The Oscars and Musical Pillaging

The Academy Award nominees were announced today. Cue fanfare!

For the few of you that have been dedicate readers of "Music in the Bubble" over the past two years, you may remember that I used to do a bit of film reviewing (see here, here, here, and here). And like everyone, I am awards obsessed, even when I try to convince myself they don't mean anything, and always get it wrong (Crash? Over Brokeback? Really? REALLY?).

So I can't help from commenting on today's nominee announcement in some way. First, the category of what I'm excited about:

1. "Tree of Life" for best picture! And Terrence Malick for best director.

This was definitely my favorite movie of the year, but I'll admit it can be a difficult viewing experience without the proper mindset. It certainly has won its share of accolades (Palme d'Or at Cannes), but I didn't think it would be acknowledged by the more middle-brow Academy. If nominees reflect what Hollywood thinks of itself, then I feel "Tree of Life" reflects their highest artistic aspirations.

2. "The Muppets" get a nomination for best song.

Most people are talking about the fact that there are only two songs nominated (I think it's because they changed the rules so that only songs that actually appear in the film can be nominated, and only one from a particular film). But I'm just excited thinking about Brett McKenzie/Jason Segal/Walter the Muppet getting to do ridiculous things on big-time TV. I disagree over their choice of song though. I would put my money on the opening "Life's a Happy Song," the most joyously upbeat, earnest song I've heard all year.

3. "The Artist" did not get the most nominations (though it did get a lot).

Ok, so I have some problems with this movie. There are a lot of neat tricks throughout, it's well-shot and such, but it never really coalesced for me into an affecting, singular product. The story and characters felt somewhat overshadowed by all the gimmickry. It still may walk away with the top prize, but without all the technical award nominations, there's a good-sized segment of the Academy voting bloc (the technicians/cinematographers) that will likely not be voting for it. If I had to put money on anything, it would be "The Descendants," (as a makeup for "Sideways" and the rest of Payne's career), or "The Help" (the closest thing nominated to a successful, middlebrow drama). The techies will probably split between "Hugo" and "Tree of Life," leaving these actor-driven dramas at the top.

But anyway, my major complaint with the artist comes with its musical score (and its best score nomination of course, and it's win at the Golden Globes). This is my greatest concern going into the awards. Yes, I did just bury the lead again.

Ludovic Bource's score for "The Artist" has generated about as much controversy as a musical score can. A little over two weeks ago, actress Kim Novak, co-star of the Hitchcock film "Vertigo," saw the much-buzzed "Artist." Soon after, she bought out a full page ad in the trade magazine Variety lambasting the film for using music from Bernard Herrmann's famous "Vertigo" score. She called the usage a "rape," feeling that her body of work "...has been violated by the movie." Novak strongly objected to the film's re-appropriation of the music as a way to score a cheap "in" with the audience, eliciting emotions that were a product of "Vertigo" rather than the new film itself.

Bource was taken aback by this comment, and responded on the red carpet at the Golden Globes (and elsewhere, everyone asked him the same question) that the use of Herrmann's score was in tribute. Since "The Artist" is a love-letter to the art of making films, then it's only appropriate to reference famous bits of film history. Bernard Herrmann's widow Norma, then responded on BBC Radio 4, saying that although the producers of "The Artist" had never asked or even said that they were using Herrmann's cues, she said that he would have approved of their use in this context.

I agree with Novak that the use of Herrmann's "Veritgo" cues was improper, but only because of the fact that I agree with Herrmann's widow that pre-existing film music would have been acceptable to use as a send-up. When I saw "The Artist," I had known of the musical controversy, and paid close attention to when the Herrmann music popped up. I was expecting to have it jump out at me, provide a substantial musical change of pace, and be evident that this was in fact a musical reference. Instead, the famous "Vertigo" love theme blended imperceptibly into the rest of the score. The movie used a re-recorded version, giving it the same timbre as the Bource's new music cues. Bource's own musical aesthetic is that of a normal, contemporary film composer - it's subtle, and more about the general atmosphere than tunes or intricate counterpoint. It certainly is far removed from the overstatement of classic composers like Herrmann, Korngold, and others whose scores demanded the attention of the viewer, and became a character themselves.

Because Bource uses the "Vertigo" themes in this way, reorchestrating them rather than playing them in their original, grainy atmosphere, he isn't as much sending up Herrmann's work as much as plagiarizing it. By altering Herrmann's music to fit his particular aesthetic, Bource is admitting that he can't write a great tune like Herrmann's "Vertigo" love theme, and so must steal it and record it in a way that divorces the theme from its original sound-context. A true send-up makes it clear that one is referencing or lampooning a particular style. It has to be obvious, like "Back in the USSR" - the Beatles sending up the Beach Boys. In his interviews, Bource is trying to make it seem that his use of Herrmann's music is in loving tribute. Bource may actually feel that way, but the way he actually uses the "Vertigo" cues feels like a robbery rather than a tribute. It would be same as if James Horner said that the reason he steals themes from Copland, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich is that they are in tribute to their great work.

Like music critic Alex Ross said, it could be some complex meta-message about the borrowing of Art in a media-saturated world, or it could just be that Bource is a hack. A hack that's the odds-on favorite to win the biggest music award in Hollywood.

I'm not saying that I am against borrowing music for different movies. It's many times hugely effective. Kubrick was an expert (all that crazy Gyorgy Ligeti in 2001, all of Clockwork Orange), Wes Anderson is an expert (um, like everything), "Tree of Life" was made by its intense use of various classical themes. It can even be effective to recompose a theme into a new soundworld, what Bource tried to do in "The Artist." In my favorite film from last year - "The Social Network" - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross decided to arrange Edvard Grieg's famous "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the first Peer Gynt Suite in a weird, electronic way to accompany the big regata a little over halfway through the film.

This usage works because it plays on contradictions, like all good, clear references do. Reznor and Ross's score was eerie and ambient in the best way, and very un-classical. By appropriating a famous classical theme for the scene that symbolizes the Winkelvii's inability to be truly the best at anything, the score effectively satirizes the dying old world of aristocratic privilege they live in, a world being taken over by technology. Reznor and Ross were not trying to be Grieg, like Bource is trying to be Herrmann, but were using Grieg to make a specific point.

The ineffectiveness of Bource's appropriation of the music of "Vertigo" crystalizes for the me the problems of "The Artist" in general. "The Artist" is allegedly a tribute to the silent film era, but it doesn't embrace the sound world of silent films. Bource's score is an amalgam of Herrmann-ish and noir tropes. There aren't any notable mad-cap scenes with ridiculous percussion sound effects. The era that Bource seems to fetishize is not the silent era, but the Hollywood heyday of the '40s and '50s. In this way, "The Artist" feels like a tribute to a fictional past, an era that never actually existed. Having such nostalgia for a time that didn't actually occur is a very problematic idea - an idea central to the conservative and Tea Party mindset. While a film like "Singin' in the Rain" or a musical like "Follies" gets to the heart of bygone eras of entertainment through their embrace of contradiction and pastiche and clear references to famous films of that actual era, "The Artist" prefers to rewrite film history, and steal the good stuff to make it seem like a well-made movie.

Today Meets Yesterday on Latin Jazz Double Bill

It's well known that today meets yesterday in a museum, but a concert hall is also a nice place for intergenerational communication. Sometimes its just musicians in tuxedos and audience members communing with a dead white guy. But it's nicer when there's a sense of dialogue between musicians themselves, like an old master and an up-and-comer.

The McCarter Theater here at Princeton had just this kind of concert on Friday evening, pairing Cuban piano wunderkind Alfredo Rodriguez with his legendary countryman (and rare US visitor), pianist Chucho Valdés. While both performances were standouts on their own, putting them together helped highlight how the two take their Cuban musical heritage into new places.

Some assorted observations from the evening are below the jump.

To Read (Music) is to Not Know?

Late yesterday evening, jazz critic Nate Chinen posted a rather innocuous tweet. He wrote, "Sometimes I think jazz musicians underestimate the appeal of a band performing without music stands."

Cue firestorm.

I'm not going to report on everyone who said what, just that it touched a lot of nerves across various musical communities. Drummer Matt Wilson chimed in with remembrances of Dewey Redman. Sara Kirkland Snider and Judd Greenstein spoke from experience in the world of alt-classical. And of course the prodigious tweeter-cum-trumpeter Nicholas Payton had to get in on the action this morning ("It ain't the tool, it's the fool using it," he said).

So I responded as well with the following tweet. "[I]s it that there's less tune-learning by ear now & jazz people refer to selves as composers not songwriters?"

Chinen responded by noting that this is definitely a factor, but then noting the impressiveness of working bands that play complex music without charts - Vijay Iyer's trio and the Bad Plus.

So now I will try to answer why this set off such a firestorm, what I really meant in my tweet, and what I think about Chinen's response.

What's the big deal?


Jazz people always love a negative opinion. The oft-repeated jazz is dead meme, Kurt Rosenwinkel's modern jazz sucks rant, Nicholas Payton's post-modern New Orleans-jazz as a word has no meaning thing. Stuff like that catches on. Chinen's tweet certainly has enough snark to catch on with jazz folk, and it gets an entire idea across within the 140 character limit, so all the easier to respond to.

But it can't just be the negativity thing. There were those classical people getting in on the threat too. The great thing about Chinen's tweet is that it gets at a fundamental issue of how to teach and learn music. If a small jazz group is reading music on the bandstand, it probably hasn't rehearsed the music much. The group hasn't had time to internalize it. Written music allows for quicker uptake of more music, but the problem is that there is so much more to a piece of music than what is on the page. Chinen seemed to be speaking to an apparent epidemic in jazz where bands use seemingly use gigs as rehearsal time (even affects the best of us, like Ravi Coltrane) and aren't putting forth a strong, fully-baked product.

Which leads me to my tweet

I remember hearing guitarist Mark Stewart of the Bang On a Can All Stars (and Paul Simon's music director) talk about rehearsing a piece for the group by Ornette Coleman. Stewart said that Coleman said something to effect of, "We've had notation for hundreds of years and all it does is give us more problems." Coleman has a point in that notation as we know it isn't the best way of communicating many kinds of musical gestures. Transcribing jazz solos (especially Coleman's) can many times be an exercise in futility because everything that makes the solo great - the particular character of the rhythmic feel, the pitch bends, the tone quality of particular notes - are impossible to completely encapsulate on paper.

When one is truly "reading" a piece of music, one's focus is devoted to playing the correct notes at the correct time, and maybe getting the correct articulations and dynamics too, if the notes and rhythms aren't too hard. Any of the "music" that actually comes out is the result of the pre-programmed instincts physically encoded into the muscle memory of the player. The performer doesn't really have time to think about musical character and inflection. Seeing a group of musicians read music they're not particularly familiar with in front of an audience is like seeing a show where all the actors carry their scripts around. The latter happens, but it's definitely not standard operating procedure.

If a musician learns a particular piece of music aurally, he or she has to learn the notes and rhythms in small chunks (based on the whole 7 +/- 2 bits of information that one can hold in short term memory at a given time), but doesn't just learn the notes and rhythms in abstract. The musician learns the qualities of each note, and how they're supposed to go from one note to the next in the phrase. By the time the musician finishes learning the piece, they have already gotten inside it, internalized all of the nuances.

However, this process is time consuming and so usually only works for short pieces, i.e. songs and tunes. Which finally brings me to the point of my tweet. (Prepare for un-backed sweeping statement). Until the mid-1960s or so, jazz was primarily a tune-based idiom. Jazz bands would play versions of pop tunes of the day, having learned them from ubiquitous radio-play or what not. When jazz musicians would write their own tunes, they would be based on pop forms (sometimes explicitly, stringing a new melody on a popular tune's chord progression) or traditional forms like the blues. (Digression: big bands needed notation to coordinate many instrumentalists, but that leads to another part of the argument). When beboppers came together for a jam session, there was never a need for charts. The players just picked out tunes they all knew.

Most jazz musicians have gotten away from this mindset. Young players trying to "get with the tradition" play songbook standards out of fake book and lose all the nuance that makes a tune good. The impulse to art-ify the jazz led most musicians to write more and more complex charts with shifting meters and through-composed solo sections. There's a shift from an aural, vernacular idiom to a written, art-oriented one (America's classical music anyone?).

It's no surprise then that jazz people refer to themselves as composers rather than songwriters. To me, I feel that a lot of post-bop falls for a fetish of complexity that only a few musicians (David Binney as the prime exception that proves the rule) can pull off. My guess is that Chinen was at a gig with one of these kinds of bands when he unloaded his tweet.

There are still a few jazz musicians that work in a no-notation, tune-oriented environment. Lee Konitz comes to mind, with his pick an arbitrary standard and hope the band catches on game. Then there's Bill Frisell and his trio, who have a unique shared vocabulary of tunes across generations and genres. And then there's the whole folk/traditional/fiddle circuit where written charts would be even more out of place. It makes sense then that a lot of the bands I've been getting into lately that seem less reliant on charts come from this folk-ish sense of tune (Jeremy Udden's Plainville, Jenny Scheinman's Mischief and Mayhem).

Chinen's Response and Complexity Without Charts


I definitely agree with Chinen in terms of the impressiveness of groups like the Bad Plus and Vijay Iyer trio that can pull off tricky pieces with hardly a piece of paper music in sight. That's true with groups that play highly-complex classical music too. It's nuts seeing So Percussion rock John Cage's epic Third Construction completely memorized. And then there's Steve Reich's original group that read pieces like Music for 18 Musicians off little cheat sheets that hardly got in the way of anything.

When I perform any solo percussion piece, I always have to do it without music, just from a practical standpoint - I have to watch where my sticks are flying in order to hit the right marimba bar, or the right part of drum. Having to memorize pieces also helps me really internalize all aspects of the complex music. Having a written chart to read from may help the learning process at first, but by the time I memorize it, it's in the same performance state it would be if I learned it aurally bit by bit.

In this regard, I don't feel that the Bad Plus and Vijay Iyer playing without charts is any more special than a folk group playing a series of traditional tunes they learned by ear. The concept of "tunes" being "simple" is definitely blown up by this album by Crooked Still's Brittany Haas and composer-fiddler-laptop maven Dan Trueman (Go to track 5 for prime example). It's certainly possible to learn a lot of Vijay's and the Bad Plus's music in this way (I've done it with "Prehensile Dream" on piano). And Vijay's complexities are rhythmic rather than form or harmony-based. If Norwegian Fiddlers can learn the uneven springar meter (see the last track "Hangdog" below) by ear, it's possible to learn Vijay's crazy rhythms that way as well.



In the end, I feel performing without written music and music stands is the result of knowing music in a deep, subconscious, programmed-into-the-muscles way. One can get to this deep knowledge by learning music aurally and capturing the entire essence of each short phrase, or by memorizing a written work over a long period of time, and gradually adding more and more nuance through practice. In a performance context, it becomes more than just showing the audience you know the music so deeply, it takes on a sense of performance art. Without worrying about the mechanics of reading music, the players have the opportunity to actually look at each other and interact, move more freely and expressively, and translate the essence of the music in a more unadulterated way. It takes on a more ritualistic bent, and a greater sense of humanity. Watching someone read is boring. Watching someone speak well is fascinating. (Maybe they can make musical teleprompters?)

I'm now led back to the first part of my entry - why this tweet set off such a firestorm. Based on the amount of word vomit here, Chinen's tweet touches on huge issues that are very central to what makes a piece of music good - the what (the notes) or the how (the character). Pretty impressive for something less than 140 characters long.

Either way, I do think we can all agree on that if you're going to get up in front of an audience to play music, you better know that music damn well, music stand or no music stand.

Best Downtown Music of the Year - Even More Intriguing Instrumentals

5. Ben Allison - Action Refraction

"Jazz musicians are often their own worst enemy," bassist and composer Ben Allison says. "The classic trap is trying to add interest to a piece by making it more complex."

So when Allison sits down to compose, he keeps his "jazz" instincts in check by keeping things simple. Allison's compositions, like on his terrific 2009 album "Think Free," are quirky but tuneful, expressively direct but filled with little hidden surprises.

Because of his interest in tunes over pyrotechnics, one would think that Allison would be an expert at the art of the cover. In reality, Allison is deathly afraid of taking on well-known tunes, whether songbook standards or the rock hits he grew up with. On his first nine albums as a leader, Allison performed only two covers total.

That has all changed with "Action-Refraction."

While a jazz album with tunes by PJ Harvey and the Carpenters may appear to the cynical as a self-conscious grab for younger audiences, in Allison's case it is a great risk, and one that pays off fantastically for both performer and listener.

Even on a jazz classic like Theolonius Monk's "Jackie-ing" and classical composer Samuel Barber's "St. Ita's Vision," Allison imbues the entire album with a strong rock vibe. Drummer Rudy Royston tunes his kit dry and low, grounding the tracks in that kind of  time-feel that makes you clench your lips in approval. Pianist Jason Lindner sticks mostly to keyboards of the electronic variety, including the Prophet synth that seems to pop up on every hit today. And to complete the package, guitarists Steve Cardenas and Brandon Seabrook unleash scurrying lines and thrashing dissonances that could even make Nels Cline a bit jealous.

What's most impressive about "Action-Refraction" though is how thoroughly Allison reinvents each tune without losing its essential personality. “We’ve Only Just Begun” is retrofitted with a hyperactive breakbeat from Royston as guitarist Cardenas emits full-bodied downstrums. Saxophonist Michael Blake lofts a languorous interpretation of the melody on top, capturing the casual innocence of Karen Carpenter’s vocal. All together, the cover elicits the feeling of someone caught in a crazy urban pace of life, using this song of their youth to ground them.

But the cover that sticks in the mind longest is of Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll All Be Free.” Trying to duplicate Hathaway’s greasy, moving vocal from the original is an unwinnable battle, so Allison instead attempted to translate the cathartic feeling of the song into an instrumental gesture. After a subtle statement of the melody from Lindner, the band launches into a simple, two-chord slow build. Little by little, Steve Cardenas’ lines become more churlish and Brandon Seabrook gradually threatens to down the vessel with unholy noises coming from a Walkman plugged into his guitar pickup. After four and a half minutes of building tension, it all explodes in a cathartic release at the return of the main hook. Ohmygod. Dry mouth. Chills. You turn the album off for a minute just to make sense of it all.

4. NOW Ensemble - Awake



A band name like "NOW Ensemble" makes a big statement. Capitalization is confrontation in typeset. It's really like having one of those exclamation points-within-parenthesis, but without the ridiculousness. So this band name asserts hipness, newness, all-around now-ness with such force that it would be an utterly pretentious name if the music didn't encapsulate what's going on in classical music today, which it does.

If the record label New Amsterdam (see the Jefferson Friedman/Chiara Quartet album too) is the face of the alt or indie classical movement in New York, and NOW Ensemble - which is co-led by New Amsterdam co-director Judd Greenstein - is the flagship group of New Amsterdam, then by syllogism NOW Ensemble is the face of New York indie-classical. On their sophomore album "Awake," this chamber presents a set of 6 distinctive compositions that articulate the indie-classical values of textural novelty, cross-genre engagement, and a mindset of "We care if you listen!"*

There is much to like in all of these pieces. There's the spine-tingling pins & needles texture in Prix de Rome winner Sean Friar's "Velvet Hammer." There are the moody, eye-liner black harmonies of Missy Mazzoli's "Magic With Everyday Objects." There's Bon Iver-like lyricism in David Crowell's "Waiting in the Rain for Snow" and darting Afro-pop guitar lines in Mark Dancigers' "Burst."

But you may not even get to those tracks for a while after falling in love with Greenstein's own "Change." It starts with a solitary flute fragment and over the course of 13 minutes blossoms into a full-on dance party. With halting phrases and bouncy rhythms borrowed from Hip-Hop and an inviting modal harmonic palette, it goes down as easy as a pop tune but with intricacies that demand repeated listens. Your culturally-aware non-listener friends will exclaim "I can't believe it's classical!" It certainly doesn't pander to fans of the National and Dirty Projectors, it just articulates a belief that classical music can be enjoyed by anyone willing to tune in.

*"Change," "Velvet Hammer" and "Burst" are by Princeton University grad students and premiered at the University, a far cry from the Babbitisms of eras past.

3. Gerald Cleaver & Uncle June - Be It As I See It



Like its counterpart on the vocal list (The Roots' "undun"), drummer Gerald Cleaver's "Be It As I See It" is an ambitious concept album. It translates into musical form the Great Migration of African-Americans in the early 20th century - and the move of Cleaver's own family from the rural South to Detroit, Michigan in particular. Just as no family's story, or no person's retelling of the family story, is the same, each track here has a different mood, a different soundworld, a different sense of narrative and pacing. All in all, it's quite the messy affair, but held together by the indefatigable drummer-leader and his killer band featuring the likes of Mat Maneri on viola (he of the Paul Motian strings album), Craig Taborn on piano (he of the prodigious solo piano album), and Tony Malaby on saxophone (wait, how's he not on my list this year?).

Much of the album is dense and abstract, sometimes Beefhearty on "To Love," sometimes AACM/chamber jazzy on "Fence & Post: Lee/Mae." But there's a intense warmth that permeates every inch of the music, probably stemming from Cleaver's old world, trashy cymbals. It's familiar free jazz, a story told over dinner, or a fire in the living room.

You feel the sense of history most intently on "Fence & Post: Statues/UmBra." It starts with a calm broken eighth-note feel, Taborn adding an array of lush keyboard harmonies on top. Visions fly through the darkening mind - open fields seen from a train, tall buildings far off. Then it all disintegrates under a wall of indecipherable voices, distorted guitar, and phosphorescent keyboard splotches. Cleaver and co. have just transported you to a time you didn't think you knew.

2. Jeremy Udden's Plainville - If the Past Seems So Bright



You've probably found a couple of commonalities in what I liked this year and since we're getting near the end, I'll freely admit them.

I love messy music.

I love music that sustains a wonderful mood for a long time.

"If the Past Seems So Bright" is both messy and leisurely, and got me right from the start, as my review from May certifies.

But what makes it hold up against all the other great music I've heard this year is how it pushes those long sustains to extremes. It is the most patient music I've heard all year.

The opening track "Bright Eyes" is the prime example of the album's patience. The tempo is in the ballpark of 40 beats per minute, about 66% slower than a big hit from the likes of Gaga or LMFAO, literally at the far end of the metronome. Drummer RJ Miller rarely deviates from this dirge-like boom-chick the entire tune, maybe adding a sizzle-cymbal accent once a minute. Keyboardist Pete Rende, guitarist Brandon Seabrook (yep, him again), and the leader-saxophonist Jeremy Udden each take long, spacious solos, upwards of 2 minutes each. They aren't laden with vocabulary, but emphasize and explore the individual sounds their instruments make. It may not "go anywhere," but it sure doesn't need to.

Maybe "If the Past Seems So Bright" can be a part of 2012 resolution: take an analog break from this crazy digital world once each day.

1. David Binney - Graylen Epicenter 


The nebulous genre of "post-bop" is a real hard one to navigate for musicians. First to describe post-bop. It's um, like, gosh. Maybe the best way to describe is just any music descended from the tradition of Charlie Parker & John Coltrane (and others of course). There's an emphasis on vocabulary & harmony, playing changes. Actually, it's really the style of jazz that's taught in American conservatories. And herein lies the dual rub of this style.

First, with everyone being taught the same scales and ways of improvising, how is one going to forge and individual voice. And second, why waste your breath when Miles & Trane have already played it all?

This looks like a pretty bleak picture of post-bop, and for jazz in general, considering that it's the dominant style. But some players and composers have found their way out. Tenor Sax player Mark Turner embraced the woody sound of pre-Coltrane cool players like Warne Marsh. Trumpeter Terrence Blanchard embraces cinematic harmony and pacing (he does do a lot of film scores for Spike Lee), a moody style picked up by acolytes like pianists Aaron Parks & Fabian Almazan and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Then there's the whole crew of musicians that embraced different strains of Afro-Latin music, a list that would stretch far too long.

And then there's alto saxophonist David Binney.

In the two decades since his move to New York City, Binney has done pretty much everything a saxophonist can do. He's formed collaborative bands, some funky, some Latin-tinged. He's been a first call sideman for jazzpersons of all stripes, from Joel Harrison (see no. 9) to garrulous saxmaster Donny McCaslin. He's held a regular gig at Greenwich Village's 55 Bar for a decade now. He's even spent some time backing up the likes of Maceo Parker and Aretha Franklin. Out of all these experiences, Binney has formed a unique musical vision, combining post-bop's reputation for uncompromising angularity with a punkish sense that Binney might die if those notes don't come out of his horn.

Binney's style has reached a new apotheosis with his uncompromisingly-titled "Graylen Epicenter." And it sure does start with bang.

The beginning of the opener "All of Time" feels you're being shot out on one of those 500-foot-tall phallic roller coasters at Six Flags or Cedar Point. But instead of being over in 30 seconds, it goes on for 3 minutes without letting up. The second 2 are occupied by a thrashing and altogether astonishing dual drum solo by Brian Blade and Dan Weiss over an unrelenting ra-ta-tat tat vamp (since when is it ok to start a tune with a drum solo? Oh well, I'm not gonna argue here). Just to make sure you don't die from an adrenaline-induced heart attack, the solo subsides into a lightly swinging piano solo by Craig Taborn (see what I said about the sideman thing?). But Taborn builds it all back up before too long, unleashing a typically wild and passionate solo from Binney. Then unexpectedly at the 8:30 mark, a voice pops up in the mix. No, it's not that of Gretchen Parlato, who's been wordlessly vocalizing the melody throughout, but that of Binney himself. "If I only could only see you," Binney intones like a lost backup track for Brian Wilson's "Smile" record, "then all of time would stand still for you and I." With all the thrash and edge leading up to it, it's a disarming and vulnerable moment and it somehow feels like the just the thing the piece needed to send it out into the stratosphere.

Ok, now it is time for you to listen to this face-meltage.





Good. Now that's taken care of.

Even after a transcendent performance such as this, the rest of the album doesn't disappoint. There's still plenty of drum dueling on the quirky free-funk jams "Terrorists and Movie Stars" and "Any Years Costume." There are dynamic, exploratory solos on the title track and the chipper vamp-based "Equality At Low Levels." And there's tenderness too on the slow-build pop ballad "Everglow" and the tropic lullaby "From This Far."

On "Graylen Epicenter," David Binney takes a defibrillator to post-bop, cutting through all the irregular chaotic beats, showing that there is a pulse there, and still many new adventures to be had.

For all of time, you ask? I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't count anything out with Mr. Binney around.