Elton Dean's Ninesense - 'Happy Daze' (Ogun)

They're called Ninesense cause there's 9 of them, get it? Elton Dean was in Soft Machine but here's a place to show off his jazzy side. This is from '77 and the liner notes, laid in out a lovingly hand-written manner, talk extensively about the history and composition of the band. I like this record lots, but I have a major soft spot for the South African expat/Chris McGregor axis, of which Louis Moholo and Harry Miller are present here. That's a hell of a rhythm section and they really start off with a warm inviting ball on 'Nicrotto', and then into a propulsive, slow swing on 'Seven for Lee'. The other 7, led of course by Dean's confident if slightly indistinct alto, never overplay. This is a who's-who of 70s British jazzbos, with some names I sort of recognize and others that I don't at all. The duo of Marc Charig and Harry Beckett are the high points for me, who play trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn and tenor horn (though I'm not one to really distinguish these). They give the ninetet a bright and brassy assonance that cuts through the repetitive themes laid down by the saxes and trombones.  The opening cut 'Nicrotto' is such a beautiful start to a record - such a gentle swell of harmony - and yet it also starts pulling away from itself about halfway through, where Keith Tippett's piano revs the whole band towards a discordant mess. It comes crashing back down into some nice, smouldering ashes, and the record never actually gets better. 'Seven for Lee' maybe gets a bit too Apollonian for my tastes, but it works well against the more outré sounds heard elsewhere, and it has an excellent start, lurching out of the aforementioned ashes. The flipside is a bit more traditional, opening with 'Sweet F.A.', I assume a paen to the football association of England. This is where Dean and Tippett really get their freak on; long, dizzying solos fill the 11 minutes of this song, over Harry Miller's repeating bass chords. It's jazz-by-numbers, but Tippett's solo in particular is stunning, sounding like he has 4 hands. The closer, 'Three For All', is not as wild as it's title might suggest, falling into a hard-bop groove that works because of the confident rhythms behind it. Tippet's piano chords punctuate all the right moments, giving this a nice momentum. Happy it is, a daze it's not, but it's a successful outing for sure.

The Curtains - 'Fast Talks' (Thin Wrist)

Thin Wrist is an interesting label ; I discovered them cause of the two great Burning Star Core albums and then picked up a few other releases from around the same time.  Curtains was a band that featured some members of Deerhoof but was closer to the skittery, rambunctious sounds of US Maple or some late Skin Graft-label stuff.  There wasn't any aggression to it, so Curtains end up having an almost twee Beefheart feel.  It's all instrumental and the guitars and thin and wiry.  Keyboard pop in and out and there's a bouncy, tapping feel to the drumkit.  In sixteen songs, Curtains sketch out a musical world that is always about to sputter out of control but never does.  At their best bits ('The Divers'), it feels like vultures circling prey, but drunk.  This type of instrumental, brainy rock is something very much from my past and not anything I'd pull out, but this listen after howevermany years (about ten, amazingly) was kind of refreshing -- ah, yes, people do this kind of thing -- they always have, and they always will, and Curtains do it particularly well.

Anthony Braxton/Joseph Jarman - 'Together Alone' (Delmark)

These two giants supposedly only ever recorded this one album together, but it's immense. The Jarman side is first, with three compositions that begin slowly. It's multi-instrumental as you'd expect, but the first half is a very slow awakening. Jarman and Braxton tease each other slowly, trying to pull out a strong direction but then darting away when the other commits. This is the title track, 'Together Alone', and I guess that's an apt description. By the end of the side things are jittery and ecstatic, with tons of chimes and percussion clanging about, like a small furry animal trashing about in a skip full of disaprate metal shards. The voices start to come in while you can still hear saxophones, which means - gasp! - overdubs! 'Morning (Including Circles' is the name of this piece and the awakening metaphor continues, though the psychobabble of speech layers up into an indecipherable tangle of fishing lines. When flipped over, there's Braxton's two compositions to ponder. 'CK7 (GN)-436", dedicated to David Berman, begins with some electroacoustic noises quite alien to the AACM aesthetic. There's a buzzing motor sound and some flanged-out space fuzz over the Jarman/Braxton interplay. Occasionally it explodes into a fingernail-on-chalkboard soup, though processed by the big computer in Giles Goat-Boy. I'm not sure if it's distracting to the saxophone duet at the core of these pieces or if it makes things more interesting. I think a whole record of this would be a bit hard to focus on, but when juxtaposed against the more "traditional" (ha!) duets on side A, it works well. So do we have a meeting of the earth-spirit-soul (Jarman) and the turtleneck-wearing technical innovator (Braxton)? Or are things a bit less definable than this? If we listen carefully to Braxton's sax when Jarman is flauting about (or at least I assume that's the breakdown since individual credits aren't listed), Anthony is totally kicking it warm, open and human. The electronic interjections do make it occasionally sound like a giant speck of dirt has just hit the stylus, but maybe that's what he intended. 'SBN-A-1 66K' is the closer, which is the least improvised and most dirge-like moment here. It's a slow, winding melody that stops to rest every few notes. Braxton and Jarman are in-sync, playing contrapuntal harmonies off each other while a triangle randomly clinks about. There's a dynamic of push and pull at work; the lock-step song over a haphazard triangle, sure - but also you can hear little bursts of air and taps behind it all. It's a strangely unsettling thing to listen to (like all of side B, really) but when the low reed tones kick in, it shakes my esophagus.

Art Ensemble of Chicago - 'People in Sorrow' (Nessa)

I couldn't find a cover via Google image search that actually looks like mine, which is yellow ink on a white background. It's a truly beautiful (if hard to read) design that is sadly marred by some magic marker scrawlings on the back of my copy. But the sounds within are beautiful and unmarred, unless you count elegiac misery through tonal illusion as some form of detriment. This long piece, split onto two sides, is the yang to the yin of Jackson in the House/Message to Our Folks. Whereas those pieces were chaotic, lively, and exuberant, People in Sorrow is an apt title. This is much closer to Roscoe Mitchell's Sound: space breathes, the notes expand, and there are some definite throwbacks to ballads of jazz past, though through a damaged prism. At times it feels like each of the four musicians are wandering through a desert, conserving their energy yet crying into the wind. There are moments of Third Stream/post-modal hoohah, but undercut by little bit of percussion and, whattatheycallit, "little" instruments. To go back to the cover art, it's interesting how stark and monochromatic the jacket design is, because this music is pure colour. These Paris Art Ensemble records are so special for many reasons. Before Don Moye joined the group, these guys took it upon themselves to provide the rhythm - I mean, they had to. But instead of making Malachi Favors carry it all they equally share rhythmic duties as well as all other soundroles. It's part of their approach - it's what makes them an Ensemble, right? And those early Chicago AACM sides (the solo Mitchell and Jarman, plus early Anthony Braxton -- all of which we'll get to later) are such a bold statement of a sound, that I can't help but feel that the Paris residency was partially about spreading this new gospel. When you listen to People in Sorrow - or rather, when I listen to it -- I hear four geniuses who grew up in the tradition of jazz but have decided to strip away the composition and leave only the feelings, images and accents. There are gestures back to a lot of things - Third Stream as I said before, but also Bowie's utter passion for Dixieland creeps in even on this most wispy of Art Ensemble releases -- but it's never concrete enough to materialise. Dislocated Underbite Spinal Alphabetiser Encourager Templates is proudly supportive of music that dissipates before it is being played; and yet despite our enthusiasm, this probably isn't the first record we reach for when looking to jam these guys. But dark moments are never easy.