las/wɛl/ kuh m-plee-tist /ˈse·ries | 06

Niels & the New York Street Percussionists

REPOST

com·plet·ist

[kuh m-plee-tist]
a person who attempts to complete a collection or set,
especially a collector who wants to collect an example of every item in a particular field:

The idea of the com·plet·ist series was to post rare or hard to find Bill Laswell releases but now Laswell is re-releasing his back catalogue himself via bandcamp this series will  probably come to an end even though I haven't been posting much lately anyway. Not a big fan of the corporate approach i.e. not giving original release dates and changing the covers that give the impression that the releases are new music. Yoko Yamabe gives Laswell's reason here.

1. Uman

2. Dream in Steam

3. Mess-Age

4. The Crowd

5. 3-D-ID

6. Raw War

7. Autodidact

8. The Void

Niels Jensen • Vocals, Dobro

Peter Brötzmann • Tenor Saxophone

Robert Musso • Keyboards

Bernie Worrell • Keyboards

Nicky SKopelitis • Fairlight

Bill Laswell • Bass

Jamal Evans • Buckets, Metals

Produced By Jonas Hellborg

Recorded and mixed at The Gates of Hell, Brooklyn,

New York by Oz Fritz and Jonas Hellborg

Label: ITM Records – ITM 1453
Format: 320
Country: Germany
Released: 1990
Genre: Jazz, Rock
Style: Jazz, Rock

Bill Laswell Remembers Bernie Worrell

In the early 1980s, I started working with a lot of the musicians from Parliament-Funkadelic. In P-Funk there were some very high-level players: Maceo Parker, who’s very versatile; Jerome Brailey; Eddie Hazel; Fred Wesley. A lot of them were very open and trying to branch out into many areas. But Bernie Worrell was at the top of that pyramid, with a classical background, and perfect pitch, and his rhythmic sense. He was an original.

He was probably the one I did the most work with, and in a lot of pretty diverse areas. I was always conscious of taking him out of this funk-musician mode for which he was best known and putting him with other kinds of musicians in challenging situations. A great deal of that was just having him play on a session that you wouldn’t ordinarily connect with Bernie Worrell. And not just the stuff he did with Talking Heads or Keith Richards, or even the brief moment he was in Paul Shaffer’s band on David Letterman. You’d see him playing with Pharoah Sanders, or Zakir Hussain, or Fela Kuti, or Manu Dibango—the possibilities were endless. We applied this kind of thinking to the solo records I produced for him, too. We worked out ideas for what would be good for his current concept as well as for his evolution, his development.

 Read more:

Bill Laswell Remembers Bernie Worrell

JazzTimes

Arto Lindsay

It's been awhile, always interested in what Arto Lindsay has to offer. Good to see that Melvin Gibbs is on board  as well as Thiago Nassif whose album I posted here a few months ago.

There are more preview tracks on youtube but I'm going to wait as I have already pre-ordered the album on bandcamp.

Arthur Blythe • Lenox Avenue Breakdown

Arthur Murray Blythe

(July 5, 1940 – March 27, 2017)

 

I am not just avant-garde. I like to play all types of music… I like music with form, not atonal or aform… Sometimes they put me into a weird bag and want me to be weird, inaccessible. I think I am accessible.

 

From an All About Jazz interview: 

 

 Repost

Forget what you've heard about Arthur Blythe, because it only gets in the way. Forget his outré all-star projects of the eighties, and even his In The Traditional material - Blythe was never in any cubby hole long enough to earn any labels. And unline fellow West Coaster Horace Tapscott, who opted to stay in California and, thus, has yet to get his share of the limelight, Blythe arrived at the New York loft scene in `73 to a flurry of acclaim and barbs alike. Forget those too.
"Lenox Avenue Breakdown", recorded in `79, the same year as "In The Tradition", and ostensibly Blythe's most successfully listenable album, is anything BUT traditional. It's a unique melange to which Blythe never really returned, mostly thanks to the unusual nature of this septet. In fact, only the title tune really dwells on the clear-eyed jazz flats. The way the carefully-wrought melody plays over an almost lackadaisical pace points at a certain debt to composer Muhal Richard Abrams, or at least a similar that school - something which crystallized during Bob Stewart's Languid tuba solo. Abrams always has a special place for a tuba, and Blythe makes excellent use of it.
The Afro-Caribbean groove of "Down San Diego Way" apparently has flautist James Newton right at home - he gets lots of space to wail, to play a little game of keep-away with Blythe, who, in turn, is characteristically intense, burgeoning, clean-as-a-whistle. Blythe is also in good spirits on the swaggering 7/4 "Slidin' Through," swinging tautly along.
in fact, the only stumble comes on "Odessa", where drummer Jack DeJohnette takes his crash-banging one step too far and the whole affair becomes merely adversarial as the band tries to get it's riff out behind James "Blood" Ulmer's free-thrashing solo. Oh well. "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is even likeable in its failures: always brash, always changing, and as good a place as any to start in blythe's discography. If you just can't leave those expectations at the door, well, just be prepared for a little shakeup.
Jeff Morris

1. Down San Diego Way
2. Lenox Avenue Breakdown
3. Slidin' Through
4. Odessa

Arthur Blythe • alto saxophone
James Newton • flute
Bob Stewart • tuba
James "Blood" Ulmer • guitar
Cecil McBee • bass
Jack DeJohnette • drums
Guillermo Franco • percussion

Produced by Bob Thiele
 

Label: Columbia – JC35638
Format: 320
Country: US
Released: 1979
Genre: Jazz
Style: Avant-garde Jazz

Paranoise • Constant Fear

Get your combat boots out, and grab your jazz and prog encylopedias while your at it. It would not hurt to anchor the ceramics in your home before you elevate the volume to two and a half, either.
Paranoise were a New York band from the 1980s. Listening, you can hear a lot of James White--check out the sax--and those dissonent little structres you hear in DNA.
But those New York bands came out of punk- albeit the most arty end of it. James White uses avant jazz shadings, but works to maintain the flatness of 1970s do it yourselfism. DNA kept their tracks minimaliazed to leave their no wave credentials in tact.
Paranoise embraces avant-gaurd 1970s loft jazz in full force. A lot of these musicians are on this album, and this band does not try to hide a much more sophistacted pool of influcences, some of which were almost antithetical to the New York underground of the time.
There is no smallness or punk amaturism to this music. The dissonent intervals this band uses derive from free jazz and the left wing of progressive rock; Albert Ayler and Pharroh Sanders, Vander Gaff Generater and Henry Cow come to mind, in impulse if not actual sound.
The sound here is far bigger and a lot more dangerous than 1960s free jazz or 1970s progressive rock. Made in the 80s, Constant Fear uses electric drums and heavy electronicly generated basslines. The production gives the music that hugeness that early digital recording allowed so many 80s albums. If you can picture the most dissonent 70s prog pumped on 80s steriods, you get Paranoise.

Bill Your 'Free Form FM Print DJ

Amazon Review

1. Armageddon
Anthony Jackson • Contrabass Guitar
Steve Elson • Baritone Saxophone
Lenny Pickett • Tenor Saxophone

2. Suffocation
Luther Thomas • Alto Saxophone

3. The Plague
Luther Thomas • Alto Saxophone
Gary Windo • Tenor Saxophone

4. Carburetor
Luther Thomas • Alto Saxophone
Don Cherry • Trumpet
Percy Jones • Fretless Bass

5. Cut It Out
Lenny Pickett • Tenor Saxophone
Steve Elson • Baritone Saxophone

6. Roll Groover
Gary Windo • Tenor Saxophone
Anthony Jackson • Contrabass Guitar

7. Constant Fear
Gary Windo • Tenor Saxophone
Percy Jones • Fretless Bass

8. Fight The Power
Joy Askew • Backing Vocals
Nikki Gregoroff • Backing Vocals

9. Forget About The Earth / This Is Where It's At
Gary Windo • Tenor Saxophone
Don Cherry • Trumpet, Clay Whistle
Percy Jones • Fretless Bass
Spirit Ensemble • Percussion

Micky Ortiz • Lead and Backing Vocals
Jim Matus • Guitar, Backing Vocals, Keyboards, Programming, Horn Arrangements
Lloyd Fonoroff • Drum Programming, Backing Vocals

Produced by Jim Matus and Lloyd Fonoroff

Label: Antilles New Directions ‎– ANCD 8737
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: 1988
Genre: Rock
Style: Rock, Jazz

Pharoah Sanders & Sonny Sharrock Reunion

 Live at the 24. Deutsches Jazzfestival Frankfurt, Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, Germany; November 1, 1992. Rebroadcast October 19, 2013. Very good radio broadcast.

1. Little Rock
2. Japan
3. Upper And Lower Egypt
4. Many Mansions
5. Venus
6. Announcer
7. Mr PC

Pharoah Sanders • tenor, soprano saxophone
Sonny Sharrock • guitar
Charnett Moffett • bass
Pheroaan AkLaff • drums

HERE 

Jaki Liebezeit

Jaki Liebezeit

RIP

26 May 1938  •  22 January 2017

Bill Laswell Shares the Stories Behind Some of His Most Memorable Releases

With approximately 4,000 projects to his name since 1978, it’s fair to say that bassist-producer Bill Laswell has been around a block or two in his day. As house producer for Celluloid Records, he recombined New York’s rock, jazz, funk, reggae, and hip-hop scenes in the ‘80s with inspired abandon. In 1983, he struck gold with Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” which led to lucrative production gigs for Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, Public Image Ltd., Motörhead, and Iggy Pop. In 1990, he bought Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn and launched his own label, Axiom, which provided him with a home base for increasingly esoteric experiments in improvised fusion as he began reaching out to the sounds of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. At the same time, Laswell was laying down the sonic groundwork for aggressively avant-garde outfits like Last Exit, Praxis, and Painkiller while forging career-long relationships with looming figures like John Zorn and the late P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
Laswell’s currently moving forward with the combination musical collective and label Method of Defiance (M.O.D.), whose recent emergence on Bandcamp gives us the opportunity to check in on this free-ranging American original.


How’s Bandcamp working for you? What do you like about it?

We have two pages, one for my label and one for me. The albums on the M.O.D. Technologies page are all fairly recent. My personal page mostly contains out-of-print albums and a few newer releases. It’s like a combination art gallery and storage room. It’s changed my mind about alternate ways of releasing music. Now I can record something tonight, edit it, balance it, create artwork, write a story, and tomorrow morning someone could access it, listen to it, or buy it. While my past experiences with digital releases and downloads were not positive, I can now see exactly what was sold, how much it was sold for, and even where it was sold. It’s a big difference from somebody telling you that your digital sales aren’t worth mentioning.

Do you tweak the content in any way for the site?

We try to do new artwork, and sometimes we remaster. I have a lot of live stuff from Japan and Morocco I need to go through and clean up, edit, mix, and master.

What’s your focus as a player these days?

It’s intuitive. Lately, it’s not so much about systems and notes as telling stories in a language you don’t even understand. I want to play with people who are also able to tell stories musically. The music is starting to be its own thing, and I’m just part of it. Like, this isn’t me—this is the record I made, the music, the sound. And lately, the sound has been mainly telling a story. I’ve had my own facility to work in for the last 20 years. It’s a much different environment than these spaceships in Manhattan where the assistant has an assistant, and somebody’s getting the menus because lunch is coming up pretty quick. They don’t do music. That’s something else. That’s why it takes so long and costs so much. I drift toward expression. That may not be good for your livelihood, but it’s good for you.

Read the rest of the article here

Las/wɛl/ kuh m-plee-tist /ˈse·ries | 05

com·plet·ist

[kuh m-plee-tist]
a person who attempts to complete a collection or set,
especially a collector who wants to collect an example of every item in a particular field:

The Men Xperience  • La Mancha Negra The Black Stain

1. P Spot
Menace

Guitar, Bass, Live Drum Loops, Keyboards, Lead Vocals
Adamhead • Rap
Duane Snite • Intro Rap
Elsa Cornish • Backing Vocals
Kozio • Funky Clavinet
Vincent Henry • Saxophone
Bruce Purse • Trumpet

2. LSD
Menace

 Guitar, Bass, Keyboards, Lead Vocals
Keziah Jones • Lead Vocals
Bedhead • Drums
Reggie Powie • Bass

3. Give It Away
Menace

 Guitar, Keyboards, Lead Vocals, Backing Vocals
Elsa Cornish • Lead & Backing Vocals
Reggie Powe • Bass
Pierre Andre • Saxophone
Bedhead • Live Drum Loops

4. Mr. Intellectual
Menace 

Guitar, Bass, Keyboards, Live Drum Loops, Lead Vocals
Elsa Cornish • Vocals
Umar Bin Hassan • The Last Poet
Donald Blackman • Electric Piano Solo

5. Sam Wake Up Call
Menace 

Guitar, Bass, Keyboards, Live Drum Loops
Umar Bin Hassan • The Last Poet
Bruce Mack • Keybords

6. End The Sin
Menace • Guitar, Keyboards, Lead Vocals
Elsa Cornish • Backing Vocals
Sandra Smith • Backing Vocals
Bill Laswell • Bass
“Fatty” Black • Live Drum Loops

7. Nu Age Aquarius
Menace 

Guitar, Bass, Keyboards, Backing Vocals
Vernon Reid • Guitar Solo
Elsa Cornish • Lead & Backing Vocals
Lady Zara • Vocal Ad-libs
Toby Kasavan • Piano Solo
“Fatty” Black • Live Drum Loops

8. Plunk
Menace • Lead Vocals, Guitar, Keyboards
Joool • Rap
Elsa Cornish • Chant, Ad-libs
Toby Kasavan • Chants
Reggie Powe • Bass
Vincent Henry • Saxophone
Bruce Purse • Pocket Trumpet
Kozio • Funky Clavinet
Bedhead • Drums Loops

9. Hold On
Menace 

Guitar, Bass, Keyboards, Percussion, 

Live Drum Loops, Lead Vocals
Elsa Cornish • Backing Vocals

10. Backdoor
Menace • Guitars
Elsa Cornish • Vocals
Bill Laswell • Bass
Pierre Andre • Sax Madness
Bedhead • Live Drums Overdubs & Trumpet

11. Truth Of Sex
Menace • Guitar, Keyboards, Lead Vocals
Lady Zara • Lead Vocals
Bootsy Collins • Bass
Maceo Parker • Saxophone
Bastard Bob • Drum Loops
George Clinton • Inspiration

USA recordings engineered by Julian Baker & David Crafta at 

Undersound Ground Studios, New York City
Bill Laswell & Umar Bin Hassan recorded at Greenpoint Studios, 

Brooklyn, New York by Bob Musso
Programming engineer: Julian Baker at Night Owl Studios, NYC
London recordings recorded at Trinity Studios, London
London production coordinators: Hooch, Annette, Chris, 

Jaspar the Vinyl Junkie, 

and the rest of the Nu Funk Mission, Funkin Pussy Crew

Album production coordinator: Duane Snipe
Management: Dick Vos of World Events and Projects, Holland

Produced, arranged and mixed by

Menace

Label: P-Vine Records ‎– PCD-5354
Format: Flac
Country: Japan
Released: 1998
Genre: Hip Hop, Funk / Soul
Style: Screw, Favela Funk, Funk